Traitor's Field (36 page)

Balfour nodded once. ‘Very well then, gentlemen.’ He shrugged. ‘We match notes, I propose.’ A glance at each. ‘I give you “Cross 3”.’

‘“Dusk July”.’

Finally Manders, with one cautious lick of the lips. ‘“Shenley 1”.’

‘But it makes no sense!’ Vyse was disappointed.

Balfour shook his head. ‘Neither singly nor together.’

Manders held up a ponderous hand. ‘Seems likely enough.’ The hand was still poised, as if to sanctify the moment. ‘The month presupposes a day, and the numbers give it to us; dusk reinforces the idea of rendezvous. You’re sure this isn’t from the Adair sisters, Hal? The date would be the 13th or the 31st.’

‘We’d need a place. And Shenley Cross is more likely than Cross Shenley.’

Vyse: ‘Had your notes torn edges? One, at least?’

Three crumpled scraps, smoothed and held neatly together.

‘There it is, then.’

‘Pretty enough.’

Balfour looked up. ‘I think we know from whom this comes, gentlemen, do we not? A message would come to us, and we’d not know how or from whom.’ A glance at each again. ‘But we’re obliged not to hesitate.’

Thurloe found Thomas Scot in his cubicle, gaunt and angular and surrounded by the shelves of papers and books that were his world, a desiccated insect tapping around a dead trunk. As usual the large ledger was open in front of him, among the papers on the desk.

‘Master Scot.’ Scot looked up, high eyebrows sharpening the expression. ‘Master Scot, I’m trying to understand our enemies.’

Scot sat back in the chair, and nodded. ‘Very good, Master Thurloe. Quite right.’ For a moment he looked rather forlorn, and then the energy flashed back into his face. ‘Do not underestimate them; do not weaken for a moment. We must – we must – eradicate them.’

He nodded, agreeing with himself. More softly again: ‘Understand them. Yes, that’s good, Thurloe.’ The old face screwed up. ‘But – my counsel to you – do not try to understand too much.’ His eyes dropped away. ‘Too much understanding creates. . .’ – he waved a brittle hand vaguely near his head – ‘an overburdening. . .’

Thurloe waited. Eventually he said, ‘Who are they? How do they work? At Nottingham I saw recklessness turned into brilliance, a man who could make a whole garrison conform to his design. At Pontefract I saw a man prepared to die for a paper.’

‘They have their networks. They have their mercenaries – debased men prepared to sell the ruthlessness they learned in the European wars.’

It was a crude simplification, and they both knew it. Thurloe just looked at Scot, almost sadly. Scot pursed his lips, and glanced down at his ledger.

Thurloe pressed on. ‘And the man whom we chased from Doncaster? The man who escaped?’ 

‘A courier.’ Thurloe breathed out silently.
I am becoming a little adept at these lures
. ‘A sprat. Of no consequence, but he might have told us a thing or two.’

‘Part of a chain of communication between the Pontefract garrison and the outside.’

‘Yes.’

‘I would like to read our reports on Pontefract, please.’

Scot’s face pulled back over his teeth, and on an instinct his two spread hands covered the pages in front of him. ‘I understand, Thurloe. I do. But too much information. . . in too many hands. . . it creates misunderstandings. Tensions. I would not want any mistaken assumptions, which you might make in all innocence, to further trouble my relationship with Master Cromwell, who has my fullest support, as a favoured instrument of the Creator himself.’

Thurloe watched him, and looked again at the double page under the fingers. Columns: short references to the left, text to the right. A summary of reports?

‘You will have to rely, Master Thurloe’ – Scot was sharp again, in eye and tone – ‘on your own considerable talents, won’t you? You will bring us something fresh, perhaps.’

Thurloe nodded. ‘I’ll try, Master Scot.’

Shenley Cross, dusk on the 13th of July, three shadows sheltering under a tree, hunched in cloaks and silent. An insidious apprehension – of wrongdoing, of unworthiness, of the cold.

‘We’re exposed here.’

‘Mm. But we can see if anyone approaches. And we can be seen as three and no more. We are not here by chance.’

A grunt.

From the east, a wind was coming from the distant sea, unsettling the leaves and playing with the horses’ manes. Hands adjusted cloaks on shoulders, shifted on reins, stroked a restive animal.

Then, out of the west and the last glow of the sun, a rider came at a canter, a shuddering shadow against the light and a pounding on the ground. 

The horses’ ears pricked up, and the men shifted too: peering, stretching, glancing at each other’s murky faces. The rider loomed quickly, the noise growing and the shadow shading into horse and man, arms on reins and a high broad body. At last the horse juddered to a halt in front of the three, and in the twilight they saw the ghost of Nottingham Castle, the memory of the mill. 

He looked at them individually, a brief but intent scrutiny. Balfour had got rid of the moustache.

A nod to each, as if accounting their good order. ‘Vyse. Balfour. Manders.’ They nodded back, uncertainly.

‘My name is Mortimer Shay.’ The confidence bespoke a new beginning. ‘I’m glad to find you here, truly.’ 

He sat up on the horse, stretching his shoulders. ‘You are crossing the bounds, gentlemen. I give you fair warning, and I urge you to heed me close, and make your choice with no boy’s bravado, for those days are gone from you for ever.’ Their eyes were fixed on him. ‘Ride with me now, and I promise you no protection of law or grace. I fight for what we know to be worthy and pure, but I fight in the shadows, and in those shadows I have lost sight of the scruples of justice and the little details of Christ’s morality.’

Again the scrutiny of the darkling faces. ‘Ride with me now, and we shall try the mettle of this new world of theirs.’ He pulled at his reins in the gloom, and the horse jumped and spun and carried him away. A moment, a glancing and a swallowing, and then the shadows – three of them – hurried after him into the west.

By the beginning of the third week in July, Thurloe was among the last ripples of the English Midlands before the terrain bunches up into the peaks and moors of the north. The road moved slow and listless through the humid morning, pulling itself up valleys and falling away invisible behind turns in the hills. He remembered from before the feeling of a place lost to the rest of the country.

There were no signs or markers to show the road, and few other humans to guide him. The road drifted among the folds in the landscape, edged with scrubby hedge or nothing. Then the oak, as he remembered it, and an opening in the hedge and a track disappearing into woods. Buried within the hedge end a fallen stone marker, with the name of the house smoothed away.

The track only turned past the woods – another trick of the gentle slopes – took him out of sight of the main road, then straightened. Thurloe and his horse were at the mouth of a perfect avenue of beech trees, not yet fully mature, but healthy and exactly aligned and spaced and drawing the eye instantly to a house at the end, its details blurred by the summer foliage.

He’d come via Doncaster. The Adjutant was still there, glad to take a drink with another quiet, intelligent man and talk a little. He had told Thurloe of the chasing of the courier. The government man in Doncaster – that would be Lyle – demanding three soldiers for an errand one morning, follow a man and tell where he went – always these little errands, and the Adjutant had learned not to ask questions – a sordid side to a war that was already sordid enough, wouldn’t you say? Yes, Thurloe would say. The soldiers had followed their man as ordered, throughout the day; then, near Leek, as evening brought tiredness and gloom, a mistake and a scuffle and an exchange of shots, the man they were following escaping into the gathering night. Wounded, they’d said. For sure.

Leek: the courier had been heading towards the line of march of the Scottish army that had been invading for King Charles. Thurloe had checked the dates: the courier had been tracked and lost just a day or two before the battle at Preston had destroyed that army and the King’s last hope. Was that significant?

And was any of this connected to the strange suggestion in J. H.’s letter to the Reverend Beaumont? An association between Royalists and Levellers was surely improbable. But the suggestion was troubling enough. And – he’d checked – the suggestion had been made elsewhere, too; publicly. Border in
The Kingdom’s Weekly Intelligencer
had proposed it, and there had been hints elsewhere.
What path is there through this?

Alone as he was this time, the strict discipline of the beech avenue struck him uneasily. Out of the casual chaos of the English landscape, hidden in the heart of the country, someone had forced precision. It made the house at the end of the avenue somehow ominous. The brick and the yellow stone window frames glowed in the morning, but the windows were blank and dull. The beauty of the place, the harmony of the building within the scented silence, reinforced the idea of something illicit concealed among the hills, far from the dirty dangers of England at war. Thurloe stood under the warm frontage, watching the creeper as it started to explore the window sills and the moss blotching the flagstones, and trying to place it all in the same world as London, and Doncaster, and skirmishes in the twilight. Three shallow steps up to the door.

An afternoon in an inn, with a map and a mug of wine. And memories. He’d been in the district himself, hadn’t he, not so long afterwards? His seedy work of scrabbling money from compounding Royalists. The Astburys. Astbury House was near Leek. A rattling of memories in his mind. Something in the records he’d had back then: one of the Astburys was somehow very close to the King; that’s why he’d been given particular instructions to press the family. The reference had been vague, but somehow – had it been copied from somewhere else? – taking for granted an understanding that it no longer gave.

And flashing among the rest, another memory: the young woman. An Astbury daughter, he’d guessed. In memory, there were golden streaks among the waves of her hair, but it had certainly been long and waving, emphasizing the slender body. Burning hottest of all was the memory of her anger – had she even said anything to him, though? – something raw and human within the world of careful compromises and little deceits. Thurloe tried to see himself wryly – the healthy joke of a married man looking twice at a lovely girl – and tried telling himself that the memory of the lithe body and the face hadn’t distorted his logic.

In the present again: the front door, large panels of cracked and fading grey wood, opened.

It wasn’t her.

A maid, pretty enough, but not her. Not as far as Thurloe could remember. He introduced himself in general terms, and asked for Sir Anthony Astbury.

Sir Anthony Astbury had gone early to a neighbour. Perhaps the mistress would see him.
Mistress? Astbury was a widower, surely.
The door closed again.

The blank panels of the door. The warmth of the morning across his shoulders. The distant bleating of sheep.

The door opened, and Thurloe was ushered in, and up a flight of stairs to an open landing. ‘The mistress will see you, sir.’ The maid nodded towards a door. ‘She’s just in there.’