Traitor's Field (39 page)
Authors: Robert Wilton
Thurloe had walked a full circuit of the Tower three times, like a carrion crow circling a carcase. His report to the Committee had been clear in his head after one circuit and twenty minutes inside the fortress, examining the Mint and the moat and the forgotten yard and tolerating ten minutes of shame-faced outrage from Tichborne, invoking the Pope and the King and unpurged Royalists and unpurged Parliamentarians for the simple ignominy that someone had lifted his cloak and tickled his purse while he was looking the wrong way.
The reflections of his subsequent circuits of this battleground – from the shadowed corner of the moat, to the blackened earth near the city to the west, up round to Shadwell in the east, and back to the moat again – were not for a report. Not yet.
An explosion of sound and light masks the explosion of a vital doorway, and a whole castle looks the wrong way.
I have been here before
. Nottingham, a man on a horse; a letter.
There is cunning here as well as daring.
The dark, dank end of the moat; the hole in the wall.
There is knowledge here, knowledge as old as these stones
. The message to Tichborne; the abandoned house of a man of fluid loyalty.
How may these be parsed? How do they fit the sentence?
They do not fit. Yet.
These are but hanging prepositions.
And yet they serve a purpose.
Every minute of diffuse speculation moves the crown further off. While Thurloe and his thoughts go in circles, the men on horseback ride straight and away.
These men are creatures of the fog, creatures of the shadows.
Angry stupid Tichborne, who killed a King and now rattles in his emptier fortress; a pamphleteer, whose loyalties all have bought, and whose house may be stolen for a mere device.
These creatures feed on our confusions.
T
O
THE
L
ORD
P
RESIDENT OF THE
C
OUNCIL OF
S
TATE
, L
ONDON
Sir, the Scotchman Montrose has been lately here seeking to beg money and buy soldiers. He has secured one interview at Court, pleading the affinity of thrones in support of the cause of Prince Charles Stuart. So far he has for lack of coin secured few followers, but these few hardy soldiers and tested, and he tells them he already has men from Sweden too.
Copenhagen, August 1649.
Sir Mortimer Shay had described precisely the location of the stable, on the edge of the lands of Cheshunt House and within sight of Waltham Abbey, and Henry Vyse found it exactly according to the description. Alone, he pushed open the door and slipped inside. The sun was lancing in white through a hundred gaps in the timbers, but his eyes still took a moment to adjust.
The stable was empty. A thin spread of straw on the earth floor, and two shambling posts holding the roof. Then Shay appeared from the shadow of the far corner.
He looked the question, and Vyse started to speak, then held up an uncertain hand to ask for pause, and returned to the doorway.
A minute later the three of them were standing together in front of Shay: Vyse, Balfour and Manders. Balfour carried a small sack. He stepped forward, crouched, and placed the sack on the floor. Shay found his lips dry. Then Balfour looked up uneasily at the older man.
Vyse said, ‘We were too late.’
Balfour pulled the sack open, and there was a frail gleaming in the dust. The ceremonial riches of the Kings of England, one of the greatest collections of historical treasure in Europe, now consisted of half a dozen jewels, a golden spoon and a small golden bowl shaped like an eagle – and one misshapen apple-sized lump that glowed dull. Molten and resolidified, a clumsy golden ball, the ancient crown of the Saxons would be worn no more.
A world away from London, Rachel was walking alone in the garden at Astbury. The garden was a fat luxury of nature, shocking colours in the flowers and plump drowsy bees and, in another quarter of the grounds, pendulous vegetables flaunting themselves among the leaves.
She wanted the paler shades of spring, the sadnesses of autumn. She wanted to be too cold to think.
She wanted Mary to scold her, Mary to laugh at for her prudence, Mary because an older sister was reassurance. Without Mary, her father had no one to act as intermediary to his younger daughter. He worried about her, worried about his inability to communicate adequately to her, and so withdrew into his study and his visits to neighbours who would say to him what he said to them. He was getting thinner.
She spent what time she could with Jacob. It made her feel small again, and away from war and politics and change, to follow him around the gardens and listen to him murmuring softly to his charges, occasionally noticing her and pretending he’d been talking to her. But she was restless, fretted, and it unsettled him.
She hadn’t seen Shay for some while, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. He seemed to know her too well, to know the world too well; and he didn’t seem to care about any of it.
She kept thinking of John Thurloe: the Government man; the clever, careful man, with sad eyes. She was supposed to hate the Government and its triumph and its oppression; she was supposed to know them all short-lived. Shay would defeat Thurloe and all the men like him. That seemed likely. But for now the only voice for the old world was her father’s, peevish and distant.
She wondered about the clever, careful mind, and the sad eyes.
Oliver St John was eating when Cromwell entered – he always seemed to be eating when Cromwell entered – and dropped Thurloe’s report onto the tablecloth in front of him.
St John took two further bites, scanning the paper dubiously from over the end of the ravaged chicken leg. Then he dropped the leg to the plate, cleared the last lumps of flesh from his teeth with one bulging rotation of his tongue, and wiped his hands on a napkin.
‘My man Thurloe grows a little presumptuous, I fear.’
A grunt from Cromwell above him. ‘I disagree. He grows more useful and shrewd. Enlightenment is all that we may seek of God, and this young man may be an instrument of it.’ Cromwell picked up the paper again, and turned and left. Over his shoulder: ‘I think that he may be my man now.’
T
O
M
R
J. H.,
AT THE
S
IGN OF THE
B
EAR
Sir,
your letter to the Reverend Beaumont came into my hands, but not immediately, and so I fear you have waited a more than reasonable time for a reply, and perhaps begun to cherish doubts about your correspondent.
I must immediately, and with the greatest regret, tell you the Reverend Beaumont is gone from us, into that greater Kingdom of which he spoke and of which he was so worthy a representative. We must hope that his rewards in that place are brighter than his end in this one, for I must also admit to you that it was ignominious, hanged for having secret communications with Pontefract garrison. I suppose we may say that he died honourably for he died for his principles, whatever those principles, and since I learn that his end was speedy, we may say that he died with God’s mercy.
I feel it amiss that I had to read the privy correspondence of two gentlemen, and I hope you will excuse this in the sad circumstances, and yet through your words I inferred that you shared my high opinion of the excellent Beaumont. We met but a few times, and I confess that we did not always agree on politics or principle, yet in those few meetings I could only admire his clarity of intellect and sincerity of belief, and felt ever respected and on my mettle.
I understand from you that the work of the community of active minds of which he was a part goes on. I must confess that I am concerned at the idea of more causes for strife in these beggared islands, yet I am sympathetic with the desire of some men to remove so many false and vain degrees of difference between free Englishmen and their rulers. Do you think that this chatter of a combination between some of the King’s friends and the so-called Levellers is more than mere tap
room muttering?
Sir, it would please me much to think that in these hard times there are yet men whose intellects may lift their gazes above those things which divide us, and who may accordingly maintain that kind of civilised relation between educated souls which, among many false and little ideals loose in these times, is surely something worth defending. If you would write to I. S. at the Angel in Doncaster, it will be passed to me. In any case, I hope that I have, by giving you the last sad news of an apparently mutual friend, rendered you some little service, though no more than that due to a true spirit.