Traitor's Field (40 page)

[SS C/S/49/100]

By the first hours of August, Shay was through Cumbria and into the Scottish borderlands. He kept to the west, away from the centres of population and the concentrations of the Army. Here he was prey more to local scavengers than to Parliament’s militia. The peasants would cut a throat for a shilling, and the decade of war grinding back and forth had left them raw and brutalized. 

Hamilton’s army had come south across these barrens the year before, with the usual indifferent excesses of troops on the march; it didn’t take a foraging soldier long to work through the Ten Commandments, and the seventh and the eighth were usually broken well before the sixth was forgotten in battle. Those who’d survived Preston and straggled back again towards Scotland a month or two later – those who’d avoided capture and a slit nose and the hell of transportation to the Americas – would have paid the price for their earlier boisterous sins. Shay in his light-shy journey north had come across two corpses, bone and scraps of leathered flesh, and many more no doubt rested in the gullies and ditches and marshes of the wild landscape.

The sad, twinkling residue of English monarchy had been easily hidden; hopefully it would form the heart of the new regalia of the new King soon enough. The exploit at the fortress of London had been an incidental, a necessary obligation. If the new King was ever to benefit from it, Shay must continue to test his ground, and to prepare it. 

And that meant Scotland. Ireland might prove a handy way to distract Parliament’s Army, to swallow its men and its enthusiasm. But the political and military support for a restored Stuart King would come from Scotland. Probably not this year. It would take more than one winter to forget Preston, for the clans to recover their strength and their heart, and for the politics to resettle towards the young Prince Charles. But next year. . .

For now, Shay’s meetings and his observations were hidden things: lonely rendezvous with trusted men; distant scrutiny of fortifications and unobtrusive testing of roads; casual conversations with strangers; a chapel in a village near Glasgow; a doctor’s house on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Shay needed to be momentarily remembered and then rapidly forgotten, to learn without asking, to impress without being felt, to happen and then to vanish.

Only once, eager for warmth and humanity and a glimpse of those whose wavering might become loyalty again, did he risk company. There was a supper and a dance at the house of a successful cloth-merchant outside Falkirk, a man who discreetly funded every cause that promised success, and Shay felt his way into it in the shadows and busyness. Head bowed under the harsh glare of the torches in the porch, he stepped into the front hall and disaster. A heavy figure suddenly looming in front of him – no time to move – the jarring of two large bodies clumsy together, the clutching, two faces inches apart and staring, and Shay knew that he knew the face and some surprise in the face suggested the feeling was mutual. Shay immediately in the skirmish, driving the man back into a dark corner of the hall, arm across the man’s throat and trying to remember who he was and his other hand reaching into his pocket.

A moment of hesitation, a risky second to try to remember who the man was. The big face grinned stupidly, and sagged, and an ineffectual hand brushed at Shay as if at a fly.

The man was blind drunk, clearly incapable of thought or recollection, and it saved his life. Shay stepped aside and replaced his knife, and stalked onward down the corridor. The main hall was a chatter and a bustle, faces and clothes that had survived the upheavals serenely enough. The centre of the space glittered under the light of tall candelabra, but the edges were gloom and Shay eased into it comfortably.

A woman’s face across the room – older, surely, and handsome still. And eyes that seemed suddenly to catch his, to frown, to widen in surprise, and then look away and around in confusion.

Immediately Shay was back against the wall, watching the room, and then slipping along the panels to the door and out.

In the passage, comfortable in the gloom, time to re-focus.

‘No man ever liked the darkness so much.’ A low female murmur, then a soft chuckle.

He heard himself breathing, felt the crowding years around his shoulders.

‘Hello, Con.’

There was gentle wonder in the voice. ‘Mighty Shay. You came back to us.’ And a little mockery.

‘Don’t say it. You thought me dead. Everyone seems to.’

‘Not you. You never really lived in our world; how could you die?’

He turned.

‘Constance Blythe. Great God, it must be—’

‘No! It mustn’t.’ Her murmur lightened. ‘Why must everyone talk about time?’

He took her two hands in his and kissed them once, hard, searching her face. Caught in the faint light slipping through a window, its every crease and flaw was shadow. The flesh was thicker on the bones and tired, but he knew it as beauty.

‘Are you hunted, or hunting?’ She pulled her hands away. ‘Ah, what mightn’t be possible, now you’re here?’ She moved to stand beside him, and they stood in the gloom as if watching the sound coming through the closed door. She remembered a decorum, like a piece of the catechism. ‘How is Margaret?’

‘Well enough. I don’t—’

‘Of course you don’t. That poor girl.’

‘Meg’s hardly lucky in me, I grant. You of all people—’

‘Your embraces were marvellous, Mortimer. Thrilling. Rather terrifying. But we knew they were the things of an idle hour for you. For you, as pleasant an exercise as a morning’s hunt.’ He had started to protest, and then frowned, and then was silent. ‘But to be the woman whom Mortimer Shay committed himself to, swore to protect for ever.’ She shook her head. ‘A hundred female souls died a little when it happened. And in that moment, darling lucky Meg became a kind of queen; we never looked at her so casually again.’

‘Little old Meg? Surely—’

‘Mortimer.’ It was spat. ‘Even you are not so much of a fool.’

He shifted uncomfortably, grunted. ‘You were married too, I think.’

‘I was married. And then I was widowed. In the end it was just another affair. Not as short and not as sweet. When a wife I was expected to make as much effort as when a mistress, for none of the little fondnesses or pretty offerings in return. Do you men know how boring it is to have to flatter, Mortimer? Especially when you know there are no pearls in it.’

Shay chuckled, deep in his throat, and glanced down at her.

She lifted a hand and ran the fingers intently down his sleeve, feeling the old muscle inside. ‘But that was never your insecurity, was it?’ Her hand clutched around his arm, and then released it. ‘Sometimes, when I touched you, I was surprised to find you any softer than stone. And sometimes I was surprised to find you had any physical presence at all.’

‘You flatter well enough still.’ He said it indifferent. ‘You always did.’

‘No.’ She was colder, firmer. ‘You did not care enough for flattery. You would not trust enough.’

A voice suddenly in the hall, a clattering approach that disappeared up a flight of stairs. 

Shay had pulled back into the shadows. Constance Blythe saw the movement, and laughed quietly.

He scowled. ‘Have you children?’

She shook her head, without looking at him. ‘Not any more.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I did not love them enough, and so the Lord took them back to him.’ The sentiment was empty, and he said nothing. ‘Not meant for a family, perhaps. Neither of us.’

Shay considered this. ‘And what shall remain, then?’ There was silence. He stirred himself with a grunt. ‘I must—’

‘Of course. And once again we shall wonder if you ever truly were, or whether we just dreamed you.’ He laughed quietly. ‘Shay, the world seems to move a little faster now you’re back. I hope you’ve life enough for all of us.’

Again the laugh, soft and harsh in the throat. ‘Plenty.’ The echo of the laugh hung as whispers in the air, but the man was gone, and Lady Constance Blythe was left alone in the darkened hallway.

It had been the frustration at the Tower that had finally prompted Thurloe to contrive the letter in reply to the Reverend Beaumont’s friend – the sense that he was nowhere in understanding his enemies, that they were somehow laughing at him. It only compounded his frustration with Thomas Scot, the conspiratorial old crow deliberately blocking him; Scot and Tarrant, the insecure bully. He was surely a cleverer man than them. The world – and in particular the tricks of his enemies – could teach him ways to prove himself.

Writing the letter had been a tussle between the instinct that he was doing wrong – wrong by a man and wrong by the interests he himself was supposed to uphold – and the intellectual satisfaction.

How did one write such a letter?
How would one capture the spirit of the poet when translating his Greek?
He’d not been at all sure how to refer to the Reverend’s hanging, and it didn’t help that he didn’t really know what the reader would think. He’d started with strong interest and hearty support for Beaumont and the Royalists, but it looked ludicrous under his pen and he realized –
who am I myself supposed to be in this performance?
– that prudent doubt might be more credible. It might also provoke more discussion. He hoped the interest in the possibility of a Royalist-Leveller combination wasn’t overdone. Likewise the flattery at the end – he rather warmed to his idea of a network of intelligent men corresponding regardless of the little differences of politics – but perhaps he’d been too strong in presuming the character of his reader.

And Doncaster sounded right. Better than London. In any case, it had to be plausible that he was being given Beaumont’s letters. He knew the Angel Inn for a reliable place, and could easily arrange the forwarding. Strange to think of these deceptions moving between the inns of England.

T
O
THE
L
ORD PRESIDENT
OF THE
C
OUNCIL OF
S
TATE