Traitor's Field (46 page)

Thurloe, watching:
I am always looking now for the scene within the scene; the other reality; the plot.

There were two horses being walked in a circle, skittering nervily and avoiding each other’s glance, and around them the sporting men shuffled and muttered, affecting insouciance but watchful and posing like truebreeds themselves. 

Today, a secret meeting.

There was money here; Thurloe could see it – in the boots, in the occasional feather, in purses passed casually out of cloaks to waiting lackeys and tipsters. There was more money in these twenty-odd men than in. . . in any twenty men he’d ever met, probably than in any two hundred men of his sort. Mr Garvey’s Ajax would race Sir Thomas Tovey’s Conqueror over one mile and a half – in recent days the ground had been first muddy, and then frosted, and he wondered how it would be under those rampaging hooves – and the prize, in silver no less, was a year’s fees to a lawyer. As much again would pass around in private wagers.

Would these tend to be royal sympathizers, these twenty self-assured men, with their lolling glances and easy-given purses? Thurloe felt a flicker of isolation. Then rationality. There were dandies enough among Parliament men, and sober-dressed men enough among this group.
False premises, false observation.
But race meetings were a well-known cover for Royalist gatherings. Again the flicker of isolation, and Thurloe trying to hold to his logic.

There was a shout, incoherent. A shifting among the rich men –
rich men? See the faces, Master Thurloe, and the boots, see some worn leather and some hungry glances
– and then the two horses were being pulled and led away, and the little crowd began to tramp after them. Thurloe watched the cloaks swaying away, the rich blues and clarets, the feathers bouncing in the crisp air.

The reply had come from Mr J. H.: after reflection, he thought he would like to meet Mr I. S., for might two men not prove that there was a limit to suspicion in this uneasy world? Which noble sentiment Mr J. H. then undermined rather: Mr I. S. should be at the course at Newmarket on this day; at the start of the second race he should leave the ring and walk to the Bushel; Mr J. H. would meet him there.

Leaving at the start of the second race was a neat arrangement to set a time without setting a time – that he understood. Fifty yards away from the track the sound disappeared completely, and the town as he entered the main street was silent. It would do its trade in the evening.

He felt the cold in his ears, his nose. Autumn had conceded defeat.

The arrangement also meant that he could be watched. If his contact chose to have a friend or friends with him, Thurloe could be tracked. But his destination was known, so that hardly mattered. His contact – his contact’s friends – could see if he was alone.

Thurloe had the odd sense of being in some way an object of what was happening. He was no longer an agent –
ago, I act
– in the situation, but instead that which was being acted upon.

Am I somehow vulnerable?
Surely, I am on the side of the Government.
Can what I’m doing be wrong?
The private correspondence; the deliberate deception of Scot.

What if this is a trap?

Thurloe stopped immediately in the street, and reconsidered his progression to this minute and to this particular patch of dirt next to this particular tailor’s.

If the situation is as promised, then I need not worry. If this is a trap, then I could have been taken already, or could yet be taken, and nothing I may do will change that.
 He started to walk again, with long steady steps.
Besides, I am in the game now. I must face the
—

He slowed.

Am I now a man who runs risks?

He tasted the idea cautiously, an unfamiliar fruit, or something about to sour.
Life has its risks. But I have never sought them out. I have never chosen risk over safety.
Pontefract; the red-headed man with the gunpowder. Doncaster; the letter. And his assault on Thomas Scot’s ledger: an explosion of impetuousness against the attempts to obstruct him; a borrowed Royalist trick and his own true logic. 

But risk surely didn’t inhabit this quiet English street, merchants and slumped thatches, and a horse scratching its neck against a post. 

He tried a pose of cheeriness, and knew it wasn’t his, tried to kindle the excitement.
There is a stranger England now, always on the edge of my vision
.

This time the long steady steps took him to the Bushel.

The inn was a new building – trim, with straight timbers and clean bricks. Inside was as quiet as out. Just one other customer, hunched over a mug on the counter. Thurloe grunted for wine, and picked a chair sheltered by the chimney.

This meeting itself, the conversation, was a risk. He had not lied, but he had dissembled, about who he was, about Doncaster and the Reverend Beaumont, and conversation would more easily reveal it. But there were truths out there – the strange link between Royalists and Levellers – that he had to find.

My contact would prefer this chair, shielded by the chimney.
Thurloe felt his legs readying to change places. But the wine came, and he waited.

Should he try to become someone else for the conversation; should he invent some other man and inhabit him? Or should he be as much himself as possible?

If I change places, put my back to the door, he will not see that I am waiting.
Thurloe felt his legs relax again.
Or should I not seem—
He finally caught hold of himself, took a mouthful of wine.

The door opened, and a man stepped into the inn. Boots and a cloak and a hat and a face obscured by a scarf up to the eyes. 

Is it?
Thurloe watched him, fixed.
How will he—
The man glanced around the room, and back at Thurloe.
How do I—
Something shifted around the man’s eyes, the suggestion of a question. Thurloe felt his own eyebrows lifting, openness, acknowledgement.
I am now a man who runs risks
, and his heart was thumping.

The man stepped forward towards Thurloe. He’d taken three steps, halved the distance between them, when a glance to the side froze him. He stopped still, stared for a second – towards the counter, towards the other customer – then turned and hurried out.

Thurloe half-rose –
follow? shout?
– and then half-turned towards the other customer. But the other customer was still hunched over his drink, a blank back denying Thurloe’s hope for clarity. Thurloe subsided from his awkward posture, frustrated and angry. He knocked the rest of the wine back in one, and left, with a malevolent glance towards the shadow at the counter.

The rain came down forever – as if there were no alternative to the steady hissing on hat and shoulders, the water sluicing down his back; as if God had decreed the flood for eternity. And Shay continued to stare at the weird scene, a little rustic hell, men and women on the margin of existence.

Two or three figures lurked on the edge of the tree line, watching like him, confused and suspicious. Further off, a man on horseback. They didn’t stay long.

He shifted his body gingerly within the jacket, trying to make a friend of the rain: to believe it was a bath, to believe it was warm, to believe that a fireside awaited – the tricks of a lifetime of sieges and delayed attacks.

This was Surrey; even within England, a place of more than usual familiarity and comfort; London, a great city of the world, of art, of civilization, was less than half a day’s easy riding.

Across two or three acres of common wasteland, a vagabond settlement had grown: wooden shelters and makeshift tents, of blankets and branches. Around them the inhabitants had started to till the land: the scrabbly undergrowth had been pulled aside, the earth turned until the weeds and roots had become uniform lines of rich brown clod, and in this earth they had planted what they needed.

A grumpy pig trudged closer and began to forage at Shay’s boot. He looked down at it, a fellow creature in the storm.

They’d called themselves the True Levellers, whatever that meant. Their opponents – the scornful, the alarmed – called them Diggers. Which made more sense.

There’d been speeches; pamphlets, of course; demonstrations in the local church. The earth was a common resource for all. Property – the having of land, of wealth – was an offence to this. If all the unused land were put to use, all men would have enough.

Just more of the idle words and ideas that had filled the heads of unhappy, unsettled men in the last years of destruction and ruined harvests. Shay watched the people. A scarecrow band, crude sodden clothes and empty faces, ankle-deep in their precious earth and wrestling it with simple tools and hands that shivered white in the rain.

One man moved among them – an older man, his own age or more, amply built but with clothes that hung loose – a figure of authority, though did they have such a thing? – offering encouragement and support. As Shay watched, he pulled a hoe from a ghost-pale young woman, raised one open palm to heaven in a moment of damp rapture, flicked the collected water out of his palm and began to work the soil with the pedantic rigour of a man who hadn’t been doing the same for the last hour.

Shay had come across the Weald, through the very fringes of mankind. Through furnace-settlements of a dozen inhabitants, where the charcoal smoke made a permanent dusk over the glistening smeared faces, a way of life for a thousand years or more. Through groups of outcasts – deserters from armies, deserters from life – that had reformed themselves as new communities in clearings in the endless forest, barbarian lives lived in the undergrowth: tinkers, tramps, and pedlars; itinerant smiths hammering at brute tools; crazed preachers watched by a scattering of world-shocked faces; the most desperate whores he’d ever seen. All the habits of humanity rehearsed as if by animals; as if, in its decay, English society were retreating, regressing.

Watching the cultivators through the curtain of water, he felt somehow uneasy.

It wasn’t the poverty, or the politics. He’d seen extremes enough of both in the German lands, across three decades of chaos, and now all the upheavals in this island. 

He looked again – at the woman thirty paces off, lost utterly in the misery of rain and desperation and still crouched over the mud, hands as trowels, scraping holes for the seeds and refilling them; at the man nearest him, driving a shovel down into the world with inhuman determination.

It was something unfamiliar and untouchable in these people. Mortimer Shay had spent his life moving among other men and women; never dependent, but always able to find some tie of companionship, to however remote a fellow – through duty, or through drink, through loyalty or masculinity or passion. Through all his life, Shay had counted on being able to join a stranger or group of strangers, of any quality or faith, and within an hour make himself comrade enough to be able to bed down next to them without fear.

Is this become my England?

Now, in the heart of the kingdom, he felt uneasy.

It was Oliver St John at his most typical: a glass of wine in his hand when Thurloe was shown in, a glass of wine thrust into Thurloe’s hand before he was halfway across the room – ‘You’ll take a little food as well, of course?’ – and every surface and object shining or plush; gorgeous fabrics and twinkling, probably foreign, glass. At first it increased the discomfort in Thurloe’s mind, but gradually it relaxed him.

‘Thought I’d lost you, Thurloe. Cromwell’s man now. Greater things.’ St John had settled back on a couch, shoulders sinking level with his knees. ‘You’ve missed the wine, I suppose. You’re sure we won’t eat a little something? You’re properly among the Spartans there, aren’t you?’

‘It’s a change from Lincoln’s Inn.’

‘Cromwell rarely eats, and the drink is foul stuff. Fair sacrifices for your career, I suppose. Have you a fancy for a royal title?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Some of them – most of them – we can abolish as worthy defenders of the public good. But there are serious administrative titles still; the Lord knows what they actually do, but they sound important. Vice-Admiral of the Shipyards, Master of the Forests, that sort of thing. I’ve a bagful of Lieutenancies to give away, and umpteen Secretaryships of various kinds. We’ve our own men to reward as much as the King ever did, and folk like a little continuity. Do you suppose Cromwell wants a Groom of the Stool?’ And they laughed, Thurloe easing into the atmosphere and St John boisterous. ‘You look a little pale.’