Traitor's Field (47 page)

‘It’s – it’s an interesting mix of people.’

‘It’s the new world, John. If we let open the door to liberty, as we must, it’s remarkable the people and the ideas that slip in.’ He was watching Thurloe out of languid eyes, and then the slumped head came forward. ‘How do you find Thomas Scot?’

‘He’s committed. He’s sincere. A little—’

‘He’s a dried-up old lizard! And vicious. God save us, John, don’t say you’ve gone fully puritan in six months.’

Thurloe smiled, and resumed. ‘He is committed. He is sincere.’ He hesitated, looked up at St John again.
Is conviviality making me indiscreet?
‘But about what? That. . . worries me.’

‘Most men who signed the King’s death warrant were rather afraid of what they were doing. Surprised. Scot was. . . like a stoat with a chicken; ferociously satisfied.’

‘He’s sympathetic to the Levellers.’ St John was suddenly watching more carefully. ‘He has men around him who are sympathetic. That’s why you wanted me to investigate the death of Rainsborough.’ A faint nod from the couch. ‘I still don’t quite know what was going on at Doncaster then; there’s intelligence that Scot’s keeping to himself. And now I have. . . indications – faint indications, from elsewhere – that there might have been – might still be – some possible link between the Levellers and the Royalists.’

St John sat up. ‘But that’s insanity, surely.’

‘Quite. Some of the news-sheets suggested it, though, didn’t they? And Lilburne and Sexby said as much.’

‘We’d thought the Levellers a spent force.’

‘But if they weren’t. If their defeat in the spring had made them more ready for alternatives.’

‘Lord, if that were even half likely we’d have to go so careful we’d come to a stop. We wouldn’t know which way to turn.’

‘Will you mention it – to Cromwell?’

St John chewed the idea. ‘Lot on his mind, that man. The Army. Parliament. All of our souls.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll slip it in.’

Thurloe took a mouthful of wine, and watched the light playing in the glass. ‘Master St John; there’s something else.’ St John’s eyebrows went up. ‘The Royalist plotting; their intelligencing. I don’t think we have the first idea about it.’

A great sniff. ‘Probably true.’

‘I’ve the feeling we’re dealing with something that’s – that’s decades old.’ Nottingham Castle. London fortress. ‘Ancient. And our people, they’re. . .’

‘They’re not ten days out of the shires. No, you’re right.’

‘But there must be someone who knows how the royal systems worked – not last year, not just during the war, but ten and twenty years ago. Someone who’d talk to us. I need to find such a man.’

St John’s cheeks puffed out, and then he released the breath slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said, and the head swung round to Thurloe. ‘Yes, there’s a man who might do. If he’s still alive.’

Winter again, and again Rachel walked among the spare bones of the trees and shrubs, charcoal against the silver landscape.

And what has another year brought us?

A dead King. The little exactions of the County Committee and their reforms – she saw and felt little of this – her father’s business, and his complaints – but it was the only change she was made aware of. Her father more withdrawn, as if practising for his absence from the world. Sometimes in the evening he would take out the family Bible, and she’d see him running a solitary finger down the inscriptions on the flyleaves, muttering the details of the Astburys to himself. He could only look backwards, check his proper place in history, ready to give a full and correct pedigree when the time came for final justification. And she too was shrinking away from the world; or the world was shrinking away from her, like the plants.

Nearby now, Jacob’s shoulders rose and fell over the spade; his perennial labours.

Then there was Shay. Shay’s presence had grown in her life: mysterious, bleak despite his aggressive vitality, and somehow dangerous. All things that Astbury and the Astburys were not. Where Anthony and George Astbury had fussed and feared at the changes and the defeats, and stepped backwards and bent in the face of them, Shay was questioning, testing, challenging.

‘I’m not going anywhere, Jacob.’

Jacob straightened, frowning. Then he got it, sniffed, and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

He bent to the spade again, guiding it deftly around the hibernating plants.

‘Right you are, miss.’

Her tongue clicked in exasperation, and she turned and tramped back to the house.

Curving away into the last of the winter sun, the Thames was a dull silver against the fringing grey landscape. To the west, England was gloomy and pagan and mysterious. As Thurloe stepped up onto the bank, the boatman behind him looked surly and vulnerable, unhappy despite the exorbitant fare he’d bid for waiting.

The house – a broad frontage of red brick like its surrounding wall, a garden, and somewhere a forlorn bird – felt like the last outpost of civilization.

The dying evening made the house seem dilapidated, and the garden had darkened and shrunk for winter, but as Thurloe walked through it he could see the order and industry in it. The plots were trimmed and logically arranged, and even the most unpromising runts of plants had labels.

The ghost of a servant flickered in front of him behind the door, and drifted away down a passage, and Thurloe followed.

The house was an overstuffed chaos of things and colours and smells. The walls were packed with pictures and tapestries, part-obscured by darkwood furniture that lined the passage with little apparent thought for logic or utility, except that every surface was necessary to support something: astrological instruments, a death mask, stuffed animals, plates of half-eaten meals, a skull, a lute, racks of glass jars, a dead bird, erratic piles of books and papers. There was no straight path down the passage, only a track to be plotted among the debris. Occasional candles guttered and flashed, and the gloom made everything a weird soup of oranges and browns. The smell, meanwhile, was everywhere and overpowering and indistinct: an apothecary’s shop, a perfumery, a kitchen, as if the world of senses had been distilled into one cloying spoonful of taste.

The servant had disappeared and, in following him, Thurloe found himself alone in a large study. It was as gloomy and diverse as the passage, but it was more clearly a place focused on learning. Bookshelves rose from floor to ceiling, except on one wall completely filled with a rack of hundreds of jars and pots of powders and leaves and liquids. Beside the rack a large table was covered in trays and glass beakers and apparatus. A fire glowed in the grate, and near it there was an enormous chair piled with cushions and fabrics.

Thurloe looked at the table and the rack warily, and moved towards the nearest bookshelf. Astrology, Botany, Alchemy, History, Medicine: all were represented here in heavy bindings and half a dozen languages.

In the pile of cushions and fabrics on the chair, two eyes opened, and a voice began to speak.

Startled, Thurloe couldn’t make out the words, and even when he’d overcome the surprise and peered, and distinguished a great pink potato of a head, fringed with white bristles top and bottom and crowning an immense body, he still couldn’t make out the words.

Something familiar in the rhythm and the sound and. . . Greek. The vast man in the chair was speaking Greek – with a foreign accent. Thurloe replayed the words, also somehow familiar. ‘Who are ye? Is it on some business, or do ye wander at random over the sea, even as pirates, who wander, hazarding their lives and bringing evil to men of other lands?’ Pirates? Evil to men of other lands?

Homer, of course. Polyphemus the one-eyed giant, to Odysseus.

Thurloe thought for a moment. ‘We have come by another way, by other paths – as suppliants to thy knees, in the hope that thou wilt give us entertainment.’ He stepped forward. ‘My name is John Thurloe, Sir Theodore.’ He extended a hand. The pile of fabric in the chair didn’t seem to have any hands, and he withdrew it again. Too late, a set of pudgy pink fingers emerged from among the fabric and flapped vaguely towards him. ‘I was advised to seek your guidance.’

‘Oh-ho, you wish to consult Mayerne.’ In the accent – it wasn’t quite French – the second syllable of his name was both swallowed and elaborate. ‘Kings and Queens have found relief in these hands. For Princes and Princesses these hands were the first touch of the world.’ The tiny eyes opened wide, perhaps surprised to find themselves in such an unlikely face. ‘But such credentials do not serve in these days, I think.’

‘Not your skills as physician, sir. But as a. . . a man of affairs.’

‘Affairs?’ A fleshy smile. ‘A pretty word, that. Can you procure for me some gold leaf?’

‘Gold leaf?’

‘And ten ounces of the seeds of the
Tulipa Aleppensis
. I think it may prove beneficial to a certain palliative decoction of my devising. Your Parliament has become most insular in its habits, and restricts the trade in such things, which are the essence of my simple work here. They fear I would smuggle messages among my seeds, and commit heresies in my alembic with the gold.’

‘Tiresome for you.’

There was a rumbling from the mountain of fabric. Sir Theodore de Mayerne was chuckling. ‘They’re right, of course. I would do those things. But tiresome all the same.’

‘The more quickly enemies may converse with one another, the more quickly they will be friends.’

A great heave, and Mayerne’s face pushed forward. ‘That is rather good.’ He relapsed into the chair. ‘Quid pro quo.’

‘I’ll. . . do what I can.’

A cluck from the great face. ‘That’s what I miss about the servants of the King. They lied with such charm, such panache.’ The eyes narrowed. ‘Your so-solid honesties do not inspire joy, young man. Your pages will not flow with poetry. Your bed will not swell with luxuriant mistresses. But what is the quo that you seek?’

‘I was told you were the most knowledgeable diplomat in England.’

‘In Europe, young man. Europe. I knew no little boundaries of country. I served the free movement of knowledge.’ The lips pushed out sulkily. ‘Until your late King forbade me to travel. A logical calculation, but so pedantic, so narrow-minded.’ The jowls juddered. ‘Such a fragile man. Now Mayerne is little more than a prisoner, tolerated by your Parliament because of my serv—’

‘You travelled back and forth across Europe. Switzerland. France. Here. On diplomatic business. Sometimes on secret diplomatic business.’

A little smile in the flesh. ‘I travelled as a physician. As a scholar. I and my brother physicians, we speak in the universal language of learning, and we trade in our roots and seeds and minerals. As an adjunct, Mayerne learns things here and there; is able to pass useful counsel backward and forward; soothe the fevers of diplomacy. When once you have cured Richelieu of
lues venerea
, touched the offended member, what is a protocol or a fortress or a royal confidence?’

‘You were trusted by both Stuart Kings, before—’

‘I was used by both. I should say: ill-used.’

‘Who were your intermediaries in the Stuart Court? Was there some. . . office, within the Court, responsible for these things?’

‘Mayerne is not a clerk, to deal with officers. I whisper in the ears of Kings, and they whisper to me. Certain senior counsellors are my companions. . .’

‘Which counsellors?’

The old man looked sulky.

‘This was Thomas More’s house, Sir Theodore, wasn’t it?’ The little eyes opened wider, waiting. ‘A good man perhaps, but not a worldly one. You on the other hand are not a man to rot here in isolation. You thrive on contact, on influence. Things only the Parliament can give you; men like me.’ The eyes narrowed again, buried in the slabs of the face. ‘You thrive on tulip seeds.’

The little smile again.

‘At the Court of Charles Stuart, for example.’

Mayerne’s face rippled in thought. For such an old man – what had St John said? Nearly eighty – the face was amazingly unlined. ‘For the diplomatic business, I would present it as gossip among the King’s closest companions. First the man Buckingham, of course, though he was little more than a peacock. Later that pinched Archbishop. That was a trial, believe me. But I realized that for more secret business – very occasionally – I would be visited by someone of lower profile. Someone in the second rank at the Court; someone less noticed, someone less susceptible to the fashions of royal favour. The last of these that I met was a man named. . .’ The eyes closed, though it was hard to notice it. ‘Ass. . . something.’