Traitor's Field (49 page)
Authors: Robert Wilton
[SS C/S/50/6]
And I too must plan my spring campaign
. The tug of home, and the secluded peace of Astbury garden, made it seem rather wearisome.
The house touched him with unease, too. The book was lost to him, and he could only hope that it was destroyed. Its destruction was a little disaster for the history of England and her Kings, but still better than its discovery. Even George Astbury would not have been so mad as to have the thing with him on Preston field, or to leave it to be ransacked in Hamilton’s train. He had lived here more than anywhere, and there was nowhere else he could safely have kept it. He had left no key to it. It was not to be found. In which case, destruction and loss was much the best hope.
Anthony Ascham is made Ambassador to Madrid
. Shay tried to remember if he’d ever met the man. So many anonymous silly courtiers. He should have been more diligent.
George Astbury would have been more diligent
.
Regardless, Ascham would serve.
Miles Teach in the skirmish, eyes narrow and all-seeing, body poised in the crouch for defence or attack or flight.
What forgotten town is it today? What country even?
Just a bridge, a tower, and an enemy.
The enemy was filling the bridge now, surrounding the tower, with the stupid jostling of men whose blood is up and who have run out of uses for their energy. The tower would fall soon, and Teach had got well out of it an hour past.
Now he was in the trees, a shadow among the trunks, and the English soldiers were closer and beginning to fringe around the edges. Time to pull back further; no good prospects for a fox in a spinney.
Who is trying to kill me today?
But now another fugitive had bolted into the trees, desperate and stumbling in the undergrowth, and Teach’s whole face swore. Immediately shouts and pursuit, a stray musket shot hustling through the leaves, and soldiers feeling their way into the green gloom in twos and threes.
The English knew they’d won; their voices and movements had the confident cruelty of those who no longer fear resistance. Teach was slipping backwards among the trees as fast as he could manage with discretion and the occasional glance around him.
My God, what have I not deserved from all this chaos?
Then shouts nearer, another stray shot thumping into a trunk, and suddenly two soldiers exploded out of the bracken at him from different directions. One sword, one musket; musket hesitant and skittering to a halt in the undergrowth, sword livelier and hungrier and dancing towards him. Musket starting to swing up level –
what idiot tries to use a musket in a forest?
– and Teach swerved towards the bewildered soldier with sword swinging, dashed the musket barrel down with a backward sweep of his blade from his left arm and swung his other shoulder into the man’s face; down he went, flailing and stunned, and Teach had already turned towards the other, and swung his pistol up in his right hand, held low, held for the impossible breath that was the difference between a professional’s life and a levy’s hasty waste, and fired at the swordsman’s upper body, now open in the swing, from all of three feet away.
The ball caught the man somewhere in chest or shoulder, and Teach knew it for mortal even as he turned again to the musketeer. The man was pulling himself up out of the undergrowth, angry for the fight, but he was thinking too much, much too much, wondering how the certain victory of two men against one had turned so, wondering whether he should reach for his musket, just there among the leaves like another fallen branch, and Teach had switched hands and sent him staggering back with one wild sweep of his sword and then driven the blade hard and sure into his chest. He kicked the body off the blade and swung round again. The other man was dying, sure enough, but dying noisily. Teach scrambled over and finished him, hand over mouth and knife into heart. Then up on his haunches with knife and sword and looking all around. Now he had the silence he needed. Another glance full around, the narrow eyes searching the trees for threat. Then he checked the ground, checked that he had all his weapons, and drifted quickly away into the darker heart of the wood.
These are the lives of Miles Teach.
T
O THE
L
ORD
P
RESIDENT OF THE
C
OUNCIL OF
S
TATE
,
Sir, by horse couriers from the north of Scotland we learn of rumours and reports, diverse enough to be credited, that the Marquess of Montrose is landed in the Orknie Islands and bound for the mainland, here to take up his proclaimed Lieutenancy and raise an army in the Royal interest.
Edinburgh,
March.
‘I confess that I perceive the Orkney Islands much as I do Turkey, or the moon.’ Oliver St John, a walrus of decadence slumped in an ornate chair.
Thomas Scot, hovering: ‘They are wild and primitive peoples in those islands. He may do much mischief among them, with their tribalisms and superstitions.’
‘He may make himself a private kingdom for all I care.’
Cromwell, eyes lost in the Highland landscape of northern Scotland, visualizing a man’s rain-blasted journey by goat track and cattle drove, the God-questioning wildernesses of forest and mountain: ‘He might have made the mainland by the time these words were written. By the time we read them today, he might already be at work among the Catholic peasants of the far north.’
‘As yet the Church in Scotland is against him.’ Scot, feeling his way through the sentence cautiously.
But Cromwell wasn’t listening. Hurriedly and briefly back from Ireland, his mind was between kingdoms. A slab of a hand rose and the fingers rummaged in his forehead. ‘I fear we must soon turn again to Scotland.’
Sir,
from the fishermen of the far north it is heard that a man of great note has arrived in the Orkney Islands with many soldiers, joining a force already there; the host is reputed vast, and the effect on food prices prodigious. We may safely take this to be Montrose, joining the advance force he sent thither in the autumn to secure the place as base. The reports of the size of his force are inflated by mere peasant wonder and the benefit for sellers of fish; by other indications such as number of boats etc we know that his force remains slight, but a few hundred paid men of the German states and a horde of untrained men of the islands. Meanwhile, the clansmen of Ross and Munro, who might have been likely volunteers, are held comfortable for the rival interest, and it seems that this quarter of the Kingdom will be something of a wilderness to Montrose.
U. J.
[SS C/S/50/28]
‘The world looks like a puzzle to you today, Uncle Shay.’ She’d been sitting silently near him, as had become her habit in the mornings when he was in the house and eating or reading. It had started as a provocation, and he had been duly provoked, but now they both found a kind of satisfaction in it.
He was semi-resident at the house now. Sometimes he used a tavern in the district, not too far off on the Ashbourne road, for affairs that he did not wish to link to Astbury. Rachel knew the place, and grasped something of his motives.
Shay was still trying to decide whether he liked the ‘Uncle’ business. ‘The world is a battlefield to me, always.’
I’m not Uncle enough to ignore the pleasure of a pretty young woman nearby.
The fresh face darkened. ‘That’s a terrible way to go through life.’
He was half in a paper. ‘And yet I have found that it serves.’ He looked up. ‘And I think that somewhere you agree with me. Marauding militia men. Gentlemen being stolen and ransomed. And a regime exacting taxes merely for old loyalties. This is not a world that you find comfortable, surely.’
‘But there must be hope.’ Her own voice sounded dead to her.
‘Yes, there must.’ He set the paper down on his lap, and looked at her with an old bear’s discomfort. ‘You – you and people like you – are the hope, Rachel. You are the inheritors of a world that I care about – a world that I inherited – and you will carry it forward, beyond these present upsets. This is the battlefield where I find myself. First I must survive. Then I must win.’