Traitor's Field (50 page)
Authors: Robert Wilton
She ran her eyes from the heavy boots crossed on the flagstones, up the legs and the trunk to his iron head. ‘And you have done – you would do. . . evil things, to win?’
He shifted on the hard chair, pulled himself straighter in it. ‘Evil things will always happen. I had rather they were in my control, and not some other man’s. I had rather they served a purpose that I care about, and not a purpose that I oppose.’
She affected lightness in her voice, to mask embarrassment. ‘I had thought there might be a chance for. . . for morality.’
‘And so there will be, for you.’
She smiled slowly. ‘But not for you. Too much of a luxury for Uncle Shay the warrior.’
His face opened, and he looked at her with more of a smile. ‘Too much of a limitation, Rachel.’
She looked down at her hands, folded on her thighs. ‘They say you have led a. . . a very bad life.’
‘They don’t know the half of it.’ His face hardened again. ‘My life has been in the service of other lives, Rachel. In the service of a world in which I’ll never be comfortable. Allow me at least to enjoy it.’
Rachel closed her eyes, and let her head back against the window. ‘Enjoyment,’ she said. ‘I would like that. It seems like. . . like some silly game of childhood, now put aside.’
‘Very well,’ Shay said, and slumped further down in the chair again. ‘We shall fight for enjoyment.’
He read distracted, and she watched him.
Eventually she said, quietly, ‘Uncle George vexes you for some reason.’
He looked up, considering whether to accept the engagement on this terrain. A great breath, and then: ‘Surface-wise, I admit I always thought George a fool. Too concerned to be the gentleman. Too concerned to be the courtier. Some of his habits with. . .’ – he waved the paper – ‘with the King’s business were like. . . schoolboy games.’ She looked sad, and Shay wondered if George Astbury had caught up his niece in some of his enthusiasms. ‘He did not leave these affairs as he should. But he was not a stupid man. No, he was an intelligent, thoughtful man. And that’s why I wish I understood what preoccupied him at the end.’
‘The siege of Pontefract? The possibility of using the Levellers? You were scornful, I think.’
‘It seems nonsense. The fancy of a simpleton. I’ve taken it as useful inspiration, nothing more – just a provocation to unsettle our enemies. But again, George was not a simpleton. So I want to know what he was planning – or what he feared.’
His head swung round to her. ‘You tell me about him.’
It surprised her, and she sat up straighter. ‘I think he cared about his duty very much. He worried that he was not the man he was supposed to be, and he worked diligently to compensate for this.’ Shay nodded, reflectively. ‘There’s more. He could be very stubborn – very proud. At the end, he wasn’t just worried about. . . about whatever he was worried about.
He was convinced by something – determined to prove himself against those who doubted him.’
He considered this. Then he nodded, and returned to the paper in his lap. He put it aside, and picked up another, and immediately the heavy face rumpled.
Rachel saw it. ‘A reversal on the battlefield?’
‘A printer has died.’ He looked at her; had George slipped so gently into these confidences? ‘And yes. An inconvenience. An additional journey for me. New arrangements.’
‘How did he die?’
‘He jumped from a battlement. Killed himself.’
The shock flared blatant on her face. ‘What must have been in his mind, to want to do that?’
But Shay was lost in the paper, and Rachel could only watch his grim absorbed face, and wonder at his world.
. . . Allgood Haseldine, Printer, died in custody at the Castle, of his own doing. Haseldine was well-known for a compromiser and sometimes a pen for hire, and his printing had oftentimes trod close to sedition. Finally there were found proofs enough that he was printing secretly the Royalist news-sheet called Mercurius Fidelis, and he was arrested on that charge. On his first night of confinement, let to walk one hour, he jumped from the Castle walls unto immediate death. It is said he had a wife.
[SS C/T/50/7]
It was a curiosity at the end of a list of administrative trivia from Oxford, a sorry little tragedy buried in a commonwealth of broken families and broken minds, and Thurloe wondered at it.
First he wondered because this was now his world: the bureaucratic routines of the state; reports from adjutants and magistrates and village constables; little facts and little deaths; interrogations.
Then he wondered at Haseldine the printer, and why he would throw himself to his death rather than face the next hours or minutes of his life. Buried in his reckoning was an assumption of brutality in interrogations at Oxford, presumably well-known or at least well-rumoured among men like this printer. Did he simply fear pain – fear the humiliations of weakness and the collapse of his body in the presence of other men? Or was there something he was so determined not to reveal, some cause to which he was so committed, that he would chose death rather than risk it?
Underground printers weren’t uncommon: some were truly unknown; some known and tolerated, monitored. In the last year such men had turned out edition after edition of the late King’s
Eikon
, his book of self-justification and reflection. Those who were tracked were questioned, fined, perhaps imprisoned. But this?
‘Matthew!’ Thurloe now had a subordinate clerk to assist him and do his bidding, and earnest Matthew was at his side in seconds. Each time Thurloe used and relished his new little authority, it as quickly embarrassed him. He stood, trying vaguely to blunt the hierarchy.
What must it be like to launch yourself into space, knowing it means destruction? To want that destruction?
‘Matthew, there’s a Royalist news-sheet –
Mercurius Fidelis
. Can we get copies of it?’
There was lily of the valley starting to bloom at the edge of the wood now, the little white caps bobbing demurely as if ashamed of their poison. Our Lady’s Tears, old Mrs Jacob had used to called it and, stiff-fingered and shooing the Astbury girls away, she’d gathered it for the herbalist every spring until she died. The symbol of Christ’s coming; the symbol of the possibility of hope.
There were crocuses out too, clustering around Rachel’s feet as she walked back towards the house, and dusty blue like the sky.
Mortimer Shay was gone again, southward first and then northward, he had said. With him went her connection with the world of war and politics beyond Astbury; with him went the darker shadows of life, leaving it a paler, blander thing.
Shay is fighting for my future. What is my future – if I am not to be the spinster of this forgotten green island adrift from the world?
Mary wrote regularly. Mary was comfortable and content. Mary had the life she wanted. Mary sounded deader and a little trapped.
I want to live.
Marriage – or men, at least, for a start.
She conjured again a picture of her father’s generation at her age, a tableau drawn from memories of comments by her father, Uncle George and before that her mother. A dancing world of wildness, of sex, of pleasure. She tried to insert Mortimer Shay – tried to imagine a younger, leaner, lither Shay – the wild Shay of her father’s fears, not the ominous, implacable hulk who now haunted Astbury.
Will Shay re-create that world for me?
His wife was still alive somewhere. The cleverest woman of her age, Father had said. It wasn’t clear whether the tone of disapproval was at her having married Shay, or having been clever. Rachel wanted to meet Lady Shay.
Rachel wanted to be the brilliant centre of a brilliant Court.
Is that what Shay fights for? For his own youth again?
Shay fights; and that is all.
T
O
M
R
I. S.,
AT THE
A
NGEL
,
IN
D
ONCASTER
Sir,
It has taken me these months to overcome my alarm at our attempted meeting, and in truth that alarm has often times persuaded me that I must not continue this correspondence. I mean no disrespect to you, Sir, but this world of shadows and threats has wearied me quite to my core and I would abandon all things that speak to me of it.
But it is a world to which I am bound, and since we have but one life we are bound to live it as we find it, and, sensible of my discourtesy in so abruptly breaking off our meeting, and sensible too of the gap in our correspondence, I have found it meet that I should write again.
My apologies to you therefore, good Sir, and my hopes that you will understand my trials and that this finds you no worse than when I saw you.
First, a word about that unfortunate incident at Newmarket. By way of background I should say there are – as I think I have indicated – some men among the partisans of the Royal interest who believe that any alliance, even were it with the Levellers, would be a good alliance if it would advance the cause. Indeed they believe that they have found among the Levelling men some who reciprocate their belief that a mutual accord might somehow be possible. It seems so improbable to me, and yet they are in earnest, and the attacks by the Army last year on the Levellers in its ranks, and the consequent weakening of the Leveller interest, have only made them more determined to be proved right. They are become most heated about this plot, as they are about any scheme that seems to offer the hope of advancing the cause by sudden and surprising means, and those of us who are doubtful, or, as we would say, more prudent, are often cursed for faint-hearts and waverers. These are the men who were in contact with one or more individuals of the Leveller persuasion among the Army in Doncaster – around the Colonel Rainsborowe of whom you wrote.
One of these is a most hot-tempered fellow, and suspicious, and you must understand my shock when, on walking into the inn at Newmarket, I saw his face across the room. His volatility of character extends, I regret, into a predisposition to gamble, and with hindsight I apprehend that this alone may have placed him there on that day, but in my state of mind I could only guess at the most bewildering and alarming explanations, of great suspicion of me personally, and so I confess that my spirit failed me and I fled.
Meantimes, the life that I try to lead as a dutiful Christian takes me northwards, into Scotland. The Royal cause is rallying there – every sympathetic house from Oxford to the border is alive with enthusiasm for what the year may bring – and I have found some little responsibilities on the fringes of those who serve it, and so trudge thither with a heart not blithe but as faithful as I may stir it.