Traitor's Field (55 page)

‘I can’t believe that you dared come to London. Uxbridge was bad enough, but here!’

Shay gripped the man’s arm, as much to stop him fidgeting. ‘Then we may hope that no one else will believe it.’

‘I often have visitors from Parliament; the Army even. To see my books. Or on business.’

‘Perfect. My reputation can only benefit.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of you.’ It was said with deliberate bitterness.

Shay ran one finger along a line of books, enjoying its rhythmic bumping over the spines. The room was hardly big enough for the two of them, and all four walls were solid leather, rank after rank of buff-coloured boots on parade, broken by the rare gleam of calfskin. A table was piled with letters, news-sheets and pamphlets.

He felt somehow clumsy in this temple. ‘Did you bring it?’ he asked sharply.

A startled glance from the other, and then a little nod. He lifted a copy of the
Veritas Britannica
to show another pile of papers, and Shay dropped onto a stool in front of it.

‘
Being a strict record of the Debates held within the Army, at Putneye, during October of the year of our Lord 1647
’.

In his ear, insistent: ‘Cromwell ordered these suppressed.’

‘But you have rather more respect for our history.’ He looked up.

The man flushed slightly. ‘To have lost them. . . It would have been – I thought it—’

‘I understand.’ Shay watched the strained figure as it straightened the top paper unnecessarily. Not for the first time, he marvelled at the little braveries that flickered in men. ‘Our history will need these details. We’re all servants of the future.’

The man looked at him, examining the idea. ‘Yes. That’s rather good. Yes, we are.’

Shay began to turn over the pages, skimming and occasionally slowing. Cromwell and the other senior commanders trying to take the heat out of the radical men in the Army by giving them a hearing. Wild ideas, and the uneasy balancing of discipline and release. Votes for all men; fundamental rights; equality before the law; freedom of conscience. 

Shay said, ‘Tell me about Thomas Rainsborough.’

‘The most eloquent of the radical men, and the most forward. A devil in his manner, but—’

‘A politician? A rabble-rouser?’

The man hesitated. ‘No. No, I should say not. Passionate, yes, but when he spoke he was most earnest and most sober.’

‘Trouble for Cromwell, though.’

‘They shared a mistrust of the King. But Cromwell thought the Levellers meant chaos in the Army, and anarchy in England. He worried about the King being captured by the Leveller faction.’

Shay had found Rainsborough in the record.

[SS C/T/47/7 & WORCESTER COLLEGE MS 65]

One finger thumped at the page, slowly.
This, surely, cannot be reconciled with Royalism.

How should a King behave before his people?

These are the decades of Charles Stuart, the second King of that name: a satin sheltered childhood, lace and loneliness and the strange tensions of his father’s retreat from his own Government; an adolescence at war, an uncomfortable, precocious presence on the battlefield, just another ridiculous extravagance in the tent like the gold dinner service and the bust of Aurelius, his pudgy insecurities being played out across a whole nation, and then the forced adulthood turned back to childhood games again, hiding and disguise and catch me if you can, and then the courtiers, with their endless matronly obeisances and scoldings, coming to tell him that his father, so cold and so painful, had been murdered by his own people.
This is not what I was promised.

I’ve never met this people.
Perhaps some forgotten ceremonial unveiling of the infant to the world, and the soldiers plodding nearby like cattle when he stood in the tent doorway in defiance of his father’s hasty murmured pleas. Then fear and poverty and exile kept the company small, and of his own class.
Shall they think me handsome?

At the start of his third decade, Charles II was invited by his people to join them, and he came to Edinburgh by ship and by a plodding ride through endless wet hills, stopping at houses of surpassing meanness and gloom. Finally the entry to Edinburgh, his first conscious introduction to his people, a present for his twentieth birthday.

And shall these people, too, think me tall and handsome?
They seemed an emotionless, stubborn set of faces, these Scots gathered to greet him from their doorways and from their windows like raised eyebrows. Not to greet him; to consider him.
This is not what I was promised in the paintings; this is not like the dreams.

Used and forgotten, the Marquess of Montrose was there to greet his master too. From a spike protruding high out of the tolbooth his head gazed down on the procession, blackened and shrivelling and most indifferent of all.

Shay adjusted his bulk on the bench, resettling his shoulders against the damp plaster wall. Unsuccessful. He remembered the conversation in London; stared down again at the letter in his fist.

This is supposed to be a mere device.
Levellers in communication with Royalists. Royalists in communication with Levellers.
What wasps’ nest have I kicked?

‘Teach, I’m bored of the politicians. I’ve a fancy for a yarn.’ Teach, crammed into a wooden chair across the fireplace, waited. He was leaner since his time in Ireland. ‘What happened in Doncaster? With that man Rainsborough? I heard you had a hand.’

Shay’s second hearing of the death of Colonel Thomas Rainsborough was in a slumped excuse for a tavern, in an unnamed Scottish hamlet.

‘That?’ Miles Teach shifted uncomfortably, and then shrugged, dismissive. ‘Wholly reckless, and it hardly changed the war, did it? Something for the young bloods to feel better about themselves – siege eats at a man, d’you know? – and it rattled the enemy.’

‘I heard you helped to plan it.’

Again the uncomfortable shrug. Then a deliberate shake of the head. ‘One of the Pauldens thought of it. William. Clever man.’ 

‘You said two or three of you had the secret channel to the outside. Him?’

A nod. ‘Yes. The other Paulden – Thomas – he knew enough of things too. He got away, I think? Abroad?’ Shay nodded. ‘William Paulden’s idea and plan. Kidnap Rainsborough and—’

‘Kidnap him?’ Shay was forward, startled. ‘Not kill?’

‘No. It wasn’t intended, anyway.’

‘I’d not thought. I’d just assumed it was a sortie, a revenging.’ 

‘Lot of the men in Pontefract had been Marmaduke Langdale’s troops, and they’d heard he’d been taken after Preston. Someone – don’t know – had the wild idea of doing something to force Parliament to release him. This became kidnapping Rainsborough.’ Teach watched the effect of his words. ‘A nonsense, I guess. Doubt politics works like that. And men don’t kidnap easily.’

‘As you found.’ A grunt from Teach. ‘What happened?’

Teach shrugged. ‘Like the Swedes used to say. “Reality happened.”’ Shay smiled instinctively. ‘We rode in. Surprised the pickets and the gate. Got to his billet – an inn—’

‘Wait – who did what?’

‘We’d split up. We were four at the inn – William Paulden was scouting around – and Thomas Paulden went on immediately to spy the road. That left myself, and. . . Austwick – he was the regular military man in the thing, commanding type – and a lad.’

‘Blackburn. Cornet Blackburn.’

‘Mm. I’d a ruse about having a message for this Rainsborough, and that got us in. The lad held the horses, Austwick took me upstairs and we rooted out Rainsborough. His Adjutant too. Got them into the yard again and out into the street.’
Just two men
. ‘Then it got out of hand.’

‘How?’

Teach scowled. ‘Shay, you know the skirmish better than most men living. Frightened men happened. Angry men, excited men. Everyone’s blood up. Hot words. Rainsborough resisted. Or perhaps it was his man. One or both of them lashed out. Then there was a pistol – not Rainsborough, the other, his Lieutenant – he had a pistol suddenly – a regular scuffle and . . .’ He shrugged. ‘No choice. Middle of an enemy camp. No time for a brawl or a parley.’

‘You killed them both?’

It wasn’t a question one asked, and they both knew it. Teach looked faintly bitter. ‘I don’t think I did for Rainsborough; I make no boast either way. That was Austwick, I think. The other? I don’t know. Perhaps.’

Shay knew he’d gone too far, and felt uneasy at his own strange obsession with the story. ‘As you say,’ he murmured. ‘A bit of recklessness. But we’ve few enough heroics. Folk’ll take them where they find them.’

Teach grunted and looked away. Shay was amused for an instant, and then lost again.
I have learned nothing of this. These facts, the men and the deaths, are nothing.

Four men came to the inn, and were still alive: Thomas Paulden, Teach, Austwick and Blackburn. He’d found two so far.

The letter was still in his pocket. Astbury’s strange interest in Pontefract, and the Levellers and Rainsborough. Rainsborough is to be kidnapped. Rainsborough is killed.
Where is the truth in this?

The garden at Chelsea had exploded into colour. When Thurloe stepped up from the river, the silvered black of shrivelled winter had become yellows and reds and mysterious gradations of purple, with an undergrowth of all the greens. Sir Theodore de Mayerne’s garden was an encyclopedia of herbs and shrubs, and now that it was fully awake Thurloe saw more clearly the meticulous ordering. It seemed too that the rich smells, crammed together in the corridor in his previous visit, had now been taken out and spread over the garden, fresher now and in their proper places.

The old man was sitting in a chair on the path, well-wrapped despite the July heat, head slumped, silent and staring into his horticultural world. For a moment Thurloe wondered if he might be dead. Then the two eyebrows rose slowly up the dome, and the eyes fixed Thurloe and waited.

Thurloe said, ‘A man named Duncan Campbell will visit you. He is troubled by irregularities and excitements in his heart rhythm. Duncan Campbell is factor in London for Archibald Campbell.’

Silence. Then Mayerne’s mouth flickered. ‘The Marquess of Argyll?’

‘He.’

‘The Campbell land is. . . in the west of Scotland, I think.’

‘Yes. I don’t know about mining there, but I understand that also you have an interest in oysters; Argyll has substantial estates on the Clyde.’ 

The heavy face bulged up in a smile, and Mayerne’s eyes disappeared for a moment. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is most thoughtful of you, young man.’ The eyes reappeared, sharp and shrewd. ‘How may I oblige you today?’

Thurloe was caught in a deep breath. ‘This garden is a miraculous place.’

‘No, Master Thurloe; quite the opposite.’ A shudder, and the head shifted forward. ‘It is a supremely rational place. While men like you burn Europe with your hysterias of religion and politics, men like me are creating places like this together. Did you come here to debate which of us will leave more to future centuries?’