Traitor's Field (6 page)

Soon after – the treetops are silvering, but the army of Parliament still sleeps in grey – a small door opens in a shadow in a cleft in the walls of Colchester. A figure stands still, and watchful – first for any sign of life from the besieging army, then scanning the ground nearby. The arrow was aimed at this point, and he sees it almost immediately. Another check for movement nearby, four purposeful strides and he has the arrow, and is back at the door and safe inside. The door has been open for considerably less than a minute.

He waits until he is back in his lodging room, the arrow tucked into his coat, before unwrapping the message from the arrow shaft.

Five words only are on the paper, and something dies in his hungry gut.

Again he is hurrying through the town, and now its chaos offers him only tragedy rather than defiant hope. Crumbled walls, burned houses, a hollow-cheeked woman staring wild at him, the blanket-covered mounds of dead, the stench, two soldiers cornering a cat, a dead-end – yesterday there was a road here, and now it’s blocked by a mess of rubble and timber – a smear of blood on stone where some other animal has been caught and killed, a listless soldier trudging nowhere, a forlorn flag.

He has not heard conversation on the street for many days. There is nothing to say, and other people’s faces offer only despair, and shame.

The sentries know him, and don’t care any more, and soon he is knocking at a door, entering, handing the paper to a dapper dark man interrupted while pulling on his boots. The man takes the paper but still watches him.

He shakes his head.

It’s a decent face in front of him: not handsome, but good. The siege has turned it inside out, the flesh becoming hollow. He has marked the change day by day, complacency becoming piety, for that is what hunger will do to a man, and it’s somehow more noble now. Something flickers, uncontrolled, around the mouth. The decent man breaks his gaze and looks down at the paper.

Hamilton’s army destroyed. Invasion scattered.

In the third week of August 1648, a stranger was travelling the land around Preston. North to Kendal, east to Skipton and Halifax, and south to Wigan, he moved from tavern to tavern and to the occasional sympathetic private house. He asked after friends who had been involved in the fighting, selecting the army according to the likely inclination of his host.

Where he found a soldier – a fugitive Royalist seeking some kind of absolution, a Roundhead ready to take a drink and give his opinions – he gathered details of the Preston campaign: the men and the movements, the manoeuvres and the tactics.

It was a waiting time, a time of frustration, worse because Shay didn’t know what he was looking for in the conversations. They were merely a way to pass the hours, and to do so as productively as possible. He was storing up facts and ideas, as if for winter. Information, like Oliver Cromwell, had a way of coming back at you when you didn’t expect it.

Thus Colonel Thomas Rainsborough: a pale, domed head with golden-brown hair falling in thick waves behind it; the crown hairless and so emphasizing the strange pallor. Hooded hawk’s eyes under high brows, a small vivid red mouth. A golden wisp of moustache brushing the lips. An elegant angel of a face. 

Colonel Thomas Rainsborough at prayer: the eyes lightly closed, the face even more uniformly pale, the lips flickering with devotion, nibbling at the words and whispering them intimately to the infinite.

Colonel Thomas Rainsborough at the siege of Colchester. On 21st August the defenders sent out five hundred of their womenfolk to beg for food. For there might – even after the frenzied skirmishes, after the starvation and the barrage, the endless mad explosions of stone as the balls shattered the fabric of the old town, shattered history itself, after the bitter heckling and the nasty violences, after the poisoned bullets and the thumbscrews and the matches lit under fingernails, the violation of the tombs, the desecration of the bodies – even after all this there might still be pity and charity and a gentleman in the besieging force.

Uneasy, frightened, ashamed at their weakness as beggars and their implied weakness as women, the crowd drifted towards the besiegers’ lines. There was an uncomfortable shifting among the encircling forces as they realized what was happening, shouts and gallops and hasty consultations. Colonel Rainsborough, roused from prayer by an orderly who knew that of all things one never roused the Colonel from prayer, ordered a volley of musket fire over the heads of the women.

Still the herd shuffled forwards, leaderless and random and faces down, towards the Parliamentarian lines. Four of the women were grabbed – a shifting, a murmuring of alarm, a nascent moaning among the others – and Colonel Rainsborough had them stripped naked. Laughter across the field, the unbeautiful animal laughter of men as men, and fear: nakedness is what comes before violence; nakedness is what comes before violation; nakedness is what comes before death. After nakedness, anything is possible.

Then he sent the women back. Lost between worlds, dumb and hungry and stripped of humanity and hope, the herd drifted back into the besieged town.

The things I have suffered for Charles Stuart
.

James, Duke of Hamilton sat heavy on his horse. The compact body was slumped, the clothes battered. A hard freakish wind threw gusts of rain at man and horse, blustering and dropping, roaring in the ears then vanishing, and as suddenly launching the deluge from some new quarter. The road east from Uttoxeter rises gently, and the Duke found himself at the top of a shallow hill, surrounded by the incessant, exhausting storm and the surly remnant of his army.

There was some further obstacle, some new delay. His mind was numb to it all now.

Another flurry of wind and rain at his back, and his neck hunched instinctively. The large eyes flicked around. It had been a long time since he’d really looked at his army. Too much mutual resentment. Too much shame. Now that he glimpsed it, he realized how small and straggled it had become. The regiments empty-ranked and intermingled. The few horses hang-necked. The riders slumped like their commander. The weapons carried careless and awry. A musket dropped at the roadside, a ribbon trodden in the mud, a blanket wrapped around a shivering head, the wordless squelching trudge, and the faces that would not look back at him: drowned faces, sullen, beaten. The unearthly force that was Cromwell, the long meandering flight across the country, the sudden alarms and the sleepless nights, and the eternal furnace of wind and rain, had eaten and shrivelled the army like some vicious plague.

‘The men’ll go no further, your Grace.’ A voice at his side.

Head up suddenly with the anger and the pride, and damn the rain. ‘The hell they won’t! I’ll talk—’

‘Your Grace!’ The hand white on the Duke’s arm – uncontrolled, improper. An uneasy release. ‘That would be. . . perhaps a risk. And beneath your dignity.’

‘Then they can rot here. We’ll away!’ The wind blustering up around his face, catching the words and swallowing them. ‘Come on, then!’

But again the wrong hand on the Duke’s arm. ‘They won’t. . .’ The words caught. ‘They won’t allow us, your Grace. Too many of the officers have already fled.’

‘Aye, I wondered where Langdale had got to.’ The Duke’s heavy features dark and scornful.

‘The men. . . insist that they will keep us here at any hazard.’

James, Duke of Hamilton: a low black cloud, hanging solitary on the little hill.

In the final week of August, the stranger shifted base eastwards, from the districts around Preston to the districts around Leeds. It was unlikely that a reply would come yet – there was certainly no chance of anything from Amsterdam or Paris – but something was just possible from London or Edinburgh. He read news-sheets and pamphlets wherever he could find them, for they were all the information he could get for now. As he travelled, he sounded casually the opinions and loyalties and characters of innkeepers and farmers, shopkeepers and clergymen. Where they were promising, he probed – tested, challenged, encouraged, reached out. One never knew when one might need a good hand or a good heart.

‘George Astbury is dead. On the field at Preston.’

‘What cause had he for that? It was neither his inclination nor his duty! The man who holds that office is supposed to stand above the fray, to work outside the world. What did he think he was playing at?’

‘You must ask him when you see him. Until that time, we who are left must shift to survive as we can.’

‘We always thought him an uneasy choice. Who is to follow?’

A pause.

‘Shay.’

‘Shay? Do you offer me an opinion or a decision?’

‘I offer you a fact. Shay is in possession of the field. He has the experience. He is reassuming control of the organization. He fulfils the office.’

‘Mortimer Shay is a living chaos. Shay is misrule; Shay is mayhem; Shay is blood.’

‘These are not settled or normal times. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’