Traitor's Field (63 page)

‘I sent word in September! Fully two months ago.’ The voice was too heavy with tiredness to carry the anger.

The man perched on the chair opposite him was small and neat and feverish with nerves. ‘These affairs – they may not be sparked like flint, sir. Surely you—’

‘Two – months.’ Shay growled the words with equal weight.

‘I know, but. . .’ – inspiration wild in the flickering face – ‘Cromwell and his Army are still in the north. We are as much a distraction as ever!’

‘What of it? He has beaten the Scottish army for this year. A platoon of militia could hold Edinburgh and the border right through to spring.’

But the local man was lost in his fantasy now, voice breathy and agitated. ‘But surely – what of it, sir? What of it? Cromwell may try to bring his Army the length of England, but he’ll not get to Norwich before me, will he?’ He was nodding with a mad steady regularity. ‘Our troops will gather, we will march on Norwich – three hours only – and our friends there are ready to open the gates. The greatest town of the east will be ours!’

Shay watched the eyes, thought of the endless boggy miles he had travelled.
What is Norwich? Cromwell could lose it whole and never notice.

He was at the fireside again two nights later, dark and wet after another day’s riding, as the news began to stagger in from the nearby villages. A few dozens of men at Easton, the same at Thetford. . . weavers, carpenters, farmers, rounded up like sheep. Not a gentleman, not a trained sword, among them.

As winter bit, the royal hopes for the year shrivelled and cowered as a huddle of terrified men in a village square, and Mortimer Shay watched it grim.

T
O
M
R
J. H.,
AT
M
ACRAE’S
.

[SS C/S/50/172]

John Thurloe likewise heard of the failed Norfolk risings at the fireside, but cosy in dry clothes and his family and a general feeling of content. With his new letter to J. H., he had overcome his frustration and set himself up against his man once more.

Anne was pregnant, pleased with his unexpected return, and inflating herself with quiet pride at his apparent importance, and so more inclined to keep the children out of his way and let him play master of the house. She was cosy-wrapped and pretty to him, and their days felt warm and well-fed.

Thanks to privy contacts in high Royalist circles, these risings were known of in advance, and we judge that they would have failed even were they to have formed not in these mean flocks but with credible strength. The Norwich authorities were aware of them fully, and ready to oppose and overwhelm them even had the misguided rebels reached to the town.

Thurloe mused on those privy contacts. The phrase could mean much. Nevertheless, it seemed that the Royalists could not plan—

But that is not the lesson, surely. That little complacency is not what we learn.
The risings were not sympathetic manifestations of Royalist feeling, born of local grudge and nostalgia.
If they were betrayed at a high level, then they were known and planned at a high level.
Had these been intended to complement the campaign in the north?

How would I command risings from four hundred miles off?

John Thurloe by the fire, a snug and flexible intelligence at ease. He was still gazing pleasantly into the flames five minutes later, when the servant boy came in on some errand.

‘Adam.’ Adam was from the village, in awe of Thurloe’s unimaginable learning and wealth and gravely aware of the precious chance he represented. ‘In my study, on the table, there’s a package of news-sheets. Bring them, would you?’

Margaret Shay watched her husband from the window. The stiff straight back, the big shoulders, the hair above his neck plucked up in the wind. She badly wanted to touch him, to pull at his sleeve, to lead him out of his chilly reverie and into the house. But he could not be disturbed when he was like this. And soon he would be off again, to some other war or quest. She knew the signs – the changed tone, the grumpiness, the fidgeting; she had polished his boots herself in readiness.

Shay’s eyes were on the hills: his lungs, his ramparts. His mind was lost beyond them.

I have never thought of the ending. I have never thought of the aim.

Always the struggle merely.
His life was the next challenge, the next feat, the next scheme, the next skirmish.
As if my world was an endless string of nameless German towns, with their blank horror-shocked faces and their mindless atrocities; as if my eternity was wading through blood and dreaming of treasons.

Now the cause was in Scotland: packs of Scottish politicians jostling to use the young King, newly arrived among them from his exile, defeated once already at Dunbar, and forced to trust his future and his Crown to the temporary interest of their factions, to the commitment of their cheap-levied clansmen.

Shay took a deep breath. Bracing himself for the fray.

And always the ghost of George Astbury somewhere over his shoulder, a more elusive guardian of the secrets of the Comptrollerate-General than he would have imagined. 

Astbury had been worried about Pontefract and Doncaster, and somehow with the Levellers. Shay himself had played with the idea of a compact between Levellers and Royalists to unsettle his correspondent, the Parliamentarian I. S.; but the idea of such a compact was surely fantastical. What, then, had been so fretting Astbury? Had it anything to do with the Levellers in the Army?

There had been a channel for communication between the Royalists besieged in Pontefract and the outside world; messages delivered via a church. Directly or indirectly the Reverend Beaumont had been the next link in the chain. Messages to Pontefract from George Astbury via the Comptrollerate-General network had gone through Beaumont. Messages coming out of Pontefract had entered the network through him.

What then of the soldier, who had come from Pontefract all the way to George Astbury the night before Preston, mortally wounded? Was he some kind of courier for Astbury? It was surely unlikely. The network didn’t function with irregular couriers, and a soldier was the worst possible choice for one in any case. But surely he had brought that letter. And what, if anything, did any of this have to do with the killing of Colonel Rainsborough two or three months later?

And what of Preston?
Astbury had been worried about the scouts, and he’d been right: Scoutmaster Ruce had turned traitor.
Ruce, whom Astbury didn’t think much of.
Shay remembered the panicked face, the babbled details of being approached by Parliament’s intelligencers.
Ruce didn’t turn; he was turned.
They’d known Ruce, known his weaknesses.
George Astbury had been right; Ruce hadn’t been the man to have contrived this himself.

Behind all these fancies lurked a greater concern, lurching out at him when he dared to consider it. Had Astbury not destroyed the great book of the Comptrollerate-General after all, but hidden it? The possibility haunted Shay: a cataclysm of secrets, waiting somewhere to ambush England.

Later, in the parlour, Shay said: ‘I have always known that I would conquer.’ She watched him, hand frozen at the needle. ‘Lately I have begun to doubt.’ She laid down the needle and the work, and her eyes searched his face. ‘They have. . . a different breed of men now, in the Parliamentary service. There’s one man. A clerk. Rather clever, I suspect.’

Still she watched; loving, worrying. He shrugged himself out of the mood. ‘I’ll have them yet.’

‘You are a great man, Mortimer. In your terrible way, you’re a good one. But you may not always be right.’

He looked at her, absorbing this.

‘On your own ground, in your own way, you have always been unstoppable. But a warhorse is little use at sea. With a rapier and pistol you can destroy a world, but you cannot rebuild one.’

He pondered it.

Too soon Margaret Shay was waiting to say goodbye again. He was striding over the stones, head turned towards Gareth and snapping orders as the silent steward trotted beside him with mumbles of agreement and acceptance. A momentary halt, and the strange ritual handshake between the two men, gauntlet gripping elbow, a familiarity reaching back into the decades. Then he was striding towards her again, as he always had been, striding down the corridor at Richmond Palace and through all the years at her. He stopped in front of her, suddenly uncertain.

She grabbed a fistful of his jacket, and rested her forehead on his chest. ‘My little heart gallops with you, old wolf.’ She looked up at the face. ‘Where you are, there is life.’

Shay gasped, and pressed her head between his hands, and kissed her. ‘You are my aim. You are my end. You are the one thing I have ever found that was worth living for.’

O
n 1st January, the young Charles Stuart was crowned King of the Scots. But Scone, sober masks concealing self-congratulation or doubt from the uncomfortably poised young man, was unknown to Astbury. News of the ceremony would not come through the hills for weeks, and what would it mean anyway, that the pretender King of England had got himself crowned somewhere else? Rachel tried not to notice the turning months, under the snow that blurred everything. In the valley where Astbury huddled, the world had stopped. Nothing came or changed or went. The rhythm of the meagre meals, of encounters with her ghostly father, of a ritual daily exchange with Jacob, were the heartbeats of her existence. One afternoon, the house utterly silent, Rachel walked far out into the fields until she knew she could not be seen or heard, and screamed at the white encircling hills and threw herself down into the snow.