Traitor's Field (64 page)

John Thurloe passed December and January among his family, trying poses of complacent fatherhood: stern, benign, patriarchal, playful. Anne – locally more influential than Parliament – had insisted that they go to church on 25th December, and he had glanced, like a drake patrolling his pond, down the descending line of Thurloes and thought,
Is this success? Is this stability?
Anne was grown large, and her stately, stiff-backed gait reinforced the little arrogances she was acquiring, and Thurloe smiled at it and teased her. In the evenings he read, to himself or to her, while the pile of
Mercurius Fidelis
news-sheets rested on his desk. Whenever he saw them he would touch one with a finger, glance at it, peer at the fat ramshackle letters, the smudges and the printing mistakes and the forced waspishness of wording and emphasis – and wonder at a code or cypher. Once he went as far as to underline all the words in one sheet that seemed unnatural, and then try to re-see the text as instruction or exhortation should those words have double meanings. But he could make nothing of it.

England’s soldiers endured another winter in the field. Last year it had been Ireland, with its evil spirits, and the plagues that had eaten at besiegers as well as besieged. This year it was Scotland, tents and horses disappearing under snow, the constant search for warmth, for wood to burn, cramped fetid Edinburgh bunk rooms and petrifying weeks in camp before Stirling, a primitive struggle to survive the day, and all the time watching the tides of disease spreading through the regiments. Buried in and behind the fortified town, in this farthest corner of the land, Royalism mustered its strength in fireside bravados and little parlour intrigues, and waited for spring. 

With the winter sun white on her face, Margaret Shay sat cloak-wrapped on the bench and reviewed her world.

She knew what waited underneath the soil of every one of the wide sweep of fields below her. She knew the condition and character of each tree. She knew who the distant trudging figures in the landscape should be, and could check her knowledge by how they walked and where they stopped and which other figures they tarried with.

It has been a long while since I wrote a verse.

The habit of a more naïve time, perhaps. A silly painted time, self-regarding and conceited.
So many rhyming vanities.
She did not feel now like a woman who wrote trifles. 

Yet I fear this is not wisdom, but age only
. It wasn’t the times that had changed; only her.
A farmer’s wife now, doughy and stupid.
A mind once open to the infinities of natural philosophy, now sceptical of over-reliance on parsnips.

Where is the world we promised ourselves, on those dewy golden mornings, the evenings of hungry intelligence?

The times had indeed changed, and changed the people. The handsome witty men were become clerks and controversialists and sentimental. Spiteful pamphlets and sickly laments for lost loves and lost causes.

I wish I had given Shay sons.
He would have been a terrifying inspiration, a riotous guide to the world,
and I would have planted in them seeds he would not know.

Perhaps he would have loved them more than me.
And the wars would have killed them.
Shay’s wars would have killed them
. In any case there had been no sons, and now Shay’s voracious potential, which could out-stride the world, could not out-stride time, and he was rendered futile.
And I, who promised and was promised so much. . . 

No.
This is but lazy melancholy. These are the indulgent complaints of a silly girl, an unfocused mind
. It had been the lot of women in every age to take the roles neglected by men. Her generation of men had created a world first of speculation, and then of chaos; her duty accordingly had been to provide rationality and then stability.

These truths are only worthy if one has a daughter to teach them to.
Women do not make the world; but there is none else to nourish and protect it.
I inspired men out of their dullness, and then I offered the scaffolds to their fancies. And now I manage an unruled estate, and decide justice in its disorder.
In the tumult, women had become poets, and prophesiers, the defenders of concepts and the defenders of castles.
I have tended to his wounds and tended to his lands and tended to his restive questing spirit.
She had married Shay because
– partly I married Shay because when we danced his arms were hard and his shoulders were like crags, and I would not let my eyes smile and he wondered at it, and I saw him realize that for once he had a challenge for which he had no weapon or trick and never would, and in one heart-burst I saw all the sparkling charming girls shrink, and still his instinctive hand slipped down my bodice to my hip, for Shay is ancient and Shay is also a boy –
she had married Shay because he was the least bounded man in existence, nothing of convention or habit or morality, and accordingly offered the whole universe, corporeal and intellectual, for her to roam untrammelled. And her dominion was a valley in north Wales. This had been her duty; this had been her world; this had been her life.

I wish I had had a daughter.

Thurloe thought that he had been granted a personal epiphany one evening when, the family all asleep, he took a second glass of wine and tried considering
Mercurius Fidelis
by pure logic.
One: for the sake of argument, we shall assume that these sheets definitely contain messages. Two: if I wished to write to one or two men, I would write to them singly rather than hiding a message in a news-sheet, which is an elaborate means and might be risked unnecessarily. Three: ergo, if there are messages in these sheets then they are to be read by a number of men, which is the advantage of the news-sheet.
He looked for words that repeated between news-sheets, which might in code carry alternative meanings for politics or conspiracy. But it seemed perverse to look for encoded references to Oliver Cromwell and Charles Stuart in a news-sheet that talked incessantly of Oliver Cromwell and Charles Stuart.
Four: if words had hidden and alternative meanings, my collection of fellow conspirators across England would each need to know my list of secret meanings of words. Five: it would be the more elaborate and thereby more troublesome and more risky an arrangement for a relatively large number of men each to have a list, on paper or in brain, of concealed meanings. Six: ergo, it is more likely that this is not a code in which words are to be substituted for other words, and the meaning accordingly somewhere outside the paper, but a cypher in which the letters and words of a message are somehow concealed within the text, and to be found entirely within this paper.
He picked up the nearest paper, held it against the candle and wondered at the spots and holes in it.
No, again, such things could not be replicated.
He tried reading every other word of
Mercurius Fidelis
of October 26. to November 2. 1648.
Recent do show the.
Every third word.
Recent surely the
. Starting with the second word. Or the third. Backwards.

He put down the paper.
I am playing children’s games in a world in flames
. He took a great mouthful of wine, holding it in his cheeks a moment so that it stung his tongue, and then swallowing it grossly. He picked up the sheet again and read the first letter of every word.
R.E.D.
Red?
R.E.D.S.S.T.T.
Hardly. He read the first letter of every sentence, and suddenly the room was cold and the wine was thumping in his head.

R.E.P.O.R.T.

Report. True, the letters after that became gibberish again, but wasn’t that a word of potential significance? The noun. . . no, the imperative?

He picked up another sheet, winey blood thundering heavy through him, from earlier that same month – September 28. to October 5. 1648.

T.T.H.E.T.M.G.

With great concentration, Thurloe crumpled the sheet two-handed into as compact a ball as he could make, and threw it into the fire.
In a large collection of random letters, thus ordered, it is likely that some shall by mere chance have some little meaning. Especially to a drunk man with dreams of glory
. The paper ball hit one of the fire dogs and bounced out into the room.

After a moment, Thurloe went to retrieve it.
The genius of the poets and the appreciation of the ages, Master Thurloe, I think we may take as more reliable than your stubbornness. If there is a mistake, it is likely in your Greek and not theirs.
He smoothed the paper out, replaced it in the pile and went to bed.

Anne Thurloe gave birth to another daughter on the coldest day of January, the midwife blustering out of a snowstorm with a babbling of little wisdoms, and the house was a bustling of maids and good women of the neighbourhood and messengers from London and unregulated children. Thurloe moved quietly among them, doggedly retrieving rogue infants when no female could be found, issuing instructions and judgements to the couriers, talking Greek to his earnest uncomprehending eldest boy.

At around this time, a solitary rider came by patient winding roads to the royal town of Stirling. 

There was a great hall in Stirling that had become the centre of the Court-in-exile – in the mornings it jostled and flowed with gossip and plot and the business of politics and royalty and arms. Shay treated it with a caustic loathing, but was to be seen there most days, somewhere on the edge of the business, a hand on an arm, a word in an ear.

On this day there was a flicker of disruption on the margins of the Court, for the solitary rider was not recognized and had none of the routines for greeting or entry; his clothes were unfamiliar and rural, the weather-worn face under the greying curls likewise uncourtly, and the accent almost impenetrable to the sentry. Raised voices began to cut through the mundane chatter of the hall, and among the first to glance over was Shay, sensitive to the change of rhythm. The sentry, scornful and too casual with the primitive who was now trying to get past him, reached out an arm and grabbed at the stranger’s shoulder. In a second: the arm flung up, a vicious head-butt, and the sentry was sprawling back over an outstretched leg, and in fairness how could he have known the history of blood and war, decades old, in this peasant?

It was Gareth, and it took Shay a moment to accept the fact – Gareth, his steward; Gareth who in the last twenty years had not been known to leave his home valley, let alone leave Wales; Gareth who had come alone through three restive kingdoms, across the lines of war. How was Gareth become part of this world? Gareth saw him, but strangely the only familiar face in the great bustling hall caused the leathered features to look even more lost than before. Through the cliques of curious men, oblivious, the little Welshman walked up to Shay, and then collapsed to his knees in front of him, and around Sir Mortimer Shay the whole world rotted and shrank and dimmed and he felt his blood curdling and writhing inside his emptying body in a sickening pain of cold, a great roar of impossibility for which he had no breath.