Traitor's Field (66 page)

Mortimer Shay came to Astbury with the spring again. To Rachel it seemed paler, colder around him.

She found him first in the study, in front of the painting of his half-sister, turning around almost guilty as Rachel came into the room. Had he been touching the portrait?

She walked up to him, and reached her arms around him as best she could and laid her head on his chest a moment. Then she stepped back a pace.

‘I wish I’d known Lady Margaret.’

‘I wish you had. She’d have liked you very much.’ Rachel flushed slightly. ‘You’re the two most. . . truly honest people I know.’

The voice was hoarse, the throat exhausted, the eyes likewise. 

‘And still you ride. And still you fight.’

‘There is nothing else, girl. I fight. Eventually I’ll die. That’s all there is.’ The words came dull, as if through fog.

‘Won’t you – can’t you make your home here with us? Just a while? Even a few days.’

‘Men are fighting and dying for you. You only want your faerie land.’ There was no bite to the words. He wasn’t really looking at her. ‘Another rising has failed. A network of men captured around Glasgow. Maybe another leftover of George Astbury’s schoolboy habits.’

‘Or maybe you made the mistake!’ The last of her comforts, her certainties, was fissuring.
Surely I cannot be wiser than he.
‘Or maybe there are people out there more persuasive than you. Better than you. Maybe this country wants a future, not an endless war.’

‘These people have not understood me yet. They have not found the end of my vengeance.’

‘That’s all you offer? Vengeance? For ever? You don’t even know what people you’re talking about.’

‘I know my enemies when I find them. And they shall know me well enough.’

She stared at him, scared and sad.

Anthony Astbury insisted on receiving his half-brother-in-law, and Shay and Rachel watched uncomfortably as the skeletal figure stepped gingerly down the staircase towards them, over-formal clothes hanging loose around him. Trying to shake hands, he stumbled into Shay, a reed against a rock, and for a moment the two clutched at each other. Astbury straightened, and his eyes closed for a moment of intense effort. Then he said, ponderously, ‘She was the jewel of our age, Mor— Mortimer.’ Shay nodded. ‘She was – she was your redemption.’ And at that Shay swallowed a breath with difficulty.

Then Astbury had to mark this newest change in his world in the family Bible, and Shay and Rachel sat stiff in chairs opposite him as he heaved open the cover as if it were the front door and brushed shakily at the flyleaves and scratched out the words with brittle formality.
Margaret Shay, d. January 1651
.

Rachel’s eyes flickered empty between the two men: her ridiculous father, begging him to stop, to die, to end everyone’s pain; and Shay, an empty hulk, a castle where no lights showed.

Oliver St John stepped onto Dutch soil on 17th March 1651, oblivious to a sorry-looking crowd of hecklers being jostled away behind cross-wise pikes, bellowing for a bath and a good meal. John Thurloe followed him onto the quay – more watchful of the hecklers, asking himself who had paid them – wondering at the smells and the quiet flat faces and the neatness of the place.

While St John restored himself after the trials of the sea passage, Thurloe chatted with the English Parliament’s representative in The Hague.

‘Will they receive us?’

‘Oh they’ll receive you well enough. They can see how the wind’s blowing. They’re merchants here, first, last and always, and they want to know about English maritime policy, not our domestic squabbles.’

‘But the Royalists have been here as well.’

‘They still are. Always on the hunt for support, or money, or a promising Princess.’

‘They’ll know about this embassy?’

‘Oh yes. Before you got off the boat. We usually know what each other’s about.’ A bowl of fruit pushed towards Thurloe. ‘They’ve an agent in the town – young chap – busybusy, you know? Escaped here after the siege of Pontefract, and been carrying on the fight ever since.’

‘Pontefract?’

‘A man called Thurloe has asked to meet me.’

‘We know that name, surely.’

‘We do. One of Cromwell’s terrier-hounds. His wife is niece to Thomas Overbury, by the by.’

‘Overbury – who was poisoned in the Tower? Lord, he’d better not start asking questions about that.’

‘He has other cares now. He’s here with St John’s embassy to the Dutch.’

‘He’s not just any Roundhead clerk. He’s Cromwell’s most trusted agent. The rising man. You’re going to arrange a little accident for him?’

‘No. I’m going to meet him.’

‘What can you possibly gain? There’s too much risk in it.’

‘I don’t see that – unless you take me for an utter simpleton. I want to see this man. Besides, the Dutch wouldn’t like us disappearing a visiting diplomat.’

‘This is mere curiosity.’

‘He is the new England. I want to know what we face.’

Thurloe had been kept more than an hour when a servant finally beckoned him out of the waiting room. It had been a cold room, unfurnished, and Thurloe catalogued it with his other observations of the house and what he had heard of the Royalists in this city. The fewest possible servants, and those badly dressed. The economies and the selling of jewels. No one invited to dine. The British royal cause in Holland was living a threadbare exile.

The room into which he was shown was also spartan, but there was a fire burning at least, a single log in the grate. The door closed behind him.

The room was empty. For a moment, he was uneasy. This was no longer a land in which he represented the prevailing authority. It was a borderland, a place of exchange, where he and his Royalist opponents met on equal terms. He looked around the room quickly, seeing windows and thinking of them as exits, feeling little flutters of doubt and foolishness. What would happen if—? He was no fighter. St John and the rest of his party would – but he had told no one where he was going or what he was doing.

The latch clicked up, and Thurloe turned to face the door, bracing himself.

A single man stepped in and closed the door behind him, a man about his own age.

A man with bright red hair, and Thurloe saw his own surprise reflected in the other’s face. 

Pontefract, two years before. The man burning papers in the fire. The red hair, the strange smile, and the barrel of powder.

Red hair caught his breath. ‘You,’ he said with emphasis, ‘I had not expected. My intrepid friend from Pontefract.’ A more attentive scrutiny. ‘You, then, are Thurloe. How do you? Did those papers mean so much to you that you’ve hunted me two years?’

Thurloe tried a bit of bravado. ‘I had no need to hunt you, or your papers, Master Paulden.’ Thomas Paulden smiled, and the memory of that strange morning in Pontefract flared brighter with it. ‘I’m intrigued that you agreed to see me.’

‘I was intrigued that you asked.’

Thurloe hesitated, tried to identify why he had wanted to come, thought again of his vulnerability.

‘Lost your nerve, Master Thurloe?’

‘Wondering about a conversation in which I assume you will lie consistently.’

‘That’s hardly civil, Thurloe, but I take your point. And yet a man may learn from a lie, don’t you find?’

‘What were you so desperate to destroy at Pontefract?’

Paulden smiled. ‘A love letter. I’d been composing it for days; couldn’t get it right.’

‘It seemed rather bulky for a love letter.’

‘That was the problem. One tries to get the precise word, and I was rambling.’

‘But what I don’t understand is why this outburst of. . . extreme discretion only came to you at the last possible moment – with someone like me at the door. You must have known – for hours, probably days – that the castle was going to surrender.’

‘I’d had it on my person for two days – one didn’t want to risk losing it in a sudden sortie or collapse. Had I found a chance to escape unsearched, I would have kept it with me. Once it was clear that that was impossible, I had to wait to find a few minutes’ privacy with a fire and powder – which wasn’t easy in the chaos of that day.’

‘All that for love. You thought there was so much chance of escape?’

‘There were ways in and out. There are always ways.’

‘For messages too, I think.’

Paulden smiled. ‘You have your spies in our camps, Master Thurloe. Allow us ours in yours.’

‘You have a network, surely. Across the country. Ready to pass a message or give practical help.’

Still the smile. ‘There are loyal Englishmen still, Thurloe, and more than you’d choose to acknowledge. You’ll forgive me if I take your protest as frustration.’

‘Loyalties shift damn’ fast, Paulden, as you’ve found to your cost. And networks may be broken or turned.’ Paulden held the smile on his lips, but his eyes were hard now. ‘The currents and connections of affinity are known. The Astbury family – George Astbury in particular. His sister-in-law’s family. Lady Constance Blythe. General Langdale.’

The smile had weakened on Paulden’s face, and now spread again. ‘Why, these are relics of thirty years past, Thurloe. I think most of those are dead, aren’t they? Though you must, of course, hunt phantoms if it please you.’ The tone was different, and the clear dismissal unusual, and Thurloe marked it. ‘I’m pleased to reassure you that our cause is in fresher hands.’

‘Old hands or new, they’re hardly competent. The battle of Dunbar was a disaster for you, the stillborn offspring of your. . . cankered cause and your rotten, corrupted structures.’
Careful. In provoking him I must not overbalance myself.
‘What faith can you have in your networks now, if they’re so easily abused?’

‘And still you come scurrying to the Continent for support. Still Scotland waits to descend on England. You take us seriously enough, I think.’

‘While we win the battles, and you are confined to mere spiteful schoolboy pettinesses, we’ll tolerate you cheerfully enough.’ Thurloe wondered an instant at his own bravado. ‘The assassination of Ascham at Madrid. If backstair tuppenny cut-throats are your heroes, we may pity rather than fear you. The assassination of Rainsborough, too. Had you a hand in that?’

Paulden’s smile was stretched thin. ‘We heard that loss burned fierce. Bit uncomfortable for you, surely. The Army’s darling, and Cromwell couldn’t trust him. My brother’s idea, since you ask. And yes, I rode in the party. Perhaps you owe us for doing you a favour.’

‘Your idea of an alliance between Royalists and Levellers is fantasy.’
Is it fantasy?

‘You will learn in time.’

‘Neither your scheming nor your raid gained you anything in Doncaster.’

‘Perhaps not. But there are other Doncasters, Thurloe, where men you think yours have not forgotten where their true interest and loyalty are.’

‘There was something else behind the raid, wasn’t there? It was too elaborate, too risky, to be mere impetuousness.’

Paulden was suddenly back against his chair, watchful, and then forward as quickly with the old grin. It was the same wild face Thurloe had seen hovering over the powder barrel in defeated Pontefract. ‘Wouldn’t want you to have any false confidence, Thurloe. Wouldn’t want you to go away without learning something.’