Traitor's Field (68 page)

T
O
M
R
I. S.,
AT
T
HE
G
EORGE
, N
EWCASTLE

[SS C/T/51/38]

Remembering his way through winding roads to Astbury, Thurloe tried to distinguish his motives in coming. But the effort only made him uneasy, first at the idea that he was acting on emotion as much as professional intent, and then at the tension implied by the increasingly apparent overlap – or was it now a conflict? – between the professional and the emotional.

Astbury and the Astbury family were a centre of Royalist plotting in England, and Paulden’s distinct reaction in The Hague had only reinforced his impression. What then of Rachel Astbury’s otherworldly innocence? Was it her attempts at manipulation, the games he’d taken for girlish whim, that he should take more seriously?

Paulden had also been spurred into the fuller story of Pontefract and Doncaster, and how should that be read? Should he read Paulden’s deflection of the question about the link between Royalist and Leveller as confirmation that it was a confected fantasy, or confirmation that it was somehow real? And if there was some kind of truth in that strange link, and if there was truth in Paulden’s story of the source in Doncaster sending messages to the Royalists in besieged Pontefract, then. . .

The raid had also been an attempt to contact the supposed agent in Doncaster. Somehow, the raid had gone wrong, and Colonel Thomas Rainsborough had—

Rainsborough?

Surely that was insanity.

Reports had come out of Pontefract. Lyle, the Leveller sympathizer, had passed them to Scot, the Leveller sympathizer. Scot – it would have to have been Scot himself – had decided that at least one of those reports had to be erased from the record, even from his own private ledger of reports. Tarrant, the Leveller sympathizer, had come to Doncaster and had an angry exchange with Rainsborough, the prominent Leveller. And soon after that, Rainsborough had died.

But Rainsborough had been killed by Royalists, surely?

Rachel Astbury received him in the parlour, alone, hair down. She felt herself relaxing, smiling as she saw him. His smile in response was slower, heavier, touched by thought.

He removed his hat, and dropped it onto the table beside him. ‘Hallo, Rachel,’ he said.

She looked at the hat on the table. This was somehow a new Thurloe: more confident, more comfortable. She’d words prepared, but swallowed them; waited.

‘You’re an old family, aren’t you? You have a family Bible, I hazard.’ She nodded on instinct, uncertain. ‘I’d like to see it please.’

Rachel stared at him a moment.
What is in there for him? What reason have I to refuse?
‘Why?’

I cannot stop him, regardless.

‘A curiosity. Something I was trying to remember as I rode.’ He smiled without humour. ‘Perhaps we may prove that religion is no division between us.’

Several minutes later she brought in the fat volume. Thurloe placed it on the table and opened it, respectful. On the flyleaf, his finger ran back through the neat history of the Astburys. The children of a Mary Lowell – the sale of a piece of land – the marriage of Mary Astbury to Sir Henry Lowell – more land sold – the death of the King – the fine paid to recover the estate – and so back through the milestones of country and county and family, a troubling world controlled for once in the handwriting scratched on the crackling, yellowing pages. A pair of entries, the words written smaller and less sure, a little family sorrow: the death of Isabelle Astbury, wife of Anthony, in childbed; a day later the death of her newborn son. Then back to the birth of Rachel Astbury, and it made him think of her as a girl, and he glanced up at the anxious face and the woman’s body – the birth of Mary Astbury, and back down to the foot of the preceding column, and there it was.

A year after the marriage of Sir Anthony Astbury to Isabelle Shay, of Chester in the County of Cheshire, was an entry in a different hand – Isabelle’s?

21st March, 1624. Mortimer Shay, brother of Isabelle Astbury, m. Margaret Talbot.

Thurloe closed the Bible with care.

He looked into her face, and then down at his hand as he flexed it open and closed, then up to her again.

‘Royalism isn’t dead in this land, Rachel. There’s life in it yet. Not in the silly fantasies of romantics and old men, but in a network of committed men and women controlled and functioning as a network. A network of support, of communication, of intrigue. Of action.’

She was frowning, trying to gauge his tone.

‘Men are dying as a result. Idiots persuaded to rise in a futile rebellion. The tools of this network who are captured and left to swing. Inoffensive men who are found to be a useful symbol of the new regime, and assassinated to prove a point. A little piece of deception, a misleading letter, and thousands of men die in battle.’ She had stepped back. ‘This is treason, Rachel. Not a game between one faction and another, but a deliberately maintained underground campaign of sedition and insurrection and murder. This country could be settled now. At peace. It is not, and that is so solely because of the men who are the clockspring of it all – one man, perhaps.’

Her face had gone cold, and Thurloe found his own voice rising to try to make an impact. ‘George Astbury was one of these men, and he surely made this house a centre of this work. He’s dead, and his work has been taken on by others. Perhaps by one of his relatives through his sister-in-law, your mother. The Shays – there was one more at least, wasn’t there? Mortimer Shay, I think.’ Her eyes were wide, at the words and more at the tone.

She stayed silent. 

‘You must tell me, because I have to know where you stand. I have to know if – if you’re part of the future of this country.’

‘To hell with you!’ The words were spat, cat-hissed, and Thurloe’s eyes closed for a moment. ‘With you, and your laws and your liberties.’

‘Rachel—’

‘Your soft words about the future are just pretence: for me – perhaps for yourself. Your world is constant struggle. It’s violence. It’s tyranny.’

He stepped towards her, and she pulled away.

‘Each day that these men are left free to act is greater complicity for you. Greater danger.’

‘How can you pretend to care?’

‘But I—’

‘I thought that. . . I thought that I might. . . But you have nothing for me. You are nothing to me.’ Her chin came up, and her chest rose and swelled. ‘Get out!’ The face was wild, lost, vicious. ‘All of you: go!’

The decade of war seemed to have fought itself in the weary body of Oliver Cromwell. Now emerging from months of intermittent fever, he was thinner and paler, the flesh hanging slack on his cheeks. Wide pinked eyes stared bleak at Thomas Scot, and John Thurloe and General Lambert.

He took in a laboured breath. ‘How do our enemies? Lambert?’

‘General, our scouts report no change in the strength of the lines, nor the attitude of the men behind them.’ He shook his head to emphasize the point.

‘Scot?’

‘No change, Master Cromwell. There is no military frailty to strain their politics, and thus no political frailty to unsettle their military.’ The reedy voice and the sharp rhetorician’s mind picked out the words.

Cromwell swung round to Thurloe, and the eyebrows merely lifted.

Thurloe looked down at the letter in his hand – the few lines which were all he had from J. H. – doubts about the strength of the defences at Stirling, fears of what would happen should the English Army attack.
What hidden grammar is in these lines?

A determined shake of the head. ‘I have no reason to question Master Scot or General Lambert. They’re comfortable behind their lines at Stirling. They’re gathering men in Fife and the north-east at leisure, and I assume’ – he glanced at Lambert – ‘that the longer they have to do that the more comfortable they’ll be.’

‘Well that’s just it, isn’t it, Master Thurloe?’ Cromwell’s voice came hoarse out of the jowls. ‘We’re hundreds of miles from home, living off this impoverished and resistant land, and time is against us. Time is on the side of General Leslie and the Duke of Hamilton and their Princeling, impregnable at Stirling and husbanding their strength.’

The bloodshot eyes widened, and he looked at them each. ‘I have a will to change this arrangement, gentlemen. We are over-extended, vulnerable, a house built upon sand, and we can but butt against them. I will see the Scots so vulnerable; I will see them exposed. We must be the ones in control of the manoeuvres; we must be the ones drawing them into our strength.’

Lambert’s austere features had creased. ‘But that would mean—’

‘It would mean England.’ The words fell deep, ominous. ‘That’s right, John. We must draw out the fox. We must have him loose, even in England, if we are to hunt him to destruction. Can we do it?’

Lambert, a little pale, nodded warily.

Cromwell’s glare settled heavily on Scot and Thurloe. ‘I must take them in the flank. I must chivvy them out of their snug burrow. And then I must harry them through the north of England, even to the heart of the country. It will risk many men; it will risk our firmest ground. I will do it if you can tell me that you have the measure of them. That you hear our enemies right – that you read them – that you whisper to them.’

The eyebrows rose. Oliver Cromwell’s eyes were massive globes gazing out at the two of them.

Scot and Thurloe glanced quickly and uneasily at each other. Each breathed in. They too nodded.

T
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J. H.,
AT
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ACRAE’S
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ALASHIELS