Traitor's Field (79 page)

‘The King! They have him to earth!’ Scot and Lyle and Thurloe up and staring at the soldier hurrying in. 

Tarrant was shortly behind. ‘Where?’

‘In the town! At the Whale.’

Pulling on coats and boots – reaching for weapons – Thurloe snatching at a list of ships due to leave Brighton – jostling out into the street – even Thomas Scot trying to run – and hurrying through the midnight mud with torches held high. ‘How was it reported?’

‘It’s everywhere!’ There were more shouts now, more figures shifting in the gloom as they came near the Whale tavern.

Thurloe’s blood was up, he could feel his heart drumming in him, wondered at seeing the King close up, wondered if somehow he might be the one to. . . and then something caught in his mind, and he slowed, dropped a pace behind the others. He felt the silliness of his excitement, and immediately afterwards there was doubt. He hurried after his companions, grabbed at the soldier’s arm. ‘How was it first reported?’

‘I – I don’t – it’s everywhere! I heard – someone had come in – they’d heard—’ and then an explosion and as the darkness roared they were stumbling backwards on instinct. 

Silence, and then movements and shouting again, men picking themselves up from the mud, clumsy black acrobats in the torch-pricked gloom, complaints and questions. Next to the Whale was a low wooden building, a barn or a storehouse, and smoke was belching through cracks and holes in its skin, hanging and glowing fierce in the orange light.

It didn’t take long to batter in the door of the little building, already damaged and now assaulted by boots and musket butts. Tarrant and Lyle were pressing in, Scot staring anxiously, Thurloe hanging back, following more slowly.

What is really happening here? What am I not seeing?

The building was empty, except for a few last strands of straw burning themselves out, and the body of a soldier, blackened in the explosion but not so ruined as to disguise the savage cut in his throat.

It silenced them, and as the news spread the men outside quietened too. Lyle stomped out, and began barking orders: a perimeter, a search. Then a shot from nearer the sea. An incoherent shout. Another shot.

An urgent voice from someone: ‘The jetty!’ And Lyle and Tarrant were hurrying after the man.

Thurloe followed, felt his heart kicking, and then caught himself again.
What is really happening here? What am I not seeing?

The jetty was a long spindly finger, sloping up out of the shingle and stretching out into the darkness, on ramshackle wooden legs. At the end of it, just beyond the end of it, the sail of a ship gradually filled with wind, ghostly in the night and edging away from them. ‘Stop them! Hold that ship!’ Tarrant and Lyle thundering up onto the jetty, Thurloe following with long grim strides; hesitation from the two men on the jetty, standing over another body, then they were racing along the jetty again with shouts and drawn pistols as the last rope dropped from the boat.

Thurloe stumbled, an unexpected drop in the shingle, down on one knee and pushing himself up, but now there was a figure near him, a dark shape low on the beach, but not low because it was up and driving towards him. He recoiled, stumbled again and it saved his life. As he fell the outstretched blade stabbed through the last flutter of his coat and he was sprawled backwards on the stones. He gaped up, a large figure standing over him, a dextrous flick and the man had altered his grip on the knife and Thurloe waited for the plunge and knew he was dead.

More shouts, boots on the shingle, and the man hesitated, looked up and around, and Thurloe’s focus shifted for an instant from the blade to the face above it.

And knew it. The face in the portrait at Astbury. The man on the horse at Nottingham Castle.

More men were crunching around on the shingle now, musketeers hurrying onto the jetty, a rowing boat being dragged down to the water. But the man had gone, and Thurloe lay flat on his back staring at the stars and trying to believe in the face.

Invisible in the darkness, his horse’s head cradled against him to soothe it and muffle its breathing, Shay heard rather than saw a troop of horsemen clattering into the village of Shoreham, felt their dust billow around him.

He feared that he knew the direction they were going, and he was right. They would not find his contact at home, but it was clear that his contact was known.

Subtler movement near him. ‘Shay, I congratulate you.’ An earnest, exhausted face and a hand thrust into his. Shay felt his whole body sag and sigh. ‘The grandest thing. Honestly, I had never thought we would manage it.’

Out at sea, the pale flicker of a sail showed in the dawn.

Something kicked in Shay, some stubborn relic of duty.

He would need support. But there was no one left now.
The last relic of the old world
. Except Teach – he would have to send for Miles Teach.

He shook his head. So old; so weary.
This is not done yet
.

Tarrant and Lyle had successfully stopped a French smuggler returning home with a cargo comprising a pair of runaway lovers. Before they had even started their interrogation of the Captain, Thurloe had troops of cavalry going east and west with named contacts to find and arrest. But the ship
Surprise
had already slipped out of Shoreham five miles to the west, and the completion of victory had disappeared with her.

Thomas Scot was exhausted by an unaccustomed night of action, and grieving. ‘I cannot allow that a hotch-potch of peasants and rebels has defeated us.’

‘We’re hardly defeated, Master Scot.’ Thurloe’s voice was quiet, steady. He felt alive; he felt himself, despite the frustrations of the night, at last coming into a kind of synchronization with the world. ‘Charles Stuart’s run away, and he may be more convenient as an exile than a martyr. Your work will endure.’ Scot didn’t look as if he believed him. ‘But this was no accidental collection of rebels. It’s a network. Controlled by one man. One very extraordinary man, I think.’

Tarrant was scrabbling for a place in the conversation. ‘What do—’

‘His predecessor was George Astbury, who died at Preston. Perhaps you knew him, Master Scot.’

Scot was frowning. ‘Astbury – of Astbury House, yes? I knew him, but only for a – a genteel busybody, on the edge of the old King’s circle.’

‘I suspect he was a better man than that. But he was nothing compared to the man who took on the role – the role of Royalism’s chief intelligencer.’

‘You have a name, Thurloe?’ Tarrant, doubtful but interested.

Thurloe nodded. ‘Shay. Mortimer Shay.’ Scot’s eyes went wide. ‘Kin to Astbury, but with a history and daring that few men in England could match.’

‘Shay!’ Scot was feverish. ‘But he’s dead, surely. These many years. He was a notorious rogue in the old days; practically an outlaw. He can’t be alive. He can’t be in England.’

‘I saw him in Nottingham in ’48. I saw him here not three hours ago. And I’ve felt his presence many times between. I rather think I’ve been exchanging letters with him.’

‘You’ve what?’ Scot and Tarrant echoing.

‘He had me as his dupe, right up to Dunbar.’ Thurloe looked down, and the others did not see the smile. ‘Since Dunbar, I fancy I’ve had his measure.’

Scot was watching him with a kind of awe; Tarrant was still grappling. ‘But – surely that’s trea—’

‘Tarrant, we delivered the victory our masters wanted. But this war may not be done. Shay is still loose in England, and I doubt he’s done fighting.’

‘You have a way into this network, Thurloe?’

Thurloe felt the papers inside his coat.
These are mine. . .
Then there was illumination on Tarrant’s face: ‘Well, there’s one definite link, isn’t there?’

Thurloe’s stomach lurched.

Shay had allowed himself three hours’ sleep, when clouds over the moon had made it too dark to ride with even barest safety, and when exhaustion threatened to pull him off his horse in any case. Three unconscious hours in a ditch, and then he was up with the dawn and away northward again.

He’d got the King away; the Parliament men would be seeking vengeance. And the man Thurloe seemed to know something of the Comptrollerate-General now, seemed to know its systems.

He hurried on, by villages and muddy tracks, the old paths of England. The country was alive with Parliament’s soldiers, those who’d been hunting the King and those still picking up fugitives from Worcester. Every town meant checkpoints and sentries, and after all that had happened even the slightest suspicion could kill him.

That seemed to matter again.

The network of the Comptrollerate-General was a passive thing; when not called or used, it disappeared back into the fabric of English life. Thurloe and his soldiers would have trouble finding any part of it, and could make little of it if they did.

But there was Astbury. Thurloe had been there. Something had led him to the Comptrollerate-General, and George Astbury and Astbury House were the most likely. Astbury couldn’t disappear.

Thurloe couldn’t get rid of Lyle and Tarrant, and their shadows cantering beside him through the evening felt oppressive. He’d had one attempt at blithe dismissal of the relevance of Astbury House, a passing attempt at suggesting alternative lines of activity, but he knew that to say more would only increase their suspicion of Astbury – and of him. They knew of the house, and Lyle had pointed out how close it was to Leek, where the courier they’d tracked from Doncaster three years back had disappeared. So now they hurried north as a three, and Thurloe felt like an escorted prisoner.

And what am I?

The thought of Rachel faced with Tarrant and Lyle, the bitter and the implacable, was nauseating. But the frustration of the young King’s escape still kicked at him. For all his cleverness with misleading letters and fake news-sheets, the network of the Comptrollerate-General still eluded him, hidden threads no doubt crossing his path even as he rode, watching him from behind these night hedges. 

Rachel had chosen that world, and she was somehow part of it. It was a world he had to destroy.

The three shadows jogged onward under the moon.