Traitor's Field (81 page)

She gave a little snort, and then breathed in an air of superiority. With a jolt Shay saw his half-sister, scolding him out of the past. ‘Perhaps, Mortimer Shay, you’re not so much cleverer than George Astbury after all.’ The head lifted higher. ‘So little imagination, men. Like Uncle George, you had to use the one room that was kept for you. Uncle George was a man who craved stability, who thought instinctively of home, and his hiding place was in the fabric of the house. You’re a man who must move to breathe, who could never be tied to one place, and the stool was one of the few unfixed things in the room.’

‘And now?’

‘I smuggled them out of the house, but they are safe on our land.’

A nod. ‘Does anyone else—’

‘Jacob. He has them. And the satchel with the jewels and our Bible. As you said.’

His mouth chewed uncomfortably. ‘Thank you,’ he said simply. ‘Those papers are—’

‘I didn’t do it for your blasted papers, and I certainly didn’t do it for you. If they’d found them they’d have killed us all for traitors, wouldn’t they?’

He knew it, and it was another failing that clutched in his chest.

‘His Majesty is safe out of England at last. He should be in Paris by now, with his mother.’

‘Thank God.’

‘Thank Shay. Fully six weeks the prey of every soldier in England, and he protected him and got him out.’

‘We have lost the kingdom.’

‘We have saved the King. The seasons will turn again. I’ll wager Cromwell won’t find government as easy as battle.’

‘There was treachery, as Astbury thought?’

‘That seems clear now.’

‘And we know who it must be. Does Shay know?’

‘He seems to find out these things.’

‘And what then? You won’t get His Majesty back on a boat for Edinburgh for a season or two.’

‘England takes the strangest paths to peace. Stability needs the men back in the fields, and merchants back in London docks. Westminster is not without reasonable men.’

‘Exactly. So what of Shay? Our duty. . . our duty is greater than any one man.’

‘Indeed. Different ground; different horse. The Comptrollerate-General must hold the longer view.’

Shay was still awake ten minutes later, lying on the bed with futile thoughts squabbling in his head, when he heard two knocks on the shutter.

Rachel was a pale grey outline under the moon. She hissed up at him, ‘My horse is lame.’

‘Take mine.’

‘It’s too big, and it’s a grey. The soldiers might notice the difference. And there are no others here.’

Shay’s window was barely six feet off the ground, and he dropped into the yard with only a slight hiss at the effect on his knees. Within the minute they were trotting out of the yard, Rachel sitting behind and clutching at Shay’s coat.

‘Do you have to go back?’ he murmured. ‘I can help you; I can—’

‘I don’t want your help. Even if you could.’ He felt her shifting behind him on the horse. ‘I want my home back.’

The moon watched them onward.

Something was moving in Shay’s brain: night journeys to Astbury; danger; the soldier from Doncaster coming to the house; news of Pontefract. What had he brought George Astbury that was so valuable? He probably hadn’t known. But why had Astbury wanted it so badly? Was it only the report from Teach, and if so, what was there about the information that was worth risking a life for? Not just risking, but losing a life, for the soldier had been dead and buried at dawn, another contribution to Astbury’s rich soil, another bit of history silently and imperceptibly absorbed.

Why, now, does this haunt me so? Is this now my dotage, to live in these past confusions and failures?

Another quarter-hour of riding and they reached a watermill, a black outline in the gloom. Rachel knew the place vaguely; a memory of a dour ferrety owner. What kind of reception would they— But Shay was already off the horse and knocking heavily at the door.

A minute, and he knocked again. From the horse, Rachel watched his silent outline against the blackness of the mill, and started to wonder more about the sentries at Astbury.

Another minute. The snap of a latch and the creak of the door and there was a thin figure shadowed against some glow inside; a glint of metal, and the beginning of an angry question, but Shay was already speaking. ‘I’m a friend of Mandeville. I need a horse; black, preferably.’

A grunt. ‘I’ve no black. A chestnut?’

‘It’ll do. Thank you.’

Within a minute Rachel was on a new horse and heading for home, planning paths and excuses that might serve in the misty dawn, and wondering again at the strange power of Mortimer Shay and his friends.

‘Going somewhere?’ The voice behind her in the stable, and Rachel whirled round, trying to swallow her heart. A soldier, a shadow in the doorway, the first of the light catching his musket-barrel.

‘I was – I couldn’t sleep. I needed to – I wanted to check my horse. Check you people hadn’t done anything to her.’ She turned away and stroked the nose of the mill-owner’s chestnut. The bridle and saddle still hung on a beam immediately beside her; did they look out of place?

‘I didn’t see you come.’

Rachel’s glance towards the tack had also showed that the horse was very definitely a him rather than a her.

She turned. The man’s eyes looked stupid, or just sleepy. ‘Good. I wouldn’t want you to.’ She pulled on a show of defiance and strode past the sentry. He reached indifferently for her arm as she passed, but she ignored him and hurried on into the house.

She managed four hours’ sleep, on a mattress salvaged from the garden yesterday and laid in her bedroom on a patch of undamaged floorboards. Joanna woke her, and Rachel was immediately aware of the cold.

‘Please, miss, but the man wants to talk to you. I’ve kept him waiting an hour, but I worried that—’

‘Which man?’ Looking around the remains of her room, she realized that Joanna must have tidied the worst of the plaster and laths and debris the previous evening.

‘The Government man. The one who came before.’

Thurloe was sitting on the bench in the arbour. He looked up as she approached, held her eyes a moment, and looked down at the pile of papers perched carefully in his lap.

The shock had her gaping and confused. 

Shay’s papers. They had to be Shay’s papers.
But how. . .?

She brought her face under control. Thurloe finished looking at one page, and replaced it neatly on top of the others. He looked up.

He must know them for what they are. But how. . .?

Thurloe said, ‘I assumed there were papers here. Then you were too sure. The only way you could have got something out was in the kitchen scraps. Your most logical collaborator after that was the old man.’

Was Jacob safe? Surely he hadn’t—

‘Jacob would not have betrayed. . . anything of us. I don’t believe it.’
What can he really know? What can I say that does not incriminate?

Still the same wretched neutrality in Thurloe’s manner. ‘Nor should you. That man would die for this land, and for you above all. So I told him that I knew all about the papers. I told him that unless he gave them to me I would make this whole estate a desert, and have Mistress Rachel in the Tower.’ His voice softened somehow, and became more sincere. ‘The principles of the good Jacob run deeper than these little vanities of political loyalty.’

‘And would you?’ She attempted scorn, to cover the insidious sense of vulnerability in her belly. ‘Would you have laid waste to it all? Would you have seen me in one of your dungeons?’

He looked up slowly, and dour, and the words were leaden. ‘My instincts are immaterial to you, surely.’

It was spiteful, and they both knew it, and suddenly Rachel Astbury wanted to scream madly at the childish, self-destructive lunacy of their world.

The destruction of the house yesterday had seemed to strip away the warmth of this life. Then her night ride to see Mortimer Shay had somehow rekindled a sense of possibility, of vitality. Now that had collapsed again and for ever.
The game is done
.

She moved to the end of the bench, and slowly sat down, and folded her hands in her lap. ‘So what follows, then, John?’

His tensed shoulders dropped, and his face seemed sadder, and at last there was sincerity in the eyes. ‘Rachel. . .’ He sighed. ‘The papers are mine now, and I must use them. They were not yours, and their treason is not yours. They were your uncle’s, and your uncle is an enemy to this country, and I must find him and if I find him he will surely hang. You. . .’

His eyes searched her sadly. She felt the scorn starting to seethe in her again, but he saw it and spoke fast and earnest. ‘You are vulnerable, Rachel, and I beg you to believe me. Scot and Tarrant know you for their only link to these late treasons, and if they have a fragment of evidence they will – they will. . . tax you to the uttermost to find out more. If they saw a single one of these papers and thought your fingers might have touched it, they would have you in. . . torments, in the Tower.’ 

They were both shaken, and stared at each other in silence, his great mournful eyes and hers wild and strained. ‘If you fly they will find you, and they will know you guilty. Stay here. Stay silent. See no one who is not of the immediate household.’ He watched her lost face, and something lurched in him. His hand seemed to flicker, as if he wanted to reach out. ‘You must step back from the world, Rachel. Above all, do not – I beg you, do not – try to contact your uncle.’

The August night wound itself up into a storm, swirling and roaring and hurling rain horizontal out of the darkness, and the storm brought forth Sir Mortimer Shay. 

Some ancient stubbornness made Jacob wait for one more hammer-blow on the planks before he opened his cottage door, dog straining at its collar under his hand. Shay was a midnight waterfall on the doorstep, streams rolling off every shadowed feature, and then a satanic grin. ‘I’m the past, Jacob. We have a little unfinished business tonight.’

Jacob, after a moment, just nodded and stepped aside.

The spindly wheel-backed chair by the fire squawked as Shay dropped into it. He began to puddle, and steam. The dog sniffed around him dubiously.

Jacob stood nearby, the crevasses and outcrops of his face waiting for an expression, like barren ground before rain.