Traitor's Field (9 page)

Once well out of town, and alone on the road, Shay pulled the letter from inside his coat. No obvious sign of tampering, though it was rarely possible to tell – unless you were dealing with complete fools, and the decade had taught the royal cause hard that it was not.

The letter was from Jacob Hoy, bookseller of Edinburgh. He regretted that he himself could not satisfy Mr Padget’s desire for a copy of the
Codex Walther
, but he had heard it said that Master Peter Staurby had – no more than a year ago, anyway – been in possession of one.

Staurby. Shay read the name again, then replaced the letter in his coat; he would destroy it in the first fireplace he reached.

He rode on, only half conscious of the pale morning around him, the wet fields.

Staurby. Something about the name. Something –
Good grief. Astbury, you old fool. You fool of a schoolboy, you amateur.
The old man had not died too soon; the system had to be gripped, and quickly.
The age of such games is past; this is a new world.

He could not assume that the place was not being watched, which meant both that his approach must be unremarkable but also that he could not make any sign of watching himself. Behaviour intended to escape scrutiny is dangerous enough, but nothing so much as behaviour intended to detect scrutiny exposes a man to it. So, no circuits, no dawdlings in the street, no adjacent vantage points, no more significant scanning of his surroundings than a man might reasonably do to find his way.

The house of Mr Farthing, he had learned from one courier. The town of Stoke, he had learned from the other. In the town, discreetly, he learned that the house of Henry Farthing was better known as the Jug – an inn.

Shay liked inns. No one could remark on a man entering or leaving an inn at most times of day or night. A man could stay in an inn for a few minutes or a few hours and not be remarked either way. He was also pleased because it suggested that Astbury had shown some sense in managing his messages: knowing Astbury, he had feared hollow oak-trunks and loose flagstones.

Shay rode up to the Jug at unremarkable pace, and left his horse in the yard. There was a rich, fat smell there, and his instinct was assuming horse shit while something in his brain told him he was wrong. He stepped into the inn. It was a warm morning and the fire wasn’t lit, but the chairs were more comfortable by the chimney and he sat there for an hour, drinking steadily. There were three other customers for different periods of his stay, and he responded to their casual bites of conversation.

Then he left: watching the little details of the rooms, the faces, the movements of people in the street outside, he left – got on his horse, trotted steadily out of town.

The following day, at around the same time, Henry Farthing heard faintly the sounds of an arrival in his yard – the calling for the ostler, the whinnying of a horse – and glimpsed movement through a small back window. A moment later the new arrival was in the main room of the Jug Inn.

A man getting on in years, but big and healthy by the look of him. A man of power, Farthing felt. Did he remember the man from before? Yesterday, even? So many faces.

The man ordered a drink, and sat – the chair wasn’t a strong one, and it creaked badly as he dropped into it – ruminating near the door.

There was another drinker in the room – a trader from the square, in out of the day just for a moment’s ease, been here a quarter-hour already and wouldn’t be much longer – and then sure enough he was gone.

The big man still sat in silence; half asleep, sort of. Eventually he seemed to find himself. He looked around the room – at the window, at the door – then stood and walked towards the bar. Farthing watched the looming figure, tried to read the expression.

‘I’m looking for Henry Farthing.’

‘Me, sir.’

It was a strong face in front of him – big-featured, and worn, the lines deep between the brows and crackling around the eyes. ‘You keep messages, papers: have you anything for Peter Staurby?’

Farthing felt his eyes widening in his face. That name. So rarely heard – sometimes letters were collected in person by one of two faces he’d come to recognize, and sometimes the letters just disappeared during a busy day – and hearing it revived an old unease.

‘I – I’ll check, sir. One moment.’ He turned away into the back room.

The name was an ulcer, flashes of discomfort and never quite forgotten. He was doing nothing wrong – surely, he was doing nothing wrong. But the Staurby correspondence was trouble and, in an age without law, trouble preyed unpredictable and vicious like a snake.

When he returned to the main room, the stranger was halfway between bar and door, watching him intently, somehow on edge. A man alert to surprises; a man who would be trouble and attract trouble.

He swallowed. ‘Just two, sir.’ The man was back at the bar, nodding once. ‘I don’t – I don’t recognize. . .’

Grey, cold eyes stared into him. Then the old man lifted his fist, and Farthing saw the ring: a flash of the first remembered pain of this business, years ago now. He looked up into the eyes, nodded with a little frenzy, eager to placate. ‘Thank you, sir. I’ll be sure to remember.’

The man took the papers. ‘Don’t remember too hard, Master Farthing.’

‘No. No, sir.’

‘I don’t know that Staurby will be getting many more letters. I might need to collect for other friends, time by time.’

‘Of course. Anything, sir.’ He opened his mouth to speak – couldn’t manage it – tried again. ‘Some papers have been destroyed, sir. It was the instruction. Burned. After every week, if not collected.’ He waited for the reaction.

A pause, and then the curtest nod. ‘I’m pleased to hear it. For now you will continue the same system of precautions exactly.’ 

‘Of course, sir.’

Something rapped on the bar, and Farthing’s eyes snapped down. 

A gold coin. ‘Thank you – thank you very much, sir.’

‘A tidy inn this, Master Farthing. Good luck to you.’ And the big man was gone.

As Shay stepped back into the inn yard, the smell was nagging at him again – not horses, surely; sweeter, more exotic – and finally he saw it: an apothecary’s shop backed onto the yard too: a dark doorway, green things in its shadows, strange small sacks and boxes around it.

The name – Staurby – would need to be changed.

For a moment, Shay had wondered at what he might have missed in the letters that Farthing had dutifully burned. The thought faded quickly.
If I am to fret, it must be about the book.

But now he felt something building in him, some excitement or strength. The men of shadows had decided to legitimize that unknown knife-thrust on Preston field. Now he had ears in every significant chamber in the kingdom, eyes on every desk. Now all England spoke to him. Once again, he was master of the network of the Comptrollerate-General. 

The first of the two reports retrieved from the Jug Inn was the last report out of Colchester, written on 27th August and rightly predicting the town’s fall the following day. Shay read the summary of the last futile flickers of pride and nobility with irritation suppressing sympathy. The second report was much shorter, and more recent.

[SS C/S/48/10]

Sir Mortimer Shay: away from Stoke now and a shadow against a beech-trunk under the low roof of its branches.
And why in God’s name do I care for Colchester’s hungry and for this Colonel?
A shake of the head at his predecessor’s diversion of resources into inefficient irrelevance.

Once again, he reached into an inner pocket and removed the page recovered from George Astbury’s body on Preston field. A simple report – almost routine – from inside besieged Pontefract, and he wondered at it.

At least once in a week, usually on a Saturday when the King slept in the afternoon, or when he had adequate other company, William Seymour would beg permission from the castle Governor to walk down to the river. The begging was a humiliating business, and the answer inconsistent, but the Governor was not a bad fellow – and where, after all, could he really get to on the island?

His regular path took him down through the town – the temporary sensation of freedom, of air that was really his, enabled him to endure the wide eyes of the peasants, the pointing – to where the Medina river became the estuary, and so on towards the sea.

Always a sentry came with him. It was a routine of habit, of discipline, for he had nowhere to escape to and they probably wouldn’t care if he did. But it confirmed that he was different from other men now – a member of a new and more select aristocracy, of the isolated, the unfree. The world he had roamed had shrunk now, to the world of that little majesty in his closely watched rooms in the castle, to the castle grounds, to the views around the Isle of Wight from the battlements, to this one merciful breath of air, the fetid closeness of the town and the empty freshness of the river.

It was colder today. Autumn was slowing, shrinking towards death. The riverbanks were darkening as the leaves turned and fell, and the colours were becoming simpler and starker: the grey flicker of the water, the sterile wall of sky. There were few boats on the estuary, and no travellers on the path today. Ahead, a rowing boat had been pulled half out of the water onto the bank, two men pottering slow around it.

He strode on, feeling his stride lengthen, enjoying the feel of the path under his feet, solid ground and his to walk on. Once they were clear of the town the sentry would drop back a bit – they hardly felt comfortable with each other – and he could pretend that he was alone.

‘Seymour.’ The sound jolted him.

The unexpected sound and, he realized, the knowledge of his name.

One of the men at the boat – he had reached it without noticing – standing against it now, looking along the path towards the sentry then murmuring a word over his shoulder to the other boatman. The other glanced up, then just stood and ambled away past him in the direction of the town. The first man had turned towards him again: an old face, worn but hard –

‘Shay!’

‘A word or two, if you will.’ A glance back along the path, and he pulled off a rough and shapeless cap. ‘Please preserve your calm and your stance. I am a humble river man, you are bored enough to talk to me. Your sentinel will give us a few minutes, I imagine.’

Mortimer Shay, leaning against a little fisher-boat in anonymous working clothes, a ghost from history come out of the waters in the middle of the Isle of Wight, not a mile from the King. Seymour said, ‘We thought you dead, or abroad.’

‘I am returned to office.’

‘The devil you are.’

‘Nevertheless.’