Traitor's Field

by Robert Wilton

  ‘Josiah Talbot.’ The voice was flat and heavy. Two men standing close in front of him now. Not so tall, to speak of. But solid. Was the voice a young man’s?

  His name fell like a verdict of guilt.

  Again: ‘Josiah Talbot: time by time you have been wont to take a shilling for producing a reforming letter. You have been silent of late.’

  ‘I haven’t—’

  ‘We fear you may have strayed. We fear you have grown sentimental for the King.’

  ‘I never—’

  ‘You took a shilling or two from the King’s friends, too, Talbot.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t a man—’

  ‘Tonight you pay, Talbot.’

  Was this it? Was this death? Two masked devils in his shitty den, booming bland treasons at him?

  ‘Tonight you leave this place, Talbot, or tonight you die in it.’

  By this time the great fortress of London had been standing guard at the eastern approach to the city – the direction from which all evils had come – for almost six full centuries. Time and prosperity had allowed other, finer buildings to rise, and fall, and rise yet finer within the city walls.

  The great grey sentry grew only wider and more solid, as the fears and fancies of England’s Kings gave birth to new walls and new towers, so that generation by generation the fortress seemed to spread like a family, each new crenellated offspring adding the fashions of its time to the old inherited outlines. Its features and its functions were innumerable and ever-changing, and so history has found it impossible to know the Kings’ vast and rambling fortress-palace as anything more than simply ‘the Tower’.

  On this night, at its darkest hour, there were three men huddling against the eastern wall of the Tower. Time and some long-forgotten mason’s hastiness had produced a flaw at the foot of the wall at this point, which had become a crumbling of mortar and a loosening of stone, and then over the years a low opening in the wall. Now the opening was a gap three feet high and as many wide, and a rough cascade of stones slumped into the moat which slept still and stagnant a couple of feet below. Tonight a small rowing boat had been tied to one of those stones, and the three men had climbed slowly and awkwardly out of it, hissing curses behind covered mouths and clambering on hands and feet like primitive scavengers over the heap of stones and bones and last week’s vegetables.

  The stench was foul, a mocking acid reek, and the first man’s face was clenched and his throat torturing him with rank retches as he neared the top of the stones and extended a hand towards the opening at the base of the wall. Feet planted rigid. Must be silent, must try to breathe. To reach the top is to reach a flat place, a forgotten courtyard of grass, fresh grass and the fresh night air. The hand found a firm hold in the opening and the muscles started to tighten and the body moved forward into the opening – and then flung back, a gangling twist of limbs as he pressed himself against the wall and tried not to breathe.

  Movement inside the opening. There was supposed to be no one in this courtyard. But he’d seen movement, a flickering shadow, a pair of legs. Of course the courtyard was used! The kitchen waste wasn’t rowing across the moat, was it? Must be silent. Must be still. Three black insects pressed against the grey wall.

  The legs stopped in the opening. Then a pair of hands, a fumbling, and a long arc of piss soared over the stones and splashed noisily at the moat edge.

  The performance lasted for no more than twenty seconds, but the first man held his rigid tortured pose for a full minute before relaxing, and moving his head forwards again to check that they were alone. Then he turned back, and extended a slow arm down the slope and grabbed the collar of the man below.

  His face dropped slowly after the arm, and the words were spat individually in the softest murmur. ‘This – was not – how – the name – of – Manders – was – born.’

  The reply was softer still. ‘Mm. Might be how it dies though, eh? Move, damn you.’

  The yard was but thinly grassed, and the stench still carried from the moat in the cold night air, but it was flat and it was dark and, pressed against an inner wall, the three were glad enough. They had to wait a quarter-hour or more in silence, and their minds and their lurching stomachs peopled the black void of the yard with memories and fears and parallel worlds of what might happen or what could be happening instead.

  They were waiting for a signal, and when it came it so shattered the utter emptiness of their waiting as to paralyse them for one awful terrified moment. An explosion to the west, from the direction of the city, but directions and civilizations were meaningless in the sudden thump across their night.

  Hearts plunging up and hammering and muscles clenching and lurching for control in cramped limbs. Vyse was supposed to be counting, only realized he’d forgotten to start after one second, spent another second in a shock of failure, then gasped a desperate ‘three’ into the scrabbling confusion. Manders pushing a small barrel against a door, Balfour behind him with a tinderbox, and Vyse hissing the numbers out with new-found restraint. ‘Nine. Ten.’ No one should come out this way, the old man had said, but what if the old man was wrong? No spark. ‘Twelve. Thirteen.’ Manders with the short fuse ready, other hand on his sword hilt, Vyse swallowing and hissing. ‘Fifteen.’ No spark. ‘Sixteen.’ No spark. ‘Seventeen.’ The door blank in front of them and all their fears crowding mad and formless over their shoulders. ‘Eighteen,’ and Balfour had the taper lit. ‘Nineteen.’ Manders holding the fuse up from the barrel with precise fingers. ‘Twenty!’ and it was lit and now the hiss was coming from the fuse and they scrambled away behind the nearest buttress.

  A fuse is an inexact device, and so are two men counting to twenty on opposite sides of a fortress, and a few of the bewildered inhabitants of the Tower – the men who were now waking and wondering and hurrying to the western walls and shouting orders into the darkness and peering out from the arrow-slits of the gatehouse – found their ears and brains playing an extra trick on them: the nagging impression of a second small explosion, this time from the east of the fortress, a kind of strange pre-echo appropriate to this night of demonry and confusion, before the vast roar that blasted into the sky to the west again.

  A vast roar, a torrent of sound that shattered the open ground between the city and the fortress and hung heavy in the night sky, and the fickle tricks of the mind were erased in the assault on sense. Then, as the Tower’s sentries stared from the turrets and walls and gaped and prayed, they found something new to wonder at: a great blaze had started up on the open ground between their defences and the first buildings of the city, burning in fierce unearthly yellows and blues. There was nothing there to burn, surely, no structure or waste, at least there hadn’t been before night. Thinking their faces hidden in the darkness, despite the weird glow that flickered over the walls, the men in the fortress worried at their forgotten sins.

  By chance, the Deputy Constable of the Tower was in residence that night. Once he had wrestled his way to the walls, and once he had passed a few moments in yellow-faced awe and unease staring at the fire, he gathered himself enough to order a detachment of sentries to sally out and investigate. By the time they approached the fire, edging closer with public bravado and private fears, the flames were already dying down. As the soldiers watched, the last ghostly veils of yellow and blue danced and waved in front of them and then vanished into the night, and the soldiers were left alone again in the void.

  It was fully half an hour before – hurrying and shame-faced and bewildered – the reverberation of that smaller explosion to the east reached Deputy Constable Tichborne: on the other side of the fortress, masked men had battered their way into the outbuilding under the Salt Tower that had become the temporary home of the Mint; surprising the man left on duty there, they had escaped with the ceremonial crown and jewels of the Stuart Kings, which had been taken there for destruction.

  In the silent hours of the early morning, another explosion near the Tower – among the slum houses to the east �
�� and then a fire. Buckets were hurried from the river. But the house of Josiah Talbot, sometime pamphleteer and now known for a drunk and a nuisance, was badly damaged.

  A detachment of soldiers from the Tower was hastily at the scene: another blaze coming out of this bewitched night, burning in angry brains and flickering in fearful hearts. They stood and watched while the civilians flirted with the flames with their buckets, then scuffed aimlessly through the smoking ruin, replying intermittently to the scornful comments from the crowd who now watched them.

  Of Josiah Talbot himself there was no sign.

  TO THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL OF STATE, BEING A REPORT ON THE EVENTS AT THE FORTRESS OF LONDON, AND THE SEIZURE OF THE LATE KING’S JEWELS THEREFROM.

  Sir,

  the facts of these events may be given briefly. Shortly after midnight, on the night of 23rd–24th July, an explosion was made to the west of the Tower. Residue of a small powder barrel in this place supports this. At around the same time, a small group of men had gained entry to the fortress precincts by taking a small boat across the moat at its quietest area and climbing through a point where the wall was age-worn. These men used a small powder charge to gain access through a locked door to the Mint, which has of late been situated in outbuildings between the walls at the east of the fortress. This detonation was covered by a much larger charge set simultaneously on that same ground to the west, where scorching and displacement of the ground may easily be discerned. This distraction of the inhabitants of the Tower was extended by use of a cart of straw nearby which was set afire immediately afterwards. Residue in the cart suggests that sulphur or some like mineral was employed to make the blaze more terrible. Under these confusions, the raiders, numbering at least three or four, entered the Mint, overmanned the guard who is used to pass the night on the premises but was much stupefied by the explosion, and, threatening violence to the guard if he would not reveal all to them, collected such of the regalia and jewels of the late Charles Stuart that had not yet been destroyed and melted according to the orders of the Council. These valuables were removed out of the fortress, it may be assumed by the same route that their removers gained entrance, and there is no more track of them.

  A paper was left in the Mint, and one of the disguised raiders was heard to term it a receipt, declaring that ‘Tichborne [Lieutenant Constable here, whose confirmed views against the King and name on the death warrant are widely known] shall not long enjoy the spoils of his crime.’ The half-destruction of the house in Shadwell, nearby the scene of the exploit, of one Talbot, known for a pamphleteer inclined by turns to monarchy and more lately to radical ideas, is susceptible to suspicion but not clear link to these events.

  It is not the purpose nor proper business of this report to speculate on the identities of the men without more fact, nor to comment on the management of the defences of the Tower. The news of the loss of the jewels, which in truth were already mostly destroyed, are known only to very few, and I have recommended to the Lieutenant Constable that this remain so; the embarrassment of those who know the truth will buy their silence and, should the Council agree, for the rest it might be put out that the royal relics have been destroyed according to the Council’s original instruction, and so these events might never be widely known.

  24th July 1649

  [SS C/T/49/28]

  Thurloe had walked a full circuit of the Tower three times, like a carrion crow circling a carcase. His report to the Committee had been clear in his head after one circuit and twenty minutes inside the fortress, examining the Mint and the moat and the forgotten yard and tolerating ten minutes of shame-faced outrage from Tichborne, invoking the Pope and the King and unpurged Royalists and unpurged Parliamentarians for the simple ignominy that someone had lifted his cloak and tickled his purse while he was looking the wrong way.

  The reflections of his subsequent circuits of this battleground – from the shadowed corner of the moat, to the blackened earth near the city to the west, up round to Shadwell in the east, and back to the moat again – were not for a report. Not yet.

  An explosion of sound and light masks the explosion of a vital doorway, and a whole castle looks the wrong way. I have been here before. Nottingham, a man on a horse; a letter. There is cunning here as well as daring. The dark, dank end of the moat; the hole in the wall. There is knowledge here, knowledge as old as these stones. The message to Tichborne; the abandoned house of a man of fluid loyalty. How may these be parsed? How do they fit the sentence? They do not fit. Yet. These are but hanging prepositions.

  And yet they serve a purpose. Every minute of diffuse speculation moves the crown further off. While Thurloe and his thoughts go in circles, the men on horseback ride straight and away. These men are creatures of the fog, creatures of the shadows. Angry stupid Tichborne, who killed a King and now rattles in his emptier fortress; a pamphleteer, whose loyalties all have bought, and whose house may be stolen for a mere device. These creatures feed on our confusions.

  TO THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL OF STATE, LONDON

  Sir, the Scotchman Montrose has been lately here seeking to beg money and buy soldiers. He has secured one interview at Court, pleading the affinity of thrones in support of the cause of Prince Charles Stuart. So far he has for lack of coin secured few followers, but these few hardy soldiers and tested, and he tells them he already has men from Sweden too.

  Copenhagen, August 1649.

  Sir Mortimer Shay had described precisely the location of the stable, on the edge of the lands of Cheshunt House and within sight of Waltham Abbey, and Henry Vyse found it exactly according to the description. Alone, he pushed open the door and slipped inside. The sun was lancing in white through a hundred gaps in the timbers, but his eyes still took a moment to adjust.

  The stable was empty. A thin spread of straw on the earth floor, and two shambling posts holding the roof. Then Shay appeared from the shadow of the far corner.

  He looked the question, and Vyse started to speak, then held up an uncertain hand to ask for pause, and returned to the doorway.

  A minute later the three of them were standing together in front of Shay: Vyse, Balfour and Manders. Balfour carried a small sack. He stepped forward, crouched, and placed the sack on the floor. Shay found his lips dry. Then Balfour looked up uneasily at the older man.

  Vyse said, ‘We were too late.’

  Balfour pulled the sack open, and there was a frail gleaming in the dust. The ceremonial riches of the Kings of England, one of the greatest collections of historical treasure in Europe, now consisted of half a dozen jewels, a golden spoon and a small golden bowl shaped like an eagle – and one misshapen apple-sized lump that glowed dull. Molten and resolidified, a clumsy golden ball, the ancient crown of the Saxons would be worn no more.

  A world away from London, Rachel was walking alone in the garden at Astbury. The garden was a fat luxury of nature, shocking colours in the flowers and plump drowsy bees and, in another quarter of the grounds, pendulous vegetables flaunting themselves among the leaves.

  She wanted the paler shades of spring, the sadnesses of autumn. She wanted to be too cold to think.

  She wanted Mary to scold her, Mary to laugh at for her prudence, Mary because an older sister was reassurance. Without Mary, her father had no one to act as intermediary to his younger daughter. He worried about her, worried about his inability to communicate adequately to her, and so withdrew into his study and his visits to neighbours who would say to him what he said to them. He was getting thinner.

  She spent what time she could with Jacob. It made her feel small again, and away from war and politics and change, to follow him around the gardens and listen to him murmuring softly to his charges, occasionally noticing her and pretending he’d been talking to her. But she was restless, fretted, and it unsettled him.

  She hadn’t seen Shay for some while, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. He seemed to know her too well, to know the world too well; and he didn’t seem to care about any of it.


  She kept thinking of John Thurloe: the Government man; the clever, careful man, with sad eyes. She was supposed to hate the Government and its triumph and its oppression; she was supposed to know them all short-lived. Shay would defeat Thurloe and all the men like him. That seemed likely. But for now the only voice for the old world was her father’s, peevish and distant.

  She wondered about the clever, careful mind, and the sad eyes.

  Oliver St John was eating when Cromwell entered – he always seemed to be eating when Cromwell entered – and dropped Thurloe’s report onto the tablecloth in front of him.

  St John took two further bites, scanning the paper dubiously from over the end of the ravaged chicken leg. Then he dropped the leg to the plate, cleared the last lumps of flesh from his teeth with one bulging rotation of his tongue, and wiped his hands on a napkin.

  ‘My man Thurloe grows a little presumptuous, I fear.’

  A grunt from Cromwell above him. ‘I disagree. He grows more useful and shrewd. Enlightenment is all that we may seek of God, and this young man may be an instrument of it.’ Cromwell picked up the paper again, and turned and left. Over his shoulder: ‘I think that he may be my man now.’

  TO MR J. H., AT THE SIGN OF THE BEAR

  Sir,

  your letter to the Reverend Beaumont came into my hands, but not immediately, and so I fear you have waited a more than reasonable time for a reply, and perhaps begun to cherish doubts about your correspondent.

  I must immediately, and with the greatest regret, tell you the Reverend Beaumont is gone from us, into that greater Kingdom of which he spoke and of which he was so worthy a representative. We must hope that his rewards in that place are brighter than his end in this one, for I must also admit to you that it was ignominious, hanged for having secret communications with Pontefract garrison. I suppose we may say that he died honourably for he died for his principles, whatever those principles, and since I learn that his end was speedy, we may say that he died with God’s mercy.