Traitor's Field

by Robert Wilton

  What has been happening to captured towns is well-known now. The news has travelled on horseback and running feet; repeated and magnified, it has travelled on the wind and the water. It can be read in scratched frantic letters; it can be read in the staggered faces of refugees; it can be read in the severed heads outside Dublin.

  In the town, there is bitterness and muttering. Anonymous papers of protest are appearing. Soldiers are spat on. Seditious words are heard against the commanders who refuse to surrender. Food is being hoarded. Ships carrying coin and papers and children are sneaking into the predawn mist. More people are going to church. More people are being robbed in the streets.

  In his commandery in the town, the Royalist Colonel in charge of Wexford reads for the fourth time the short letter from Cromwell. His hands won’t keep still; his heart is beating hard – that seems to happen a lot now. Cromwell offers terms for the protection of life and property if the town is surrendered.

  It is 11th October. It is exactly one month since the slaughter of Drogheda.

  In the town, rumours of the letter have spread helter-skelter; hungry mouths will find food quickest. Cromwell has offered generous terms. There have been other stories spreading, stories of towns that surrendered honourably and were spared. Cromwell will not want to cause outrage unless he is forced. Perhaps the stories of Cromwell’s monstrosities are exaggerated. Surely a man of God is a man of peace. Imagine the relief of the siege ending, this frozen anguished existence changed instantly.

  The Colonel’s heart continues to hammer at his head. Pride. Pain. Honour. Escape. Duty. Fear. Ormonde’s relieving forces coming nearer. Disease spreading in Cromwell’s camp. Negotiation. Cleverness. One more exchange of letters. An extra concession for his people.

  Then there is sound, sound outside his head, outside the room. From beyond the city a shrillness rises like angry birds; not birds – men, screaming in the charge and cheered on by artillery that applauds against his walls. Cromwell is attacking, and in his shock the Colonel knows that it cannot be, because I am holding this piece of paper and the paper is real. Then the world crumbles in explosions and wooden hammerings and faces and reports and impressions. The castle is surrendered. The castle is falling. Confusion. The walls have been abandoned. Shrieking panic in the streets. Fear.

  Something has gone wrong. The laws, the conventions, the agreement have been forgotten. The assault is under way, with shouts and swords, and no arrangements have been made for mercy.

  And so it begins again.

  The crown of Henry Tudor, the seventh of that name, was twenty-two jewelled inches in circumference: seven across and as many high, from its padded brow-furrowing base to the tip of the flat cross at its summit. A little gleaming Golgotha, the last surviving crown to have touched the head of a King of England, the sacred relic now huddled in darkness in a mean unvelveted wooden chest. As the chest swayed in the hands of the man carrying it, the crown could be heard sliding across its base, a rat in a dungeon, or a usurped King.

  To those who revered it and to those who despised it, it had become an embarrassing and uncomfortable demonstration of the obvious absence of a head to wear it. To forestall the dangerous enthusiasms of the former, the latter had decided that this last hostage should be destroyed.

  There had been some discussion about the appropriate handling of the chest. It was obviously valuable, and to be closely guarded. As the object of this evening’s activity and of so much concern, it was of great importance – but importance should not be allowed to attach to the object itself. The chest was sturdy, but unornamented. The guard was substantial – six men in two files of three escorting the bearer, a walking ‘H’ bunching and distorting at the frequent corridor turns – but not ceremonial. Nevertheless, the carriage of the crown through the palace to the water had something of the procession about it, something ritual. A captive was being escorted to execution, a victim to sacrifice. The boots fell naturally into rhythm as they tramped over the tiles and flagstones, the uncertainties in the faces seeming like gravity.

  At the water’s edge, confusion. The chest was carried down the three steps to the side of the boat, and handed to the man standing waiting inside, legs braced against the little restless bobbing of the river. His balance shifted as he reached for the chest, and shifted again as he swung it in close, and he waited to find stability again. And then stood looking around in uncertainty.

  ‘On the thwart, sir, here.’

  ‘Between those two pikemen, perhaps.’

  ‘Shuffle along a bit.’

  ‘Should I hold it, maybe, would that be right?’

  ‘The thwart’s the proper place.’

  ‘Don’t know. It seems too. . . you know.’

  ‘On your head, then?’ and a collective frown.

  Eventually the small chest was stowed under its bearer’s bench, and he settled himself over it, clumsy against the water’s rocking. Immediately, automatically, he checked that it was still there, saw it not quite square to the line of the boat, and eased it straight with his boot in some buried instinct of propriety. Thus the crown of the Tudors, and of the Stuarts after them, was set on the river at last, to be rowed away for destruction by fire like the pagan Kings who had ruled this land a millennium before.

  Two miles down the river, a pair of bulky shadows pressed into a stone wall and murmuring.

  ‘You see the scene, Manders? You see your role?’

  ‘I do, sir. And when I’m done? I should come to you – to aid you, in case. . .’

  ‘When you’re done you get away from here, and we can have no risk that you’ll lead them to us. If you see a threat to us from the land and you can do aught about it, we’ll be thankful, but otherwise get you well away into the night. Do not meet your friends until tomorrow. All being well, I should be good and clear by then. It’s a part for a man prepared to stand alone, Manders, not just a man with strong arms to him.’

  A grunt, and then silence.

  ‘This is – this is when one finds out, sir, isn’t it? I mean. . .’

  A heavy nod, but it was unseen in the darkness. ‘This is that time.’

  A firm hand on a shoulder, and then Sir Mortimer Shay was gone into the gloom.

  Approaching them along the Thames came the crown of the Tudors, gliding in furtive majesty. The boat was a broad and steady gig, eight rowers bending and heaving at the oars. Among them, squashed and awkward on the benches and struggling for dignity and balance, were as many pikemen, weapons high and wavering over the water. The blades flashed above them, collecting little freaks of light from the city and glittering in the growing gloom. The boat shoved itself smoothly over the river, a strange water porcupine bristling with its oars and pikes.

  A coxswain sat in the stern at the tiller, to keep order among the rowers and negotiate the tricksy eddies of the river and its chaotic traffic, and one bench ahead of him was the courier.

  The courier was the only man not holding anything, and he felt it in restless adjustments of his hands – now clasped, now held straight out on his knees. He tried to carry himself upright against the rocking of the boat, tried to manage a pose of dignity, gazing out into the evening of the city through the thicket of oarsmen and soldiers and trying not to catch any eyes.

  ‘Pikes!’ from the stern, and there was a shifting and a rustling and the soldiers looked around and saw the mighty bridge looming nearer behind them and understood, and the pikes wavered and dropped with thumps and jostling among the irritated oarsmen. One didn’t quite make it and the pike-point scratched harsh against the underside of the bridge, the noise picked up by the hissing, cursing teeth of the soldiers.

  The bridge made evening suddenly night, the city lights were fewer and farther through the arches, and the smooth progress over the water became somehow a more hidden thing, a whispered echoing scurrying in a tunnel, a rat in a sewer. By the time that the boat emerged moments later, the bridge buildings looking down blankly on this strange emanation from their
skirts, the last light had gone and the sky was black, so that the few-second journey under the little city that was London Bridge seemed to have been a transit of hours, a journey to a different realm, and they had been cheated of the wistful fading of the evening.

  The courier watched the rhythm of the rowers as they bent and heaved and sprawled back and lurched forward again, and swapped blank faces with the two nearest soldiers. There were bigger boats this side of the bridge, masts bustling against both sides of the river; but there were fewer lights, and ahead the east and the sea were empty darkness. To his left he could see the Tower now, a foggy white over the black invisible sins of the city, lurching closer with every sweep of the oars.

  The chest rested on the bottom of the boat, peeping out from under the man above, uncomfortable as if a mouse had appeared under his cloak.

  In the ebony shadow of the wharf, hidden by its height from the monstrous ghost of the Tower of London floating overhead, another boat bobbed and chattered on the oily water of the night.

  Three men sat in it. Two bulky shapes, an older man and a younger, waited over the oars. A third man, slender and trying not to shiver in the shirt and close breeches that were all he wore, crouched in the bow.

  Haunted voices came over the water at them, calls and cackles bouncing and echoing oddly in the darkness, suddenly shrill or eternally far away. Mighty creaks and whispers swooped nearby, as if the night itself were a shifting restless machine. Through the damp walls of the wharf they felt the spirits of traitors past, seeking company.

  In the gloom, Balfour saw for the first time a small barrel in the corner of the stern, and turned to the comfortable bulk beside him. ‘Powder again?’

  A grunt.

  ‘We foresaw no need.’

  A reflective breath. ‘Emergencies.’

  Balfour shook his head. ‘Sir Mortimer, you surely are a man for a revel.’

  Somewhere above them, Michael Manders waited in his own darkness, and found his lips muttering forgotten entreaties.

  The wharf stretched the length of the waterfront of the Tower of London, and the prickly boat was heading for its centre, the coxswain steering her in a slow curve from the middle of the Thames in towards the cold waiting fortress.

  Huddled over the waterline at the centre of the wharf waited the barred mouth of Traitors’ Gate. Queen Anne Boleyn, all the dancing and ambition behind her; Lady Jane Grey, used and terrified; Saint Thomas More, grim-faced and pale as he went to test his compact with God: all had been rowed through the sloshing, weed-greased archway, all of them on their way to death.

  ‘Pikes!’ again, this time well enough in advance, and the pikes wavered and bristled and fell slowly, the oarsmen ducking aside in irritation and the courier in alarm; then: ‘Ahoy at the gate!’

  High above, on the wharf, a shadow moved against the Tower.

  A creaking of ropes, and the wooden gates began to swing open, the black water rushing and chattering through the lattices. Traitors’ Gate showed the way to a fetid unlit tunnel beneath St Thomas’s Tower and, beyond it, the moat running between the wharf and the fortress.

  ‘Oars!’ The coxswain skew-mouthed and staring as he tried to gauge the movement of the bow in the current, and the rowers looking around and pulling their blades in a foot and instinctively hunching as Traitors’ Gate opened black to receive them, the slaps of the water echoing tinny in the stone purgatory, and then the bow was in, nicely in under the very centre of the arch.

  Then a blur to trick the panicked brain and a roar of shattered wood and the centre of the boat disappeared and water was gushing up through the blasted planks. ‘Now, fast and hard!’ from somewhere in the darkness, and the prow of another rowing boat was racing in from the side. The assaulted boat was chaos, a screaming of shattered men and the wild mournful shouts of their confused and sinking comrades. ‘Now, look for it! See it! Swim for it!’ Again the words came from outside, from the nightmare of confusion, and the water was everywhere and so cold. The men who’d been in the way of the first plunging shock, a shattered arm and a smashed leg between them, were already drowned. The courier and the coxswain were sprawled back against the stern, askew and bewildered and alarmed – something had dropped, surely, something had smashed through the bottom of the boat and the boat’s back was broken and now there was no stability any more, just wrenched portions of boat that rolled away under frantic arms and legs and kept on rolling and then they were floundering and retching in the thick clutching river.

  In the attacking boat Shay had dropped his oars and spun round and was scrambling forwards. Behind him Balfour’s oars kept the boat steady, and as Shay clambered along the boat Vyse disappeared in front of him, a pale flash of shirt that rolled over the bow and into the freezing water, a movement and a sound lost in the madness.

  By the time Shay was leaning over the bow, the water in front of him was a maelstrom. The remains of the shattered boat, the flailing shouting men and the log-jam of oars and pikes, seethed and splashed up at him. He had a sword raised in his right hand and a pistol in his left, but for a moment he couldn’t see Vyse and he couldn’t see the crown. In the gloom and the chaos all the movement was a rolling whirlpool of black and white against grey. ‘Forward a stroke!’ and Balfour pulled them so, the bow nudging its way through the water and one bobbing body. An arm reached up at him and Shay hacked down at it. Then he saw Vyse, a purposeful white torso pushing through the water a few yards ahead – ‘Again!’ – two more swooping cuts of the blade at the churning of men and river – nearer now – and then what had seemed a shattered fragment of hull became a wooden chest.

  ‘There!’ Shay shouted to no one and no purpose, and ‘Forward!’ and still Balfour was pushing them forward. Vyse had seen the chest, had seen it before he jumped, was pulling himself furiously towards it, and as Shay watched with face clamped teeth-tight in intensity one long pale hand reached for it – but too far. ‘Come on!’

  Another man was reaching for the chest now, a clumsy stupid arm that clutched at it and slipped and pushed it away and lunged and clutched again; then Vyse had two hands on it and was trying to kick himself backwards in the water, but the flailing arm had slipped off the chest again and grabbed him by the shirt. Shay switched weapons between hands, braced his knees against the insides of the bow and found a precious moment of steadiness in his rigid right arm and fired. The face exploded black and away into the water, and Vyse was free and splashing his way back towards safety, kicking clumsily while clutching the chest to him. A hand clutched at his shoulder, at his shirt, and he writhed and tried to pull away, and then the boat prow was over them and Shay drove his sword into the face of the pursuer and reached down for pale spluttering Vyse. ‘Now away!’ and Balfour instantly reversed the pull of the oars, and the momentum checked and changed and gradually they began to back away from the mêlée. Vyse was hard against the side of the boat, coughing, with the chest in both hands, and Shay had him by the neck of his shirt, but there were two soldiers clutching at his back and legs; overreaching dangerously, Shay hacked at them both, the sword in his right hand again and swooping mad and vicious. The men fell away, blooded and screaming, and he checked again but there was a moment’s peace.

  Over the bow, the shouting and the splashing and the drowning were receding into the darkness. There were figures on the wharf now, and shouts, and for a second Shay wondered about Manders. Then he bent again to Vyse, a hand under each shoulder, and hauled him bodily upwards out of the water until Vyse got one hand over the side and clutched tight.

  Shay grappled the chest away from him, and Vyse got his other forearm wedged over the side. Shay turned to put down the chest, and as he did he saw at the other end of the boat a hand, then an arm and a shoulder and finally a head appearing over the stern.

  Balfour saw it too, turned back for a moment to Shay, and then they both watched for one dumb moment as a soldier pulled himself over the stern and into the boat, to lie there spluttering and staring at them and
instinctively reaching for sword or knife. Again Balfour looked over his shoulder, and his eyes widened: Shay’s face, inhuman and black, the words dropping ominous like drumbeats: ‘Kill him.’

  And Thomas Balfour killed him. As the soldier flapped clumsily at the sides of the boat and tried to lever and kick himself up, Balfour had a knife from his belt and threw himself forwards. His right arm landed on the man’s shoulder and neck and drove him down uncomfortably into the stern, and his left hand pushed the knife into the man’s chest. Hasty and wide-eyed, Balfour pushed himself awkwardly up from the mass beneath him, and stared. He’d not heard the cry begin, but he heard it now, a high moan of agony and outrage, accompanied by a feeble flapping of hands towards the knife. He’d stabbed the man but the man wasn’t dead, the man was still moaning and flapping for the knife and now his eyes flickered open and gaped at Balfour pitiably and hurt. Gasping incoherent words, Balfour fell forwards onto him again, scrabbled the knife free and stabbed and stabbed, hacking through coat and shirt and cutting at the thin feeble meat of the chest. The face stared and twisted at him, tortured and stupid and surely, surely dead now. His hand clutched for the man’s face, stifling the moan and trying to cover the gazing sad eyes.

  Revolted, futile, Balfour pushed himself up again and began trying to heave the man up by his armpits. Slumped like sacks in the boat, the man would not come. A shoulder – an arm – eventually Balfour had him by one leg and pulled the body up and against the side of the boat and then rolled it over the side into the Thames. He lay collapsed for a moment, chest crushed against the hard wood and face swaying over the water, aware that the body was still rolling and moving nearby. Then, as he watched balefully, it rolled upwards one last time and sank.