Traitor's Field

by Robert Wilton

  A hand grabbed his shoulder and wrenched him round and up, a pair of hands at his collar and Shay was shifting him back and down and he found himself on the bench. Legs wide and re-finding the balance, fists still clenched on the collar, Shay brought his face down close.

  ‘You don’t have to enjoy it. You don’t have to exult in it. But sometimes you have to do it.’ He released Balfour’s collar at last, and gave the slightest nod. ‘You did it. Now row. We must get away from here, and you must row.’

  Behind him as he took the first heavy pull at the oars, Balfour could hear Vyse’s gasping breaths starting to ease. Shay stepped to the pale shivering figure slumped in the bow, took off his jacket and pressed it down over the torso. Then he pulled away and bent to check the small wooden chest that now sat innocuous in the bottom of this other boat.

  Oliver Cromwell scowled at the page, and let it thump to the table in his hand. He picked up a second page and moved it over and on top of the first. The scanning of his eyes back and forth over it became an irritated shake of the head.

  ‘And I suppose, Master Thurloe’ – Cromwell’s heavy face staring up at him, no clue as to sympathy or irony, only the Lord’s justice waiting to be done – ‘you will have me denying this fiasco like the first.’

  Thurloe took a breath. ‘We have no proof that the crown is not at the bottom of the Thames.’

  Cromwell’s eyes widened a fraction. ‘These men, whoever they are: they may have that proof – and thereby power to shame us.’

  ‘Then they would only prove their guilt. None may use this story without revealing himself to us.’

  Cromwell’s jowls chewed at this for a moment. Then he nodded heavily.

  The big head came forward, the eyes hard on Thurloe. ‘Young man, I had you marked for a man of will. A man of resolve. A man ready for all the trials that God may send us.’

  Thurloe waited.

  ‘Ready to prove himself against such outrages as these. To overcome.’ Still the implacable eyes.

  Thurloe nodded slightly.

  ‘Well then.’

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

  Sir,

  I received with humble pleasure your last letter. I dare say that your willingness to look beyond the little divisions of present days is a fit commemoration of the broad-mindedness of Beaumont, who has brought us into contact in such sad circumstances. I may add that I am no strong adherent of any cause, and certainly not of the killing of good priests, and I think that such an event should cause us not to cower more cravenly between this or that wall of principle, but instead to begin to wonder whether we have not as a country lost something more important than both causes. We have not sage good hearts enough to waste them scatter-wise, and when we are so careless of men like Beaumont we should all I think pause a while and examine our causes and our consciences.

  As you expected, there is little I can do to find a soldier knowing no more than his Christian name. If you could remember the Regiment in which he served – perhaps the name of his Colonel, or some identifying ribbon or device on the uniform or hat – I might have more success. There was a Colonel – Rainsborough was his name – who came from Colchester to Doncaster – could that have been the Regiment?

  Or perhaps we may trace him from the other direction. Perhaps you will not wish to name your active friends in the Royal interest who are so enthusiastic for further strife, but perhaps you have heard the name of a man or men in the Army with whom they are in contact.

  What do you do yourself in these days? I imagine these must be difficult times – as they are for all of our people, but I am not insensible to your difficulties, and I hope that partisanship does not stop me sympathising with the discomforts of a fellow man.

  If you should ever choose to meet in person, at any time or place of mutual convenience, it would please me much. We might more easily identify your friend, and in any case a fresh conversation with a fresh mind would hearten me much. I sense that we share a belief in the common humanity of man, and I would be most glad to help you explore and come to terms with the world as it moves today, with all its errors and flaws.

  [SS C/S/49/170]

  What game do I play here? Shay in shadow, fingers tapping on a letter, trying to conjure the spirit out of it. A little agitation, yes. And my odd hunger for more of Pontefract. Blackburn’s intriguing report of the death of Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, by raiders from Pontefract. William Paulden has a plan, and William Paulden dies. Four men lead it, three go into the inn, just two bring out Rainsborough.

  George Astbury’s obsession. The soldier had come from Pontefract, on George’s last night at Astbury. Had the soldier brought with him the letter that George would have on his body? George’s obsession becoming my own.

  With bulldog persistence, Balfour had coaxed Manders and Vyse into a game of dice, and they were hunched over the table when Shay entered. Vyse stood immediately, glad of the chance to distance himself and somehow embarrassed.

  But Shay said: ‘Balfour. Manders. I’ll have an errand for you, if you’d oblige me.’

  There was the lurking sense that an errand for Mortimer Shay could involve anything from delivering a letter to assassinating Oliver Cromwell, but they could only nod.

  Vyse was shaping to speak. ‘Sorry, lad. Fair hair. Too distinctive. Next time.’ And Shay was gone again.

  Thurloe, watching: I am always looking now for the scene within the scene; the other reality; the plot.

  There were two horses being walked in a circle, skittering nervily and avoiding each other’s glance, and around them the sporting men shuffled and muttered, affecting insouciance but watchful and posing like truebreeds themselves.

  Today, a secret meeting.

  There was money here; Thurloe could see it – in the boots, in the occasional feather, in purses passed casually out of cloaks to waiting lackeys and tipsters. There was more money in these twenty-odd men than in. . . in any twenty men he’d ever met, probably than in any two hundred men of his sort. Mr Garvey’s Ajax would race Sir Thomas Tovey’s Conqueror over one mile and a half – in recent days the ground had been first muddy, and then frosted, and he wondered how it would be under those rampaging hooves – and the prize, in silver no less, was a year’s fees to a lawyer. As much again would pass around in private wagers.

  Would these tend to be royal sympathizers, these twenty self-assured men, with their lolling glances and easy-given purses? Thurloe felt a flicker of isolation. Then rationality. There were dandies enough among Parliament men, and sober-dressed men enough among this group. False premises, false observation. But race meetings were a well-known cover for Royalist gatherings. Again the flicker of isolation, and Thurloe trying to hold to his logic.

  There was a shout, incoherent. A shifting among the rich men – rich men? See the faces, Master Thurloe, and the boots, see some worn leather and some hungry glances – and then the two horses were being pulled and led away, and the little crowd began to tramp after them. Thurloe watched the cloaks swaying away, the rich blues and clarets, the feathers bouncing in the crisp air.

  The reply had come from Mr J. H.: after reflection, he thought he would like to meet Mr I. S., for might two men not prove that there was a limit to suspicion in this uneasy world? Which noble sentiment Mr J. H. then undermined rather: Mr I. S. should be at the course at Newmarket on this day; at the start of the second race he should leave the ring and walk to the Bushel; Mr J. H. would meet him there.

  Leaving at the start of the second race was a neat arrangement to set a time without setting a time – that he understood. Fifty yards away from the track the sound disappeared completely, and the town as he entered the main street was silent. It would do its trade in the evening.

  He felt the cold in his ears, his nose. Autumn had conceded defeat.

  The arrangement also meant that he could be watched. If his contact chose to have a friend or friends with him, Thurloe could be tracked. But his destination was known, so that h
ardly mattered. His contact – his contact’s friends – could see if he was alone.

  Thurloe had the odd sense of being in some way an object of what was happening. He was no longer an agent – ago, I act – in the situation, but instead that which was being acted upon.

  Am I somehow vulnerable? Surely, I am on the side of the Government. Can what I’m doing be wrong? The private correspondence; the deliberate deception of Scot.

  What if this is a trap?

  Thurloe stopped immediately in the street, and reconsidered his progression to this minute and to this particular patch of dirt next to this particular tailor’s.

  If the situation is as promised, then I need not worry. If this is a trap, then I could have been taken already, or could yet be taken, and nothing I may do will change that. He started to walk again, with long steady steps. Besides, I am in the game now. I must face the—

  He slowed.

  Am I now a man who runs risks?

  He tasted the idea cautiously, an unfamiliar fruit, or something about to sour. Life has its risks. But I have never sought them out. I have never chosen risk over safety. Pontefract; the red-headed man with the gunpowder. Doncaster; the letter. And his assault on Thomas Scot’s ledger: an explosion of impetuousness against the attempts to obstruct him; a borrowed Royalist trick and his own true logic.

  But risk surely didn’t inhabit this quiet English street, merchants and slumped thatches, and a horse scratching its neck against a post.

  He tried a pose of cheeriness, and knew it wasn’t his, tried to kindle the excitement. There is a stranger England now, always on the edge of my vision.

  This time the long steady steps took him to the Bushel.

  The inn was a new building – trim, with straight timbers and clean bricks. Inside was as quiet as out. Just one other customer, hunched over a mug on the counter. Thurloe grunted for wine, and picked a chair sheltered by the chimney.

  This meeting itself, the conversation, was a risk. He had not lied, but he had dissembled, about who he was, about Doncaster and the Reverend Beaumont, and conversation would more easily reveal it. But there were truths out there – the strange link between Royalists and Levellers – that he had to find.

  My contact would prefer this chair, shielded by the chimney. Thurloe felt his legs readying to change places. But the wine came, and he waited.

  Should he try to become someone else for the conversation; should he invent some other man and inhabit him? Or should he be as much himself as possible?

  If I change places, put my back to the door, he will not see that I am waiting. Thurloe felt his legs relax again. Or should I not seem— He finally caught hold of himself, took a mouthful of wine.

  The door opened, and a man stepped into the inn. Boots and a cloak and a hat and a face obscured by a scarf up to the eyes.

  Is it? Thurloe watched him, fixed. How will he— The man glanced around the room, and back at Thurloe. How do I— Something shifted around the man’s eyes, the suggestion of a question. Thurloe felt his own eyebrows lifting, openness, acknowledgement. I am now a man who runs risks, and his heart was thumping.

  The man stepped forward towards Thurloe. He’d taken three steps, halved the distance between them, when a glance to the side froze him. He stopped still, stared for a second – towards the counter, towards the other customer – then turned and hurried out.

  Thurloe half-rose – follow? shout? – and then half-turned towards the other customer. But the other customer was still hunched over his drink, a blank back denying Thurloe’s hope for clarity. Thurloe subsided from his awkward posture, frustrated and angry. He knocked the rest of the wine back in one, and left, with a malevolent glance towards the shadow at the counter.

  The rain came down forever – as if there were no alternative to the steady hissing on hat and shoulders, the water sluicing down his back; as if God had decreed the flood for eternity. And Shay continued to stare at the weird scene, a little rustic hell, men and women on the margin of existence.

  Two or three figures lurked on the edge of the tree line, watching like him, confused and suspicious. Further off, a man on horseback. They didn’t stay long.

  He shifted his body gingerly within the jacket, trying to make a friend of the rain: to believe it was a bath, to believe it was warm, to believe that a fireside awaited – the tricks of a lifetime of sieges and delayed attacks.

  This was Surrey; even within England, a place of more than usual familiarity and comfort; London, a great city of the world, of art, of civilization, was less than half a day’s easy riding.

  Across two or three acres of common wasteland, a vagabond settlement had grown: wooden shelters and makeshift tents, of blankets and branches. Around them the inhabitants had started to till the land: the scrabbly undergrowth had been pulled aside, the earth turned until the weeds and roots had become uniform lines of rich brown clod, and in this earth they had planted what they needed.

  A grumpy pig trudged closer and began to forage at Shay’s boot. He looked down at it, a fellow creature in the storm.

  They’d called themselves the True Levellers, whatever that meant. Their opponents – the scornful, the alarmed – called them Diggers. Which made more sense.

  There’d been speeches; pamphlets, of course; demonstrations in the local church. The earth was a common resource for all. Property – the having of land, of wealth – was an offence to this. If all the unused land were put to use, all men would have enough.

  Just more of the idle words and ideas that had filled the heads of unhappy, unsettled men in the last years of destruction and ruined harvests. Shay watched the people. A scarecrow band, crude sodden clothes and empty faces, ankle-deep in their precious earth and wrestling it with simple tools and hands that shivered white in the rain.

  One man moved among them – an older man, his own age or more, amply built but with clothes that hung loose – a figure of authority, though did they have such a thing? – offering encouragement and support. As Shay watched, he pulled a hoe from a ghost-pale young woman, raised one open palm to heaven in a moment of damp rapture, flicked the collected water out of his palm and began to work the soil with the pedantic rigour of a man who hadn’t been doing the same for the last hour.

  Shay had come across the Weald, through the very fringes of mankind. Through furnace-settlements of a dozen inhabitants, where the charcoal smoke made a permanent dusk over the glistening smeared faces, a way of life for a thousand years or more. Through groups of outcasts – deserters from armies, deserters from life – that had reformed themselves as new communities in clearings in the endless forest, barbarian lives lived in the undergrowth: tinkers, tramps, and pedlars; itinerant smiths hammering at brute tools; crazed preachers watched by a scattering of world-shocked faces; the most desperate whores he’d ever seen. All the habits of humanity rehearsed as if by animals; as if, in its decay, English society were retreating, regressing.

  Watching the cultivators through the curtain of water, he felt somehow uneasy.

  It wasn’t the poverty, or the politics. He’d seen extremes enough of both in the German lands, across three decades of chaos, and now all the upheavals in this island.

  He looked again – at the woman thirty paces off, lost utterly in the misery of rain and desperation and still crouched over the mud, hands as trowels, scraping holes for the seeds and refilling them; at the man nearest him, driving a shovel down into the world with inhuman determination.

  It was something unfamiliar and untouchable in these people. Mortimer Shay had spent his life moving among other men and women; never dependent, but always able to find some tie of companionship, to however remote a fellow – through duty, or through drink, through loyalty or masculinity or passion. Through all his life, Shay had counted on being able to join a stranger or group of strangers, of any quality or faith, and within an hour make himself comrade enough to be able to bed down next to them without fear.

  Is this become my England?


  Now, in the heart of the kingdom, he felt uneasy.

  It was Oliver St John at his most typical: a glass of wine in his hand when Thurloe was shown in, a glass of wine thrust into Thurloe’s hand before he was halfway across the room – ‘You’ll take a little food as well, of course?’ – and every surface and object shining or plush; gorgeous fabrics and twinkling, probably foreign, glass. At first it increased the discomfort in Thurloe’s mind, but gradually it relaxed him.

  ‘Thought I’d lost you, Thurloe. Cromwell’s man now. Greater things.’ St John had settled back on a couch, shoulders sinking level with his knees. ‘You’ve missed the wine, I suppose. You’re sure we won’t eat a little something? You’re properly among the Spartans there, aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s a change from Lincoln’s Inn.’

  ‘Cromwell rarely eats, and the drink is foul stuff. Fair sacrifices for your career, I suppose. Have you a fancy for a royal title?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Some of them – most of them – we can abolish as worthy defenders of the public good. But there are serious administrative titles still; the Lord knows what they actually do, but they sound important. Vice-Admiral of the Shipyards, Master of the Forests, that sort of thing. I’ve a bagful of Lieutenancies to give away, and umpteen Secretaryships of various kinds. We’ve our own men to reward as much as the King ever did, and folk like a little continuity. Do you suppose Cromwell wants a Groom of the Stool?’ And they laughed, Thurloe easing into the atmosphere and St John boisterous. ‘You look a little pale.’

  ‘It’s – it’s an interesting mix of people.’

  ‘It’s the new world, John. If we let open the door to liberty, as we must, it’s remarkable the people and the ideas that slip in.’ He was watching Thurloe out of languid eyes, and then the slumped head came forward. ‘How do you find Thomas Scot?’

  ‘He’s committed. He’s sincere. A little—’