Traitor's Field

by Robert Wilton

  Shay watched him go, then looked around. Balfour was sitting on a chair near the door, as ever quiet and watchful. ‘Tom.’ He was up and across in a moment. ‘I’ll have a little journey for you.’

  TO MR I. S., AT THE GEORGE, IN NEWCASTLE

  Sir,

  Where previously there was great appetite for violence, I rejoice to say that the majority here now finds the pleasures of peace more seductive. The caprices of the Church leadership here do infuriate the young King’s advisors, but such is their hold over the simple men who make up most of the army that there is nothing the Court men may do. The Church party are now most satisfied that General Cromwell is departing their land and, wanting in the final reckoning to be on terms with him as comfortable as the recent fluctuations do allow, are reluctant to press their military advantage and waste lives. I think they will do what they can ahorse to harry your forces away as fast as is possible, but happily the foot-men are mostly kept behind their stout defences in the city and should not be risked against Cromwell.

  I write thus to you, in haste, in anticipation that you will soon be travelling southward again, and accordingly to wish you safe journey homeward, that we may continue to correspond, with our consciences untroubled by any clash of arms or further difference between us.

  [SS C/T/50/89]

  Oliver Cromwell on campaign was an even more volatile prospect than when in London, and Thomas Scot composed his brittle dignity before entering the inn-room that served as his headquarters.

  Cromwell’s big eyes rolled up ominously.

  ‘General, I regret that I have no useful intelligence to offer you on the Scottish manoeuvrings or intentions. Our most promising channel has grown quite cold. I fear this must encourage a more precipit—’

  ‘No matter.’ The eyes had dropped again, and Cromwell was drifting back into the papers on the table in front of him. ‘Thurloe has a report that the Scots don’t want to fight. They want us away from Edinburgh, which I will gladly manage, for this month at least, but they’ll not throw more than a few horsemen at us. We have time to move towards Berwick without abandoning our supplies or artillery. If the supplies keep coming in by sea we may even find a new safe base nearby.’

  Scot left, unsure whether he was supposed to feel grateful or vengeful towards Thurloe.

  Thurloe himself was woken early by the increasingly familiar sound of military urgency. The two men who’d been sharing his room were gone, and he dressed quickly and hurried downstairs into the dawn to find a riot of galloping and shouting. Weapons were being grabbed, papers were being burned, and a stream of white-faced couriers was emerging from Cromwell’s room.

  The Scottish army was advancing from Edinburgh. A detachment of its infantry had circled the English and blocked the road south. Cromwell and his Army were surrounded.

  Thurloe first absorbed the news with his usual dogged grappling at military affairs. Then he reabsorbed it, with a growing queasiness in his belly, and hurried off to find Thomas Scot.

  The sun rose feeble out of the sea and began to climb the Doon Hill. As it reached the top it picked out a line of men and then, breaking over them, began to hurry down the western slope in the footsteps of the Scottish army, tramping towards battle. But the light was losing against the clouds that were being chased in off the water by an angry wind, and growing heavy.

  Among the small group on the crest, Sir Mortimer Shay: dark pride.

  The letter to the Parliament man: reassurance, the Scots unlikely to bring out their infantry, no need for Cromwell to hurry. I have created this.

  The landscape rolled out below him like a map. In the distance, the sea, a white blank margin to the world and to what was possible in it. Immediately in front of him, backs and boots dropping away down the hill, the army that he had helped to pull together and bring to this place, Scottish soldiers fighting for his King. At the foot of the Doon Hill, protecting the new Scottish position, the river wandered from outside his leftward vision across the scene to the sea. Between the advancing Scots and the empty sea was the English Army, smudges of men spread across the plain.

  Teach said: ‘Seems a pity to be abandoning this high ground.’ He had to articulate the words with care to make them carry.

  ‘I never generalled a battle. All my fighting was hand-to-hand.’ Shay shrugged slightly. ‘I never saw my enemy’s plan, or his dispositions, or his regiments. Only his face.’

  Teach grunted agreement. ‘Leslie says that since there is no chance Cromwell will climb the hill to meet us, we must go down to him. And if we don’t force him to battle, he’ll have time to escape by sea.’

  ‘Mm. And these Scots are miserable enough without spending another hour on this god-forsaken mountain.’ As he said it, the wind blustered up again and this time it brought moisture, and they and the others on the hill hunched and looked instinctively for shelter.

  The backs of the soldiers bent a little as the rain came on. Behind them, their commanders wrapped cloaks around themselves more tightly and began to follow them down out of the wind.

  ‘We have him now, regardless.’ Teach had to shout the words.

  Shay nodded slowly, watching his world spread out in front of him like papers on a desk. ‘So it seems.’

  Somewhere below him across the river, one of the flags or clusters, was Oliver Cromwell, trapped.

  Oliver Cromwell’s great thick-coated shoulders were bent over the table, carrying the world. The face, when it looked up to find Thurloe standing there, seemed as usual bigger and more strongly shaded than the things around it. Dark brown hair; the nose, the wart, the textured flesh hanging heavy on the cheeks; and the eyes, far away in a plan or a prayer. The lives of tens of thousands of men; his commission on behalf of the country; the future of an ideal that might reshape Europe – all depended on how shrewdly he read a crude sketch map, how keenly he saw into a landscape, and whether once more he could summon up enough genius to make God himself think his cause worthy of favour.

  Thurloe felt his stomach kick again, and set his teeth hard. ‘Master Cromwell’ – the eyes focused on him – ‘I must. . . admit failure. Apologize.’

  The eyebrows rose a fraction.

  ‘The letters I’ve been getting – insights on Royalist intentions and movements – I strongly believe they’re. . . deliberate deceptions.’

  The great nose wrinkled up.

  ‘I’ve checked against Master Scot’s sources. Charles Stuart actually signed his declaration to the Scottish Church on the 16th of August – at least two days after my correspondent wrote to say he had done so. My correspondent wanted to make us think the Scots and the Royalists were more united than they were – to make us hesitate – to buy time for their politics. The same when he wrote that the Edinburgh lines were strong, and the defenders eager to fight.’ He winced, took a breath. ‘The same when he wrote that the Scots would not pursue – making us relax – allowing them to surround us.’ Breathe. ‘I’m. . . sorry.’

  Oliver Cromwell nodded. Then his head dropped to the papers on the table again.

  One of the papers crackled as Cromwell unrolled it.

  ‘What – what happens now?’

  Cromwell looked up again, and the eyes re-focused. ‘Now, Master Thurloe, we will fight a battle.’ Fate itself was speaking, low and ominous. ‘We will depend on God’s mercy, as always, and nothing else. God is never deceived.’

  The eyes and the shoulders dropped to the table again. Thurloe nodded, pointlessly, and turned to go.

  ‘Thurloe.’

  He turned back.

  The big eyes focused sharp and narrow, and the words fell hard. ‘Next time.’

  Shay and Teach found a little shelter halfway down the hill, an outcrop of rock at their backs and a gorse reaching over them.

  Teach pulled some biscuit from inside his jacket, and shared it. ‘And today: another little slaughter.’

  ‘Mm.’ Shay’s eyes were still on his trap. ‘Tomorrow, I think.’

  ‘A
strange country we have become.’

  ‘I was born in battle, Teach; in blood. I am a creature of fields like this. It served me well enough as an education. You too, I think.’

  Teach nodded. ‘And yet you keep your young terriers away from the field.’

  Shay’s glance was quick, the return slower. ‘Their duties took them elsewhere.’

  ‘You sent them. Vyse and Manders on the staff. Balfour another courier’s errand. In their different ways, they’d each want to be on the field, but you’ – the accusation came soft, jovial – ‘you made sure they’d be elsewhere. I charge you for an old sentimentalist, in spite of yourself.’

  Shay took in a vast slow breath, uncomfortably as if through a wound. ‘Is it wrong to hope that this all might be worth something?’ The voice was low, slow, heavy. ‘Can’t our ravaged generation leave something – anything – a little bit good?’

  Teach nodded again. The waiting continued to eat at their guts, as the soldiers shifted and settled at the river, opposite the English soldiers caught between them and the sea.

  Shay had found a cottage where a pretty, scared, manless woman would give him a bed for a penny. He woke to darkness, a hand on his shoulder and then a candle offering hints of Thomas Balfour.

  ‘Sir Mortimer.’ Shay blinked away the glare and the momentary confusion. Have I lived my life in these broken hours?

  ‘A man must find his own bed, Tom. This one’s taken.’

  ‘There’s movement across the river – from Cromwell’s lines.’

  Shay forcing his old-feeling head into thought. ‘He’s resetting his regiments for the battle. Or he’s preparing a rearguard to cover an evacuation by sea. Either way, our Scots won’t move before morning.’

  ‘Shouldn’t—’

  ‘They won’t move because they can’t yet know what to move against.’ He smiled without warmth. ‘Sorry, Tom: sometimes there’s only waiting.’

  Balfour nodded. ‘I’m sorry I woke you.’

  ‘Don’t be. You did rightly, boy. It’s better – it’s always better – to sleep too little than sleep too long. Ask Master Cromwell.’

  In the darkness, the Scottish army slept like cows, bunched together in the fields, against hedges where they could, rolled in their cloths and padded with torn clumps of grass, quietly shrivelling in the rain.

  A constant shivering, a shifting of the black uncomfortable lumps, soft bitter chatter and hunched curses, and always the rain and the cold.

  Across the river, the English commanders dragged their men through the night, through hours of little shifts and stops that moved them only sideways and apparently no distance at all. And always the rain and the cold, sharp at the neck and insidious in the boots.

  Shay slept ill after the interruption, Cromwell nagging at his shoulder whichever way he rolled. He was awake with the first faintness of dawn, set off by some odd crease in a dream or in the grey world outside. The inescapable first pang of uncertainty – What place is this? What death am I trying to avoid today? – and then he was up, buckling himself together like a groom with a dray horse, and plunging into his boots.

  Then he was away into the grey flush of the morning, cold but alive, striding up the Doon Hill again, in time to watch Cromwell’s miracle.

  This then is his genius. He sees further and quicker than other men, and he acts faster.

  The centre and left of the Scottish army slept tight between the hill and the river, and woke to sounds of battle and found itself with no space to manoeuvre. They stood uneasy or milled around, according to the temper of their regimental commanders, while the right wing of the army tried to hold back the torrent.

  It is so obvious, but he sees it first, and to see it second is too late.

  The English Army, rank after rank of them grim and shivering and stretching back out of the reach of morning, were concentrated in a single column, and Cromwell sent them in one continuous punch out of the gloom against the Scottish right. As one attack faltered against the desperate sodden Scottish defence, the next broke over it like the storm, and so over and over until the defence shrank and was washed away. From the hill, only the faintest trace of the English singing could be heard drifting up. Oh praise ye the Lord, all ye nations. From the hill, the Scottish ribbons and pennants flickered and fell into the drowning brown scrum of soldiers, and still the English ranks and the English colours kept coming.

  Does this make him truly the angel of his God? That he sees the battle so entirely and so rightly?

  The Scottish right broke. Lost now and individually alone, its soldiers died in the bloody mud, slipped, scrabbled away through the swamp, wrestled to freedom through the milling, chaotic shoulders of their former comrades, ran. Their regiments evaporated in fear and confusion and their remains were swallowed by the endless ordered flow of the English. And still the psalm rolling over the carnage: Praise him, all ye people. For his merciful kindness is great toward us.

  As the Scottish right collapsed, its fugitives raced through the hesitating centre regiments like woodworm through timber, and through the mists of morning and artillery smoke the timber could be seen to brittle and creak, then it too was engulfed. As the English roared through the Scottish army at Dunbar, right to left – The truth of the Lord endureth for ever – from the Doon Hill its remnants could be seen drifting away over the river and the hillside in desperate, lonely hope of safety.

  Shay watched it all from the remove of the hill and the months past. The Crown has lost another year of striving, in one moment of ruthless clarity from that man. Down from the overcast morning he scowled at all his meetings and manoeuvrings, all the uncovered truths and undiscovered lies that had led to this place.

  Praise ye the Lord.

  Angry and frustrated, Shay found himself stalking through the wreck of so many hopes looking for Vyse, Manders and Balfour, and uncomfortable about it. Have my hopes become so contingent? Do I depend so little on myself these days? The royal cause was a scattered threadbare thing now, huddled and hunted in cottages and ditches; he strode among torn uniforms and pale bewildered men, and the litter of weapons thrown aside in flight or shame.

  He recognized the sick shock of defeat in the faces, though they were all unfamiliar. And they stayed unfamiliar and unreassuring: the men who might have seen the three young men, or should have seen them, had not and could not help him.

  Shay walked the scattered remnants of the army increasingly grim, some instinct of undefeated self maintaining the high shoulders and long stride, while the unease grew in him. Eventually he got on the trail of rumours of the three, reports at two or three removes. They had been in the battle after all. Heroism. Where the battle was thickest. Charging in. Death or glory. He forced himself to mistrust the worst reports as much as the best. At least one was dead. They had died together, united as always.

  Among the hearsay and the platitudes he felt his anger swelling. You should not have been there. Do I control nothing now?

  Eventually the trail led to a low mean cottage, slumping stones among old bent trees. A figure was carrying in a bucket of water, and as Shay strode forwards the head turned, pale and golden, and he knew that Henry Vyse at least was alive and hope kicked in his belly. Vyse didn’t break his step, distracted, and they reached the doorway together and Shay grabbed at the young man’s shoulder but Vyse was pushing him away and handing over the bucket to another. At his second attempt Shay caught at him, pulled him closer: ‘Why in hell’s name—’ and then he realized that the other man had been Balfour, and growing relief brought him closer to normality.

  On a bench in the gloomy cottage room was Manders, paper-white and battered. He was mud-caked from hair to boots, varying black to grey as it dried patchily, and his left leg from the knee down was a blasted crimson mess, a silly patchwork of red-pink flesh and white bone and fragments of trouser and boot. Shay was beside him in two strides, staring down at the waxy feverish face. The eyes alternated wide in shock and tight shut in pain, and a surg
eon was readying himself nearby.

  Shay gripped the shuddering head in two great hands, and gazed down. ‘You had no need to be there, Michael!’

  Manders gulped and coughed at the air, and words hissed from his throat. ‘This cause – Will. Not. Fail for.’ A long shallow breath. ‘Want. Of my. Hand.’

  Shay smiled hard at the grim bravado. ‘We might succeed after all, boy. If this is not the last King of England to know he has a Manders in his ranks.’ And he continued to hold the pale shivering face clamped in his hands as the surgeon approached with his knife.

  Edinburgh, new-captured by Cromwell’s Army, was edgy. Every face was suspicion and a desire not to offend. Every back alley was furtive with fears and rumours and hurried departures. Thurloe tramped the great grey streets trying to feel like a conqueror, and constantly expecting a knife in his back.

  The self-claimed King and his broken followers had retreated west and north, with the Firth of Forth on their flank as a shield. Cromwell was consolidating his troops, the city’s docks were choked with supply ships up from London, and John Thurloe had leisure to pursue an untried thread.

  Lady Constance Blythe had kept him waiting the fifteen minutes no doubt necessary to dress her age adequately for company, and then offered him her hand like an insignificant gift. A protracted ritual in which hostess and younger man refused to sit in the presence of, or certainly before, the other ended with the lady comfortable in the high, cushioned chair that seemed to be the centre of the first-floor room, and Thurloe in an oak chair pulled round in front of her.

  Thurloe thanked her for her time, and introduced his task. He was come up from London on behalf of the Parliament. Parliament was most anxious to rebuild a peace between London and Edinburgh. Battles created divisions where there need not be divisions. He did not wish to be indiscreet, but no doubt Lady Constance would know that there was not always perfect harmony between Parliament and Army. . .