Traitor's Field

by Robert Wilton

  ‘What of it? He has beaten the Scottish army for this year. A platoon of militia could hold Edinburgh and the border right through to spring.’

  But the local man was lost in his fantasy now, voice breathy and agitated. ‘But surely – what of it, sir? What of it? Cromwell may try to bring his Army the length of England, but he’ll not get to Norwich before me, will he?’ He was nodding with a mad steady regularity. ‘Our troops will gather, we will march on Norwich – three hours only – and our friends there are ready to open the gates. The greatest town of the east will be ours!’

  Shay watched the eyes, thought of the endless boggy miles he had travelled. What is Norwich? Cromwell could lose it whole and never notice.

  He was at the fireside again two nights later, dark and wet after another day’s riding, as the news began to stagger in from the nearby villages. A few dozens of men at Easton, the same at Thetford. . . weavers, carpenters, farmers, rounded up like sheep. Not a gentleman, not a trained sword, among them.

  As winter bit, the royal hopes for the year shrivelled and cowered as a huddle of terrified men in a village square, and Mortimer Shay watched it grim.

  TO MR J. H., AT MACRAE’S.

  Sir, you will I hope excuse a delay in writing to you. The chaos of war and then certain administrative duties and continuous travelling have kept me much distracted. You, I imagine, will have been likewise greatly shifted about since the battle at Dunbar and the fall of Edinburgh to General Cromwell. Should this find you, I hope that it finds you well enough. Are you with the prince’s remnants at Stirling? Is there much expectation of new war? They do say that the Royal position at Stirling is impregnable, and sure it is the key to the rest of Scotland, but I think that most here care little for the rest of Scotland.

  My duties bring me sometimes northwards. I learn that Edinburgh Castle, which has stood out these several months against the Army now occupying the rest of the city, is like to fall soon, and that this will restore a further stability to a place that in truth has grown quickly used to the new politics. They say that Cromwell is speedily attracting support from Scots happier with a compromised peace than a principled war.

  I pray that you keep safe, and will let me know something of how you fare.

  [SS C/S/50/172]

  John Thurloe likewise heard of the failed Norfolk risings at the fireside, but cosy in dry clothes and his family and a general feeling of content. With his new letter to J. H., he had overcome his frustration and set himself up against his man once more.

  Anne was pregnant, pleased with his unexpected return, and inflating herself with quiet pride at his apparent importance, and so more inclined to keep the children out of his way and let him play master of the house. She was cosy-wrapped and pretty to him, and their days felt warm and well-fed.

  Thanks to privy contacts in high Royalist circles, these risings were known of in advance, and we judge that they would have failed even were they to have formed not in these mean flocks but with credible strength. The Norwich authorities were aware of them fully, and ready to oppose and overwhelm them even had the misguided rebels reached to the town.

  Thurloe mused on those privy contacts. The phrase could mean much. Nevertheless, it seemed that the Royalists could not plan—

  But that is not the lesson, surely. That little complacency is not what we learn. The risings were not sympathetic manifestations of Royalist feeling, born of local grudge and nostalgia. If they were betrayed at a high level, then they were known and planned at a high level. Had these been intended to complement the campaign in the north?

  How would I command risings from four hundred miles off?

  John Thurloe by the fire, a snug and flexible intelligence at ease. He was still gazing pleasantly into the flames five minutes later, when the servant boy came in on some errand.

  ‘Adam.’ Adam was from the village, in awe of Thurloe’s unimaginable learning and wealth and gravely aware of the precious chance he represented. ‘In my study, on the table, there’s a package of news-sheets. Bring them, would you?’

  Margaret Shay watched her husband from the window. The stiff straight back, the big shoulders, the hair above his neck plucked up in the wind. She badly wanted to touch him, to pull at his sleeve, to lead him out of his chilly reverie and into the house. But he could not be disturbed when he was like this. And soon he would be off again, to some other war or quest. She knew the signs – the changed tone, the grumpiness, the fidgeting; she had polished his boots herself in readiness.

  Shay’s eyes were on the hills: his lungs, his ramparts. His mind was lost beyond them.

  I have never thought of the ending. I have never thought of the aim.

  Always the struggle merely. His life was the next challenge, the next feat, the next scheme, the next skirmish. As if my world was an endless string of nameless German towns, with their blank horror-shocked faces and their mindless atrocities; as if my eternity was wading through blood and dreaming of treasons.

  Now the cause was in Scotland: packs of Scottish politicians jostling to use the young King, newly arrived among them from his exile, defeated once already at Dunbar, and forced to trust his future and his Crown to the temporary interest of their factions, to the commitment of their cheap-levied clansmen.

  Shay took a deep breath. Bracing himself for the fray.

  And always the ghost of George Astbury somewhere over his shoulder, a more elusive guardian of the secrets of the Comptrollerate-General than he would have imagined.

  Astbury had been worried about Pontefract and Doncaster, and somehow with the Levellers. Shay himself had played with the idea of a compact between Levellers and Royalists to unsettle his correspondent, the Parliamentarian I. S.; but the idea of such a compact was surely fantastical. What, then, had been so fretting Astbury? Had it anything to do with the Levellers in the Army?

  There had been a channel for communication between the Royalists besieged in Pontefract and the outside world; messages delivered via a church. Directly or indirectly the Reverend Beaumont had been the next link in the chain. Messages to Pontefract from George Astbury via the Comptrollerate-General network had gone through Beaumont. Messages coming out of Pontefract had entered the network through him.

  What then of the soldier, who had come from Pontefract all the way to George Astbury the night before Preston, mortally wounded? Was he some kind of courier for Astbury? It was surely unlikely. The network didn’t function with irregular couriers, and a soldier was the worst possible choice for one in any case. But surely he had brought that letter. And what, if anything, did any of this have to do with the killing of Colonel Rainsborough two or three months later?

  And what of Preston? Astbury had been worried about the scouts, and he’d been right: Scoutmaster Ruce had turned traitor. Ruce, whom Astbury didn’t think much of. Shay remembered the panicked face, the babbled details of being approached by Parliament’s intelligencers. Ruce didn’t turn; he was turned. They’d known Ruce, known his weaknesses. George Astbury had been right; Ruce hadn’t been the man to have contrived this himself.

  Behind all these fancies lurked a greater concern, lurching out at him when he dared to consider it. Had Astbury not destroyed the great book of the Comptrollerate-General after all, but hidden it? The possibility haunted Shay: a cataclysm of secrets, waiting somewhere to ambush England.

  Later, in the parlour, Shay said: ‘I have always known that I would conquer.’ She watched him, hand frozen at the needle. ‘Lately I have begun to doubt.’ She laid down the needle and the work, and her eyes searched his face. ‘They have. . . a different breed of men now, in the Parliamentary service. There’s one man. A clerk. Rather clever, I suspect.’

  Still she watched; loving, worrying. He shrugged himself out of the mood. ‘I’ll have them yet.’

  ‘You are a great man, Mortimer. In your terrible way, you’re a good one. But you may not always be right.’

  He looked at her, absorbing this.

  ‘On you
r own ground, in your own way, you have always been unstoppable. But a warhorse is little use at sea. With a rapier and pistol you can destroy a world, but you cannot rebuild one.’

  He pondered it.

  Too soon Margaret Shay was waiting to say goodbye again. He was striding over the stones, head turned towards Gareth and snapping orders as the silent steward trotted beside him with mumbles of agreement and acceptance. A momentary halt, and the strange ritual handshake between the two men, gauntlet gripping elbow, a familiarity reaching back into the decades. Then he was striding towards her again, as he always had been, striding down the corridor at Richmond Palace and through all the years at her. He stopped in front of her, suddenly uncertain.

  She grabbed a fistful of his jacket, and rested her forehead on his chest. ‘My little heart gallops with you, old wolf.’ She looked up at the face. ‘Where you are, there is life.’

  Shay gasped, and pressed her head between his hands, and kissed her. ‘You are my aim. You are my end. You are the one thing I have ever found that was worth living for.’

  1651

  The Fugitive Crown

  On 1st January, the young Charles Stuart was crowned King of the Scots. But Scone, sober masks concealing self-congratulation or doubt from the uncomfortably poised young man, was unknown to Astbury. News of the ceremony would not come through the hills for weeks, and what would it mean anyway, that the pretender King of England had got himself crowned somewhere else? Rachel tried not to notice the turning months, under the snow that blurred everything. In the valley where Astbury huddled, the world had stopped. Nothing came or changed or went. The rhythm of the meagre meals, of encounters with her ghostly father, of a ritual daily exchange with Jacob, were the heartbeats of her existence. One afternoon, the house utterly silent, Rachel walked far out into the fields until she knew she could not be seen or heard, and screamed at the white encircling hills and threw herself down into the snow.

  John Thurloe passed December and January among his family, trying poses of complacent fatherhood: stern, benign, patriarchal, playful. Anne – locally more influential than Parliament – had insisted that they go to church on 25th December, and he had glanced, like a drake patrolling his pond, down the descending line of Thurloes and thought, Is this success? Is this stability? Anne was grown large, and her stately, stiff-backed gait reinforced the little arrogances she was acquiring, and Thurloe smiled at it and teased her. In the evenings he read, to himself or to her, while the pile of Mercurius Fidelis news-sheets rested on his desk. Whenever he saw them he would touch one with a finger, glance at it, peer at the fat ramshackle letters, the smudges and the printing mistakes and the forced waspishness of wording and emphasis – and wonder at a code or cypher. Once he went as far as to underline all the words in one sheet that seemed unnatural, and then try to re-see the text as instruction or exhortation should those words have double meanings. But he could make nothing of it.

  England’s soldiers endured another winter in the field. Last year it had been Ireland, with its evil spirits, and the plagues that had eaten at besiegers as well as besieged. This year it was Scotland, tents and horses disappearing under snow, the constant search for warmth, for wood to burn, cramped fetid Edinburgh bunk rooms and petrifying weeks in camp before Stirling, a primitive struggle to survive the day, and all the time watching the tides of disease spreading through the regiments. Buried in and behind the fortified town, in this farthest corner of the land, Royalism mustered its strength in fireside bravados and little parlour intrigues, and waited for spring.

  With the winter sun white on her face, Margaret Shay sat cloak-wrapped on the bench and reviewed her world.

  She knew what waited underneath the soil of every one of the wide sweep of fields below her. She knew the condition and character of each tree. She knew who the distant trudging figures in the landscape should be, and could check her knowledge by how they walked and where they stopped and which other figures they tarried with.

  It has been a long while since I wrote a verse.

  The habit of a more naïve time, perhaps. A silly painted time, self-regarding and conceited. So many rhyming vanities. She did not feel now like a woman who wrote trifles.

  Yet I fear this is not wisdom, but age only. It wasn’t the times that had changed; only her. A farmer’s wife now, doughy and stupid. A mind once open to the infinities of natural philosophy, now sceptical of over-reliance on parsnips.

  Where is the world we promised ourselves, on those dewy golden mornings, the evenings of hungry intelligence?

  The times had indeed changed, and changed the people. The handsome witty men were become clerks and controversialists and sentimental. Spiteful pamphlets and sickly laments for lost loves and lost causes.

  I wish I had given Shay sons. He would have been a terrifying inspiration, a riotous guide to the world, and I would have planted in them seeds he would not know.

  Perhaps he would have loved them more than me. And the wars would have killed them. Shay’s wars would have killed them. In any case there had been no sons, and now Shay’s voracious potential, which could out-stride the world, could not out-stride time, and he was rendered futile. And I, who promised and was promised so much. . .

  No. This is but lazy melancholy. These are the indulgent complaints of a silly girl, an unfocused mind. It had been the lot of women in every age to take the roles neglected by men. Her generation of men had created a world first of speculation, and then of chaos; her duty accordingly had been to provide rationality and then stability.

  These truths are only worthy if one has a daughter to teach them to. Women do not make the world; but there is none else to nourish and protect it. I inspired men out of their dullness, and then I offered the scaffolds to their fancies. And now I manage an unruled estate, and decide justice in its disorder. In the tumult, women had become poets, and prophesiers, the defenders of concepts and the defenders of castles. I have tended to his wounds and tended to his lands and tended to his restive questing spirit. She had married Shay because – partly I married Shay because when we danced his arms were hard and his shoulders were like crags, and I would not let my eyes smile and he wondered at it, and I saw him realize that for once he had a challenge for which he had no weapon or trick and never would, and in one heart-burst I saw all the sparkling charming girls shrink, and still his instinctive hand slipped down my bodice to my hip, for Shay is ancient and Shay is also a boy – she had married Shay because he was the least bounded man in existence, nothing of convention or habit or morality, and accordingly offered the whole universe, corporeal and intellectual, for her to roam untrammelled. And her dominion was a valley in north Wales. This had been her duty; this had been her world; this had been her life.

  I wish I had had a daughter.

  Thurloe thought that he had been granted a personal epiphany one evening when, the family all asleep, he took a second glass of wine and tried considering Mercurius Fidelis by pure logic. One: for the sake of argument, we shall assume that these sheets definitely contain messages. Two: if I wished to write to one or two men, I would write to them singly rather than hiding a message in a news-sheet, which is an elaborate means and might be risked unnecessarily. Three: ergo, if there are messages in these sheets then they are to be read by a number of men, which is the advantage of the news-sheet. He looked for words that repeated between news-sheets, which might in code carry alternative meanings for politics or conspiracy. But it seemed perverse to look for encoded references to Oliver Cromwell and Charles Stuart in a news-sheet that talked incessantly of Oliver Cromwell and Charles Stuart. Four: if words had hidden and alternative meanings, my collection of fellow conspirators across England would each need to know my list of secret meanings of words. Five: it would be the more elaborate and thereby more troublesome and more risky an arrangement for a relatively large number of men each to have a list, on paper or in brain, of concealed meanings. Six: ergo, it is more likely that this is not a code in which words are to be s
ubstituted for other words, and the meaning accordingly somewhere outside the paper, but a cypher in which the letters and words of a message are somehow concealed within the text, and to be found entirely within this paper. He picked up the nearest paper, held it against the candle and wondered at the spots and holes in it. No, again, such things could not be replicated. He tried reading every other word of Mercurius Fidelis of October 26. to November 2. 1648. Recent do show the. Every third word. Recent surely the. Starting with the second word. Or the third. Backwards.

  He put down the paper. I am playing children’s games in a world in flames. He took a great mouthful of wine, holding it in his cheeks a moment so that it stung his tongue, and then swallowing it grossly. He picked up the sheet again and read the first letter of every word. R.E.D. Red? R.E.D.S.S.T.T. Hardly. He read the first letter of every sentence, and suddenly the room was cold and the wine was thumping in his head.

  R.E.P.O.R.T.

  Report. True, the letters after that became gibberish again, but wasn’t that a word of potential significance? The noun. . . no, the imperative?

  He picked up another sheet, winey blood thundering heavy through him, from earlier that same month – September 28. to October 5. 1648.

  T.T.H.E.T.M.G.

  With great concentration, Thurloe crumpled the sheet two-handed into as compact a ball as he could make, and threw it into the fire. In a large collection of random letters, thus ordered, it is likely that some shall by mere chance have some little meaning. Especially to a drunk man with dreams of glory. The paper ball hit one of the fire dogs and bounced out into the room.

  After a moment, Thurloe went to retrieve it. The genius of the poets and the appreciation of the ages, Master Thurloe, I think we may take as more reliable than your stubbornness. If there is a mistake, it is likely in your Greek and not theirs. He smoothed the paper out, replaced it in the pile and went to bed.