Traitor's Field

by Robert Wilton

  ‘It could work,’ Shay said. Staggeringly, there’s a faint chance it actually could work. And then he looked at Marsh again, at the life-beaten face.

  ‘Couldn’t it, though?’ Marsh smiled, and looked into the fire. ‘It would be something, wouldn’t it? Something to tell the grandchildren.’ He looked up apologetically. ‘My son – well, he’s gone – he – he. . .’ He shook his head, lost in the fire again. Then tried again, more reflectively. ‘It would be something, wouldn’t it, sir?’ He turned to Shay again and – perhaps it was just a trick of the fire – there was a new light in the eyes, a fat man’s geniality hiding in a thin man. ‘Something for the old ways.’

  Shay watched him; watched them both, somehow distanced from the routine. Are you the world I am offering Vyse, and Balfour, and Rachel? Why are you alive, and Meg not?

  He hungered to spend the night there, but couldn’t risk it and couldn’t stop so early. Soon he was pulling himself up onto the horse again, and man and beast weaved out of the inn gate into the gloom and began to tramp northwards.

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

  Sir,

  I have been no kind of correspondent these many months. I am sorry for it. As I recollect you surmised when last you wrote, it has been an unsettled time for the Royal army. And I have had certain personal hurt that has distracted me quite. The army is well-established now at Stirling. But it is no longer a cheerful prospect, for souls are low as if winter has still not quitted this place, and the defences are left weak. There is fear that should Cromwell attack directly here it would cause a great crisis in the army and in the compact with the loyal Scots. I trust you are well.

  [SS C/T/51/38]

  Remembering his way through winding roads to Astbury, Thurloe tried to distinguish his motives in coming. But the effort only made him uneasy, first at the idea that he was acting on emotion as much as professional intent, and then at the tension implied by the increasingly apparent overlap – or was it now a conflict? – between the professional and the emotional.

  Astbury and the Astbury family were a centre of Royalist plotting in England, and Paulden’s distinct reaction in The Hague had only reinforced his impression. What then of Rachel Astbury’s otherworldly innocence? Was it her attempts at manipulation, the games he’d taken for girlish whim, that he should take more seriously?

  Paulden had also been spurred into the fuller story of Pontefract and Doncaster, and how should that be read? Should he read Paulden’s deflection of the question about the link between Royalist and Leveller as confirmation that it was a confected fantasy, or confirmation that it was somehow real? And if there was some kind of truth in that strange link, and if there was truth in Paulden’s story of the source in Doncaster sending messages to the Royalists in besieged Pontefract, then. . .

  The raid had also been an attempt to contact the supposed agent in Doncaster. Somehow, the raid had gone wrong, and Colonel Thomas Rainsborough had—

  Rainsborough?

  Surely that was insanity.

  Reports had come out of Pontefract. Lyle, the Leveller sympathizer, had passed them to Scot, the Leveller sympathizer. Scot – it would have to have been Scot himself – had decided that at least one of those reports had to be erased from the record, even from his own private ledger of reports. Tarrant, the Leveller sympathizer, had come to Doncaster and had an angry exchange with Rainsborough, the prominent Leveller. And soon after that, Rainsborough had died.

  But Rainsborough had been killed by Royalists, surely?

  Rachel Astbury received him in the parlour, alone, hair down. She felt herself relaxing, smiling as she saw him. His smile in response was slower, heavier, touched by thought.

  He removed his hat, and dropped it onto the table beside him. ‘Hallo, Rachel,’ he said.

  She looked at the hat on the table. This was somehow a new Thurloe: more confident, more comfortable. She’d words prepared, but swallowed them; waited.

  ‘You’re an old family, aren’t you? You have a family Bible, I hazard.’ She nodded on instinct, uncertain. ‘I’d like to see it please.’

  Rachel stared at him a moment. What is in there for him? What reason have I to refuse? ‘Why?’

  I cannot stop him, regardless.

  ‘A curiosity. Something I was trying to remember as I rode.’ He smiled without humour. ‘Perhaps we may prove that religion is no division between us.’

  Several minutes later she brought in the fat volume. Thurloe placed it on the table and opened it, respectful. On the flyleaf, his finger ran back through the neat history of the Astburys. The children of a Mary Lowell – the sale of a piece of land – the marriage of Mary Astbury to Sir Henry Lowell – more land sold – the death of the King – the fine paid to recover the estate – and so back through the milestones of country and county and family, a troubling world controlled for once in the handwriting scratched on the crackling, yellowing pages. A pair of entries, the words written smaller and less sure, a little family sorrow: the death of Isabelle Astbury, wife of Anthony, in childbed; a day later the death of her newborn son. Then back to the birth of Rachel Astbury, and it made him think of her as a girl, and he glanced up at the anxious face and the woman’s body – the birth of Mary Astbury, and back down to the foot of the preceding column, and there it was.

  A year after the marriage of Sir Anthony Astbury to Isabelle Shay, of Chester in the County of Cheshire, was an entry in a different hand – Isabelle’s?

  21st March, 1624. Mortimer Shay, brother of Isabelle Astbury, m. Margaret Talbot.

  Thurloe closed the Bible with care.

  He looked into her face, and then down at his hand as he flexed it open and closed, then up to her again.

  ‘Royalism isn’t dead in this land, Rachel. There’s life in it yet. Not in the silly fantasies of romantics and old men, but in a network of committed men and women controlled and functioning as a network. A network of support, of communication, of intrigue. Of action.’

  She was frowning, trying to gauge his tone.

  ‘Men are dying as a result. Idiots persuaded to rise in a futile rebellion. The tools of this network who are captured and left to swing. Inoffensive men who are found to be a useful symbol of the new regime, and assassinated to prove a point. A little piece of deception, a misleading letter, and thousands of men die in battle.’ She had stepped back. ‘This is treason, Rachel. Not a game between one faction and another, but a deliberately maintained underground campaign of sedition and insurrection and murder. This country could be settled now. At peace. It is not, and that is so solely because of the men who are the clockspring of it all – one man, perhaps.’

  Her face had gone cold, and Thurloe found his own voice rising to try to make an impact. ‘George Astbury was one of these men, and he surely made this house a centre of this work. He’s dead, and his work has been taken on by others. Perhaps by one of his relatives through his sister-in-law, your mother. The Shays – there was one more at least, wasn’t there? Mortimer Shay, I think.’ Her eyes were wide, at the words and more at the tone.

  She stayed silent.

  ‘You must tell me, because I have to know where you stand. I have to know if – if you’re part of the future of this country.’

  ‘To hell with you!’ The words were spat, cat-hissed, and Thurloe’s eyes closed for a moment. ‘With you, and your laws and your liberties.’

  ‘Rachel—’

  ‘Your soft words about the future are just pretence: for me – perhaps for yourself. Your world is constant struggle. It’s violence. It’s tyranny.’

  He stepped towards her, and she pulled away.

  ‘Each day that these men are left free to act is greater complicity for you. Greater danger.’

  ‘How can you pretend to care?’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘I thought that. . . I thought that I might. . . But you have nothing for me. You are nothing to me.’ Her chin came up, and her chest rose and swelled. ‘Get out!’ The face was
wild, lost, vicious. ‘All of you: go!’

  The decade of war seemed to have fought itself in the weary body of Oliver Cromwell. Now emerging from months of intermittent fever, he was thinner and paler, the flesh hanging slack on his cheeks. Wide pinked eyes stared bleak at Thomas Scot, and John Thurloe and General Lambert.

  He took in a laboured breath. ‘How do our enemies? Lambert?’

  ‘General, our scouts report no change in the strength of the lines, nor the attitude of the men behind them.’ He shook his head to emphasize the point.

  ‘Scot?’

  ‘No change, Master Cromwell. There is no military frailty to strain their politics, and thus no political frailty to unsettle their military.’ The reedy voice and the sharp rhetorician’s mind picked out the words.

  Cromwell swung round to Thurloe, and the eyebrows merely lifted.

  Thurloe looked down at the letter in his hand – the few lines which were all he had from J. H. – doubts about the strength of the defences at Stirling, fears of what would happen should the English Army attack. What hidden grammar is in these lines?

  A determined shake of the head. ‘I have no reason to question Master Scot or General Lambert. They’re comfortable behind their lines at Stirling. They’re gathering men in Fife and the north-east at leisure, and I assume’ – he glanced at Lambert – ‘that the longer they have to do that the more comfortable they’ll be.’

  ‘Well that’s just it, isn’t it, Master Thurloe?’ Cromwell’s voice came hoarse out of the jowls. ‘We’re hundreds of miles from home, living off this impoverished and resistant land, and time is against us. Time is on the side of General Leslie and the Duke of Hamilton and their Princeling, impregnable at Stirling and husbanding their strength.’

  The bloodshot eyes widened, and he looked at them each. ‘I have a will to change this arrangement, gentlemen. We are over-extended, vulnerable, a house built upon sand, and we can but butt against them. I will see the Scots so vulnerable; I will see them exposed. We must be the ones in control of the manoeuvres; we must be the ones drawing them into our strength.’

  Lambert’s austere features had creased. ‘But that would mean—’

  ‘It would mean England.’ The words fell deep, ominous. ‘That’s right, John. We must draw out the fox. We must have him loose, even in England, if we are to hunt him to destruction. Can we do it?’

  Lambert, a little pale, nodded warily.

  Cromwell’s glare settled heavily on Scot and Thurloe. ‘I must take them in the flank. I must chivvy them out of their snug burrow. And then I must harry them through the north of England, even to the heart of the country. It will risk many men; it will risk our firmest ground. I will do it if you can tell me that you have the measure of them. That you hear our enemies right – that you read them – that you whisper to them.’

  The eyebrows rose. Oliver Cromwell’s eyes were massive globes gazing out at the two of them.

  Scot and Thurloe glanced quickly and uneasily at each other. Each breathed in. They too nodded.

  TO MR J. H., AT MACRAE’S IN GALASHIELS

  Sir,

  Truly these men will run and run at the same stone wall until their heads are quite dulled – unless, that is, they should by some exceptional feat of strong-headedness crack through those stones, and find themselves in the pit. I am not privy to their planning, but I infer from much bustling and toing and froing, and from certain comments either ominous or belligerent from those better-informed, that Cromwell and Lambert do mean to focus all their strength on Stirling, and to continue to spend that strength until one or both sides are obliterated. I will not say that I would not be pleased were the English arms to have victory – I care enough for my beliefs that I will welcome a success for them, howsoever it may be – but, truly, have we seen in this whole century such a hot-blooded fever?

  I must tell you that I am resolved to maintain as best I may an even-tempered intellectual life in the middle of the chaos: that I shall do my duty to the world: that I shall strive as much to do my duty to my mind. I hope that this even-handed determination may make me a better servant to both. For these political eruptions will pass, and will I trust lead us to some better time and place. We should I think strive to render ourselves as fitted for that time and place as we may, and even if we do not ourselves survive to see it, our children should not thank us were we to have passed these years in mere frozen stagnation, rather than sustaining as best we may what progress God may see fit to show us in the arts and in the understanding of the world he has created for us.

  I was in part prompted by the information that an old friend from the University is trying this year to publish, fifty years after that remarkable philosopher’s death, Gilbert’s private reflections on the relationship between the earth and the stars. I do not venture to presume that you are an enthusiast for natural philosophy, yet, even in this unruly summer, a man may rest his head upon a cannon, and stare up into the heavens!

  [SS C/S/51/50]

  North Queensferry early on a summer morning: mist hangs sleepy on the expanse of the Forth river, the barrier to Edinburgh and England. Far out in the estuary, towards the sea in the east, the gannets are starting to shriek and reel. The tide is low, and these first few yards of the unmeasurable, unknowable north of Scotland are dark mud, rising gently from the mist to the few cottages of the village. The cottages are silent. The ferry’s oars haven’t moved for months, for the Forth is now a frontier; the ferryman drinks more now, and sleeps in.

  An early cormorant splashes on the mud, trying its thin pools for food.

  From the mist a thumping and splashing, a weird heartbeat of the predawn, and shapeless, consonantless voices. At night, drowned demons of men who died without God come from the firth to rot fish and steal away the souls of children. Thumping and splashing, then patches of mist darken and solidify and lunge forward towards the mudflats, a thousand men in new-built boats crossing the frontier of night and mist, Colonel Overton kneeling in the prow reciting the Lord’s Prayer as the shore materializes.

  The thumping and splashing of the oars, and now urgent voices of exhortation, strangely subdued out of instinctive respect for the mist-spirits, and the boats slew and squelch into the mud, and boots begin to tumble out and stamp ungainly towards the village.

  Thy will be done; Thy will be done; Thy will be done.

  The news was in Stirling in hours, despite the winding miry roads it had to travel. Shay heard it first from Vyse and Manders, respectively hurrying and clumping into his room and insistent with rumours of an undefined English attack, until he hushed them both. Then Balfour arrived with a summons, and Shay heard the news a second time over the Council table.

  ‘Cromwell has outflanked us, Your Majesty, gentlemen.’ Leslie, voice reedy and pedantic. ‘He’s put men across the Forth, and we can’t stop him reinforcing them. He’s behind us.’

  And heard it again. ‘This smacks of bad generalship. We’ve let him baffle us: he kept us looking one way, and he went t’other. While we focused all of our effort on Stirling, waiting dumb as ducks for him to hit us there, he’s leapt into the heart of our supplies and our recruits.’

  ‘Will he reinforce them? Put himself entirely to our north?’

  ‘Nothing to stop him.’

  ‘Pardon me.’ It was Hamilton, steady and austere. ‘If he does move entirely across the Forth, behind us, isn’t he trapped?’

  Uncomfortable glances. Leslie took up the point warily. ‘He commands the sea. Supply is no difficulty for him. It rather depends on whether we think we can face him in pitched battle, on open ground, and defeat him.’

  Silence. Then, from somewhere down the table, ‘He’s left the door to England open, surely.’

  A moment while it was absorbed, and then noise like a flood.

  ‘Advance into England while he’s across our supplies? It’s madness.’

  ‘What are we fighting for if not England?’

  ‘Our priority must be to defend Sco
tland!’

  ‘We’ll gather supplies and recruits as we march. We’ll be heading towards our heartland!’

  ‘It’s a betrayal of the Scots.’

  ‘It’s dangerous.’

  At the head of the table, silent and watchful, slumping and then catching himself, King Charles Stuart. Everything seems to happen around me, and sometimes to me. Am I not supposed to lead? Occasional uncomfortable glances at him from the men at the table about to speak, sometimes a muttered token ‘Y’r M’sty’ as they begin. What am I supposed to say?

  At the opposite end of the room, away from the table, Sir Mortimer Shay. His conversations were private, in corners, to single men – not in these circuses. Hamilton, Leslie, they had had such information as he could give them, and it was up to them to manage their dispositions as a result. He merely watched, half-listening.

  Is this where George Astbury sat? Is this what he heard, what. . . exactly three years ago, before they marched down to die at Preston?

  When Manders entered Shay’s room, breaths coming hard and steady after the concentrated effort of getting up the stairs, he found Shay leaning against the edge of a table. Beside him were Lady Constance Blythe, silent on a chair, and a small wooden chest prominent on the table.

  As usual Shay made no allowances for his incapacity, letting him clamber his way around the door and close it, and then starting into speech.

  ‘Manders; good man. I have a duty for you.’ Manders straightened on his single crutch. ‘You escort Lady Constance to the Continent tonight; you’ll start downriver at dusk.’