Traitor's Field

by Robert Wilton

  He had to go careful. The direct road, the fastest ride, risked attention and capture. Whatever had happened to Rachel he could rectify. Even if his papers were discovered, something might be done. But if he was captured all was lost. As Astbury loomed nearer, the back façade high over the trees, he slowed again and began to look for cover: ditches, hedges and walls, the thick greenery of summer.

  It had been a fast journey regardless. The network had served him well.

  Now he was in the orchard, moving from tree to tree and ducking the lower-hanging apples. At the end of the ranks of trees there was a high brick wall, beyond it the first terrace of garden below the house. He glanced left and right for avenues of movement; for concealment; for escape.

  The orchard: where a soldier had been buried three years before, another unexpected visitor. The strange crops of Astbury.

  A fast journey, and it wasn’t certain that the Parliament men would have fixed on Astbury or come with any speed. They were not as driven as he, nor as wise. There could still be time.

  The last rank of trees, and he set himself behind a trunk and peered carefully through the blurring of apples and leaves.

  A musketeer was leaning over the wall, staring out into the orchard.

  Infinitely slowly, Shay pulled back through the trees.

  At first it had been three men, cantering up the beech alley to the house. Rachel had seen them from an upstairs window, and known that something had changed, badly. The Army – Thurloe – had new information; there had been a defeat of some kind; Shay was prisoner; Shay was dead.

  Three men. One of them, surely, was Thurloe.

  Then more horsemen hurrying up the drive. She went cold. What threat could she and her distracted father represent? What threat did they now face?

  Then the three men were standing in the hall. Thurloe wouldn’t catch her eye. One of the others was sneering – ‘suspected of complicity in treason’ – ‘hand over immediately all materials pertaining to Royalist conspiracy, and all money hidden to support it’ – and her rheumy-eyed father was grinning foolishly and babbling and no one was listening.

  Rachel looked shocked, and hurried away up the stairs. Through every window she could see soldiers.

  Thurloe had watched her go. Why did I come here? Do I want her to see me triumph? Do I want to see any of this?

  He wanted to be in the search. But he didn’t want Rachel to see him at it. He turned and walked out of the house. Two platoons of soldiers had arrived: one to establish a cordon around the house; the other to search.

  He began to wander around the outside of the house, enjoying the warmth and the peace and trying not to see the soldiers bustling past him to surround the building. There were little vestiges of routine standing out against the chaos he had brought: a pile of apples, the old man – Jacob – head down at his garden work trying to pretend there was no intrusion, kitchen waste flung out the back door in the last minutes of normality, the faint whinnying of horses, and insects oblivious to it all buzzing near him.

  The soldiers unbuilt Astbury House.

  Every layer of it above the brick was ripped away, in a beastly seething of men that tore and hacked until the old civilized thing stood naked among the trees. It was a savage destruction, a fast and implacable wrenching of wood and fabric, the smashing of crockery and glass, the unnecessary hurling of things from dented-lead cracked-glass windows, small pieces of furniture and trinkets that weren’t worth the pilfering plummeting stupidly to earth to smash and thud. A dozen fragments of curtain plunged out of upstairs windows, the heavier cloth swooping down to shroud the mounting debris, the lighter materials catching the wind, and billowing over the lawn, blurring like tears over the scene until they hitched up on a branch. But the destruction had a remorseless knowledgeable sense to it as well: with craftsmen’s understanding the soldiers went at panelling and joints and frames and tables, like anti-carpenters, reversing whole lifetimes of work.

  Sir Anthony Astbury sat hunched on a bare chair in the hall, arms clamped around himself and shuddering, and watched as his whole existence was dismantled around him. The layers of luxury were ripped away with the curtains and tapestries, the layers of structure with the panelling and the random efforts the soldiers made with their knives and feet at the plaster and the floorboards. As the plague of soldiers swarmed over it, the house split and pustuled, debris and scars and blemishes. Astbury ceased to be the place he knew, and the layers of his identity peeled and shrivelled with it. In the end, Sir Anthony Astbury huddled on the chair and cried the mad, unknowable tears of a baby.

  Rachel found Thurloe on the front lawn. He was forcing himself to watch the destruction now, explaining to himself the need to sacrifice beauty to principle, and suddenly his vision was the wild gold hair and cold face of Rachel Astbury, and something heaved in his gut.

  She planted herself in front of him, two paces away, and stood there gazing silently into his face.

  His eyes widened in faint apprehension, and then uncertainty.

  She stood in front of him, gazing into his face. Her head was high, the eyes wide and shocked and defiant and somehow triumphant.

  The ugly sounds of destructive men and splintering wood continued to squawk from the house, behind her, and she did not move. To Thurloe, the world was her vast eyes, and the blur of destruction beyond.

  A soldier approached, briskness suppressing his unease at the strange scene: the Government man in black and the beautiful young woman, standing close and staring silently at each other from blank faces. The scene was wrong, anyway: he knew that somehow it needed remaking. Besides, pretty girl, might be a spy, there’d be ways of treating her. . . From the side he neared, hesitated, and then advanced and his arm swung up towards her. ‘Soldier!’

  It was the Government man, and a bitten ferocity in the word made the soldier stop, and his hand hung in the air near the woman’s shoulder.

  ‘If you touch her I’ll see you hanged by evening.’

  Such a strange and disproportionate idea and the soldier started to smile, and then he saw the Government man’s face staring at him dead cold, and the hand hung in the air and then dropped, and he turned away.

  ‘Your heroism is meaningless to me, John Thurloe.’

  For a moment he relaxed at the return of conversation, something natural, but then he absorbed the tone of the words, bitter-bleak. He refocused on the lovely face, and was confused to see that something in it seemed to have collapsed with the words.

  ‘You and your kind are destroying my whole world. The life I know is no longer possible. You might as well give me to your soldiers.’

  How could she be triumphant and yet somehow disappointed, somehow broken? Still Thurloe stared back at her, determined to suffer the accusation that she represented, but she was done now and uninterested, and turned and left him.

  He was ashamed to find that part of his mind held clear.

  Either she does not know of anything hidden here, it was thinking, or she knows that we will not find it.

  A gentle heartbeat on the edge of Shay’s dreams. Out of place; from another world.

  Still it came, a low rhythmic thump.

  He woke quickly – a moment of staring stupidity in the night – and shook himself to full alertness.

  A low rhythmic thump at the door.

  Not a feeble knock, but a knock delivered with deliberate restraint.

  He picked up his knife, took another moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, and then moved with long careful strides to the door.

  He waited there. No more knocking; how long had his visitor been trying? Then a squawk of a creak.

  He reached for the latch. He gripped it, lifted it delicately, and then with one smooth fast movement pulled the door open and stepped back to the side into the darkness.

  A gasp and a little spasm of alarm from the figure now outlined clear in the doorway thanks to a candle somewhere behind it, and then Shay registered the slenderness, knew this fo
r a woman, saw something familiar in the waves of hair. . .

  ‘Rachel!’ He held the surprise to a murmur, and then grabbed at her arm and pulled her inside. He checked behind her, picked up the candle from the corridor, and was swiftly into his room again and closing the door.

  Another candle lit and the fire rekindled and her face glowed orange in the darkness. There was a wildness to her, an abandon to her hair and her expression.

  ‘Great Gods, girl,’ he muttered insistently, ‘why are you come? How—’

  ‘I hoped’ – she spat the word, unpleased at the implication of dependence – ‘you were nearby. If you were nearby, and couldn’t get to the house, you’d be here.’

  ‘What will these people think of you?’

  Her head lifted a fraction. ‘Exactly what I want them to think. They’ll not be surprised that a lone traveller is visited by a whore, and they’ll think nothing further of my identity.’

  It was a woman’s wisdom, delivered by a woman, and amid the warming frankness Shay felt a cold pang of something lost. ‘You should be—’

  ‘Astbury is ruined.’

  ‘What?’ The sense of loss was growing as he spoke.

  ‘They have pulled it apart. My world is a shell of a building with an old broken man keening in the wreckage.’ And immediately the control and the maturity strained and threatened to break. ‘Every thing I have ever owned, every thing I have touched, has been. . . the soldiers have – they have touched it all – every thing, every place, is fouled.’

  Two great hands clamped on her shoulders, and her chest and breath heaved and shuddered.

  ‘You poor girl.’ He knew the destruction, he knew what Astbury looked like now. He felt the loss in his gut, and he winced for these precious things he could not save. ‘It’s like a great part of our family has died. All we have fought for.’

  ‘Why should you care?’ The eyes were up, fierce and wet and shining. ‘This is a chaos of your creation, and you have set us all adrift in it. You – you are chaos.’

  Shay’s face soured in the gloom, and then he gave a great mournful nod. ‘Yes,’ he said with finality. He watched her wild face in the weird glare of the flames. ‘I am truly sorry, Rachel. I would have burned the world to protect your innocence.’

  ‘By burning the world you have destroyed it.’ She wriggled free of the powerful hands, and immediately missed them. She wanted a comfort, but no longer knew where to find it. And she wanted this big, knowing shadow to realize that he too could be vulnerable.

  ‘But don’t worry.’ The bitterness stuck through the murmured words. ‘Your papers are safe.’ And she watched him.

  A horse-kick of hope in his gut, and a slower surprise, and then caution. ‘Papers?’

  She gave a little snort, and then breathed in an air of superiority. With a jolt Shay saw his half-sister, scolding him out of the past. ‘Perhaps, Mortimer Shay, you’re not so much cleverer than George Astbury after all.’ The head lifted higher. ‘So little imagination, men. Like Uncle George, you had to use the one room that was kept for you. Uncle George was a man who craved stability, who thought instinctively of home, and his hiding place was in the fabric of the house. You’re a man who must move to breathe, who could never be tied to one place, and the stool was one of the few unfixed things in the room.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I smuggled them out of the house, but they are safe on our land.’

  A nod. ‘Does anyone else—’

  ‘Jacob. He has them. And the satchel with the jewels and our Bible. As you said.’

  His mouth chewed uncomfortably. ‘Thank you,’ he said simply. ‘Those papers are—’

  ‘I didn’t do it for your blasted papers, and I certainly didn’t do it for you. If they’d found them they’d have killed us all for traitors, wouldn’t they?’

  He knew it, and it was another failing that clutched in his chest.

  ‘His Majesty is safe out of England at last. He should be in Paris by now, with his mother.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘Thank Shay. Fully six weeks the prey of every soldier in England, and he protected him and got him out.’

  ‘We have lost the kingdom.’

  ‘We have saved the King. The seasons will turn again. I’ll wager Cromwell won’t find government as easy as battle.’

  ‘There was treachery, as Astbury thought?’

  ‘That seems clear now.’

  ‘And we know who it must be. Does Shay know?’

  ‘He seems to find out these things.’

  ‘And what then? You won’t get His Majesty back on a boat for Edinburgh for a season or two.’

  ‘England takes the strangest paths to peace. Stability needs the men back in the fields, and merchants back in London docks. Westminster is not without reasonable men.’

  ‘Exactly. So what of Shay? Our duty. . . our duty is greater than any one man.’

  ‘Indeed. Different ground; different horse. The Comptrollerate-General must hold the longer view.’

  Shay was still awake ten minutes later, lying on the bed with futile thoughts squabbling in his head, when he heard two knocks on the shutter.

  Rachel was a pale grey outline under the moon. She hissed up at him, ‘My horse is lame.’

  ‘Take mine.’

  ‘It’s too big, and it’s a grey. The soldiers might notice the difference. And there are no others here.’

  Shay’s window was barely six feet off the ground, and he dropped into the yard with only a slight hiss at the effect on his knees. Within the minute they were trotting out of the yard, Rachel sitting behind and clutching at Shay’s coat.

  ‘Do you have to go back?’ he murmured. ‘I can help you; I can—’

  ‘I don’t want your help. Even if you could.’ He felt her shifting behind him on the horse. ‘I want my home back.’

  The moon watched them onward.

  Something was moving in Shay’s brain: night journeys to Astbury; danger; the soldier from Doncaster coming to the house; news of Pontefract. What had he brought George Astbury that was so valuable? He probably hadn’t known. But why had Astbury wanted it so badly? Was it only the report from Teach, and if so, what was there about the information that was worth risking a life for? Not just risking, but losing a life, for the soldier had been dead and buried at dawn, another contribution to Astbury’s rich soil, another bit of history silently and imperceptibly absorbed.

  Why, now, does this haunt me so? Is this now my dotage, to live in these past confusions and failures?

  Another quarter-hour of riding and they reached a watermill, a black outline in the gloom. Rachel knew the place vaguely; a memory of a dour ferrety owner. What kind of reception would they— But Shay was already off the horse and knocking heavily at the door.

  A minute, and he knocked again. From the horse, Rachel watched his silent outline against the blackness of the mill, and started to wonder more about the sentries at Astbury.

  Another minute. The snap of a latch and the creak of the door and there was a thin figure shadowed against some glow inside; a glint of metal, and the beginning of an angry question, but Shay was already speaking. ‘I’m a friend of Mandeville. I need a horse; black, preferably.’

  A grunt. ‘I’ve no black. A chestnut?’

  ‘It’ll do. Thank you.’

  Within a minute Rachel was on a new horse and heading for home, planning paths and excuses that might serve in the misty dawn, and wondering again at the strange power of Mortimer Shay and his friends.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ The voice behind her in the stable, and Rachel whirled round, trying to swallow her heart. A soldier, a shadow in the doorway, the first of the light catching his musket-barrel.

  ‘I was – I couldn’t sleep. I needed to – I wanted to check my horse. Check you people hadn’t done anything to her.’ She turned away and stroked the nose of the mill-owner’s chestnut. The bridle and saddle still hung on a beam immediately beside her; did they look out of place?r />
  ‘I didn’t see you come.’

  Rachel’s glance towards the tack had also showed that the horse was very definitely a him rather than a her.

  She turned. The man’s eyes looked stupid, or just sleepy. ‘Good. I wouldn’t want you to.’ She pulled on a show of defiance and strode past the sentry. He reached indifferently for her arm as she passed, but she ignored him and hurried on into the house.

  She managed four hours’ sleep, on a mattress salvaged from the garden yesterday and laid in her bedroom on a patch of undamaged floorboards. Joanna woke her, and Rachel was immediately aware of the cold.

  ‘Please, miss, but the man wants to talk to you. I’ve kept him waiting an hour, but I worried that—’

  ‘Which man?’ Looking around the remains of her room, she realized that Joanna must have tidied the worst of the plaster and laths and debris the previous evening.

  ‘The Government man. The one who came before.’

  Thurloe was sitting on the bench in the arbour. He looked up as she approached, held her eyes a moment, and looked down at the pile of papers perched carefully in his lap.

  The shock had her gaping and confused.

  Shay’s papers. They had to be Shay’s papers. But how. . .?

  She brought her face under control. Thurloe finished looking at one page, and replaced it neatly on top of the others. He looked up.

  He must know them for what they are. But how. . .?

  Thurloe said, ‘I assumed there were papers here. Then you were too sure. The only way you could have got something out was in the kitchen scraps. Your most logical collaborator after that was the old man.’

  Was Jacob safe? Surely he hadn’t—

  ‘Jacob would not have betrayed. . . anything of us. I don’t believe it.’ What can he really know? What can I say that does not incriminate?

  Still the same wretched neutrality in Thurloe’s manner. ‘Nor should you. That man would die for this land, and for you above all. So I told him that I knew all about the papers. I told him that unless he gave them to me I would make this whole estate a desert, and have Mistress Rachel in the Tower.’ His voice softened somehow, and became more sincere. ‘The principles of the good Jacob run deeper than these little vanities of political loyalty.’