The first houses of the village were in sight. He slowed his tired horse to a trot, and felt Rachel matching him. He had to be normal, he had to be calmness.
Movement on the road ahead, coming from the village, and the sun coming low over his shoulder sparkled on metal.
‘John—’
‘Keep going. We have to keep going. Not every man and woman in England is hunted.’
Soldiers; dragoons. Half a dozen mounted men, trotting in a line, helmets and swords shining dark as they came. Twenty yards, and then ten. Was the leader looking at him? Now they met, and the leader and then some of the others had turned their heads and were watching as they passed. Thurloe forced himself to look straight ahead, caught himself in the unnatural pose, allowed a glance to the side, an indifferent nod to the eyes that he met.
But they weren’t looking at him; it was Rachel they were watching. The news of his own flight hadn’t travelled this far, and—
No. They were watching Rachel because she was a beautiful woman, murderess or not, and because underneath the madness they were only men.
There was a simple barrier of two crossed pikes in the centre of Bingham, and as they came nearer Thurloe saw the sentry beside it register the two of them, and then duck his head into an adjacent doorway.
‘This way!’ he hissed, and grabbed at Rachel’s bridle and turned them into an alley; her horse, sluggish, pulled against him and came with bad grace. Twenty yards, a turn, and another turn, straight across a side street into another alley and he stopped them in an empty yard.
‘You think they’re waiting for us?’
‘I can’t be sure, but. . . It looked like – We must assume we could’ve been overtaken; when I lost the shoe; or on a faster road through Nottingham.’
‘Perhaps they don’t know us by sight.’
‘Perhaps. Perhaps they’ve just sent gallopers with orders to set up checks and patrols. But if Lyle was at Astbury this morning he’ll be after us like all the powers of hell, and he knows us.’
‘And you can’t risk bluffing your way through?’
‘At Derby we had a head start, and it was a fair bet. Now it’s too late.’ He looked at her, at the big intent eyes, and then down at their two hang-necked horses. ‘We need new mounts, and we need a safe place to think, even for a few minutes. It’s not a big place, and we’ll be noticed soon enough.’
‘If I knew people near here. . . But it’s too far from home.’
Thurloe alive; people who know people. ‘What county is this?’
‘What?’
Thurloe had the sheaf of papers out of his coat. ‘Nottinghamshire, would you say? Or have we reached Lincolnshire?’ He saw her bewildered face, and smiled heavily. ‘Pray that your uncle once came this way.’
Lyle and his two companions rode hard into Bingham, and Lyle stopped only to interrogate the sentry at the barrier, and then his stolid Sergeant who came out to see what the fuss was. Had a man and a woman come through? Were there patrols out? Instructions and urgency, and then Lyle had kicked his horse into jumping the pikes and was away.
The afternoon light was starting to thin when two strangers walked warily into the dairy in Bingham, a sad-looking man and a beautiful woman, both somehow strained. The man asked for Hugh Miles, and the boy in the dairy hurried off into the shadows to find him.
‘You think he’ll just give us horses. So easy?’
‘There is no easy any more. Perhaps there’s a signal; a word of recognition. But since neither of us knows it, we have to bluff.’
The owner emerged through the shadows and the straw.
‘Hugh Miles?’
‘Me, sir.’ Hugh Miles waited, watching the man and glancing at the woman.
The man looked around himself quickly. ‘I understand that you. . . that you provide help sometimes, Mr Miles. To friends.’
Miles’s face screwed up in a frown.
The stranger leaned forward, voice low and urgent. ‘I need two horses.’
Miles shook his head slowly. ‘I’m a dairy, sir. I don’t—’
‘Mandeville!’ She blurted the word, surprising herself.
The man staring at her, and then stifling his own surprise; Miles uneasy.
The watermill at night. Shay unhesitant. ‘I – I should say that. . . we’re friends of Mandeville.’
Miles’s eyes widened slightly, and he glanced beyond them. ‘Of course, miss; sir. Take a little while – I have to get them from my brother – but you can rest up here.’
Half an hour after the two had departed on fresh horses, another man came to the dairy, with the same word and the same request. Something about Miles’s response struck him odd, and Hugh Miles was pushed to observe, softly, that their friends were busy this afternoon.
Mortimer Shay was thrown for a moment, and then something twisted at his lips.
Lyle and the two soldiers with him: witches in the night, while the honest citizens of Grantham kept their doors locked and prayed for morning.
‘They’ll have been cautious at Nottingham, and they must have lost time at Bingham. They can’t have come as fast as our gallopers, and they can’t have changed horses as often. We must be ahead of them now.’
Lyle’s nervy alertness wasn’t shared by his weary companions. ‘So?’
‘So I think a little ambush.’
‘Can’t the patrol just pick them up?’
‘These militia peasants? In the half-light? Thurloe’ll turn tail and it’s evens he’ll get clear away. Have to cut them off. Surround them.’
Thurloe was fighting to keep himself alert as he rode into Grantham. The idea of rest was a cruel tease. The idea of a bed was an image of the divine. The evening was closing in, and the gloom was echoed in his head.
Had to assume they were ahead of him now. Had to be careful.
Ahead of them on the road: flames. How could that be? He slowed. Sentries, of course, with a fire to keep warm. Fifty yards away, and he could make out the intermittent orange-tinged outline of men moving in the firelight.
But there was a turning before then, to the right. Without breaking pace they took it. Houses to the left; hedges and gardens and occasional houses to the right. Skirting the centre of the town would be sensible, anyway.
The horses trudged on in the twilight.
A vestigial alertness, and Thurloe saw another fire ahead of them. The horses trudged closer. Voices, obscure, and again the suggestion of shapes and movement. He sucked in a breath of the evening, tried to revive his brain. He’d guessed the alarm would have overtaken them by now, and so it had. This was still possible. He knew it was possible. Two people could disappear into England. Nottingham; London fortress; Brighton: a man could slip into the cracks of night unseen.
Sentries on the main road behind them. Sentries ahead. No gaps to the right.
Another turning to the left, between two buildings, and again they took it without changing step.
The steady tramp of hooves was lulling Thurloe. The evening closing around him, the quiet dark backstreet, the even plod of the horse, it all felt so gentle, so easy.
The street ahead deserted, inviting; the occasional glow of a lantern. A street to slip through; a night to disappear in.
‘We’re only three, Mr Lyle; shouldn’t we—’
‘It’s a Government clerk and a woman. Lost your nerve?’
‘So who did for Baines, then?’
‘Do as you’re damn’ bid! Hutch blocks the road, we move in. How hard do you want it?’
And now the trudge of horses, somewhere in the darkening evening, and Lyle clutched the other’s arm, pulling them back, eyes peering to pick up the first suggestion of movement round the corner.
‘Mr Lyle, sir.’ A murmur only, but Lyle had spun and grabbed the throat. The Captain of the local militia detachment, now a frozen alarm in the shadows. ‘Sir, one of our pickets – patrol just found him – dead, sir – his throat cut.’
A ferocious hiss: ‘Hold your positions!’
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The lure of the deserted street, a way ahead and freedom from all the sentries behind. Thurloe was fighting to clarify the shadows, and all the time the even thump of the hooves beneath matching his heartbeat.
An eruption in the steady line of the street in front, a distortion of the darkness, one of the shadows billowing out from the side and becoming a horse, and a man on the horse, and the first suggestion of a cart behind, and now the enticing backstreet was narrowing, being swallowed by the shadow. Instinctively Thurloe pushed the horse forwards, heard Rachel’s gasp.
The shadow bloomed further across his vision and the light dwindled and the path was still wide enough for their horses, and then for one horse, and then it shrivelled and the night exploded in shouts and then a shot.
The shadows, the shouts, stopped for an instant at the shot. Then the outline of the man on top of the horse began to change, shrinking and toppling and disappearing, and the path between horse and wall opened again and Thurloe grabbed Rachel’s reins and kicked his horse into life and in a second they were plunging through the gap and into space.
‘Hutch is down!’
‘After them!’
More shots, from behind them, and shouts. ‘He’s getting away!’ A chaos of boots and voices. ‘There!’
‘This way! He’s killing our men!’
‘Then it’s him or the pox, and I don’t care. There’s a Royalist spy and a bloody traitor making for the sea, and I will stop them. Come on, damn you!’
The ride to Boston was a weary unruly dream, a constant apprehension of shadows and shapes in the moonlight and the lurching and stumbling of the horses on the rough road. How long had she been riding now? Nine hours? Twelve? More than she’d ever ridden, more than should be possible. Her body was numb: hands locked on the reins, shoulders dead, her backside and her thighs sore for ever. And her head felt empty, adrift: a wasteland of sleeplessness that blurred unconsciousness and wakefulness, reality and her strange spectral fancies.
Thurloe was beside her, Thurloe was leading her to safety. But when he turned to check on her she saw the worry in his eyes, and the dead staring exhaustion.
A flickering, elusive parade hurtling past them: trees, bushes, isolated farmhouses glowing pale in the night, fences, glimpsed and reconstructed in the fog, and sometimes the pinpoint flashing eyes of animals.
A building to the left, close by, and one to the right. More buildings, hollow sockets of doors and windows gaping at her as she passed. They were in a settlement.
Thurloe slowed, stopped a moment, heaved himself up in the stirrups to get a better look at something, and then led the way into an alley and blackness. She heard him drop off his horse, and she did the same.
Some grain of strength: ‘And now?’
‘We find our boat.’
She looked at him, pulled herself up. ‘You’re very sure of yourself, John Thurloe.’
‘I think a horizontal line is a bed. I think two vertical lines is a horse. But I know that the flat ‘u’ is a boat.’ She stared at his outline. ‘Come along. We’ll leave the horses now. The soldiers could be all around us.’ She saw his shoulders sag, saw him wrestle them up again.
Shay eased his way around Boston by memories: old paths and old scents in the moonlight. The darkness was full of the rich sour smell of the marshes, edged with salt. The world of his younger misdeeds: assignations and trades; a place to find a lover, or to lose an enemy.
Unseen creatures whistled and shifted nearby.
Thurloe had the network now, and he was learning to use it. If he’d known how to get a horse in Bingham, he’d know how to get a boat in Boston.
Hesitation: the path was not as Shay remembered. There’d been efforts to drain the marshes in the thirties, and those had created new paths and new pools. Then the dykes had decayed or been destroyed in the forties, and again the land and the water had shifted against each other, an eternal skirmish, a perpetual blurring of the boundary.
Trying to bustle around the town looking for Rachel and Thurloe would be a dangerous waste of time. If they’d come safe to Boston, they’d be hiding out for the hour or two it would take to ready the boat. His last service to her could only be to track the boat down the river to the sea, and make sure she got on it. If Rachel hadn’t come safe here, he couldn’t help her any more.
A squat square ghost off to his left, perhaps half a mile, and the memory kicked warmly in him. A place of ancient sins, the old chapel, a place for forbidden love and forbidden trade. Teach knew it too, and if nowhere else he would go there. The chapel wouldn’t have moved, and Shay knew he could navigate by it.
The larger question: what was Thurloe’s game, now?
Again he stopped. A whispering in the gloom, animal movement or voices or just the wind. Shay stood still, listening to the spirits of the night, alone on the borderland of the world.
Thurloe had tried to stay awake, but the knocking at the storeroom door roused him from a dead-brained doze. His nerves had him upright quickly enough, jogging Rachel out of sleep.
A boy, pale and young and silent. He beckoned to them. Rachel picked up the satchel, hung it close about her, and the two of them followed the boy out.
The understanding had been quickly spoken, but was clear enough. The boatmen did not take on their night cargoes at the wharves in town: Thurloe and Rachel would be led across the marshes to near where the Witham met the sea, and the boat would meet them there.
They were spectres in the fitful night of the town. They moved in its alleys and shadows. They never saw a front door or a human. Life was something indicated or overheard, light under a curtain, moans behind a door, a fresh heap of kitchen waste, a far-off song. They only knew the damp tramp of their feet through the slimy hidden pathways of the town, and the vague shape of the boy’s back leading them away from life.
Beyond the last of the buildings they were in less danger of capture, but they kept the same cautious pace. The boy paused a moment, touched Thurloe’s arm: he pointed to the faint view of the stone-strewn path, and nodded; he pointed to the darkness either side of it, and shook his head mournfully. In the silvered night, the great shadows of the marsh encircled them.
They walked perhaps half an hour, and Rachel realized that she’d begun to get the unfamiliar taste of salt in her nose. The breeze was fresher now, and sharper. Attuning herself, she could hear the whispering of water somewhere ahead: the German Sea, and the unknown world beyond the margin of England.
The sea opened up as a void to their left, and shortly afterwards they saw the river snaking out dark to meet it. The boy led them closer to it, and pointed to the outline of a jetty, ramshackle planks protruding from the path over the reeds to where the water flowed freely.
He stared at the two of them for a moment, and then turned and hurried away.
For the first time, Rachel noticed the cold, forgotten in the madness and fears of the last twelve hours. She’d dressed for a mild Astbury morning, and been transported to this anxious marshy night. The comparison jarred sick in her. That garden was gone for ever.
A minute later, from back along the path taken by the boy, a cry squealed into the night and was cut off.
She clutched Thurloe’s arm. The silence swallowed them again. ‘Bird of some kind,’ he murmured, and neither of them believed it. Behind them England, a darkness of hunters and unknown pains. Ahead the sea, the edge of their existence. And all around the shifting world of the marsh.
When they moved their feet, they could feel the soft ground readjusting itself subtly under them.
Shay waited.
So soft, a click and a squelch, a few yards off to his right. His fingertips rubbed together slowly, feeling the night. He concentrated on his breathing, and then on his hearing. Silence.
The faint sucking of the marsh settling or absorbing.
If the spirits have come for me, I am ready to go. If there be men here, I may trust to myself.
He turned, and felt the prick of a blade a
t his throat. A thick-jacketed arm, a gauntlet, and a heavy cavalry blade shining out into his vision.
Shay swallowed his gasp.
A handsome man, alert. The eyes widened slightly. ‘You must be the one called Shay, I think. Lucky day for me, then.’
Shay brought his breath under control again. ‘Lucky?’
‘Kill the greatest Royalist spy. Or torture you, perhaps. That might be fruitful. Then kill you. Settle with Thurloe. After this there’ll be no doubting where the power in the land is.’
‘You must be one of Thomas Scot’s crew; his troop of snoops and thieves and cut-throats.’
‘My name is Lyle, old man. And you’re ill-placed to underestimate me.’ The blade shivered, flashing as it caught the moonlight differently. ‘By morning Scot and I will be the most influential men in England.’
‘Could be a long night, though.’ Just a second. Just a fraction of a second to get to the pistol. Shay’s eyes flicked around for resources.
The blade pricked at his throat again. ‘Easy, old man.’
‘There’s gold in my knapsack.’
The eyes narrowed. ‘There’s probably not. But once you’re dead I’ll find out, won’t I?’
A hand clamped around Lyle’s mouth and yanked the head back, a blade flashed and the handsome eyes went wide and the sword arm flapped futile, and then his throat gushed black. The body slumped to the ground, and Thomas Balfour stepped forward.
‘Is there really gold in your knapsack?’
‘No.’
‘If you can’t trust a Royalist spy, who can you?’
Shay grabbed at his shoulders. ‘You, it seems. I feared you dead.’
‘I’ve spent my life trying to die. I can’t manage it.’
Shay absorbed it. ‘I know the feeling.’
‘The only place I knew to find you was Astbury. The old man there told me where you were headed.’ A grunt. ‘A hundred miles of chaos and angry soldiers. I recognized the signs.’
‘I was expecting someone else, but you’ll do well enough.’ Shay stared into the watchful eyes, then blinked himself alert. ‘Balfour, I’ve moments only. Listen fast.’
Traitor's Field Page 48
