Traitor's Field Page 19

  She leaned forward, until her forehead touched the window. ‘And we remain here.’

  Another low scream from the next room, and Thurloe winced.

  I have followed, like a dumb puppy in my enthusiasm, and this is the price I pay.

  There had been screams for – what – twenty minutes now? Was that so very long?

  Another, an animal protest, a man losing control of voice and breath in his agony. Again he winced. Why have I not learned? Should I not be inured now? How many screams in those twenty minutes?

  An angry voice through the wall, a desperate babbling murmur after it, and then a scream, and Thurloe gasped. My little discomfort is nothing to that man’s. My little discomfort may be the last piece of humanity in this evil building; in this world.

  In the adjacent room, lying on a table, was Cornet Michael Blackburn, who had escaped from Pontefract and been recaptured and had tried to escape from York. Blackburn with a broken leg, and Tarrant standing over him, working at the unhealed break with all his bitterness.

  And whose side am I on?

  Another scream cut through the stones, and Thurloe leapt up, hands clenching and unclenching. Then he spun and strode from the room.

  Tarrant was lost in his interrogation: the latest bout of his struggle with the world was this competition of will with a wrecked youth. ‘Who helped you? You were destitute, you were lost, and then you had horses and food and all very comfy. All I want is a name, Blackburn.’ Blackburn’s breaths were desperate gasps. ‘A name!’ and Tarrant’s hand twisted at the leg and the breath was wrenched into another shriek.

  ‘Tch— Tchay—’

  ‘James?’ Louder, as if to compete with the scream. ‘James, is that the name?’ Another vicious twist of his hand and Blackburn’s scream scoured the walls.

  ‘Tarrant!’ Tarrant spun round to find Thurloe in the doorway. Tarrant was sweating, and frustrated; an animal. 'Fore God, this is enough! Men like you have suffered a generation or more to change these mediæval habits.’

  ‘He’s gone again, sir.’ This from another man, Tarrant’s assistant. Tarrant glanced back and then, hot and sneering, to Thurloe again.

  ‘Besides. . . look – he’ll tell you anything to make you stop, and we’ve no way of knowing if it’s true.’

  Tarrant glanced back at the unconscious man on the table, and strode out, shouldering Thurloe aside as he went.

  Thurloe forced himself to look at the man on the table: his white sweat-greased face, his battered leg.

  This is what I have become.

  Oliver Cromwell had come to mistrust papers. Once, paper had told only one truth. It had told God’s truth, and Cromwell had prayed and fought that all might read that truth for themselves. The spread of print had promised to bring every man closer to God’s word. But now papers were become mere voices, just flimsy, rustling tongues. Each one had its insistent story.

  He scanned the spread of pages on the desk in front of him, more reports from Thomas Scot’s world of spies and correspondents, every one with some alarm or warning from Ireland.

  Each tongue had its own particular claim to truth. Each, no doubt, had its deceits.

  A knocking and a rustling, a rodent on the edge of his attention. He looked up: there was Scot, crept into the room and scrutinizing him.

  Cromwell gave him no welcome or greeting. ‘What have we fought for, Master Scot?’ The rhetoric fell heavy. ‘That we find no end of woes? Is this the eternal trial that God offers us on the corrupted earth? By squashing the latest boil of your Levellers I have brought a temporary peace inside our Army’ – things flinched in Scot’s face – ‘but that division is raw and grieves me. And you bring me nothing but new dangers.’

  ‘Ireland is an old and lasting danger, Master Cromwell. It will remain a danger until the ungodliness is wiped out.’ The big eyes watched him. ‘Until the last of the brute, disbelieving, heathen peasants is driven into the sea.’

  Cromwell chewed on this.

  Scot had another paper in his hand. Cromwell’s eyes narrowed. ‘And what’s that? More ill from Dublin, no doubt.’

  A pained smile from Scot. ‘No, this is. . . from another quarter.’

  ‘Nearest his heart?’ Cromwell looked up at Thomas Scot, bleak and angry. ‘That disinherited puppy has his father’s politics and more, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Names the Kingdom of Scotland before England, too. A nice touch, that.’ Scot’s thin vinegar smile. ‘It will please in the slums of Edinburgh.’

  ‘You have me hopping like a flea over Ireland, and now you bring me Scotland! The Lord has been most generous to us, but he will not grant me victory in two places at the same time.’

  ‘Montrose is still a divisive figure in Scotland. Unless the pretender Charles can make his peace with the Church there, there will be no general support.’

  ‘You presume too much!’ Cromwell was simmering, a great brown pot of ill-suppressed heat, and Scot took an instinctive little step sidewards. ‘Montrose has raised armies before, has he not? And the smallest of his armies has won great victories, has it not? And I cannot make a new peace with the Scottish Church without splitting the English Parliament and the English Army!’

  Scot made a sad little shake of the head. ‘Then Montrose must be def—’

  ‘I say you presume too much! I am not some hound that you may unchain as you please! The Army is not a witch’s charm with which you may be assured your every victory.’

  Scot’s eyes bulged among his sharp features. ‘Then we must trust to providence. And to Scottish factiousness. For we have nothing else.’

  Cromwell gazed at him grimly for a moment longer, and then the heavy eyes dropped again to the reports from Ireland on the desk.

  After York, Thurloe had been in Nottingham on legal business again, settling the cases of Royalists and their fines: loyalty rehearsed as moot debate; battles being waged in accountants’ ledgers. It felt sordid, and petty, and he was uncomfortable that this clerk’s sweeping up was all his portion of the great conflict. Nottingham Castle squatted over his perception of the city, with its memories of Langdale’s escape last autumn, a shadow from some other world which he could not grasp.

  Business done, he continued northward rather than turning for London. Oliver Cromwell was still angry at the Leveller risings in the Army, hurt that the weapon he had forged had become two-edged, bitter at the self-destructiveness of it all; he was fretful, even he, apparently trapped in an eternity of threats and battles. St John too was become nervy.

  So Thurloe headed for Doncaster, telling himself that it was the logical response to his chief ’s concern, knowing that it was his own unfinished business that was kicking at the horse’s flanks.

  Colonel Thomas Rainsborough had been a prominent figure in the Leveller movement. Thomas Scot might be Parliament’s chief of intelligence and someone Cromwell was obliged to rely on, but he too was a man of prominent Leveller sympathy. This apparently held true for some of those he employed: Tarrant, and Lyle in Doncaster. Rainsborough had been killed, and the prominent Leveller sympathizers had wanted revenge, but Cromwell hadn’t wanted to unleash Scot to hunt witches throughout the Army and Government. So Cromwell had chosen him, Thurloe, a reliable neutral clerk, to do enough to assuage Leveller anger without frightening the horses.

  But Thurloe wasn’t comfortable with his own conclusions, not comfortable with the strange melodrama of that Doncaster morning. And he itched at the thought of Tarrant, a stupider man, and Lyle, with mere cunning, overmastering him.

  Now the Levellers had gone from radicalism to rebellion; men had been hanged and shot. But still their sympathy was everywhere.

  Was there something else to discover about Rainsborough, something that a hungrier man like Tarrant might have discovered? Or were Tarrant and his kind the mystery?

  It was late morning when Thurloe made Doncaster, and Lyle was away from his base above the dairy. Thurloe went to find lodging. The town was dramatically quieter than when
he’d last been here. With the fall of Pontefract up the road, the army quartered here had largely dispersed. Doncaster was feeling its way slowly back into normality, like something emerging from a long winter. It made a good bed easy to find and cheap.

  ‘It’s Thurloe, isn’t it?’

  A soldier, slowing from a natural stride and hesitating. Thurloe recognized the Adjutant who’d looked after him when he’d been here in the autumn. Polite greetings from careful men; an indifferent exchange of information about London and the garrison here packing up.

  ‘What brings you back?’

  Thurloe murmured something about his legal work, and an acquaintance in the town, wondering about the Adjutant. He’d had his own sympathy for the Levellers, hadn’t he? An affiliation of reason, perhaps, not of the heart, and he’d kept his head down in recent months no doubt.

  Courteous preparations to go their separate ways, and then Thurloe hesitated. ‘I say—’ The Adjutant turned back. ‘I was wondering. . .’ The Adjutant seemed relaxed enough; his days too were easier now. ‘Your men gave me a full understanding of Colonel Rainsborough’s death, but. . . was there – had there been anything. . . unusual, in the period before his death?’ The Adjutant was frowning now. Careful. What battle is this, and what side am I on? ‘Any non-military business involving the Colonel?’

  The Adjutant shrugged, shook his head emptily. Thurloe shrugged back at him, diminishing the business.

  ‘He had a visitor – from London – the week or two before.’ Thurloe’s face opened in interest. ‘I only mention it because – visitors hardly unusual, I mean to say – they had an almighty row. The London man was asking questions around the place. Seemed quite close to Rainsborough; intimate – private meetings and so on – but I was at Rainsborough’s lodging once and they were at it like lions. The Colonel, mainly – he had the devil’s temper in him – then the London man left, looking pretty grim.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know him? I presume not.’

  Again the shrug, the shake of the head. ‘No – but – you know him, surely.’

  ‘I?’

  ‘When you were here last time, when Pontefract fell. I thought I saw him with you then. I assumed him for some colleague.’

  Tarrant?

  Back at the dairy, Thurloe learned that Lyle had returned and left again, but this time they knew where. Thurloe followed him, to the house of the late Reverend George Beaumont.

  From the outside the house was normal, anonymous. Inside it was madness. Every room had been devastated: floorboards ripped up, plaster chipped away, furnishings slashed, cupboards hanging open or roughly dismantled. In his first bewilderment, wandering uneasily through the ground-floor rooms, skirting holes and stepping over debris, Thurloe imagined that Lyle had just done this in some bizarre berserker frenzy.

  Then he realized the chaos for what it was: this was an investigation; this was the Government – or that fraction of it led by Thomas Scot – trying to discover, trying to understand. Thurloe thought of the confusion in his own head, and saw it embodied in this mayhem.

  In a first-floor room he found Lyle, pensively running his fingers down a window pane, as if it was this most transparent thing that hid the answer he had not found elsewhere.

  ‘Miss a piece?’

  Lyle turned fast, alert. His face was dark against the window, and Thurloe couldn’t see the expression. Lyle grunted. ‘It’s easier when you don’t let ’em blow it up first.’

  ‘Seems to have the same effect.’

  Lyle looked around the room. ‘Careful man. He hadn’t left much to find. Good habits.’

  ‘This was Beaumont, wasn’t it? The priest they – we – hanged for communicating with the Royalists in Pontefract.’

  ‘Mm.’ He began to come closer, stepping carefully and intermittently looking around at the destruction he’d created. ‘He was their channel in and out. We’ve had the place ever since. Giving it up now.’

  ‘You knew for a while – before you arrested him, I mean?’

  Lyle paused by a table and, perversely, righted a mug that was lying on its side. He looked up. ‘A little while.’

  Thurloe was somehow both committed to the game and tired of it. ‘But you didn’t find anything more about their system?’

  He could see the face clearly now. Lyle was watching him; then shrugged. Does he not tell me because he assumes I know, or because he does not want me to know? ‘We spotted a courier once. Suppose he was a courier – it was odd – didn’t fit the normal pattern. Anyway, our soldiers tracked him west a day or two but lost him.’

  He watched Thurloe a moment more, then lost interest and started forwards.

  A courier? ‘I assume that any reports – anything you intercepted, anything you found – were all passed to Scot, in London. It would be recorded there.’

  Lyle stopped, not in front of Thurloe but to his side, and smiled. ‘Yes, Thurloe. It would.’

  He brushed past, and disappeared into the next room.

  Thurloe left.

  As he opened the front door and stepped into the daylight, there was a boy suddenly in front of him.

  The boy was even more startled than he was. He hesitated, held out a tightly folded paper, then pulled it back again.

  Thurloe waited.

  ‘I’ve a letter, sir. For the Reverend Beaumont. But I didn’t know what to. . .’ He looked down at the paper, then up. ‘Him being hanged. And that was months back. I didn’t. . .’

  ‘All’s right, boy. I’ll take it.’ Thurloe gave him a penny.

  Thurloe turned and stepped back into the house, then stopped. Paper in hand, he looked up towards the sounds of Lyle making his farewell round of the wrecked building.

  Then he turned again, slipped the paper into his coat, and re-entered the daylight, closing the door quietly behind him.

  TO THE REVEREND GEORGE BEAUMONT, DONCASTER

  Dear Reverend,

  I have been a wanderer these four months, since despair at what was becoming of Doncaster and Pontefract sent me into the bitterest roads of winter, and only now that I am, by the great kindness and mercy of God himself only, come unto some new station of rest and relative permanence, do I find the time to communicate with him who was most often in my thoughts as I roamed the land.

  You were ever my guide in those dark evenings – and there have been many lonely rootless moments since that I have wished for your excellent mixture of principle with pragmatism.

  And what has become of our young friend with the ‘Levelling’ tendencies? You know that I was ever uneasy at the dallying between the partisans of the King’s interest and those most restless spirits in the Army, however tempting the possibilities for the Royal cause. But I confess a fondness for that lad; so handsome, and so earnest. Has his great scheme come to anything yet?

  I continue to move, of course, in the same circles as I was used to; the followers of the Royal interest are a little forlorn in these days, but in any gathering there is always at least one with the blood and the heart for a scheme or a dare, and it keeps one’s spirits alive. I mention it because only last week I listened to a man still very convinced that the Crown’s dutiful obligations to all of its people equally, and the desire of those Levelling men for a society more flat and more free and without the traditional gradations, were principles in natural harmony, and he hinted that there were still those of both persuasions pursuing such an alliance most heartily. I confessed myself openly both weary and wary of such schemes, but it brought to my mind our young friend and our many conversations in strange furtive Doncaster, with soldiers at every window.

  I do not wish to put you to extra burden, but it would please me much to hear just a line of the town. You may write to me as J. H., at the Sign of the Bear in York, and through my friends your words will surely find me, as they were ever wont to do, wherever I may have strayed.

  Your friend.

  May, 1649

  [SS C/T/49/18]

  Thurloe read it three times
straight. To discipline his mind, he tried to hold his focus on the character of the writer – his doubts, his loneliness, his melancholy – but kept returning to the alarming implications of the middle paragraphs.

  And what could he do with this? He was not the intended reader. Nor was he the proper man to receive and interpret the letter on behalf of Parliament. Through irritation and impetuousness he had in effect become the Reverend Beaumont. A dead man.

  To admit his false status in either direction seemed difficult now. While his heart burned a little at the ambiguity of this strange position, Thurloe’s head was wondering at its possibilities.

  Sir, this day the royal [assume crown(s), from context] have been found in the Palace of [assume Westminster, from context], and transported under guard east of the city to the Tower. No more is known of what is planned thereafter.

  [SS C/S/49/40 (LATER DECYPHERING)]

  Shay never considered landscape as other than terrain: barriers, weaknesses, avenues of attack or escape. So he was watching Jacob, rather than the flower beds in which the old man bobbed and prodded. People were terrain too: obstacles or advantages, vulnerabilities or strengths.

  But Shay’s consideration moved naturally from Jacob to his task, and from the task to the garden, and for a moment he tried to see the fascination or the attraction in the geometric plots, the regimental divisions of plants, the games with space and colour.

  Jacob was walking towards him, carrying a small cloth bag, leaves and a stalk protruding from the top of it. Some new exotic curiosity for the garden. Shay wondered what the arrangement was between Anthony Astbury and old Jacob. Astbury was the sort of man who would want one of the modern gardens, but he probably left Jacob to get on with the details. The old man was more than just gnarled hands and strong shoulders; lettered too, presumably.