Traitor's Field

by Robert Wilton

  The other had seen the stiffening of his body, saw the intensity in his eyes. Shay held his body firm; a sudden movement could provoke his death regardless.

  The other man moved his hand slowly down towards his knee. Still he held Shay’s eyes. Slowly, he wiped his palm on his thigh, and the trace of a smile came to his lips.

  ‘You must be the friend of Francis Padget.’

  ‘I am Shay.’

  A nod from the other. ‘I have heard something of you.’ He held Shay’s eyes for a moment, and then his gaze dropped. Shay held up his left hand clenched, and the man examined the ring that glowed dull on the little finger.

  ‘You’ve come from Edinburgh?’

  ‘I have. Whither else did you write?’ The accent sounded strained, as if the man was uncomfortable with the conversation.

  ‘London, Paris and Amsterdam.’

  A nod. ‘We have sent to each. You will receive no reply from any but us.’

  Shay waited.

  The rider said, ‘My message to you is simple enough, sir, and I hope it suffices.’

  The message was simple indeed: the message was a single word; a place.

  Shay repeated it once, and the other nodded, and pulled at the reins of his horse. ‘I’ll leave you to your road, sir. Leeds will not see me again.’ He stopped, and gazed respectfully at Shay. ‘I pray that God go with you on your journey.’

  MERCURIUS FIDELIS

  or

  The honeſt truth written for every Engliſhman that cares to read it

  From MONDAY, AUGUST 24. to MONDAY, AUGUST 31. 1648.

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 28.

  n this day at about 6 of the clock was ſeen over Oxford with great alarm by many perſons there a great black cloud, & ſhortly it did appear to run with blood, which was taken as an omen of great woe for ſome though it was not known whom. On this ſame day were found divers other ſigns of ill-portent, among them a cow of Reading that did give blood and not milk & a plague of dead fiſh at Marlow.

  On this ſame day alſo occurred after long and deſperate trial the fall of the town of Colcheſter. As it ſhall ſurely be ſeen, the black omens of heaven were both for this defeat of proud men & alſo for the ſhameful and barbarous handling of the vanquiſhed. The ſtruggle of Colcheſter had laſted fully two months and one half, & the oppreſſed within the walls were teſted with many and growing torments, ſuch as no water and great ſickneſſe and the foul uſages of the enemy. The townſpeople had reſort to eat their horſes, & the horſes the dogs, & the dogs the cats, etc, & them all riven with maggots and plagues. The EARL of NORWICH, and Sir CHARLES LUCAS, and Sir GEORGE LISLE, and the other Lords and Gentlemen having command of the defences, were reſolved to proſecute their ſtruggle to the uttermoſt, but the women and the children did cry unto them GOOD SIRS WE HAVE NO FOOD AND ARE SORE HUNGRY AND AFRAID and when at laſt there was no food more they ſought terms.

  Sir THOMAS FAIRFAX, commanding the attacking army, had according to all the normal uſages of war and the habits of Engliſhmen promiſed quarter and good treatment for all, but he ſhamefully broke this promiſe and Sir GEORGE LISLE and Sir CHARLES LUCAS was ſhot firſt, and he died in the arms of his comrade. The ſoldiers ſaid to Sir GEORGE LISLE that they were ſure to hit him and he replied that I HAVE BEEN NEARER YOU WHEN YOU HAVE MISSED ME.

  This was the fouleſt deed that I think ever was done in the hiſtory of the war in theſe iſlands.

  [SS C/T/48/4 (EXTRACT)]

  Another day, another crossroads outside Leeds, and another rider clumping towards a rendezvous.

  Shay waiting by the junction again. The hooves of the approaching horse stamped slow enough to be counted.

  Something seemed. . . the rider was a woman. Shay wondered what story she had for her journey south. Perhaps there was a servant in town, or back along the road.

  She rode well: steady, flexible. Instinctively, Shay looked optimistically at the face. Not a fair woman, but a strong one – dark and sure.

  The same exchange of greetings, the invocations of a captive King and a disputed God, and again Shay showed the gleam of the ring on his finger. The woman nodded, and Shay knew she was reviewing the protocols in her head. Now she looked up – still there was no relaxation in her face – and spoke.

  Again, a messenger had come full two hundred miles to pass a single word: a name.

  Some days later, a letter arrived at the Sign of the Boar in Leeds, addressed to Mr Francis Padget. It was put by, as letters were, for travellers and local residents. It was a full week before a large, older man appeared in the inn and, having taken a drink, asked whether there might be any correspondence for Padget. The letter was produced, the drink finished, and the man disappeared back into the town.

  Once well out of town, and alone on the road, Shay pulled the letter from inside his coat. No obvious sign of tampering, though it was rarely possible to tell – unless you were dealing with complete fools, and the decade had taught the royal cause hard that it was not.

  The letter was from Jacob Hoy, bookseller of Edinburgh. He regretted that he himself could not satisfy Mr Padget’s desire for a copy of the Codex Walther, but he had heard it said that Master Peter Staurby had – no more than a year ago, anyway – been in possession of one.

  Staurby. Shay read the name again, then replaced the letter in his coat; he would destroy it in the first fireplace he reached.

  He rode on, only half conscious of the pale morning around him, the wet fields.

  Staurby. Something about the name. Something – Good grief. Astbury, you old fool. You fool of a schoolboy, you amateur. The old man had not died too soon; the system had to be gripped, and quickly. The age of such games is past; this is a new world.

  He could not assume that the place was not being watched, which meant both that his approach must be unremarkable but also that he could not make any sign of watching himself. Behaviour intended to escape scrutiny is dangerous enough, but nothing so much as behaviour intended to detect scrutiny exposes a man to it. So, no circuits, no dawdlings in the street, no adjacent vantage points, no more significant scanning of his surroundings than a man might reasonably do to find his way.

  The house of Mr Farthing, he had learned from one courier. The town of Stoke, he had learned from the other. In the town, discreetly, he learned that the house of Henry Farthing was better known as the Jug – an inn.

  Shay liked inns. No one could remark on a man entering or leaving an inn at most times of day or night. A man could stay in an inn for a few minutes or a few hours and not be remarked either way. He was also pleased because it suggested that Astbury had shown some sense in managing his messages: knowing Astbury, he had feared hollow oak-trunks and loose flagstones.

  Shay rode up to the Jug at unremarkable pace, and left his horse in the yard. There was a rich, fat smell there, and his instinct was assuming horse shit while something in his brain told him he was wrong. He stepped into the inn. It was a warm morning and the fire wasn’t lit, but the chairs were more comfortable by the chimney and he sat there for an hour, drinking steadily. There were three other customers for different periods of his stay, and he responded to their casual bites of conversation.

  Then he left: watching the little details of the rooms, the faces, the movements of people in the street outside, he left – got on his horse, trotted steadily out of town.

  The following day, at around the same time, Henry Farthing heard faintly the sounds of an arrival in his yard – the calling for the ostler, the whinnying of a horse – and glimpsed movement through a small back window. A moment later the new arrival was in the main room of the Jug Inn.

  A man getting on in years, but big and healthy by the look of him. A man of power, Farthing felt. Did he remember the man from before? Yesterday, even? So many faces.

  The man ordered a drink, and sat – the chair wasn’t a strong one, and it creaked badly as he dropped into it – ruminating near the door.

  There was another drinker in the room
– a trader from the square, in out of the day just for a moment’s ease, been here a quarter-hour already and wouldn’t be much longer – and then sure enough he was gone.

  The big man still sat in silence; half asleep, sort of. Eventually he seemed to find himself. He looked around the room – at the window, at the door – then stood and walked towards the bar. Farthing watched the looming figure, tried to read the expression.

  ‘I’m looking for Henry Farthing.’

  ‘Me, sir.’

  It was a strong face in front of him – big-featured, and worn, the lines deep between the brows and crackling around the eyes. ‘You keep messages, papers: have you anything for Peter Staurby?’

  Farthing felt his eyes widening in his face. That name. So rarely heard – sometimes letters were collected in person by one of two faces he’d come to recognize, and sometimes the letters just disappeared during a busy day – and hearing it revived an old unease.

  ‘I – I’ll check, sir. One moment.’ He turned away into the back room.

  The name was an ulcer, flashes of discomfort and never quite forgotten. He was doing nothing wrong – surely, he was doing nothing wrong. But the Staurby correspondence was trouble and, in an age without law, trouble preyed unpredictable and vicious like a snake.

  When he returned to the main room, the stranger was halfway between bar and door, watching him intently, somehow on edge. A man alert to surprises; a man who would be trouble and attract trouble.

  He swallowed. ‘Just two, sir.’ The man was back at the bar, nodding once. ‘I don’t – I don’t recognize. . .’

  Grey, cold eyes stared into him. Then the old man lifted his fist, and Farthing saw the ring: a flash of the first remembered pain of this business, years ago now. He looked up into the eyes, nodded with a little frenzy, eager to placate. ‘Thank you, sir. I’ll be sure to remember.’

  The man took the papers. ‘Don’t remember too hard, Master Farthing.’

  ‘No. No, sir.’

  ‘I don’t know that Staurby will be getting many more letters. I might need to collect for other friends, time by time.’

  ‘Of course. Anything, sir.’ He opened his mouth to speak – couldn’t manage it – tried again. ‘Some papers have been destroyed, sir. It was the instruction. Burned. After every week, if not collected.’ He waited for the reaction.

  A pause, and then the curtest nod. ‘I’m pleased to hear it. For now you will continue the same system of precautions exactly.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  Something rapped on the bar, and Farthing’s eyes snapped down.

  A gold coin. ‘Thank you – thank you very much, sir.’

  ‘A tidy inn this, Master Farthing. Good luck to you.’ And the big man was gone.

  As Shay stepped back into the inn yard, the smell was nagging at him again – not horses, surely; sweeter, more exotic – and finally he saw it: an apothecary’s shop backed onto the yard too: a dark doorway, green things in its shadows, strange small sacks and boxes around it.

  The name – Staurby – would need to be changed.

  For a moment, Shay had wondered at what he might have missed in the letters that Farthing had dutifully burned. The thought faded quickly. If I am to fret, it must be about the book.

  But now he felt something building in him, some excitement or strength. The men of shadows had decided to legitimize that unknown knife-thrust on Preston field. Now he had ears in every significant chamber in the kingdom, eyes on every desk. Now all England spoke to him. Once again, he was master of the network of the Comptrollerate-General.

  The first of the two reports retrieved from the Jug Inn was the last report out of Colchester, written on 27th August and rightly predicting the town’s fall the following day. Shay read the summary of the last futile flickers of pride and nobility with irritation suppressing sympathy. The second report was much shorter, and more recent.

  Sir, this by my hand but to pass you the words of another. I learn that Sir Thomas Fairfax has completed his new dispositions in and around the fallen town of Colchester. The people of that place, with one day of warm thin soup in their bellies, have quite forgot that they ever knew or had a King, and the blood yet undried where poor Lucas and Lisle were slain. Colonel Thomas Rainesborowe is detached by General Fairfax to join the siege of Pontefract.

  Faithfully, T. S.

  [SS C/S/48/10]

  Sir Mortimer Shay: away from Stoke now and a shadow against a beech-trunk under the low roof of its branches. And why in God’s name do I care for Colchester’s hungry and for this Colonel? A shake of the head at his predecessor’s diversion of resources into inefficient irrelevance.

  Once again, he reached into an inner pocket and removed the page recovered from George Astbury’s body on Preston field. A simple report – almost routine – from inside besieged Pontefract, and he wondered at it.

  At least once in a week, usually on a Saturday when the King slept in the afternoon, or when he had adequate other company, William Seymour would beg permission from the castle Governor to walk down to the river. The begging was a humiliating business, and the answer inconsistent, but the Governor was not a bad fellow – and where, after all, could he really get to on the island?

  His regular path took him down through the town – the temporary sensation of freedom, of air that was really his, enabled him to endure the wide eyes of the peasants, the pointing – to where the Medina river became the estuary, and so on towards the sea.

  Always a sentry came with him. It was a routine of habit, of discipline, for he had nowhere to escape to and they probably wouldn’t care if he did. But it confirmed that he was different from other men now – a member of a new and more select aristocracy, of the isolated, the unfree. The world he had roamed had shrunk now, to the world of that little majesty in his closely watched rooms in the castle, to the castle grounds, to the views around the Isle of Wight from the battlements, to this one merciful breath of air, the fetid closeness of the town and the empty freshness of the river.

  It was colder today. Autumn was slowing, shrinking towards death. The riverbanks were darkening as the leaves turned and fell, and the colours were becoming simpler and starker: the grey flicker of the water, the sterile wall of sky. There were few boats on the estuary, and no travellers on the path today. Ahead, a rowing boat had been pulled half out of the water onto the bank, two men pottering slow around it.

  He strode on, feeling his stride lengthen, enjoying the feel of the path under his feet, solid ground and his to walk on. Once they were clear of the town the sentry would drop back a bit – they hardly felt comfortable with each other – and he could pretend that he was alone.

  ‘Seymour.’ The sound jolted him.

  The unexpected sound and, he realized, the knowledge of his name.

  One of the men at the boat – he had reached it without noticing – standing against it now, looking along the path towards the sentry then murmuring a word over his shoulder to the other boatman. The other glanced up, then just stood and ambled away past him in the direction of the town. The first man had turned towards him again: an old face, worn but hard –

  ‘Shay!’

  ‘A word or two, if you will.’ A glance back along the path, and he pulled off a rough and shapeless cap. ‘Please preserve your calm and your stance. I am a humble river man, you are bored enough to talk to me. Your sentinel will give us a few minutes, I imagine.’

  Mortimer Shay, leaning against a little fisher-boat in anonymous working clothes, a ghost from history come out of the waters in the middle of the Isle of Wight, not a mile from the King. Seymour said, ‘We thought you dead, or abroad.’

  ‘I am returned to office.’

  ‘The devil you are.’

  ‘Nevertheless.’

  ‘I rather think the King decides such matters.’

  ‘I rather think the King should begin to listen to better advice.’

  Seymour’s shoulders dropped. Eventually he nodded.


  ‘By all means check with the Committee. You will have channels of communication, no doubt.’

  ‘Be sure that I’ll check, Shay. Where is your Committee now, whoever they are? Fled with the rest?’

  Shay shifted in the sand. ‘The Committee is everywhere and nowhere. I presume that most are abroad now. One or two in Scotland, perhaps.’ He looked up towards the town and the castle sitting over it. ‘None, I’d imagine, is here. Confinement does not sit naturally with the Committee.’

  ‘But you’re not sure where they are?’

  ‘I’m not sure who they are. I can hardly be sure where they are, can I? How does His Majesty?’

  Seymour hesitated. Out on the water, two ducks were drifting with the flow, and his eye followed the movement. ‘He lives outside this world, Shay. I think he bears this waiting – this eternal, damned waiting – better than any normal man might. But the little indignities of confinement irritate him. The disrespects. The dependences. He is often peevish.’

  Shay nodded. ‘Our misfortune in finding ourselves a Scottish papist for a King.’

  ‘His Majesty is no papist, Shay, and it’s treason to say it!’

  ‘Papists are lively fellows, in my experience, but fragile. Scotsmen are miserable but enduring. Either is perfectly tolerable, but they’re an ill combination.’

  ‘Shay—’

  ‘The waiting must continue.’

  The voice had been immediately firm and unchallengeable. ‘We wonder whither it leads us.’

  Shay shook his head in sudden intensity. ‘That’s for the priests, Seymour; the future – destiny. The King must just survive today – and he must do it every day. You must help him to it.’ Seymour shifted uneasily. ‘There is no alternative to the King! While he endures they must inevitably turn to him. If he endures, he wins.’

  ‘Easily said.’