Traitor's Field

by Robert Wilton

  St John watched the performance sadly. ‘Oliver, this smells of over-passion. We risk setting afire the very threat we wish to avoid. The Scots are that stubborn.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Yes,’ St John said with feeling. ‘They will not like this trifling with their inward disputes.’

  ‘Then they should not let their inward disputes become ours.’

  John Thurloe had never troubled to look inside a hive of bees – in general a man who liked to prove things for himself, he nevertheless accepted some that could in safety be taken for granted – but he knew that it would look much like the mediæval hall in front of him now. One hundred feet from where he stood to the platform at the far end, at least half as many from the centurion stones under his boots up to the hammer-beams duelling far above his head, the hall was barricaded with long wooden desks, rank after rank of them stretching away. Each was lined with sober, mostly young men – men much his own age and type – each bent to his work in his own particular place at a desk, so that what Thurloe saw was in fact a bobbing pool of tops of heads, coloured and styled with such diversity as the Lord had offered. Among the dark coats moved other men – mostly brown-coated – taking and passing papers and instructions to the men at the desks.

  It was some mighty impish conceit: to take one of the fuggy dining halls of his Cambridge, and fill it with these bent black-coated insects, and then set the whole to work in the heart of unsuspecting, complacent, commercial London.

  This, in literal truth, was the British Government working.

  ‘Master Thurloe!’ Thomas Scot, standing at the first rank of desks, had seen him before he had seen Scot. ‘What think you of this?’

  Thurloe moved to him. Scot was given to waspish intensity, but rarely enthusiasm, and Thurloe was intrigued. Scot thrust a handwritten page at him.

  The page was laid out in the form that, printed, it might shortly have. Of the Right Diversity of Fruits in the Garden of Eden, ran the title, and under it: Or, How the Lord doth Nurture and Encourage a Fitting and Natural Variety of Spirits within His Kingdom. The text opened with the variety of beautiful and God-created specimens that were to be found in Eden, and the rightness of each despite their difference, such was their overall conformity to his design; it then noted the poisonous and destructive effect of the introduction of that which God had not intended. So by turns the text moved through a general comparison of cultivation with the political world, to a warm celebration of the distinct but similarly faithful settlements that currently dominated London and Edinburgh, with a warning of the divisive and disastrous outcome that might be anticipated should Edinburgh fail to treat the Marquess of Montrose like the serpent he surely was.

  ‘Do we use the word “kingdom”?’ Thurloe said mildly, and Scot’s face sharpened. ‘Master Scot – forgive an indiscretion – but your own views are not usually so. . .’

  A squawk of scorn. ‘So damned lax! Master Thurloe, for myself I consider this opinion treason.’ The lips recoiled from a pained feral smile. ‘The Scotchmen in Edinburgh think themselves Godly, and we suffer them to sustain that delusion; they are Bishop-loving Stuart sentimentalists to a man, and I would see them purged. But for now it suits our purposes to divide Scotland, and this pretty paper will fuel the nauseating conceit that they have more in common with us than with that troublesome renegade Montrose.’

  To his distaste, Thurloe found Scot’s rare enthusiasm a little appealing, whatever the content. The old man pulled the paper back from him, and waved it in front of him happily.

  Another uncomfortable smile. ‘This,’ he said, waving the paper again and then gesturing with it expansively at the hall behind him, ‘is the world that you younger men will inherit. This is the world you are creating with us. Your talents – your minds – your voices – these are freer than they might have been these two thousand years past.’

  I have been exalted in these mists.

  James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, perched on a rock above the river and gritted his teeth into the wind, as it whipped his hair into his face and plucked spray from among the stones.

  I have seen the palaces and fineries of many lands, and they have been but grey lifeless places to me, painted masques. My glories have been all in these wild Scottish landscapes: mad charges through the heather, brilliant coups from bracken-built villages with mean-mouthed hard-choked names known only to their inhabitants, nights snatched on patches of moor and riverbank that belong more to the spirits than to men. In these places only have I truly lived.

  He blinked into the north-west, from where they had come, and then round towards his men, sheltering in the trees. Perhaps a thousand, Danes and Germans and Orcadians and such Scots as had, like in his previous campaigns, emerged silent from the mountains and the winds to follow him. Wild men for a wild place.

  From among them, a single man was striding towards him.

  And now, another nameless burn, another forgotten glen.

  He watched the man approach, waited with open face.

  ‘No sign?’

  Montrose shook his head vigorously. ‘No sign. Neither pursuit nor support.’

  ‘We go on?’

  ‘That we do. There’ll be more to join us there. That’s where the battle must be, besides.’ He smiled down from the rock. ‘His Majesty means to be King of more than merely Ross-shire, I think.’

  ‘And if there is none more to join us?’

  Montrose was jumping down from his rock, and his boots landed soft in the mossy ground, his face close to his lieutenant’s. He scraped strands of hair out of his face, and again the smile stretched over him. ‘Why, Johnnie, I beat you well enough in ’45 with as few.’

  Thurloe had to travel to Liverpool in the third week of April. A printer named Peter Dupuy had been arrested for forging passes for those wanting to take ship abroad. At the same time a man named Potter was accused of seditious talk and plotting a rising in support of Charles Stuart. Gangs of the destitute, starving and hopeless after another bad harvest and another hard winter, were capturing food-wagons heading for the town; Liverpool was feeling uncomfortable.

  Dupuy – it was probably Pierre rather than Peter – was a refugee from France. By the time Thurloe got to Liverpool, he’d been beaten through a phase of babbling suggestibility into incoherence. The ill-spelled testimony scrawled on the page suggested that Dupuy was rather better educated than the parish clerk, but none of it indicated any knowledge of wider Royalist organization. Thurloe was interested in the men who would know of Dupuy, but Dupuy clearly didn’t know of them. A lonely exile using his one talent to earn his bread.

  Rowland Potter, meanwhile, was a merchant who had done well selling shovels and pikes to the Army, and decided to branch into foodstuffs. As far as Thurloe could gather, this had offended those who’d previously enjoyed a local monopoly for this, and dark stories about Potter’s allegiance and activities had begun circulating immediately. Half a dozen soldiers had been produced and persuaded, either by vanity or sixpence, to testify that the funny taste of their biscuit might be poison rather than the normal quality of supplies to the Army. The magistrate dealing with the case was a new man trying to meet the expectations of his sponsors and disprove the fears of the community, and succeeding in neither. Thurloe left him to it.

  As he started for London again, the hills rose up to the east.

  Behind: Liverpool, and the regime’s rough justice. Ahead: London, and the duplicities of Scot and Tarrant.

  Astbury House was close; it made sense to stop there. Thurloe had questions to ask, didn’t he?

  The beech avenue was a corridor into a quieter world. The brick and the stone glowed soft against the fertility of the hills behind. When Thurloe breathed, it seemed to reach forgotten corners of his body.

  This time, Thurloe was asked to wait in the study. It was a room to make him feel comfortable: learning; books; titles – even editions – that he recognized. He stepped closer, trying to gauge whether Astbury was
still buying books or was living in the scholarship of earlier decades.

  This is not why I’m here. And yet – This should not be why I am here.

  George Astbury had dealt in secret work for the late King. George Astbury had spent much time here, in his brother’s house. What secrets had been talked here? What secrets had been kept here? The soldier from Pontefract.

  Now nearer the shelves, he could see an alcove to the right, a portrait hanging in it. A woman, perhaps forty; the clothes rich, a fur neckline on a silvery gown, the style not so old. A handsome woman: strength in the bones, at forehead, cheek and jaw; large dark eyes.

  Something about the face. Something in the glance; something to him. A promise? A warning?

  Somewhere before, he’d—

  ‘My mother.’

  Thurloe swallowed the feeling that he’d been intruding, and turned. ‘I see her in you,’ he said, honestly. ‘A compliment to you both.’

  Rachel Astbury was dressed this time, and dressed well. A gown in deep grey-green, like heather, brimming with lace that drew attention to her bare collarbones and the top of her breasts; the hair pulled up at the back of her head, but still dropping to her shoulders.

  The eyelids dropped for a moment, ignoring the comment or embarrassed by it.

  Rachel’s eyes, and the eyes of the portrait. Thurloe nodded towards it. ‘Who was she?’

  ‘She was born Isabelle Shay. Her family were from the western borders – the old marches.’

  Shay?

  ‘We’ll talk in the garden, please.’ She turned and led the way out.

  As she opened the front door, a shawl over her shoulders now, the sun burned in her hair, and Thurloe remembered his first uncertain memories of her. Concentrate.

  ‘My father must not be disturbed. He. . . he sleeps a great deal these days.’

  Thurloe said quietly, ‘It’s a difficult world to have to live in.’

  Rachel glanced back sharply, but the eyes were sincere – big and sad, as she’d remembered them. She nodded, and walked on.

  Thurloe moved beside her and said, ‘Your uncle – George Astbury – was a very intimate adviser to the late King. For intelligence. Secret dealing.’

  She stopped. ‘Question or statement?’

  ‘It’s true. I want to understand. . . what it was like. It brought danger here.’ His voice dropped. ‘It still could.’

  She walked on again. ‘You say secret. You mean he didn’t tell you and your friends about it? Hardly surprising.’

  Thurloe smiled uncomfortably. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘What if he was? My uncle, like many men, served his King as best he could.’ She slowed, and turned, and stood and looked into his face. ‘In fact: yes, he did. Secret work. I don’t know what: he never talked about it, never showed me anything. But I helped him burn his papers, before he died. I repeat: what of it?’

  Papers. A system of correspondence. And where is it now, this system? ‘It’s all history now, of course.’

  ‘So why are you interested in it?’

  ‘There is a new world being born. Your generation – our generation – has the chance to be born in it anew.’

  ‘But you’re still fighting an old battle!’

  ‘I’m trying to escape it.’ There was real frustration in his voice. ‘I’m stuck in. . . in the battles and schemes of old men. The deceits, the vindictiveness. . . the loyalties of men whose time has passed.’

  She walked on. She was. . . more subdued, somehow. Or perhaps just more thoughtful: age and life starting to hang on her. She pulled at the shawl, and it rode up revealing a patch of skin at the back of her neck.

  They were walking along a path between two elaborate fences of trees. The trunks – Thurloe didn’t recognize the breed of tree – were slender and precisely spaced, and only at waist height and head height had branches been allowed to sprout to right and left, the single limbs reaching out to the next tree. Something confused him, and he looked more closely: where the limbs met, they had somehow been grafted into each other. It made him uncomfortable.

  Rachel Astbury had walked on a few paces, and now she turned into a path between two yew hedges. Thurloe followed.

  She had disappeared. In front of him, the path stretched dead straight towards a distant opening, between the dark green walls, empty. He took two uneasy steps forward.

  ‘Your new world is the upsetting of everything.’ She said it dully. ‘Destruction merely.’

  There were openings to left and right in the hedges, dark in the darkness, further alleys leading to other junctions. She was a short distance down one of the alleys, waiting for him.

  ‘It is the restoration of laws and liberties that governed this country fairly. Traditions that made places like this – the little society of Astbury – possible. Traditions that were twisted and destroyed as the old King got more desperate. It is the protection of those laws and liberties in a system of government that properly represents the real interests and quality of the country.’

  She watched him, unblinking, then turned again and crunched away down the path.

  Tarrant the torturer. The trivial oppressions of justice in Liverpool. I wish I believed in what I said.

  The yew alley opened out onto a raised area of ground, paths to left and right and a section of the garden laid out in front below: neat blocks of shrubs and flowers, symmetries of shape and colour arranged by a scholar rather than a God; further out, beyond a low brick wall, lines of vegetable plants and frames. From somewhere far off, a faint heartbeat of metal on metal.

  ‘We have our own forge here,’ Rachel said to the garden. ‘We grow our own food. We bake our own bread. We churn butter, and milk, gather honey, slaughter and salt meat, brew beer.’

  ‘And still you’ve never offered me a drink.’

  She moved off again, alongside a willow hedge that led to an arbour, a sheltering trelliswork of leaves and flowers. Buried among the leaves, part of the remains of a wall, was a worn stone: crudely carved figures, letters or numbers beside them; something pagan, older than all of the world’s antipathies; something ancient being marked or worshipped here.

  Thurloe murmured, ‘Society is all but rude, to this delicious solitude’; he looked up in time to see her expression, and grunted. ‘An acquaintance. The lines have stayed with me. Can you truly isolate yourself here? Cut yourself off, live on your bread and your beer? Pretend that the world does not exist?’

  ‘What else is there? What is that world to me? It’s death and division and questions and soldiers in the trees. It’s men like you, strange creatures who are so damned sure of everything, going to rule the world with your Cromwell and your Greek. It’s an alien world, it’s far away, and I can’t reach it even if I wanted to.’

  The dress blended into the greenery of the arbour, and the hair was willow fronds. Rachel Astbury was a sunlit face and bust, and two vast eyes searching him.

  ‘I believe in the same God as you, Rachel, in the same way. I believe in the same country as you, for the same benefit of the same people. I believe in my own ability to shape my own life, and on that basis I will accept God’s judgement on me for good or ill. I believe in the beauty of Greek grammar as well as Greek poetry. I believe in the marshes at Maldon when the sun rises out of the mist and all I can hear is the invisible sea. I believe—’

  She leaned forward and up and kissed him, her lips and breath warm on his. Thurloe’s hand had come up instinctively as she moved, had touched her side, and now held her. When she pulled away, eyes somehow alarmed at what she’d done, his hand stayed on her a moment longer.

  ‘You’d better—’

  ‘Yes. I should—’

  Thurloe trotted away down the beech alley, the sunlight flashing at him between the trunks, head flushed with the memory of Rachel Astbury’s breath on his mouth. Foolishness, of course: an aberration, an impossibility, a misconjugation. But something warm, and live, and natural.

  Something was nagging at him, knockin
g at his brain with each bump of the horse beneath him.

  Rachel Astbury: truly lovely, and something real in the world of deceits.

  Blackburn. Cornet Michael Blackburn under torture, pressed to tell who had helped him.

  A syllable he could not suppress, a syllable his tormentors could not catch.

  Shay?

  Sir,

  Montrose was routed not far from this place, before he could even emerge from the northern forests, and those of his meagre force who did not perish in the field are prisoners, or prey to the wild clansmen of these parts. The Marquess himself escaped the slaughter but was shortly betrayed, and is now in the hands of the Church party in Edinburgh. The swift efficacy of their victory has left these men the unchallenged masters of Scotland – and the unavoidable partners of any cause that desires success here. For the great Montrose himself there will be no more miraculous scapes and triumphs: his enemies have him at last and, whatever their future policy, they will see him swing a traitor first.

  U. J.

  [SS C/S/50/61]

  AN OPEN LETTER:

  FROM THE PRECINCTS OF ST PAUL’S

  AN EPISTLE TO THE SCOTTISH

  Gentlemen,

  good neighbourlinefs does lie in a proper concern for the interefts of the neighbour as much as a difcreet indifference to his privy bufinefs, and fo too does it lie in an honeft fincere advifing as much as a prudent filence. For furely it is only Chriftian charity to help a man to his beft interefts, to fhow him to the right road. To correct a man before he err in policy or prayer, fuch as to fave him from peril to his perfon and morefo to his foul, is no more than to cry ‘beware’ fhould his foot be about to tread on a fnake. The Samaritan would have done no lefs a fervice, and deferved no lefs a renown, by croffing the way to help a man ftricken by falfe doctrine as one ftricken bodily.