‘I’ll come with you.’
Shay shook his head. ‘No. I thought I might need Teach’s help to get this far, and I got yours. But the last yards I must do alone. And you must get away from this place.’ His hands clutched harder at the shoulders. ‘Balfour, the stability of this kingdom no longer depends on Royalism, not for a time at least. The cause that I’ve upheld must. . . it must take a different path for now. But the spirit of Royalism must still glow. The people must be reminded of it, and Cromwell and his minions must feel it at their heels. You will find a message waiting for you – I sent it before Worcester. Instructions. Certain contacts. Unknown to the Parliament men, whatever papers they have seized, and unknown even to my patrons abroad. Use them.’
‘Very well. But—’
‘There’s – there’s something else. Sometime – and it may be soon, for these many months have felt like – like twilight – I will at last. . . defeat life. There is a manor. In the north of Wales. A good land, and good people. I have arranged that it will be yours.’
Balfour swallowed, and fought to hold himself. ‘I will. . . try to be—’
‘Don’t try to be anything. Just be.’ Shay smiled, and pulled away. ‘Tom: while you live, live proud and live fierce.’
Balfour nodded, but the old man was gone.
Rachel felt Thurloe’s arm stiffen, and then she heard what he had: a change in the rhythms of the water, a thickening of the sound.
She peered into the gloom, and eventually saw it: a shadow moving across the marsh towards them, a pale spectral aura wafting around it. Her heart kicked on instinct while her brain realized that it was her boat.
Is it actually possible, after all? Am I really going to escape this place? The horror of the morning, the nightmare of the hours since. The satchel bit at her shoulder. Then, the lurking under-thought: Can I leave this place?
‘You’ll be too late, won’t you?’ The voice came out of the darkness of the marsh, and they both spun away from the river towards the sound.
The land was black, but out of it came a figure, a soldier with pistol extended towards them, moonlight touching the barrel as he moved closer.
An instinctive step backwards, two, and Thurloe stared around them. They were yards from the beginning of the jetty.
‘Hell of a dance you’ve had, eh?’ The barrel gleaming and flashing in the moonlight. ‘Murdering spies! But two of us are enough for you, I reckon.’ Thurloe was still glancing left and right, trying to see firm ground, wondering how quickly he could reach his own pistol, wondering about Rachel.
Another sound, from near behind them now. Thurloe and Rachel turned again, and a figure was climbing up onto the jetty from the soft ground beside it. This figure had a pistol levelled in their direction as well.
‘That’s right,’ the first soldier said. ‘All here together now.’ And he kept on towards them, and Thurloe and Rachel moved instinctively away towards the beginning of the jetty, hesitated, two thumping hearts in the trap, and as their desperate eyes swung back and forth between the threats, the second figure, a rigid shadow and pistol, spoke for the first time, hard and low.
‘Get – down.’
Rachel recognized the voice and gasped and Thurloe wrapped his arms around her and dropped and the night cracked in a shot. Rolling, fighting for purchase on the soft earth, he stared up. The first thing he saw was the soldier, arm still extended.
The pistol barrel fluttered, wavered, and fell, and the man toppled into the gloom.
Shay strode towards them, boots thumping on the jetty planks, and then past them to the soldier. He was back in a moment with the soldier’s pistol and a lantern, which he lit. In its little glow, he saw that Thurloe had a pistol of his own out, pointing at him.
Shay stopped, looked at the pistol, then up at Thurloe.
‘What do you propose to do with that?’
‘I don’t know. But since I don’t know what you’re doing, it seemed a sensible idea.’
Shay considered this, and nodded.
‘What the hell’s happening?’ Another voice, hissed out of the darkness of the river behind them.
‘All’s well,’ Shay called low; ‘we’re friends of Mandeville.’
‘Well hurry along! We’ve a tide to make; militia'll be here any time.’
Shay stepped to Rachel. He looked at her for a long moment, at the curves of her hair and body in the moon. Then he bent and kissed her forehead. ‘You’re the last of my people,’ he murmured. ‘And there could be none finer. God speed.’
He stepped back a pace. She watched him, then stretched out her arm, and touched him on the chest. ‘All future generations will be less,’ she said quietly.
She took another step towards the jetty, and turned back. ‘Why aren’t you coming?’ she asked. Shay and Thurloe looked at each other. ‘I mean—’
Shay smiled. ‘I’m afraid that even if either of us wanted to, the other wouldn’t allow it.’
Rachel felt a flutter of loneliness. She looked to Thurloe, hesitated. ‘Thank you, John. I don’t know—’
‘It’s been my privilege. I was. . . I was glad to find an ideal worth fighting for.’
‘Hurry, damn you!’
‘Rachel,’ Thurloe said. ‘I’ll take the satchel, please.’ He took a step away from Shay and towards her. ‘Call it a memento.’
His pistol was up, and pointing at Shay’s stomach.
She was clutching the satchel to her chest. ‘It’s just trinkets. Family things.’ She took an uncertain step towards him. ‘Surely that’s not what you care about, after all this.’
His eyes flicked between her and Shay. ‘Show me.’
She glanced at Shay, and Shay nodded. Another step, and she held the satchel open.
In the lantern light Thurloe saw the dull gold gleams. Something else: he reached for it, a fat book.
‘Our family Bible. Please, John!’
‘We must leave! The tide turns soon, and we’ll never get away!’
Thurloe glanced at Shay, but he hadn’t moved. He pulled the book half out, opened the thick cover, saw in the sickly light the careful handwriting of successive Astburys filling the flyleaves, and then the distinctive cover page. He pushed it back into the satchel.
His fingers still rested on the gold shapes, one of them a bulbous lump. Another glance at Shay. ‘Family things?’
‘You’ll hardly need them in a Republic, will you?’
Thurloe thought, and nodded ruefully. He closed the satchel and, hand still on it, looked up. ‘Fare you well, Rachel. I hope we make an England you’ll want to return to.’
She backed away from them, the satchel held against her breasts. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Both of you. You were both essential to me. But now I have to leave this place.’ For a moment she stared beyond them into the darkness of England. ‘Do what you must with it.’
Then she was striding over the jetty and dropping carefully into the boat, already starting for the open sea and freedom.
Shay said, ‘If you’re not going to shoot me, perhaps you’d help me tidy your friend here into the marsh.’ Thurloe lowered the pistol. ‘Then, since you’ve been hunting me these three years, I hope you’ll afford me an hour’s quiet talk.’
The news of the chaos at Astbury House had sent Thomas Scot hurrying there, fed intermittently with uncertain and confusing reports of the chase across the middle of England.
When he arrived in the first grey hours of the morning, he found a solitary old man in the heart of the wrecked house, sitting on a chair, a large book clutched to his chest.
Scot knew the power of books, of words, and snatched it out of the feeble hands.
The cover was ancient – thick and gnarled. In one discreet corner of it there was a seal – a heraldic badge with which he was not familiar. He began to turn the pages.
The flyleaves were as old as the cover; stained and blotched. But then there was a break in the binding, and pages of a different quality, with the unmistakabl
e form and language of God’s holy book.
Thurloe said: ‘You’ve distracted me with baubles before. What did I really let go into that boat, aside from that molten relic of history?’
Shay looked up from the table, where he had just placed his own pistol and the dead soldier’s. ‘A book; the book. The secret register of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey. And a lovely and remarkable young woman.’
‘Crowns, and secrets, and beautiful women. Have we not had enough trouble?’ Their eyes caught. ‘And the other crown? The unmelted?’
‘Oh, that’s around somewhere. In case you, or someone, should find a crown useful again.’
Thurloe smiled cautiously. ‘And you,’ he said, ‘are Sir Mortimer Shay.’
‘And you are John Thurloe.’ Shay extended his hand. Thurloe watched it, and his glance returned to Shay’s face. He transferred his pistol to his left, and slowly reached out and shook hands.
The abandoned chapel closed around them, dank. It was barely twenty feet long, half as wide, but the ink-black corners and niches were too much for the single lantern. On the plain table – who had needed a table here, and why? – it huddled for security between the two men. On all sides the charcoal slabs ran with marsh water.
Shay said, ‘Your wife’s uncle was Overbury, I think; who died in the Tower in James’s time.’ Thurloe frowned, surprised; then nodded. Shay let out a long ‘Mm’ of thought, and seemed to consider the tangent for a moment.
Thurloe waited, but nothing came of it. ‘We’ve been in correspondence two years now, I think,’ he said.
‘I had come to assume so. I. S. is too weak a cypher, by the by. George Astbury did the like.’ Shay pointed a heavy finger. ‘I think it’s something in you learned men – you can’t miss a chance to be clever, and it makes you stupid.’ A great sniff. ‘But you had me after Dunbar. I relaxed too much in my little game. Always a mistake, and this time it cost us our position in Scotland.’
‘As you had played me before Dunbar. Was that your intent? Merely to manipulate a little?’
‘Just a sortie of opportunity, at first. Throwing a line into a dark stream. Nine chances of ten, my letter would never have been read. But you got it, and replied to it, and so I took the chance to spread a bit of misinformation – and make the little graves of the Levellers throw big shadows.’
‘You had us worrying and searching ourselves a year longer than we needed.’ Shay nodded cheerfully. ‘But there was more. You were trying to learn about Pontefract, and Doncaster, and the Levellers there – just as I was.’
‘Yes. J. H., the melancholy Royalist, was a useful masquerade.’
‘There was a real Royalist source, though.’
‘No. Just me.’ Shay smiled consolation.
Thurloe frowned stupidly. ‘Scot was getting reports out of besieged Pontefract. I know it.’
‘Low-level gossip, perhaps. A penny or a meal or a whore, for a hungry sentry.’
More earnest, confused. ‘No. A very particular source. Recorded faithfully in Scot’s private ledger.’ The memory of his wild ruse, the frantic flicking through the pages. ‘I’ve seen the summaries. And since before Dunbar, Scot has had direct reports of Royalist strategy. The decision to come south into England; the decision to march for Worcester rather than London.’ Thurloe watched the old gaze lengthen, lost. ‘You didn’t suspect this? This wasn’t what you were about?’
Shay’s face was grim.
He glanced up, and away again. ‘All along, I wondered what so obsessed George Astbury. Why he spent his last days looking towards Pontefract. Why he was so haunted.’
‘He knew something?’
‘He knew something was wrong.’ Shay's eyes were hard, wary at the revelation. ‘And for some reason he was focused on Pontefract and not the Scottish army coming south for the King.’
‘And your masquerade – J. H. – was intended to learn more of this.’
Have I lost my way quite? ‘I thought I was confusing you. I ended by confusing myself more.’
Thurloe was feeling his way. ‘The idea of a Leveller agent in Doncaster, in contact with Royalists. After Dunbar I thought it merely a ruse in your letters: trying to unsettle us about the Levellers, trying to learn more of Pontefract and Doncaster.’
‘It began as both of those things.’ Shay shook his head. ‘I came to realize that it built on truth; perhaps that was why it was powerful. One of your soldiers in Doncaster was sympathetic to us. The idea of an alliance was nonsense, but this man didn’t like the direction General Cromwell was taking this country. He learned about the contact between Reverend Beaumont and Pontefract, and he used it to send messages in.’
‘There was definitely a source? Your man Thomas Paulden – I thought he was bluffing me – said that the raid, when Rainsborough was killed, was an attempt to meet this man.’
‘It was an attempt to rescue him.’
Thurloe’s mind was screaming. Surely this would be madness. The Leveller hero? ‘This makes no sense.’
‘It must do, because it happened.’
‘But what happened? You must know more!’
Shay laughed once, hollow. ‘I’d hoped you did.’ A smile. ‘Between us, perhaps.’ And Thurloe nodded, wary, faintly entertained.
‘So, royal Pontefract is besieged, by your Army based in Doncaster. There is a strong Leveller strength in the regiments there, centred around the man Rainsborough.’
‘A Leveller hero as well as an Army hero,’ Thurloe put in, trying to reassure himself. ‘The great orator for the new liberties.’
‘And an inconvenience for your Generals, yes? The Generals he spoke against in the Leveller debates. And someone in Doncaster is unhappy enough with the direction of Army and Parliamentary policy that he decides to give information to the Royalists in Pontefract, trying to help them last out, perhaps, until a relieving army can reach them from Scotland and turn the tide in the north. Yes?’
‘Yes. Scot had logged a report of someone in Doncaster passing information out.’
‘Because there’s also a spy in Pontefract communicating with Scot’s people. And he learns that Pontefract is getting helpful messages from Doncaster, and he reports it.’
Thurloe remembered the Adjutant in Doncaster. ‘There was an argument. One of Scot’s men came up from London – Tarrant – asking questions. He had a – a confrontation with Rainsborough.’
‘Wait. There’s a step missing there, surely.’
Thurloe nodded, slowly. ‘There’s a report missing, in fact. Thomas Scot had torn a page out of his own private ledger, because for some reason he decided that one report, perhaps two, couldn’t be allowed to stay in the records.’
‘Scot’s sympathetic to the Levellers. Most likely—’
‘Most likely the report was from Parliament’s spy in Pontefract confirming that the man communicating with the Royalists was a Leveller.’
Shay watching Thurloe intently: ‘Then what?’
Thurloe rehearsing the faces and the habits: ‘Lyle, in Doncaster, would have got the report. He’d have known its significance. No doubt he normally shared this material with Rainsborough, the local commander and a man to whom he was sympathetic. Not this; he rushed this to Scot in London, very alarmed. Scot was shocked, and eventually destroyed all reference to the report, and sent Tarrant to Doncaster to investigate.’
‘And there’s not much to investigate, but he says enough to Rainsborough to provoke an argument. Perhaps’ – Shay looked at Thurloe’s wary face – ‘perhaps he suggests that there’s suspicion coming close to Rainsborough himself. And the next thing—’
‘Is the raid on Doncaster.’ Thurloe nodding, hurrying on: ‘Supposedly an attempt to kidnap Rainsborough, but actually an attempt to rescue the source.’
‘Who must have got word out that he was under suspicion, in danger.’
‘Which suggests he was well aware of what Tarrant was saying.’
‘Wait.’ One of Shay’s fingers flicked up. �
�We’re supposing it’s an attempt at kidnap, but we’re only supposing it’s an attempt at rescue too. Because what actually happens – stripping away all the chaos and the stories—’
‘Is that Rainsborough was killed.’
Shay nodded. ‘An agent is supposed to be rescued, and Rainsborough is killed. By William Paulden, or more probably by Austwick.’
‘But why would one of—’
‘Wait.’ The whole hand held up now, Shay grasping for sense, scrabbling to remember a conversation in a lightless ditch. ‘There’s confusion, chaos. According to Austwick, he finished off Rainsborough, but the first wound came from Rainsborough’s Lieutenant. In the chaos, he shot Rainsborough.’
‘Wait – you mean it wasn’t an accident? Rainsborough’s own Lieutenant was trying to kill him?’ Thurloe hissed his frustration: at his own confusion, at the madness of his world. ‘Scot and Tarrant and Lyle learn that one of their Leveller friends is a traitor. Tarrant comes to Doncaster and threatens Rainsborough. The traitor decides he needs to get away. A Leveller Lieutenant attacks Rainsborough, and he dies.’
Shay whistled. ‘Your friend Scot is more efficient than I thought. He set this Lieutenant as watchdog on Rainsborough, and assassin?’
Thurloe was staring into one darkened corner of the chapel. ‘But how did the Lieutenant know? I can’t believe it.’ His head was shaking slowly again. ‘Did Rainsborough do something – say something – suspicious?’
‘Blackburn said that William Paulden had told his comrades to look for a signal.’
‘A word of recognition from this agent?’
A slow nod from Shay. ‘Miles Teach thought the man was supposed to contact Thomas Paulden, at the north bridge.’
‘Thomas Paulden said his brother was giving the chance for the man to reveal himself anywhere.’
‘Austwick described Rainsborough using elaborate words; a curse – intestines of Satan, or something.’ Thurloe was trying to read it all: the faces of Scot and Tarrant and Lyle leering into his mind; an attempt to conjure up the scene outside a Doncaster inn. Shay pressed on. ‘And immediately afterwards the scuffle started, and the Lieutenant fired at Rainsborough.’
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