Rebels and Traitors (71 page)

Captain Smith turned and told Gideon defensively, ‘I was taken ill during the guard. I carried on as long as possible, but was urged by Master Watts and Corporal Flexney to seek a house with a fire —’

At the Hinde? It’s a damned whorehouse!’ muttered Wilkes, struggling desperately into his coat.

Smith carried on justifying himself. ‘Truly I knew it only as a travellers’ rest. I saw nothing of any trouble until I heard a great noise of horses, the enemy leaving — at once I put the men on guard and came to you, sir —’

‘Out of my way! Come with me, Jukes —’

It was just after sunrise. They tasted mist on the sharp autumn air. They ran to Rainborough’s lodging. He lay out of doors, on the cobbles some yards from the house, with blood trails all along the street. They recognised his body instantly, that big, powerful man: unmistakable. A small crowd had gathered, standing not too close. Their shocked murmurs stopped as Wilkes and Jukes approached. Beyond, a saddled horse stood, trembling, also covered in blood.

A second body lay somewhat apart. Major Wilkes walked over and turned the corpse, discovering their lieutenant. Neither Wilkes nor Gideon wanted to touch the colonel. The soldier who had been on guard as the colonel’s sentinel was sitting on the kerb, badly shocked and woozy from a battering, saying over and over again, ‘I had no match! I had been issued with no match!’

Rainborough had terrible sword thrusts through his torso, with defensive wounds on his arms. Gideon counted up: he had been slashed at least eight times. Under his jaw, his throat was cut.

The only witness to everything was a maid from the house.

‘Get her story!’ Major Wilkes ordered Gideon in an undertone. He was a hardened soldier, normally matter-of-fact but now badly shaken. Gideon saw the man’s eyes darting as he assessed how much danger, if any, still threatened. Wilkes set about ordering a search of the town and drumming up the rest of the soldiers.

Gideon led the weeping woman back indoors where he seated her on a rush-bottomed chair. His heart pounded. He had witnessed terrible sights in the war, but Colonel Rainborough’s savaged corpse would haunt his dreams for ever. He wanted to yell, but forced himself to address the maid reassuringly. ‘Just say what happened.’

In their agitation, neither could well understand the other’s accent, but Gideon had learned how to listen to a strange brogue and any northern woman knew how to tell a story. Up with the light, the maid had gone out for something — water? coal? She admitted she had temporarily left the door ajar. ‘Three men came, dressed like gentry; they told the sentinel, proper like, they had brought a packet and letters from Oliver Cromwell. The lieutenant was there and he let them go up. The colonel was in his chamber — in his waistcoat, drawers and slippers!’ whimpered the maid.

The image of those slippers would haunt Gideon. He had seen one in the gutter outside, completely drenched in blood. The other, moulded by long use to the exact shape of sole, toes and bunion, had stayed wedged on his colonel’s foot. It was embroidered. A wife — Margaret Rainborough — would have bought those slippers as a loving gift, or even worked the tapestry herself. They were personal items, easy to pack, which Rainborough had carried with him everywhere, as soldiers did: a little piece of home, however far he travelled; comforting at the end of a hard day.

Gideon reddened and tersely corrected the maid: ‘Say in his shirt. More decorous than drawers.’

She accepted the demure alteration. ‘They claimed to have brought letters, but when he looked it was but a packet of blank paper. They made him come downstairs, dragged him in his shirt!’

‘How do you know all this, if you had gone for water?’

‘I was only gone with the pail a minute. I would not have left the door open, else.’

‘All right. So you saw these men? Did you recognise them?’

‘I never saw them before.’

‘Did they sound local? Northerners?’

‘Aye, they were not strangers.’

‘Go on.’

Rainborough had been overpowered in his room before he could reach his sword and pistols. Ordering him to keep silent, the raiders forced him down to the hall. Unarmed, but thinking his sentinel would assist, Rainborough suddenly shook them off. The sentinel had no match for his musket and could do nothing to raise the alarm.
(Truly?
wondered Gideon, already alert for discrepancies and treachery.
Why did he not club them with his musket butt?)
The cavaliers then pushed Colonel Rainborough out to the street and tried to force him on to horseback. They had taken his lieutenant prisoner too but when Rainborough saw there were only four assailants, one of whom was holding the cavaliers’ horses, he paused with his foot in the stirrup and roared a call to arms. He and his lieutenant put up a vigorous resistance. Rainborough snatched one man’s sword, the lieutenant grabbed another’s pistol. Rainborough was thrown down and thrust through the throat, his lieutenant was run through the body and killed.

Are you telling me they wanted to carry off the colonel alive?’

‘It seemed so. He refused to go.’

Gideon thought rapidly. This was a bungled kidnap? Perhaps the intention had been to make Rainborough a hostage, maybe exchange him for some prominent Royalist prisoner — Sir Marmaduke Langdale would be a prime candidate. After the battle of Preston, Cromwell’s pursuing men had captured Langdale at an alehouse near Northampton, though in fact he had just escaped.

The struggle lasted, the maid thought, a quarter of an hour.
(And nobody else heard anything?)

The maid kept going over it. The choreography seemed confused, but the picture was vivid enough. The colonel demanded a sword so he could die like a man. But they refused, then stabbed him through the body several times more. He nonetheless seized an assailant’s sword, struggling for it with his bare hands, bending it right back on its pommel. I heard one man cry out to another to shoot him, but the pistol misfired. The shooter hurled the weapon, causing a great bruise on Rainborough’s head that made him stagger.’

The lieutenant lay dead, the sentinel was out of action. No soldiers had answered the colonel’s call to arms. The raiders began to move off. Rainborough staggered along the street after them.

They noticed him, and cried out “The dog follows!” They turned back, even though the colonel had fainted. Then they ran him through again and again, and at last rode away crying “Farewell, Rainborough!” I heard him groan, before that, “I am betrayed! Oh I am betrayed!” Those were his last words on earth —’ The maid collapsed.

Gideon slumped briefly in a country chair, covering his face.

Leaving the maid, he explored the house.

In the kitchen, he found the owner, sitting with other occupants, amazed and deeply shocked. There was a full water pail, abandoned. Gideon grew up in a house where working women were sternly controlled by his mother, but he had seen that other servants had their own ways. Some maids constantly vanished on little errands they dreamed up, to fetch water, wood, shopping, eggs from the henhouse, to borrow flour, to visit friends for gossip, to help at births. In some houses they took it as their right to come and go.

Accepting that the maid had not left the door open as part of the conspiracy, he continued his investigation. In the hall were signs of scuffle. On the stairs lay a dropped gauntlet. New marks disfigured the wall, white gouges in the simple panelling. He found his colonel’s room by deduction; its door stood open. For a few moments he was able to stand there alone, hearing the silence, yearning to communicate with the dead man who had so recently stayed here.

The bed was turned back as if a sleeper had just left. One chair was a little askew, as if someone had stood up and turned to the doorway. There were few real signs of violence. A sword and sword belt, pistol and ammunition pouches were laid by on a chest of drawers, unreachable from the bed or the chair. Everything was as it ought to be: black cloak, scarlet coat, baldric and hat on door-pegs, britches folded over a chair-back, belt loosely coiled on the chair’s seat, Bible at the bedside, papers on a small table with ink ready, small notebook for jottings (at Putney, Gideon remembered, the colonel had complained of a poor memory). Chests and saddlebags were neatly lined up along one wall. Everything was neat, as a sailor would have it.

A soldier entered quietly, with respect. The same maid had shown him in. ‘Major Wilkes sent me, in case you need assistance.’

Gideon gave orders for securing the papers, which should be taken to the major. He explained that the room must be carefully locked up until Colonel Rainborough’s property had been packed for his family. There would be no private sneakings up here to steal just a keepsake’ — a handkerchief, falling bands, spectacles, prayer book — no stolen memorials appearing in seedy auctions later, with faked rusty bloodstains,
‘as owned by the prominent Leveller Colonel Thomas Rainborough, and in his possession at Doncaster the same night he was treacherously slain…’.

‘Will they bring the corpse here?’ The maid’s eyes flickered to the bed. She could not help thinking of all the blood and how that blood, even congealing, would ruin good coverlets.

Gideon glanced at the soldier. ‘If the body comes back to the house, let it lie on a table in some convenient room downstairs. A coffin will be ordered …’ He and the soldier shared a brief silence, thinking of their great tall colonel. Rainborough would require a large coffin, specially made. Someone would have to organise that.

Tears wet the soldier’s cheeks as he gazed miserably around the room. Like Gideon he was infected by melancholy as he viewed this place that Thomas Rainborough had used, in which he had spent his last moments. The doused candles in the sconces had been quenched by his fingers. The room still contained his smell and his spirit. His piss would be in the chamberpot, his clothes still carried hints of him. Those boots — which Gideon had just spotted with their crumpled boot-hose laid across their tops, ready to jump into again — would be intractably imprinted with his shape and sweat, permanently altered since they left the maker’s last by the individual way he had walked and ridden.

‘Never more!’ uttered Gideon Jukes, despite himself. The reaction was private and unintentional. ‘Farewell, Rainborough,’ he added more formally, as he shepherded out his companions. They walked quietly on to the landing. Gideon himself found the key inside the chamber door, pulled it out and locked the room behind them. The housekeeper was staring up from downstairs.

After a second, Gideon unlocked the room again and reached behind the door for something which he carried downstairs on his arm. When he left the house, the body was still lying in the street, though Major Wilkes had set a guard until it could be taken up. He could hardly bear that terrible sight again, but Gideon Jukes walked steadily across to the corpse. The guards saw his intentions and allowed him through.

He knelt down on the cobbles, heedless of the wide pool of now-glutinous blood. There he gently covered Colonel Rainborough with his riding-cloak, for decency.

Gideon Jukes escorted the coffin to London.

More details of the raid had emerged. Twenty-two Royalists had ridden out from Pontefract Castle, on Friday night. ‘Eluding Sir Henry Cholmeley’s troops, a feat they achieved with ease, they crept south to Doncaster. They hid up in woods. At sunrise on Sunday morning, they emerged and met a spy from the town, carrying a Bible as identification — obviously the same man who directed Gideon. He passed on to the cavaliers details of how Doncaster was guarded and gave directions where to find Rainborough.

The horsemen presented themselves at St Sepulchre’s Gate, on the south side. They claimed that they had brought dispatches from Cromwell. Since they appeared to have ridden up on the London road, the single sentinel on this approach believed it all too trustingly.

The raiders split up: six to fall on the guard at St Mary’s Gate north of the town, through which they would make their eventual escape; six to tackle the main guard as it patrolled the middle of the town; six to cover the streets in case the alarm was raised. Four went to Rainborough’s lodging, where they gained admittance by once again spinning the yarn about dispatches and were taken upstairs by the lieutenant.

After the murder, the cavaliers rode home in daylight to Pontefract. At two o’clock in the afternoon, in full view of Cholmeley and his several hundred cavalry, who made no attempt to interfere, they trotted back into the castle. A great shout was heard from within the garrison. It was said that the castle governor then sent a letter to Sir Henry Cholmeley to say that Rainborough was lying dead on the streets of Doncaster. Cholmeley was reported to have burst out laughing, and laughed for a quarter of an hour.

In Doncaster, recriminations flew Captain John Smith was believed to have been with a whore at the Hinde Tavern. He fled, leaving a note for Major Wilkes, in which he claimed he intended to go to Fairfax at army headquarters to protest his innocence. He never got there; his money ran out halfway. Discovered and arrested, he was taken to London with a warrant to answer to both Houses of Parliament. While he was locked up at Ludgate, someone told him he had been convicted by a council of war and would be summarily shot. According to him, when he appealed to God for advice, God advised him to escape — so he took himself to the Netherlands, where in a feeble attempt to clear his name he issued a pamphlet, full of excuses for his own conduct and accusations of cowardice and grudge-bearing against Major Wilkes.