Traitor's Field (14 page)

His visitors murmured their sympathy. 

‘All very well for you men, trotting the countryside with no responsibility and no greater calling. All most pleasant for you, I’m sure.’ He picked up a folded paper from his table. ‘And you make your arrangements pretty tight, don’t you? We’ve barely received your letter.’

‘Our letter?’

The paper was brandished with more energy. ‘Announcing your visit. Only just got here.’

‘What letter?’

Now openly angry, and waspish: ‘You’ve come to talk to the prisoner Langdale. We’re getting him ready now.’

‘We came to bid you greeting, nothing more. We sent no letter.’

From the open door to the corridor: running boots on the stone, and shouts.

‘Langdale: another question.’ The voice was a murmur, the attention focused elsewhere.

‘You become tiresome, Shay. I thought you knew everything.’

‘Why did Cromwell stay north of the river?’

The old beaked face was immediately grave, and somehow sadder. ‘It made no sense. By all the calculations of convention, it made no sense. And yet there he was, suddenly and unstoppably. I had many hours to ponder the matter, every minute of them evil.’ He focused on Shay again. ‘You think somehow he knew our dispositions? Scouted us out?’

‘I wondered.’

Langdale shook his head slowly. ‘They say he can smell the secrets of a field: the terrain, the placement of the men. It’s unearthly.’ The lines of the face sharpened and crackled; Sir Marmaduke Langdale was back in the sunken lane again, his men drowning in mud and Cromwell’s horsemen coming at him in waves that would never end. ‘He is a force of nature herself, Shay. He has the devil in him.’

Shay listened in silence. A military opinion from Langdale was truth. ‘I never thought to hear you superstitious.’

‘In thirty years, and as many slaughters, I’ve not seen the like.’ Another shake of the head. ‘I think it’s much simpler, Shay; no secret, nor complicated calculation. That man hungers for battle, for glory and for slaughter, and when he sees them near he comes at them by the straightest road.’

The cell empty, the prisoner Langdale disappeared: Governor Hutchinson had acted fast, his deeper frustrations channelled into anger at this new outrage to his dignity, anger at those who had allowed this embarrassment, anger at his two visitors for somehow being linked to it. Instant orders to one of his Captains had spread throughout the castle, and soldiers had clattered through the warrens towards the abandoned cell.

The Governor had himself visited the scene, had returned still angrier from his private maze, now unfamiliar and treacherous to him. More orders. A message to the town. The main gate to be closed. He had been leaving to resume his personal oversight of operations when another sentry had hurried up to him, a bustle of breaths and equipment: a cupboard had been found awry, a hidden passage behind it – the Prince’s passage of legend. More orders: urgent pursuit into the tunnel; soldiers to leave through the main gate and make for the lower meadow with all haste; another message to the town. Then the Governor was striding off again into the maze.

A Captain was left in Governor Hutchinson’s chamber in case further information should arrive and need to be carried to the Governor. Everyone else was caught up in the search, with one exception.

John Thurloe sat silently, upright in a simple chair, frowning at the folded letter that still lay on the table.

Shay and Langdale had passed forty minutes in companionable silence on a crumbling spiral stair that twisted up into the open sky. Two minutes after the pursuit had passed by the entrance to the stair, they were back down it and away towards the opposite side of the castle.

‘A waste of a secret tunnel if you ask me, Shay.’

‘I don’t. Most likely it remained one of the thousand secret conveniences of our history, but over three centuries I can’t guarantee it’s not become known. And I may have been seen.’

‘Now what, then?’

‘Now you’re my prisoner, Langdale.’ An irritated shake of the grizzled head. ‘I’ll take that knife, and I’ll bind your hands.’

‘I preferred my plan. I liked the sound of the gaoler’s wife.’

‘So why did they send the letter?’

‘Sir?’

Thurloe’s head snapped round. ‘The letter, Captain. The forged letter from the Committee. What was its purpose?’

The Captain shifted uncomfortably, shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t – To distract us, I suppose. Put us off our balance.’

Thurloe launched up out of the chair. ‘But it put us on our balance!’ He aimed a slow and deliberate kick at the leg of the Governor’s table. ‘You people clearly weren’t paying much attention to General Langdale, and the first thing that letter made you do – very natural – was go to check on him.’

‘A bit lucky, then?’

Thurloe smiled and shook his head. ‘This wasn’t about luck.’ His head was columns of figures, tumbling Greek declensions, the mental disciplines of his youth; he felt the warmth and thrill of rigorous thought. ‘What was the effect of that letter? To send us to the cell to check the prisoner. What was the effect of sending us to the cell?’ The Captain kept opening his mouth as if to try to answer, but Thurloe was looking through him. ‘To have us find the secret passage. What was the effect of us finding the passage?’ The questions and answers came steadily, as if by rote. ‘To have us chasing into it.’

‘And we’ll try to block the end, sir.’ The Captain’s efficiency found voice at last. ‘Supposed to come out somewhere in the lower meadow.’

‘Which is where?’

The Captain thought for a second and pointed to his left. ‘Roughly that direction.’

Thurloe nodded. The castle around him, a shambling warren of holes and tunnels and mistakes and possibilities. He pointed a long finger in the opposite direction. ‘And does the castle have any gate or door on the other side?’

‘Help him up then, man!’ The sentry, sullen but quick to take an order, bent to the task, but Langdale had gripped the saddle with his tied hands and swung himself over. Shay on his unfamiliar horse skittered beside him, stared down at the sentries as if in thought. ‘Can you two find mounts?’

‘You’ll need men with you, sir?’

‘I’ve a troop outside, but. . . No matter. Shouldn’t have a problem with this old relic.’

‘Pox-raddled, dirty traitor!’ – and Langdale lunged at him; Shay batted him back into his saddle. Ahead, the gate swung open.

Thurloe striding through the castle corridors, deducing his way through the maze with the Captain trotting behind him calling suggestions; and then Governor Hutchinson loomed in front of him as he spun round a narrow turn. ‘We’ve got him!’

A confusion of limbs and words and thoughts, then: ‘Got him?’

The Governor, breathing hard and somehow heated: ‘Got Langdale. They’re taking him away now – that third man of yours and a couple of my men.’ He glared at Thurloe: ‘Your man’s a bit damned rud—’ 

‘A third man?’ A second of confusion, then instinct faster than deduction, and Thurloe barged the Governor aside and was charging through the warren, the Captain still clattering after him.

Shay was at the gate, ducking his head under the arch as his nag clopped ponderously over the uneven stones. 

Ahead, through the gate, a short wooden bridge and then open ground. Something snagged in his hearing, some imperfection in the stolid rhythms of the castle. The hooves trod hollow and heavy over the stone.

He had Langdale’s horse on a long rein, following behind him, the old General slumped and scowling.

‘Stop those men!’

The horses’ ears pricked up, and the heads of Langdale and the two sentries whirled up to seek the sound, but Shay had yanked on the long rein and kicked viciously at his horse. Beyond the open ground the trees. If they could make the trees. . .

Thurloe, a frozen moment as he saw conspiracy happening in front of him, and then he was stumbling down rough steps, hands snagging and scratching against stone, the Captain above him repeating the shout: ‘Stop those men!’

A uniform meant an order, and the nearest of the sentries lunged for Langdale’s horse. Shay was through the gate, but the unknown horse wasn’t having it. It hesitated, skittered round, and backed into Langdale now accelerating through. The old General swore, pulled at his horse’s neck, kicked into the flanks, but now there was some new pull on him, the beast swerving odd and heavy beneath him. Then Shay moving past him back through the gate, the horses squeezing and shuffling, a flick of a knife to release his hands, and Shay lashed out with his boot at the man clutching the saddle. Suddenly free, the knife grabbed and in his belt, Langdale kicked at his horse again and was away through the gate, Shay spinning and hurrying after, with the man in black no more than a strange stain across his blurring vision.

Hooves rattling and echoing on the planks of the bridge, and now there were more men closing in on it from the other end. Langdale’s horse reared at the sight of blades, and there were three, four soldiers blocking their way. Shay kicked his animal into the charge and for once it obeyed, but there wasn’t the distance to gather speed. One man went sprawling, but other hands were scrabbling at his legs, reins, saddle. A blade appeared and flashed in his hand, and another man went down with a scream, but he was slow now and stopping.