Traitor's Field (80 page)

Shay came at Astbury across country, down out of the hills. His horse he left a mile away from Astbury lands, and he went the rest of the way with the dewy grass brushing at his knees and his eyes fixed on the first buildings of the estate.

He trudged dull-headed, an instinct of mission moving him forward when consciousness could not. His thighs started to feel damp as the dew soaked through, and it wakened him a little.

He had to go careful. The direct road, the fastest ride, risked attention and capture. Whatever had happened to Rachel he could rectify. Even if his papers were discovered, something might be done. But if he was captured all was lost. As Astbury loomed nearer, the back façade high over the trees, he slowed again and began to look for cover: ditches, hedges and walls, the thick greenery of summer.

It had been a fast journey regardless. The network had served him well.

Now he was in the orchard, moving from tree to tree and ducking the lower-hanging apples. At the end of the ranks of trees there was a high brick wall, beyond it the first terrace of garden below the house. He glanced left and right for avenues of movement; for concealment; for escape.

The orchard: where a soldier had been buried three years before, another unexpected visitor. The strange crops of Astbury.

A fast journey, and it wasn’t certain that the Parliament men would have fixed on Astbury or come with any speed. They were not as driven as he, nor as wise. There could still be time.

The last rank of trees, and he set himself behind a trunk and peered carefully through the blurring of apples and leaves. 

A musketeer was leaning over the wall, staring out into the orchard.

Infinitely slowly, Shay pulled back through the trees.

At first it had been three men, cantering up the beech alley to the house. Rachel had seen them from an upstairs window, and known that something had changed, badly. The Army – Thurloe – had new information; there had been a defeat of some kind; Shay was prisoner; Shay was dead.

Three men. One of them, surely, was Thurloe.

Then more horsemen hurrying up the drive. She went cold. What threat could she and her distracted father represent? What threat did they now face?

Then the three men were standing in the hall. Thurloe wouldn’t catch her eye. One of the others was sneering – ‘suspected of complicity in treason’ – ‘hand over immediately all materials pertaining to Royalist conspiracy, and all money hidden to support it’ – and her rheumy-eyed father was grinning foolishly and babbling and no one was listening.

Rachel looked shocked, and hurried away up the stairs. Through every window she could see soldiers.

Thurloe had watched her go.
Why did I come here? Do I want her to see me triumph? Do I want to see any of this?

He wanted to be in the search. But he didn’t want Rachel to see him at it. He turned and walked out of the house. Two platoons of soldiers had arrived: one to establish a cordon around the house; the other to search.

He began to wander around the outside of the house, enjoying the warmth and the peace and trying not to see the soldiers bustling past him to surround the building. There were little vestiges of routine standing out against the chaos he had brought: a pile of apples, the old man – Jacob – head down at his garden work trying to pretend there was no intrusion, kitchen waste flung out the back door in the last minutes of normality, the faint whinnying of horses, and insects oblivious to it all buzzing near him.

The soldiers unbuilt Astbury House.

Every layer of it above the brick was ripped away, in a beastly seething of men that tore and hacked until the old civilized thing stood naked among the trees. It was a savage destruction, a fast and implacable wrenching of wood and fabric, the smashing of crockery and glass, the unnecessary hurling of things from dented-lead cracked-glass windows, small pieces of furniture and trinkets that weren’t worth the pilfering plummeting stupidly to earth to smash and thud. A dozen fragments of curtain plunged out of upstairs windows, the heavier cloth swooping down to shroud the mounting debris, the lighter materials catching the wind, and billowing over the lawn, blurring like tears over the scene until they hitched up on a branch. But the destruction had a remorseless knowledgeable sense to it as well: with craftsmen’s understanding the soldiers went at panelling and joints and frames and tables, like anti-carpenters, reversing whole lifetimes of work.

Sir Anthony Astbury sat hunched on a bare chair in the hall, arms clamped around himself and shuddering, and watched as his whole existence was dismantled around him. The layers of luxury were ripped away with the curtains and tapestries, the layers of structure with the panelling and the random efforts the soldiers made with their knives and feet at the plaster and the floorboards. As the plague of soldiers swarmed over it, the house split and pustuled, debris and scars and blemishes. Astbury ceased to be the place he knew, and the layers of his identity peeled and shrivelled with it. In the end, Sir Anthony Astbury huddled on the chair and cried the mad, unknowable tears of a baby.

Rachel found Thurloe on the front lawn. He was forcing himself to watch the destruction now, explaining to himself the need to sacrifice beauty to principle, and suddenly his vision was the wild gold hair and cold face of Rachel Astbury, and something heaved in his gut.

She planted herself in front of him, two paces away, and stood there gazing silently into his face.

His eyes widened in faint apprehension, and then uncertainty.

She stood in front of him, gazing into his face. Her head was high, the eyes wide and shocked and defiant and somehow triumphant.

The ugly sounds of destructive men and splintering wood continued to squawk from the house, behind her, and she did not move. To Thurloe, the world was her vast eyes, and the blur of destruction beyond.

A soldier approached, briskness suppressing his unease at the strange scene: the Government man in black and the beautiful young woman, standing close and staring silently at each other from blank faces. The scene was wrong, anyway: he knew that somehow it needed remaking. Besides, pretty girl, might be a spy, there’d be ways of treating her. . . From the side he neared, hesitated, and then advanced and his arm swung up towards her. ‘Soldier!’

It was the Government man, and a bitten ferocity in the word made the soldier stop, and his hand hung in the air near the woman’s shoulder.

‘If you touch her I’ll see you hanged by evening.’

Such a strange and disproportionate idea and the soldier started to smile, and then he saw the Government man’s face staring at him dead cold, and the hand hung in the air and then dropped, and he turned away.

‘Your heroism is meaningless to me, John Thurloe.’

For a moment he relaxed at the return of conversation, something natural, but then he absorbed the tone of the words, bitter-bleak. He refocused on the lovely face, and was confused to see that something in it seemed to have collapsed with the words.

‘You and your kind are destroying my whole world. The life I know is no longer possible. You might as well give me to your soldiers.’

How could she be triumphant and yet somehow disappointed, somehow broken? Still Thurloe stared back at her, determined to suffer the accusation that she represented, but she was done now and uninterested, and turned and left him.

He was ashamed to find that part of his mind held clear.

Either she does not know of anything hidden here
, it was thinking,
or she knows that we will not find it
.

A gentle heartbeat on the edge of Shay’s dreams. Out of place; from another world.

Still it came, a low rhythmic thump.

He woke quickly – a moment of staring stupidity in the night – and shook himself to full alertness.

A low rhythmic thump at the door.

Not a feeble knock, but a knock delivered with deliberate restraint.

He picked up his knife, took another moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, and then moved with long careful strides to the door.

He waited there. No more knocking; how long had his visitor been trying? Then a squawk of a creak.

He reached for the latch. He gripped it, lifted it delicately, and then with one smooth fast movement pulled the door open and stepped back to the side into the darkness.

A gasp and a little spasm of alarm from the figure now outlined clear in the doorway thanks to a candle somewhere behind it, and then Shay registered the slenderness, knew this for a woman, saw something familiar in the waves of hair. . .

‘Rachel!’ He held the surprise to a murmur, and then grabbed at her arm and pulled her inside. He checked behind her, picked up the candle from the corridor, and was swiftly into his room again and closing the door.

Another candle lit and the fire rekindled and her face glowed orange in the darkness. There was a wildness to her, an abandon to her hair and her expression.

‘Great Gods, girl,’ he muttered insistently, ‘why are you come? How—’

‘I hoped’ – she spat the word, unpleased at the implication of dependence – ‘you were nearby. If you were nearby, and couldn’t get to the house, you’d be here.’

‘What will these people think of you?’ 

Her head lifted a fraction. ‘Exactly what I want them to think. They’ll not be surprised that a lone traveller is visited by a whore, and they’ll think nothing further of my identity.’

It was a woman’s wisdom, delivered by a woman, and amid the warming frankness Shay felt a cold pang of something lost. ‘You should be—’

‘Astbury is ruined.’

‘What?’ The sense of loss was growing as he spoke.

‘They have pulled it apart. My world is a shell of a building with an old broken man keening in the wreckage.’ And immediately the control and the maturity strained and threatened to break. ‘Every thing I have ever owned, every thing I have touched, has been. . . the soldiers have – they have touched it all – every thing, every place, is fouled.’

Two great hands clamped on her shoulders, and her chest and breath heaved and shuddered.

‘You poor girl.’ He knew the destruction, he knew what Astbury looked like now. He felt the loss in his gut, and he winced for these precious things he could not save. ‘It’s like a great part of our family has died. All we have fought for.’

‘Why should you care?’ The eyes were up, fierce and wet and shining. ‘This is a chaos of your creation, and you have set us all adrift in it. You – you are chaos.’

Shay’s face soured in the gloom, and then he gave a great mournful nod. ‘Yes,’ he said with finality. He watched her wild face in the weird glare of the flames. ‘I am truly sorry, Rachel. I would have burned the world to protect your innocence.’

‘By burning the world you have destroyed it.’ She wriggled free of the powerful hands, and immediately missed them. She wanted a comfort, but no longer knew where to find it. And she wanted this big, knowing shadow to realize that he too could be vulnerable.

‘But don’t worry.’ The bitterness stuck through the murmured words. ‘Your papers are safe.’ And she watched him.

A horse-kick of hope in his gut, and a slower surprise, and then caution. ‘Papers?’