Traitor's Field (82 page)

Shay watched him. Eventually Jacob settled himself cautiously on a stool on the other side of the fireplace. The dog settled next to him; its slack features slumped into sleep.

‘Trouble for the garden, Jacob?’

Jacob lifted one shoulder, a suggestion of a shrug.

Shay waited. 

Eventually Jacob shook his head. ‘The earth don’t mind. Mix a few things up. Wash out a bridge maybe.’ Another shrug. ‘Branches. Thatch.’

‘Sometimes the wind blows from one flank, sometimes another. The tree bends and sways but does not break. Eh, Jacob? A man must shift as best he may.’ Jacob watched him, warily. ‘You and this land: you’ll outlive all of it, won’t you? All the Kings and Parliaments and battles and trickeries.’

Jacob said, ‘I have broken no trust nor undertaking given freely to any man, sir.’

‘I’m sure you have not.’ Shay’s voice was grave, but then lightened. ‘Men come to you, with the newest idea, the newest fashion, and you absorb it. The newest secret. I was not the first, and I will not be the last man to trust to you and this good soil.’

Silence from the two old gnarled men. The snoring of the dog, a gentle rasping and hissing in the corner, the faint pulse of the world. The bluster and shout of the storm outside, testing the windows and moaning.

George Astbury would have burned the ephemeral papers before he burned the book. He did not burn the book with the papers. That night he was in the house with the family, the soldier arrived, the soldier died and was buried, and George left for Preston and death. In that time the book disappeared.

‘We have to dig him up again, Jacob.’

Jacob glanced to the window, whining and bleared with rain.

A chewing, and a nod. ‘Aye, sir.’

A decision. Rachel stood with her back to her battered home, staring out over the garden, bright and lush with summer. Small in the distance, keeping away from the house on some instinct of mourning or self-preservation, Jacob was bent to work among the flowers.

There were two visions in front of her; two possibilities. Mortimer Shay, as she had seen him in the night, an old man overtaken by his own stratagems, in a cause that looked backwards and had become self-defeating. And John Thurloe, as she had seen him in the day, brilliant servant of a power that had lost all restraint, a power whose self-preservation had become more important than its ideals, its ideals more important than humanity.

Bees humming near her, and the faint click of Jacob’s blade breaking the earth.

She shook her head.

She would have to find one of them; for one last time she would have to depend on one of them. 

Either would do.

She turned, and there was a man walking towards her. A moment’s wonder at what fortune might have decided, and then the uncomfortable realization that it was neither of them. It was one of the other Parliament men; one of the other brutes from yesterday.

No doubt: he was heading for her. Rachel’s heart began to hammer in her chest.

There was clear intent in his expression – and some underlying discomfort. Tarrant, was that the name? Instinctively, her hands clutched together against her bodice.

‘Rachel Astbury.’ The sneer made it a kind of accusation. ‘You’re coming with me. We’ve some questions for you.’

She nodded slowly. ‘Far? For long?’

He shrugged, smiled. ‘Could be.’

Another nod. ‘I must just fetch. . . some necessities – for the journey. Will you come inside?’ Heart hammering.

She saw him enjoy the sense of invitation, and she turned and started for the house. ‘I thought I’d answered all you needed yesterday. With Mr Thurloe.’

‘Mr Thurloe doesn’t make the rules.’

‘No. No, he doesn’t.’ Heart hammering, hammering, hammering against her clenched hands.

He followed a couple of steps behind her and to the side. ‘I’ve always hated women like you.’ Her stride altered, and she wondered what was coming. ‘Women like you always thought I was dirt, didn’t you?’

She hesitated, slowed, glanced over her shoulder at him. ‘Aren’t you afraid it’s all women?’ And she strode on towards the house, Tarrant coming behind with face twisting up into the scowl. In through the wrecked door by the pantry, the empty stone space a sudden cool, fighting to control her breathing, starting to turn, and as Tarrant stepped into the gloom and his eyes began to readjust, the dagger came free of her cuff and she stabbed him in the chest.

I have done it. Oh God what have I done?

It turned out that men don’t always just die, if you stab them. Tarrant staggered back against the door, and it slammed shut, and then swung open again as its wrecked catch failed to engage and he rolled clumsily to the side and dropped. He slumped against the door pillar, feet scrabbling for purchase, gasping and calling as his hands flailed for the blade. ‘You – bitch! You vicious. . . fucking bitch! You’ve—’ and another agonized choke. His hands were scarlet, his white shirt front was scarlet, and he rolled and moaned and would not die.

The bright doorway darkened and filled. Pressed back against the wall, every muscle clenched and eyes wild, she pulled her gaze away from the writhing man on the floor.

‘Tarrant, this— My Christ!’

It was Thurloe.

His eyes went rapidly back and forth between the wounded man and Rachel and he fought for words. ‘Christ, what have you done?’

‘She. . . bitch – she—’ the words collapsed in choking.

Thurloe gazed at her. His scrutiny kindled a renewed defiance, and she fought her breaths under control and her chin came up.

He bent towards the body. ‘You—’ He grappled for control, for the rightness.
Tarrant’s sneer at Pontefract: What are you fighting for, Thurloe?
The twisted coughing face beneath him, and the beautiful crazed pride above. One great breath, hissed out. ‘You must get out of here. Now. Exactly now.’

‘Yes,’ she said, brittle calm. ‘I must.’

Another shadow in the doorway, and Rachel gasped in a kind of relief and stepped past Thurloe and Tarrant towards it. ‘Oh, Jacob! The satchel: I need it now.’

Thurloe hissed, ‘We’ve no time!’

The old man grunted. ‘In the dog’s corner, miss, by the fire; in his blanket.’ He caught her arm – ‘Give him a pat as you go, eh?’ – and she was away.

For an instant it distracted Thurloe from the moaning, rolling man beneath him. ‘I’d guess you didn’t give me everything, then?’

Jacob chewed on this. ‘Guess you didn’t ask, sir.’

Tarrant was white, and still coughing and swearing sporadically, but his breathing had evened. Thurloe, crouched over him, glanced from the face to the dark wound in the chest and up again. Tarrant’s eyes followed. ‘You. . . You. . .’ Thurloe took another deep breath. Then he clamped his hand over Tarrant’s mouth, wrenched the dagger from his chest, and stabbed him in the heart. He held his hand firm until the body ceased to spasm.

He looked up. Jacob considered the scene for a moment, and then shook his head slightly, faint bewilderment and then indifference.

‘Oh, go and mind your garden, old man.’ 

Shay came at Astbury on foot and across country. It was enemy ground now, but he had to see how it lay.

The ruin of the place struck him first, as he peered through a screen of leaves: the smashed windows, the broken timbers, the sign of scorching above some of the openings, and the debris scattered across the lawn. The sight kicked him again for his complacency.

Then he saw the soldiers around what was left of the front door, and saw their excitement. Something unusual; the signs were immediate. The press of men, the circling of the horses, the shouts, the toing and froing. As he watched, three riders flung out from the group at a gallop and tore down the main drive. There was one man still giving orders, then in a single fluid movement he swung himself up onto a horse and pulled it round and set off down the drive himself, three more men following.

Shay watched for a moment longer, saw the energy dissipating, and withdrew into the trees.

Jacob was wheeling a barrow of leaves with steady momentum, when he heard his name murmured close by. He hesitated, and then continued until he reached a shed, where he emptied the barrow. Then he drifted into the shadow of the trees, and worked his way back.

‘What’s the fuss, Jacob?’

Jacob hesitated.

‘If it doesn’t concern Miss Rachel, it doesn’t matter to you. If it does, she needs you to tell me everything.’

Jacob told him, to Shay’s gathering alarm.

‘And she’s flying – but how? How can she—’

‘There’s a man with her. A Parliament man, sir.’

‘He’s – what, he’s arrested her? Stolen her away?’

‘I think he’s helping her.’

It made no sense. ‘Who?’

‘The one called Thurloe.’

Thurloe?

‘They’re making for Lincolnshire, sir. Boston.’

‘Why there?’

‘Better for the Continent, he said. Maybe not what pursuers’d expect. He had some paper helped him decide.’

‘Paper?’

‘A bundle of papers, like a—’

‘Like a list of names?’
Ye Gods. But how?

‘Could be. He had to hunt in it – seemed to be guessing at some names – then he hit on Boston.’

Worcester. The commandery at Worcester
. Shay felt the world falling away from him. He gathered himself again, nodded towards the house. ‘Who was in charge there?’

‘Man called Lyle, sir.’

‘What manner of man?’

Jacob shook his head.

‘And this Thurloe?’

‘A fair enough gentleman. One who’d try to find his way to right in the end.’

‘And now he’s trying to find his way to the coast, across a hundred miles of country, with Miss Rachel in his power.’

‘You’d best be after them, then, sir.’

‘Yes, I had.’ He turned, and stopped. ‘Had she a – a bag with her?’

‘She did.’

Shay nodded. ‘Jacob, if a man asks for me – a man on his own, not a Parliament man or a soldier – tell him to find me in Boston. To ride like Satan himself. He’ll know where.’

‘Aye, sir.’ The old man leaned forward, hand opening and closing in an attempt to find a gesture. ‘Sir. . . she is all we have left, sir.’

The first stage of the journey felt like freedom: the horse pounding rhythmically and sure beneath her, Thurloe steady by her side, the wind pulling at her hair and bathing her face and seeming to blast into her, washing clean all past sense of confinement.

But by Derby, after three hours of hard riding, the aches had become permanent in her thighs and hunger and tiredness were starting to eat at her spirit. The mad euphoria of what had happened at Astbury had seeped away.

I am a fugitive.

I am a murderer.

I have deliberately abandoned the only place I ever knew safety.