Traitor's Field (84 page)

Lyle and the two soldiers with him: witches in the night, while the honest citizens of Grantham kept their doors locked and prayed for morning.

‘They’ll have been cautious at Nottingham, and they must have lost time at Bingham. They can’t have come as fast as our gallopers, and they can’t have changed horses as often. We must be ahead of them now.’

Lyle’s nervy alertness wasn’t shared by his weary companions. ‘So?’

‘So I think a little ambush.’

‘Can’t the patrol just pick them up?’

‘These militia peasants? In the half-light? Thurloe’ll turn tail and it’s evens he’ll get clear away. Have to cut them off. Surround them.’

Thurloe was fighting to keep himself alert as he rode into Grantham. The idea of rest was a cruel tease. The idea of a bed was an image of the divine. The evening was closing in, and the gloom was echoed in his head.

Had to assume they were ahead of him now. Had to be careful.

Ahead of them on the road: flames. How could that be? He slowed. Sentries, of course, with a fire to keep warm. Fifty yards away, and he could make out the intermittent orange-tinged outline of men moving in the firelight.

But there was a turning before then, to the right. Without breaking pace they took it. Houses to the left; hedges and gardens and occasional houses to the right. Skirting the centre of the town would be sensible, anyway.

The horses trudged on in the twilight.

A vestigial alertness, and Thurloe saw another fire ahead of them. The horses trudged closer. Voices, obscure, and again the suggestion of shapes and movement. He sucked in a breath of the evening, tried to revive his brain. He’d guessed the alarm would have overtaken them by now, and so it had. This was still possible. He knew it was possible. Two people could disappear into England. Nottingham; London fortress; Brighton: a man could slip into the cracks of night unseen.

Sentries on the main road behind them. Sentries ahead. No gaps to the right.

Another turning to the left, between two buildings, and again they took it without changing step.

The steady tramp of hooves was lulling Thurloe. The evening closing around him, the quiet dark backstreet, the even plod of the horse, it all felt so gentle, so easy.

The street ahead deserted, inviting; the occasional glow of a lantern. A street to slip through; a night to disappear in.

‘We’re only three, Mr Lyle; shouldn’t we—’

‘It’s a Government clerk and a woman. Lost your nerve?’

‘So who did for Baines, then?’

‘Do as you’re damn’ bid! Hutch blocks the road, we move in. How hard do you want it?’

And now the trudge of horses, somewhere in the darkening evening, and Lyle clutched the other’s arm, pulling them back, eyes peering to pick up the first suggestion of movement round the corner.

‘Mr Lyle, sir.’ A murmur only, but Lyle had spun and grabbed the throat. The Captain of the local militia detachment, now a frozen alarm in the shadows. ‘Sir, one of our pickets – patrol just found him – dead, sir – his throat cut.’

A ferocious hiss: ‘Hold your positions!’

The lure of the deserted street, a way ahead and freedom from all the sentries behind. Thurloe was fighting to clarify the shadows, and all the time the even thump of the hooves beneath matching his heartbeat.

An eruption in the steady line of the street in front, a distortion of the darkness, one of the shadows billowing out from the side and becoming a horse, and a man on the horse, and the first suggestion of a cart behind, and now the enticing backstreet was narrowing, being swallowed by the shadow. Instinctively Thurloe pushed the horse forwards, heard Rachel’s gasp.

The shadow bloomed further across his vision and the light dwindled and the path was still wide enough for their horses, and then for one horse, and then it shrivelled and the night exploded in shouts and then a shot.

The shadows, the shouts, stopped for an instant at the shot. Then the outline of the man on top of the horse began to change, shrinking and toppling and disappearing, and the path between horse and wall opened again and Thurloe grabbed Rachel’s reins and kicked his horse into life and in a second they were plunging through the gap and into space.

‘Hutch is down!’

‘After them!’

More shots, from behind them, and shouts. ‘He’s getting away!’ A chaos of boots and voices. ‘There!’

‘This way! He’s killing our men!’

‘Then it’s him or the pox, and I don’t care. There’s a Royalist spy and a bloody traitor making for the sea, and I will stop them. Come on, damn you!’

The ride to Boston was a weary unruly dream, a constant apprehension of shadows and shapes in the moonlight and the lurching and stumbling of the horses on the rough road. How long had she been riding now? Nine hours? Twelve? More than she’d ever ridden, more than should be possible. Her body was numb: hands locked on the reins, shoulders dead, her backside and her thighs sore for ever. And her head felt empty, adrift: a wasteland of sleeplessness that blurred unconsciousness and wakefulness, reality and her strange spectral fancies.

Thurloe was beside her, Thurloe was leading her to safety. But when he turned to check on her she saw the worry in his eyes, and the dead staring exhaustion.

A flickering, elusive parade hurtling past them: trees, bushes, isolated farmhouses glowing pale in the night, fences, glimpsed and reconstructed in the fog, and sometimes the pinpoint flashing eyes of animals.

A building to the left, close by, and one to the right. More buildings, hollow sockets of doors and windows gaping at her as she passed. They were in a settlement.

Thurloe slowed, stopped a moment, heaved himself up in the stirrups to get a better look at something, and then led the way into an alley and blackness. She heard him drop off his horse, and she did the same.

Some grain of strength: ‘And now?’

‘We find our boat.’

She looked at him, pulled herself up. ‘You’re very sure of yourself, John Thurloe.’

‘I think a horizontal line is a bed. I think two vertical lines is a horse. But I know that the flat ‘u’ is a boat.’ She stared at his outline. ‘Come along. We’ll leave the horses now. The soldiers could be all around us.’ She saw his shoulders sag, saw him wrestle them up again.

Shay eased his way around Boston by memories: old paths and old scents in the moonlight. The darkness was full of the rich sour smell of the marshes, edged with salt. The world of his younger misdeeds: assignations and trades; a place to find a lover, or to lose an enemy.

Unseen creatures whistled and shifted nearby. 

Thurloe had the network now, and he was learning to use it. If he’d known how to get a horse in Bingham, he’d know how to get a boat in Boston.

Hesitation: the path was not as Shay remembered. There’d been efforts to drain the marshes in the thirties, and those had created new paths and new pools. Then the dykes had decayed or been destroyed in the forties, and again the land and the water had shifted against each other, an eternal skirmish, a perpetual blurring of the boundary.

Trying to bustle around the town looking for Rachel and Thurloe would be a dangerous waste of time. If they’d come safe to Boston, they’d be hiding out for the hour or two it would take to ready the boat. His last service to her could only be to track the boat down the river to the sea, and make sure she got on it. If Rachel hadn’t come safe here, he couldn’t help her any more.

A squat square ghost off to his left, perhaps half a mile, and the memory kicked warmly in him. A place of ancient sins, the old chapel, a place for forbidden love and forbidden trade. Teach knew it too, and if nowhere else he would go there. The chapel wouldn’t have moved, and Shay knew he could navigate by it. 

The larger question: what was Thurloe’s game, now?

Again he stopped. A whispering in the gloom, animal movement or voices or just the wind. Shay stood still, listening to the spirits of the night, alone on the borderland of the world.