Traitor's Field (3 page)

Further away to the south there’s movement again. Another patrol, perhaps, or off-duty men on the scavenge.
The battle is not done.

The lane drops below the surrounding fields, and the bodies cluster like flies around the mud.

This is where it started.

The wounds tell him. The sheer volume of death tells him. He’s walking on the bodies now, bodies torn and shattered by the violence, bodies that drowned in the mud. He remembers the endless rain of yesterday as he galloped across England, and he sees today what he was too late for then: the bleary blinking through the downpour as the endless attacks come across the fields, the slippery hacking in the sunken lane as finally a wave of men breaks through the musket fire to the pikes, the gasping for breath and for a mouthful of water through the torrent, the vast onslaught of noise.

Why did Cromwell stay north of the river?

This is where it started, but still he has not found his man. The battle was thickest here, and longest. There will be more officers among the dead. There should. . . but no, their finery will not betray them now, because it will have betrayed them already to the scavengers. 

A naked torso. He wrenches at the slippery shoulder; sure enough, the face tells breeding. But not his man. The blackened chest tells close-range musket fire.

A glimpse of brighter cloth at the bottom of a brown pile of death, and he’s on his knees rummaging in the squelch of limbs and wounds, the eyes wide with horror and the mouths packed with mud, until he pulls another pale unknown face towards the light for the last time.

Have you somehow slipped away?

The forward edge of the sunken lane, knee-deep in bodies and the wind stinging his ears, trying to see the very first instant of battle, the first fact: a shout of alarm, a musket shot, a thunder of mounted death coming across the Lancashire fields.

He turns away, towards the distant huddle of the town. Much nearer, there’s a single oak, and as the wind gusts again something waves to him from behind the trunk.

His boots and legs belong more to the earth now than to him, brown and misshapen and pulling him down with them as he tramps up out of the lane and over to the tree.

You poor fool. Was this what you wanted?

The old man is sitting against the tree as if asleep. He reads the wounds in the torn clothes. The old man has taken a deep cut across the shoulder and a worse one in his side.

Did it feel like heroism? Did it feel like manhood?

The man wasn’t really so old, but dying has hurried things along. The face is the distant empty grey of the morning sky beyond. The eyelids hang frail and wrinkled above the hollow cheeks. He had staggered away from the carnage to die, seeking some final moment of privacy, some last trace of the privilege for which he fought. The oak kept its secret well from the scavengers.

He makes a swift search of the body: pockets, but also boots and sleeves, pulling the dead weight away from the tree to be sure he has missed nothing. A few coins, which he leaves. Three or four rose petals, likewise. Then, inside, stubborn among the distorted clothes, a folded piece of paper. He pulls it free, glances at it, and black frown lines rip across his face. This he takes.

The dead face coughs.

Surely not.
And something like frustration flickers in him. He crouches closer to the face. Hand against the temple; finger and thumb pulling up the eyelids. There is something stubborn still at work in the old head. Ear and cheek tilted close towards the lips, trying to isolate a ghost of a breeze in the cold morning.

Surely not
. He checks the wounds again – especially the side, pulling the clothes uneasily away from the gore, teeth set. These wounds will not be endured for much longer.

Then voices in the wind. A glance behind him. There are men on the bridge again. The eyes come back more intently to the face, to the wounds.

There is no such thing as capture for this man.

For a moment, the two old faces are close. Two grey men alone in the wilderness of the death-blasted moor, ghosts of a fertile age long past.

As gently as he can, he pulls a ring from one of the wounded man’s cold fingers; it catches on the old rolls of knuckle-skin. Then he pulls a dagger from his mud-clutched boot. He places the blade tip against the old man’s breast, and a simple kiss on the forehead, and then he pushes until the dagger’s hilt comes hard against the body.

Thus passes the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey.

‘T
here’s men, Miss Rachel, in the trees.’ Brown eyes came up fast from the book. ‘In the trees?’ Her body seemed sharp, strained; she felt the muscles pulling at her to stand up.

‘Yes, miss. Just across the lawn. They might – they might be coming here, miss.’

She was up and across to the window in four long lithe steps, the sweep of her dress hurrying behind her.

I cannot remember when I was not afraid.

Stubborn raindrops still held to the glass, and the pale spread of the front garden flickered at her crazily, distorted and strange through a hundred panes. The garden was a fresh breath of green stretching away, but the oaks fringed dark around its edges.

Among them, the black shapes of men were moving.

The door slammed open against the wall, the noise gross and wrong and sending her instinctively backwards, and a soldier was standing on the threshold. He had a smashed grin in a stained and unshaven face, a caricature of impurity and mischief.

‘What’s here, then?’ Big eyes patrolled the room, smiling at the effect of the door slamming and his own words, and then widening with an uneasy excitement as they absorbed the long brown waves of hair and the full sweep of the female body.

He said it again – ‘What’s here, then?’ – but the words were a hesitant substitute for anything better to say; a little tongue wandered over the lower lip. Rachel Astbury tasted revulsion in her throat. Her breath came in an uneasy hiss.

The man began to sway towards her. Was he drunk? Or was this shamble his broken norm? Some stiller part of her brain was telling her that she couldn’t even be sure this was a Roundhead, a soldier of Parliament, and not a fugitive King’s man.

But then, what did that matter?

‘Who’s this, then?’ He seemed to be conducting a dialogue with his own sly mind. Three yards away he stopped, and his spread hand came up and then travelled down over the undulating image of her body, as if gauging it, or practising the movement. 

‘Eh? Who, eh?’ Somewhere in the house there was a shout, and hurrying steps.