Traitor's Field (60 page)

Shay nodded slowly, watching his world spread out in front of him like papers on a desk. ‘So it seems.’

Somewhere below him across the river, one of the flags or clusters, was Oliver Cromwell, trapped.

Oliver Cromwell’s great thick-coated shoulders were bent over the table, carrying the world. The face, when it looked up to find Thurloe standing there, seemed as usual bigger and more strongly shaded than the things around it. Dark brown hair; the nose, the wart, the textured flesh hanging heavy on the cheeks; and the eyes, far away in a plan or a prayer. The lives of tens of thousands of men; his commission on behalf of the country; the future of an ideal that might reshape Europe – all depended on how shrewdly he read a crude sketch map, how keenly he saw into a landscape, and whether once more he could summon up enough genius to make God himself think his cause worthy of favour.

Thurloe felt his stomach kick again, and set his teeth hard. ‘Master Cromwell’ – the eyes focused on him – ‘I must. . . admit failure. Apologize.’

The eyebrows rose a fraction.

‘The letters I’ve been getting – insights on Royalist intentions and movements – I strongly believe they’re. . . deliberate deceptions.’

The great nose wrinkled up.

‘I’ve checked against Master Scot’s sources. Charles Stuart actually signed his declaration to the Scottish Church on the 16th of August – at least two days after my correspondent wrote to say he had done so. My correspondent wanted to make us think the Scots and the Royalists were more united than they were – to make us hesitate – to buy time for their politics. The same when he wrote that the Edinburgh lines were strong, and the defenders eager to fight.’ He winced, took a breath. ‘The same when he wrote that the Scots would not pursue – making us relax – allowing them to surround us.’
Breathe
. ‘I’m. . . sorry.’

Oliver Cromwell nodded. Then his head dropped to the papers on the table again.

One of the papers crackled as Cromwell unrolled it.

‘What – what happens now?’

Cromwell looked up again, and the eyes re-focused. ‘Now, Master Thurloe, we will fight a battle.’ Fate itself was speaking, low and ominous. ‘We will depend on God’s mercy, as always, and nothing else. God is never deceived.’

The eyes and the shoulders dropped to the table again. Thurloe nodded, pointlessly, and turned to go.

‘Thurloe.’

He turned back.

The big eyes focused sharp and narrow, and the words fell hard. ‘Next time.’

Shay and Teach found a little shelter halfway down the hill, an outcrop of rock at their backs and a gorse reaching over them.

Teach pulled some biscuit from inside his jacket, and shared it. ‘And today: another little slaughter.’

‘Mm.’ Shay’s eyes were still on his trap. ‘Tomorrow, I think.’

‘A strange country we have become.’

‘I was born in battle, Teach; in blood. I am a creature of fields like this. It served me well enough as an education. You too, I think.’

Teach nodded. ‘And yet you keep your young terriers away from the field.’

Shay’s glance was quick, the return slower. ‘Their duties took them elsewhere.’

‘You sent them. Vyse and Manders on the staff. Balfour another courier’s errand. In their different ways, they’d each want to be on the field, but you’ – the accusation came soft, jovial – ‘you made sure they’d be elsewhere. I charge you for an old sentimentalist, in spite of yourself.’

Shay took in a vast slow breath, uncomfortably as if through a wound. ‘Is it wrong to hope that this all might be worth something?’ The voice was low, slow, heavy. ‘Can’t our ravaged generation leave something – anything – a little bit good?’

Teach nodded again. The waiting continued to eat at their guts, as the soldiers shifted and settled at the river, opposite the English soldiers caught between them and the sea.

Shay had found a cottage where a pretty, scared, manless woman would give him a bed for a penny. He woke to darkness, a hand on his shoulder and then a candle offering hints of Thomas Balfour.

‘Sir Mortimer.’ Shay blinked away the glare and the momentary confusion.
Have I lived my life in these broken hours?

‘A man must find his own bed, Tom. This one’s taken.’

‘There’s movement across the river – from Cromwell’s lines.’

Shay forcing his old-feeling head into thought. ‘He’s resetting his regiments for the battle. Or he’s preparing a rearguard to cover an evacuation by sea. Either way, our Scots won’t move before morning.’

‘Shouldn’t—’

‘They won’t move because they can’t yet know what to move against.’ He smiled without warmth. ‘Sorry, Tom: sometimes there’s only waiting.’

Balfour nodded. ‘I’m sorry I woke you.’

‘Don’t be. You did rightly, boy. It’s better – it’s always better – to sleep too little than sleep too long. Ask Master Cromwell.’

In the darkness, the Scottish army slept like cows, bunched together in the fields, against hedges where they could, rolled in their cloths and padded with torn clumps of grass, quietly shrivelling in the rain.

A constant shivering, a shifting of the black uncomfortable lumps, soft bitter chatter and hunched curses, and always the rain and the cold.

Across the river, the English commanders dragged their men through the night, through hours of little shifts and stops that moved them only sideways and apparently no distance at all. And always the rain and the cold, sharp at the neck and insidious in the boots.

Shay slept ill after the interruption, Cromwell nagging at his shoulder whichever way he rolled. He was awake with the first faintness of dawn, set off by some odd crease in a dream or in the grey world outside. The inescapable first pang of uncertainty –
What place is this? What death am I trying to avoid today?
– and then he was up, buckling himself together like a groom with a dray horse, and plunging into his boots.

Then he was away into the grey flush of the morning, cold but alive, striding up the Doon Hill again, in time to watch Cromwell’s miracle.

This then is his genius. He sees further and quicker than other men, and he acts faster.

The centre and left of the Scottish army slept tight between the hill and the river, and woke to sounds of battle and found itself with no space to manoeuvre. They stood uneasy or milled around, according to the temper of their regimental commanders, while the right wing of the army tried to hold back the torrent.

It is so obvious, but he sees it first, and to see it second is too late.

The English Army, rank after rank of them grim and shivering and stretching back out of the reach of morning, were concentrated in a single column, and Cromwell sent them in one continuous punch out of the gloom against the Scottish right. As one attack faltered against the desperate sodden Scottish defence, the next broke over it like the storm, and so over and over until the defence shrank and was washed away. From the hill, only the faintest trace of the English singing could be heard drifting up.
Oh praise ye the Lord, all ye nations.
From the hill, the Scottish ribbons and pennants flickered and fell into the drowning brown scrum of soldiers, and still the English ranks and the English colours kept coming.

Does this make him truly the angel of his God? That he sees the battle so entirely and so rightly?

The Scottish right broke. Lost now and individually alone, its soldiers died in the bloody mud, slipped, scrabbled away through the swamp, wrestled to freedom through the milling, chaotic shoulders of their former comrades, ran. Their regiments evaporated in fear and confusion and their remains were swallowed by the endless ordered flow of the English. And still the psalm rolling over the carnage:
Praise him, all ye people. For his merciful kindness is great toward us.

As the Scottish right collapsed, its fugitives raced through the hesitating centre regiments like woodworm through timber, and through the mists of morning and artillery smoke the timber could be seen to brittle and creak, then it too was engulfed. As the English roared through the Scottish army at Dunbar, right to left –
The truth of the Lord endureth for ever
– from the Doon Hill its remnants could be seen drifting away over the river and the hillside in desperate, lonely hope of safety. 

Shay watched it all from the remove of the hill and the months past.
The Crown has lost another year of striving, in one moment of ruthless clarity from that man.
Down from the overcast morning he scowled at all his meetings and manoeuvrings, all the uncovered truths and undiscovered lies that had led to this place.

Praise ye the Lord.

Angry and frustrated, Shay found himself stalking through the wreck of so many hopes looking for Vyse, Manders and Balfour, and uncomfortable about it.
Have my hopes become so contingent? Do I depend so little on myself these days?
The royal cause was a scattered threadbare thing now, huddled and hunted in cottages and ditches; he strode among torn uniforms and pale bewildered men, and the litter of weapons thrown aside in flight or shame.

He recognized the sick shock of defeat in the faces, though they were all unfamiliar. And they stayed unfamiliar and unreassuring: the men who might have seen the three young men, or should have seen them, had not and could not help him.