Traitor's Field (62 page)

Thurloe was walking towards Lady Constance Blythe’s house again at dusk, a soldier with him. Even the cobbled streets were thick with mud, and the two squelched in an uneven rhythm, the musket occasionally knocking into Thurloe’s side as the soldier wrestled with it and a lantern. Through fifteen minutes of little sighs and huffs and asides, the soldier – a local man – had made clear his dissatisfaction with the extra duty. 

The evening was clear-skied and warm, but the city’s tall grey town houses, crowding impassive on either side made it seem more dreary.

Thurloe stopped them opposite the house, and behind him the soldier began to look around for a more sheltered spot to base himself and those who would come after him. Like all of its neighbours, the house was narrow – probably only one room and a stair or corridor wide – and four floors high. There was light glowing from the first-floor windows – where he’d been earlier in the day – and the suspicion of it from somewhere on the ground floor.

‘That’s the other snag with coming out at night, sir,’ the soldier was saying, with the misleading implication that there had been only one other snag previously identified. In the Lowland Scots accent, selected vowels echoed the painfulness of the situation described. ‘During the day, you see, these shops would be open, and we could ask if maybe there was a handy spot inside for our lookout.’

Irritation and amusement jostled in Thurloe, and the unworthy satisfaction of knowing that he would not himself be suffering outdoors tonight. Such a pleasant simplicity to the world of the soldiers. Inside better than outside. Dry better than wet. He wished his own head could find such certainties.

‘Come with me a moment,’ he said. ‘I’ve an idea.’

He would draw Lady Constance’s attention to the sentry; say the man was for her protection – such a brittle environment after the fall of the city, and her co-operation was much appreciated. She’d be grateful or she’d be intimidated, and either would serve. With the soldier huffing behind him, he knocked at the front door.

Silence, and half a minute passed. Listening closely, Thurloe convinced himself he could hear sporadic steps in the hall beyond. He knocked again.

This time the steps came clear, and quickly nearer, and the door opened without sound of a bolt. The maid – Marie, wasn’t it? – peered out warily.

‘Good evening,’ Thurloe said, and stepped up into the hall. Really it was just a corridor, running from front door to back, broken halfway along by a step down that also marked the change from plaster walls and floor tiles to whitewash and flagstones. ‘I’d like to see Lady Constance again.’

The maid took a breath. ‘She’s gone to bed. The house is locked up now. You must come again tomorrow.’

Thurloe had been pleased with his little idea, and he was irrationally annoyed to be thwarted. And this frustration kept him asking questions.

She has retired to bed. Yet the first-floor living room is illuminated, and not the second-floor bedroom.

He peered down the corridor.
The house is closed up for the night. But the doors are unbolted.

‘Soldier! Bring the lantern!’ Back to the maid, with a soft smile. ‘I’ll trespass a few yards further, if I may.’ And he was past her, with the heavy boots of the soldier tramping behind him.

Crouched over the mud just outside the back door, lantern held above him, Thurloe could see the track of a pair of small boots stepping off the back step and away. ‘Quickly’ – insistent to the soldier – ‘if you had to get out of the city from here, as fast as possible and avoiding sentries, how would you go?’

There was a frustrating pause as the soldier warmed up to the urgency of the situation and then to full understanding. Then he was off and eager, proud of his local knowledge and something to do. He led off in the same direction as the boot tracks, Thurloe hurrying after with the lantern and trying to distinguish the trail in the mess of mud and his jolting, ill-lit view.

The alley opened onto a side street, but the soldier was unerringly across it and into another alley, a weird black world of looming, jerking, distorted shadows. He jinked right and then left again, and ten trotted paces later stopped at a fork. ‘Either up here to the left, sir, curving more to the left as she goes and then taking the first right and so down some steps. Or down to the right and keep following down as she twists about. Used to run wild in these lanes as littlins, we did. Either way you get to the same place. Small gateway – not even a gate to it and it won’t be guarded.’

Thurloe could make out no suggestion of the boot prints. ‘Take your pick,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you at the gate.’

Constance Blythe hesitated at the gateway, then stepped into it, a threshold between the town she knew but now feared, and the unknown land outside.
This is what we are come to
. She felt her vulnerability, exposed in the opening.
I have lived in lights and beauty, and now I huddle in darkness and the shit of vagrants, desperate and afraid.

‘Lady Constance?’ As she heard the voice she heard other noises behind it – footsteps, and the stamping of horses – and then saw two shapes in the gloom, one of them mounted. ‘Shay has come for you. I’m Vyse; this is Balfour. Will you get up on his horse, please?’ Shay’s name sparked a flicker of warmth in her, and for a moment she felt the old thrill of young men and an exploit.

Then, behind them, slippery steps from the darkness, and hasty breaths. Balfour hissed fierce: ‘Into the wall, my lady. Vyse’ –Vyse looked up grim – ‘I will show myself.’ Vyse nodded resolute and stepped away.

A figure appeared in the little gateway, heard and saw at the same time a man on a horse wheeling and splashing not ten paces away, and stepped forward and opened his mouth in the shout. He stepped forward onto Henry Vyse’s knife and died, with a single breathless choke, and two pairs of wide white eyes stared in shock at each other, and the dead man slumped into the mud. Vyse gaped for a second, then heard the horse and the hissed command and was fumbling his knife away and grabbing at the old lady and dragging her out and pushing her up onto Balfour’s horse and lunging for his own and they were away.

Moments later they pulled up in front of the vast mounted hulk of Sir Mortimer Shay, a shadow in the darkness glistening with knife and sword and pistol. They helped the old lady over onto his larger horse, bundled side-saddle in front of him, and then they all hurried away into the deeper night of the countryside. For one last time Constance Blythe felt Mortimer Shay’s great arms wrapped round her, felt a girl again, and safe.

Behind them, another figure came splashing through the mud to the gateway, tried to pull sense from the confusion of hoof-beats in the darkness, then saw the outline of the body slumped at his feet. He dropped instinctively, pulled the face upward, and knew it dead.

Once again, John Thurloe shook his head grim into the night, and wondered at his enemies.

P
ARIS
, O
CTOBER

[SS C/X/50/179]

Shay came into East Anglia by muddy lanes and silent failing inns. The nights were longer, and he filled them with plodding wet journeys and the occasional indifferent meeting. He needed to know what was happening in Norfolk, felt the old ache of displacement –
I am not where the battle is
– but the eastern counties stretched out in flat, cloud-pressed eternities, and their roads sucked heavily at his horse’s hooves.

In the last week of November he came to a farmhouse, coat sodden and wet face glistening in the firelight.