Traitor's Field by Robert Wilton Page B

hanged.’
    ‘You’re out of luck.’
    Langdale stood, and they shook hands like old oak branches creaking in the wind. ‘You want to borrow money, presumably.’
    ‘Merely ask a question of an old comrade.’
    ‘Don’t come the old comrade with me, you misbegotten bandit.’ Langdale returned to his chair. ‘The lack of furniture deprives me of the pleasure of not offering you a seat.’
    ‘I need to have an ear anyway. What was George Astbury doing on the field at Preston?’
    ‘I feel you’ve spent your life keeping furtive watch, Shay: fathers, husbands, bailiffs, sergeants-at-arms. You have passed your every minute of existence in some pursuit or other that must be hid from other men.’ He folded his hands primly in front of him. ‘Why do you want to know?’
    ‘You know old Astbury. A worthy fellow, I’m sure, but I doubt he did a reckless act in his whole life. He’d been given no place in the line of battle, surely?’ Langdale shook his head. ‘And he had no business there. Yet I found his body not thirty paces from that midden where you fought the day out.’
    Langdale’s heavy eyebrows had risen. ‘He did die, then? I had heard it said.’ The beaked face twisted sadly. ‘Not a warm man, but a decent one. He was terribly in earnest that day.’ The eyes were gone back into the battlefield. ‘Bustling everywhere. He would insist on checking everything with the scouts.’
    ‘The scouts?’
    ‘Jumped on anything they reported. Rode out to see for himself. Back again, quiz the fellows, check the map, off into the field again. Well, you know how scouts are.’ Silent agreement from Shay. ‘Solitary, nervy fellows. Didn’t like this much. Ruce – Scoutmaster that day – he got very unhappy about it.’
    ‘What did Astbury think he was doing?’
    ‘I couldn’t imagine. He was pretty dismissive about Ruce – thought he was just a low fellow, a mechanical, didn’t credit him for any initiative. When he started bustling around me I told him straight not to interfere. He’d got into a kind of fever over when and how Cromwell might catch us out. Cromwell’ – the words became sharper and more pronounced – ‘has a way of bewitching men.’
    ‘Mm. He mention Pontefract at all?’
    ‘Astbury? Might have done – siege still going on, people were thinking about it – but I don’t. . .’ He turned to Shay. ‘Yes. I do remember one comment. We were talking about it – there were fresh rumours – usual fatuous chatter; you know how it is. Came to old George, and he looked very thoughtful, and he just said, “There is sickness there.” That was the word: sickness. Sounded rather final.’
    What was Astbury’s obsession?
The repeated references to the place; the last letter in his pocket. ‘Meaning disease, you think?’
    ‘That is what sickness means, Shay, yes. But I can’t speak for George Astbury. Ask him yourself, in the unlikely event you end up in the same billet. He seemed damned bleak about it, that I can say.’
    Shay was silent. ‘I had rather gathered,’ Langdale went on, examining his folded hands and then peering hard at Shay, ‘that Astbury was starting to interest himself in intelligencing matters.’ Still silence. ‘That might explain his interest in the scouting, I mean to say. Same sort of business you always seemed to be dabbling in. Stuff you never talked about.’
    Slowly, Shay produced a malevolent smile. ‘Quite,’ he said. Langdale’s face was sharp and hard and full of distaste.

    The journey from Coventry to Nottingham was fifty miles, and the two Parliament men plodded most of them through a wet afternoon along muddy Derbyshire roads, cloaks hunched around shoulders and the few words lost to the wind. 
    The region was still uncertain: angry hunted Scots were loose and lost and roaming wild, and little bitter deeds of Royalist violence could catch a man anywhere. So they had an escort: one fat levy, hardly the pick of the new Army, which told them