Free Traitor's Field by Robert Wilton Page A

wilful lad; they may not be reordered like pans on a shelf. They simply are, like the stars or the sun, like the weather, like the very earth itself, and we may merely decide how to conform ourselves to them.
    And still you drone. Theorists native and foreign. Empty threats. Pathetic entreaties. A Christian instinct to conciliate; a holy compromise.
    Do not you understand? I cannot trifle with these perfect glories! The throne, the religion, these were not given me for my amusement and contingent use, to be gambled with, or traded like so many tinker’s trinkets. This was my inheritance, given to me in trust for the good of all my people. The right ordering of the state is our heritage and our defence. The true religion is God’s, and God’s alone, and we must account ourselves thrice blessed to be allowed to share it. To toy with the state is treason. To toy with the religion is damnation, and for us all. While Europe has burned in a hell of intestine chaos these three decades past, we had lived at peace one with the other, tolerant of our varieties within the embrace of God. Your innovations, your experimentations, your Parliamentary meddling, would set us all adrift for eternity.
    I wish my fallible voice could be trusted to impart these truths aright, that you would understand and believe.
    The Bishops are the interpreters of the Lord God Himself, and I am His regent. Do not you understand that if I give up the Bishops I give up the soul of all my kingdom? The Bishops are divine. This ordering of society is divine. This ordering of society is mine!
    I must not seem to weep. A Prince must have no private side for the world. Brother Henry twisting my ears until I wept. A Prince must have no emotion. The King so scornful of his pale and feeble second son, court pranks and blustering words, until the second son became his heir. Then such a pathetic race to make me fitted, the ghastly forced hours of paternal counsel, an old man desperate to mould his youth anew before death overtakes him.
    What have I done wrong that I am thus tormented? The Son of God suffered for the sins of other men. Surely, this land has known every manner of sin for ten years or more. I have striven to protect my people and protect my faith, to do my duty as I saw it. In what has lain my sin, that my God should punish me thus? 
    Why do these men not understand me? Is there no one in this realm who could have been my fellow?

    The old manor house huddled in the foothills of the Peak District, local stone and lack of show, as if to convince the violent world of politics that it was more of the natural world than of the human, and could be left in peace. The guests, as Shay watched them from the edge of the room, were such as might be found after some great battle or calamity: battered and world-worn and dull-headed, clothes and eyes that had seen too much of life in the last ten years.
    ‘Shay, surely? I did not know you were living still.’
    ‘As you see.’ His face offered no warmth, and the forgotten acquaintance drifted away.
Perhaps none of us here is living still.
    Not a forgotten acquaintance. Roger Savary: widower; East Anglia, but that would hardly be comfortable now; son killed at. . . Edgehill? Early, anyway. Now huddling here on the high ground as the flood destroyed his old world.
    And then a flash of a girl across the room. There were young people here, after all. This one would be. . . not yet twenty, surely, but woman enough. The clothes were worn, but that only heightened the bright glow of her bust, thin sharp collar bone and the creamy sweep down to her breasts, dramatically pure flesh against the old linen. Behind her a man of her own age in a coat too big for him, watching her face, her open smile.
    Shay felt his own chest move, the blood in him.
Yes, Roger Savary, I am living still.
    ‘Mortimer Shay,’ and there was genuine warmth in the voice. It was the warmth that made him turn.
    ‘Sarah! My lady Saville, how are you?