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could cover as many again. The two hundred will do, and precise accuracy is not necessary. Again the slow, staring perusal all around to his left and then to right. Again the ferocious intensity of listening.
    The only movement in the ghostly grey scene, he rolls his shoulders, sets his knees solid, and with one fluid motion fits arrow against string and pulls the string back in a mighty heave until the feathers tickle his ear, holds – for pride, for one long breath – and then the arrow is away with a hiss into the dawn.
    A faint rattle as the arrow hits the town wall, but he does not hear it: frozen in the posture, then again the look around, again the listening, and he is away at a crouch through the undergrowth, breathing free and dreaming of breakfast.
    Soon after – the treetops are silvering, but the army of Parliament still sleeps in grey – a small door opens in a shadow in a cleft in the walls of Colchester. A figure stands still, and watchful – first for any sign of life from the besieging army, then scanning the ground nearby. The arrow was aimed at this point, and he sees it almost immediately. Another check for movement nearby, four purposeful strides and he has the arrow, and is back at the door and safe inside. The door has been open for considerably less than a minute.
    He waits until he is back in his lodging room, the arrow tucked into his coat, before unwrapping the message from the arrow shaft.
    Five words only are on the paper, and something dies in his hungry gut.
    Again he is hurrying through the town, and now its chaos offers him only tragedy rather than defiant hope. Crumbled walls, burned houses, a hollow-cheeked woman staring wild at him, the blanket-covered mounds of dead, the stench, two soldiers cornering a cat, a dead-end – yesterday there was a road here, and now it’s blocked by a mess of rubble and timber – a smear of blood on stone where some other animal has been caught and killed, a listless soldier trudging nowhere, a forlorn flag.
    He has not heard conversation on the street for many days. There is nothing to say, and other people’s faces offer only despair, and shame.
    The sentries know him, and don’t care any more, and soon he is knocking at a door, entering, handing the paper to a dapper dark man interrupted while pulling on his boots. The man takes the paper but still watches him.
    He shakes his head.
    It’s a decent face in front of him: not handsome, but good. The siege has turned it inside out, the flesh becoming hollow. He has marked the change day by day, complacency becoming piety, for that is what hunger will do to a man, and it’s somehow more noble now. Something flickers, uncontrolled, around the mouth. The decent man breaks his gaze and looks down at the paper.
    Hamilton’s army destroyed. Invasion scattered.

    In the third week of August 1648, a stranger was travelling the land around Preston. North to Kendal, east to Skipton and Halifax, and south to Wigan, he moved from tavern to tavern and to the occasional sympathetic private house. He asked after friends who had been involved in the fighting, selecting the army according to the likely inclination of his host.
    Where he found a soldier – a fugitive Royalist seeking some kind of absolution, a Roundhead ready to take a drink and give his opinions – he gathered details of the Preston campaign: the men and the movements, the manoeuvres and the tactics.
    It was a waiting time, a time of frustration, worse because Shay didn’t know what he was looking for in the conversations. They were merely a way to pass the hours, and to do so as productively as possible. He was storing up facts and ideas, as if for winter. Information, like Oliver Cromwell, had a way of coming back at you when you didn’t expect it.

    Thus Colonel Thomas Rainsborough: a pale, domed head with golden-brown hair falling in thick waves behind it; the crown hairless and so emphasizing the strange pallor. Hooded hawk’s eyes under