“In such a matter your Grace’s own vast experience should surely serve you better than could I.”
`The duke dismissed the scarcely perceptible sneer by a wave of his fine hand.
“I’ll tell you more precisely how I need you,” said he. “I have a house of my own in Knight Ryder Street, lately deserted by its tenant, who has gone into the country out of fear of the pestilence. That house you shall take in your own name at once, and thither shall you convey the jade. That is all I ask of you; the rest you may leave to me. But it needs despatch, for there are rumours that the Duke’s Theatre is to be closed, and with that our chance may be lost. Your best opportunity should be some evening after the play, taking what men you need to waylay and capture her chair as it is being borne home. We’ll consider that more closely.”
“But,” said Holles, who desired to understand something that puzzled him, and who was keeping his temper for that purpose, “since the house is already at your Grace’s disposal, would it not be fitter if your Grace yourself took the matter in hand? Thus there would be less time lost.”
“On my soul, your wits are sluggish!” was the answer. “Why do you suppose I seek to hire you, and promise to pay you handsomely, for a service that, were it as simple as you conceive, and cut-throat could perform for me? Do you not perceive that I desire to use you as a screen? I have no mind to be gaoled, or perhaps hanged, for abduction — which is a hanging matter. It is already blown abroad that I am a dissolute rake, and although in ordinary times I should care little for the rabble’s malicious tongue, yet, scared as people are with the plague, and crying out against what they call the vices of the Court, which they say have brought this visitation upon the City, they would be but too ready to make me a victim of their stupid anger. That is why, should any accuse me, I must be able to reply that it is a lie, and prove it by showing that the abduction was the work of another, who bore her to his own house, whither I followed as a rescuer. D’ye see?”
“I see,” said Holles, in a voice that shook with unleashed anger, “that your Grace is led by your vices like a blind man by his dog! Will you go by the door or shall I throw you from the window?”
The duke rose quickly, but he was very cool and masterful. Instantly he wrapped himself in a mantle of arrogance, which sharply underlined the difference between their respective stations in life.
“I warned you, sir, that I should suffer no heroics, that I will have no man play Bobadil to me. You asked service of me; I have shown you how I can employ you.”
But Holles interrupted in a voice strangled by indignation.
“I claimed repayment of a service that I did you once, the honourable service that one gentleman may do another, and I desired from you repayment in kind, not this insulting proposal that I—”
“Why, you impudent dog,” the duke interrupted, in his turn, “for what you did I paid you then, and handsomely! The jewel I gave you in quittance was worth a hundred pounds, payment enough, in faith, for turning your back whilst I made off from your crop-eared friends!”
“Had I known what a mangy cur it was I succoured,” was the answer, “I would ha’ wrung your neck there and then!”
The duke’s pale face turned paler. He looked at Holles in silence, controlling himself, and dabbing his red lips with his scented handkerchief.
“Very well,” he said at length. “Your insolence I disregard. I can even understand the stupidity that prompts it. You have yet to realise, my friend, that there is no music without frets. I have offered to make your fortune in return for a trifling service. Since you refuse, there is no more to say. I’ll leave you to starve.” He took a step or two towards the door, cool and self-possessed, yet very watchful of the other. Then he checked, for, after all, his needs were very urgent, and he knew not where he should find another man as desperate as Holles to do his work. “But as to the starving, indeed, I can reassure you. You are in no danger of it. Edward Holles, who was lately in the ranks of Cromwell’s army, in the service of the regicides, need not fear death by starvation.”
Holles started at the covert threat.
“You mean, sir?”
“I mean that if that in itself were not enough to hang you, there is the notorious fact that you are in hiding, and that you have made certain changes in your appearance lest you be recognised as the late associate of Tucker and Rathbone, two of the tools of the traitor Danvers. I tell you that Parliament is to attaint by name a number of other conspirators who are still at large, and I promise you that I shall see your name included among them.”
Holles felt the icy hand of fear clutching suddenly at his heart; in imagination the rope was already about his neck, and those high ambitions of his were to find their final fulfilment at Derrick’s hands on Tyburn. Nevertheless —
“I care not an apple-paring,” he growled.
“Be it so.” The duke reached the door, there paused again. “You are a fool, Holles.”
“I have long known it,” answered Holles bitterly; “but I was never so much a fool as when I saved your filthy life. You pay me, I suppose, as a fool should be paid.”
“Nay, you pay yourself in fool’s coin. I offer you on the one hand — what shall we say now? — a thousand guineas, and in the other a yard of hemp. You choose the hemp, and I ask you, are you not a very fool?”
Holles stood towering and scowling.
“I think,” said he, with cold menace, “that I had better do what I should have done at Worcester, and wring your neck now. If they hang me for that, at least they’ll hang me for a meritorious deed.”
And he advanced upon the duke.
But the duke smiled, entirely unintimidated.
“My grooms are just beyond the door,” he said; and threw it open, disclosing them.
Holles checked in his advance, and Buckingham stepped out. From beyond the threshold he looked back over his shoulder.
“To show my gratitude for the service you once did me,” he said, “I will give you until this time to-morrow to decide which it shall be — gold or hemp, fortune or Tyburn.”
And on that he went, his lackeys following after him.
Holles slammed the door and stood there cursing his Grace of Buckingham and the ingratitude of man, until he realised that in cursing lay no profit. Then, since he had neither food nor the means to buy it, and because he was hungry, he scraped together some little remaining tobacco, and sat down to smoke it and so cheat his stomach.
The pipe brought with it calm reflection, in which he considered this door of salvation that was opened to him as a means of escape, not merely from adversity, as he had hoped, but from the very gallows. Its portals were choked with foulness, but then he had waded already through so much in the course of his adventurous existence that perhaps the duke was right in deeming him a fool to hesitate here. And what, after all, was at issue? It was not as if the lady to be carried off were some tender, virtuous maid of gentle birth and rearing. Was he to set a rope about his neck for the sake of qualms touching an impudent playhouse drab?
Yet, for all that, it still revolted him. His conscience evoked for him the wistful face of Nancy Sylvester — wistful as he conceived that it must look could she know of the thing his mind was balancing. Often in the years that were sped the thought of her had acted as a curb when evil beckoned him. Thus now it seemed as if her spirit were with him to assist him in this battle with temptation. Perhaps because of that he strove to turn his mind to the danger to life with which the thing was fraught. But that, he reflected, was an ordinary risk, and he considered the high scale of the payment commensurate with the peril.
Need we follow his reflections further? The ultimate road they took will be obvious, since you know that necessity drew him forward by the nose, whilst the fear of death whipped him on from behind. You need not marvel that early on the morrow he wrote and despatched the following letter:
“My Lord Duke, — I have considered, and I will do your will, and so I beg that you will command me
further. May it please your Grace to give the bearer a shilling for his pains, since I have not so much as a groat myself. — Your Grace’s obedient servant, EDWARD HOLLES.”
Chapter IV.
THE taking and equipping of that fine house in Knight Ryder Street took most of the days they had at their disposal. The carrying off of Mistress Sylvia Farquahrson was to be attempted immediately after the last performance should have been held at the little theatre in Salisbury Court; earlier was out of the question, since she must at once be missed and the hue-and-cry raised forthwith.
It was, therefore, one evening a week or so after he had engaged himself in this infamous business that Holles landed, at dusk, from a boat at Whitefriars Steps, and, with a word of injunction to the watermen, took his way to Salisbury Court. Hackney-coaches and chairs were becoming scarce in the City in consequence of the plague; moreover, it was not wise to employ them, lest infection might linger in them from their having carried someone stricken with the pestilence. But, apart from these considerations, the river was the better road for such an affair as the colonel had in hand.
Upon reaching the theatre, Holles found the scanty audience that had attended this last performance of “The Lovers’ Quarrel” streaming out from under the pillared portico. To avoid being seen, and already informed of the way she must come, he took a turn in Water Lane, preferring to await her and waylay her there. And presently the chair that bore her came swinging into view, dimly outlined in the gathering dusk.
At sight of it, the colonel went running to meet it down the street.
“Back there! Back!” he cried. “You cannot go this way. There’s a riot in Fleet Street, and the mob has broken open an infected house that was closed, and they’re scattering the plague to the four winds.”
It was a loose tale, none too well conceived, but the scoundrelly chairmen, who were in his pay and prepared for this, at once set down their burden, and gave tongue to their counterfeit alarm. The actress leaned forward to demand the reason of this halt. One of the chairmen raised the roof of the chair, whilst another threw back the apron, inviting her to alight, and informing her of what they had been told, adding that they themselves could hear a faint echo of the din.
Whether she feared a trap or not, I do not know; but if she did the behaviour of the man who had checked their progress very effectively disarmed all suspicion. Having issued his warning, he seemed utterly to disregard her, and, continuing his way like one pursued by fear, would have gone past her, but that she herself checked him by a question.
“But which way then?” she asked.
He paused, impatiently as it seemed.
“Which way do you go,” he flung at her, breathlessly— “east or west?”
“I go eastward.”
“Then do as I do,” said he. “Take sculls from Whitefriars to Dorset Steps, and pursue your way thence.”
And upon that he went hurrying on with so scant a chivalry that it would have been ludicrous to have suspected him. The chairmen added their counsel to his own, and in a moment she was speeding after him down Water Lane alone; for the fear of the plague was by then a very urgent thing.
As she reached the steps he was on the point of entering a boat, which apparently he had summoned. Seeing her, he stood aside, and now it was that, remembering her persecution at the hands of Buckingham, the fear of a trap assailed her. But he quenched her fears almost as soon as they arose.
“Take you this boat, mistress, if you are in haste, and since you are alone. Another will serve for me, who am going further.”
And, without waiting for her reply, he made a trumpet of his hands, and, raising his voice, shouted:
“Sculls!”
A faint hail answered him from the water, followed by the dip of oars.
His indifference to her made him seem a desirable escort, where some escort was to be desired, since it was not well for a woman to be alone at dusk.
“Will not one boat serve us both?” she asked him.
“Why, madam, why — if you will. Why not? And you are alone, which is not wise at all. So be it then.”
He stepped after her into the boat, and sat down beside her in the stern. The men pushed out into the tide, which was ebbing strongly at the time, and they were swept eastward.
In a moment almost they were at Dorset Steps, and they had flashed past them before she could protest, which she did sharply.
One of the watermen swore fiercely for answer.
“It is the tide, mistress; the ebb is over strong. Hold her, Tom! Fetch her round. Bend to it, man!”
“I’m a bending, plague on you,” growled his companion. “I am a-bending fit to break my back. She’ll not be held up in this tide. Let her run, Jack, and we’ll make Blackfriars instead!”
But at Blackfriars they fared no better. Tom flung out a boathook as they passed, missed the steps, and they were swept on. Swearing with all a waterman’s famed fluency, he dropped the boathook and clutched at his oars to stem their too rapid progress.
And now the lady becoming seriously alarmed, Holles raised his voice, and reassured her by cursing the watermen for a couple of clumsy cobblers who didn’t know a keel from a gunwale, swearing that unless they put the lady ashore at the wharves they would have to deal with him. The men played in this comedy the parts he had assigned to them, and answered him whiningly that they did their best, that it was getting plaguey dark, and the tide was stronger than they had ever known it, but that they could be trusted to make the wharves.
And, indeed, this they accomplished with an ease so apparent that it might almost have proved to the lady that their failure to make the steps had been intentional.
“I shall have to trudge back at least a mile, unless I can find a coach,” she complained as she stepped ashore, assisted by one of the watermen on one side and the colonel on the other. She was seeking her purse, when the colonel, who had sprung out beside her, flung them some money, and they pushed off. She looked at him.
“Why, how is this?” she asked. “Do you go no farther then?”
“Anon,” he answered her. “I could not leave a lady thus. This is your way, madam,” and he pointed up Paul’s Chains.
But she stood back from him, ignoring the invitation.
“Not so, sir,” she replied coldly. “I have been brought far enough out of my way already.”
He did not attempt to argue with her, knowing it futile, but for answer caught her up in his stalwart arms, and, before she realised what was happening, she found herself flung across his shoulder. Taken then with sudden terror, she fought and struggled desperately; but he held her firmly, and in such a way that she could do little damage with her nails. Carrying her as if she had been a child, he went quickly up the street. She screamed, of course, incoherently at first, then coherently, calling for help to the few people that were still abroad.
As a consequence, before they had gone far, two sturdy citizens, attended by a link-boy with a torch, attempted to bar the colonel’s progress.
“Stand, villain!” cried one of these.
But Holles had foreseen this possibility of interference, and was ready for it.
“She has the plague!” he cried to them. “Keep your distance on your lives. She is out of her mind, poor child. She has the plague!”
If they had any doubt, they did not dare to put it to the test. Her struggles might well be those that usually beset the victims of the dread scourge. So they fell back hastily, and gave him a free passage, as did one or two others presently who would similarly have intervened in response to her wild appeals.
Thus the colonel brought her to the handsome, well-appointed house in Knight Ryder Street, a house of which he was represented as the tenant. As he reached it, the door was opened by a man who had evidently been waiting his arrival. He entered, still carrying his burden, bore it down the narrow passage and into an elegantly furnished, brilliantly-lighted room on the right. There, at last, he flung her down on a cushioned settle under th
e shuttered windows, and stood to regain his breath and to mop his brow, for the sweat run down him like basting on a capon.
But no sooner had he released her than she was on her feet again. As breathless as himself, white of face, and with eyes ablaze, she stood confronting him.
“Sir,” she said, “you shall let me depart at once, or you shall suffer for this villainy. You shall—”
And then she broke off abruptly to stare at him, her parted lips and dilated eyes bearing witness to an amazement so overwhelming that on a sudden it had overridden her anger.
Her voice came hoarse and tense:
“Who are you? What is your name?”
He stared in his turn, checked in the very act of mopping his brow, wondering what it was she saw in him to be moving her so oddly. He was still wondering how he should answer her, what name assume, when she spared his invention further trouble in the matter.
“You are Ned Holles!” she cried. “You! You of all men — and to do this thing!”
And now, where there had been amazement in her eyes, he beheld a growing horror. She staggered back, covering her face for a moment, and in that moment Holles understood. The years rolled back, he saw himself, a lad of eighteen, going out into the world with a lady’s glove in his hat, bent upon knight-errantry for that sweet lady’s sake, and he saw her — this Sylvia Farquahrson of the Duke’s Theatre — as she had been in those long-dead days when her name had been Nancy Sylvester. Those eighteen years had wrought in her appearance a change that utterly disguised her. Where, in this resplendently beautiful woman could he discover the slender little child of sixteen whom he had loved? How could he have dreamt of his little Nancy Sylvester transformed into the magnificent Sylvia Farquahrson, whose name was a byword for gallantry, lavishness, and prodigality, whose fame was as wide-spread and questionably lustrous as that of Moll Davies or Eleanor Gwynne? Small wonder that he had found her to have vanished utterly when he had sought her ten years ago; small wonder that he should never have suspected her real identity until this moment in which she thus revealed herself to him.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 512