Lady in Waiting

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  She slipped into his clasp, and he set her down a little clumsily because of his left arm, and went to hitch the horses’ reins over a low alder branch beside the stream. Then he returned to Bess, where she had seated herself on the sloping side of the hollow, and going down full length beside her into the warm heather, reached out and with lazy masterfulness, pulled her down into his arms. Bess, relaxing to him, remembered the time when his arms about her had been hard and hotly compelling when he held her so. With the passing years, love had gentled and grown silvery, become a thing of dear companionship and shared experience and the quiet touching of hands; but none the less potent for that, it seemed ... And the potency of it twisted under her heart as she awoke to the discovery that even now, after all the years together, after all that had happened, after Little Watt, his touch could still set her pulses racing like a young girl’s.

  He kissed her, his mouth quiet on hers as the hold of his arms about her. ‘You are so sweet,’ he said. ‘There are grey feathers in your hair, Bess — do you know it? But you are still as sweet as linden honey in the kissing. That’s because you have a big mouth. Big-mouthed women are ever the sweetest in the kissing.’

  ‘Have you kissed so many?’

  He laughed, with his cheek against hers. ‘I do but quote Quintilian.’

  It was very warm in the little hollow, very peaceful; a tiny, enclosed universe. Only the voice of the stream in the wind-hushed emptiness, only the bees among the first flowers of the bell heather, and the pipits calling. Bess lay quiet, smelling the warm summer scents of the moor, gazing up through height beyond height of a heaven whose sparkling blue was already paling a little at the first touch of evening. A spray of bell heather arched into her field of vision, hung with papery pink bells. It almost seemed to her that she could catch their chiming as the little wandering wind brushed by. What kind of carillon would it be, she wondered. Sweeter than the Fleet Bridge carillon ... All her senses seemed heightened, and she was exquisitely aware of the shining moment between the dark and the dark. ‘It may be that this is the last time I shall lie in his arms,’ she thought, ‘the very last time of all,’ and she held the moment to her, that she might be able to hurt herself with the remembrance of it afterwards, to all eternity.

  Once, Ralegh shifted as though to come at his pipe and tobacco box; then, changing his mind, relaxed again. ‘It would be good to lie out here through the night,’ he said presently.

  ‘Better than behind stone walls. The stars will come out presently. We should see the Pole Star, and Arcturus — and over yonder, Cassiopea. And in the morning we should wake with the curlews calling in the first green light, and the day-spring chill on our faces.’

  A little later they heard the soft trampling of horses’ hooves coming up the stream side, and Ralegh released her and got stiffly to his feet, calling, ‘Up here, King.’

  When Captain King joined them, leading his horse, he looked hot and disturbed. He said, ‘Sir Walter, your kinsman is down yonder at the Mermaid in North Street.’

  And it seemed to Bess that something twisted in her.

  ‘Lewis?’ Ralegh said after a moment.

  ‘Aye, Sir Lewis.’

  ‘Have you told him that I am on my way?’

  The seaman’s face was a little pugilistic, as he hitched his horse to the alder branches beside the others. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t,’ and he looked with deliberate meaning at Ralegh.

  The other shook his head. ‘Oh no, Captain King. You may shake that bee out of your bonnet once and for all.’

  ‘Then — do we ride on now?’

  ‘Not until we have supped. You have brought the where-withal? Ah, that is good. Let my kinsman wait on our pleasure yet awhile, since presently we must wait on his.’

  King produced from his saddle-bag several articles wrapped in a clean napkin. ‘The Inn-wife let me have these — very privily. Bread and cold pasty; a trug of strawberries for Lady Ralegh, a flask of muscatel.’

  Ralegh took them from him and brought them to Bess, where she sat, rigid and unmoving. ‘Sweet, we have a banquet indeed! Nay now, smile, Bess; it had to come today or tomorrow, or a week hence.’

  She smiled obediently, and taking the things from him, began to set them out on the spread napkin.

  So, sitting in the warm heather, the three of them ate together, dividing the strawberries between them with scrupulous fairness, passing the flask of muscatel from hand to hand. To Bess the food was choking sawdust, and clearly Captain King had little pleasure in it. But Ralegh seemed to enjoy his meal, lingering over it pleasantly while the world drained of warmth and the shadows gathered in the little hollow, and the sky took on the quiet pallor of a fading harebell.

  When the meal was finished, they remained sitting for a while in silence. ‘A quiet evening, this,’ Ralegh said at last. ‘See, Bess, there is the first star, and it singing like a linnet if our dull ears could but catch the song.’ He drew himself together, to rise. ‘God’s life! I am stiff.... We have eaten our Passover meal, my friends, and it is time to go.’

  Chapter 22 - King David’s Beard

  IT was almost dark when they rode into Ashburton, and the windows of the Mermaid in North Street were full of candle-light shining welcomingly into the summer night. They dismounted in the courtyard and handed the horses over to the care of the head hostler, who was an ancient friend. Mine Host, who came forth to greet them was a friend also. ‘Ah, Sir Walter, Sir Walter, us be proper grieved to see this day come!’

  Ralegh laughed a little harshly. ‘Nay, man, never pull a long face. Is my kinsman Sir Lewis Stucley within doors?’

  ‘In the guest parlour, Sir.’

  ‘Good. Then I will go in to him — no, do not you trouble, I know my way and he must take me unannounced. Since ‘tis to meet me that he comes, he can scarce complain of that.’

  He had turned down the familiar passage-way as he spoke, tossing the words over his shoulder to the landlord. He reached the door of the guest parlour, and opening it, stood aside for Bess to precede him, then limped serenely in with Captain King at his shoulder.

  Sir Lewis was lounging at his ease with a long-necked bottle and a slender wineglass on the table beside him, and his exaggeratedly long rapier hanging by its slings from a chair back near by. He sprang up at their entrance, his pleasant, slightly ineffectual face blank with surprise in the candle-light, his eyes going past Bess to Ralegh. ‘What the Devil! — Walter!’

  Ralegh advanced to the table. ‘Why so startled, my coz? Is it not, after all, the matter of my arrest that brings you into these parts?’

  The other regarded him with a troubled face. ‘It is,’ he said at last. ‘I suppose that I was startled because I was thinking of other things, and — I had scarce thought to meet you on the road.’

  ‘You were so confounded slow in coming,’ Ralegh complained.

  ‘I was as slow as I dared be,’ said his cousin, with so much meaning that Bess looked at him quickly.

  But Ralegh appeared to notice nothing; he had turned to gather the other two. ‘Lewis, my wife you know, at least by sight, but Captain King is, I think, a stranger to you: Captain William King, my Shipmaster and good friend ... And now, suppose that we proceed to business; here I stand for your arresting, Cousin Lewis.’

  There was a long and utter silence; the two men facing each other, one grave and unhappy, the other smiling with faint insolence, as he waited for arrest. ‘Walter,’ Stucley said at last, with unexpected warmth, ‘I beg you to believe that there is nothing of pleasure for me in this.’ He reached out with a clumsy, unwilling gesture, and brought his hand down on Ralegh’s shoulder. ‘There, we will count it done.’

  ‘So. And now that I am your prisoner, do you require that I deliver up to you my sword?’

  ‘No!’ the other said quickly, with the same warmth in his voice. ‘For the Lord’s sake, Walter, do not make this worse than need be, for either of us. We have not been good friends in the past; but when we fell out I was
younger and of hotter blood — so were you, for that matter — and at least it has been no fault of mine that the breach remained open so many years.’ He made a small, earnest gesture of appeal. ‘It is all such ancient history, and I would to God this task had fallen to another man than I.’

  Ralegh studied him at his leisure, coolly and in silence. At last he nodded. ‘It is ancient history, as you say. Nay then, let us call a truce, at least for the time that I remain your prisoner.’

  The door opened, and another man came in, a little round man in a long black gown, with the bright tragic eyes of a marmoset under a bald dome of forehead, who hesitated at sight of the new arrivals, and began to back out again, saying with a strong French accent, ‘Ah, a million pardons. I had thought that you were alone, Sir Lewis.’

  Stucley stayed him as he was half outside the room. ‘No, no; here man, come you and be presented to my kinsman and his lady.’ He made the introduction hastily, and with the hesitancy of manner that Bess had noticed about him before, while the Frenchman bowed to each in turn, lingering a little over her hand with the gallantry of his race. ‘Lady Ralegh, I present to you Dr. Manourie, a skilled physician and a friend and travelling companion of mine. Sir Walter — Captain King.’

  An uncertain pause followed, which was broken by Sir Lewis speaking rapidly to his prisoner. ‘Walter, you will not object to Dr. Manourie remaining one of our company? He is a Frenchman, and as such, has small sympathy with the aims of the Spanish faction.’

  This time Ralegh seemed to catch the meaning in his tone, and turned a searching look from him to Manourie. ‘We shall have much in common,’ he said.

  The little physician raised those tragic marmoset’s eyes to his. ‘The French have little cause to love Spain. A few of us still remember St. Bartholomew’s Eve, and have even less to love the Papacy.’

  Bess found her world swimming. Could it be that in this cousin who had come to arrest him, Raleigh had found a friend? Had she been unjust to Sir Lewis Stucley all these years? It seemed so, and yet — she could not be sure.

  *

  Next morning they took the road again. Exeter, Honiton, Sherborne — Sherborne that had passed from Robert Carr now, as it had from Ralegh, with all its lime trees in flower and the cuckoos calling broken-voiced from Jerusalem woods — Shaftesbury, Salisbury.

  In the private parlour of the White Hart at Salisbury, Ralegh and Bess, with their three companions, were waiting for supper on the evening of their arrival. The table was already laid, and Mine Host was supervising the bringing up of sundry pies and a pair of roast capon from the kitchen. Mine Host was a friendly soul, and having seen the capons arranged to his satisfaction, he turned an expansive face to his guests. ‘Fine doings here next week, Gentlemen.’

  ‘Fine doings?’ Ralegh who was lounging before the hearth, asked, without interest.

  ‘Why, haven’t you heard, Sirs? They say the King is due in Salisbury in four days.’ He grinned. ‘King James, he do seem to grow a-most as fond of progresses as her late Majesty.’

  There was a small, startled silence in the room, and then Ralegh began to fiddle with the snuffers on the mantel, leaving the resumed talk to his companions. But as the door closed behind Mine Host and his minions for the last time, he dropped the snuffers and swung round from the hearth. ‘Lewis,’ he said, ‘we must wait four days! No, listen, man: I must gain an audience with the King, here, where his evil genius Gondomar is not at his elbow!’

  Lewis Stucley began to bite his nails. Bess watched him with aching intensity; they all watched him, as the silence lengthened. He went on biting. ‘I daren’t,’ he said at last.

  ‘What a-devil do you mean?’ Ralegh demanded.

  ‘Simply what I say — I daren’t.’ Stucley lowered his bitten hand. ‘I delayed as long as might be — longer — in making this arrest, and my orders, now that I have made it, are to bring you to London without delay. One day, we may wait, since tomorrow is the Sabbath; more, I cannot do without good excuse.’

  There was a long pause. Ralegh was looking at his kinsman speculatively. Slowly his eyes brightened with an idea. ‘No, I see that you cannot — without good excuse,’ he said.

  Alone with Bess that night he told her abruptly. ‘I want you to break the Sabbath and ride on tomorrow.’

  She looked at him questioningly, her comb in her hand, her hair falling round her shoulders. ‘I thought that you wished to stay here,’ she said.

  ‘I do. I am staying here. Captain King will ride with you. Go home to Broad Street and wait there till you have word of me.’

  ‘But why? Walter, why are you sending me on ahead? I had so much liefer stay with you.’

  He set his hands on her shoulders among her hair, gazing down at her. ‘I know, but I had liefer that you went on before. Listen, Bess. I have hit upon a device whereby I can furnish Lewis the excuse without which he dare not delay four days. But I have a singular objection to playing the buffoon in your presence.’

  So next morning, with Captain King for her escort, Bess broke the Sabbath and rode away.

  And on the following morning, Ralegh, who had begun to vomit in the night, was discovered in a raving delirium, sitting on the floor of his bedchamber clad only in his shirt and covered from head to heel with great purplish blotches.

  From his bed, when he had been tenderly put back into it by Stucley, and the French doctor, he croaked triumphantly. ‘So — you have your good excuse for delay, sweet cousin.’ Then in a fresh access of sickness, ‘Oh God, I feel like the Day of Judgment! What hell’s broth have you given me, Manourie?’

  The Frenchman smiled. ‘A simple decoction of my own, harmless, but effective. There can be no question of your travelling while you continue the draughts and the unguent.’

  Ralegh lay sick and fevered until Stucley brought him word that James was arrived in Salisbury, from which moment the sickness began to abate and the blotches to fade. By next morning he was clearly mending from his strange disease, and supporting his aching head on one hand, he wrote from his bed of sickness a humble petition to his Most Gracious Majesty, that he might be received in audience and accorded some opportunity to justify himself, before being hurried away to his fate.

  After it was signed and sealed, and Sir Lewis had taken charge of it, the time that followed seemed to drag itself along like a wounded thing on its belly. When his cousin had been gone a while, Ralegh got up, swaying on his feet in a swimming world, and donning shirt and breeches, crawled to the window. Here, with the fresh air blowing in his face, he felt less miserably sick and dizzy, and the sight of the people passing in the street was vaguely comforting. And he was still there when, seemingly an interminable time later, his kinsman at last returned.

  He swung round at the other’s entrance, the world swinging with him, and stood looking across the room with a moment’s almost painful hope. But at sight of Stucley’s face, the hope died.

  Stucley came forward into the room, and tossed the appeal that had meant so much on to the bed. ‘He will neither see you nor receive your justification. I did what I could, but it was not enough.’

  Ralegh took up the unopened packet, and tore it across and across, letting the pieces drift to the floor. ‘Strange and passing strange, the power that we poor mortals have, to blind ourselves to truths we have no wish to see. I do not think I understood until now, the utter hopelessness of my position. Bess understood it, but I would not heed her. Poor Bess, she must be used to that by now.’ He dropped the last fragment of paper. ‘Well, I have used a deal of Manourie’s vile unguent to no purpose, that is all. We can resume our journey tomorrow. My thanks, that you tried to help me, Lewis.’

  Late that night, safe from interruption, with Ralegh in his chamber and one of Stucley’s servants on watch before the door, Stucley and the French Doctor faced each other across the table in the inn parlour.

  ‘I think, my dear Manourie, that we have turned this unlooked-for visit of the King’s to not unsatisfactory account,’ S
tucley was saying, and his face in the candle-light was no longer either pleasant or ineffectual.

  The other shrugged. ‘It seems to me a small matter about which to take so great pains.’

  ‘No matter can be too small, when it comes to propping a weak case. The King’s case is damnably weak — so weak that we cannot let slip the least opportunity of causing my dear kinsman to discredit himself, however slightly. If he could be persuaded to attempt escape, and then taken in the act, that would be an undoubted point to us in the game.’

  Manourie set down the glass he had been holding, and leaned forward across the table, gesturing with plump hands. ‘Ah bah! Why does your King trouble with this — this child’s play? He has promised Ralegh’s head to Spain as part of the Prince’s Marriage portion; ver’ well; why does he not send for Monsieur the headsman and make an end?’

  ‘Because he daren’t, you fool. There’s a wind rising against Gondomar of late, and Spaniards are already unsafe in the streets of London. There’s always the risk of a revolt, and Ralegh’s death for a Spanish holiday might well touch it off. No no, the King must have some show of justice to please the fools in the gutter.’

  ‘Justice, yes; and so you and I enter upon the scene, that we may perhap — at a price — from Ralegh get some damaging admission that shall help this show of justice. But how shall it serve any purpose. this that we have arranged with such care?’

  Stucley’s face was malicious. ‘It is hard to make a hero of a man who runs about in his shirt and sprouts purple blotches by the aid of a fair-ground ointment; hard to care greatly what becomes of him. Laughter is a powerful weapon, my friend.’