Lady in Waiting

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘They would matter the less, if I could be sure of finding you again when they are accomplished.’ Bess’s voice was hoarse and toneless with grief held in check.

  ‘Sweetheart, from the outermost curves of Infinity, God led your spirit and mine to find each other. I will not believe He would have taken so great pains, if we were to meet only once between the dark and the dark.’

  ‘Oh, it is not God’s mercy that I question ... Always you have outdistanced me, following your dream, and I have run behind, calling to you, calling and calling. How can I be sure that you will turn back for me at the last?’

  ‘How, save by faith, may we be sure of anything that is beyond sight or touch? Yet in all my wanderings, something of myself has turned back to you; in all my wanderings you have been — you are — with me in my innermost sanctuary, far deeper than the need to think of you, in the same quiet place from which those dreams are sprung.’

  He was holding her close, compelling her belief. The first note of the Abbey clock striking midnight thrummed out into the windy darkness. ‘A new day. Sweetheart,’ Ralegh said.

  ‘Not yet — I need not go just yet —?’

  ‘Very soon. Any moment now, Bess.’

  The clock went on striking, the slow remorseless notes pulsing behind her rush of words. ‘Then listen — listen, Walter: in the morning I shall be in the little room that looks this way — my linen room. Think of me there, when the time comes — close to you, so close —’

  The clock had finished striking.

  They had time for little more, before footsteps sounded outside, and with a loud rattle, the door was unlocked. ‘Time’s up, Sir,’ said the gaoler. ‘Five minutes extra. the lady’s had, for I let her up before her time.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ralegh said. ‘Captain King waits to take you home, Bess. Now kiss me, Sweetheart, and go.’

  But at this last moment, Bess’s hard held-control broke under the strain upon it, and she clung to him after all, frantically, sobbing and shuddering. ‘Not yet — Not just yet! Only five minutes more! Walter, I can’t, I can’t —’

  ‘It is but for a while.’

  But the prospect of some distant coming together again in a thin and alien Heaven could give poor Bess no comfort now. This world was all she had, and his living presence with her that made it sweet. ‘Walter, I can’t — not yet — just a little longer! Walter, don’t let them take me away — I love you — I love you so —’

  His hands were on her wrists, gently but inexorably breaking her hold. ‘Beloved, it is no easy thing to part from you; don’t make it harder ... King, for God’s sake take her!’

  His hoarse voice, and the sight of his drawn face steadied her; and with an effort that seemed to wrench at her whole being, she caught back her self-control. She ceased her broken entreaties. She allowed him to lift her hands away; stood for an instant looking into his face as though to be sure she had it by heart. and then, speaking his name once, turned and dragged herself to the door.

  She had no recollection of getting home, until she was actually in the narrow candle-lit hall, and Joan, with face all bloated with weeping, had come to take her cloak; and somebody was bending over her hand, saying that he was going to his lodging now; that she knew where to find him at any hour of the day or night; that he was her servant and her friend in all things.

  She looked at him wildly for a moment, then saw that he was William King. ‘Captain King, what do you do here?’

  ‘I have brought you home, My Lady,’ he said gently. ‘Sir Walter bade me.’

  She gave him both her hands then. ‘I beg you forgive me. My wits are all broken. I shall see you again?’

  ‘Whensoever you need me, Lady Ralegh.’

  ‘Walter has many enemies, but very faithful friends,’ Bess said. ‘Goodnight, Captain King.’

  He went into the night, and as she turned from the closing door, she saw someone else waiting at the stair-foot. Carew. ‘You should be in bed, Carew,’ she said dully.

  The boy seemed not to hear, but came towards her, a little uncertainly, his eyes on her face. ‘There is — no news, then, Mother?’

  She knew what he meant. ‘No, there is no news.’

  ‘There may be yet — There is still time.’

  ‘It would need all the time from now until the Judgment Day, to move the King’s mercy towards your father.’

  She found that she was in the parlour, sitting by the hearth. The fire burned brightly, but it was cold, so cold. She held her frozen hands to the blaze, but the flames had no warmth in them. She was dimly aware of Joan hovering round her; of Carew watching her — waiting for something. His eyes were fixed on hers, wide and expectant. What was it that he waited for, she wondered.

  ‘Mother, did — did Father speak of me at all — or send me any message?’

  The question caught her like a physical blow, and looking into the boy’s stricken face she was stabbed by self-accusation. They had spoken of him, yes, of his schooling and his future; but only to keep other things at bay; they had not spoken of him as they had of Watt. They had shut him out. forgotten his existence. She realised now, for the first time, that Carew had not asked to go with her, that he might see his father for the last time, and even had he been older, it would not have occurred to her to take him. It had not occurred to Ralegh to ask for him or send him any word of goodbye. ‘He talked of your future,’ she said; but how cold that sounded. And then the words she needed came to her, out of a letter written fifteen years ago. She had it still, upstairs in her almost empty jewel casket, with Watt’s battered Testament with a tiny scarlet feather pressed between the pages. They had been for her and Watt, those words; she gave Watt’s part in them to Carew now, as the only reparation she could make him. ‘He sent you his blessing; he said to me, “The true God hold you both in His arms”.’

  Carew knelt beside her, without a word, beginning to chafe her cold hands between his. Then still holding them, he dropped his head on her knees and burst into a storm of tears. He was only thirteen after all.

  Alone in his prison after Bess had gone, Ralegh trimmed one of the candles, which had begun to gutter, undid Bess’s bundle and spread out on the pallet the garments she had brought him, that the creases might have time to smooth out before morning, relit his pipe, and sat down with his Bible open on the table before him. He regretted for a passing moment those maps and charts that had gone with Lewis Stucley; and yet he had small need of them, for he knew their every line as he knew the back of his own hand; knew them as he knew Hayes Barton woods when he was a boy.

  He sat for a long while puffing at his pipe, and staring at the opposite wall, or rather through it, seeing perhaps those maps of Guiana; perhaps Guiana itself, all the wide green promise of Guiana. Seeing perhaps Hayes Barton woods with the sea wind swinging through the branches, and the world shining as a small boy’s world can shine.

  A long road he had come since those days, and now he stood at the end of it, in the gateway of the unknown. With his passing through that gateway, in the morning, there would be none left of Elizabeth’s Round Table. He was the last of them, the lonely one. Grenville and Frobisher, Drake and Hawkins, all gone, by fever or Spanish shot; Essex and Robin Cecil; Philip Sidney long ago. His mind lingered over them and many more, men who had been his friends and his enemies, a few whom he had loved. Watt, too, and Lawrence Kemys. He had not relented towards Lawrence Kemys’s memory in all these months, had not spoken of him save with bitterness; but there was no bitterness in his thoughts of his old Captain now. Well, in a few hours time he would have rejoined their company.

  He did not lie down on the pallet, as the long hours wore away. He had no wish for sleep, and many things to think about; his speech from the scaffold to polish into perfection; his peace to make with his own unorthodox God.

  Some time in that night, his winged muse returned to him. The pen and ink-horn which he had demanded for writing his note to Bess were still on the table, and for paper, he had
the fly-leaf of his Bible.

  And on the blank page he wrote almost word for word, the lines which he had set down in a mood of furious pessimism, when first the Earl of Essex had threatened to oust him from the Queen’s favour.

  Even such is time which takes in trust

  Our youth, our joys, and all we have,

  And pays us but with age and dust.

  Who in the dark and silent grave

  Wizen we have wandered all our ways

  Shuts up the story of our days.

  Then, dipping his pen again into the ink-horn, he added two more lines in a different mood; lines which rang like a trumpet call.

  And from which earth and grave and dust,

  My God shall raise me up, I trust.

  When the Abbey clock struck five, he proceeded to dress himself for his last appearance. Black taffeta breeches and grey silk stocks, a doublet of fawn-coloured satin, and over all, a gown of wrought black velvet. The effect was perhaps a little sombre for his taste, but they were his best clothes, and suitable for the occasion, and he donned them with infinite care, making as fastidious a toilet as ever he had made in his life; he, the Queen’s Captain. Smoothed his hair and pointed his beard — he would have liked to have had his beard trimmed — and fingered for an instant his one ornament, the pearl drop that still hung in his left ear. The lack of a mirror troubled him, but he contrived as best he could without one, to make sure that he had achieved perfection.

  All his life, Ralegh had had his full and more than full share of the vivid self-awareness, the conscious and cultivated grace of living that had belonged to the men of his own day more than to the men of any other. He had lived life with an air, making of the raw fabric of it something rich and shining beyond the common run. Now he prepared to make a final exit that would be worthy of the play that had gone before.

  *

  At dawn, Dr. Townson, still a little shaken out of his comfortable self-satisfaction and somewhat chilly without it, returned to compose his mind for him, but found the prisoner far more composed than he was himself. Ralegh still refused to admit any guilt. He took Communion, and when the Dean had gone, ate a hearty breakfast, and finding that there was time to spare, filled and lit his silver-bowled pipe for the last time.

  Time to go, and his pipe smoked out, he put on his hat — a cap edged with bone lace under it, for an added protection against the morning chill and the fever that ached in his bones — and said to the Sheriffs of London, who stood by, ‘Now Gentlemen, shall we go?’

  At the gatehouse entrance a man stepped forward to offer him a cup of sack. He took it with a word of thanks, and stood a few moments on the threshold, to drink it down, glancing about him at the morning as he did so. The wind was still blowing up from the river, with an edge to it that cut like a knife; the morning was bleak and cheerless under a lemon-grey sky, nothing left now of last night’s stars. The narrow alleyway before the gatehouse was empty save for the men gathered about him in the arched entrance, and the garbage fretting to and fro before the autumn wind; but from the direction of Palace Yard came the murmuration of a gathering crowd. A faint quirk of satisfaction twitched Ralegh’s lips as he heard it. It was Lord Mayor’s Day; chosen for his execution, he was well aware, that the rival attraction of a pageant might prevent a crowd gathering to witness his departure. But it seemed that the plan had miscarried. He drained the cup in his hand, and returned it to the official.

  ‘The sack was to your liking, Sir Walter?’

  Ralegh smiled. ‘Will answer you as did the fellow who drank of St. Giles’s bowl as he went to Tybourne; “It is a good drink, if a man might but tarry by it”.’

  The plan to prevent a crowd gathering had certainly failed. Palace Yard was a seething mass of people, gentle and simple, on horseback and on foot; faces at every window, boys clinging to every ledge. A murmurous and sympathetic crowd who pressed in on Ralegh and his guards from all sides as they edged through towards the scaffold that rose like an obscene island in the midst of a sea of heads. A noble, a merchant, a ballad seller, a pickpocket, a bawdy-basket from the bankside stews, a soldier with tears trickling down his nose; a young woman with a black-eyed infant in her arms. In the forefront of the crowd, an old man with a head as bald as an egg caught Ralegh’s attention, and he checked an instant to ask what he did, coming out on such a raw morning.

  The other looked at him with blue seaman’s eyes in a face as weathered and deeply wrinkled as his head was smooth and shining. ‘Come to pray for you, Sir Walter.’

  ‘That is kind of you,’ Ralegh said. With a flicker of grim humour he caught off his hat and the lace cap under it, and tossed the cap to the old man. ‘You have more need of this now, my friend, than I,’ and clapping on his hat again, he continued on his way.

  As he limped composedly up the steps to the scaffold, the Dean was beside him again; the Sheriffs who had escorted him from the gatehouse, the Earl of Arundel and two more of the Council; a tall figure in black velvet who stood aloof from the rest, leaning on a long-handled axe.

  Arundel and his fellows gathered round him, pointedly, to shake his hand before the eyes of the world, and Ralegh turned from one to another, with a brief word of greeting and farewell. Only to Arundel himself he had a little more to say. ‘For God’s sake use your influence with the King, that he blacken not my name when I am no longer here to speak in my own defence.’

  ‘I will do all that lies in my power,’ Arundel promised, as they shook hands.

  Ralegh cast a quick, all-embracing glance about him. ‘I thank God in his infinite goodness, that he has brought me into the light to die, and not suffered me to die in the dark of the Tower,’ he said, as though to himself, or to someone not visible to those around him. His gaze passed out over the still-swelling crowd. as though it would pierce through the tall buildings that hemmed him in, through the grey distances of the morning, and find Bess at her linen room window.

  Beside him, an officer was making the proclamation for silence; and Ralegh’s gaze dropped to the sea of upturned faces. What chance, alter all, had a Lord Mayor’s pageant, which happened every year, compared with the taking-off of the last of Elizabeth’s champions, which could happen only once? But that was hardly just; doubtless the rabble below him had been drawn here partly by the lust for sensation that always drew huge crowds to the execution of a well-known figure, but he knew that they had also come to wish him God speed on his journey; and he looked down on them kindly. They were a cross-section of England, and he was glad that he was not to be hustled out, as at one time he had feared he might be, without the chance to defend himself in their eyes.

  But the autumn chill that made the old wound ache intolerably seemed to have eaten into his fever-ridden bones; and he was shivering as he stood above them, and unsure of the strength of his voice. With a sudden fear that they might misconstrue these things and believe him to be afraid, he began: ‘Good people, I crave your indulgence if that my voice seem weak and some of you find it not easy to hear. This is the third day of my fever.’

  And that matter having been taken care of, he launched into the speech that had occupied him during the night. One by one, he defended himself from the charges made against him. New charge and ancient calumny, even to the oldest of them all, whose shadow had clung to him for seventeen years. ‘It is said that at the death of the Earl of Essex, I stood in a window over against him when he suffered, and puffed out tobacco in disdain of him. God I take to witness that I shed tears for him when he died! And as I hope to look God in the face hereafter, the Earl of Essex did not see my face when he suffered, for I was afar off in the armoury where I saw him but he saw not me. I confess indeed I was of a contrary faction, but I knew My Lord of Essex was a noble gentleman, and that it would be the worse with me when he was gone; for I got the hate of those that wished me well before, and those that set me against him afterwards set themselves against me, and were my greatest enemies. And my soul has many times been grieved that I was not near
er to him when he died; for it was told me afterwards that he asked for me at his death, to have been reconciled unto me.’

  There was little more that he wished to say. Looking down at the hushed multitude, he took off his hat. ‘And now I entreat you all to join with me in prayer to the Great God of Heaven; for I have many sins for which to crave his pardon. I have been a seafaring man, a soldier and a Courtier, and in the temptations of the least of these there is enough to overthrow a good mind and a good man. Pray therefore with me, that He will forgive me, and that He will receive me into everlasting life. So I take my leave of you all, making my peace with God.’

  The crowd stirred as though a wind blew through their ranks, and a hoarse murmuring rose from them.

  Now the scaffold was clearing. A few moments more, and there were left upon it only three dark figures; those of the Dean, the headsman and the Queen’s Captain. The Queen’s Captain standing in the eye of his world for the last time.

  He slipped off his gown and gave it, with his hat, to an attendant on the scaffold steps, then turned to the terrible black figure beside him and asked to examine the axe. The executioner hesitated, clearly distressed, then gave it into his hands. Ralegh turned it over, looking at it, ran an experimental finger along the blade, and nodded in satisfaction. ‘This is a sharp and fair medicine to cure all my ills.’ He handed it back. ‘When I stretch out my hands, dispatch me.’

  For answer, the headsman, still holding the axe, dropped on his knees. ‘Forgive me, Sir. Forgive me for what I do.’

  Ralegh looked down at him an instant, then patted the bowed black shoulder very kindly. ‘Man, I forgive you freely.’

  He turned once more to the crowd, as the headsman, stumbling to his feet, spread his own cloak before the block for him to kneel on. ‘Now, friends, give me your hearty prayers, for I have a long journey to go.’