Give himself and that man but one campaign together away from the interference of the King’s Court, and what might they not yet achieve?
He raised his head from the bold straggling writing on the paper and saw the long humped line of the dunes slipping away from him, the sands pale grey as a corpse in this cold light, scarred with dark patches of scrub. A church spire in the distance pierced the clouds, the arms of windmills whirled round and round behind the dunes, but so flat was the country that that low barrier of sand, only a few feet high, hid all the rest of it. He thought of the people he was leaving behind in that hidden land, the people he had just seen – fat Ned Hyde pegging away interminably at his papers, Lauderdale that Learned Pig, his mother gay among her bankrupt jewels, Louey.
In a short time now Montrose too would be there to adventure his plan.
A ray of watery sunshine straggled through the clouds, the church spire gleamed white in it, the sandhills silver-gold; then it passed, and only a low grey line remained of Holland.
V
The Admiral lay safely at anchor in Kinsale harbour off the south coast of Ireland, and Maurice’s ship, the Constant Reformation, had just sailed in, two days later. The rest, owing to their inexpert pilots, had been driven to leeward, and Rupert had now to wait for them at this their rendezvous. He was not sorry for a few days’ quiet, for the wind had reached gale strength soon after they had left the shores of Holland and he had been exhaustingly sick and with little chance to stay below, for his ship, which was used to a crew of three hundred men, now carried only forty seamen and eighty soldiers, so that the Lord High Admiral took his full share of the practical seamanship.
Few and weakly manned as they were, they had had to sail through the Channel, and there came in full view of the enemy’s fleet, which rode at anchor in the Downs. The grumbling of the men at thus running into danger reached something like panic when Rupert, leaping down from the poop where he had been looking out through his telescope, shouted an order to charge straight at the enemy.
But – ‘There he is in the saddle again, sticking his spurs into the old ship’s side!’ Tom Smith jeered admiringly, and his determined backing of ‘our trooper’ helped more than the officers to prevent the crew’s terrified disobedience.
‘What’s good enough in the army is good enough in the navy,’ Rupert told them, and proved it, for the very impudence of his little fleet ‘charging’ so boldly down on the far greater Parliament fleet bluffed them so badly that they did not stay to count the enemy but slipped their anchors and sheltered under the castles, while the Royalist ships sailed gaily on to Ireland.
There Rupert sat in his stateroom in the stern of the ship, with its two round windows (a new experiment that, to see if a circle of glass would weather better than a square), working out his ‘Rule of Proportion’ allotting what share in the booty should be taken, in capturing a prize, by every man in the ship down to the swabber and the swabber’s mate and even the boy (half a share), when Maurice came on board and down into the stateroom and the two met again for the first time since Helvoetsluys. Maurice had been driven out of his course as far as Cork, had put in there for a few hours, and heard an astonishing report that had just been brought by a Dutch merchantman that had come straight from London.
‘But there’s no need to believe it just because it’s bad,’ said Maurice. They say Cromwell’s brought the King to London.’
‘We’d heard that before: that the King had made a treaty with Parliament, and London was preparing an array for him.’
‘No. They say they’ve brought the King to London to make him stand his trial there.’
‘His trial? On what charge, in the name of God?’
‘High treason,’ answered Maurice, as sullenly as if he were on trial himself, ‘for bearing arms against his subjects!’
Rupert turned on his brother, his face so dark with fury that even Maurice shrank from it. It was said that Rupert when angry looked like a devil in hell. He himself felt blasted by his rage, it tasted dry and bitter in his mouth since he could not assuage it in fight; his clenched fist tingled with the longing to smash it against all the injustice, cruelty, and slavish imbecility in the world.
He had to force himself to think reasonably, striding up and down that confined space.
‘This cannot be true,’ he said. ‘Cromwell would never run himself into such a preposterous impasse. To find the King guilty would be to condemn him to death. And they could never carry out the sentence. Kings have been murdered, but not executed with a solemn show of law.’
There was his own great-grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, but even so, she had been beheaded by a rival queen, her lifelong foe not by her own subjects. No, England might do many things, ridden as she was by that hard rider, General Cromwell, but not that.
Then, turning this way and that, he remembered how he had met General Cromwell at Bristol at the end of the war, and saw again the thick nose, the hot eyes, the bitterly repressed mouth. Sir Theodore Mayerne, King Charles’ own doctor, had told him how he had once had to treat Cromwell for melancholia and had thought him a bad case unless he could contrive always to drug his tormented soul with action. He had certainly contrived it these late years, but that gave one no confidence as to whether the required action might not take some monstrous form.
‘ “A man who has a genius for practical organization plus a morbid hysteria,” ‘ Rupert muttered, thinking of Sir Theodore’s words, then added, ‘given such a man, whose genius is hampered by a certain obstacle, will he not then take steps to remove the obstacle? What is to prevent Cromwell from killing the King?’
‘He would never dare,’ said Maurice.
‘You have forgotten the hysteria. He would make himself think it was the will of God.’
‘He could never make others think it.’
‘You did not see him. I did.’
A heavy silence fell on him, and when Maurice spoke later he did not hear him; he stood still and began shoving the papers here and there on the table, unable to push away the unbearable fear now in his mind. There was no escape among those papers. Charles’ own writing struck up at him from the litter, the pointed handwriting piercing his heart as his eye fell carelessly upon it and saw what it was saying to him:
‘Next my children (I say next), I shall have most care of you.’
The stammering precision of that repetition (‘I say next—’) was the very echo of his uncle’s stammering speech; more poignant was that tender assurance of the loving care that the helpless prisoner intended to take of his nephew.
He took up the letter to tear it across – why was it still lying here? It was an old one and of no importance – but as the paper began to tear, he laid it down again. Why should he destroy this letter which spoke concern and gratitude towards him, when he had kept others in evidence against his uncle?
He had kept the letter in which King Charles in their bitterest quarrel had dismissed him from his service, banished him from England, and told him to seek employment elsewhere, ‘somewhere beyond seas’.
And for years he had kept another of his letters, for no other purpose than the bitter, secret justification it gave to his pride to keep for himself the actual words in which his uncle had doomed him to his failure at Marston Moor.
Even now he could not say those words ‘Marston Moor’ to himself without checking the vigorous rush of life in his veins, just as that disastrous battle had checked and turned the mighty onrush of his success that had made his enemies as well as his friends declare him invincible. Marston Moor had turned the flow of that fierce tide; at Marston Moor he had gone down, and Oliver Cromwell, the cavalry leader for the English Parliament, had gone up, and had been going up and up ever since, until now he ruled all England.
It was this that mattered – nothing else. His uncle, King Charles, for whom he had fought in vain, was Cromwell’s prisoner; and Cromwell was bringing him to trial – so they now said.
He swung round with
a furious gesture, pushing the table back from him.
‘We are fools to listen to every lying rumour!’ he exclaimed. ‘If Cromwell runs mad, there’s Fairfax to restrain him, and he’s a gentleman; there’s all England, and for that matter all Europe. Cromwell has always had method in his madness, he’d not bring every country into line against him. Come up on deck. I must cool my head.’
It felt dazed and empty after that blinding rage, a way it had had now and then ever since that bullet-wound in the head during that negligible Franco Spanish campaign in which he had engaged last year to fill up time after the Civil War had ceased in England. It had destroyed his reputation as the Wizard Prince, Rupert the Devil, whom no mortal-made weapon could touch. That bullet last year, fired from a stupid little ambush, had touched him quite severely, and though it had healed remarkably well, his head now sometimes ached abominably, and sometimes gave him a queer dizzy feeling as though he were walking in space, unable to bring his feet down to earth.
Now he felt at ease again, he no longer had any belief in that report – King Charles had been killed by rumour too often before now. He walked on deck with the sea-air on his bare head, and Maurice beside him, leaving that small dark room below for this vast pearl-coloured space. There was no sun and no wind for the moment; a spatter of rain fell like a sigh, whispered a little in the still air, then died on it as softly as it had begun. North of the ship lay the dim white lines of Kinsale harbour cutting into the towering rocks of the headland, a huddle of low white huts behind it, and the purple mist which showed where the bogs and wintry woods stretched away beyond the rocks.
This damp air destroyed distances both in memory and space, like the mist that blurred all outlines of the further scene, then suddenly rolled up over some brilliant patch of blue hill and crimson bog, showing it as dazzling clear as if it lay within a few yards. After the rich land of Holland, every inch of it tended and worked over, nursed into wealth that would repay the labour a million-fold, it was amazing, at first infuriating, to see, when he went ashore here, the starved, stony, uneven ground, where nothing seemed to grow but thorns and weeds.
Yet he had already ceased to wonder at the people’s lack of effort; he, who had had all his nerves and energies strained to breaking-point these last months, now felt as though he had slipped from the immediate burning necessities of every day into the ramifications of a dream.
‘Sir John Davies ought to have mentioned it among his “True Causes why Ireland was Never Entirely Subdued”,’ he remarked – ‘that you can’t subdue men who are asleep – and dreaming.’
And he told Maurice how every man he talked with when he went ashore told him that the first thing he must do if he hoped to consolidate Ireland for the King’s cause was to get rid of the Protestant upstarts or alternately the Roman Catholic rebels, or else the English settlers or contrariwise the Irish rapparees; and how one could seldom make out if the invasion or the battle or the massacre or the famine of which one was hearing had happened a few years or a few centuries ago.
‘Look at that spider on the water,’ he exclaimed, pointing at a long black boat rowed by two men, bobbing among the ships in the harbour. ‘They call that thing a curragh, it’s made of wicker work and tarred canvas, and it’s so light that a man has only to slip out one of the seats to carry it on his head down to the shore. Yet they’ll go out in those boats in the roughest weather, wriggling up the big Atlantic waves and down again feet foremost into the trough of the wave. They say they’re the boats the first settlers ever came in to Ireland, thousands of years ago, yet they still use them and always will, for no one ever wants to change anything here.’
The wind had freshened again, it rose higher and higher as they walked the deck, talking of Ormonde’s plan for Ireland which their fleet must now follow, but he wished he and Montrose could have got into conjunction over it.
‘Montrose, Ormonde, you and I,’ he said, ‘we worked well together that night at Oxford in the King’s rooms at Christ Church, do you remember?’
‘I remember going to sleep,’ said Maurice frivolously; ‘and some drunken undergraduates going home from a supper-party singing that song from the play—
‘ “But did he take the fair Lucrece by the toe, sir?”
“ Oh no, no, sir!” ’
‘ “And did he somewhat nearer go, sir?” ’
Rupert chimed in, and they finished in uproarious chorus,
‘ “Oh no no, no no, no no, sir!” ’
‘There’s a pinnace to starboard, Your Highness,’ said the captain, coming down from the upper deck. ‘She’s making for us with all sail set.’
Rupert, still humming,
‘ “But did he take the fair Lucrece by the thigh, sir?”
“Oh fie, fie, sir!” ’
walked across to the upper deck and stared into the skirts of a cloud that was dropping rain as it passed only a little way off, though here where he stood it was not raining at all.
Through the grey slanting lines of rain the pinnace came flying to where the broken stump of rainbow that the sailors call a wind-dog splashed the cloud with iridescent light. A monstrous black bird was flapping its wings above the mast, following it so closely that it must have perched upon it. No raven would be that size, it could not be a bird at all, but before he could, or would, think what it might be, Rupert saw it for an instant as a black sail furled about the mast – and then the tail of the shower blotted out the boat and it disappeared.
The fancy came to him that this was no ship of the present world, but the black-sailed boat that came to Tristram as he lay dying, looking out to sea; the black sails told him that Iseult had not come, he turned his face to the wall, three times he called upon her name, at the third time he died.
He was making sound practical comments to the captain about the ship’s course and probable nationality while beneath his spoken speech his mind was darting this way and that, trying to lose the meaning of that black thing above the mast in this fragment from a romance heard long ago at the English Court. It was the air of this western island, the sad rains and unnatural flying brilliance of the sky, the old memories of vanished glory, it was all these things, he told himself, and no real cause that wrapped his mind in foreboding and intangible sorrow as with its wreaths of white mist.
And then the pinnace came out again from behind that curtain of rain, and the black flag on its mast spread itself clear against the rainbow light in the sky.
‘The captain has died on board.’
‘By the cut of her jib she’s a French pinnace. The young King of France must be dead.’
Rupert said these things to himself as precisely as if he were saying them aloud, while behind his reasoned conjectures, behind this vague cloud-curtained sky and sea, he saw, sharp and clear as at the wrong end of a telescope, a tiny picture of dense crowds mustered in the London streets to see King Charles go by, all standing still as death and in a deathly silence.
He had seen that picture before, in Hyde’s room, in front of Lauderdale’s gross face. Now he knew that it was true. He went down to his cabin and sat there staring at the round window, waiting for the news that they would bring.
But when they brought it, tramping down the ladder one after the other, Maurice and his captain and the captain of the pinnace, when they came and stood round him there as he sat at the table and said, ‘King Charles is dead. He has been beheaded by Cromwell’s soldiers at Whitehall,’ the words he had known they would say fell like stones wide of their mark, he could neither understand nor believe them.
In that dark and narrow place where he sat, there was still the clear circle at which he had been staring all this time, a circle of greenish-whitish sea and white sky and the white wings of seagulls swooping and swirling. Now he could see nothing but that; the waiting men round him, the dark narrow walls had melted away, and he saw nothing but that circle of infinity, of cold space, of utter timelessness.
‘Somewhere beyond seas’ – Charles now
was there, where he had once banished Rupert; he was beyond seas, beyond the world, and life, and time. There was nothing he could do now for Charles any more.
‘This is the end of it all!’ he cried in a great voice. He heard it as the voice of another man, of a wave crashing over his head. The white circle widened, rushed in on him, engulfed him.
This, then, is the end of it all, this white immensity, featureless, endless, not to be seen nor heard; this is what lies round life, waiting to release us, this is death. He had broken through the thin and brittle margin of time, he was in eternity.
But something was whispering, no, shouting at him; sound was coming back, and sense, – hands round him, fumbling at his neck, cold liquid splashing at his lips, the strong smell of brandy, an arm pushing round his shoulders, Maurice’s face, long and yellow with fright, staring down into his own, dragging him back with his imploring eyes, refusing to let him go out through that white circle.
‘Let me get back,’ he whispered.
It was no good; it was life that was coming back, familiar objects, faces, sounds, Maurice’s voice claiming him, urging him—
‘It is not the end. It is the beginning. We will avenge him. We will get his son back on to the throne. Charles shall not die forgotten.’
A moment since he had been forgotten, with all else, and yet he had been there. There had been no memories beyond that white circle, only a vast discovery.
Some day Rupert would get back. He could not now. He dragged up his head from the table where he had fallen sideways, and looked round him in astonishment.
‘I died just now,’ he said.
‘You fainted,’ said Maurice. ‘You have never done that before, that is why it seemed like death.’
‘No,’ said his brother, ‘it seemed like life.’
Book Two
The Bride Page 6