This arrangement would have a very fair show of truth, since Charles was now so beset with spies that it was all but impossible for him to discuss anything of real private importance with Montrose; moreover, Charles was in actual fact going to Amsterdam soon on a short visit on an equally private matter, since it was to visit no less and no more a person than Lucy Walters, who had been bundled out of the way there with her baby. As soon as he should depart, the false summons would be sent to Montrose, and Aank and his gang would attack him either on the road or at his own house when he returned to it alone.
This was discovered on the afternoon of Easter Eve, and Honthorst at once went to Montrose’s house to warn him beforehand, but found it empty, the servants all absent, presumably for the Carnival. He promised Louey to go back again the first thing next morning – Charles was sure to be at the Easter Eve reception at the Binnenhof that evening, and nothing could happen as long as he was at The Hague.
But it was that very evening, at that very reception, that Louey learned of Charles’ departure. Most of the guests wore masks and fancy-dress; it was late in the evening, just on eleven o’clock, when the Princess Mary interrupted a long complaint to her cousin (she had not been able to wear her dress as an Amazon with a delicious little silver bow, because she was in mourning) to whisper indignantly, ‘Do you know why that wicked Charles is not here? He has this afternoon ridden off to that horrible woman, and wouldn’t your mother be angry! Oh yes, she laughs and won’t let anyone else say a word against him, but for all that she’s scolded him soundly.’
Louey could hardly wait to hear her as far as that. Since Charles had already gone, it meant that Lauderdale’s spies knew of it and would be even now sending the message to Montrose that would take him out to a secret interview with his King – but really to the ambush for his death. She could not lose a moment in trying to find Honthorst or anyone else whom she might trust to go and warn him, if indeed he had returned.
All she did was to catch Etta aside, whisper to her to cover her departure and say that she had already left to go home, and then slip out by herself in a borrowed mask and her dark cloak, in the confusion of all those fantastic figures coming and going, while the music thrummed and spun its intricate spider-dance about them.
Like Cinderella, she fled out of the Palace, and that thin music and the roar of voices faded away behind her.
XVI
Luckily there was no moon, and the streets showed only here and there the lighted doorway of a tavern or a lantern hung at a cross-road. It was raining too – a good thing, as it would keep people indoors – and the mud squelched underfoot. She kept to the darkest side of the road and ran too fast and desperately for any of the decent though drunken Dutch citizens returning from a supper-party to try to molest her, though they hailed her jovially. Then, as that silent black figure flew past them, they crossed themselves surreptitiously, those determined anti- Romanists, in anxious reversion to that forbidden charm, thinking a ghost or witch might have flitted past them through the night.
But now some cavalier, short and stout and also drunk, was making for her with more determination, hailed her with one or two of the gross words in Dutch that every Englishman at The Hague knew by now, and barred her way, putting a hand on her arm and holding it tight as she tried to shake it off. She had a’ heavy ring on her right hand which Rupert had once remarked would make a useful knuckle-duster, and at once lunged out, crashing it into his face with so sudden and swift an action that he staggered back with a cry of pain, slipped in the mud and fell sprawling at her feet. In another instant he was clawing for her cloak, but she had already leaped past him and was tearing down the dark street quicker than any drunkard could follow.
She had reached the house now. There was a light in one of the upper windows. Then Montrose had returned, alone, as Lauderdale had planned, and she was most likely in time. The side door had been left unfastened. Was that the servants’ carelessness or because they had already come? Her heart beat so quick and loud as she went up those silent stairs that it seemed to echo through the house. What would she see when she went through that door – Montrose dead, or alive?
But she must be in time; she would see him sitting at his table perhaps, or walking up and down, and she would tell him very quickly – ‘you must go; they are coming here to kill you’ – and he would be kind and comforting and they would get away at once from this dreadful, silent, waiting house. Her fingers fumbled at the door; lifting the latch, she went in.
Yes, he was sitting at the table, writing. She tore off her mask, – it was not he, it was General Sir John Hurry who was rising slowly, getting taller and scrawnier and more astonished every instant. His enormously wide shoulders stooped forward as if they were holding up the ceiling, his long thin slightly bowed legs narrowed sharply to his feet; he was a long triangle standing on its point, and his scarred face lowered forward, leered forward, the lamplight striking on his shining red jaw – the hard-bitten, driven-in red of a fair, weather-beaten Scot.
She gasped out: ‘Where is Montrose?’
‘He is expecting Your Highness?’
‘No, you idiot!’ she snapped, in answer to his tone rather than his question, and he started, actually believing for a flash that it was the mother and not the daughter who stood there, words and voice were so exactly what she would have used. But the next moment he forgot her and all women, for she told him of Lauderdale’s plot.
‘If he is still on the road,’ she said, ‘they will try to get him there.’
He turned his back on her to pick up a couple of horse- pistols, which he loaded and rammed into his belt.
‘Are you going to ride and meet him?’
His answer was a surly grunt, inarticulate, but in the accent of Aberdeen. (‘What did the woman need asking such fool questions?’)
‘But he might come by the other road,’ she said.
‘Not if I ride fast enough to reach him before the cross-roads. There’s a risk, but I must take it.’
‘If they miss him on the road, they’ll come after him here. Some of them may come here anyway. Is there no one you could leave here to warn him?’
‘Not a soul in the house, and I’ll not wait to fetch any.’
‘I’ll wait here, then.’
He gave her a nod and a narrow glance under his light red eyelashes. ‘I’ve thrown finer lumps of flesh than yon on their backs, but none with more spirit,’ he thought, and aloud said, ‘Ay.’
She heard him clattering downstairs, then leading his horse out of the stable. It must have been all ready saddled and bridled, for there was no pause. She heard the hooves splash in the mud and then thud away.
The house shut down round her, all dark outside this room, all silent, waiting. She drew her cloak tight round her to try to stop herself shivering. She felt very cold. At any moment Montrose might come in – or his murderers. The clock on the chimney-piece was ticking heavily, its pendulum swinging to and fro in time to that loud ticking, a ticking that sounded more and more like the steady clatter of hooves on the cobblestones outside, of steps in the paved courtyard. Yet whenever she looked at it the time was the same as when she had looked last.
But this night too must pass as other nights had done; time must go on past this moment and tell her whether Montrose was alive or not. He must be alive, it was unthinkable his great design should end like this before it began, God could not allow it, Fate itself would have too much sense to allow such a thing to happen. The moments would move on, and someone would come to tell her all was well.
But supposing there was no God, no Fate even; only the blind working of chance?
She crammed her hand into her mouth to stop herself from screaming, for she heard someone – more than one – coming up the stair. She looked round frantically for a place to hide, but what was the use of that? They would ferret into all possible hiding-places. Now they would burst the door open. She must stand up stiffly and not show she was afraid.
&nbs
p; But there was no sound now. Had they stopped at the door to listen, to peer through the keyhole? The thought that someone might be watching her, unseen, was more unbearable than any other fear. She went to the door and flung it open. There was no one that she could see outside. The stairs yawned in a deep well of darkness. No one had come up them; she had imagined it all.
‘In another hour I shall be mad,’ thought Louey. She went back into the room and walked round the table with her fingers in her ears to shut out the innumerable unnamable sounds one hears at night in an empty house. But that made it worse.
She began deliberately to look at different things in the room – there were not many. His lute lay on a stool. She took it up and plucked out the beginning of a jerky little tune on the strings; but the sounds went echoing away through the silence and terrified her.
There was a shelf of books. She pulled out the biggest, a thick brown folio. It was Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World, published in 1614, when he had still been alive and in the Tower where he wrote it. Montrose’s name was at the beginning, but as James Graham, and the date and a brief inscription from his father, showing the book to have been a gift from him for his son’s twelfth birthday in October 1624. She dipped here and there; the pages fell open of themselves in several places as if from long usage.
One had a thin, crushed, withered stem of some herb to mark the place; all the leaves had fallen from it long ago and only the faintest dusty scent remained, nothing to show if it had once been lavender or lad’s love or rosemary; nothing to show if it had been he or some woman, his wife, walking in his garden, their garden, who had plucked it and laid it there. It left a faint stained dent in the margin beside these words: ‘Only those few black swans I must except, who behold death without dread, and the grave without fear, and embrace both, as necessary guides to endless glory.’
This had been written by Raleigh in the Tower, who had been let out of the Tower, a man nearing seventy, weakened by fourteen years of imprisonment and disappointment, to try his luck once more in his ship named The Destiny, to break the huge power of Spain and to found an empire for the king who behind his back was already conspiring with that enemy against him.
And she remembered how that voyage had taken four times as long as that distance had ever taken before, and a hurricane had sunk one of his pinnaces, and a raging epidemic destroyed half his men, and for weeks they lay becalmed and Raleigh’s log was one long catalogue of death day by day, and Raleigh himself was sick of the fever and with the pleurisy he had already had in the Tower, and so weakened he could scarcely hold his pen.
And on that voyage his son was killed in the attack on the Spanish town on the Orinoco.
Then at the end he might have escaped as his friends urged him to do, but on his way to the French ship that was to rescue him he turned back to meet his destiny, and so became immortal.
She sat there with her chin between her hands, her elbows on the table, seeing these things so clear before her mind that for the first time the house was filled with silence – until she could no longer bear the silence, and the echoes of that past that could be heard in it throbbing away into the future. She picked up Hurry’s pen and pulled towards her the paper on which he had been writing, and scrawled a caricature of Hurry rising, an immense raw-boned ruffian, against the ceiling.
There were more sheets of paper beneath Hurry’s crabbed scrawl; she drew one out to make another sketch, and saw straggling short lines of verse scribbled on it. She knew them, from one or two notes he had sent her mother, to be in Montrose’s handwriting. He might be fighting his death-battle even now, living his poem to its sharp end instead of writing it, and these disjointed verses might be his last words, whether said or written. She must not read them; she must read them; she read:
‘My dear and only love, take heed
How thou thysell dispose.
Let not all longing lovers feed
Upon such looks as those.
I’ll marble-wall thee round about
Myself shall be the door,
And if thy heart dare to slide out
I’ll never love thee more.’
Doggerel? With a certain wild swinging, or indeed swingeing vigour perhaps, but not much else? Louey tried to read it as critically as Eliza would do, but it was no good. There was only one question in her mind: To whom was this written? Could it be herself?
Her cheeks that had felt so cold with fear against her hands were now burning, and a vein pulsed madly in her forehead; she looked here and there over the scattered lines, scarcely daring to choose which to read next, for words caught her unawares:
‘Thou traitorous and untrue!’
Was that for her? And—
‘Thy spirit grown so poor.’
And this?
‘Thy beauty shined at first so bright
And woe is me therefore
That ever I found thy love so light
That I could love no more.’
That ‘damnable iteration’! And there again, scrawled along the side, a cruelly mocking jest,—
‘If thou turn a Commonwealth
I’ll never love thee more.’
Since this was what he thought of her, why did he choose the obvious rhyme to that insistent refrain? Perhaps that final stone was flung at her here down in the corner where something almost illegible had been scribbled about ‘that tracing goddess Fame’, who
‘Shall record it to thy shame
How thou hast loved me!
And how in odds our love was such
As few have been before.
Thou lovedst too many, I too much,
So I can love no more.’
Nor could she read more. She felt she had been stripped and beaten. She put her hands over her face, trying to see herself as Honthorst saw her, and all the other men who had loved her and told her they had to do so for ever, howsoever she had treated them.
But she could not shut out that brutal, jeering vision of her in Montrose’s eyes, and her despairing certainty that that vision was the last he had seen of her, that he would never know how she indeed loved him, would never come back to know it, that he was lying out there on the marshes outside the town, his eyes shut fast in darkness for ever.
Death mattered most, after all.
What did it matter what he thought of her, since now he thought no more? (Still that refrain was knocking at her mind with the relentless throbbing of a witch’s curse.)
But that was a lie. He had died hating and despising her, and that would matter to the end of her life. She would have no courage now to take up any of the threads of it again, but would let them take their own course and do with her what they would.
She did not even hear when first the sound of horses’ hooves came into the distance, came nearer, galloping fast, nearer and nearer the house. They stopped outside; someone was coming into the house, up the stair. She sprang up and saw the door flung open, saw Montrose enter with his drawn sword in his hand and bring it to the ready at the sight of someone in the room.
Then he saw who it was and lowered its point, but his eyes were still bright and dangerous, she knew now how he looked in battle. He came towards her, flinging his sword on the table; she saw blood on it: and on his hand, in the same flash as she saw his fierce amazement at her presence.
She backed in terror before his eyes.
‘Wait,’ she cried. ‘Didn’t Hurry tell you I’m here?’
‘I can see you are here!’
He was breathing fast from his gallop – and what else?
‘Are you hurt? There’s blood—’
‘It’s not mine.’
‘Did Hurry miss you? Did you fight them alone?’
He flung back his head and laughed.
‘Don’t!’ she cried sharply, more frightened by his face than when she had been alone. ‘I don’t know you. You are someone different.’
‘That is what you want, isn’t it? That I should be different?’
He dropped his hands. He was still staring at her, but differently now, incredulous, shocked – and, was it possible, disappointed?
But at least he had heard her.
‘And you think,’ she gasped out, ‘just as your oaf of a general did—’
‘I was not thinking at all.’ He turned from her and walked up and down the room before he spoke, and now he did not look at her. ‘I had been fighting and riding for life or death, I came in, saw someone waiting for me, another assassin, and then it was you. Why didn’t you tell me this before?’
‘I did – or didn’t I? It’s all been so desperate.’ She looked at the naked sword on the table and began to shake. ‘I thought you were wounded. Then you wouldn’t hear – wouldn’t see. They might still come here.’
‘Not now. My man has gone to rouse the Prince’s guards. They’ll know that – they daren’t enter the city. And you’ve been waiting here – how long?’
She looked at the clock. ‘I don’t know. I’ve looked at it too often. It’s close on one o’clock now. I don’t think I came later than eleven. That only makes two hours after all.’
It was inconceivable it should have been only two hours; inconceivable that that clock should still be ticking so loud and calm, would still be ticking whatever had happened just now in this room. Her breath was coming as sharp and painful as if she had run a race. So she had, against him and time. Had she won it? She was still too shaken to be certain, still playing for time.
She pushed the Raleigh over the paper with the verses, it was somehow desperately important to hide them. ‘I’ve been reading this,’ she said, showing him the passage by the sprig. ‘Was that why you put a marker in it, for the black swans?’
The Bride Page 24