It was from a clerk in the inn there that the story came, who declared that there was no secrecy about the matter any longer, and that he himself had seen the tale in writing. It ran as follows:
The entire plot had been known from the beginning. Gilbert Gifford had been an emissary of Walsingham throughout; and every letter that passed to and from the various personages had passed through the Secretary’s hands and been deciphered in his house. There never had been one instant in which Mr. Walsingham had been at fault, or in the dark: he had gone so far, it was reported, as to insert in one of the letters that was to go to Mr. Babington a request for the names of all the conspirators, and in return there had come from him, not only a list of the names, but a pictured group of them, with Mr. Babington himself in the midst. This picture had actually been shown to her Grace in order that she might guard herself against private assassination, since two or three of the group were in her own household.
“It is like to go hard with the Scots Queen!” said the clerk bitterly. “She has gone too far this time.”
Robin said nothing to commit himself, for he did not know on which side the man ranged himself; but he drew him aside after dinner, and asked whether it might be possible to get a sight of the Queen.
“I am riding to Derby,” he said, “with my man. But if to turn aside at Chartley would give us a chance of seeing her, I would do so. A queen in captivity is worth seeing. And I can see you are a man of influence.”
The clerk looked at him shrewdly; he was a man plainly in love with his own importance, and the priest’s last words were balm to him.
“It might be done,” he said. “I do not know.”
Robin saw the impression he had made, and that the butter could not be too thick.
“I am sure you could do it for me,” he said, “if any man could. But I understand that a man of your position may be unwilling——”
The clerk solemnly laid a hand on the priest’s arm.
“Well, I will tell you this,” he said. “Get speech with Mr. Bourgoign, her apothecary. He alone has access to her now, besides her own women. It might be he could put you in some private place to see her go by.”
This was not much use, thought Robin; but, at least, it gave him something to begin at: so he thanked the clerk solemnly and reverentially, and was rewarded by another discreet pat on the arm.
The sight of the Chartley woods, tall and splendid in the light of the setting sun, and already tinged here and there with the first marks of autumn, brought his indecision to a point; and he realized that he had no plan. He had heard that Mary occasionally rode abroad, and he hoped perhaps to get speech with her that way; but what he had heard from the clerk and others showed him that this small degree of liberty was now denied to the Queen. In some way or another he must get news of Mr. Bourgoign. Beyond that he knew nothing.
The great gates of Chartley were closed as the two came up to them. There was a lodge beside them, and a sentry stood there. A bell was ringing from the great house within the woods, no doubt for supper-time, but there was no other human being besides the sentry to be seen. So Robin did not even check his weary horse; but turned only, with a deliberately curious air, as he went past and rode straight on. Then, as he rounded a corner he saw smoke going up from houses, it seemed, outside the park.
“What is that?” asked Arnold suddenly. “Do you hear——?”
A sound of a galloping horse grew louder behind them, and a moment afterwards the sound of another. The two priests were still in view of the sentry; and knowing that Chartley was guarded now as if it had all the treasures of the earth within, Robin reflected that to show too little interest might arouse as sharp suspicion as too much. So he wheeled his horse round and stopped to look.
They heard the challenge of the sentry within, and then the unbarring of the gates. An instant later a courier dashed out and wheeled to the right, while at the same time the second galloper came to view—another courier on a jaded horse; and the two passed—the one plainly riding to London, the second arriving from it. The gates were yet open; but the second was challenged once more before he was allowed to pass and his hoofs sounded on the road that led to the house. Then the gates clashed together again.
Robin turned his horse’s head once more towards the houses, conscious more than ever how near he was to the nerves of England’s life, and what tragic ties they were between the two royal cousins, that demanded such a furious and frequent exchange of messages.
“We must do our best here,” he said, nodding towards the little hamlet.
II
It was plainly a newly-grown little group of houses that bordered the side of the road away from the enclosed park—sprung up as a kind of overflow lodging for the dependants necessary to such a suddenly increased household; for the houses were no more than wooden dwellings, ill-roofed and ill-built, with the sap scarcely yet finished oozing from the ends of the beams and the planks. Smoke was issuing, in most cases, from rough holes cut in the roofs, and in the last rays of sunshine two or three men were sitting on stools set out before the houses.
Robin checked his horse before a man whose face seemed kindly, and who saluted courteously the fine gentleman who looked about with such an air.
“My horse is dead-spent,” he said curtly. “Is there an inn here where my man and I can find lodging?”
The man shook his head, looking at the horse compassionately. He had the air of a groom about him.
“I fear not, sir, not within five miles; at least, not with a room to spare.”
“This is Chartley, is it not?” asked the priest, noticing that the next man, too, was listening.
“Aye, sir.”
“Can you tell me if my friend Mr. Bourgoign lodges in the house, or without the gates?”
“Mr. Bourgoign, sir? A friend of yours?”
“I hope so,” said Robin, smiling, and keeping at least within the letter of truth.
The man mused a moment.
“It is possible he might help you, sir. He lodges in the house; but he comes sometimes to see a woman that is sick here.”
Robin demanded where she lived.
“At the last house, sir—a little beyond the rest. She is one of her Grace’s kitchen-women. They moved her out here, thinking it might be the fever she had.”
This was plainly a communicative fellow; but the priest thought it wiser not to take too much interest. He tossed the man a coin and rode on.
The last house was a little better built than the others, and stood further back from the road. Robin dismounted here, and, with a nod to Mr. Arnold, who was keeping his countenance admirably, walked up to the door and knocked on it. It was opened instantly, as if he were expected, but the woman’s face fell when she saw him.
“Is Mr. Bourgoign within?” asked the priest.
The woman glanced over him before answering, and then out to where the horses waited.
“No, sir,” she said at last. “We were looking for him just now …” (She broke off.) “He is coming now,” she said.
Robin turned, and there, walking down the road, was an old man, leaning on a stick, richly and soberly dressed in black, wearing a black beaver hat on his head. A man-servant followed him at a little distance.
The priest saw that here was an opportunity ready-made; but there was one more point on which he must satisfy himself first, and what seemed to him an inspiration came to his mind.
“He looks like a minister,” he said carelessly.
A curious veiled look came over the woman’s face. Robin made a bold venture. He smiled full in her face.
“You need not fear,” he said. “I quarrel with no man’s religion;” and, at the look in her face at this, he added: “You are a Catholic, I suppose? Well, I am one too. And so, I suppose, is Mr. Bourgoign.”
The woman smiled tremulously, and the fear left her eyes.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “All the friends of her Grace are Catholics, I think.”
He
nodded to her again genially. Then, turning, he went to meet the apothecary, who was now not thirty yards away.
It was a pathetic old figure that was hobbling towards him. He seemed a man of near seventy years old, with a close-cropped beard and spectacles on his nose, and he carried himself heavily and ploddingly. Robin argued to himself that it must be a kindly man who would come out at this hour—perhaps the one hour he had to himself—to visit a poor dependant. Yet all this was sheer conjecture; and, as the old man came near, he saw there was something besides kindliness in the eyes that met his own.
He saluted boldly and deferentially.
“Mr. Bourgoign,” he said in a low voice, “I must speak five minutes with you. And I ask you to make as if you were my friend.”
The old man stiffened like a watch-dog. It was plain that he was on his guard.
“I do not know you, sir.”
“I entreat you to do as I ask. I am a priest, sir. I entreat you to take my hand as if we were friends.”
A look of surprise went over the physician’s face.
“You can send me packing in ten minutes,” went on Robin rapidly, at the same time holding out his hand. “And we will talk here in the road, if you will.”
There was still a moment’s hesitation. Then he took the priest’s hand.
“I am come straight from London,” went on Robin, still speaking clearly, yet with his lips scarcely moving. “A fortnight ago I talked with Mr. Babington.”
The old man drew his arm close within his own.
“You have said enough, or too much, at present, sir. You shall walk with me a hundred yards up this road, and justify what you have said.”
“We have had a weary ride of it, Mr. Bourgoign.… I am on the road to Derby,” went on Robin, talking loudly enough now to be overheard, as he hoped, by any listeners. “And my horse is spent.… I will tell you my business,” he added in a lower tone, “as soon as you bid me.”
Fifty yards up the road the old man pressed his arm again.
“You can tell me now, sir,” he said. “But we will walk, if you please, while you do so.”
“First,” said Robin, after a moment’s consideration as to his best beginning, “I will tell you the name I go by. It is Mr. Alban. I am a newly-made priest, as I told you just now; I came from Rheims scarcely a fortnight ago. I am from Derbyshire; and I will tell you my proper name at the end, if you wish it.”
“Repeat the blessing of the deacon by the priest at Mass,” murmured Mr. Bourgoign to the amazement of the other, without the change of an inflection in his voice or a movement of his hand.
“Dominus sit in corde tuo et in labiis——” began the priest.
“That is enough, sir, for the present. Well?”
“Next,” said Robin, hardly yet recovered from the extraordinary promptness of the challenge—“Next, I was speaking with Mr. Babington a fortnight ago.”
“In what place?”
“In the inn called the ‘Red Bull,’ in Cheapside.”
“Good. I have lodged there myself,” said the other. “And you are one——”
“No, sir,” said Robin, “I do not deny that I spoke with them all—with Mr. Charnoc and——”
“That is enough of those names, sir,” said the other, with a small and fearful lift of his white eyebrows, as if he dreaded the very trees that nearly met overhead in this place. “And what is your business?”
“I have satisfied you, then——” began Robin.
“Not at all, sir. You have answered sufficiently so far; that is all. I wish to know your business.”
“The night following the day on which the men fled, of whom I have just spoken, I had a letter from—from their leader. He told me that all was lost, and he gave me a letter to her Grace here——”
He felt the thin old sinews under his hand contract suddenly, and paused.
“Go on, sir,” whispered the old voice.
“A letter to her Grace, sir. I was to use my discretion whether I carried it with me, or learned it by rote. I have other interests at stake besides this, and I used my discretion, and destroyed the letter.”
“But you have some writing, no doubt——”
“I have none,” said Robin. “I have my word only.”
There was a pause.
“Was the message private?”
“Private only to her Grace’s enemies. I will tell you the substance of it now, if you will.”
The old man, without answering, steered his companion nearer to the wall; then he relinquished the supporting arm, and leaned himself against the stones, fixing his eyes full upon the priest, and searching, as it seemed, every feature of his face and every detail of his dress.
“Was the message important, sir?”
“Important only to those who value love and fidelity.”
“I could deliver it myself, then?”
“Certainly, sir. If you will give me your word to deliver it to her Grace, as I deliver it to you, and to none else, I will ride on and trouble you no more.”
“That is enough,” said the physician decidedly. “I am completely satisfied, Mr. Alban. All that remains is to consider how I can get you to her Grace.”
“But if you yourself will deliver——” began Robin.
An extraordinary spasm passed over the other’s face, that might denote any fierce emotion, either of anger or grief.
“Do you think it is that?” he hissed. “Why, man, where is your priesthood? Do you think the poor dame within would not give her soul for a priest? … Why, I have prayed God night and day to send us a priest. She is half mad with sorrow; and who knows whether ever again in this world——”
He broke off, his face all distorted with pain; and Robin felt a strange thrill of glory at the thought that he bore with him, in virtue of his priesthood only, so much consolation. He faced for the first time that tremendous call of which he had heard so much in Rheims—that desolate cry of souls that longed and longed in vain for those gifts which a priest of Christ could alone bestow.…
“… The question is,” the old man was saying more quietly, “how to get you in to her Grace. Why, Sir Amyas opens her letters even, and reseals them again! He thinks me a fool, and that I do not know what he does.… Do you know aught of medicine?” he asked abruptly.
“I know only what country folks know of herbs.”
“And their names—their Latin names, man?” pursued the other, leaning forward.
Robin half smiled.
“Now you speak of it,” he said, “I have learned a good many, as a pastime, when I was a boy. I was something of a herbalist, even. But I have forgotten——”
“Bah! that would be enough for Sir Amyas——”
He turned and spat venomously at the name.
“Sir Amyas knows nothing save his own vile trade. He is a lout—no more. He is as grim as a goose, always. And you have a town air about you,” he went on, running his eyes critically over the young man’s dress. “Those are French clothes?”
“They were bought in France.”
The two stood silent. Robin’s excitement beat in all his veins, in spite of his weariness. He had come to bear a human message only to a bereaved Queen; and it seemed as if his work were to be rather the bearing of a Divine message to a lonely soul. He watched the old man’s face eagerly. It was sunk in thought.… Then Mr. Bourgoign took him abruptly by the arm.
“Give me your arm again,” he said. “I am an old man. We must be going back again. It seems as if God heard our prayers after all. I will see you disposed for to-night—you and your man and the horses, and I will send for you myself in the morning. Could you say Mass, think you? if I found you a secure place—and bring Our Lord’s Body with you in the morning?”
He checked the young man, to hear his answer.
“Why, yes,” said Robin. “I have all things that are needed.”
“Then you shall say Mass in any case … and reserve our Lord’s Body in a pyx.… Now listen to me. If
my plan falls as I hope, you must be a physician to-morrow, and have practised your trade in Paris. You have been in Paris?”
“No, sir.”
“Bah! … Well, no more has Sir Amyas! … You have practised your trade in Paris, and God has given you great skill in the matter of herbs. And, upon hearing that I was in Chartley, you inquired for your old friend, whose acquaintance you had made in Paris, five years ago. And I, upon hearing you were come, secured your willingness to see my patient, if you would but consent. Your reputation has reached me even here; you have attended His Majesty in Paris on three occasions; you restored Mademoiselle Élise, of the family of Guise, from the very point of death. You are but a young man still; yet——Bah! It is arranged. You understand? Now come with me.”
CHAPTER IV
I
IN SPITE of his plans and his hopes and his dreams, it was with an amazement beyond all telling, that Mr. Robert Alban found himself, at nine o’clock next morning, conducted by two men through the hall at Chartley to the little parlour where he was to await Sir Amyas Paulet and the Queen’s apothecary.
Matters had been arranged last night with that promptness which alone could make the tale possible. He had walked back with the old man in full view of the little hamlet, to all appearances, the best of old friends; and after providing for a room in the sick woman’s house for Robin himself, another in another house for Mr. Arnold, and stabling for the horses in a shed where occasionally the spent horses of the couriers were housed when Chartley stables were overflowing—after all this had been arranged by Mr. Bourgoign in person, the two walked on to the great gates of the park, where they took an affectionate farewell within hearing of the sentry, the apothecary promising to see Sir Amyas that night and to communicate with his friend in the morning. Robin had learned previously how strict was the watch set about the Queen’s person, particularly since the news of the Babington plot had first reached the authorities, and of the extraordinary difficulty to the approach of any stranger to her presence. Nau and Curle, her two secretaries, had been arrested and perhaps racked a week or ten days before; all the Queen’s papers had been taken from her, and even her jewellery and pictures sent off to Elizabeth; and the only persons ordinarily allowed to speak with her, besides her gaoler, were two of her women, and Mr. Bourgoign himself.
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