Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Lord Secretary, you may rise,” she said then. “Pray be seated, all of you.” But Phelippes continued kneeling, so I did the same, and Mildred also, I wondering how one lone woman — nay, nor she not even healthy to the eye — should so impatronize herself on men whom all the world feared. They were neither cowards nor yet dullwitted men who trembled at her bidding; they were men self-proven capable.

  Presently the Queen’s quick, brilliant, cold eyes looked steadily at me and my courage went into my heels. I felt she was seeing through me to the patch o’ my shirt-tail, and I wished I had worn my other shirt that had not yet needed mending. Then she eyed Mildred.

  “Whom have we here?” she demanded. “Girl dight like a man? Stand up and let me see you. Unmask.”

  Mildred stood, and I beside her holding her hand, which I could feel trembling. And when she pulled off the mask the Queen stared at her long and critically, until the Earl of Leicester rose at the end of the table and said: “Madam—”

  Sharply she rebuked him, showing such a flash of anger as they say the great Lord Harry used to when his will was challenged:

  “Robert, lately you presume too much on patience! I will brook no impertinence from you! An I let you have your way my Privy Council would become a cockpit, every man speaking out of his turn and the loudest crower the victor! Truth, they tell us that we lend our ear to you too often for our country’s good.” tie sat down. I could not see him, since I faced the Queen, but I could see Lord Burghley with the corner of my eye and there appeared, I thought, the shadow of a smile, though he was studying a paper.

  “How come you in a man’s clothes?” the Queen demanded, staring again at Mildred.

  I squeezed Mildred’s hand and she answered in a voice so vastly gentler than the Queen’s — so sweet it was and musical — that Sir Christopher Hatton and Sir James Crofts turned sideways in their seats to watch her.

  “Madam, it is not my choosing. I obeyed my guardian, nor did I know into whose presence I should come.”

  “Whose clothes are they?” the Queen asked her.

  Mildred hesitated, and the Earl of Leicester rose to his feet importunate.

  “Most dread sovereign,” he exclaimed, “she is wearing the clothes of the traitor Coningsby, of whom I spoke to you, whom my men took from the company of the culprit standing there beside her. And he, Madam, is the William Halifax whose father fell in a quarrel, as I told you, that he forced upon two of my gentlemen. The guardian of whom she speaks is a lout named Tony Pepperday, accused of treasonable practice and now doubtless missing, since this Master Halifax was sent in search of him. I accuse Halifax of having harboured Coningsby, whom my men had to take away from him by force; and I have here John Coningsby’s deposition, duly sworn, in which he avers that William Halifax did promise for a price to carry a certain message to the Scots Queen at Fotheringay.”

  “What of it, sirrah?” the Queen asked me. “You have heard the accusation. Answer sharply to the point.”

  So I told her how I was sent in search of Tony Pepperday, and by whom; and how I found him; and how Tony had free-willing brought forth Coningsby, whom I — a loyal signatory of the Association Bond — arrested in the Queen’s name; which, if it were a presumption, I begged might be excused on the ground of my reason for so doing, which was loyalty.

  “I accuse him of lying!” said the Earl of Leicester. “I demand that he be put on oath. The depositions here of thirteen men, as well as Coningsby’s, aver that he and Coningsby are cronies well affected to each other. It is charged, too, that he assaulted my men on the London Road.”

  “Assaulted thirteen of them?” the Queen asked him. “No wonder Sir Francis Drake came hurrying to commend him to our notice! Are you the son of Sir Harry Halifax?” she asked me.

  “A brawling miscreant,” began the Earl of Leicester.

  “Silence, I tell you, Robert!” she commanded. “An I credited all slanders of your ready tongue, God pity me, I would not know whom to trust! Whosoever falls foul of Robert, Earl of Leicester, for a moment is a traitor to the crown and against our person; and yet I have found some of these traitors reasonably loyal men!”

  She glanced around the table, nodding, as though not one of them but had suffered accusation.

  “Speak,” she commanded, looking steadily again at me. So I brought forth the sealed package.

  “This,” I said, “I took from Coningsby, or rather my man did, before the Earl of Leicester’s men took Coningsby from me.”

  I offered her the package, kneeling, and one of her ladies took it from me, passing it to the Queen, who looked at the seal, and then at me, and at the seal again, turning the package over and over in her two hands. Lord Burghley stared at it, and then at me, then met the Queen’s eyes, and she nodded.

  “This is the same young man,” Lord Burghley said, “who caught Joshua Stiles and lodged him in the Marshalsea.”

  “Nay,” I interrupted, “Berden had a share in that. And Berden helped me with Tony Pepperday.”

  “What’s that?” the Queen exclaimed. “Did I hear aright? Is the world at an end, that I hear speech in favour of an absent man?” She looked sharply at me, as if she thought me guilty of a treason — to myself, it might be.

  “I but spoke the truth,” I said. “I need no man’s credit.”

  I thought that angered her, she looked so sharply at me, but her next words were to Lord Burghley:

  “Yes, Madam,” he said, standing, “Berden confirms the words of Halifax in every detail. He describes him as a loyal gentleman; and he confirms, too, that it was Tony Pepperday who brought forth Coningsby from hiding, though he denies having witnessed it, being absent at the time on other matters.”

  “‘Od’s faith! Then it looks like collusion between them!” said the Queen. “Each one praising the other! Is Berden to be trusted?”

  Lord Burghley nodded. The Queen looked at Mildred.

  “The Lord Secretary says you are a daughter of that Master Robert Jackson who lost his head in the reign of my late unhappy sister. Is it so?”

  “An it please you, he died for your Highness’s sake,” said Mildred.

  “Nay, it never pleased us that an honest man should die a mean death. And it pleases us as little,” said the Queen, “that such a matter as this should so long have been kept hidden from me. As we understand it, the Lords Leicester and Burghley are in rivalry as to who shall have this maid to ward. ‘Od’s faith, it irks me that such envious contentions should have brought the daughter of good Robert Jackson to this pass. Where is this Tony Pepperday?”

  “Without, Madam,” I answered. “Shall I summon him?”

  “God’s mercy, no, sir! Is this a stable? You say there is a warrant for him? Who signed it?”

  I held out the warrant and she saw Lord Burghley’s signature. She scowled at him, but he seemed well used to it.

  “Write a release from Pepperday of all his claims as guardian, if any, and make him sign it before witnesses. Then destroy that warrant,” she commanded. “I will take this maid into my own keeping, for Robert Jackson’s sake.” She turned to the lady on her left hand. “Take her to the wardrobe now and clothe her decently!”

  The lady rose and, beckoning to Mildred, led her, curtseying and walking backward, through the door by which the Queen had entered, Mildred smiling at me. But I was not so pleased. I felt suddenly lonely, as if more than a palace door were being shut between us.

  “And now you, sir?” the Queen said to me. “What will you? By an accident — I doubt not it was accident — you have brought us papers of more value to the realm than any hundred squabbling country gentry! Look to it that you hold your tongue and spread no rumour of it! And now what will you? Do you reckon yourself fit to be sworn of our service?”

  “I am the son of Sir Harry Halifax,” I answered, “as true and loyal a knight as ever lived.”

  “I care nothing for your beginnings,” she retorted. “It is your latter end I look to! God ha’ mercy on us, but
I lack a secret courier since Parma’s men slew poor Guy Mannering in Flanders.”

  “Madam,” I said, “I have two good horses and such blood in my veins as I inherit.”

  “See that he has allowance for two horses. Let him put them in our stable,” she commanded.

  “And four men,” I added.

  “Bumpkins, doubtless, who will drink us out of beer and be in everlasting trouble with the scullery wenches! They shall be smartly whipped an they behave not! But you may show them to Lord Hunsdon and if he approves them let them be victualled with the palace servants. What else?”

  “Mistress Mildred Jackson,” I said. But I said no more, for the Queen’s face froze, as it were, against me and her bright eyes stared as if I were an enemy. I understood. No words were needed. I must earn my Mildred. The Queen would keep her from me, and forbid our wedding, until I should have paid for that privilege with the utmost ounce of zeal and loyalty — as in truth has happened.

  “God’s death!” she exclaimed suddenly. “Take him away, Lord Hunsdon, before he asks us for our crown and sceptre! Have him sworn of our service. And mark you,” she commanded, frowning at me, “next time that you come into our presence, let me see you dressed as becomes a courtier. No country louts at court!”

  And me in a good suit made by Fugger of Augsburg! So I bowed my way out, side by side with Lord Hunsdon, understanding something of how the Queen ruled England. And now that I at last have Mildred, though I dare not let these memoirs see the light of day, I will set down step by step as I remember them the perils of land and sea, and of the court no less, that I have been thrust into whether I would or not, and that have brought me at last to this opinion: that Queen Elizabeth is the greatest and the bravest monarch, though the meanest mistress, who ever in all history has saved a half-rebellious country from its foes. I give her all the credit; since, without her mastery and meanness, I believe the land had fallen of its own internal bickerings.

  KING OF THE WORLD

  OR, JIMGRIM SAHIB

  CONTENTS

  PART 1. THE REINCARNATED

  CHAPTER 1. “As the light is against the darkness, so are you and I against each other.”

  CHAPTER 2. “I am an old man, Jimgrim. Help me.”

  CHAPTER 3. “I am always Baltis.”

  CHAPTER 4. “I’ll take this case.”

  CHAPTER 5. “Imagine what would happen if—”

  CHAPTER 6. “How many wives had Solomon?”

  CHAPTER 7. “No longer Number Seventeen?”

  CHAPTER 8. “Am sadist. Masochism to the devil!”

  CHAPTER 9. “Emperor Jimgrim — how does that sound?”

  CHAPTER 10. “Dorje! Dorje!”

  CHAPTER 11. “Stole my name. Says she is Queen of Sheba, I am.”

  CHAPTER 12. “Delphic-oracle-ly minded babu spilling noncommittal verb sap.”

  CHAPTER 13. “I have ordered sandwiches and claret.”

  PART 2. MESSIAH OF TINSEL

  CHAPTER 14. “Is it the key to Dorje’s cipher?”

  CHAPTER 15. “The Lord Dorje, the Daring — the King of the World!”

  CHAPTER 16. “Can’t make brain empty. Can’t listen.”

  CHAPTER 17. “Harlem!”

  CHAPTER 18. “Eight-six-four-one-nine-seven-five-three-two.”

  CHAPTER 19. “So I will bring on all of us a tragedy, unless—”

  CHAPTER 20. “It’s only being caught off-stage that actually hurts.”

  CHAPTER 21. “What has our babu done to them, I wonder?”

  CHAPTER 22. “Play this as you would your last ten dollars in a poker game!”

  CHAPTER 23. “Now! Go the limit!”

  CHAPTER 24. “Gad, what a team she’d have made with her twin!”

  CHAPTER 25. “People don’t want problems. They want answers. And they want the answers wrong, I tell you!”

  CHAPTER 26. “Even Lenin never had the nerve to blow his horn as loud as that!”

  CHAPTER 27. “Deify me, and I bu’st. But I bu’st you also!”

  CHAPTER 28. “In indelible ink?”

  CHAPTER 29. “But you must kill him!”

  CHAPTER 30. “Dorje is in Delhi!”

  CHAPTER 31. “Grim seems to have dug up someone to ballyhoo him.”

  CHAPTER 32. “Dorje!”

  CHAPTER 33. “Here is darkness. Curse me, sahib!”

  CHAPTER 34. “I will bet you pounds Egyptian fifty that the Jewess overboils the eggs!”

  PART 3. THE UNCROWNED

  CHAPTER 35. “She is a happening — a tragedy exuded from the womb of ruin.”

  CHAPTER 36. “I will not be vairee jealous.”

  CHAPTER 37. “Henri — he has genius.”

  CHAPTER 38. “A leader without a plan is more exciting than a ‘plane without a rudder.”

  CHAPTER 39. “There’s nothing you would ask me, that I wouldn’t do.”

  CHAPTER 40. “Wreck his bug’s nest. Him we kill last.”

  CHAPTER 41. “Good-bye, old man.”

  PART 1. THE REINCARNATED

  CHAPTER 1. “As the light is against the darkness, so are you and I against each other.”

  It was one of those sun-drunken days in spring for which the South of France is famous. There was the usual nondescript crowd at Notre Dame de la Garde — tourists, beggars, women selling candles and rosaries — a few citizens of Marseilles in love with the view — a few youngsters in love with each other. In the distance the Chateau d’If stood grimly silent in a sapphire sea. The funicular railway kept disgorging passengers, too lazy or too wise to make the climb on foot, and I envied them. I never could see why Jeff Ramsden will insist on walking when there are easier ways to get there. Churches don’t particularly interest me, and I would rather look at Times Square on a warm night than at all the views in Europe. I was wishing myself on a chair at a cafe window watching the crowd in the Canabière, although the street is overrated and the beer is beastly. But it is no use arguing with Jeff.

  He is a tank of a man — one-eighth of a metric ton of bone and muscle that can go through anything on earth and come out mildly wondering why other people got excited.

  James Schuyler Grim was studying the view. I don’t know why. He stood on the steps of the church of Notre Dame de la Garde — in a tweed suit and a tourist hat — looking like fifteen frontiers and a wind howling over the snow. When you looked at Grim you felt you’d got to go and buy a ticket to somewhere comfortless, where unexpected but important things are bound to happen. And they do.

  No matter which way Grim was looking, if anything happened within the range of his vision you might bet your boots Grim saw it. There are two booths, one on each side of the church door, in which sisters of the sacred order that has charge of the church sell souvenirs and candles. Grim was talking to one of the sisters, making jokes that she was trying to pretend she didn’t understand, and trying not to laugh at, when he suddenly turned away from her and glanced toward the platform at the top of the funicular railway, where an iron railing protects the curious tourist from the fate he probably deserves. Grim moved so quickly that Jeff and I followed him down three steps and gazed in the same direction. It was worth watching — if you like that kind of thing.

  A man in a pepper-and-salt suit, not exactly shabby, but looking as if he had slept in it, and wearing a brown derby hat that looked as if he might have found it in an ash-can, suddenly jumped as if shot. He was lean; he had an Adam’s apple as big as your fist and a collar two sizes too large; his gestures were pantomimic, and he seemed scared out of his wits. What seemed to have frightened him was an Arab, about sixty years of age, wearing a sea-captain’s blue jacket with three gold stripes on the sleeve, who had evidently come toiling up the steps as we had done, and who had paused on the top step but one.

  The pepper-and-salt man seemed to try to run three ways at once. He actually did start in our direction, as if the church door suggested sanctuary; but either he thought better of it or else his lean legs got the better of his brain
. At any rate, he vaulted the iron railing; and before a sergeant de ville and two uniformed employees of the funicular railway could lift a finger to prevent him he jumped. I don’t know how many hundred feet it is from top to bottom; plenty, at any rate. The sergeant de ville and the other two leaned over to watch, and their shrug when he hit the roof of the descending car and bounced off was as eloquent as things French usually are; it is always easier for me to understand their shoulders than the things they say. The sister in the booth leaned as far as she could over her counter to ask Grim what had happened. A woman fainted. Almost everybody else rushed to the railing to witness a horror that they would have paid money not to see if they had stopped to think a minute. But the Arab sea-dog smiled and came straight on toward the church door.

  We three stood back to let him pass, and I noticed that he eyed Grim rather strangely, as if he half-recognized him, but he said nothing. He stopped to buy a full-sized candle from one of the sisters, and with that in his hand he strode in. Then Grim spoke, sideways, through the corner of his mouth, his lips not moving.

  “Recognize him, Jeff?”

  “Yahudi. Haroun ben Yahudi.”

  “That was his vessel below in the harbor — the lateen rig by the old wharf — did you see it?”

  Grim followed him into the church. We followed Grim. It is a strange scene in there — stranger then because that sea-scarred Moslem lighted his fat wax candle and set it on the iron bracket in front of the Virgin’s statue along with thirty or forty others already burning there. From the roof-beams and against the walls hang scores of marvelously fashioned models of ships, set there by sailor-men of fifty generations; as you look upward at them they seem to be afloat in air. And on the walls are countless slabs set up by mariners acknowledging indebtedness to Notre Dame de la Garde for perils on the high seas by her favor overcome. As I think I said, I don’t as a rule care much for churches; but that one got me by the throat; it got Jeff too, who is a sentimental giant. I don’t know whether it got Grim; he was watching the Arab. It got the Arab harder than it did me.