“He is a better horseman than any of them. The best in England.” Captain Burley flung the words at her over his shoulder, having noted the faint disappointment in her voice. Stepping forward, he almost elbowed her aside. “Let us welcome his Majesty to Newport!” he called, raising both hands commandingly so that nearly all the people about him broke into a really rousing cheer. The King slowed his mount to a walking pace. Cheers could not have been too plentiful of late, for a look of pleasure warmed the still composure of his face. Mistress Trattle, making a charming picture against the homely walls of the inn, picked up the skirts of her best plum-coloured satin and swept a splendid curtsy which Mary, standing a little behind her, tried self-consciously to imitate. The irrepressible Captain drew smartly to attention and saluted. Some prentice lads standing near threw up their Sunday caps into the air. The maid servants of the “Rose and Crown” flung wide an upper casement to wave, while their master stood respectfully, cap in hand, his keen knowledgeable eyes searching his Sovereign’s face.
Colonel Hammond’s horse reared a little and swerved at all the noise and commotion; or more probably, thought Mary with her close understanding of animals, because of some nervous tension passing from man to beast. Although etiquette demanded that he must ride a little behind the King, it seemed almost as though the Governor were hurrying him forward. And just at that moment, the sour-faced man Trattle had been watching stooped down behind a knot of people, his white-cuffed arm shot upwards and a handful of mud splashed against the King’s borrowed cloak, some of it even spattering the sparkling George beneath.
Charles Stuart disdained to notice it, but Mary saw his face tighten with angry hurt at the indignity.
“Oh shame!” cried the women in the crowd, while their men, furious at the slur upon the hospitality of their town, closed in to catch the mud-slinger. But he was too quick for them, or lived too close. The front door of his house banged in their faces. And it was not for them, without the Governor’s orders, to break it open. Ashburnham pricked his horse forward and would have wiped the mud away with his handkerchief, but the King stayed him with an authoritative gesture. The people of Newport stopped cheering, feeling that part of the shame was theirs.
In the sudden silence before the royal party had time to ride on, Frances Trattle’s wit and facile emotion told her what to do to efface the insult. With a sure sense of the dramatic she turned to pull one of her mother’s damask roses from the inn wall and ran forward with it into the middle of the street. Without any formality she held it up to the King. All the freshness of youth and the impulsiveness of loyalty were in the gesture. She looked lovely as a rose herself in her close-fitting cap and pink-tabbed gown. The King’s set face broke into a smile. With quick courtesy he drew off a glove to take the stiff-stemmed bloom, lifting it delicately to his nostrils to inhale the sweetness of its perfume.
“He has a daughter of about her age from whom he has so recently been forced to part,” murmured Agnes Trattle, her eyes abrim with tears.
Hammond looked annoyed and was clearly as anxious to terminate this kind of demonstration as the other, but short of running Frances down he was forced to rein in his horse.
A murmur of admiring approval ran through the crowd. Only a few Newport girls, less fortunate than she, muttered something about Frances Trattle always knowing how to put herself into the picture. For a moment or two cavalcade and onlookers kept still, so that King Charles and Frances seemed to be momentarily alone and the centre of all attention.
“God bless you, my child, for this good omen!”
Their King’s pleasant, cultured voice came to them clearly in the stillness before he rode on towards Carisbrooke with the red rose in his hand.
Agnes Trattle was beaming with maternal pride. Captain Burley almost pranced with jubilation. Mary was torn between admiration and envy. “Oh, Frances, how splendid of you!” she cried, running to embrace her friend. Frances herself began to laugh self-consciously, her cheeks aflame. As soon as the riders had passed on and the staring crowds closed after them everyone crowded around her. A few hours ago none of them had expected ever to behold a king, and now the Sovereign of Great Britain had actually spoken to young Frances Trattle, and given her his blessing.
“It is something that will always be remembered about her,” prophesied the doting old Captain.
“If only I could think of things like that and do them without becoming tongue-tied and clumsy!” thought Mary, suddenly conscious that she, unlike the rest of them, had not even had time to change from her workaday clothes.
Presently they were all indoors again drinking to the King’s health, and to the safety of young Prince Charles over the water, and then—upon Burley’s fond insistence—lifting their glasses laughingly to Frances. “Now you must let her go back with Mary to help Druscilla—now that the King himself has noticed her!” exulted Agnes Trattle, slipping persuasive arms about her husband’s shoulders. When she smiled like that it was easy to see from whom Frances inherited her coaxing ways, and difficult to deny her. But Edward Trattle was a long-thinking man, not readily moved from his convictions by the emotions of the moment. Gently he detached Agnes’s clinging hands. “’Twas prettily done and I was as proud as you, wife,” he admitted. “But maybe ’twas unwise.”
His wife stared at him in amazement. “Edward Trattle, you’d never be chicken-hearted enough to fawn to the opinions of these ranting Puritans?” she gasped.
“Or be thinking of your own skin?” joined in Burley indignantly.
“’Tis Charles Stuart’s skin I am thinking of,” answered the innkeeper, thoughtfully twirling the contents of his half-empty glass. “Many’s the time I’ve seen it happen in a brawl that you can help a man better if you are not suspected of being his friend.” He looked up to make sure the door was shut and the servants gone before attempting to explain a half-formulated idea. “Men come and go in my house. Men of all kinds and parties. Their tongues are loosened with my good liquor, so that whether I will or not I hear a mort of things. The ‘Bull’ has a definitely Cromwellian trade. Jackson of the ‘George’ hears many a royalist toast raised over his tankards. A time may come when it will be wiser for the ‘Rose and Crown’ to cater for no particular party.”
“Meaning that you want the trade of both?” accused Burley, because his blood was overheated by excitement and a good deal more of his host’s good Burgundy than his doctor would have allowed.
Mercifully Trattle, who knew all the old man’s weaknesses, was both morally and financially above any need to defend himself. “I mean because no one is sure which side the Governor himself is really on,” he said quietly. “On Saturday before he left for the Main he told some of us councillors that he had insisted upon going with those two gentlemen to escort the King across so as to ensure his Majesty’s safety. Yet as you saw just now he did not have that mud-slinging crop-head clapped into the stocks. So who knows but what—should the King stay here long—it may not prove useful for his friends to be able to come into my house without being labelled royalists?”
The serious moment passed, and was soon relieved by Mary’s anxious insistence that she must get back to the castle. Attention focused upon her now because she would presently be in the place where all their thoughts were. “You will see the King every day!” they said.
“And I suppose she may even help make his Majesty’s bed!” pouted Frances enviously.
“And perhaps be allowed to launder that priceless lace collar he was wearing!” sighed Agnes Trattle, wishing that she had brought up her own daughter to be less decorative and more domesticated.
But Mary only laughed as she kissed her friend’s flushed cheek. “Even if I do is it likely that his Majesty would ever be aware of my existence? Much less speak to me as he did to you,” she said comfortingly. “And truly, Frances, I should feel like sinking through the floor if he did!”
Edward Trattle rode part way home with her lest there should be any roughness among the crowd
, and once back in the castle, her estimate of her own unimportance seemed to be only too correct. She had missed the garrison’s diligently drilled reception, which she would have been so proud to watch, and was scolded for loitering because the imposing Trattle salt cellar was only just in time for the King’s table. And far from gazing at their important guests, she spent the rest of the day obeying her aunt’s instructions and running up and down the backstairs trying to help the flustered servants. From time to time, as the dishes were being carried in, she caught the sound of men’s animated voices. And once when she paused to rearrange a dish of fruit which one of the men servants was carrying, she heard Colonel Hammond saying very politely that he trusted his Majesty would not find island hospitality too inadequate after the luxury of Hampton Court, and then, before the door shut again, that quiet voice which she now knew to be the King’s assuring him that it was a comfort indeed after the inn at Cowes where they had been obliged to spend the previous night.
The momentous November day darkened early and after attending evensong his Majesty was pleased to retire to the room which had been so carefully prepared for him. All three of his gentlemen went in, too, to undress him. To Mary, so completely ignorant of the complicated etiquette of courts, it seemed strange that one man—even a king—could need the services of three people to prepare him for bed. But perhaps, she thought, they wanted to talk among themselves without their host. She could not know how near the truth she was. All she knew was that most of the servants would have given anything to go to bed, too. But there was the royal supper table to clear as well as the ordinary tables for the household in the hall below, the fires to be damped down and the best silver to be put away. Relieved at last of his formal duties the Governor himself was standing looking uncertainly at the closed door of the King’s room when he found himself waylaid by Mistress Wheeler and the head cook wanting their orders for the morrow.
“Must we prepare for any more guests?” asked the housekeeper.
“I suppose that all the island gentry will expect to come up and pay their respects,” said the Governor, passing a hand over his high forehead. “Certainly Sir John Oglander. His Majesty had been asking for him. He seems to have expected to find him here.”
“Whether he comes or not we shall need more poultry,” announced Cheke, the cook, firmly.
“To-morrow I will see what I can do,” promised the harassed Colonel, heading for his hastily arranged quarters in the officers’ wing.
“If he would just give one word of praise for all our work!” sighed Druscilla Wheeler. At any other time she would not have demeaned herself by discussing even a Parliamentarian governor with any save her own intimate friends; but she was nearing sixty and had been on her feet since dawn.
“When Lord Portland gave a dinner party he drove us much harder,” recalled Cheke, looking disapprovingly after the tall departing figure of his present master. “But he always let us know afterwards what he thought of the sweets and the sauces, and often came down and drank a glass of wine with us afterwards.”
“The trouble with this one is that no one knows what he thinks about anything!” agreed Mistress Wheeler.
Aunt and niece began to mount the backstairs to their well-earned rest. This day, so utterly different from all others in their lives, would soon be done. But as they tiptoed past the best bedroom the door opened quietly. To their surprise, Mr. Ashburnham stood tall and solemn in the lamplit passage with something white held across his extended arms. “There will be his Majesty’s shirt to wash, madam,” he said, holding it towards the castle housekeeper as reverently as though it were the Holy Grail.
“To-night?” stammered that weary lady, taken aback.
Ashburnham’s features relaxed into a sad, propitiating smile. “Having left Hampton so hurriedly, he has no other,” he explained simply.
It was a plight they had not thought of. “Perhaps Colonel Hammond could lend—” she began; but one glance at the exquisitely stitched garment and the recollection of the Governor’s severely starched linen dried up the words. “But how could we get it laundered and aired before his Majesty rises?” she asked instead.
“And his Majesty’s collar,” insisted Ashburnham imperturbably. “We rode hard from Hampton and he has already been obliged to wear it two days.”
“The servants are at last gone to their beds,” objected Mistress Wheeler, feeling that this day she could do no more.
“It does not concern the servants. No one at Court, Madam, touches his Majesty’s linen save the royal laundress.”
For once Druscilla Wheeler was at a loss. In all her careful planning, this was a contingency which she had overlooked. There was no royal laundress at Carisbrooke. Only the giggling, clumsy laundry maids. “My niece is clever with her hands,” she said, falling back in her weariness upon a familiar phrase.
“Old Brett has not yet damped down the fire in your room. I could dry them by that,” suggested Mary, in a small tired voice.
“It will mean sitting up half the night to get them just right for pressing,” her aunt reminded her, turning away as though the matter had passed beyond her control.
All Mary longed for was the small, hard bed in her little attic room next to the maidservant’s dormitory; but she found herself obediently stretching out her arms in unconscious imitation of the King’s confidential friend, while very carefully he laid the King’s shirt across them and placed the elaborate lace collar on top of it. “What shall I do with them when they are ready, sir?” she asked, with her usual common sense.
“Bring them to this door before the King breaks his fast, and one of us will take them.” His master’s need provided for, John Ashburnham smiled down at her like the great gentleman he was. “This is the second time I find myself indebted to you,” he added gently.
Aunt Druscilla was already halfway up the stairs. Standing there with the lamplight shining on her ruffled curls and the King of England’s garments in her arms, Mary looked very childlike and uncertain. “I pray God I will do them aright!” she murmured anxiously.
The weight of a far greater responsibility had already deepened the lines on John Ashburnham’s face. “Since it was I who persuaded the King to cross the Solent, I too have good reason this night to pray God that I have done aright,” he said, sharing her burden and drawing her unwittingly into the companionship of a cause.
Chapter Four
When Mary woke next morning it was full daylight and Libby was standing beside her with a plate of bread and honey and a mug of milk. “The King’s shirt—” Mary stammered, struggling up in bed although still heavy with belated sleep.
“Mistress Wheeler found it where you’d set it to air and took it to them,” Libby reassured her. “She said not to waken you. That you’d done right well.”
“Did she really, Libby?” A warm feeling of happiness filled Mary at such unaccustomed praise. Eating her bread and honey she savoured the luxurious novelty of not rising at dawn and considered the prospects of an unpredictable Monday morning. “To-day will be even busier,” she prophesied. “The Governor said that Sir John Oglander and all the other gentry might be coming.”
“He’s already sent two of the men to fetch them to meet him in Newport. To ask ’em up here to dinner, I reckon. And your aunt’s invited the folk from the ‘Rose and Crown’ to see ’em arrive.”
“Then I must be getting up.”
“I reckon ’er won’t be sendin’ me away now?” Libby asked.
“I am sure she cannot spare you,” said Mary. “That is one good thing the King’s coming has done.”
The chambermaid’s dark eyes softened behind half-lowered lashes as she waited to take the plate. “All the same, you was mortal kind, Mistress Mary. And I b’aint one to forget—not if there should ever be any ways I could do ought for you.”
Embarrassed by the girl’s gratitude, Mary got out of bed and began washing her face at an earthenware basin. But Libby still lingered, the empty mug and platter i
n her work-roughened hands. “Tom Rudy b’aint come back,” she said.
“Maybe Captain Rolph left him at Cowes,” suggested Mary, sensing the anxiety behind the flatly uttered words. “I did hear my father say something yesterday about Colonel Hammond wanting the ports watched.”
“That’ll be it, I expect, because Captain Rolph b’aint back neither.”
“Now you say so I don’t remember seeing him at supper last night. But we were all so busy.”
“I should ha’ thought you would ha’ noticed.”
The girl’s quizzing glance brought the colour to Mary’s wet cheeks so that she hid them quickly with a towel. “Why should I?” she asked defensively.
Libby, so much more sex wise than she, turned on her heel and lifted the door latch. “Because of the way he looks at you.”
“What way?” asked Mary, standing in the middle of the room in her shift.
“The same as Tom used to look at me,” said Libby, opening the door with the point of her heavy shoe and letting it bang behind her.
Her words lay menacingly at the back of Mary’s mind throughout a busy morning. For some weeks she had known them to be true; and the uncomfortable knowledge had been the beginning of womanhood.
Mary of Carisbrooke Page 4