Mary of Carisbrooke

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  He heard her and turned. He always had liked her. She never spoke high and haughty to a fellow. She was a real lady and deserved to be treated as one. But he had forgotten his instructions. He bowed elaborately, blew her a kiss with the tips of his dirty fingers in grotesque imitation of the Court gallants he had seen in Newport, and lurched on. On in the direction, not of the servants’ quarters or the housekeeper’s room, but of the main door to the King’s apartments. “Libby! Libby! Stop him!” implored Mary, in panic. “He has a letter…See how the fool has stuck it in his hat for all the world to see.” All her invention deserted her. She wished with all her heart that Harry Firebrace were still there beside her to help. He was so quick, so ingenious—and so far away. “Do something, Libby,” she urged. “Don’t let the old zany go any farther. The sentries at the Governor’s door will see him.”

  She was aware of her companion’s curious, speculative gaze. Although Libby might understand nothing of the reason, she understood another woman’s distress when she saw it. She hurried out after the ostler and waylaid him, pulling at him, cajoling, even walking with him arm in arm. But he disengaged himself and would not listen to her blandishments.

  “Important messash!” he told her, waving his disreputable, decorated hat.

  “If Libby cannot stop him, no one can,” thought Mary, in flat despair.

  Libby came dejectedly back, and standing together in the laundry doorway she and Mary saw the sentries challenge him. It seemed that the pair of them were for tolerantly shooing him away. They pointed towards the servants’ entrance round at the back but Jem persisted, drawing the packet from his hatband. Laughing at his fuddled state and incurious as to his errand, one of them took the packet carelessly while the other gave him a good-natured prod with the butt of his pike. “Probably neither of them can read. I may be able to get it from them afterwards. God is going to be good to me after all!” thought Mary.

  But at that moment Captain Rolph came hurrying down the steps from the officers’ quarters. He held out a gloved hand for the packet of letters, flayed their drunken bearer with some well-chosen denunciations from the Scriptures, made a gesture to the sentries to arrest him and stalked past them into the Governor’s house.

  “He could have seen everything from the window of his room,” pointed out Libby gloomily. “Does it matter terribly—about the letters?”

  “It matters—everything.” Mary sank back against the ironing table, covering her eyes with her hands. “They will send me away.”

  “Away from him—from Master Firebrace—you mean?”

  Mary nodded without subterfuge. “I don’t mind what they do to me, if only they don’t send me away.”

  Libby remembered saying much the same words. And how the only person prepared to help her had been Mary. She stood considering, looking round at Mary’s bent head, at the King’s grand nightcap set up like a symbol on its mould, at the glittering piece of gold which she imagined Firebrace must have left to buy some love token. She pushed her half-fainting companion down on to a stool. “You do be all of a fair firk,” she said, her warm island voice full of compassion. “Bide still a while while I go see if I can muddle their gurt minds.”

  She picked up the piece of money and slipped it into her pocket, and went across the courtyard to where Jem waited, already half-sobered by the Captain of the Guard’s biblical epithets.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Governor of the Wight stood by his desk weighing the packet of secretly conveyed letters upon his palm. He would have given a great deal to read the contents. For security’s sake the packet had been addressed to Master Mildmay, but when he requested the Conservator to open them before him, they had found that the inner wrapper was addressed to the King. “I am convinced that Anthony Mildmay’s amazement was not assumed,” Hammond told his mother, who was sitting by the fire. “When I asked him if he would have delivered the packet he told me quite candidly that he supposed he would have done so, but that he had had no part in the deception.”

  As the Governor laid the packet down, the door opened and Edmund Rolph, hot and mud-splashed from a day-long manhunt, came into the room. “You did not get your man, then?” said Hammond, reading at a glance the dark-visaged Captain’s disappointment.

  “No, sir. We took a couple of bloodhounds and combed every lane and copse for miles around. From what the messenger said it must have been Major Bosvile who persuaded that sot to bring the letters.” Rolph stood in the middle of the room, thumbs in regimental sash, gloomily considering that if he could have caught so useful a Royalist General Fairfax would almost certainly have given him his own majority. “It’s my belief he’s got clean out of the island.”

  “It was no fault of yours, Rolph. You did right to go after him straight away without waiting for my return,” commended Hammond, wishing that all his subordinates were as vigorous in the prosecution of their duty. “Parliament knows that Bosvile is a master at his game, and I shall make a point of telling them that it was thanks to your vigilance that the letters were intercepted.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Rolph’s eyes rested greedily upon the sealed packet. “You have not opened it yet?”

  “It is not addressed to me,” Hammond told him stiffly.

  Mistress Hammond turned to look up at her son approvingly, and Rolph—aware of the slight movement—hastened to remove his helmet, muttering a sheepish apology. “But you will not let the King have them?” he exclaimed anxiously.

  “I shall send them to Parliament to deal with as they think fit.”

  The erstwhile shoemaker had no patience with such punctiliousness. “If I were in charge of this castle,” he thought, as he so often had of late, “there would be no polite pandering to the prisoner nor loopholes left for all these silly plottings among his servants.” He walked over to the Governor’s desk and stared rudely down at his papers, poking at the creased package with a hairy, spatulate finger. “But suppose some of these letters contain more cunning notions for opening the royal bird’s cage?” he said aloud.

  “Then you may rest assured the Commissioners will waste no time in letting me know,” Hammond told him, with exasperated bitterness. For had he not already received warning from Derby House that previous letters had been conveyed to the King by some woman of his household? It galled him that gentlemen sitting comfortably in that smug backwater of the city should profess to know more about his own household than he did himself. He was watchful and conscientious, and it made a mock of his Governorship; therefore it was not a matter which he felt himself called upon to impart to his second-in-command. “I understand that the man bribed to bring the message from Newport was asking for someone called Mary, but that it was the chambermaid Libby who was seen with him?” he asked.

  “I saw the girl Libby run out to meet him myself,” testified Rolph. “They were crossing the courtyard familiarly, arm in arm. And my men say that after I had put the drunken ostler under arrest she ran to him and felt in his pockets as if searching for something.”

  “And the man himself, what does he say?”

  “He was too disgustingly fuddled to remember.”

  “Then it could have been either girl?”

  “Not that clear-eyed girl, Mary Floyd!” exclaimed the Governor’s mother.

  “I cannot think that Sergeant Floyd’s daughter could be guilty of such duplicity,” said Hammond. “Has the other girl ever had access to the State Room?”

  “Since Mistress Wheeler’s sickness she has helped to make the King’s bed,” remembered the old lady.

  “This Libby did not deny it, although she is married to one of my men. Besides, a gold piece was found in her pocket, which seems to me conclusive enough,” said Rolph. “A girl like that knows only two ways of getting gold, and at the moment—”

  “She is pregnant and near her time.” Mistress Hammond finished the sentence for him in order to spare herself any more of his coarseness. Having spent much of her life in the cultured atmosphere of Whit
ehall, she found the manners of some of her son’s republican associates hard to bear. “If you should send her away, Robert, I pray you allow me to see her before she leaves the castle, so that I may make sure she has somewhere respectable to go.”

  Hammond nodded assent. “I must question both of them,” he said. “But Bosvile is our main concern. Whoever takes the packet to Westminster can keep a watchful eye along the road to London.”

  Rolph offered to go himself, a shade too eagerly. Hammond knew that no one else whom he could send would be so efficient, but he did not care for the possibility of the King’s letters being steamed open and stuck up again. “I shall need you here,” he said shortly. He was beginning to sense the Captain’s jealous ambition, and was uncomfortably aware that, given the opportunity, he would make a better gaoler than himself. And that in these desperate times, too fastidious a sense of honour could be a distinct disadvantage.

  Dismissing Rolph, he sat down and wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons, then went down into the courtyard himself to dispatch his messenger. As he stood there giving last-minute instructions to a young lieutenant mounted upon the garrison’s fleetest horse, the King happened to come down the steps, followed by Herbert and Mildmay, for his postprandial walk. He gave the Governor a pleasant salutation, making some knowledgeable comment upon the horse’s finer points. He even stood for a minute or two watching the high-spirited creature rear and wheel towards the gate, all unaware that the letters he was hungering for were within a few yards of him in the lieutenant’s pocket. That after so nearly reaching him in safety, they were being borne away beneath his very eyes to his worst enemies at Westminster.

  Involuntarily, a wave of pity assailed Hammond. “Judas that I am!” he thought; and instead of offering to accompany his unwanted guest he turned back into his own quarters, sending for the girl Libby whose manner soon persuaded him of her guilt.

  The King went on his way, stopped for a few moments at the stables to give some tid-bits to the donkeys, then passed out through the postern gate to the place-of-arms, his tasseled stick tapping briskly on the stones as he went. The afternoon sunshine was almost springlike, and catkins hung in small golden showers from the hazel bushes along the banks of the moat. With his back to the forbidding walls of the castle it was easy to forget for a while that he was a prisoner. “It is a lovely place!” he exclaimed, pausing as he so often did to admire the immense grass plateau behind the castle, which commanded such fine views all over the island. “It would make a splendid bowling green to alleviate our tedium, but one cannot help picturing the splendid jousts that must have been held here in olden times.”

  “And the archers practising every evening at the butts before Henry the Fifth sailed for Agincourt or the Spanish Armada was sighted in the Channel,” mused bookish Thomas Herbert.

  “Always vulnerable, always preparing for the defence of their country, right down to the present day,” said Charles, walking on towards a battery where Sergeant Floyd and Howes, the master-gunner, were discussing the mounting of a new piece of ordnance sent from the mainland. Both men sprang to attention as the King sauntered up and bade them a pleasant good-day. “It must have been from about this spot where you showed me how to fire my first cannon, Floyd,” he said.

  “’Twas that very culverine, over to your Majesty’s left,” said Floyd, inordinately pleased that he should have remembered.

  “How can you tell after all this time?”

  “I set a mark upon it the self-same day, and got a fine basting for it,” grinned Floyd, coming to show him. “See, here on the underside of the muzzle, sir.”

  By bending down Charles could just make out a roughly scratched C on the iron. Because he had to endure so many slights these days, he was so deeply touched that when he straightened himself the view from the ramparts was blurred by tears. “You were very patient. I am afraid I was not a very apt pupil,” he said.

  Standing with a hand on his beloved gun, Silas Floyd smiled back at him with that attractive mixture of respect and independence peculiar to his island breed. “Your young Highness was not so bad,” he recalled without flattery, “except that you killed someone’s cow.”

  It was Charles’s own voice that led the gust of laughter. “And you did not tell me!” he said ruefully.

  “’Twould have spoiled a happy day.”

  “And have gone against your native courtesy, no doubt.” Charles sighed as he turned away and looked back at the castle. “Ah, well, Floyd,” he said, raising his stick in a friendly gesture of farewell, “at least you and Sir John Oglander between you gave me one completely happy recollection of Carisbrooke. It may even have helped persuade me to return.”

  “God save him! ” muttered the master-gunner, when the royal party had passed on.

  Across the heavy iron gun-carriage Silas Floyd glanced at him searchingly. “Do you really fear that he—may need saving?” he asked gruffly.

  Howes shrugged. “Not from this Governor. But there are those on the mainland who hate him.”

  “And some over here. One has only to listen to these New Model men talking.”

  “To say nothing of Captain Rolph! The way he abuses the royal family one feels he would not stick at murder.”

  Both of them were men who usually kept their thoughts to themselves; but there were many things going on in the castle which gave the Sergeant of the Guard food for anxious thought. He would have liked to speak more openly to a man whom he had known from boyhood, but there always seemed to be some spying Roundhead within earshot; and even now the smith and his mate were coming to work on the new gun emplacement. “You would have laughed to see my little lad drilling his playmates down by the stables yesterday,” said Howes, changing the subject as they moved back along the battery to supervise the mounting. “And the way his Majesty delighted him by stopping to inspect them.”

  “The young Duke of Gloucester must be about your boy’s age,” remembered Floyd.

  “They do say the King eats his heart out for his younger daughter. The delicate fourteen-year-old one, Princess Elizabeth.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Alone with the boy in St. James’s Palace, according to that know-all Rudy.”

  Floyd stood by giving occasional directions to the smith, but half his thoughts were on the more domestic subject of daughters—his own and the King’s. It must be hard to be parted from them. He had always supposed that his Mary would marry an islander and settle down somewhere where he would be able to see her until the end of his days. But now, with all these fine overners about, how could one be sure? They all seemed to like her, teasing her and offering to help her with her tasks. And there was a new radiance about the girl these days, a gayer warmth to her laughter. His shy slender Mary was growing into a woman—and a beauty. He had no notion which of the gallants she preferred. He must speak to Druscilla about it. Women were sharp as needles about such things. “I’d not be sorry to see Mary wed—not in these unsettled times with lecherous brutes like Edmund Rolph about,” he decided. “But Heaven send her a husband who does not want to carry her off across the Solent, for God knows what I should do without her!”

  He had meant to talk to her about this unfortunate affair with the drunken messenger for which the girl Libby was being sent away—and to warn Mary not to get herself even remotely mixed up in such things. But now—after his recent meeting with the King—he could not bring himself to scold her. If ever there was anything his tender-hearted Mary could do to lighten the patient King’s bondage, would he really have her refuse? She was free to do as she chose, not bound by military duty as he was. But he hoped that she would not take any undue risks. He went to find her; but instead of warning or reproving her, he gave her the key to the room where Libby had been detained. “She asked to see you before she goes,” he told her, without comment.

  A pack-horse was already being saddled and Tom Rudy was kicking his heels in the courtyard waiting to take his wife down to Brett’s sist
er in the village, so Mary’s time with Libby was short. “What made you pretend it was you who were to have received the King’s letters? Why did you court dismissal to shield me?” she asked remorsefully.

  “You have done a mort o’ things for me ever since I came here,” muttered Libby, her dark, tousled head averted in embarrassment, “Didn’t I zay that if ever there was zummat I could do for you—”

  “I know. But this is such a big thing.”

  “I’d have had to go before long anyways to have my baby.”

  It was true enough, but it went against the grain with Mary to let anyone take blame that should be hers. “I ought to have told the Governor you were lying. But your manner so persuaded him that he never even sent for me.”

  Libby laughed, swinging her cloak round her shoulders and tying it under her chin. She was well pleased with her cleverness. “What fun can I have anywheres, the way I am?” she said. “’Tis more sense for you to bide, Mistress Mary, seeing you be fair set on a man for the first time in your life.”

  The colour rushed up under Mary’s fair skin. “It is not only that, Libby. Just out of selfishness, I doubt if I’d have let you shield me. It is because I can be of use here—” Hearing Rudy whistling close outside the window, she broke off the half-confidence and added lamely, “In ways I cannot explain—”