Soon he heard the chink of a bridle farther away towards the road to Gatcombe. They had understood. They were moving off. There was nothing more to stay for. Harry Firebrace let himself into the house by the window which Mary had left unlatched for him. He tiptoed upstairs and threw himself fully dressed across his bed.
“So it is all to do again!” he yawned, being young and optimistic.
Chapter Fifteen
Well, at least we were none of us caught. Friend Rolph is as accommodating as ever, and not a breath of suspicion anywhere,” summed up Osborne, when they were all gathered together in the housekeeper’s room on the following Monday.
“Though how you managed to get back and appear on duty as usual I cannot imagine,” smiled Mistress Wheeler, who had taken a reluctant liking to the deceptively indolent-looking young man.
“It was thanks to your brother, Sergeant Floyd. He sent the sentry off on some errand and let me in at the north postern. Remembering what you said, I would not have asked him—”
“Then how did he guess?”
“It seems he found the guardroom looking like a disreputable fairground, and Wenshall and Featherstone solemnly cavorting round their stacked pikes under the impression that they were dancing round a maypole. After pouring the vials of his wrath and a bucket of water over them he had the presence of mind to change the guard ten minutes before Rolph went his morning rounds.”
“Then it was Floyd who really saved the situation?” said Titus, appreciably.
“And got reprimanded for turning out his men ten minutes too soon.”
“Captain Rolph always has his knife into my father,” said Mary.
“I would not willingly have brought him into it,” apologised Osborne a second time. “But it is clear where his heart lies.”
“Is the King himself very much disappointed about last Monday’s failure?” asked Mistress Wheeler.
“He seems more depressed about not having news from the Duke of York,” Firebrace told her. “On the whole he keeps up his spirits wonderfully. He is now agreeable for me to send to London for some aqua fortis.”
“What is that? ” asked Mary.
“A kind of acid which will eat away the iron of the centre bar.”
“A pity he did not listen to you before about the file!” she muttered.
Being a woman, her aunt agreed with her. But the men evidently regarded as disloyal a remark so full of outspoken common sense. “The aqua fortis should be here in a few days’ time,” Firebrace hastened to say, in order to cover her lapse. “So we can try again next time there is no moon.”
“Things should go all the better for our last—rehearsal,” prophesied Dowcett cheerfully.
“How could the King go calmly back to bed?” asked Mary unabashed. “I was so terrified when I heard him groaning—and then that awful silence! I shook my aunt awake and clung to her—”
“‘Aunt Druscilla! Aunt Druscilla! Someone is murdering the King!’” mimicked Mistress Wheeler; and they all laughed, except Firebrace. “It is easy enough to laugh about it now,” he said ruefully.
Osborne got up and strolled to the window. In passing he laid a sympathetic hand on his friend’s shoulder. “It must have been a grim enough hour for you, Harry,” he said. “But that hooting owl…really, you unobservant townsmen!”
“I thought it was rather good myself, Dick.”
“So it may have been. But poor Worsley was nearly having a seizure. He says there are none of those ti-whit ti-whoo creatures on the island. Only shriek owls.”
It was Firebrace’s turn to provide the laughter. “Well, how was I to know?” he protested good-humouredly. “Did someone get that letter away to Ashburnham and Legge explaining why their horses on the mainland were not wanted?”
“Yes,” Dowcett assured him.
“Where are the gentlemen now?” asked Mistress Wheeler.
“Still lying low at Netley, in Hampshire, where they can be extraordinarily useful,” Osborne told her. “But Berkeley has managed to get away with messages to France.”
Because they were all relieved at having avoided suspicion and because there was nothing more they could do for the moment, a sense of relaxation began to inform them. Their conversation turned to topics of more ordinarily personal interest. Dowcett had discovered by chance that some of Mistress Wheeler’s relations by marriage were known to his wife in Windsor. Richard Osborne stood near them, alternately joining in their conversation about Court personages and encouraging Patters’ exuberant family to climb up his long legs. Before long Titus excused himself because he was due for duty. Mary and Firebrace were left to themselves on the high-backed settle. Completely at ease, for once, they had an opportunity to talk about themselves.
“Are you indeed such a townsman as Master Osborne makes out?” asked Mary, set upon finding out more about her companion’s life.
“I lived in Derby as a boy, and went to school at Repton. Yes, I suppose you would call me a townsman,” agreed Firebrace, “for by the time I was thirteen my family moved to London. We lived in the parish of All Hallows, Barking. It is near the Tower, you know.”
Mary ought by rights to have taken up some lace which she had offered to mend for Mistress Hammond in order to save the old lady’s failing sight and out of gratitude for her kindness to Libby. But instead she sat with idle hands, regarding him with rapt attention. “And what did you do there, Harry?”
“My father apprenticed me to a legal scrivener.”
“But you were so young!” she cried, picturing a bright-haired boy trying to tame his eagerness to the drudgery of a desk in some dreary city office.
“It was the best my father could do for me. I had five older brothers. I was supposed to be studying for the law.”
“That too!” murmured Mary, thinking of the summer evenings when he should have been out at play as she had always been. Yet in a way she was glad because his comparative lack of wealth seemed to bring their backgrounds a little nearer. Judging by his gay clothes and manners, she had always supposed his youth to have been so privileged as Osborne’s.
“I, too, have always had to work,” she said gently.
Appreciating her unfailing kindness, he touched her hand with one of his light, charming gestures. “Oh, but I have been extraordinarily fortunate,” he told her cheerfully. “Partly because I really did study, but largely through the good offices of my sister.”
“I did not even know you had one.”
“We have had so little time to talk.”
Mary was immensely interested, feeling that one day she and the Firebrace girl would surely meet.
“She was in the household of the Countess of Denbigh and together they persuaded the Earl to take me as his secretary. When the war came he was on the Parliamentary side, but a finer man never lived. But that is enough about me. Let us talk about you, Mary.”
“But my life has been so ordinary. Dull, I suppose you would call it.”
“I do not find your island at all dull.”
“No,” agreed Mary, with a little spurt of laughter. “But then you and dullness never come within hailing distance! You are like a gunner’s match!”
“A gunner’s match?”
“You set light to the rest of us—who are only the priming—and then everything goes up in light and flame and—excitement.”
“As long as it does not just go up in smoke!” laughed Firebrace.
“But seriously, I have enjoyed my life here,” went on Mary, her eyes alight with a repletion of happiness. “I love my island friends, of course. And the little bays, the valleys and the hills. I love them as I shall never love any other place on earth. When Frances and my other friends talked of their longing to go to the mainland, they used to laugh at me because I always said I could not live anywhere but here.”
“And now?” asked Firebrace, thinking he had never seen her look so lovely.
“Now—”
The question of the future was left hanging in the
air. Whatever she had been going to say was interrupted by Dowcett. “I am carrying Mistress Wheeler off to see my painting of my wife. There is just time before supper,” announced the excitable little Frenchman. “Do you wish to come, Mary?”
It was one of the endearing things about him that he was always telling them how beautiful his wife was. At any other time Mary would have been most interested to see her portrait, particularly as she also had forwarded royal letters from her home in Windsor. But the present moment was too precious to be lost. “Some other time, if I may, dear Master Dowcett,” she replied absently.
The Frenchman looked disappointed, and Osborne, hearing her decline the invitation, put down the clamouring spaniels. He stood for a hesitant moment or two regarding the couple on the settle with a queer, twisted smile. Their happy absorption in each other was patent. “My servant’s spavined mare needs some attention,” he remarked rather inadequately; and Mary, looking up briefly, saw him follow the other two out of the room. But her mind did not recognize his dejected altruism nor consciously register the exact moment when she and Firebrace were left alone.
“Then you only joined the Parliamentarian forces because you happened to be in that kind of household?” she prompted, plunging back into their interrupted conversation.
“Partly,” admitted Firebrace. “Though because of my legal training I saw—in fact, I still can see—how arbitrarily the King sometimes behaved.”
“Then how did you come to be his page?”
“It is rather a long story.” Firebrace settled himself more comfortably, stretching his legs to the blaze and his arm along the settle-back behind her. “When his Majesty set up his standard at Nottingham, Denbigh was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Midland counties for Parliament and I went with him. A young man has to do something on one side or the other. I got my commission and after a battle or two I had the good fortune to be made secretary of his war councils. Our headquarters were at Coventry but I was always being sent from place to place. I got to know people.”
“Important Roundheads, you mean? Like Cromwell and Monk and Fairfax?”
“Scarcely such very important people,” said Firebrace, smiling at her flattering idea of his own status. “But quite useful men on both sides. You see, I had to do most of the writing for the negotiations at Oxford and Uxbridge; though unfortunately the two armies could come to no agreement. My earl was not one of these anti-Royalist fanatics. He believed that if he could only persuade his Majesty to make a few concessions he would be peaceably restored to the throne, and the whole country saved any more bloodshed. He hoped this so fervently that after the negotiations were officially closed I was sent back and forth with private messages between them. So you see, my sweet, that must have been when I acquired my deplorable penchant for intriguing with secret letters!”
“And when you fell a victim of the Stuart charm!” teased Mary.
“It was difficult not to. King Charles was always so courteous and so thoughtful for people who did him even the smallest service. But I have always wanted to explain to you about men like Titus and myself, who must seem to you to be turncoats. It is not so much that we have changed our convictions as that we have found many of the men from whom we imbibed them now want to go to far more brutal lengths than we could ever have accepted.”
“Even here, some of them seem almost crazed with spite. Specially those who find all the curses but no love in the Scriptures. Were you in great danger carrying those secret messages?”
“Milord Denbigh seemed to think so. He used it as an argument when trying to get months of back pay which in the end was never refunded to me. But it was interesting work. When the war was nearly over, as you know, the King gave himself up to the Scots. I happened to be at Newcastle at the time; and after they had sold him back to the English, the Earl of Denbigh used his influence to get me a place in the royal household there, in the hope that I might still persuade his Majesty to make some of those concessions.”
“Anyone can see that the King likes you.”
His devoted Groom of the Bedchamber modestly shrugged the valued compliment aside. “Thank God, he trusts me,” he said. “But I have long ago come to realize that the Queen herself could not persuade his Majesty to make any concession which went against his conscience.”
Mary gave the matter her grave but immature consideration. “Does not that sometimes make things very difficult for other people?” she ventured to suggest.
But the bell clanged for supper and Firebrace did not answer. For the moment he seemed to have forgotten all about his master. He rose reluctantly, pulling her up with him. “I shall always remember this firelit room,” he said.
“So shall I,” said Mary softly. “You mean when it is really all over and the King has gone?”
“Yes. When I leave here.”
“Leave here?” she repeated, with a small catch in her voice. She had so much hoped that now, on this peaceful evening, he would have talked about the future as well as the past. “Where will you go?”
Firebrace bent down to throw another log on Mistress Wheeler’s fire before they left it. “Back to my wife, I suppose,” he said, without any particular enthusiasm. “Had we not better be going down now?”
There was no answer, no movement. And when he looked up he saw Mary’s face drained of colour, her eyes staring at him, dark and blind with pain. Her outspread hands were pressed to her breast. It occurred to him that had he driven his dagger into her heart beneath them she could not have looked more dead.
“Mary! ” he cried, catching her by the shoulders lest she should fall.
But it was the familiar room, her world, the whole of her life that was falling. Her lips parted but no words came. As Richard Osborne had said, she was so young, so inexperienced. She knew no comparison by which to lessen the sudden blow, nor any subterfuge with which to mask the shame of her total, unasked-for love.
Harry Firebrace’s face whitened too. “God forgive me for a brutal fool, I did not know!” he cried. He pulled her to his breast and held her close, so that he could not see those desperate eyes. His mouth, which had so carelessly dealt the blow, was pressed in loving contrition upon her hair.
A door slammed, voices suggested some laughing encounter, hurrying footsteps died away upon the stairs. Down in the hall people would be cheerfully eating supper. Somewhere at the back of his shocked mind Firebrace realized with relief that for an hour at least the firelit room would be theirs, undisturbed. He drew Mary down on to the settle, still holding her so that she did not have to look at him and trying to still her violent trembling. “The tragedy—the absurdity—of it is,” he muttered into the gathering dusk above her head, “that I could have loved you. How I could have loved you! I must have been blind—blind. Why, all along, from the day I first knocked into you with that absurd ink-pot, and we looked into each other’s eyes and laughed, I have never been so happy with anyone!”
His flexible young voice had begun to take on the exultation of a glad discovery so that her shame was eased. She raised her head a little and sat staring unseeingly into the fire. “Why did you never speak of—her?” she asked tonelessly at last.
“If I did not, I swear it was not of intent.”
“Did you never think of her—long for her—as Abraham Dowcett does for his wife?”
“I thought of her sometimes,” admitted Firebrace soberly. “But—she is an invalid.”
Mary’s head came up a little higher. “You mean—an incurable invalid?”
“The doctors do not know. Only time will tell.”
“So she cannot—you do not—live as man and wife?”
“She lives with a kind old body at Knightsbridge.”
“Where is that?”
“It is a village just outside London,” Firebrace told her wearily. He passed a hand over the springing strength of her curls, and got up quickly as though stung by some comparison which he could not bear.
“What is your—what is her
name?”
“Elizabeth,” he said, leaning an arm against the spandrel of the fireplace. “She is insane.”
The words dropped hopelessly into the silence of the room. They, and the pity they evoked, brought life back to Mary as nothing else could have done. She leaned forward and took his listlessly hanging hand into her cold one and pulled him back beside her. “The years must have been hard for you,” she said, the words at once a forgiveness and a comforting.
He sat forward on the settle, hands locked between his knees. “There was a man who used to visit her,” he began incoherently. “Before I even knew her he wanted to marry her. It seems such irony—now. He even bought her clothes and things when I was away at the war.”
“And you were not jealous?”
“I was glad for her sake.”
“Then you could not have loved her.”
“I did once. But it has gone on so long—her sickness and my being away. And, God forgive me, life has been so full of more exciting things… Lately I have even hoped that she—that they…But my wife is a good woman. I do not believe that she was ever actually unfaithful.”
Mary got up and walked about, as though she must have the physical relief of movement. But she walked without lightness, like an old woman. “Richard Osborne knew you were married?” she asked, arms tight across her breasts as if to keep out the cold.
“Yes. Why?”
“He once tried to warn me. He said ‘what did I know of you?’”
Mary of Carisbrooke Page 16