Mary could not tell her; nor could she know that the poor flowers were still crushed in Richard Osborne’s pocket. Or that when he found them later he smoothed out their crumpled petals with strong, pitiful fingers. “They are like Mary herself,” he thought. “Fresh and sweet and humble—and so easily crushed beneath the first heedless heel.”
Most of the women he had known had been of a much gaudier type.
Chapter Seventeen
Mary, coming from the laundry, waited until the King and all his gentlemen had trooped out to the bowling green before taking the freshly-ironed shirt up to his Majesty’s room. She had hoped to see the Governor go with them, but he was usually too busy these days. He must be dealing with his correspondence, she supposed, or gone into Newport.
At the bottom of the backstairs she met Brett, coming down with his bucket of ashes. He always took the opportunity of giving the great hearths what he called “a fair rake” at this hour of the morning when Presence Chamber and bedchamber were sure to be deserted. “So as not to make a terbul smother for the gentry,” he said.
“Have you seen Captain Rolph or the new Major anywhere about?” she enquired cautiously, before going up.
Brett shook his greying head. “Everything be prid near quiet an’ peaceful as the weather,” he grinned. “Though even that do be but a breeder, I reckon. They gurt black clouds pilin’ up Yarmouth way’ll bring a storm avore long.”
Mary went upstairs congratulating herself that she had plucked up courage to deliver the letter this morning. With her free hand she felt in her pocket to make sure it was there, folded small just as Harry had shown her so that it would fit into the crevice of the State Room wall.
She was almost happy because she was doing something to help him again. The letter was important and had come two days ago, Aunt Druscilla had told her; and Harry himself was being so closely watched that he could find no opportunity to deliver it himself. Mary would know what to do, he had said.
She had put on her softest shoes and went silently as a shadow along the passage. To her surprise she saw light coming from the King’s door, showing that it was partly open. Brett, cumbered with his load, had probably failed to shut it properly. As Titus was not on guard at the end of the passage no doubt he had gone to see to it. Certainly a man was standing just inside the doorway but he was broader than Titus and wore Cromwellian armour. His back was turned and he had not heard her. And between the buff cloth of his sleeve and the jamb of the door Mary could see into the room. She stopped dead and gasped.
She could see the brightly burning fire and the wide-mullioned window. And full in the light of both, the Governor of the Wight rifling through the contents of the King’s desk. That beautifully carved escritoire brought from Hampton, with an instrument of some kind still dangling from the picked lock. She could see the pulled-out drawers, the papers scattered round them, the little piles of letters still neatly tied with ribbon and the open letter in his hand.
Instinctively she drew back before the man in the doorway had time to turn. He was a stranger and from his broad regimental sash she guessed him to be young Major Cromwell. His shock at seeing her was obvious. He stepped out hurriedly into the passage, closing the door behind him almost furtively as though anxious not to disturb the Colonel so busily employed inside. “And what may you be doing here?” he asked. His expression was more surprised than angry, and Mary felt certain that he did not know what she had seen.
“There was one of his Majesty’s shirts forgotten,” she said, with all the stolidity she could muster. “I am supposed to leave all linen with the conservator on duty.”
He had none of Rolph’s roughness, nor any of his leering way with wenches. “Captain Titus has gone on an errand for the Governor and for the moment I am relieving him,” he said. “Better leave it on his table.”
He was new to the ways of the castle and evidently had no idea who she was. Feigning nervousness before his authority, Mary let the shirt slip from her hands and then wasted time carefully refolding it. Never taking her eyes off his back as he strolled impatiently along the passage waiting for her to be gone, she managed to push the much-folded letter into the chink in the wall where it would lie hidden from anyone inside by the arras until evening, when the King himself would look for it. Meekly she turned to go. But suddenly there came the sound of raised voices from within. Major Cromwell swung round in alarm, brushed her aside and reopened the service door.
The main door facing it had been opened too, and just inside it stood Thomas Herbert, rain dripping from his hat and indignation on his pointed, scholarly face. Robert Hammond still stood by the desk, letter in hand, fairly caught. “Because of the storm I ran ahead to fetch his Majesty’s cloak,” Herbert was saying—almost shouting. “And I find you—”
But the words were taken from his mouth because the King, wet and breathless, had already hurried past him into the room. The fury on his face was something which it would take a brave man to face. “Is this your hospitality? The ‘fulfilling to your utmost of my just desires’ that you p-promised?” he cried, going straight up to Hammond.
His face was white, his eyes blazed. It had never occurred to him that in a gentleman’s house such an indignity could be offered to him. He seized the half-read letter from his gaoler’s hand. “So you would even read a letter from my wife?” he said, his voice like ice. “Violating a decent privacy which even the meanest of my subjects enjoys!”
Hammond’s face was red with shame. That a merciful God should have allowed such ill fortune! That he, an upright man, should be found at the one detested, despicable moment of his life! “The most of it is in cypher, and the only part that concerns me is about a ship to get you away,” he said, with a kind of dogged courage.
“I know of no ship!” blustered the King, knowing full well that the coded letter was full of it.
Anger flared in Hammond, ousting all feeling of respect. “Yet I find all these letters—recently dated—secretly received…You do not suppose that I am interested in the harmlessly personal parts of your correspondence, do you? Or that I have read them?”
“Because our sudden coming prevented you.”
The Governor tried to get a grip on himself. “It was not your Majesty’s private letters, however hard some of your correspondents strive to make my duty here, that I came to seek,” he repeated. “But by the order of Parliament—” His fine swordsman’s hand stretched out suddenly to grasp a sheaf of thicker, more important-looking documents. But Charles was too quick for him. He grabbed them first. He glared defiance at his aggressor, so much taller than himself. For a moment it looked as if Hammond would wrest them from him by force. “If they are the terms of the Scottish treaty—” he began.
Herbert sprang forward towards his master, and from outside the room Mary watched aghast.
But Charles ducked beneath the Governor’s outstretched arm and dodged behind him. As he did so his slight lameness betrayed him so that he stumbled, bumping his forehead sharply on the carved corner of the desk. But he succeeded in throwing the papers into the blazing heart of the fire so lately replenished by old Brett. Hammond reached for the shovel, hoping to rescue them; but the Stuart stood in his way, like a dog on guard, and he dared not lay a finger on him. Because of what had happened there could never be anything but antagonism between them. Because Hammond’s soul abhorred what he had been seen doing, his sense of having been misjudged would always make him speak with bitter sarcasm. And even though he offended his masters by his humanity, the King would never again trust him.
There was blood now upon Charles’s bruised brow and the beginnings of a small, cool smile on his lips beneath their smooth brown moustaches. The papers, whatever they were, flared up and then died down into a mass of quivering, charred flakes behind him. That round had certainly gone to the King.
Herbert’s sigh of relief was audible. Cromwell’s nephew, who had been absorbed in watching the sudden drama, came to his everyday senses and s
lammed the service door; and Mary saw no more.
But up in the room above she described it all to her aunt, and before long rumours of it had spread all over the castle. And because no one had had the story at first hand the rumours were wild and varied.
“You should have seen the Governor’s face when he came down!” said the sentry at the main door of the house. “And heard that finicking pendant Herbert berating me for not preventing him from going up in the King’s absence—as if the likes o’ me could stick my pike in a Colonel’s belly!”
“I could see the bump on the King’s forehead, big as an egg, when I took in the roast,” reported a servant returning to the kitchen. “I reckon the Guv’nor hit him.”
“And how the alleged brutality will be seized upon by the Royalists as a tid-bit for the London news sheets!” prophesied Rudy, discussing the news after lights out in barracks.
“Whatever he does he’s bound to be wrong with one party. Governor or no Governor, I do not envy him,” ruminated Sergeant Floyd, leaning over the battlements beside the master-gunner.
All the King himself said when Herbert was bathing his forehead was: “What a mercy we were able to send those terms of the treaty to Ashburnham for safe keeping a fortnight ago! But it would have been worse had I not managed to burn his map and plans for getting me to the Essex Coast.”
For the handful of people who were plotting the King’s escape the painful encounter was more than a matter for gossip. It affected them too closely. “Finding so many letters which must have been received since his Majesty came here, the Colonel will be bound to suspect someone,” said Mistress Wheeler.
“The King should have destroyed them,” muttered Mary fiercely, noting the worry on her friends’ faces.
“He did burn most of them,” said Dowcett. “But a man’s letters from his wife—they are all we have when we are parted—” With quick sympathy he patted the pocket bulged by his own letters.
The six of them waited fearfully for what would come. And they did not have long to wait, nor did Hammond have long to wonder. Yet another letter came from Derby House telling him more or less what had happened on that dark night of the attempted escape. A very considerable personage had had word of it, they said. One of their own conservators, Captain Titus, was thought to have helped and a young man called Firebrace had waited beneath the King’s window to lead him to safety. How, they did not appear to know.
Somehow Anthony Mildmay had learned what was in the letter, and showed his goodwill by warning them. For a stolen moment or two Firebrace, Osborne, Titus, Dowcett, Mistress Wheeler, and Mary managed to meet in the housekeeper’s room. The six of them looked into each other’s faces, and knew as surely as they knew their own souls, that not one of them would have betrayed the rest. Of those outside, Worsley, who had come into the project voluntarily, was above suspicion, and Newland, already in trouble with Mayor Moses because he had been absent from so many evening Council meetings, had too much to risk. Sergeant Floyd and Brett, who must have had some inkling, were both honest men.
“His Majesty must have been in correspondence again with the Queen’s crony, Lady Carlisle. That treacherous bitch is altogether too friendly with the Scots,” growled Titus, seeing himself back again at Bushey trying to explain his dismissal to a stern Puritan father.
“Mildmay says Cromwell’s spies got hold of that last letter his Majesty wrote to the Duke of York,” Firebrace told them. “It sounded like any ordinary family letter, and he swore it was; but they demanded the code.”
“Lord Wharton tells me these Parliamentary foxes have an amazing mathematician who can break down almost any cypher,” put in Osborne.
“For as long as he dared young James kept it from them,” went on Firebrace. “But when they threatened to put him in the Tower the poor faint-heart handed it over.”
“He is not yet sixteen, is he?” murmured Mary, imagining the lad’s lonely struggle against such hard persuasion.
“And there is something about the Tower that makes human blood run cold. Maybe most of us would have done the same,” suggested Osborne tolerantly.
Firebrace looked up at the tall, almost foppishly elegant figure with a sudden warmth of affection. “I can see you doing it!” he jeered laughingly, sore at the thought of having to leave him.
“Well, however the story leaked out, it is done now,” sighed Mistress Wheeler, steering the conversation back to practical essentials. “And this morning the Governor gave orders that the King is to be moved into more secure apartments. So all the domestic turmoil is to do again. You and I will have to bestir ourselves, Mary.”
Everyone was taken aback.
“Did he tell you which apartments?” asked Firebrace, quick as a gun shot.
“In the old part along the north wall, using the upper hall of the officers’ quarters as a Presence Chamber. He and Colonel Hammond will simply change over, I imagine.”
“Hammond should have been made a general for his strategy!” remarked Titus, speaking as if, for him at least, the whole matter was over. But Firebrace’s energy, in spite of his dismissal, appeared to be unabated. “When is his Majesty to make the change?” he asked.
“It will take some time. The walls of those old rooms are in a bad state of repair, and there is all that fine arras from Hampton to be rehung.”
For the first time Mary and Firebrace allowed themselves to exchanges glances. “What sort of windows are there?” he wanted to know.
“I am not sure,” said Mistress Wheeler. “But in any case they are barred.”
“There are two smaller windows on the stairs and one in a kind of lobby,” volunteered Mary, who had often followed her father around in all manner of unexpected places.
“I must find some excuse to go there and reconnoitre. Hammond is allowing me to stay on for a few days. But for your sakes I dare not be seen with you now.” Lest he should not see her again to say good-bye, Firebrace kissed Mistress Wheeler’s hand, whispered something to Mary, and was gone.
“Why did the Governor allow him to stay?” asked Dowcett.
Titus shrugged. “Because he likes him personally, and the fellow has a persuasive way with him, perhaps. Or, more likely, because Hammond hoped that, given rope, he will inadvertently betray the rest of you.”
“I doubt if it is such sound strategy after all, if only because it does give Harry more time,” said Osborne.
“You mean he will plan the whole thing all over again from these new rooms before he goes?” asked Mary, torn between fear and pride.
“And leave us the joy of carrying it out, my pretty gosling!” laughed Osborne, rising and lazily stretching his long limbs.
They all wrung Titus’s hand in silence. “To think I once doubted him!” sighed Mary, watching him walk dejectedly away, and considering how few of them would be left.
“You doubted me, too, I think?” said Osborne softly, as Mistress Wheeler and Dowcett followed him to the door. When Mary did not answer, he stood grinning down at her confusion; then, suddenly grown serious, held out his hand. “In spite of all my grievous shortcomings, I hope you trust me better now?”
Mary put her hand into his. “You know I do,” she said, feeling that without him she could not face the lonely blank ahead.
But for the moment nothing mattered besides the fact that Harry Firebrace had whispered in passing, “I will see you again somehow before I go.”
Chapter Eighteen
Mary slid cautiously down the side of the vast bed and drew her cloak over her night shift. She paused to listen again to her aunt’s deep even breathing; then crossed the room and silently drew the bolt. Barefoot, she felt her way along stairs and passages and once past a dozing sentry. Her heart thumped in her body when she reached Harry Firebrace’s room; but it was the only way to see him alone.
To-morrow he would be gone. His shrug and lift of the brows at supper time, so eloquent of frustration, had told her that he was being too closely watched to manoeuvre a meeti
ng. The King would be moving into his new apartments in a day or so, and Dowcett was desperate because he could find no opportunity for a final word with Firebrace about the new escape plans. And even Aunt Druscilla, who would have struck her senseless sooner than let her go traipsing like a trollop to a man’s room at midnight, must realize how necessary it was for someone to have word with him.
A light showed beneath the door and Mary overrode every tenet of her up-bringing and pushed it open. If Harry would not endanger her by being seen in her company, she must go to him—whether as lover or confederate she was not sure. But she was honest enough to know that her heart drove her harder than her reason.
She found him standing by his bed in shirt and breeches, putting the finishing touches to the packing which his servant must have begun earlier in the day. He himself had been so busy about the King’s affairs, she supposed, that he had not until now found a moment for his own. He looked up sharply and the smile she loved suddenly lighted his tired face.
“Mary!” he exclaimed, with a delight which she could not doubt. He dropped the holster he was holding and came to meet her, taking both her hands. “I did not dare to hope—that you would come here.”
“I am not the prude men like Rolph think me.” Freeing herself, she walked to the garment bestrewn bed, instinctively hiding her embarrassment in the performance of some practical task. “Not riding boots on top of your cravats!” she chided. “And cannot your man pack a coat better than this? It is your best blue velvet and will crumple so that it is not fit to be seen. Let me fold it properly for you.” As methodically as if she were his wife she began putting order into the chaos he had created and packing his possessions into a leather saddlebag. Because she would never have the right to pack his things it gave her peculiar joy to do so, and the very domesticity of their occupation eased the memory of the last moments they had spent alone.
The softness of candlelight was on her face and Firebrace stood watching her, thinking how sweet such wifely administrations could be and how, during most of his married life, he had had to be dexterous for two. “You are so clever with your hands,” he said, unaware that he was echoing a dictum of her aunt’s which she still hated because at one time it had been used disparagingly.
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