Mary lingered over the last shirt and smiled tenderly at the gaudiness of a handkerchief. “But not so clever with my head as you. That is why one of us had to see you. The others, being more important, are being watched like felons until you go. But not even Captain Rolph would think of my coming to you in the middle of the night!”
Hearing the gallant laughter in her voice, Firebrace was filled with admiring gratitude. “Mary!” he exclaimed again, and could find no more to say—he who was so seldom tongue-tied!
With his arms about her she scorned to excuse her motives. “I had to come,” she repeated with softer emphasis. Because no previous giving had drained the sweet, strong current of her desire, the response of her senses made her defenceless against his closeness. Her hands reached up to caress his disordered hair; her eyes and lips invited him. But that way, he knew, lay irrevocable regret. Because he had inadvertently cheated her heart, all that was decent in him resisted the temptation to enjoy and then discard her body. How could any man so requite her loyal help? Remembering that she was only seventeen and recognizing her innocence, he kissed her with leashed passion and let her go.
With unsteady hands he began fastening the straps and buckles of the saddlebag. With an effort he concentrated upon the more practical reason for her nocturnal visit. “Will the King’s new apartments be ready by to-morrow?” he asked, picking upon a question almost at random.
“To-morrow or the next day, Aunt Druscilla says,” Mary answered automatically, her whole being concerned only with her frustration. Without full understanding of what she had desired, she knew that he would never take her now. She knew that this was the real moment of their parting. Although they might go on exchanging words for a while longer—might even catch sight of each other the following day—they would never again come into that close sharing of ecstasy. By her own quickened pulses she gauged the cost of his abstinence; and, young as she was, appreciated vaguely that the incompleteness of their union would preserve its quality of radiance.
“There is so much we must talk of,” he was saying, with unnatural briskness. He made her sit in his only chair before the hearth, and knelt to coax a flame from the dying fire. Because the early hours of the morning were cold he spread his travelling cloak about her. “The file has come at last,” he said, drawing a small piece of metal from his pocket and throwing it lightly into her lap. “You or Dowcett will have to find means to give it to his Majesty.”
“I thought you intended to use acid.”
“Mistress Whorwood sent it but it never arrived. Probably Parliament got to know about that too.”
“Who is this Mistress Whorwood I have been hearing about lately?”
There was a flatness in their voices and the spirit seemed to have gone out of their enterprise. Firebrace was leaning against the narrow window of his room, too far away to touch her; and Mary had the feeling that they were both talking for safety’s sake. Safety from their own passions, not the safety of Charles Stuart.
“Jane Whorwood used to be about the Court and is devoted to the King,” he told her. “She got the stuff through a celebrated astrologer called Lilly. I should not care to have dealings with such men myself. But she is one of those people who is never daunted, and has written to his Majesty promising to send us some more by a different messenger. You are to look out for a lean peddler, bringing Woodstock gloves to the castle.”
“I promised Master Dowcett I would find out somehow what you and the King have decided about the window.”
“It will have to be the one in the bedchamber. There are too many people up and down the stairs. After all,” mused Firebrace, remembering his nerve-racking hour in the courtyard, “it is all to the good that the windows on that side are on the outer wall. Once his Majesty has let himself down by a rope he will have only the moat to negotiate and the horses will be under the beech trees in the lane.”
Firebrace was becoming absorbed in his project again and it was easier to seem to share some of the excitement. “The only buttress on that side is close beside his window,” said Mary.
“And should provide a certain amount of cover. Don’t forget to tell Osborne that we think it will be best for his Majesty to make his way close under the wall to the bowling green and get down to the outer escarpment from there.”
“There is a kind of gully which should serve him.”
“You know every blade of grass, don’t you?”
“It is my home.” There was a proud defiance in Mary’s voice, daring anyone to imagine that she had ever dreamed of any other.
Either Firebrace did not notice it or knew of no comforting answer. “And there Osborne and Worsley will be waiting as before. But this time it will be under the north wall—instead of the south,” he said, on that note of contentment with which any craftsman, having done his best, may lay down his tools. Hearing the chapel clock strike, he roused himself and took his cloak from Mary. His hands were steady and he no longer took such care to avoid touching her. “For initiative and resolution this Mistress Jane Whorwood is really worth all of us put together,” he said, as Mary stood up. “If she should write you or even come here, trust her in everything, Mary. Dowcett knows her. He will tell you the same.”
Mary had no present interest in Mistress Jane Whorwood. “Will you go straight to the mainland?” she asked.
He walked with her to the door, his manner resolutely unemotional. “I shall try to stay a few days in Newport. I should like to see the end of this.”
“Take care of that fiend Moses,” she warned. “Perhaps Master Trattle will take you in.”
“I will go there.”
“And then you will be going back to—her?”
Firebrace was careful to answer her question only in its literal sense. “Not while I can be of any use here on the Hampshire coast. Next Sunday is the night his Majesty has decided upon.”
“Not a Monday this time?” A presentiment of calamity lent fear to the words.
“It is a matter of moon and tides. I have consulted Newland.”
“I hope you will be—somewhere close.”
Seeing her shiver he turned at the door and laid a comforting arm about her shoulders. “Do not be frightened, sweetheart. Osborne and Dowcett will make all the arrangements. There will be nothing for you to do on the night of the escape unless it be to leave some door unlocked, as you did for me.”
“Who will deal with the sentries?”
“Leave everything to Osborne. And never be deceived by his pretensions to indolent lunacy. He is far cooler headed than I in an emergency.”
“And the Captain of the Guard?” thought Mary. Once again Rolph was the incalculable factor. In his zeal he had taken to going round the battlements several times a night, her father said. But she would not add to Firebrace’s anxiety by telling him so. “I must go back now in case my aunt should wake,” she said instead.
He wanted to accompany her, but both of them knew that it would be madness.
“You think you will remember? Next Sunday, the bedroom window, the peddler, the gulley by the bowling green?” he recapitulated quickly.
“Yes, I shall remember—everything,” said Mary, trying to learn his smile so that she could keep it for ever in her heart.
“You have been wonderful. God bless you always.” The door was open, and the cold dark passage yawned before her. “I shall see you again,” he whispered. “Somehow I shall come back.”
They did not meet again before he left the castle. The workmen from Newport had finished preparing the old rooms in the north wing for the King’s use, and Mary was up early seeing that the maids swept and polished every corner before the furniture was brought in. Then there was the arranging of it, under her aunt’s supervision, while Charles himself was out on the bowling green. At the Governor’s orders an extra bar had been fitted in the window and a shelf built for the King’s books. Master Herbert himself brought in the precious volumes and arranged them while men with ladders rehung the arra
s and the bed tester, and soon the maids were scurrying back and forth with ewers and basins and bedclothes. If Mary’s face was pale and her eyes smudged with sleeplessness, no one had time to notice it.
“The Governor does not seem to mind our being in the room by ourselves any more,” she said, when the others had gone and she was helping her aunt to make the royal bed.
“I imagine he has more disturbing things to think about,” said Mistress Wheeler. “And then there were all those letters you say he found in the King’s desk. He must have realized they went on being delivered after you were forbidden to bring the linen into the room.”
Mary looked across the room at the arras now covering the solid thickness of mediaeval stone and thought sadly that there would no longer be any way of slipping them through the wall. A casement stood open and as she stood with raised head she could hear the clip-clop of horses. The sheet she was unfolding slipped to the floor. Had it been the Canopy of State she would have let it fall. She ran to the window and was just in time to see Harry Firebrace and his servant trotting down the lane. She could see their heads bobbing up and down behind the greening beech trees on the other side of the moat.
“The King’s lace-edged sheet on the floor!” scolded Mistress Wheeler. “Whatever are you staring at, child?”
“At Harry Firebrace going away.” The trees and the sharp descent of the lane stole him from Mary’s sight. She drew in her own head and went back listlessly to the bedside.
“Pass me the other pillowcase. I do not know what we shall do without him,” said Druscilla Wheeler.
“No,” agreed Mary, plumping up the King’s pillow.
After her aunt had gone she stayed to straighten the body linen in the chest at the bottom of the bed because it had been shifted about in the moving; and presently Brett came in with a taper to light the fire. Again she thought she heard hoof beats and half rose from the floor where she was kneeling. But this time it was only someone hammering. It went on for some time accompanied by the sound of men’s voices. She had not slept all night and her nerves were taut as fiddle-strings. She had never felt like this before. “What is that hammering?” she cried in exasperation.
“Hammerin’?” repeated Brett, at his deafest.
“Surely you can hear it? All that noise underneath the King’s window!” She got up from her knees, went to the window again and leaned out. Two soldiers were digging holes in the sharp slope of the grassy escarpment, while two more drove in stakes. Downer, the head carpenter, was measuring a pile of planks while his mate sawed them into equal lengths. “Come and look, Brett. Whatever can they be doing on so steep a bit of ground?”
But old Brett, who had spoken to the men when he fetched the donkeys in from grazing, came reluctantly; and before he joined her Mary saw that Captain Rolph was down there directing operations. He was leaning against the bastion looking remarkably pleased with himself, and when he heard her voice he looked up and grinned and pulled off his steel helmet in ironical imitation of the way Osborne had swept off his plumed hat to her in the courtyard. Mary drew in her head quickly, pushed Brett impatiently out of the way, slammed down the lid of the great carved chest, and went up to the housekeeper’s room in the other wing.
There, as she had hoped, she found her father. He had been present at the friendly send-off given to the popular young Groom of the Bedchamber, and had hurried to be with her as soon as he was off duty. He had expected to find her tearful, but not so tempestuous. “What are Downer and the rest of them doing on the escarpment immediately outside the King’s bedroom window?” she asked brusquely.
Floyd was slow in answering. He was watching her stricken face. “They are building a platform,” he said.
His sister swung round from the inventory of royal chattels she was checking. “A platform?” On that slope? What in the world for?”
“To mount a guard on.”
“You mean—all day?”
“And all night. Three sentries, I heard one of those cocksure lieutenants say.”
Aunt and niece exchanged glances and the older woman sank down on the edge of a chair. For once she was shaken out of her habitual composure. “Oh, Hammond is clever! How clever the man is! ” she wailed, her deep voice husky with tiredness.
“Unless that fox Rolph suggested it,” said her brother.
“Then everything that Harry worked for—” began Mary, forgetting that she must protect her father from participating in their plans. She stopped short, met his understanding smile, and ran sobbing into his arms.
Chapter Nineteen
Although it was a May evening the King was arranging his personal possessions in his new quarters instead of taking the air. The weather had turned cloudy and there were few people on the bowling green. Osborne and Dowcett, hoping for an opportunity to be alone, were engaged in a desultory game of singles; while on the next rink Anthony Mildmay, finding himself odd man out, was fulfilling a friendly promise to teach Mary to play.
“How is she doing?” called Dowcett, as they passed each other halfway down the green.
“She has a marvellously straight eye,” encouraged Mildmay, who had always been particularly kind to her.
“My father taught me to shoot when I was twelve,” laughed Mary, “but a pistol is not weighed more on one side than the other!” She was evidently finding it difficult to control the bias, but Osborne was glad to hear her laugh again. She had often watched her father and his friends playing nine-pins and could not fail to feel flattered that a middle-aged friend of the King’s should spare time to teach her a game traditionally reserved for the gentry. But then Mildmay always called her Mistress Mary, meticulously remembering that although she was a sergeant’s daughter she was niece by marriage of the late Sir William Wheeler.
As the sun moved westward beyond the gatehouse tower a chilly wind blew up, and people who had been strolling about or watching the play drifted back to the castle. Soon Mildmay himself had to go in to wash and change before carving the King’s meat at supper. Mary would have put away the woods and followed him, but the two men on the next rink stopped playing as soon as they were alone and Dowcett called to her to stay. “It becomes still more impossible to talk indoors now that this Cromwell watchdog has been appointed Groom of the Bedchamber in Harry Firebrace’s place,” he complained.
“One cannot help admiring Hammond’s cleverness there,” remarked Osborne, stooping to pick up the jack.
“Yet even that fresh difficulty is not insurmountable. After all, the man must eat and sleep sometimes. But there is nothing we can do about this accursed platform.”
“Except wine or bribe the sentries,” said Osborne.
Mary looked at him in surprise, a bowl poised on either palm. Like Dowcett, she had supposed that the guarded platform finished all chance of carrying on with Firebrace’s plan. “You mean that in spite of all these new precautions you would risk another attempt?”
“Only because I have recently learned of an even graver risk.” A few drops of rain were beginning to fall and Osborne, who usually seemed to regard himself as immune from suspicion, drew them both into the privacy of the little pavilion. He relieved Mary of her two woods, then loped swiftly back across the green to gather up the rest so that if they were interrupted they might appear to be wiping them and putting them back on their racks. “The boredom of my hours with Rolph has at last borne fruit,” he told them. “Believe me, it’s hard work trying to drag information from a Puritan who gives nothing away in his cups. But since Harry was sent away Rolph has taken me closer into his confidence. With genuine intent to console me, no doubt, as well as to gain his own ends. The man has his points, oddly enough, in spite of his murderous mind.”
“Murderous?” echoed Mary.
Osborne stood there carelessly throwing up the jack and catching it, but there was a grim set to his jaw. “He has invited me to join him in a pleasant little plot to kill the King.”
“Nom d’un chien!” Dowcett stayed poised,
horrified, in the act of swinging his short Parisian cape about his shoulders; and Mary felt befouled because she had more than once been held in the would-be murderer’s arms. “But surely the Governor—”
“The Governor is not to know,” explained Osborne. “Rolph excuses his villainy by telling me that some of the more rabid elements in the army have already offered Hammond a bribe if he will put the King out of their way by having his food poisoned. And that Hammond has not even deigned to answer.”
“The only way to treat such an insult!” declared Dowcett, particularly appalled because catering for the royal table was his responsibility.
“But you cannot expect a man of Rolph’s mentality to appreciate that. He thinks Hammond ignored them because he is afraid of losing a well-paid appointment which he himself covets.”
“And you think the story of the bribe is true?”
“Probably, because Rolph seems confident that the army will make him a colonel at least if he outwits Hammond and does the gruesome deed for them. So he has asked me to try to persuade the King to escape. Imagine being asked to do that by our precious Captain of the Guard and having to keep a straight face!”
In spite of their repugnance the other two had to smile.
“How easy it could be with his connivance!” sighed Dowcett.
“He will connive at nothing until he is sure. In fact, he will watch more closely than ever because he is afraid his Majesty might get away before he can arrange it. His idea is to lure him into some hiding place under pretext of taking him to a ship for France, and then—as he so self-righteously expresses it—to ‘root the evil man out of the land of the living’.”
“But surely, however much you may have hoodwinked him, he does not seriously think that you would do that?” exclaimed Mary, horrified by such wickedness.
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