It was difficult to discern anyone at all, save for a faint luminous glow from a steel breast-plate. Whoever it was stood still as if listening, and then turned back to close the door. And in that moment both women saw him clearly.
“It is Rolph!” said Mary, her heart seeming to turn over in her body.
From the open window they could hear his footsteps coming across the courtyard. “Going his rounds again!” wailed Mistress Wheeler.
“Only his ordinary rounds by the battlements, perhaps. If he turns off now toward the south ramp—“ Mary leaned out as far as she dared, but her hope was short-lived. The footsteps came straight on. Then he stopped. She could see his face as a white blur in the darkness as he looked up at the windows, and realized that probably he could see her too. She felt that he was staring specially at their window and was glad that she had snuffed out the candle.
“If he goes on round by the wellhouse he can only be making for the northern postern,” Whispered her aunt, moving away as if she could no longer bear the suspense.
“He is. He is going outside the walls again,” gasped Mary. “And any moment now the King will be—”
Her aunt, who so seldom lost control, gripped her wrist in panic. “Merciful God, what can we do? How can we stop him?”
There was only one way that Mary knew of, and even that might not succeed. Edmund Rolph was such a strange mixture of devotion to duty and reluctant sensuality. But there was certainly nothing anyone else could do. Now, in the last stage of the game, it was left to her to make the final move. Only she could make this last bid for success. And it was not for her to count the cost. The Captain of the Guard had always desired her, and with each frustration that veiled hunger in his eyes had grown. “I will go to him,” she said almost calmly, freeing her wrist.
Their minds were so closely fused in the tension of the moment, that Druscilla Wheeler could not mistake the full significance of that ordinary phrase. For a moment or two one fear seemed to oust another. “Mary, you cannot—you must not—” This tune she gripped her niece firmly by the arms. “I will not let you go!”
Although Mary recognized it as a last chance to carry Harry Firebrace’s cherished plan to success and to save the King, in that moment her only conscious motive was to defend her father. “If he is caught he will be shot,” she said.
Druscilla Wheeler had always had her own strange foreboding. And were they not both pledged to this cause? She gave no spoken consent, but the strength went out of her restraining arms. Mary broke from them and sped down the stairs and out into the night.
She went straight to Rolph and was enraged because he did not even show surprise. He must have seen her at the window and supposed that her interest in his movements was purely feminine. “So you had to come sooner or later, now that you can no longer get to that fancy lover of yours in Newport?” he said. “I suppose a girl starves the same as we do.”
She could have killed him. Instead she let him jerk her to him, cupping her chin in his hand. His greedy apprizing glance passed slowly from the white oval of her face to the darker outline of her body. “And what if I tell you I do not want you to-night, my pretty? What if I have more important things to do?”
She knew how he must have enjoyed saying it after all the times she had broken away from his desire. But she was beyond the lash of insolence. All she knew was that she must keep him away from the King’s window—keep him somehow for the next half hour. She summoned to her aid all those wiles she had watched and wondered at in Libby—Libby, who had this very day given birth to a child. Putting that frightening thought from her, she lifted enticing arms and forced herself to touch the man. “Is there anything more important than ourselves this summer night?” she whispered invitingly.
Chapter Twenty-One
Mary crouched terror-stricken on the bed. She stared numbly round the room—a man’s room, bare and orderly, with an army cloak lying across a shabby chair and a pistol lying on the table. At Edmund Rolph standing beside the bed she dared not look. He had thrown off his tunic and she heard the impact of his swordbelt as he threw it across the foot of the coverlet.
No sense of triumph sustained her now. At the last minute she had found the sacrifice too great and would have cheated him if she could. Once in his room, she had tried to cajole him with promises, to flatter him into talking—of the way he had risen in the world, of his promised majority, his hatreds and ambitions, of anything. But as well try to stave off a rutting stag. Ambition and lust always strove in him for mastery, and by her own doing lust was in the ascendant. He had been too urgent to drape desire with the veneer of conversation. Desire had blotted out his ever-present bogy of hell-fire. With hot hands he had stripped the gown from her shoulders and pushed her to his bed.
Past events and the world outside had been driven from her mind by present horrors; her thoughts were only of her shame and how to meet the future. She thought of Libby who had that very morning paid the natural price of some such impassioned moment. But with Libby and her man the passion had been mutual, whereas she herself felt only repugnance. Her glance went wildly to the pistol. Its owner was the sort of man who would always keep it primed. It lay within her reach, but Rolph was nearer. Would God do nothing? But why should He, when she had brought this thing upon herself? She closed her eyes and heard, without believing, a knocking on the door.
Rolph, with a hand already on her naked shoulder, stood motionless between her and the candlelight. “Go to hell!” he bawled out savagely. But the knocking only became more peremptory and a man’s voice, sharp with authority, called to him to unlock it.
“The Governor!” breathed Mary, drawing the worn coverlet about her in yet deeper shame. Yet gratitude and relief strong as joy warmed her cold body. That God should have sent him at such a moment! Until she learned the reason it seemed too fantastic to be true.
Rolph knew that voice as well as she. He came to the foot of the bed, and she saw him look from her to the door, wretchedly irresolute. One could not disobey the Governor. And only some crisis could have brought him to his officers’ quarters in the middle of the night—he, who was accustomed to sending for people when he wanted them. Reluctantly, Rolph shrugged himself into his uniform again. With coat still unbuttoned he motioned to her to keep quiet, and pulled the worn, seldom-used curtains about his bed as silently as he could.
As he went to the door Mary’s numbed mind began to work, too. She realized the circumstances which had driven her to such dangerous shame, and lay trembling behind the thin screen of worn tapestry. If Colonel Hammond found her there it was no immediate fault of Rolph’s. He could say with truth that she had enticed him like a common harlot. But much bigger concerns than her morals must have brought him. The door closed and she knew that he was in the room. “Thank God you are not yet undressed!” she heard him say. “The King is attempting another escape to-night.”
“To-night?” She knew that the dismay in Rolph’s voice was not for the plan but because he had not been told of it. “How do you know, sir?”
“Two of the platform sentries came and told me.”
Mary sat up in the bed, both hands on her racing heart.
“But they should be posted by now. I was just going out to make a surprise inspection. These fellows need watching.” Rolph still sounded flurried.
“I suppose they lost their nerve. They came and made a clean breast of it at the last minute. They’d been bribed at a hundred pounds apiece to let the King come out of his window and get away.”
The chair creaked. Evidently, the Governor had sat down. It was easy to differentiate between his crisp, cultured voice and Rolph’s rougher speech with its ineradicable Cockney accent.
“Are you sure they haven’t got it muddled, sir? That it isn’t something planned for some other night?”
“Why should it be? They tell me the bar has been tampered with. Those indefeasible fools who help the King must have got a second bottle of acid through after we dealt with t
heir first effort.”
“Who bribed the sentries? That crafty Frenchman, probably. I met him prowling about out there earlier in the evening.”
“He is probably in it. But they both say the man who persuaded them to it was Osborne.”
“Osborne!” A foul oath ripped out of Rolph. “But he went out to supper—he was talking to me of some girl he was going to see. He—” The Captain still found it hard to believe that during all these weeks he had been fooled.
“He hoodwinked us all pretty thoroughly.”
“May the Almighty let me lay hands on him!”
“He probably will if you carry out my orders with despatch. The time set for the royal departure is midnight and it is almost midnight now.”
“Who were the men?”
“Wenshall and Featherstone.”
“Islanders!” The word was so charged with contempt that it sounded as if the Captain spat. “No men of mine, God be praised!”
“I understand the third was a Londoner,” said the Governor, drily.
“From the new company Major Cromwell brought, no doubt.”
“I told the two who came to me to go on duty as though nothing had happened. To speak of it to no one—not even to their fellow-sentry. So if you watch what happens we ought to find out for certain who is involved in this and catch them red-handed. There must be someone outside the castle with a horse for the King.”
“Osborne, I’ll wager! A pox on his luscious wench and his supper party!”
“Send a dozen of your musketeers to set an ambush on the far side of the lane. Let them go out by the main gate and creep down through the copse from above.”
“And I’ll see to it that every man of them is a good shot!”
“Then go yourself immediately and hide in the angle of that bastion a few yards from the window. Take what men you need—men who will obey you implicitly.”
“I shall not need many.” The grimness of a threat was in Rolph’s tone.
“Wenshall and Featherstone will not raise a finger. I have told them to maintain their guard but to take no part in the affair. So you will have only one sentry to deal with. Let the King get to the edge of the escarpment before you take him so that we see who comes to meet him and help him down. Give your men orders to fire on anyone who resists, but forbid them to show any violence to the King himself. Only make sure that he is taken.”
Personal issues were momentarily forgotten. To both men it was merely an absorbing military manoeuvre. “And the third sentry?” enquired Rolph.
“Arrest him and bring him to me, unless he is seen actively helping the King. In that case shoot him at sight.”
The shabby old chair creaked again as the Governor got up to go, so that neither of them heard Mary’s smothered cry. “I will come with you, sir. I have only to collect my gear.” Rolph seemed to have forgotten her. Whatever other opportunities the night might bring he was eager to get to them.
The clink of steel told her that he was buckling on his armour. His swordbelt was still lying across the end of the bed, and his pistol on the table. Leaning across the pillow she reached out a stealthy hand between the hangings and drew the heavy, lethal weapon into the half darkness of her hiding place. She thrust it under the bedclothes to deaden the sound of the catch, and emptied out the powder. As stealthily she reached out and put it back.
Almost immediately she saw Rolph’s strong, hirsute hand appear and grope for his belt, then heard him stride to the table and pick up the pistol. “I should put on this dark cloak so that the King will not see you,” advised Colonel Hammond. Then the door closed behind them and she was alone.
Instantly Mary slipped from the bed and ran to the door, tugging her torn dress about her as she went. Memories of fatherly loving kindness and small shared jokes impelled her. Rolph would have to collect his men, she calculated. “If I run now to the north postern one of our garrison may be on duty. I will beg him to let me pass. Those old men have never refused me anything, I will tell him my aunt has been taken ill and that I must see my father.”
She might yet be able to warn him and he in turn could warn the King. She pulled at the door but could not open it. She pulled again with all her strength, and then began banging on it in a frenzy of frustration. But Edmund Rolph had locked it from the outside.
He had not been able to prevent her from overhearing the Governor’s orders, but he was taking no chances about her giving warnings. She supposed that if his mind had sufficiently recovered from the shock of Osborne’s duplicity, he must surely have realized by now that she, too, had been duping him. Had they opposed him openly in a matter of duty he would probably have borne no particular grudge. As Osborne had once said, the man had his points. But with understanding of her purpose the bubble of his masculine conceit would be pricked, and for that he would never forgive her. He would never lose an opportunity of paying off the score. And because he had basked in the belief that he was on intimate terms with a gentleman of the class which he envied, abhorred and hunted—because he had publicly boasted of it and must now look a fool—he would be Osborne’s sworn enemy for life.
Mary ran to the window overlooking the courtyard, but it was small and barred. “Most certainly he will pick all his best marksmen for the ambush!” she moaned, sinking down on the low window seat. She remembered how often Richard Osborne had tried to comfort her, and for the first time, in the midst of her terror for her father, her thoughts reached out in a passion of protectiveness to that tall reckless figure, all unaware of Cromwell’s musketeers closing in around him in the darkness of the copse.
What a puffed-up fool she must have been to suppose that she could interfere! And at what might have been such an irremediable price!
Chapter Twenty-Two
At any moment now the chapel clock might strike the hour.
Alone in his room, Charles had made his final preparations. Earlier in the day he had complained of a chill and asked Brett to light a fire so that he might destroy such documents as he could not take in his pockets. He had burned his wife’s letters. “Dear Heart,” she had called him in every one, and it had felt like severing his last link with her. It was four years since he had last seen her, but by God’s help he would see her again this very week and there would be no more need of all this difficultly contrived correspondence.
He took a last look round the room at his few possessions. When he had left his treasures in Whitehall he had felt beggared. Yet in a few minutes now he would be a fugitive possessed of nothing save what he stood up in. He passed his hands over his defenceless body, almost nervous of being out in the world again. Had he remembered everything Harry Firebrace had told him that first time? The black suit that would not show in the darkness, the dark grey stockings drawn up above the rosettes at his knees. How easy Harry’s enthusiasm had made things seem! How cold these old rooms were without his smile! And that sweet-faced girl who helped with the letters—she must miss him too. “They have all served me so well,” thought Charles. “If ever I come into my own again I will remember them.”
Only at the last minute did he remember to take off his glittering George, so accustomed was he to wearing it as sole ornament and as a silent reminder to the traitors about him to keep their place. He slipped it into his pocket, took it out and laid it aside with nervous indecision, then put it back again. In Holland it would be safe to wear it, and he must remember that he was a poor man now. Or if anything should happen to him before he got there Ashburnham or someone would sell it for his younger children’s needs—clever, delicate Bess and eager young Henry. If anything should happen to him…
Although it was almost June he suddenly felt chilled indeed and wished that he need not leave the comfort of Brett’s fire. But it was time to go. His jewelled watch told him so. Time to leave this castle of his which he had once thought so pleasant and which had become a hated prison. He hoped he would never see it again. In order to steady his nerves he urged his thoughts out beyond its walls. To
-morrow he would celebrate his eldest son’s birthday by riding once more through the lovely shires of his kingdom. And afterwards—who could say? Protecting each flame with a fine, tapering hand, he blew out the candles.
He knelt for a moment or two in prayer before cautiously opening a casement of his window. The dividing bar was still hanging in position, but had been so cleverly treated with acid that with one smart tug it came away from the top as Dowcett had assured him it would. Charles laid it down, careful to make no noise, and leaned out. There was no wind and the sweet scent of May trees came up to him. It seemed to him that the whole summer night smelled of freedom.
Below him, close under the wall, he could see the figures of the three sentries, and beneath their feet the new wood of the platform glimmering whitely above the steeply sloping grass. Two of them stood motionless at the far end of it. It seemed they had not heard him. The other—the shorter man with the broader shoulders—looked up. He turned at once and came closer. He propped his musket carefully against the wall and took off his helmet lest its wide, upturned sides should get in the way, then stood expectantly holding up his arms. Charles, with eyes uninured to the darkness, could not be sure which soldier he was, but he was there and ready to help him down and that was all that mattered to a man tortured by a horror of heights.
He mounted a stool and thrust first one leg over the sill and then the other. The aperture was narrow but this time it would suffice. Sitting on the sill with the scented night air all about him, he leaned forward and reached down with his hands. The hands that grasped them were warm and strong, and the man’s upturned, smiling face was so close that now he could discern the features. It was Sergeant Floyd’s face, with the same steady eyes and crisply curling hair as that girl of his—and now the corners of the eyes crinkled into an encouraging smile. So Osborne had roped him in after all Charles was glad. It was like finding, as he set off alone on a strange journey, someone whom he had known since boyhood. The jump into the darkness was going to be nothing after all—no more unnerving than a joyous vaulting into the saddle with his own groom holding the stirrup. Instead of being a nightmare, this was the beginning of an adventure—a splendid adventure like firing off the castle cannon.
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