Charles’ swinging feet felt for Sergeant Floyd’s shoulders. His muscles, which he had kept supple with swift walking, tensed themselves to spring. And as his breast came forward a sharp crack sounded from a few yards away, followed by a smothered oath. It could have been the snapping of a dry branch suddenly trodden beneath a boot, or the release of a trigger—but if it were a trigger no fire came. Both of them turned their heads instantly and became aware of figures moving in the shadow of the bastion. Charles could have sworn they were not there before. They must have been watching and crept round from behind it. For a moment or two he and Floyd remained rigid, listening.
“At the ready! Present arms! ” ordered Floyd. He was burdened, bareheaded and unarmed, his back offering a perfect target to an enemy, but Wenshall and Featherstone, at the other end of the platform, made only a poor show of fumbling with their matchlocks.
“Go back, sir!” warned Floyd, hoisting the King upwards with one hand while he reached for his own musket with the other. But before he could reach it someone fired from another angle, murderously close. There was no mistaking it for a snapped branch this time and the shot got him between the shoulder blades. Charles had already managed to pull himself back into his window. His own efforts excluded other sounds so that he did not hear the groan and thud, and was unaware that Sergeant Floyd had slumped down on to the platform and that Wenshall and Featherstone, quick enough to bend over him in shocked remorse, were hastily unbuckling his breastplate. The King closed his window and moved instinctively behind the shelter of a wall. But his reaction was incredulity rather than fear. That it should have come to this! That they should dare to fire at him! All his sense of kingly dignity was outraged. He stood there, with fast-beating heart, listening for what would come next. He could hear the other sentries talking down below. The shot seemed to have raised them from their incompetence. “Small wonder Cromwell’s soldiers beat us if all my men were as slow as they!” he thought irrelevantly. And then a sharp volley of musket fire rattled through the copse across the lane, followed by another and yet another. Then single pistol shots barking in return.
“Osborne and Worsley!” he lamented bitterly, in the darkness. “How many more men must die for me!”
It seemed to his tried experience that no two men could live through such a murderous fire. But the firing was coming from farther away now, growing fainter and more spasmodic. “Edward Worsley is an islander. Perhaps, after all, they may get away,” he thought on a faint uprising of hope.
Finding that his legs were trembling under him he sat down at his desk. With angry daring he lit a candle and sat by the uncurtained window. If any of his subjects wished to kill him let them do it while he sat, as became him, in his own room. Not while he was climbing like a thief from a window. Even if it should mean the end of freedom he would never attempt that means of exit again. Because it was so alien to him, he thought, it was doomed to failure. To-night had been but a repetition of that first night when young Firebrace had talked him into making the attempt from that other window. Only then there had been a much bigger drop and no steadying hands, and he had been secretly glad when the space had proved too narrow. In a rare moment of shamed retrospection Charles wondered whether that secret relief had had any connection with his reluctance to test the space first. But even so, when it came to the point, he had tried his utmost. Always, since his lonely boyhood in Scotland, he had fought that ridiculous horror of heights. Now he would fight again for his freedom. And for his rights. But by some method more suited to an intelligent mind. Some dastard might have shot him this night but God had miraculously stayed his hand. He was sure now that the first sharp sound he and Floyd had heard was a pistol which for some reason did not go off. He did not mean to die if he could help it. He would write again to Parliament suggesting that in the interests of the country he and they should try again to settle their differences. He would write now. He picked up his pen and pulled some paper towards him. While there is life there is hope. The words had been so often in his mind of late. Dum spiro, spero he wrote idly across a corner of the paper while he considered what proposals to make.
Everything was quiet now and to his amazement he heard a key turn in his lock. Was there then some master key? Failing to shoot him, had they come here to murder him? His mind went back to other kings, in eras which were supposed to be more savage, who had been foully put away in remote castles. He sprang to his feet, his gaze fixed in horror on the opening door.
But it was Colonel Hammond who stood on the threshold. Of course, this had been his room. He had probably retained a key. And one did not associate murder with Colonel Hammond. A deep breath of relief issued soundlessly from Charles’s lips. He stood still, pen in hand, beside his desk, waiting for an explanation. It was only impertinence, not regicide, he had to face.
The Governor offered no explanation. He bowed formally and walked deliberately across the room to the window. He was standing close beside Charles and looked pointedly at the space where the bar should have been. Comment was unnecessary.
Being left to speak first put Charles at a disadvantage. “What have you come here for, Hammond? What is the matter?” he asked.
Hammond turned towards him politely but without any particular deference. “I am come to take my leave of your Majesty as I hear you are leaving us,” he said, with the beginning of a smile curving his thin, clever lips.
The words were not unfriendly. Their eyes met and Charles laughed like a good loser. Hammond picked up the bar and examined it as he might have examined a good piece of gunsmithery. In that moment they came nearer to liking each other than at any other time. Fate had tipped the balance of power from guest to host, but each recognized in the other a reasonable, civilized person. For the first time Charles spared a thought for the difficulty of the man’s position. He was even sorry that he had purposely quickened his pace one frosty morning and then laughed when the Governor, trying to keep up with him, had slipped painfully full length on his back. And Hammond, in spite of his irritation with the King’s obstinacy and all these intrigues which made it impossible for him to alleviate captivity with any of the small privileges he would have preferred to grant, was human enough to appreciate the King’s disappointment. “I had to make sure that your Majesty was safe,” he said, almost apologetically, laying down the bar and preparing to depart.
“What was all that shooting?” asked Charles.
“I regret that it should have been necessary. But if it is of any comfort to you, your friends have got away—for the moment.”
“What friends?” asked Charles, refusing to be drawn.
Hammond’s smile was more grim. “Your Gentleman Usher and—I suspect—Master Edward Worsley from Gatcombe.” It was royalist sympathy in the island that he feared.
Charles sat down and picked up his pen again, pretending to be occupied with his writing. He managed to preserve a non-committal silence until Hammond was almost at the door. But there was something which concerned him more closely still. Something which he had to know. “And that other musket shot—which I imagine was meant for me?” he asked, without raising his head.
“I assure you it was not. My orders were that no violence was to be shown you.”
“But that first misfire—” began Charles, sure now that it had been from a pistol and remembering how urgently Sergeant Floyd had warned him, and how much more clearly he must have been able to see. But naturally the Governor would know nothing about it and at least he would not lie. “Then whom was the musket shot intended for?”
Because Hammond’s heart was heavy within him for the loss of a good man he looked back at the King without any vestige of his momentary liking. “For a sentry who disobeyed orders,” he answered curtly. “They are bringing in his body now.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Mary knelt by her father’s grave in the village churchyard, a slight desolate figure in black with summer daisies mockingly starring the grass around her. Although Ser
geant Floyd had been shot for disobeying orders, the newly-turned mound of earth was covered with flowers. There were wreaths from his sister and from the Trattles, an unobtrusive bunch of roses which had come anonymously from Mistress Hammond, children’s wilting posies, and a profusion of simple country blooms from cottage gardens. Some of his men had made a rough cross on which the master-gunner had whittled the words “Faithful unto Death,” and after the officer in charge of the burial party had gone the coffin bearers had hurriedly fixed it at the head of the grave. It meant more to Mary than any stonemason’s impersonal slab which might come later; for these men had known and understood her father and shared the memories from which her grief had grown.
Mary herself had brought no flowers, only her passionately unhappy heart.
When Rolph had released her because the Governor was asking for her, she had found her aunt distracted with grief. Seeing Mistress Hammond and the Chaplain with her, Mary had guessed the news they had come to break. She had tried to comfort poor Aunt Druscilla and then gone about her ordinary duties in silence. Her father was dead, and she had been too stunned to listen to the comfort people tried to give her. Obediently she had put on the black gown which the Governor’s mother had had made for her in Newport, and had even stood at the window to watch her father’s coffin being carried out towards the drawbridge. Aunt Druscilla, burdened with grief and sick with that past anxiety for her niece of which she could not speak, lay all that day on her bed behind drawn blinds, and it had not been thought seemly for either of them to attend the funeral.
But the following morning Mary had gone boldly to the Governor’s room and asked leave to go down to the churchyard, “You may go there at any time. Why do you ask leave of me?” he had asked, trying not to meet her tragic eyes.
“Because Captain Rolph has given orders that without your written word the guard are not to let me out of the castle.”
“You probably gave him good cause, trying to bring in letters.”
“I am to be allowed out only if I go with him,” she had added, thinking how strange it was that heart-break could so quickly eat up fear.
Hammond had looked up sharply, scrutinizing her white, set face before taking up his pen. “Here is your pass,” he had said. She was not to know how often he wished that he had his mother’s gift for conveying sympathy. “If there is anything more I can do for you, always come to me.”
She was not to know either, that as soon as she had closed his door he had sent for Anthony Mildmay, choosing him as the kind of watchdog who would not intrude upon her. “She is taking it too quietly. Follow her at a distance—particularly should she go near the mill pond,” he had ordered uneasily. “But see that no other man follows her.”
She had walked out past the sentries and no one had stopped her. Rolph, parading his company in the courtyard, had called out to know where she was going and, armed with the Governor’s chit, she had walked past him as though he had not spoken. She could still take pleasure in the men’s covert grins at his discomforture, and she was not the type to seek oblivion in millponds. Unaware that Mildmay kept her within sight, she had gone down the lane beneath the dappled shadow of the beech trees, and by the stone clapper bridge over the brook. Because it was June, ladies’ laces flung creamy bridal veils against green hedges along the village street, and the scent from an old lilac bush had drifted down to her as she pushed open the churchyard gate. And now, kneeling among the daisies beside that sad, unresponsive mound, she thought that nothing that happened in June could ever matter any more.
How could so much sorrow have come about, she wondered, staring at the wilting flowers and the little wooden cross? Surely it had all begun on that Sunday seven months ago? If the King had not come to the Wight they would all have gone on living their quiet uneventful lives. The happy lives which Frances had thought so dull. Her father would have been up at the castle now, drilling his men or seeing to the stores. There would have been none of that bustle and excitement, no introduction to a world of ceremony and fashion, no falling in love, no pain of parting, no useless attempt to barter her body, no final desolation. Why, why—out of all the castles in his kingdom—must King Charles have chosen to come here?
The soft, salt-laden breeze that stirred the grass seemed to carry a faint echo of the voice which her heart strained to hear. “What does it matter, my foolish one?” her father had been wont to say when her small world went wrong. “What does anything matter so long as we face it together?”
And now she was alone, with a world of fear and loneliness to face. During the last few days there had always been people with pitying faces, and her own aggressive pride, because everyone knew her father had been shot like any defaulting sentry. But here she could for the first time give way to her emotions. She was at an age for joy, but although the sun warmed her and the birds sung overhead, life loomed like a grey emptiness before her. She covered her face with both hands and sobbed.
When she was worn out by the wildness of her grief she felt herself being lifted from the grass by arms strong and gentle as her father’s. Blinded by tears, she made no resistance. She allowed herself to be carried to a low wall screened by the dipping branches of an old willow tree, and found herself in Richard Osborne’s arms. Too tired out by suffering to speak, she leaned her head against his breast and went on weeping silently.
He held her until her shaking body grew still, then set her down on the wall beside him; but he kept an arm about her so that she could rest against his shoulder. “That you should have been the one called upon to pay—and so bitterly!” he said, kissing her wet cheek as gently as he would have comforted a child.
“They shot him as though he were a t-traitor.”
“It was the world that changed, my sweet, never his loyalty. It is the same with all of us who are on the King’s side.”
“How did you know about it?” she asked dully.
“The Gatcombe bailiff heard about the funeral when he came in to market. I knew you would be sure to come here so I came through the woods and waited in the priory ruins.”
She roused herself and would have pushed him away, suddenly remembering his danger. “You know they have been searching for you for days. At any moment they may be out again.” But he did not move, and looking up at him for the first time she saw the roughly bandaged wound high up on his cheek. “You got that when they ambushed you?” she asked, touching it with a pitiful, exploring finger.
“It is not deep,” he assured her. “Although Worsley seems to think I shall always bear the mark of it. Mary, what happened that night? What went wrong?”
She explained it all to him as best she could, piecing her story together from what she had overheard from Rolph’s bed and from what she had learned afterwards. “I was frantic with anxiety when I heard all that shooting. The firing party sent out were the best marksmen in the garrison. How did you get away?”
“By being a rather better marksman, I suppose. And Edward Worsley knows every bush and bypath. There is no need to worry about us. We have gone to earth in a snug lair in his father’s woods and one of their servants brings us food. Mary, were you allowed to see your father before—the firing party—”
She shook her head sadly. “There was no firing party. The Governor’s orders were to arrest the third sentry unless Rolph should see him actually helping the King, but in that case to shoot at sight.”
“This must have been a terrible shock for Mistress Wheeler. How did she take it when she first heard?”
Mary looked down, picking at the wall with aimless fingers. “I was not with her.”
“Not with her? That night?”
“Not until the morning.” She hurried on without giving him time to question her further. “She took to her bed and will not speak to anyone. Not even to me. She still thinks that you persuaded my beloved father to go on guard, even when I tell her that Wenshall and Featherstone both say it was because of Tilling being drunk.”
“So you have
been defending me?” He sounded inordinately pleased, but at mention of her father Mary’s tears had begun to flow afresh. “I have no one now,” she murmured in her desolation.
“You have me.”
“But when I go back you will not be there. And poor Abraham Dowcett is under close arrest. They found the rope in his room.”
“If you can get a message to him through Brett or someone tell him that when I reach the mainland I will try to see his wife,” promised Osborne.
“Will you have to go abroad?”
“I shall try to join the Prince in Holland.”
“It really is not safe for you to stay here with me any longer,” she reminded him anxiously.
“No, I suppose not,” he agreed; but he spoke absently as though his mind were on something else. “How did you know what orders the Governor gave Rolph about your father?”
“I—overheard.”
“Overheard? How could you, possibly? You say the sentries only went to Hammond at the last moment.” He withdrew his arm and looked at her in perplexity. “Where were you that night?”
She realized that in her agitation she had betrayed herself, but could not bring herself to lie to him. She sat looking straight before her as she told him. “Dowcett was worried as you feared he might be. He had seen Captain Rolph prying round outside the walls. We all went to our rooms and, as you know, Dowcett’s is at the other end of the castle. Just before midnight my aunt and I saw Rolph from our window. He was going out to inspect the platform guards again. We knew my father was there—and that any minute would be helping the King to get out of the window. Rolph would catch them in the act. Somehow we had to stop him. I had to do something—”
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