Sea Change

by Robert Goddard

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘But Spandrel’s mother allowed to live out her days in peace. And Spandrel spared a miscarriage of Dutch justice. That’s the sum of it, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The sum of all things.’ McIlwraith sighed and looked past them across the rolling canopy of the Forest. ‘Walpole’s a keen huntsman, so they tell me. And it seems he no more wants for foxes than for hounds. He breeds the one as he breeds the other. What a grasp of economy the man does have. You’re right, of course, Spandrel. My quarrel’s with the father, not the son.’

  ‘You’ll let the boy go?’ asked Spandrel, hope blooming suddenly within him.

  ‘It seems it’s either that or kill him. And I’d sooner hang for murdering the First Lord of the Treasury than his son. You may take it I—’

  ‘McIlwraith!’ It was Wagemaker’s voice, raised in a shout of alarm. ‘We’re discovered.’

  McIlwraith swung round even as did Spandrel and Estelle. There, below them, hurrying up the track, came a troop of infantry, their musket barrels glinting in the sun. Discovered they had clearly been. Or betrayed.

  ‘Well, well,’ said McIlwraith. ‘It seems my mind’s been made up for me.’

  Chapter Forty

  Under Siege

  ‘STAND WHERE YOU are!’ came a shout.

  For a second, Spandrel thought the order was directed at all of them. Then he realized that Tiberius Wagemaker was the real target. He had started up the stairs, a pistol clutched in his right hand, glaring upwards as he climbed. ‘They’ve done for us, McIlwraith,’ he bellowed. ‘Spandrel and that she-devil.’

  ‘Halt or we fire!’

  But Wagemaker did not halt. It seemed to Spandrel that he did not even hear. Nor did he see, as they could from the roof, the musketeers taking aim below him.

  ‘Halt, I say!’

  Wagemaker raised his pistol, cocking it as he did so, and pointed it at Spandrel. In the same instant, there was a barked order and an explosion of musket shots.

  Several of the shots took Wagemaker in the back. He arched backwards and fired into the air, the roar of the shot swallowing a last, grimacing cry. Then he fell, striking his head against the stairs behind him before plunging to the ground with a heavy thud like that of a laden sack being tossed from a barn-loft.

  ‘Don’t move,’ said McIlwraith quietly, lowering his pistol out of sight behind the parapet. ‘And say nothing unless I tell you to. I reckon Wagemaker’s shown us what’s likely to come of acting hastily.’

  ‘You three on the roof!’ The musket-smoke cleared to reveal the stout figure of a heavily braided senior officer. ‘I’m Colonel Negus, Deputy Lieutenant of Windsor Castle. I have reason to believe an oppidan of Eton College, Master Edward Walpole, is being held here against his will. I require and demand his immediate release.’

  ‘You’ll find the boy in the room below,’ McIlwraith shouted back. ‘And you’ll find the key to the door in the pocket of the fellow your men have just shot.’

  ‘What’s the boy’s condition?’

  ‘He’s alive and well enough, though none too happy.’

  ‘It’ll be your neck if he’s come to any harm.’

  ‘I dare say it’ll be my neck either way, Colonel.’

  To this Negus did not respond. He sent two men scurrying over to Wagemaker’s body. As they began searching his pockets, McIlwraith said to Estelle in an undertone, without turning to look at her, ‘Have we you to thank for this, Mrs de Vries?’

  ‘Yes,’ she softly replied. ‘The landlady of the Roebuck named you as the last person to live here and a rumoured lover of Dorothea Wagemaker. I’d already guessed you were still alive and that’s when I realized William suspected you were holding the boy here. William was in the tap-room at the time, unaware of what I was doing. I paid the stable-boy to ride to Windsor Castle with a message for Walpole’s brother, Horatio, whom he sent there yesterday to organize a search.’ She paused, then added, ‘I’d thought they might arrive sooner.’

  ‘All this … negotiating … was just a delaying tactic, then?’

  ‘Partly. But I bear you no ill will, Captain. I’d have been happy to—’

  A sudden commotion below marked the discovery of the key. Negus sent his adjutant forward to open the door. He disappeared from their view, but they could hear the rattle of the key in the lock, followed by a creak of the door on its hinges.

  ‘We were supposed to be in this together,’ said Spandrel, slowly recognizing the deception to which Estelle was calmly admitting. ‘We were supposed to trust one another.’

  ‘But you didn’t trust me, did you? If you’d told me where we were going and why, it mightn’t have come to this.’

  ‘That won’t do,’ objected McIlwraith. ‘How did you know Walpole had despatched his brother to Windsor? He told you, didn’t he? And he also told you to send a message to him there if and when you succeeded in gleaning the boy’s whereabouts from Spandrel. So, if Spandrel had told you from the outset what was in his mind, you’d only have betrayed him the sooner.’

  ‘What a hard woman you think me, Captain.’

  ‘What a hard woman you are.’

  ‘We could have ended this as I’d hoped,’ said Spandrel, seeming to see in his mind a dream slipping away from him. ‘We could all have escaped, with no harm done. There was no need for …’

  ‘A military resolution,’ said McIlwraith. ‘Need or not, though, that’s what we’re to have. And in short order, I imagine, now they have the brat.’

  At that moment, Edward Walpole appeared below, limping slightly as he walked towards the soldiers, supported by the adjutant. He cast a glance across at Wagemaker’s body, then up at them on the roof, as he went. It was not a glance in which either mercy or gratitude was to be readily detected.

  Colonel Negus led the boy away, patting his shoulder as he talked to him. Their discussion lasted several minutes, during which not a word was spoken on the roof. Spandrel stared at Estelle, daring her to look him in the eye. But she trained her gaze firmly on the scene below. Then Negus strode back to his position, leaving young Walpole in the care of someone who looked to be a doctor.

  ‘Captain McIlwraith!’ Negus called.

  ‘Aye, Colonel?’

  ‘Where’s your other accomplice?’

  ‘Taken to his heels, I assume.’

  ‘Your companions there are Mrs Davenant and Mr Spandrel?’

  ‘So they are.’

  ‘Send them down. Mrs Davenant first.’

  ‘As you please.’ McIlwraith moved clear of the head of the stairs, waving Estelle forward.

  The walkway was so narrow that she could not avoid brushing against Spandrel as she passed him. But still she kept her gaze averted. He watched her walk slowly to the gap in the parapet and turn to start her descent.

  At that moment, McIlwraith moved smartly forward, raised the pistol and clapped it to her temple. ‘That’s quite far enough, madam,’ he said, cocking the trigger. ‘You surely don’t suppose I’m going to let you go.’

  ‘Don’t do it, Captain,’ Spandrel cried. ‘She’s not worth it.’

  ‘There I must disagree, Spandrel. It seems to me she’s eminently worth it, especially considering that killing her’s unlikely to increase the severity of my punishment.’

  ‘Lower the pistol,’ shouted Negus. ‘At once.’

  ‘I can’t oblige you there, Colonel,’ McIlwraith replied. ‘And if your men open fire, I should say they’re as likely to blow Mrs Davenant’s head off as mine. I advise you to stay your hand.’

  ‘Let me go, Captain,’ said Estelle, too calmly to sound as if she was pleading.

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because, if you let me live, I can save William from the gallows. Kill me and you condemn him to hang alongside you.’

  ‘And will you save him?’

  ‘If you give me the chance to, yes.’

  ‘No doubt I can have your word on that.’

  ‘Would my wor
d mean anything to you?’

  ‘Not even if this tower was built of bibles.’

  ‘I swear it, even so.’

  ‘You’re right anyway, damn it, whether you swear or no. A ball through your head is a noose round Spandrel’s neck. And I’m as sure as you probably are that Negus will have been instructed to take me at any cost – even your life.’ McIlwraith lowered the pistol. ‘Go down and join your friends, madam. And remember your promise.’

  ‘I shall.’

  Spandrel watched her as she slowly descended the stairs, disdaining to put a hand to the wall to steady herself, an eddying breeze stirring her hair beneath the hat and tugging at her dress. As she reached the first landing and turned, she glanced up at him, but her eyes were in shadow and what her gaze might have conveyed he could not tell. Then she went on down, without a second upward glance.

  ‘Spandrel may follow,’ called Negus.

  ‘Do as the man says,’ said McIlwraith. ‘You’re better off down there than up here.’

  ‘Will you surrender, Captain?’ Spandrel asked as he moved to the head of the stairs.

  ‘Do you think I should?’

  ‘Walpole told me he’d have his son’s kidnappers hanged, drawn and quartered.’

  ‘Aye. And their heads left to rot on spikes at Temple Bar, no doubt. If that should happen to me, Spandrel, will you climb up there one dark night, take mine down and give it a decent burial, for the sake of the miles we rode together?’

  ‘Yes, Captain. I will.’

  McIlwraith smiled. ‘Good man. I’ll do my best to spare you the need. Now, look lively on the stairs. We don’t want Colonel Negus to suspect you of collusion with the enemy.’

  Spandrel started down. He looked up twice during his descent, but McIlwraith was not watching him. He seemed to be scanning the horizon, his eyes narrowed against the sun.

  It was no more than thirty yards from the foot of the stairs to where Colonel Negus was standing. In the few moments it took Spandrel to cover the distance, he became aware of a difference in the manner of his reception compared with that of Estelle. She was some way off down the track, with young Walpole, the doctor and a junior officer. Around the group they made hovered an atmosphere of solicitude and deference. But for Spandrel there was only Negus’s stern gaze and gravelly voice.

  ‘Place this man under arrest, Captain Rogers,’ he said to his adjutant. ‘We’re unsure as to his allegiance.’

  A pair of burly soldiers seized Spandrel by the arms and led him aside. He did not resist. He did not even protest. It was only what he had half-expected. As to what it portended, he could not find the energy to imagine.

  ‘Captain McIlwraith!’ he heard Negus call. ‘Discharge your pistol into the air, lay down your sword and descend the stairs with your arms held aloft.’

  ‘I’m a soldier like yourself, Colonel. I don’t surrender lightly.’

  ‘Your position is hopeless.’

  ‘Aye. So it is. Whether I surrender or no.’

  ‘Give it up, man. You’ve not harmed the boy. That’ll count in your favour.’

  ‘With God, perhaps. But not with Walpole. I advise you to withdraw your men.’

  ‘Surrender, Captain, or prepare to be stormed.’

  ‘You’ll never take me, Colonel. And you’ll lose most of your men in the attempt.’

  ‘I’ll bandy words with you no longer.’ Negus turned to his adjutant. ‘Captain Rogers—’

  ‘Wait, sir,’ said Rogers. ‘What’s he doing?’

  The two soldiers holding Spandrel looked round at this, enabling Spandrel to do the same. He did so in time to see McIlwraith scrambling up the roof to the chimney and round to the far side of the stack.

  ‘The man’s mad,’ declared Negus, his patience exhausted. ‘Deploy your best marksmen and end this, Rogers.’

  ‘I’ll decree the ending of this, not you, Colonel,’ shouted McIlwraith. He threw his gun down the roof to the walkway, then pulled something from inside the chimneypot and fumbled in his pocket.

  ‘Finish the man, Rogers. Now!’

  ‘Yes, sir. But—’

  There was a flash of some kind from where McIlwraith was standing, then a duller, trailing flame.

  ‘He’s lit a fuse, sir. Do you think—’

  ‘My God, he must have mined the chimney. Fall the men back. Quickly!’

  The realization of what McIlwraith was about communicated itself to the troops before Rogers could even issue an order. Once he did, they began a withdrawal down the track that soon became a pell-mell retreat. Spandrel’s guards, intent upon saving themselves, left him where he was, staring up at the gaunt figure on the roof.

  McIlwraith’s coat flapped behind him in the breeze, his bare, grey-maned head lit by the sun. Though he could not be certain amidst the confused shouts and pounding footfalls, it seemed to Spandrel that McIlwraith was laughing with genuine amusement at the scene below him. Then he stopped laughing. And slowly, with seeming relish, drew his sword. The sunlight glinted on the blade. McIlwraith held it out before him, as if to meet the charge of some other, invisible swordsman.

  Then, with a flash and a roar, the mine exploded. The whole upper half of the tower vanished in a gout of flame and smoke and flying stone. And Spandrel’s last thought, before something struck him near his right ear and darkness swallowed him, was that McIlwraith could not be hanged, drawn and quartered now. Nor would his head need rescuing from Temple Bar. He was out of Walpole’s reach. For good and all.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Full Circle

  SPANDREL HAD A dim awareness of a wound above his ear being washed and dressed and of a bandage being wrapped round his head, but it was some unmeasurable time after that when he regained consciousness to find himself lying in bed in a bare, twilit chamber. The granular light from the window suggested either dusk or dawn, but he had no clear idea which and felt a strange lack of curiosity on the point. He fell asleep.

  When he woke, the light was stronger and his mind once more in command of logical thought. The bed was soft and generously blanketed and there were no bars at the window, but nevertheless there was something cell-like about the chamber. He rose, slowed by a dull, pounding headache, and fingered the bandage round his head, faintly surprised to discover that he still had a head to be bandaged. Then he walked unsteadily to the window and looked out.

  A high wall and a steep escarpment below it combined into a sheer and vertiginous drop beyond the mullioned panes. The river at the foot of the escarpment was surely the Thames and the town huddled on the other side Eton, to judge by the ecclesiastical building seeming to float above it that could only be the college chapel. He was in Windsor Castle. And not, the bareness of the room suggested, as an honoured guest. He crossed to the door and tried the latch. But the door was locked, as he had expected. So, he was a prisoner, as he had also expected.

  He banged on the door loudly and for long enough to rouse any guard who might be near. But there was no response. Perhaps they had not supposed he would wake so soon. He went back to the window and pushed it open.

  Church bells were ringing. It was Sunday morning. The events of the day before lay in the past. But they were fresh in his memory. In his mind’s eye, clearer by far than the vista below of river and field and chapel, Spandrel saw McIlwraith standing on Blind Man’s Tower, sword in hand, the instant before he and it were blasted into oblivion. ‘You’ll never take me,’ he had said. And he had been as good as his word.

  He was gone now, that strange, curmudgeonly warrior. He had used up the last of his lives. Spandrel wandered back to the bed and lay down, tears stinging his eyes as a grief he had never thought he would feel swept over him. It was a grief, he realized, sharpened by fear. McIlwraith had rescued him once before, when no-one else could. What would happen to him now? Who – if anyone – would rescue him this time?

  The church bells had fallen silent, and the angle of the sun across the rooftops of Eton had altered with the advance of the day, whe
n the door of Spandrel’s room was at last opened, to an overture of jangling keys. A grim-faced guard, built like a bear but clearly not given to dancing, looked in at Spandrel, then made way for a kitchen-boy, who brought in a meal that smelt surprisingly good, deposited it at Spandrel’s feet and scuttled out.

  ‘What am I—’ But Spandrel’s admittedly tardy question was cut off by the slamming of the door. And a further jangling of keys.

  Half an hour later, the door opened once more. Expecting the kitchen-boy, Spandrel picked up the licked-clean plate and held it out for collection. Only to find himself confronted by the corpulent, scowling, Sunday-suited figure of Robert Walpole.

  ‘Put the plate down, sir. Do you take me for a turnspit?’ Walpole looked round at the guard. ‘Close the door behind you. And stay within call.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The door closed.

  ‘Well now, Spandrel, how do I find you? Barely scratched, according to the doctor.’ Walpole ambled across to the window and gazed out. ‘And handsomely accommodated, I see.’

  ‘Am I a prisoner, Mr Walpole?’

  ‘Certainly you are, sir. But a well fed and softly bedded one, thanks to Mrs Davenant. She assures me you did your best to rescue my son. And he was rescued. But since you bear a large measure of responsibility for the peril he was placed in—’

  ‘I had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Don’t interrupt me.’ Walpole turned and glared at him. ‘You knew McIlwraith was still alive, yet you said nothing. I suspect you also knew what he intended to do, but still you said nothing, calculating that his plan, if it succeeded, would bring me down. Only when you realized that I would not yield to his demands and that you would therefore be complicit in my son’s murder did you attempt to retrieve the situation. In which attempt you were only partially successful.’

  ‘Your son is alive.’

  ‘Indeed he is. But Colonel Negus’s adjutant and two other members of his detachment of troops are not, having been killed by flying lumps of stone of the kind that merely grazed you. Nor are my son’s kidnappers available for questioning. Two are dead and one is in hiding. How am I to prove Atterbury’s involvement in this plot without the evidence only they could have supplied?’