The Dark and the Light

by Josephine Bell

  In the end she decided to go to her old home. Her parents there had never denied her anything. They loved her, they had always supported her. She would go home to Paternoster Row and her father would find her a boat from London river and supply her needs and tell her who she could seek out in France or Holland among the many exiles who for religion or some other reason must live outside their own country.

  She would go secretly and set about it at once before Francis could think of some new way to force her to confess. So very quickly she made a few small parcels of her jewels and her money and fastened them to her waist band under her skirt. She took her best cloak, the one she had always worn in London and rolled it into another parcel which she carried beneath her everyday cloak, the latter fastened at the neck but with the hood down as if she meant only to walk abroad. She went to the stables at a time she knew the head groom would be absent. For she had seen him from the window ride away behind Francis and guessed the latter was gone to Richard’s house to deliver the dangerous news and consult with her brother what should next be done.

  In the stables Katharine ordered her horse to be saddled at once. She named a young groom whom she had before singled out as one who would serve her without question, directing that he should accompany her.

  The lad was delighted. He imagined his mistress was setting out late to follow his master to the Ogilvy house. When he discovered that this was not the case, but that they were to ride to London his pleasure and excitement grew. Never having gone more than ten miles from his home near Oxford he had no idea where London lay, nor how far off. He thought they would arrive by evening; at nightfall the town whose lights glowed before them seemed scarcely large enough and he was not surprised when they put up there for the night in a quiet inn.

  At this point he began to have doubts about the enterprise, but it was not for him to question his lady. The next day they set off very early with fresh horses and riding hard changed mounts again at Staines and by nightfall came to Paternoster Row.

  Her arrival set the whole house in an uproar. Thomas, the groom was about to close and bar the yard gates for the night when Katharine and her escort arrived. He did not at once recognize the young mistress for he had seen very little of her since the night he remembered her coming home in a snow-storm. But he was no fool and the sight of her pale set face at such an hour, alone except for a groom no older than a stable lad, spelled dire misfortune if not worse. He let them in, locked up immediately and telling the boy to dismount, help his mistress to do the same and then tend to the beasts, he ran quickly into the house, calling for Giles.

  Thereafter the doctor and his wife took charge of Katharine, while the maids prepared a room for her, lit a fire there, cooked food, mulled wine, attended to the young groom and gradually settled down to discuss what strange catastrophe could have brought about this extraordinary reappearance of the daughter of the house.

  It was a question Mistress Ogilvy asked over and over again while Katharine, stiff from riding so far, so quickly, numb with cold, hungry and thirsty, set about her meal in silence. The enormity of her conduct and the hardship it had entailed did at last make her understand what she was now facing. She could ignore her mother’s chatter, but her father, whose horrified eyes met hers every time she lifted her head, had not spoken a word. She knew that when he did so she must answer him with the truth. His manner, kind and gentle, demanded truth, compelled it because he expected nothing less. He was content to wait but with every minute she held off, eating and drinking with a brave show of indifference, she felt her resolution melting away, until the food began to choke her and she pushed her plate away, gave a little hopeless cry and sank on the ground beside his chair.

  Even Mistress Ogilvy was struck silent. The doctor put his hand on his daughter’s head and said brokenly, for he was very moved as well as terrified, ‘What hast thou done, Kate? And wherefore art thou here, alone—and frightened out of thy wits?’

  Every word he said was true. None of the tales she had tried to invent on that forced ride would be of any use to her. She told him the whole tale of her connection with the Somersets, only concealing her adultery with Alan Carr for that had nothing to do with the Overbury crime.

  ‘I fear my Lady Somerset more than I do the Law,’ she sobbed. ‘I never knew what was in that parcel. I thought it was for Lord Essex.’

  ‘But you did deliver a parcel from the apothecary Franklin to Mistress Turner? The apprentice knew you. How did he know you?’

  She remembered and confessed her stupid arrogance when he kept her waiting. She wept freely.

  ‘The apprentice hath warned Master Leslie. That was how Francis was warned. You should have told him all. He loves you, Kate. He and Richard would have found a way to protect you. By this crazy flight you spell out your guilt.’

  ‘It is not the apprentice I fear,’ she said again, shivering. ‘It is my Lady Frances. She hath betrayed everyone of her creatures that she made to serve her. She will say I brought poison from Franklin to Turner but never at her command. I am lost! I am lost!’

  At these words Mistress Ogilvy raised a howl that made Katharine spring up to stop her cries and embrace her and cry on her bosom as she had as a child until both women became quiet from exhaustion. Mistress Ogilvy recovered herself enough to order the table to be cleared and to send the maids to bed, while Doctor Ogilvy called Giles, confided to him as much as he thought wise of the situation and set off with him to Gracious Street on foot, as being less conspicuous than opening up the stable yard again.

  This walk, though not over long, taxed the old man’s strength to the point of exhaustion. It was some time before he was able to explain his errand to the anxious alderman, who plied him with a restoring draught prepared by Mistress Butters, made him recline upon a couch and left him in the good woman’s care while he took Giles to another room to hear the purpose of the visit.

  Giles knew no detail save that the young mistress had ridden at speed from Oxford and was in a state of excitement bordering upon hysteria. The Luscombe stable lad knew nothing, but was himself so frightened by the event that he had become totally incoherent, quite apart from his country accent, which made him doubly unintelligible to Doctor Ogilvy’s cockney servants.

  When Master Leslie returned to his unexpected and extremely unwelcome guest he found the latter sufficiently restored to explain why he had come, on foot, at this late hour. The story appalled him. For the second time poor Doctor Ogilvy’s accursed, spoilt daughter had put them all in hazard, eight years ago as the main cause of Alec Nimmo’s flight from justice and now with a need for her own escape.

  But he did not now, as he had not then, refuse the help he gave. Now, as then, he discovered the means and set about planning them. He called in Walter, a little later sent for Giles and then despatched the pair to Billings Gate wharf. When they returned which they did an hour and a half later, he explained the plan to Doctor Ogilvy.

  There was a fishing boat from the Scheldt river in the Pool whose captain was an old and valued associate of Master Leslie. His cargo was only just discharged and he planned to leave upon the early morning tide. Katharine must go upon that ship. The captain would place her with his family in Ijmuiden until she could make contact with friends of the doctor’s at Leyden University. Her further plans must be her own affair.

  Doctor Ogilvy agreed. There was nothing he could dispute in this plan, nor did he wish to. Kate had brought it upon herself; at long last he understood how she had always deceived him with her beauty and charm of which he had been so proud and which he now regretted in bitterness and despair.

  Master Angus called in Giles again to give him the details of the plan. A horse was being saddled. He would take his master home mounted, walking beside him. It still wanted a half hour to midnight, there would be people about, this kind of progression, an elderly man with his servant, would not be remarkable. The doctor had feared too much when he set out on foot. Early the next morning Lady Leslie would
go with Giles, sitting pillion on the alderman’s horse, poorly dressed, to the place at Billings Gate where Walter had introduced the former to the Dutch captain’s bo’sun. She would accompany the latter on board the ship, Giles would ride home.

  This plan was followed, but on arrival at the wharf, instead of the Dutch ship’s bo’sun Giles and Katharine found waiting for them Walter with Lucy Butters, who motioned to them to be silent and led Kate quickly to Master Leslie’s warehouse while telling Giles to ride off home alone. This he refused to do.

  ‘I am to see my lady go abroad from here,’ he said stubbornly. ‘How do I know you will not betray her?’

  ‘It is from your master’s house we think she may be betrayed,’ answered Walter. ‘But stay if you must.’

  Katharine exclaimed ‘Betrayed!’ and turned as if to run, but Lucy stopped her.

  ‘For God’s sake, madam, have patience!’ she cried. ‘There is no present danger, but we fear it may come upon us before you can embark in safety.’

  They were all now inside a small shed that stood just behind the warehouse. Waiting inside was the Dutch bo’sun.

  ‘This is your rescuer, my lady,’ Walter told Katharine. ‘He will take you on board his ship, but it cannot now be upon this tide.’

  ‘How then?’

  Katharine, white-faced, trembling, called up her reserves of courage to face this blow.

  ‘Upon the next tide, lady,’ the man said. ‘When the pursuit hath been drawn off. It were death for us to attempt it now.’

  ‘Where shall I stay?’

  ‘Here, madam, behind these empty casks and beneath this tarpaulin.’

  Lucy Butters stepped forward and said, ‘We must change cloaks, my lady, if you please. I go forth from here with Walter as I came. I will ride Master Leslie’s horse. We hope to draw away any who have observed your arrival. We think they will not have noticed me arrive, for Walter and I came by a back street and a back way to Master Leslie’s office upon the wharf.’

  ‘But if they see thee in my cloak—’ Katharine began. ‘I would I had worn the other. This is too noticeable.’

  Characteristically she had put on her rich, deep-purple silk-lined garment for her farewell to England, a gesture of defiance, ill-thought of, dangerous.

  ‘I am glad of it,’ Lucy said. ‘Take thou mine. If they mistake me it cannot be for long. And it may assist you, please God.’

  All Katharine’s hard thoughts of Lucy faded at these words. She put her arms round the girl and kissed and thanked her. They wept over their reconciliation, but fear remained and soon Katharine was in hiding and the others had gone away, leaving her alone.

  All that day she lay still, enduring the hard ground, the noisome fishy smell of the casks and tarpaulin. She was hungry and thirsty. All day black rats ran about her, came and looked at her with fierce red-glowing eyes in the dark of her hiding place. Once or twice they nipped at her legs and she had to kick out to drive them away. All the time insects bit her hands and face and these too she had to brush away as best she could.

  But in the evening the bo’sun came as promised to release her. He led her down to the river and helped her into the skiff he had moored there to the wharf-side, helpful, polite, but saying nothing.

  The Dutch captain received her on board, also silent, but polite. He took her to a cabin upon the poop. It had evidently not been used for a long time. It smelled of mildew and felt damp, but Katharine was beyond caring. Food and drink were brought to her. She drank eagerly, but could not eat and lay down on the cabin bunk not caring any longer what became of her. She was not aware of the anchor being drawn up, nor the sails hoisted. She did not realize the voyage had begun.

  She never understood what had happened to her, nor that this voyage so inauspiciously begun was her last in this world. But the black rats and their fleas in her hiding place had done their work upon her. By mid-morning the next day her fever and vomiting, that the Dutch captain took to be sea-sickness, was over. She had passed into a coma that he recognized at last as the ever-dreaded plague. He locked the cabin door upon her and a day later, becalmed in the North Sea some five miles from the mouth of the Scheldt, he looked again into the cabin and saw that she was dead.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  When Katharine had been, as they thought, safely hidden in the shed and the bo’sun, after collecting some fathoms of new rope from a ship’s chandler’s shop on the wharf, had rowed away in his boat, Walter took command of the situation. Giles must go back to Paternoster Row alone, riding the alderman’s horse. The animal could be returned to Gracious Street later.

  ‘But if you feared for my lady that must be because we were observed leaving Doctor Ogilvy’s house,’ Giles objected. ‘Will I not be noticed returning alone on the mount and be taken and questioned?’

  ‘This is true,’ Lucy said, turning to Walter. ‘How was it Master Leslie came to fear they might be followed hither?’

  ‘It was the young lad who rode from Oxford with my lady Leslie. He understood there was danger for her, to whom he was greatly devoted. So he went out very early to the road beside the house, and who should he see lurking in the shadows just before dawn but a scullion from Luscombe, not long engaged in the house there. He stopped but to learn the way to Gracious Street with this news.’

  ‘The stupid oaf!’ Giles exclaimed. ‘We should have been warned!’

  ‘I think there was no time for that. Or else he feared the betrayal would come from Paternoster Row.’

  ‘But how did he manage so well on a mere direction to find his way to you?’

  ‘The master went to Oxford very recently,’ Walter said. ‘I with him. I met this youth at that time. It was my business to discover how much the servants at Luscombe knew of their master’s affairs. I found this boy loyal; in fact I had my suspicions of the scullion, but no proof that he was indeed a spy.’

  ‘We must not linger here,’ Lucy said. ‘The deception we hope for must be made in the streets away from the river. We must go.’

  Walter turned again to Giles.

  ‘Then you must return home at once,’ he said. ‘This is a better plan. By any back way you know of. Not by boat. You would be observed and it would lead suspicion to the water. Say you were sent to return this horse to Gracious Street. It doth after all belong to us there. I will lead it back.’

  ‘Nay,’ said Lucy. ‘You will ride, Walter, and I will go pillion behind you. This was the picture the spy saw come out from Doctor Ogilvy’s yard and this will satisfy any who seek to waylay us.’

  ‘Which the Lord prevent,’ Giles said, very much moved by Lucy’s resolution.

  ‘Amen to that,’ Walter said. ‘Now we must act and God preserve us all three.’

  He did not add Katharine to his prayer, which both Giles and Lucy noticed. But they did not rebuke him for it, though the girl offered a special prayer of her own as they separated and left the wharf. Whatever happened to her in this desperate situation, so long as she could save Francis and spare him any additional suffering to what he must bear, she would be content.

  All went well until Walter turned the horse into the lower end of Gracious Street. Here a posse of men, led by an officer, moved into the road to bar their way.

  ‘How now?’ Walter said mildly. ‘Know you not the livery of Alderman Angus Leslie?’

  ‘It is not Master Leslie that concerns me,’ the officer said. ‘It is the Lady Leslie, wife of Sir Francis Leslie, of Luscombe Manor, Oxford, who sits pillion behind you.’

  ‘That she doth not,’ Walter answered. He would have urged the horse on, but two men were now holding the bridle, one upon either side. ‘This lady is Mistress Lucy Butters, daughter of Mistress Butters, housekeeper to the alderman.’

  ‘I think you lie,’ said the officer and turning to Lucy he went on. ‘You must dismount, my lady, and come with me.’

  Lucy was frightened now, terrified of how she might be questioned, realizing for the first time exactly what her willing sacrifice
might entail. But she said quietly, ‘I am not your lady. I am plain Lucy Butters and I work with my mother for Master Angus Leslie, as his manservant here, Master Walter, hath truly said. This is Master Leslie’s horse. We have been on an errand to Master Leslie’s business office and are returning home again.’

  ‘And I believe you too are lying,’ the officer said. ‘Now will you dismount peaceably and go with me or must my men take you down and bind you?’

  Still further terrified Lucy let herself be helped from the horse. Walter was told the warrant was solely for Lady Leslie and he had best be off or he might too be taken in custody for preventing the officer in his duty.

  ‘At least tell me where you take her?’ he pleaded. ‘For my master will send at once to persuade you of this insolent error.’

  The officer, a little shaken by Walter’s manner, gave him the address he wanted. Then Lucy, very white but with a firm step, the hood of her cloak drawn well forward over her head, moved away, jostled a little by the crowd that had instantly gathered, but not otherwise molested.

  Walter rode on the short distance to Master Leslie’s house. Fortunately the alderman was at home. He had put off all business for that day except such as he could conduct from his house. He was not surprised to hear Walter’s news, but blamed him most severely for allowing the exchange of cloaks that he felt must have led directly to Lucy’s arrest.

  ‘She was determined, master,’ the old man said, in great agitation. ‘She would not be denied. My Lady Leslie blessed her for the intention and indeed, seeing she cannot sail until tonight, I fear she may be taken if we proceed too soon to make them aware of their mistake.’

  ‘It is another trap,’ Master Leslie said and swore loudly. ‘’S blood, that we should ever have been embroiled in the crazy schemes of that strumpet! Did’st discover what the warrant is about, how information was laid and by whom?’

  ‘Nay, sir, I discovered nothing. They would tell me nothing. They took Mistress Lucy and told me to go. It is not a quarter-hour since.’