“That black girl like a crow,” was heard.
The lady-in-waiting spoke to his Lordship. His Lordship spoke to his Marshal of the Hall, and that stately personage, with a wand to mark his office, a complete procession in himself, stalked away to the alley where the incompetents were hid. He marched straight to Sylvia Buckhurst.
“Her Highness summons you.”
Anthony, who was standing by her side, laid a hand upon her arm.
“You shan’t go,” he said violently, though his voice was low.
Sylvia unclenched his fingers.
“I must, dearest. Have no fear!”
If her heart sank, her face did not betray it. She even smiled at him as she followed the Marshal. The Queen and the concourse of his Lordship’s guests were still in their places, some seated, others grouped behind the chairs. Behind Sylvia the other dancers followed at a distance.
“I should have bidden Anthony to stay away,” she reflected as she reached the lawn.
“But he would not have obeyed,” she added as she crossed it. The odd sense of security which had filled her ever since the morning in the Closewalks sustained her now. How else could she have borne all those curious eyes and whispering voices? Before the Queen she curtsied deep in one smooth, slow movement.
“She can find no fault with that,” she thought, as, with her face blushing, she stood prettily erect again.
“There was a figure in your dance, child,” Her Grace began, in an even voice which was not unkind.
But woman knows woman. Sylvia had looked up; and one glance at the bristling lady with the eyes like black pebbles had assured her that she was in for trouble. She settled herself to meet it.
“From time to time I seemed to recognize it,” Her Highness continued. “I wish you to repeat it.”
“Your Majesty!” Sylvia gasped. “Here! Alone!”
“Here,” said Her Highness, and again her voice was smooth and kind, and again the eyes were hard like agate and formidable as a jungle cat’s. “To be sure,” and, as Sylvia dimly guessed at the ingenious torment devised for her, she added: “Come, child, must I command twice?”
The good Mr Rigby Buckhurst, who saw in all this skirmishing no more than a mark of the Queen’s good will towards himself, was making violent signs to his daughter from the edge of the crescent. The crescent, indeed, was become a circle, the guests were closing in, an expectation of no-one-knew-what was growing everywhere, spreading an excitement from courtier to courtier, holding them in fetters of suspense.
“Has the girl lost her head?” Mr Rigby Buckhurst wailed inwardly. “Must she at this moment be vapourish and fantastical? Let her dance, and who knows but what tomorrow it may be ‘Sir Rigby’ — and what will Arthur Chudd say to that?”
“Quick, now! Or must I set you an example? This is the figure I know,” and, before them all, Elizabeth rose from her chair.
Stepping forward in her semi-circled farthingale of silver taffeta and her stiff collar of lace, high at the back of her head and open low in front, the Queen danced alone. And not a stately pavane, but a Hey with its nimble movements and lively steps. Never had there been such gracious condescension! The Queen gave a dancing lesson to a girl born, for a certainty, under the fairest star! Assuredly no one was more fitted for the pretty work. For Her Grace was famed for her dancing. There was something liquid in her bearing so that each step was less a step than a melting out of one attitude into another. It was a ripple, rather than a dance, and with so deft and quick a twinkling of her feet that she seemed to turn about on a circle no bigger than a shilling. Even when she curveted and caprioled she retained her majesty, and since she was sure of herself and sure of her audience, too, she outreached her own skill. When she finished, such an ovation burst forth as Nero might have envied.
“That, child, is how I was taught to dance the Hey. Now you shall show me yours.”
Sylvia would have liked the ground to open under her. Never could she compete.
“Your Majesty, there is no difference but in Your Majesty’s grace which all others must fall below,” she stammered.
But Her Majesty was hunting that evening. This poor hare was not to double out of danger so easily.
“To it, girl, to it!” cried Elizabeth, impatiently. “Are you a singer to keep the world waiting on your nod? Quick!”
And, against her will, assured that, though she danced never so well, she must fail miserably in so ill-matched a contest, Sylvia began. Her anxious eyes were fixed on the Queen, noting each gesture of disdain, each contemptuous jerk of the head. Her slim feet faltered, her knees shook, when she spun it was rather within the circle of a great cart-wheel than a shilling.
The Queen laughed.
“It’s a country dance indeed. For thus a plough turns at the end of a furrow,” she cried to the group about her chair. “Never did I see anything like it since I was a girl and a one-legged man danced at Woodstock fair.”
And amidst the laughter Sylvia danced, the tears in her eyes and such humiliation in her soul as no girl beside herself, she thought, could ever have endured.
“Quicker! Quicker! I know a bear that has just that step in the Garden at Southwark. Ah! Now we come to it! The caper! What? No higher than that! Sure, wench, you have lead in your shoes. Was anything so insufferable?” and, after a moment more, the tears were running down Sylvia’s face, blinding her. But she must dance, like the girl in the red shoes in the fairy tale. Her Grace was openly, venomously delighted.
“Miss Crow, Miss Crow,” she cried, “are there no dancing schools in Sussex? Your father must see to it. To your lessons, Miss Crow!” and suddenly this baiting was brought to an end.
For, above the laughter and derision of the courtiers and the high-pitched tones of Her Highness, one word rang out from a young and wrathful voice: “Puniamini!”
The effect of that word upon the Queen was magical. If no other woman in that gathering understood it, she did who in the days of her imprisonment had her Latin of Roger Ascham. She beat her hands upon the arms of her chair and rose to her feet, towering high. Her eyes turned to the quarter whence the cry had rung, and the blaze of them was ferocious.
“Who dares to cry ‘Shame!’ at me?” she shouted. “Let the rogue stand forth!”
The little group at which she glared drifted away like sand in a high wind. One youth was left, standing splendid in a dress of flesh-coloured velvet, with a flushed and mutinous face above his ruff.
“Your Majesty!” cried Sylvia, clasping her hands together in a despairing plea.
But the Queen swept her away with a gesture of her arm.
“Away! Away!” she ordered. Her eyes never turned from Anthony. His very beauty and spirit infuriated her against him.
“So!” she shouted. “Because I throw you a bone, you will be free of the chain and the kennel, will you? To my feet, spaniel!”
Then followed a pause. It was not the insult of her language which kept him standing where he stood. After all, she rated her Ministers as outrageously, to the world’s knowledge. Burleigh was a traitor and Walsingham a fool. Who was he that he should not be a dog if it pleased her tongue to call him so? But he was aflame with passion against her for her cruelty.
“To my feet!” she repeated, pointing to the ground. “Must I have you flung there?”
She looked about her for her halberdiers. She was the Queen, clothed with power. Anthony moved resentfully forward and stood, for a moment, in front of her, defiant, his head flung back, his eyes a challenge. But her authority beat him down. His head drooped, his strength left him, he dropped on his knees heavily. Early a man, late a boy, he had the violence of his day in his blood and its swift revulsions. He was a boy now, in disgrace before his schoolmistress. He covered his face with his hands. A sob broke from his lips. Her Grace laughed unkindly.
“So your Daintiness will correct my manners. By God’s death, Master Impudence, I have stone rooms to cool young hotheads and iron for their wear. Have a ca
re that you don’t find the taste thereof! What? I must ask your leave, must I, how I deal with your kitchen wench?”
“Oh!” cried Anthony, and he rose to his feet. “I’ll have no more of it!”
He turned away, but before he had moved a step, a grasp, sinewy as a man’s, seized him by the shoulder and swung him round, and the royal hand boxed his ears with a round and royal vigour.
“By God, Madam,” Anthony said, whilst his head buzzed, “if Your Grace had been a King instead of a Queen, you would have answered to me for that blow.”
Her Grace stamped her foot at him.
“Out with you!” she screamed. “I have sent men to the rack for less than that. Another word, and by God, you shall find yourself all Scarr and no Anthony. Out with you!”
She stood glaring at the lad like one possessed. Slowly he backed away from her. The courtiers made a lane for him, as though he were a leper with a bell. He wandered off amongst the trees, his reason upset, his brain in a whirl, the only clear thought in all the confusion of his spirit that this disgrace had set up a barrier between Sylvia and himself which could hardly be overpassed.
He found himself in the Closewalks, at the edge of the little wood where he had cried to her that even death could not keep them forever apart. A curious sense of comfort descended upon him. It was now quite dark beneath the trees, and he felt that an echo of that sure cry still lingered here, as a token of its truth. He sat down upon a fallen trunk and let the night wrap him round. Surely she herself was near. An idea came to him and shaped itself into a plan. Surely she had prompted it. There was a way to cross that barrier — a good way, a practical way. He would not pay his call upon Mr Buckhurst on the Monday, nor marry Sylvia on Tuesday, no, nor go on the grand tour to Rome for many a long day. But at the long last, yes, these things should be.
It was dark, now, in the open glade. Anthony hurried out of the Closewalks to the Park. In front of him the great house blazed from every window. Before he had reached it, an arm was thrust through his and his friend Henry Browne spoke to him.
“I was waiting for you, Anthony,” he said.
Anthony stopped.
“I ruin my friend if he walks with me,” he answered.
Henry laughed.
“In some of our guests’ eyes, very like. In her Highness’s? I think her of too high a spirit. In my own? I am ruined if I draw back by an inch. I beg you, therefore, to walk slowly.”
Anthony pressed his friend’s arm against his side.
“I must see Sylvia, Henry.”
“That may not be. Her father hustled her off in his coach before Her Grace returned to Cowdray.”
To be sure! The poor man, with his dreams of Whitehall pricked and his daughter fooled and baited, must have carried himself and his shame away upon the instant. Anthony stopped again and stared at Henry, seeing nothing. The Queen had been subtler than he had guessed. Sylvia would have blame at home, for her portion, and ridicule abroad. She would have her father glowering at her from his corner by the fire. “But for you I might be living amongst great affairs.” She must endure the pointed finger of her friends. “There’s the kitchen wench off to her dancing school.” What a limbo of humiliation! All the more reason, therefore, to be quick. Anthony hastened, dragging Henry Browne along with him, as though that alone might see him through his task.
“I must put my servants to their packing,” he said, “and order my horses.”
“You go tonight?”
“Yes.”
“The host says no. The friend says yes.”
Henry Browne strode along at Anthony’s side.
“I had a word with her.”
For all his haste, Anthony stopped dead. They were now upon a terrace, and the light from twenty windows poured upon his face. There was so strong a torment in his eyes that Henry Browne did not need his questions put into words.
“Nay, she had been crying, but that was over. She was anxious, but for you, not herself When I told her your bones were unbroken, she even smiled. She was very quiet. She gave me a message.”
“Yes?”
So eager was Anthony now, his life might have hung upon that message. He himself would have said — more than his life.
“You were never to forget a morning in the Closewalks. She held you to the memory of it.”
Such a relief shone in Anthony’s face that he was transfigured. The pledge made in their temple of trees was renewed. Anthony could see the very spot, the cool and friendly gloom here, the dazzle of sunlight in the glade beyond. The pledge was made there — or renewed there. Wasn’t it first made by that panel of chalk in the hollow of the Downs? No! They had discovered that upon a later day — and yet — Anthony flung back his head, thinking, wondering, on the edge of some tremendous revelations which still baffled him. To Henry Browne’s startled eyes, he seemed to melt into another man of another age, sterner, less vivid and buoyant — a man apart, in infinite loneliness.
“Anthony!” he cried.
Anthony shook his head with a start. He was coming back to the terrace over the scented garden of Cowdray and the starlit summer night, but very slowly. Some element, eerie and chill, was as a mist about him, holding him aloof. He came back with a wonder in his eyes as though he had awakened from a sleep of a thousand years. And now that wonder was gone. Henry Browne had his friend by the arm again, the light pouring from the windows upon his pale velvet and his jewels and his familiar face.
“Of course!” Anthony said with a small laugh. “We only discovered that bower on the hillside on a later day.”
He laughed again at Henry Browne’s bewilderment.
“Come! I should be sunk in misery. Yet I am not. I see tonight my life like a pattern in the weaving. All this hurly- burly in the garden falls into its place. I am going to take the needle in my hand. I have half an hour before my packing will be finished. Let me give an order to my servants and change into my boots and for that half hour bear with me. For it will be a little while before we shake hands again.”
XXI. WALSINGHAM WINS
...I’ve groaned as if a fiery net
Plucked me this way and that — fire if I turned
To her, fire if I turned to you.
— Robert Browning
Anthony, with a candle in his hand, walked quietly along the corridors to Henry Browne’s room above the porch. The lights were out now, except in the Queen’s lodging, where she was busy with a messenger from Holland, and in the rooms of the Secretaries. He found Henry waiting for him with a bottle of wine upon the table and a cigar for each of them.
“You shall talk at your ease here, Anthony.”
Henry Browne was eager to listen. Visions became facts and every day a miracle dwindled to a commonplace. But this odd friend of his, who got so much love with so little effort and yet kept so much of himself secret and aloof, would have, of a surety, an enterprise in his thoughts to dazzle the world.
“Tell me! Tell me!” and he poured out the wine and pushed a cigar across the table.
The two boys — they were little more-sat opposite to one another with the candle upon the table between them, the one in his fine Court dress, the other in a sober travelling suit, their faces kindling, their troubles forgotten. But it was not to Henry Browne that the story was to be told. For Anthony had hardly spoken two words when there came a knock upon the door.
“At this hour,” said Henry Browne in a whisper.
Both sat very still. They were startled, a little alarmed. Was it one of Her Grace’s red halberdiers who came knocking on the door in the middle of the night? The knock was repeated.
“It’s my fault,” said Henry Browne in the same low voice. “But for me you would have gone ere now. You must hide.”
But Anthony would not. He was very white. There was a chill about his heart. Her Highness might easily have thought better of her clemency. The words he had spoken — she had stung him to utter them, true! But they were treasonous. And all his fine plans might be s
hattered by that knock as easily as the walls of Jericho by the blast of a trumpet. But to hide! To be dragged out from a hiding place! No! Anthony rose, and going to the door, opened it. In the doorway was no halberdier, but a servant.
“Yes?” asked Henry from his chair at the table.
“I serve Sir Francis Walsingham,” the man replied, and he turned towards Anthony. “He bade me find you, Sir. He told me that I should be like to find you here.”
Anthony stood stock-still. It was not one of Her Majesty’s halberdiers come to take him into custody. But what did Sir Francis Walsingham want of him? Once before, Walsingham had hindered him for some distant purpose of his own. Not a doubt but that he threatened all his schemes again. But this time there was . Sylvia. This time Anthony would hold on his own course.
“I’ll follow you,” he said to the servant. He went back to his friend. “I must go, of course. Walsingham lays his plans. Since he requires me, I could not slip by. Wait for me, Henry.”
Henry Browne nodded his head, and Anthony followed the messenger to a big room upon the inner court. Sir Francis, late as it was, sat at a table littered with papers, a Secretary at his elbow.
“A moment, Mr Scarr, and I have done,” he said.
He signed the paper he had been reading and dismissed everyone but Anthony from the room. Then he took Anthony by the elbow and led him to a little table in the window.
“Her Majesty has an unaccommodating tongue!” he said ruefully. “I have had the rough of it often myself.”
It was all very pleasant and friendly — two men of the world sensibly putting at their value the tantrums of a woman. But Anthony remembered a saying of his old tutor about this very man: “He outdoes the Jesuits in their own bow and overreaches them with his equivocations.” He took the seat to which Walsingham led him and said never a word.
“I have fled from her hard usage,” Walsingham continued, with a smile upon his tired, dark face, “and said ‘I will give the rest of my life to my garden and my books.’ But a man cannot turn his back upon these times — no, neither I nor you — however much our mistress buffets us,” he added, and the faint glimmer of amusement vanished off eyes and lips.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 627