Robin stood frowning at the handwriting. “There is need of heave and ho” — there was a curious phrase. Did Sir Francis know of his purpose? Did Her Grace mean to give her blessing on condition that she got the lion’s share? Or was it all excuse and delay and the sea road forbidden?
“There is an answer needed,” said Robin. “Will you dismount, Mr Gregory? Dakcombe will take your horse and — —”
But Mr Gregory broke in upon him, wagging his head:
“No, no, no, Mr Aubrey. I’ll not sit in your parlour whilst you contrive some answerless answer which will let you out. There’s the gallows’ mark, I notice, upon your letter as upon mine. I wish you joy of it, Mr Aubrey. For myself I am out of my road by a dozen miles.”
Mr Gregory of Lyme gathered up his reins with a grin and rode away by the way he had come, down towards the bay for a hundred yards or so, then to the right hand through a gateway and so past the church and up the hill. Robin watched him with a sullen look until he had disappeared. An inconspicuous interfering little busybody, Mr Gregory of Lyme! Very useful, no doubt, to Sir Francis Walsingham at the Parliament elections, and to carry letters and to point out gallows’ marks, and to explain nothing of his errand. Just the servant for the queen’s secretary with his finger always at his lips.
Robin took the letter up to the library, and even at this moment of anxiety Cynthia could not but smile. With his hair all rumpled and his eyes glowering he had so completely the air of a sulky schoolboy resentful of the injustice of his master. She took the letter from his hand and bent her brows over the queer mark on the outside of it.
“The gallows,” Robin said gruffly, and the girl uttered a cry and lost all the colour from her cheeks.
“Nay, it’s no more than a hint that obedience should be swift. Sir Francis has an ingenious humour.”
“Sir Francis! Oh!”
She sat down on a couch and read the letter quickly whilst Robin stood in front of her.
“The Lady of the Ribbons.”
Robin nodded gloomily.
“The queen.”
“You must go, Robin,” and again she looked at the gallows’ mark, and she shivered.
“This is his doing!” Robin cried. “God’s death, the queen with murders and leagues and emperors watching for her eyes to close just for a minute in sheer weariness — how should she remember a snuffling schoolboy she tossed a knot of ribbons to four years ago!”
“Yet, Robin, you must go to Sydling St Nicholas.”
“He practises with me, that dark rogue!” and dropping down by her side he seized her hands. “O love of mine, I am put to it! I am afraid of him. That’s the truth! He came to see me once. When he had gone I felt as boneless as a fish.”
Cynthia looked at him shrewdly.
“Yet you held out against him?”
“Did I?”
Robin stared in front of him, picturing the long room, the candles burning upon the mantelshelf and the pale Italian man with the sombre eyes holding him penned against the wall. “I thought I had! But I wonder now whether he wished to press me no further. Oh!” and Robin covered his face with his hands. “He sapped me of all my strength. When he went he left a baby behind him.”
There was such a look of discouragement upon his face, so evident a fear that all his plans and dreams were come to nothing, that Cynthia must take his side with all her loyalty. Their separation, for a time certainly, for life perhaps, suddenly became to her a little thing. The one great need for them both was clear as glass to her. He must dream his dreams true. He must keep his tryst with Philip’s gold fleet. Else there would be disappointment, self-contempt, a cramped and bitter life worse than no life at all.
“If you go now, Robin, there needn’t be any delay,” she said. “We go together, dearest. You leave me at my gate. You go on to Sydling Court. On Tuesday you will reach London. You can still sail out from Poole with the spring tide. Let us go!”
She sprang up and gathered her gloves from the table. Robin took his courage from her, and they rode again up the steep brown hill. At the top just for a second Cynthia reined in her horse. It was she now who looked out over the sea.
“All done with and hasting home!” she said, drawing a deep breath and yearning for that distant day.
She looked downwards to Abbot’s Gap glowing amongst its beeches like a ruby in a bed of moss, and so turned her back upon it.
The sun was sinking when they came to the gate of Winterborne Hyde. Her hand rested in his for a little while, and a word or two passed between them.
“You will send me a word if ever you can — how you are, where you are — and oh, come back to me!”
“If I can, at the first moment that I can.”
Brave faces and sorrowing hearts, voices which broke ever so little and words which were the poorest currency of their thoughts. There was no issue from their trouble but that he should take his risks and she suffer for them.
“God be with us, my dear,” said Cynthia as he held the gate open for her; and he rode on alone towards that high down between Cerne Abbas and Sydling St Nicholas.
He was strung to a high note of passion which he had never reached before. It sharpened all his senses so that he saw the country through which he rode with an amazing clarity. A pond by the roadside in which the reflection of the sun shone red, a cluster of trees upon a green knoll, a tiny church set back in a meadow. Such ordinary aspects of a journey became to him so distinct that ever afterwards he was able to close his eyes and ride again every foot of the way. And a curious illusion crept over him. This way George Aubrey had ridden on a summer night to the same house whither he was now travelling. He had a conviction that he and his father were one, were riding now with the same unknown order to be laid upon them at the end of it, and to be accepted as George Aubrey had accepted it before. An order which might end in ignominy and a shameful death. Robin tried to shake the fancy out of his thoughts. His father had been dispatched on a particular and hazardous errand — to nail the bull of the queen’s excommunication upon the door of St Paul’s Church. There could be no repetition of that errand, no need of the secrecy, no possibility of the like disgrace or the like appearance of treason. Yet the illusion stayed with him. Here his father had turned from the road onto the rough grass track across the shoulder of the down. Night had fallen then. It was falling now. When he reached the top of the ridge it had fallen and the moon was bright. Far below him a few lights gleamed in the windows of the long village street, and the moonlight made of the thatched cottages a pattern of black and silver. Thus George Aubrey had looked down; thus he was looking down, Robin Aubrey. They were one being, bound upon one errand, with the disgrace and the death of a felon at the end of it.
The shoes of his horse rang loudly between the cottages. Here was the shaft of the broken cross where the road turned up to Sydling Court. But there was no man waiting at the cross to guide him. The absence of that expected figure — for Robin understood only now with what a sure foreboding he had expected it — lifted him from his obsession. He came up out of ocean depths into clean air. He was sane again with youth’s horizons melting cloudlessly in front of him. He would outstand Sir Francis Walsingham, gallows’ mark and all, as he had outstood him once before. He would celebrate his auto-da-fé in the Atlantic; and then, his piety satisfied and his fortune replaced, it would be heave and ho for home. Mr Gregory of Lyme — puff! Robin blew him away. Sir Francis? Robin would remember his years, and his friendship with his father, and his high position in the realm. Robin would be very circumspect and use his gentlest manners. But he would not be fobbed off by any pretence that the queen remembered him. Robin turned to the right just beyond the broken cross. At the top of a short hill two gateposts glimmered white, but the gate itself was open. Nowadays a shrubbery screens the house, but then a flat grass plot within the circle of the drive stretched from the gateway to the door, with no obstruction but a stone sundial in the centre. The house which Walsingham held on a lease fr
om Winchester College was open to the view, with its great tithe barn and its church behind a wall upon the left, and the garden sloping down to a spinney on the right. The windows were lit. Robin was expected, but without secrecy. He rode up to the door.
CHAPTER XI. The Renunciation
ROBIN GAVE HIS horse into the charge of a groom and his hat and whip to a footman. He was led into a small, dark room at the side of the house, where a man sat at a round table, his head bent over a litter of papers. A pair of wax candles burned in a high-branched candlestick of silver on the table between the door and the man who wrote. But upon Robin’s entrance he got up, and over the twin flames Robin saw again the white, black-bearded face which during the last four years had caused him so much disquiet. The lines were deeper, the expression more haggard, the black beard and hair were flecked with white, but it was the unforgettable face of pain and passion — actual pain and slumbering passion — which had daunted Robin in his study at Eton. There was now, however, a gentleness in the dark eyes and a kindly smile upon the lips which Robin felt to be more alarming than a frank hostility.
“I should have known you again, Robin, amongst a thousand,” said Sir Francis, and of all questions he put the most unexpected: “And is Dakcombe still with you?”
Robin had to lay a tight hold upon himself. What was it that was said of Walsingham? “He outdoes the Jesuits in their bow and outreaches them with his equivocations.” Was it mere friendliness in the great man which prompted that question?
“Yes sir. He is still at Abbot’s Gap.”
“Ageing, no doubt, like the rest of us. But it’s better to grow old, since we must, serving, than to grow old prattling.”
He walked round the table, and taking Robin by the elbow led him towards a chair; and Robin recoiled. No doubt he was tired by the long day and its agitations. Moreover, he was not yet quite free from that mood of exaltation which made him attribute to small accidents of time and place a particular warning and intention. The candles threw the shadows of Walsingham and himself in a grotesque distortion upon the walls of the room, and confusedly he began to wonder whether these nightmare figures swelling and dwindling on the walls were not true likenesses and characters. By a chance, as Walsingham led Robin towards a great oak chair, the statesman’s shadow grew enormous and quite outdid his own. It wanted only colour to make a picture of the Last Judgment for the painted window of a church: a scene where a monstrous bloated hobgoblin with a pointed beard leads some helpless panic-stricken boy to an infernal punishment.
Something of Robin’s confusion became evident to Walsingham.
“You need food,” he said.
“No sir, I thank you,” Robin answered.
“Wine, then,” and Walsingham struck a bell and, looking at Robin’s white face, he said to the footman, “Charneco.”
The man brought a jug of Venice glass filled with a dark wine of the colour and character of port, and smaller glasses wherefrom to drink.
Walsingham poured the charneco into one glass until it was brimming full and put it into Robin’s hand.
“Drink,” he said gently. “I have news for you which it will tax your strength to hear.”
Robin drank the wine slowly. He needed time for his vigour to return to him, and he must have all of it if he was to hold his own. But he was at an age when between exhaustion and energy the difference is one of minutes. He set the glass down and turned to Walsingham. Walsingham had twisted his chair round so that they were sitting face to face, with the candles upon one side and halfway between them, so that neither had any advantage of the light.
“You have news for me, Sir Francis?”
“And need of you. The hour has come,” said the secretary very gravely.
Robin was quick to interrupt.
“I ask your pardon, Sir Francis, you will have under your hand servants more fit than I.”
Walsingham shook his head.
“It is for me to judge. As I once said to you four years ago I have no news out of Spain, and I know no one more likely to bring it me.”
Robin was more at his ease now. It was the old argument, but he had a better reason for resistance than he had had four years ago. There were only dreams then. All was in train now; the wings were buckled on the heels.
“I have plans, sir, which may be, perhaps, of some service to the realm.”
He was aware that the words had a sort of boyish arrogance in the sound of them, deferentially though he spoke. But Sir Francis did not laugh, nor did he flash out in scorn.
“I know very well,” he answered quietly. “Those five fine ships — —” and Robin lifted himself half out of his chair. He checked, however, the cry which was on his lips, and sank back again.
“The Expedition, of five hundred tons, now lying in the roads at Poole; a great ship, Mr Aubrey, and well provisioned for its work. The Sea Flower and the Grace of God at Weymouth, the Golden Real at Falmouth, the Lyon pinnace at Fowey — all manned, their cannon at the ports, the powder and shot below the hatches.”
There was admiration and a warm sympathy in the tone of the older man, but they were unnoticed by Robin. Had they been they would not have diminished by an ounce the bitterness of his disappointment. Powder and shot, indeed! This man had more of it in his body than all the arsenals of Plymouth.
“So you knew what I was doing!” he stammered with a voice of awe. He had been so secret, so cleverly secret, so pleased with the cleverness of his secrecy. He had dissembled so warily, built his ships in different ports, used different agents, attributed to their owner different names. In the great new burst of trade which sent merchants trafficking to the White Sea, to China, to the Levant and the Indies, he had found an excuse and a purpose for their building. Yet Walsingham, with his head buried in his papers at Whitehall, might have been looking over his shoulder whilst he studied his prints, or borne him company when he walked the decks. No wonder the shadows on the wall had shown him a monstrous bearded jailer with a hapless puppet of a lad in his grasp. “So all the time you knew.”
Sir Francis was not proof against the flattery of Robin’s reverence.
“I have no news out of Spain, but I have very good news out of England,” he said drily.
Robin beat upon the arms of his chair.
“I have sunk all my fortune in those ships,” he cried despairingly, “dreaming of one thing.”
“Her Majesty will need those ships, make no doubt of it. Already she is feeling the pinch. Five good ships of war, Robin. Hawkins shall treat with you. You will not suffer.”
“Suffer?” cried Robin, and he rose to his feet. “In my purse? That is the smallest part of it. You know of my ships. Do you know, Sir Francis, of the mission on which they were bound?”
Sir Francis took the ordinary view. He had dabbled himself in the ventures of those days. To raid this or that possession of Spain, to pillage a fleet of Spain in mid-ocean, to come home loaded down to the gunwale with the treasure of great monasteries and the ingots of the mines — they were all at the work, from the big companies of the City of London to the squires of western England. Sir Francis, although, as we say, he dabbled in such expeditions himself, was too much of a Puritan to rate their morality very high. Philip of Spain! By all means snatch your profit from him when you could, but there were times of peril when the realm must cry halt. And one of these times was now.
“I can guess,” he said, leaning back easily in his chair, the master of other men’s secrets and the doorkeeper of his own. “But you shall tell me, Robin.”
Then followed five humbling minutes for the great secretary, during which he learned how easily the subtlest mind may go astray in its judgment of men — of boys, too. He had thought Robin at Eton a boy swollen with the favour of the queen, a dreamer to be sure, but of victories in a lady’s drawing room.
For a profit he would send out a fleet of fine ships, like a merchant, the risk for others, the gain for him, whilst he dallied snug and warm in his fine clothes at
the court. Indeed, Walsingham had charged him with a cowardly indifference to his father’s death. Sir Francis went hot and cold as he remembered his injustice. For now here was that boy, standing slim and straight, with a passionate white face, telling him of a day when in mid-Atlantic such a funeral pyre was to be fired in remembrance of his father that the roar of its flames would be heard even by Philip at his prayers in the gallery of the Escorial.
“My thoughts, Robin, have done you a great wrong,” he said remorsefully when Robin had finished. “I beg you to pardon me.”
Robin was used to people thinking ill of him. But he was young and by nature generous, and apologies from a great man busy with great affairs were uncomfortable things.
He shook his head with the ghost of a smile upon his lips.
“I wanted you to think ill of me, Sir Francis. Thus I should slip through your fingers the more easily. But alas, it was not to be.”
There was so great an admiration in Robin’s eyes that Walsingham’s vanity could not but be tickled.
“No, my boy,” he said, complacently stroking his beard, “that could not be. What! Do I doze over my task like a dunce? Or like a good physician do I keep my fingers on the pulse of the times? And count each fluttering of the blood and trace it to its cause? God’s wounds, but you took me for a golypragmion,” and he laughed with more than a little satisfaction. Robin laughed in unison. Oh, Robin, who was practising now?
“There was never a hope I should deceive you,” Robin cried.
“Never, Robin. We may say that, I think. You and I, we may say that. Never a hope!”
“Then you’ll let me go!” Robin implored eagerly. “You have watched me build my ships, buy my powder in Holland — —” And suddenly Walsingham rose to his feet, all his amusement gone. “You will not hinder me?” Robin prayed, his hands stretched out, the eagerness upon his face itself a prayer.
“Wait!”
Sir Francis turned to a cabinet against the wall. He unlocked a drawer and took from it a closely written letter yellow with age.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 670