“Yourself shall hinder you, Robin.”
With the letter in his hand he resumed his seat. He took the jug of wine and replenished Robin’s glass. “Drink!”
There was a solemnity in his manner which daunted the boy. He sat down slowly, his eyes upon Walsingham. He took up the glass without looking at it, so that some of the wine was spilled. He drank, and over the rim of the glass his eyes still watched the secretary. Walsingham waited until he had finished.
“I have no news out of Spain,” he repeated. “Yet every now and then a letter comes to me from a foreign friend. For what it is worth I make my use of it. Here is one. It comes from a Genoese banker who travelled to Madrid to discuss with King Philip a loan. I have found him trustworthy.” He wound the letter about his fingers as though he could not bear to part with it, then he suddenly thrust it forward.
“Read! If you believe what you read, why, Richard Brymer, captain of the Catherine out of Lyme, who with the tears dropping down his face told a naked schoolboy on a beach the story of an auto-da-fé in the square of San Bernardo, made too much of his story.”
With hands which now trembled instead of implored, Robin took the letter and read. The Genoa banker had watched the auto-da-fé from a better vantage than Richard Brymer of the Catherine. He gave a horrible description of the screams of agony, the wasting of the bodies of living people in the flames, the dreadful stench of burning flesh, so that Robin could hardly keep from vomiting whilst he read it. But his father, crippled with torture and clothed in the San Benito, walked in the procession as a reprieved penitent. He had been tossed out afterwards to beg for his bread on the steps of the Church of the Virgin of Almudena.
“Why?” Robin asked in a strangled voice. “Why show him even this rag of mercy?”
“Neither you nor I can sound the black minds of these children of the devil,” Walsingham returned; and Robin caught at another detail.
“A penitent!”
A picture of George Aubrey, with his great laugh and his gallant heart and all the clean freshness of the countryside in his face and his voice, rose up in front of him to deny it. So near to release? Half an hour — perhaps an hour more — perhaps, to a man so weakened, mercifully much less of torment to be endured, and then peace. Oh no, George Aubrey would not have yielded.
“I don’t believe it,” Robin cried fervently. He threw back his head, mutinous against the slander. His voice rang, claiming Walsingham’s agreement as his right.
But Walsingham did not agree. He sat and brooded, looking down at the floor.
“Who shall say to what pain may bring a man?” he asked, and he looked at Robin and looked away again. “You, in your youth and your beauty and your health, can’t imagine how the strongest may become under pain a babe babbling for mercy. I know. We are shaped in the likeness of God, but we have pain, pain which made our Lord Jesus man instead of God! Read on!”
Robin dropped his eyes again to the letter. When all was said, Walsingham knew George Aubrey better than Robin, his son, had known him. George Aubrey was Walsingham’s great friend. “I make friends with difficulty. . . . There is some barrier stops me,” Walsingham had told Robin, but in this solitary instance the barrier had been broken down. Yet he believed this letter told the truth. Robin read on.
The Genoa banker had seen the penitent a few days afterwards in a ragged cloak crouched upon the steps of the church. Being a timorous man and the negotiations for the loan having failed, since Philip had no good security to offer, he had approached this beggar on the steps in a roundabout, secret fashion. He had dropped a few pence into the beggar’s lap. In return the beggar had asked for his name that he might remember it in his prayers. But the banker, the loan having failed and he in no good odour, and timorous by nature besides, had refused it, and got himself away from such dangerous company as quickly as he could.
The whole letter was so circumstantial and precise that Robin was staggered by it. His father! Brought to that pass, a beggar in rags on the steps of a church, and he, Robin, wearing fine clothes and living in the fine house above Warbarrow Bay! Robin covered his face with his hands, dropping the letter on his knees.
“That’s horrible,” he whispered. Then he turned to Walsingham. “And you believe it, sir?”
Walsingham raised his shoulders.
“How shall I say whether I believe it or no. I have no news out of Spain.” Once more he thrust that need of his under Robin’s eyes. “See when that letter was written. There it is, the month, the year.”
Robin uttered a cry.
“Four years ago you received this?”
“More than four.”
“Then, when you came to me that night at Eton — —”
“I had it in my pocket. I had a thought to show it you. I came to your lodgings to show it you. But we were not of a mind, Robin. I held my tongue. Nay, never blame yourself or me! What could you do then? Or I? No ships can any longer put into Spanish ports. No English but traitors dare walk the streets. Spain’s a closed book, Robin. Rumours, to be sure, blowing sharp and blowing soft. But since that letter came to my hand, nothing of account.”
Robin hardly heard. He was watching. He stood in a straight, long, narrow street between houses so tall that even at this hour of noon it was dark as night. Beyond the mouth of it lay an open square in blistering sunlight. From the spot where he stood he could see the corner of a great church with tall doors of green copper up to which led a long flight of shallow steps. Men and women passed up and down, the women for the most part dressed in black, the men in bright colours, with the sun sparkling on a jewelled chain or the hilt of a sword. Was there a cripple crouched upon those steps beseeching alms? Robin could not see so far. He bent his ears. He could hear the whine and singsong of every beggar that ever lived. His father!
“Oh!” he cried. And he heard Walsingham speaking.
“Answer me this, Robin! If I let you go, if you light this proud funeral pyre in the Atlantic and the roar of its flames reaches to Madrid, carrying the name of Robin Aubrey with it, what happens to George Aubrey on the steps of the Church of the Virgin of Almudena?”
There was no answer but the one. Robin might twist and turn as he liked.
“If he lives,” he said.
“If he lives,” Sir Francis repeated.
He was not going to argue for or against. He would but weaken his own implacable question. What will happen to George Aubrey on the steps of the Church of the Virgin of Almudena?
It was only for a moment now that Robin tarried, and that moment was spent not in speculating upon the chances of life and death for a man of crippled body and broken spirit, but in shredding away altogether the fond dreams which he had so nearly dreamed true. Then he rose to his feet.
“Once, sir, you thought that I was fondling beneath my doublet Her Grace’s knot of ribbons,” he said with a smile.
Sir Francis almost said “Yes,” but he checked himself in time. God’s death, but he was Sir Francis Walsingham, principal secretary to the great queen, who kept all Europe thinking. He was not going to fall into traps set for him by a lady-faced, long-legged undergraduate.
“I forget small things so that I may remember great ones,” he replied tartly.
Robin inclined his head.
“But it was not a small thing to me. For it hurt.”
“Hurt!” cried Walsingham in a pet. “Why shouldn’t you be hurt? Am I not hurt? I have heard Her Majesty tell me before the whole court that she’d set me in the stocks, and I dumb as a rated schoolboy! Was that enjoyable, d’you think? Hurt, ‘od’s wounds! Are you so tender a piece of flesh?” And so, with a laugh: “Well, what is it you hide against your heart, Robin?”
Robin unbuttoned his doublet and drew out the emerald signet ring slung upon its gold chain. Walsingham started forward.
“Let me see!”
He took the ring in his hand, and his face softened as he turned it over.
“George Aubrey’s,” he said softly.
“I remember it very well. Your mother gave it to him on her betrothal.” He dropped the ring so that it dangled on its chain and clapped Robin gently on the shoulder.
“You do well to carry it. You do very well,” he said, thinking of the great friendship which had bound George Aubrey and himself together and of the disparity of their fates.
“If God so wills, you shall have your news out of Spain and I George Aubrey,” said Robin.
CHAPTER XII. Robin Takes Service
“YOU HAVE NOT supped? Neither have I,” said Sir Francis. “Her Majesty’s servants, amongst whom you are now one, take their meals when they can.”
It was perhaps a meal a little too delicate to content most of the gentry of that day. A dish of whiting fresh from the sea served with a saffron sauce, a wild duck and a lettuce salad, with a bottle of claret to bear them company, a cake of marchpane with cherries and purple grapes fitly waited on by a glass of alicant, eased them both a little of their anxieties. They ate in a light and cheerful room in the front of the house, and Walsingham talked of the surface of things, dipping in only now and again some request or instruction.
“There are those who despise our English cooking, Robin. But they are chiefly these fine new ladies who have never seen the outside of London Wall, yet cannot speak without mangling a French phrase. They are wrong, as you will find when you are in Italy.”
“Italy?” said Robin.
“You will go by way of Italy,” Walsingham returned, “you who speak Spanish with the accent of Italy.” And Robin wondered whether there was one word ever spoken in this man’s hearing which he forgot. “But we will talk of all this anon — in London. I should have ordered a hare for you, perhaps? It is the fashionable dish.”
“Your wild duck, Sir Francis, was for me the happier choice.”
“I am glad. I do not allow hares at my table. It is said they breed melancholy, and God knows I have enough melancholy in my nature to be unwilling to risk an addition! You will travel to London tomorrow, Robin, and bring that knot of ribbons with you, or as like as not you’ll get your ears boxed.”
“Tomorrow!” Robin exclaimed, with a thought that he must somehow first arrange a meeting with Cynthia to explain this sudden overthrow of his plans.
“Tomorrow,” Walsingham repeated slowly. “There is so much to be done. I must have authority from you to deal for your ships with Sir John Hawkins to your best advantage,” and Walsingham chuckled. “Old Jack — he’s a fox.”
“Then it was he who betrayed me. I have been wondering,” Robin cried.
But Walsingham shook his head.
“You have been wandering, Robin. There was never a hint from old Jack. But I know now why Her Majesty’s frugality so little discomposed him. We could have one new ship. No doubt a small ship was opportune. Two? Well, at long last, two if needs must, with many sighs. Three? Did we all want to ruin her? God’s death, was she made of gold like an idol in India? We could all go to the devil. And there were we biting our fingers and old Jack as easy as a gentleman with a pipe of tobacco after his dinner. Were there not five good ships, including an admiral, of five hundred tons building for Mr Robin Aubrey on which he could close his fingers at any moment? I doubt but what every one of them would have been fetched back before it had reached the Sleeve whether you willed it or no.”
“He would have been false to me?”
“And true to the realm. The hour’s at hand. This is the year 1586. 1588 has long been prophesied as the year of great trial and disaster. Only three years ago there was so notable a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn that no wise man dare neglect its warning. A year and a half, Robin,” and the shadows darkened on his face and fear shone in his eyes.
One may call it coincidence or what one will, but spread wide over all England was the belief that the year of 1588 would be the year of destiny for the realm. Laws and empires were ruled by the planets. Perhaps 1588 would see the destruction of the world and the second coming of Christ; or plagues and famines, or a new deluge, or treasons and conspiracies and a horrible alteration of kingdoms. Ever since 1583 books of prophecy and warning had been issued, so that the belief was loud in the mouths of common men and beggars and a secret fear at the hearts of men with possessions. Each man, of course, interpreted the message according to the run of his thoughts. To Sir Francis Walsingham it meant Philip of Spain, the assassination of Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots on the throne of England, and Papacy re-established over all the land.
“You have had a foretaste, Robin, during this last week,” he said sombrely. “Ballard, Anthony Babington, John Savage! The three elements of treason. A priest to consecrate, a philosopher to balance the yes against the no, and a man-at-arms to strike the blow. Oh, those three will do no harm. They’ll be taken during this week and pay the penalty. But what if stronger brains and sharper minds take up the task? A priest less talkative and gaudy, a philosopher more sure of his philosophy, a man-at-arms less simple! The queen will not be guarded. You heard Barnewell at your window. ‘I am unarmed,’ she said, coming boldly towards him.”
And Robin cried aloud:
“Glorious!”
“Aye, and foolish,” returned Sir Francis. “The great woman! And you clap your hands, on your knees to her high spirit and her courage. The great queen to me, on whose life hangs the peace and contentment of the world. You shall see for yourself the risks she runs. The Bannets will go scot free to plot her murder again. You’ll see it. Neither father nor son was in the chapel that night when you and Gregory watched. Neither father nor son met Barnewell at the door. She’ll hold them innocent from policy. She works for Catholics as well as Protestants to gather behind her. She thinks it’s happening. She’ll not upset it. You’ll see! And Guise is gathering sixty thousand men for an invasion, and Philip is gathering his Armada! The enterprise of England.”
He sat moody and silent.
“I must have news of that Armada, Robin; the number of the ships, the men they carry — sure news. Once on a night like this your father came to Sydling Court and went away on an errand which could bring no reward and might mean ignominy and death. In the name of the queen I claim the like service from you.”
He rose as he finished, and Robin stood up in front of him. The boy was troubled by the charge which was laid on him. His five ships, his private auto-da-fé on the sea — these were far away now, vanities, imaginings fit for a children’s fable. He had never doubted his capacity to carry out that enterprise. But this great need! Could he discharge it?
“What I can do, sir, is done,” he said, “but — —”
And the secretary took him up with a smile:
“What you can’t do will be done.” And he clapped Robin on the shoulder. “Come! Let me choose my men, Robin! I have the name for choosing well.”
He rang a bell upon the table and ordered Robin’s horse to be brought to the door.
“We shall settle the particulars in London. You have a lodging in the Strand.”
Robin laughed.
“You know that too?”
“To be sure.”
Walsingham reflected for a moment or two.
“It will be better that you stay at your lodging. If you stayed with me at Barn Elms your visit would be noticed, and though we know nothing of Spain, Spain knows all it wants to know of us. You will post to London tomorrow, and I will send a messenger to your lodging on Tuesday.”
As he led the way out into the hall he said softly:
“And you will breathe not a word of your departure or your new plans to anyone.”
Robin stopped. No, Sir Francis asked too much. Something must be said, to one person. It was impossible that he should keep silent. Walsingham looked into the boy’s troubled face.
“It is a hard saying but a wise one. I shall convince you in London.”
There would still be time, Robin thought, for him to see Cynthia before he went away. Since possibly he would be able to meet her but the once, it would even be
better if he waited until all the details of his charge were fixed.
“I shall wait until I have heard you in London,” Robin agreed. But he felt that this service laid upon him was already clutching at all that he had, demanding the surrender of all, love, friendship, life too.
They went out of the house. The garden slept in a lovely silver light. Away to the left a long, high wall at the bottom of the slope threw a coal-black shadow across the ground like a huge ditch. On the lawn here the sparkling dew was as the lamps of elves. There was no sound in all the world. Walsingham stood as though amazed by the beauty of the familiar scene.
“Shall Spain foul this land?” he cried in a low voice. “Her soldiers trample its gardens? Put to the fire its honest, friendly people? Fire over England? No!”
Robin left him standing there, his sombre face lit with his passionate love. He himself rode homewards in a sober mood. Youth though he was, there was no joy of adventure in his blood as he thought upon the service to which he was committed. He grew into man’s estate on that long and lonely moonlit ride. Over the shoulder of the down, past quiet sleeping villages and fields where he heard the cows cropping the grass, he rode. Fire over England — no! What tiny thing he could do, at the expense of strength and courage and brain and life, to hinder that catastrophe he would, however menial and lowly. But Cynthia must know. That of course was settled.
Before he left England Cynthia must know.
And that having been settled, Robin turned to a question which throughout the evening had greatly perplexed him.
How long had Walsingham known of the ships which Robin had been building? Yes, and by what channel had the knowledge reached him? He was a subtle searcher of secrets, but here was one which should have been safe from him. He was a man of many curiosities, but Robin had never heard that things of the sea engaged him. Sir John Hawkins had not told him. How then had he known? And as Robin put to himself the question for the twentieth time he suddenly reined in his horse.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 671