“I heard something of this,” he said, turning about ruefully.
Youth he wanted and must have for this service, youth with its courage, its inspiration, its indifference to the for and against when there was work at its hand. The plague of it was that he couldn’t have youth without what goes with youth — passion, a girl like any other girl with just a different tilt to her chin set upon a throne as the world’s nonpareille; by whose heaven-sent wisdom every plan must be tested; to whose bosom every dangerous secret must be confided. Else there’s treachery to love, and that’s not to be thought upon. If only Cynthia Norris, of whom he had an account from Mr Gregory of Lyme, had had some small setback in her health at the time when her visit to Hilbury Melcombe was due, what a deal of argument would have been saved. However, argument must be used, and the secretary settled down to it.
“This young lady — she is a neighbour of the Bannets.”
“No doubt.”
“And the two families are friends.”
“It is so.”
“And would have, if the young lady favoured it, a closer link than friendship.”
“I believe so,” said Robin sullenly.
“Well, then! The Bannets are traitors, and nonetheless because Her Majesty in her clemency winks at their treasons. Also perhaps I wink a little too, since certain letters come from time to time out of France to Sir Robert Bannet, which, thanks to your friend Gregory, I get a glimpse of first. But let Miss Cynthia, in a moment when she’s off her guard, drop a hint of your mission, and Carlo Manucci goes to the stake.”
“She never would.”
“And with him that old beggarman on the steps of the Church of Almudena — my friend, your father, whose house stands waiting for him with its comforts and its luxuries by the sea,” said Walsingham relentlessly.
“She will hold her peace,” Robin cried in a voice of anguish, “however much they go about with her.”
“Every second she must guard her tongue, her eyes. Why put her to such a torment?”
“It would be a worse torment if I left her without a word to think that I had played with her heart and fled, a trifler.”
“Would she think that?” Walsingham asked quickly.
There was the trap open in front of Robin. If she held him of so little worth, was he right to put her so high? If at the first moment her judgment went so wide astray, could he trust her as the keeper of his secrets? If she mistook him for a traitor, would she not mistake traitors for friends? But Robin was honest even to the discomfiture of his own argument.
“No, she would not,” he answered.
“Well, then! This young lady — a Mistress Cynthia Norris, I think — —”
“And know,” Robin added.
Walsingham smiled and acknowledged the thrust.
“Mr Gregory writes of her in superlatives.”
“Mr Gregory is a little too meddlesome for my taste,” Robin exclaimed in a rage. “I think he would look very well with the gallows’ mark on his neck instead of on his letters.”
Sir Francis allowed himself to laugh.
“Gregory has, as you may have noticed, no sense of humour, Robin. Yet I should like to repeat your remark to him for the pleasure of seeing his face when I repeated it. But he is too valuable a servant for me to practise with.”
“So you practise with me instead, sir,” said Robin.
“If I do it’s for the good of this realm,” cried Walsingham, all at once in a great heat. “I set that above all, and such feeble steps as I can take for your security I take because I set it above all.” His anger fell from him after he had spoken, and he added in a gentle and compassionate voice:
“Also I am not without care for you, Robin. Had I another agent of the same strong purpose and the same discretion, I should choose him in your place and give you your chance of banners and trumpets and a splendid name. But the grave need of these times overrides us all. Come! This young lady knows of your plan against the gold fleet?”
“Yes.”
“Let her think you have set out upon it!”
“And what of Drake’s attack upon Cadiz with the Expedition as one of his ships?”
“We can change her name.”
“But not her crew. She was built in Poole. She is manned by Poole men. How could Cynthia not know? She will know that it has sailed without me. What will she think of me? A braggart, a coward who runs at a hint of danger — —”
And again Walsingham broke sharply in upon his words:
“Will she?”
And again honesty and his clear faith in the loving spirit of his mistress defeated Robin’s argument.
“No, she will not,” he answered gently, whilst a tender smile softened the set of his lips. “But if I leave her without a word, though against all seeming she will keep her trust in me, she will suffer — oh, a martyrdom.”
Walsingham did not contradict him by a word or a gesture. With a very pretty dignity he spoke of himself and his own home.
“My family, like all families that ever I heard of, has had its share of joy and sorrow. But never until these last few months did I fully learn or admire the fine strength of women’s hearts, their endurance, the brave face they show the world. You saw my daughter Frances tonight. Her lively spirit and tender friendliness make this house of mine fragrant. She was married but a few years ago to that young knight who is the very flower of England. They are a fair and lovely couple. But at any moment a messenger may come galloping to the door with the news that Philip Sidney lies stricken to death upon a battlefield. Yet only by some look of pain which we surprise in her eyes, by some little trembling word which in spite of herself she lets fall, can we guess at the martyrdom in which she lives. But would she have it otherwise, do you think? Would she have him clinging to her skirt rather than fulfilling his life, be the end what it may? Would she prefer him to be a stranger of whose glory she might carelessly read? No! Well, then, will your Cynthia fall below her? I who don’t know her will still dare to make answer. No! For I know you, Robin, and your heart will not have chosen at random.”
The argument was not perhaps very fair, but it was sincere, and it had its way. Robin’s thoughts leaped forward to a day when he would be standing in the hall of Abbot’s Gap, his father upon one side, his torments quite forgotten, Cynthia on the other, her eyes shining, her lips parted, her anxious imaginings repaid.
“It shall be as you wish,” he said. “But if it should be God’s will that I do not come back, someone must tell her how it was that I left her without a word, with what pain and with what trust.”
“That I promise on my hope of salvation,” said Walsingham, “and Frances herself shall be your messenger.”
CHAPTER XIV. Master and Man
OVER A SMOOTH SEA of sapphire the great galleass Regazzona swept past the brown hillsides of Spain. A favouring light wind just filled the square sails upon her three masts and her bowsprit, and on the lowest deck below the broadside guns thirty long oars a side churned the dark water into a glistening froth. It was growing towards noon, and though the season was late September the sun rode high in a cloudless sky of summer. Two hundred feet the ship measured between her uprights, and at her stern two great castles towered into the air, the topmost projecting farther over the sea than the lower and beginning later, so that they gave to a sailor below in the waist the appearance of two huge broad steps. At the stem the bowsprit was slanted high, and below it her long, stout ram sheathed in bright steel cast a shadow over the water as though some enormous pike swam ahead and directed the ship. The wooded Cabo de Gata, where now the lighthouse stands, stretched out towards the ship on the starboard side, then fell behind and opened out the deep bay of Almeria.
The admiral’s cabin, with a gallery over the water, was in the lower of the two stern castles, and at the closed door a sentinel with a musket was placed to make sure that no one entered. Within the cabin an odd scene was occurring which would assuredly have mystified any intruder. In an
armchair a slight Italian man of middle age, with a crest of light hair on the crown of his head and a bald lane on each side of it, sat with a bare leg and foot lifted onto a cushioned stool in front of him. There did not seem to be anything very amiss with the leg and foot. They were shapely enough to satisfy even Queen Elizabeth, but the poor man was groaning as though he was afflicted by the worst torments of the gout.
“Ouch!” he cried, and “Madre de Dios,” and if the youth who knelt in front of the stool with a bowl of hot liniment at his side reached out a hand he broke into the most violent threats and curses.
“Touch me, pig of a fellow, if you dare! I’ll have you skinned, you rogue! I’ll feed you limb by limb to the fishes! Oh! oh!” and he leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed, an exhausted man, near to his end.
“Well, you must, I suppose,” he groaned feebly. “These vile pretentious doctors and their trumpery prescriptions!”
The youth dipped a sponge into the hot lotion and took the outstretched foot with the other hand as gingerly as if he handled a quite priceless porringer of porcelain.
“What! Would you, would you?” cried the sufferer, seizing up a stick propped against the chair.
“But, Señor Marqués,” the youth answered appealingly, speaking Spanish with a marked Italian accent, “the lotion will relieve the pain and do you a world of good! My poor mother suffered in the same way.”
“What!” exclaimed the Señor Marqués in a rage. “Your poor mother dared to suffer as I do? You’re a liar, Giuseppe. It requires my delicate blood to suffer as I do! Oh! Tortures and executions! It’s demasiado hot, your cursed locion . . .”
So he went on mixing bad Spanish with excellent Italian, until with a sigh of relief his anger and his anguish passed.
“That is better, Giuseppe! You shall have a silver piece to reward you for your gentleness. Undoubtedly that is better. Now the bandage, but not too tight, you rascal, or I’ll set you at one of those long oars with the galley slaves.”
Giuseppe said soothingly:
“Multa cuidado, Señor Marqués,” and he bandaged the foot with a gossamer touch.
There was yet another servant in the cabin, a young, small, black-haired Italian at whom the Señor Marqués directed a glance whilst Giuseppe was busy with his bandage. At once the Italian looked out of the stern window over the empty sea and cried out in a sort of English:
“There’s the strangest ship that ever I saw. Oh, look! Look quickly!”
Giuseppe, however, continued his bandaging without as much as lifting his head. Then a slipper was fitted on, and the Señor Marqués said:
“You shall give me your arm, Giuseppe! I shall walk a few yards. So!”
He shot another glance at the Italian. “You can go, Andrea Ferranti, and get ready my almuerzo.”
Andrea Ferranti disappeared in the private galley at the side of the cabin. Giuseppe lifted the Señor Marqués and propped him up and supported him down the cabin. Suddenly Ferranti threw open the door of the galley and shouted urgently:
“The Signor Carlo Manucci is wanted at once.”
Giuseppe’s entire attention was occupied by the Señor Marqués, who was certainly very difficult to please that morning. He leaned his full weight upon Giuseppe’s arm — he made himself heavier than he was — and each time that he put his bandaged foot to the ground he yelped in a spasm of pain.
“The almuerzo, Andrea, you dog! And you, Giuseppe, let me fall and I’ll have you keelhauled, I will. God bless me, was there ever such a clumsy rogue?”
Then in quite a different voice he exclaimed:
“Good! We progress. We do not turn our head when the English is spoken. No! And if Carlo Manucci is summoned, that means nothing to us. That is excellent.”
He moved with agility back to his chair, whipped the bandage off his foot, drew on his stocking and gartered it, stepped into his shoe, and as Andrea Ferranti brought the luncheon into the cabin he said:
“Since we are private here and there is a watch upon the door and the lesson has been well learnt, you shall lunch with me, Carlo. Lay the table for two, Andrea!”
The Señor Marqués became, in fact, the Signor Conde Giovanni Figliazzi, who was enjoying himself enormously as he acted, or rather overacted, the part of the gout-ridden old admiral of the Spanish fleet, Santa Cruz.
Robin had travelled to Florence as Carlo Manucci, and at the court of Tuscany had quickly made a friend of Figliazzi.
“Andrea Ferranti, my bodyservant, may be trusted. He comes from my lands and has been in my household since he was a boy. He has a brother in the service of the Marquis of Santa Cruz, who is the best admiral that Spain ever had and the very brain of the Armada. You will do well, I think, to make your account with him.”
It was Figliazzi’s bold notion that, with Ferranti’s help, a place might be secured for Robin in the household of Santa Cruz.
“I must not appear in it,” he said, “for my master’s sake and my own duty, but secretly I shall do what I can. I promised that to my old friend Sir Francis on account of the friendship which we had when he was the English ambassador in Paris. I renew that promise to you on account of the friendship which I have now for you.”
Robin had made his account with Andrea Ferranti, as Figliazzi had advised him. He gave him a hundred crowns and added:
“There will be as much for your brother if I am hired, and again as much for you when the work is all done.”
Andrea had taken the money and had looked askance at the plan.
“We shall see, at Lisbon. There is so great a compulsion upon men for the ships that places on shore go abegging. But can Your Excellency hold a plate and not spill it on a lady’s lap? Can Your Excellency lacquer a pair of boots? Can Your Excellency cook a pollo con arroz and get just that saffron look and taste in the rice which turns it from food into a dish?”
“I will go to school, Andrea, with you for a master,” said Robin.
Andrea was not disposed to make light of the capacities required by a good valet.
“And when the rudiments are learnt there are more delicate duties. Can Your Excellency starch and crimp a ruff?”
At that Robin looked glum.
“Can Your Excellency open a letter?” Ferranti asked slily.
“That is an art which, above all others, I wish to learn,” Robin cried eagerly.
“And Your Excellency is right. For how shall a valet serve his master well unless he knows more of his master’s affairs than his master is willing to tell him?” said Andrea sententiously.
Robin carried his difficulties to Figliazzi, who again came to his assistance. He would send his secretaries and his staff on in the first of the ships to leave Genoa so that his lodging might be prepared in Lisbon against the time of his arrival. He himself, with two servants, Andrea and Robin, should leave on the last of the ships, and Robin would have the long voyage in which to learn his new trade. Thus all along the Spanish coast, through the Straits, with the Moorish hills upon one side and the great rock of Gibraltar upon the other, and out round Cape St Vincent, Figliazzi and Robin played the game of master and man. A game which filled the time for Giovanni Figliazzi with a prodigious amusement. He made a character in the play out of the harsh old gout-ridden admiral, invented each day new incommodities of temper and new duties for the servant to fulfil. Robin on his side studied his part as never actor did. A game, yes, but lives hung upon his playing of it properly — his own, that most likely of a ragged cripple crouched upon the steps of a church in Madrid, and perhaps a third life too. Robin thought, as he gazed one moonlit night upon the rock of Gibraltar, which moved him by its rough likeness to the great head of Portland, yes, a third life too might depend upon his acting, since away beyond Portland and inland from Warbarrow Bay a girl with her eyes strained towards the sea waited and wondered with a bursting heart.
In due time the Regazzona came to Cascaes and, after standing by at the anchorage for the night, crossed the bar of the Tagus in th
e morning between the Tower of St Bugio and St Julian’s Castle.
No visitor entering Lisbon harbour today will see what Robin saw, so entirely has the face of the city changed. The dark wooded heights above the sandy cliffs on the southern bank of the river rise not much more built upon than they were. But on the northern side the land itself has changed. The Tower of Belem now stands upon the shore, but then it crowned an islet in the channel and the water lapped the walls of the Monastery of San Jeronimo; and of St Julian’s Castle but the one storey remains, with its Indian turrets at the four corners to recall that strong place which Philip built to guard Spain’s new kingdom. A few peasants live amongst its arches, the outer wall about its platform is gashed and broken and exposes its layers of red tiles beneath the stone.
But when Robin sailed past it on this autumn morning it towered high and sheer from the river’s edge, its dark surface broken only by the orifices of its cannon and the balconies and windows at the top. It commanded the deepest of the two channels, and a great banner waved high above the roof. Robin gave less heed to that formidable hold than he was to give to it in the months which lay ahead of him. For his eyes turned to the harbour now widening out in front of him, and for a moment his heart stood still. The galleass passed into such a forest of tall masts that the land itself was hidden; and so deafening a din of cries, such a pounding of hammers, such a creaking of carts upon the quays, such a clashing of iron filled the air that he must even shout to a man with his mouth close to the other’s ear before a word that he said could be understood. It seemed that the doom of England was being fashioned here before his eyes. But his spirits revived as he watched. The work was but begun, and everywhere was visible Philip’s leaden foot.
CHAPTER XV. Giuseppe the Valet
“THIS IS THE young person, Your Grace,” said the major-domo, and with a gesture to Robin Aubrey: “Stand forward, Giuseppe!”
The old colossus who was bending his bald head over columns and columns of figures spread upon the table turned his chair and fixed his eyes upon the lad. They were remarkable eyes, big and black, very steady and searching, and quietly alarming. But the Marquis of Santa Cruz was an alarming man. Amongst the commanders of great fleets he had in that day the greatest name of all. And though he was now in his seventy-third year, his belly fallen and his health gone, he had still the readiness and resource which had enabled him in earlier days to sail his ships into the gap in the line and save the day at Lepanto; and still the ruthlessness which made him put to the sword every prisoner taken in the rout of Strozzi’s fleet at the Azores. Robin had as much ado to keep his knees from shaking as he had had long ago when his queen called him out from among the oppidans at Eton. It seemed to him that Santa Cruz was never going to take his eyes off him. “He is looking into my soul.” Robin was sure of it. How could he hope to outface this old conqueror with all his experience of men? And Santa Cruz still looked at him. “He is stripping every rag of my disguise off me,” Robin cried to himself; and then Santa Cruz spoke. He asked a bewildering question:
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 673