Behind the foot of the pillar on which he stood a tiny ledge ran along the inner side of the latticed bracket underneath the balcony to the wall. Only on that ledge would he be screened from the eyes of anyone up on the balcony. But to reach that hiding place he must step round the pillar from the dolphin’s head, he must get a hand grip on one of the holes cut through the stone, and this on a dark night when all must be done by feel and touch, and the least slip meant a cry and a broken body to make a plaything for the waves. Robin, clinging still with his left hand to the rope, groped with his right round the pillar along the great bracket until it reached a diamond-shaped cut in the stone. Through this he passed his hand and gripped hard and tight. Then he passed round his right foot and felt for the tiny ledge. It was some inches below the level of the dolphin’s head, and Robin’s toes went tapping and stretching as he lowered them. He touched it at last. It was not wide enough, but it must serve. He drew himself under the balcony, shifted his left foot from the dolphin’s head to the ledge, found another cutting for his left hand, and so clung there to the bracket like a bat.
The end of his rope he must leave knotted about the foot of the balustrade, else he would never be able to climb up again onto the balcony. It was not likely to be seen on a night like this even by one who searched.
“The old man must stub his toe on the knot before he discovers it,” Robin said to himself, and he heard the shutters above his head splinter and crash back against the wall and the old man lurch against the balustrade. His sword rattled on the floor.
Thereafter a silence followed, all the more alarming because Robin could not account for it. Santa Cruz was standing without a movement just over his head. Robin could hear him breathing, so still was the night. Why, then, he must hold his breath himself, and he must not move either, must not ease his muscles by the slightest change of pose, lest the breast of his doublet or his sleeve should rustle against the stone.
A sharp fear made Robin’s heart jump into his throat.
“He has seen the rope knotted round the baluster. He is standing up there playing cat and mouse, waiting for a cramp to knot up my tendons and snatch me from my hold!”
He saw himself swinging out on the rope into the air and then the flash of Santa Cruz’s sword and the rope severed.
A movement was made up on the balcony at last, but it only added vividness to his horrid vision. The sword dragged on the stone, fell down again and rang, and was lifted at the last.
“He’ll use it now,” Robin thought. “Trust him to use it.” He looked down between his feet to the white of the breakers flashing in the darkness a hundred and fifty feet below and wrenched his eyes quickly away. The old man’s heavy step sounded, and Robin clung even more desperately to his buttress.
“Now!” he thought. “Now!”
And whilst he was expecting to hear the whistle of the sword and feel the rope drop loose the shutters were slammed to again.
Such was his relief that he was in greater danger of falling from his hold than he had yet been that night. The sweat poured down his face, his legs trembled, a weakness was stealing over him. He hooked an arm through the latticework of the great bracket, and then, loosening his grasp on the rope, he took a coil of it round his upper arm and seized it again and so stood the more secure.
Santa Cruz was satisfied, then! But Robin must give him time to drag back to his room; and he had now no sounds to guide him. He could only guess how much longer he must wait. He counted a hundred very slowly. He had to move now if ever he was to take that long step upward round the pillar onto the dolphin’s head. He drew in a deep breath, raised his left foot, found the head under the sole of it, shifted his weight and hauled himself round and up. For a few moments he swayed dangerously — once more on the smooth curving stone. Then he pulled himself up by the rope, secured a hold upon the coping with one hand, and the next instant stood again upon the balcony. He cut the rope away from the baluster and wound it again about his waist. Then he turned to the shutters and consternation seized him. For through the lattices of the shutters a light still shone.
There was no going back for him onto that dolphin’s head. Nothing could have made him face the ordeal again. He would wait where he was, and if Santa Cruz came out again onto that balcony — well, it was the admiral’s great share in Spain in the one scale and his little share in England in the other. Robin drew his dagger from his belt — and waited — and waited. The night grew chill, there was a freshness in the air; in a little while the dawn would come. He glided to the shutters and opened them. He could see into the room, but the table where Santa Cruz sat was to the left and outside the range of his eyes.
He could hear no sound.
“The old man has fallen asleep or gone to his room and left his candle burning.”
Robin stole on tiptoe into the room. Asleep? There was something in the admiral’s attitude, some vague suggestion of collapse, which spoke of a repose deeper than sleep. Robin, with his dagger ready in his right hand, crept to his side. The old man’s mouth had fallen, his eyes were staring, his breast quite still. Death, not sleep.
The bureau was open. Robin took the two papers still left to be transcribed, he drew up the oak stool again to the table, and, by the light of Santa Cruz’s candle, with Santa Cruz’s dead body sagging at his side, he sat himself to complete his work. He must be quick, yet must omit nothing and put no wrong figures down through haste — guns, culverins, minions, baseliscos, soldiers, mariners, barrels of cheese, of salted meat, of water.
He was getting towards the end of his work when an appalling thing happened in that room. The dead man moved at Robin’s side: his arm, which had been lying on the table, struck Robin and, slipping down, dangled. Robin sprang to his feet, his dagger was raised to strike, and sheer horror checked his hand in time. The muscles of the old man, stiffened by death, were relaxing. As Robin watched him he sank lower in his chair, he became smaller, he shrank, as if only now the undaunted spirit had left reluctantly its outworn shell.
Robin sat down again to his work. When he had finished he left the bureau open, the papers which he had copied in front of Santa Cruz and the candle still burning. As he crept to his room the dawn was breaking.
CHAPTER XIX. A Bridport Dagger
IT SEEMED INCREDIBLE to Robin that a man could have as many relations as the late Marquis of Santa Cruz. They descended from all the hills of Portugal: aunts, nieces, nephews, cousins to the faintest degree of consanguinity, and his dead wife’s sisters and brothers and nieces and cousins, all swathed in black, all wailing and weeping and making such a din of lamentation that a stranger must have thought that the last tender blossom of the family had been nipped by an untimely frost. Yet the rough old sailor could never abide any of them. His ships were his family. On them he lavished all the affection that he had. Of his relations in the flesh there wasn’t one fit to command a jolly boat. Lawyers came too, and, Robin fancied, all those hundred and eighty priests whom Philip, to Santa Cruz’s disgust, had appointed to the fleet. In the midst of this confusion Robin, his wages paid and service terminated, slipped away as quickly as he could lest Oquendo should get hold of him.
He took refuge in the little posada behind the Church of Nossa Senhora de la Graça in the old Moorish town where he was wont to meet Andrea Ferranti. There he wrote out his last despatch to Sir Francis Walsingham, and being at once elated that his work was ended and so worn with fatigue that he could hardly keep his eyes open, he included in it a foolish flamboyant phrase which was to bring him to an hour of such stark horror and peril as left a scar upon his soul for the rest of his life.
He wrote:
This completes the list of the ships and their complements which will sail in the first of the summer on the Enterprise of England; with the exception of the Andalusian squadron, which Your Excellency has an account of from another source. May Her Majesty be well prepared, for the danger is great. Yet there is this comfort. Santa Cruz is dead, and there is no man he
re with the bold stroke and the long vision fit to take his place. Your Excellency, then, will have no more news out of Spain from me. D 1 is dead and buried with Santa Cruz. It is now the hour of one Carlo Manucci, a young gentleman speaking Spanish with the accent of Italy, for whom I beg your prayers.
Having given this letter to Andrea he betook himself to bed and slept for twenty-four hours; and woke with an uneasy sense of duties neglected, and was filled the next moment with such an inordinate relief and so soaring an elation that for the first time he realized the strain under which for more than fifteen months he had been labouring. His plans were set. He must lie close in this refuge till he had washed the dark stain from his skin and the black dye from his hair. His clothes were at Figliazzi’s fine house in the broad avenue behind the offices of the Inquisition. With Giacomo Ferranti as his servant he would cross the Tagus and take horses to Setubal; and one evening when Figliazzi and his train arrived at that first stage on the road to Madrid, Carlo Manucci would humbly ask permission for himself and his servant to ride with him, and so escape the marauders and cutpurses on the road.
Robin was not yet clean from his disguise when a certain Mr Christopher Vode, coming from Paris, landed at Rye. Now licences to travel in foreign countries were sparsely granted to Englishmen, and a strict surveillance was maintained at the ports; yet Christopher Vode slipped through with hardly a question: an achievement the more remarkable since he carried a letter written by Lord Paget, the most important of the Catholic refugees in Paris and one of Elizabeth’s bitterest enemies. But instead of delivering the letter to the person to whom it was addressed, Mr Vode rode post to London and carried it to Sir Francis Walsingham’s house of Barn Elms. There the letter was opened by the artist in opening letters, Mr Gregory of Lyme, and duly copied. Then it was refolded, and the original seal, which had been removed unspoilt by means of a knife with an astonishingly thin sharp blade heated in the flame of a candle, was delicately moulded and worked into new hot wax. Christopher Vode watched the dexterous fingers of Gregory with a cringing admiration.
“Oh, if I had your gift, Master Gregory,” he cried. “What a profit I could make of it for the safety of Her Majesty and the advantage of the realm!”
Mr Gregory had no taste for rhapsodies, even when he believed them to spring from the heart, and in this case he did not. He shrugged his shoulders and answered in a dry tone:
“Even if you had the gift you would have to cure that shaking hand before you could use it.”
He cast a look at a face lined and disfigured by years of ill-living and added:
“And I have a fear that the time for that cure is past.”
Christopher Vode took no offence at the words. He became reproachful, penitently and obsequiously reproachful.
“A few months ago you might have justly said so. But now that I have seen the better side — —”
His eyes were uplifted, the sleek smile of the saved wreathed his face without improving it, and Gregory of Lyme broke in testily:
“Oh, yes, yes. The better side being that on which the butter is spread.”
He turned his chair so that he looked Vode straight in the face.
“A few months ago, you said. It is, I think, seven months since you offered to Sir Francis to spy upon your friends, to work for us, pretending to work for them.”
“Seven months ago I saw my error, the error of my birth in its true light.”
“Very like, very like,” said Mr Gregory, cutting him short. He handed the letter back to Vode. “Well, go your ways, and watch well how the letter is received.”
Mr Gregory was a philosopher. Those who used the double cross must expect the double cross to be used upon them. He was not dogmatic about it. He could divide the for and the against as impartially as the late Anthony Babington. Research might discover exceptions to the rule, but he doubted much that Sir Francis Walsingham was one of them. Walsingham had his ear to too many panels and his eye to too many keyholes of the council chambers of Europe to escape being sold by one of the agents he had bought:
“And Christopher Vode would sell his own mother for a pint of canary.” Gregory thus concluded his argument. “So why not Sir Francis. God make me a talkative parrot, if I’d trust him out of my sight!”
He reached for a copybook in which he kept the records of Walsingham’s agents and the missions on which they were employed. Christopher Vode was not, however, a rarity in an age when conspiracy set the table for politics and treachery seasoned its dishes. He was the second son of a loyal Lancashire Catholic family, but was born with some vice in his blood which made him a gamester, a cheat and a profligate. Disowned by his family and ruined in his fortune, he had coined his religion by becoming a secret agent of the traitors in England and the refugee traitors in France. Having sold himself to the one side, he then sought Francis Walsingham and sold himself to the other. He had the craft to disclose to his Catholic employers in France and the North of England that he had secured a place in the household of the principal secretary, and persuaded them that they had thus a staunch friend in the very heart of the enemy’s camp.
“Not a very valuable friend,” Gregory said drily, as he consulted his book.
Nobody trusted him with deep secrets or critical negotiations either on one side or the other. He was a carrier of letters, a mere valet and postboy in the service of treason, and got but a poor pittance and much fatigue as his reward.
He set off from Barn Elms with the letter in his pouch and on the second day came, after nightfall, to Hilbury Melcombe. It was part of his trade to make a great show of secrecy. Ride with him, and his head was always turning back over his shoulder to discover whether he was pursued. Sit with him in a room when a sudden clamour arose in the street, and he would swallow and say, facing courageously his fate:
“They have come for me. Well, I know how to die.”
It was six o’clock when he led his horse to the stables, walking it over the grass. He crept on foot to the front door and knocked with so urgent and yet so cautious a touch that one might have thought that a justice of the peace was lurking behind every bush. And when the door was opened he plunged into the hall, locked it behind him, and stood listening and panting.
“Sir Robert is within?” he asked in a quick, low voice.
“Yes sir,” said the servant.
“I must see him on the instant.” He leaned his ear against the door and stood up, his own man again. “All’s safe. Tell Sir Robert it is Mr Vode.”
He was shown into that very room where Cynthia Norris had once fumbled the notes of her virginal and a modish young gentleman had thought to give a little girl a treat. Sir Robert came to him anxiously.
“You are from France?”
“I bring a letter.”
“Let me have it.”
Sir Robert tore the seal, read the letter and reread it.
“You know what it says?” he asked.
“I know only that Lord Paget was in the blithest mood when he gave it to me.”
Sir Robert nodded his head once or twice.
“He might well be. He might very well be,” he said softly. “How did you travel?”
“To Southampton. I landed early this morning,” said Christopher Vode, pressing his hands to his eyes as though he had hard work to keep them open.
“You shall have the softest bed and the best entertainment my house can give,” said Sir Robert warmly, rising up from his chair.
But beds of down were not for him that night, Christopher Vode replied sorrowfully. Sir Francis Walsingham, God rot him, was a bitter taskmaster and a suspicious one. He had letters from the British ambassador in Paris which he must deliver.
“I have come far out of my way, Sir Robert, and must make up my time by the loss of yet another night’s sleep. But I am starved too, and a cut from a pasty and a cup of wine I must needs have if I am not to fall from my horse.”
Sir Robert had him served in that small room, and while he ate questioned him
how the Duke of Guise stood with Henri Valois and what headway the Prince of Bearn was making in his penniless kingdom. Mr Vode answered at random, for he had a cause very much closer at heart which needed some delicacy of approach.
“Sir Robert,” he said when he had finished his meal. “There come from time to time to Walsingham’s house on London Wall documents, informations — I know not what — which it behoves the honest patriots and those who look with sad longing eyes for the re-establishment of the true faith to know.”
It was a misfortune for Mr Vode that he must always overcolour his phrases, so that when most he desired to produce a sure impression of fervid sincerity then most he inspired repugnance and suspicion. Sir Robert was treading almost as perilous a measure as the great queen was wont to tread, and with something of her wariness. He was not to be limed by this poor trickster.
“No doubt,” he said, stroking his beard, “there are informations. It would not be Sir Francis Walsingham unless there were informations.”
“They come from one quarter, Florence.”
Robert Bannet was surprised.
“Florence?”
What in the world had the little Duchy of Florence to do in these great affairs which were convulsing the world? Rome, Madrid, Holland, Paris, Vienna — yes. In the kaleidoscope of policies and combinations and alliances, news from any of these towns might be of urgent importance. But what should the grand duke have to say that concerned the state of England?
“I do not think, Mr Vode, that we need keep awake o’ nights over informations from Florence.”
Mr Vode, however, persisted.
“Sir, the Duke of Tuscany’s ambassador is in high favour with King Philip.”
“He is the less likely to send informations to Sir Francis Walsingham,” said Sir Robert.
Christopher Vode smiled.
“I wonder.”
Did he not himself bowl with one side and bat with the other?
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 676