Mary of Carisbrooke (16 page)

His flexible young voice had begun to take on the exultation of a glad discovery so that her shame was eased. She raised her head a little and sat staring unseeingly into the fire. “Why did you never speak of—her?” she asked tonelessly at last.

“If I did not, I swear it was not of intent.”

“Did you never think of her—long for her—as Abraham Dowcett does for his wife?”

“I thought of her sometimes,” admitted Firebrace soberly. “But—she is an invalid.”

Mary’s head came up a little higher. “You mean—an incurable invalid?”

“The doctors do not know. Only time will tell.”

“So she cannot—you do not—live as man and wife?”

“She lives with a kind old body at Knightsbridge.”

“Where is that?”

“It is a village just outside London,” Firebrace told her wearily. He passed a hand over the springing strength of her curls, and got up quickly as though stung by some comparison which he could not bear.

“What is your—what is her name?”

“Elizabeth,” he said, leaning an arm against the spandrel of the fireplace. “She is insane.”

The words dropped hopelessly into the silence of the room. They, and the pity they evoked, brought life back to Mary as nothing else could have done. She leaned forward and took his listlessly hanging hand into her cold one and pulled him back beside her. “The years must have been hard for you,” she said, the words at once a forgiveness and a comforting.

He sat forward on the settle, hands locked between his knees. “There was a man who used to visit her,” he began incoherently. “Before I even knew her he wanted to marry her. It seems such irony—now. He even bought her clothes and things when I was away at the war.”

“And you were not jealous?”

“I was glad for her sake.”

“Then you could not have loved her.”

“I did once. But it has gone on so long—her sickness and my being away. And, God forgive me, life has been so full of more exciting things… Lately I have even hoped that she—that they…But my wife is a good woman. I do not believe that she was ever actually unfaithful.”

Mary got up and walked about, as though she must have the physical relief of movement. But she walked without lightness, like an old woman. “Richard Osborne knew you were married?” she asked, arms tight across her breasts as if to keep out the cold.

“Yes. Why?”

“He once tried to warn me. He said ‘what did I know of you?’”

“Yet he did not tell you?”

A new understanding of Osborne’s dilemma came to her. “No. I suppose it would have been what you men call disloyal. He only hoped—”

“Yes?”

“That I would not get hurt.”

Mary laughed with a bitterness so alien to her that it seemed to wipe out all her childish innocence, and Firebrace’s arms were suddenly round her. Too late, they were the arms of a lover. Neither gentle, nor compassionate, but demanding. “Let us forget that you know,” he urged. “A while ago we were so happy. Let us go on from there. My sweet, my very dear accomplice, we have this hour…Afterwards, if you like, I will take you away with me to the mainland. Anything you wish. We were made for each other, Mary, and I cannot bear to see you hurt.”

With closing eyes, she almost let herself be swept into the rising tide of his passion. There would be ecstasy, and forgetting. Everything that her body had been awakening for. But the moment had come too late. Her senses had been bludgeoned with the blow to her heart, so that her mind and all her careful training gradually took charge. Involuntarily she thought of Libby, remembering that for herself there could not be even a belated marriage. “It seems I must get hurt either way,” she said faintly between his kisses.

“All these weeks how could I not have seen—”

“Perhaps because you are not very conceited. You must not blame yourself. It has been something which—just happened.” Pride came to her rescue, and she withdrew herself resolutely from his embrace. “Go now, and leave me alone,” she entreated. She knew that she must begin to learn to find her way about a new empty kind of world in which no older relatives could advise or help her to bear her burdens any more, and when Harry Firebrace would have taken her into his arms again her small, strong hands held him off. “No, no. I love you too well to have resolution for us both,” she reproached. She leant back against the table, the firelight warm on her hair, candour in her eyes and pride in the lift of her chin. There was a new dignity about her. She looked somehow taller, a grown woman, done with girlhood’s illusions. There was raillery in her voice, but it was kinder, less bitter, with half the mockery for herself. “Better go now,” she advised, “and take with you your charm and your enthusiasms and your laughter—everything that has been my foolish heart’s undoing—and spend them in the service of the King.”

The making of the bowling green was a blessing to most of the inhabitants of the castle. It gave them something fresh to think about and broke the grim routine of winter. Soldiers from the over-crowded barracks were able to spread themselves in the pleasant acres of the place-of-arms within the outer walls.

It was Mistress Hammond who first put the idea into her son’s mind. The King loved to talk to her because she was part of his old life and had known his children when they were small, and to her in some relaxed moment he had confided laughingly that without his usual hunting he feared he would grow fat, and how much he would give for a game of bowls.

“He must miss so many other things which he never does complain about,” she had sighed, repeating a part of the conversation to Hammond. “I know you cannot let him ride abroad but there is room and to spare for a green on the place-of-arms, Robert, and if you can see your way to give his Majesty that much pleasure it would please your father to hear of it.”

There were few ways in which Robert Hammond could please a revered father, since their political persuasions lay so far apart. And here was something he could do for Charles which in no way clashed with his duty to Parliament. So after supper that night he cheered his royal guest by telling him of his intentions; and soon the inner ward was humming with activity.

Sergeant Floyd spent willing hours measuring and levelling. Pikemen gladly dug instead of being drilled. The island men among them, accustomed to scythe and sickle, cut the sweet grass short. Those who were townsmen from the mainland rolled it again and again with a heavy iron cylinder loaded with stones. Cooks and scullions took time off from the hot kitchen to fashion short flights of steps in the banked-up sides. Discipline was temporarily relaxed, and out beyond the postern gate which separated the two wards friendly shouts gave an illusion of freedom and eased tension. Everyone, whenever possible, went out to watch. “It will be better than the bowling alley at Whitehall!” prophesied Thomas Rudy, forgetting his republican prejudices as he marked out the rinks under the King’s personal direction. And, warmed by a sense of his own magnanimity and the King’s obvious gratitude, Hammond, in a final burst of generosity, instructed the carpenters to build a little pavilion at the southern end where players could rest or shelter from a sudden shower.

“Our Governor is too much the fine courtier,” sneered Rolph, raging because his men were weeding grass for aristocrats when they might have been trying out the new brass cannon sent from Southampton or practising signalling with the horse-guards who now patrolled the hills. But only the sourest of his men really grudged their prisoner a chance to forget his troubles in the game he loved.

The weather was dry and when it was found that play could begin almost at once Herbert and Mildmay and the rest of the King’s attendants were glad for their own sakes as well as for their master’s; and the small coterie of people planning for his second attempt at escape were only too thankful that so many fresh activities diverted attention from their own.

April on the island was an enchantment. The kind gaiety of nature pushed through the ugly cruelty of party strife. The maidservants went out and gathered kingcups in the mill-pond meadows. Birds singing in the hedges of Castle Lane made a mock of roaring gun practices and did their best to drown the sharp sound of military commands.

But for Mary sunshine and bird-song made a mockery. She was enduring her first taste of grief. The future which had beckoned so enticingly had suddenly become an unthinkable blank, the present a penance to be lived through. From task to task, from hour to hour, was the longest measure of existence which her mind could contemplate. With pathetic young dignity she tried to draw the cloak of everyday cheerfulness about her, hoping to hide her unhappiness from an uncaring world.

From her father she could not hide it. Too deep a bond of sympathy ran between them. And after a day or so, because he had not probed the raw wound with questions, she found that she could tell him spontaneously about the misfortune of her love.

Being a man of fundamental strength and simplicity, Silas Floyd offered her no easy platitudes. He recognized the irreplaceable quality of first love. He did not say “You are so young, you will get over it,” or “My dear, there will be others.” He knew that however many men there might be, or however deep their love, no one of them could ever be the same. He knew that for his tender-hearted maid something tremulously beautiful had been broken—that the first brittle, shining wonder of it could never come again. There might be better things in her life—he prayed there would be—but never, he knew instinctively, would there be anything so innocently close to heaven.

So he spent all the time he could with her, walking with her in the sunshine when he was dog-tired and sitting with an arm about her of an evening so that she should feel assured of his love.

And old Brett, who could be as deaf as an adder when it suited him, was not deceived. He remembered the lilt in her voice and the lightness of her step whenever she and that pleasant Master Firebrace had used his wellhouse as a nice quiet spot in which to exchange their secret notes and their hastily whispered bits of news, and he noticed her lagging footsteps now. She came as often and cared for the donkeys as assiduously, but when the last bucketful of water had been raised and Jonah called out from the wheel, the old man watched her with troubled eyes. When she stayed so still in the shadows with her cheek against the little beast’s rough, grey neck he guessed that she was crying.

For a week Mary had avoided Firebrace and felt miserably sure that he was avoiding her; and when another Monday evening came round she excused herself from the usual meeting in her aunt’s room to which she had always looked forward so eagerly. She was very tired, she said. But Mistress Wheeler remembered how tirelessly her niece had worked since the King’s arrival, and how healthy she was, and looked up at her with shrewdly anxious eyes. “Go gather me some primroses, and get some colour back into your cheeks!” she bade her, with brisk kindliness.

So Mary gathered up Pride of the Litter and wandered out through the postern gate to a small wild piece of land beyond the new bowling green. Obediently she gathered a few primroses, then sat listlessly upon a log with wild violets and anemones starring a fragile pattern about her feet and the small dog dozing on her lap. During that hour before the household supper, when King and courtiers were at table, people strolled in twos and threes about the grassy inner ward. In her loneliness Mary had a sudden longing for Frances and for Mistress Trattle’s comfortable kindness. She had not seen them for so long and saw no hope of doing so without giving in to the Captain of the Guard’s importunities. But she was not left long alone. A shadow fell across the grass and Richard Osborne joined her. Startled, she wondered if Harry had told him what had happened between them after he had left them together a week ago. But his manner was as nonchalant as usual. He merely admired the bunch of flowers lying on the log and, seating himself beside her, began to talk casually of this and that as anyone might do upon so sweet an evening. He told her how his servant’s lame horse was doing, then spoke of his growing understanding of the Wight and of his liking for Edward Worsley, asking her if she knew him.

“To say good-morning or curtsy to, as we all do,” she told him. “I meet him out riding on the downs sometimes. I think he must love them as I do. And sometimes in the previous Governor’s time he used to come up here to dinner. He is considered one of the handsomest young men on the island.”

“By you?” he teased.

“Certainly by my friend Frances Trattle. Did you see her when you went to the ‘Rose and Crown,’ Master Osborne?”

“I did. And a ravishing sight it was.”

“Was she wearing her tabbed crimson gown?”

“And a lace cavalier collar that became her.”

“It seems true what they say about your having an eye for pretty women. You know that she is to marry Master Newland?”

Osborne stretched his long legs and looked down upon her disapproval with amusement. “So she informed me when I would have kissed her.”

“And so you deserved!”

“But she had the good sense not to tell me until it was too late.”

Mary had to laugh, picturing the engaging scene. It sounded so like Frances. “If you should see her again I pray you have the kindness to explain why I have not been to see her, and tell her how much I miss her.”

“I will make it my business to see her,” he promised.

“In order to kiss her again?” asked Mary, with an unaccountable prick of jealousy.

“No. To give her your message.” Having brought back the adorable dimple to her cheek and banished the desperate unhappiness from her eyes, he judged it time to say what he had followed her out there to say. “You do not need to sit here all alone, my poor gallant child. There is no rogues’ meeting being held this evening in your hospitable room.”

So he had guessed about her and Harry. She looked up in surprise and asked him why there would be no meeting.

“The Governor has had a letter from Derby House. One of those letters which put him into what your islanders call ‘a fair firk.’ The Major of the new foot company brought it. You must have seen them come marching in this afternoon.”

“Why, yes. But I was thinking—of something else—” Seeing the unusual gravity of her companion’s face, Mary jerked her mind back from personal grief to practical issues. “Does he suspect about—that Monday night?” she asked with uncanny intuition.

“Only a general suspicion, I think. After all, there is nothing he can pin on any of us. But we thought it wisest not to meet.”

“Of course.” Mary sat pondering for a moment or two, then tumbled the spaniel almost roughly off her lap. “Is it anyone in particular this time?” she asked, remembering how Napier and the little tailor had been sent away.

“Captain Titus, I fancy. And Harry.” Hearing the sharp little gasp that escaped her lips, he picked up the bunch of primroses and buried his nose in their sweetness in order to give her time. “They were both sent for and questioned an hour or so ago. Oh, they gave nothing away, I assure you. But those of us who are in this thing must be careful not to be seen too much together.”

“My father?” she asked quickly. “Did anyone see him let you in?”

“No. Definitely no, Mary. I am more grateful than I can say for that.”

She called to Pride of the Litter who was attracting attention to them by yelping excitedly down a rabbit hole, and Osborne, slipping her posy with masculine carelessness into his pocket, got up in his leisurely way to pull him out for her.

“How could news about anything we do here come in a letter from London?” she asked, absently watching his efforts.

“I do not know. But Cromwell’s espionage system is most efficient.” Heedless of the earth on his expensively tailored coat, he tucked the disobedient little creature firmly under his arm. “Harry asked me to explain that if he keeps away it is so that he may not draw suspicion upon you. Upon you particularly, who have been suspected before.”

Even that small message was of comfort to her. She began to walk back towards the Governor’s house and Osborne fell into step beside her. But as they were about to pass through the postern gate she paused uncertainly. “Thank you for coming to tell me about—everything. But would it not be wiser for you to wait a few minutes so as not to be seen with me?” she suggested, thinking for the first time of
his
safety.

But Osborne only laughed. “You do not have to add me to the list of your tender concerns, my sweet. Do you not realize that I am hand in glove with the Captain of the Guard, who is so much in favour at Westminster that he has this very day been recommended for his majority?”

“Oh, no!”

“And that I shall make it my business to be on good terms with this new Major who has arrived to-day—whose name happens to be Cromwell?”

“Cromwell!” At sound of the all-powerful name Mary stopped short in her tracks.

“Oliver’s nephew. And therefore vaguely related by marriage to our conscientious Governor.”

“Is that why he has been sent here?” asked Mary, in her innocence.

Osborne shrugged, and in full view of Rolph and a grinning guard handed over the subdued spaniel. “Scarcely, I should imagine. More likely as a goad—or a watchdog.”

And Colonel Hammond, standing gloomily before his window in the officers’ quarters, had come to much the same conclusion. Those bureaucrats at Derby House might have spared him this, he thought. True, he was glad enough of the extra company of well-trained men but he had no need of a ranting Puritan always at his elbow. Did Parliament consider him disloyal or inefficient because he tried to preserve courtesy towards his prisoner? And now they wanted him to obtain and to send them secretly a copy of the terms offered to the King by the Scottish Commissioners. And no doubt had sent this self-righteous young sprig of the Cromwells to make sure that he did so.

Robert Hammond took an angry turn or two about the room. To
obtain
. Why did they not say outright to
steal
? Charles must have those terms in writing somewhere, but he would certainly keep them under lock and key. Did the coarse-grained hypocrites expect him to pick the lock of his Majesty’s writing desk like a common thief? And rifle through his private papers? If so they had better relieve him of his command and give it to some low fellow like Rolph. And allow him, Robert Hammond, the son of the learned divine, to retire to some quiet place where he could at least live with some remnants of his self-respect.

That they were beginning to consider him inefficient Hammond could not doubt. Back by the window, he paused in his angry striding to draw a much-folded letter from his pocket and to read it through for the third time. Once again the busybodies at Derby House were presuming to know more about what went on in his household than he did. They were urging him to have a very careful eye kept in those about the King, lest some of them should help him to escape one of these dark nights. As though he himself had not taken every precaution. A conservator approved by Parliament at each of the King’s bedroom doors, bars fixed at his window and guards set all round the battlements. In this last letter they had even gone so far as to hint at the untrustworthiness of Captain Titus, with his fine republican war record, and at Firebrace, one of the most capable and popular officials in the whole castle. Two men who never made trouble with either party. He had felt obliged to question them, and a rare fool he had looked. Was he in any way dissatisfied with the way in which they performed their duties, they had asked; and there had been absolutely nothing he could find fault with.