Mary of Carisbrooke (31 page)

“How glad I am that I was able to help in that!”

“How did you manage it?” asked Mary.

“It was quite simple really. We were at St. James’s Palace at the time, which is old and rambling. After supper one evening I suggested that we should play ‘hide and seek,’ pretending it was to amuse Henry. I had laid out some clothes of mine and when it was James’s turn to hide I kept watch in the corridor outside my room and called to Henry to search in the opposite direction, James dressed up in my clothes and slipped down the backstairs and out into the garden. Someone had given him the key of a small gate into the street, and a Colonel Bamfield was waiting there with a couple of horses. My poor brother had to ride side-saddle all the way to the coast, but he made quite a creditable girl, Mary. His hair is fair like mine. A good thing it wasn’t Charles, who is six-foot two and swarthy as a Spaniard!”

“Why, Bess, how lovely to hear you laughing again!” exclaimed Judith, coming in from a stolen hour with John Barmiston and relieved to find her charge looking so much better. “This evening you must play us those new dance tunes Lady Sydney taught you. It will do you good. You see how right I was, Mary.”

It was true enough. And Elizabeth had not been in Carisbrooke a week before she was teaching Rogue tricks and playing the little organ in the Presence Chamber. “After all, someone who has been with her for months must know more about her health than I do,” thought Mary. And that evening Judith even persuaded her charge to put on a pretty dove-grey, tabbed gown and had dressed her chestnut hair in becoming ringlets. After supper they must all dance, she said, so Mary told the servants to light all the candles they could find sconces for and produced an old leather-trunk full of clothes which some past Governor and his lady had left behind. Henry plunged into it with delight and insisted upon everyone dressing up. Even Anthony Mildmay and Lovall joined in to please him, and the equerry, who had a fine voice, sang some love songs and soon the old hall was a riot of noise and colour and kindliness.

“The room looks as it used to at Christmas and Twelfth Night in Lady Portland’s time when I was a child,” said Mary happily, feeling that Judith’s high spirits and the children’s laughter would somehow help to dispel the unhappy thoughts that must hang there.

It was the first time she had seen Elizabeth Stuart in anything but mourning, and as the girl sat at the organ with the candlelight on her hair, Mary wondered how she could ever have thought her plain.

“Bess must dance too. Master Lovall, you must play for us,” ordered Judith, sparkling and generous as she always was when all men’s eyes were upon her. And Lovall, more accustomed as he was to anthems and canticles, goodnaturedly allowed them to laugh at the jerky sounds he produced in his efforts at a coranto. Elizabeth danced as lightly as any of them, and laughed as gaily. “Dear Judith, how dull life would be without you!” she cried, as her gentlewoman set young Henry and the doting equerry capering in a country dance which Mary was showing them. But before long the young Princess’s laughter turned to coughing, and she was lying back pale and exhausted in her father’s chair.

“Should we not stop and have Mistress Briot take you to your room?” suggested Mildmay anxiously.

But Elizabeth would not hear of it. “No, no, they all look so happy,” she insisted. “It was often like this at home. My brothers would dance with me for a short while and then I would have to sit down and watch. But I did not mind very much. They were all so amusing, were they not, Henry? ‘I must dance with Little Temperance first,’ Charles would say to my lovely elder sister Mary, ‘because she will not last out as long as you.” Elizabeth sighed and turned her cheek to the red velvet where her father’s greying head had so often rested. “Oh, dear God, these last years have been so lonely! Let me last out until I see them all again!” Mary heard her murmur.

Tired as she had been, Elizabeth was up betimes next morning, and when Mary and Libby passed through the Presence Chamber on their way to make her bed, she was writing diligently at her father’s desk. It was a hot August day and Judith was trying to coax her to go out of doors. “I have something else to do,” the Princess said with unusual sharpness.

“Surely, on a morning like this, you are not struggling with that Greek translation Master Lovall set you?” remonstrated Judith.

“No. I am writing in plain English. Something which I should have written down weeks ago. But there is no reason why
you
should not go out. Truth to tell, I would rather be alone.”

Judith shrugged and left her.

To Mary it seemed miraculous that a girl four years younger than herself should be able to read and write in several languages. That she should be bilingual, having a French mother, was only natural; but she was frequently to be heard helping her young brother with his Latin or with a translation of some portion of the Scriptures. Perhaps now she preferred to be alone because she was making some entry in her Commonplace Book which she did not want anyone to see. But when Mary passed quietly through the room again she noticed, although Elizabeth was careful to turn her head away, that the page before her was smudged with tears.

An hour or two later Elizabeth called for wax and sealed two packets, one of which she handed to Mildmay, requesting him with quiet dignity to have it despatched to General Cromwell. The other she had locked away in her desk, and, after dinner, seeming much relieved at having finished her long tasks, she suggested a game of bowls.

“Master Mildmay is taking your brother to visit a Sir John Oglander, or some such name,” said Judith. “And John Barmiston is to accompany them. So there will only be Guy Lovall and our two selves.”

“I can play if you want a fourth,” offered Mary diffidently. “I am not at all good, but Master Mildmay was kind enough to teach me when he was here before.”

So together the four of them went out to the green. It was a sultry afternoon and they wore their coolest clothes, but Mary noticed the small clouds piling up over the mainland. “It looks like rain,” she said, recognizing the climatic portents of what old Brett always referred to as a ‘breeder.’ “Shall I run back and bring her Highness’s cloak?”

“What, on a lovely day like this!” scoffed Judith, who was in none too sweet a temper because Barmiston had been snatched away from her to accompany the Duke.

Elizabeth enjoyed her game and, partnering Lovall, won easily. “I was always practising in the hope that one day I should be good enough to play with my father,” she said, when they congratulated her upon her skill.

“But you must not get too hot,” warned Judith. “Let us rest a while in that little pavilion.”

“Colonel Hammond had it built specially for the late King,” Mary told them, as they seated themselves gratefully upon a bench.

“Then he was not quite the ogre the royalist pamphlets always made out?” said Lovall.

“We plagued him and outwitted him whenever we could,” smiled Mary. “But looking back, now that we have Major Rolph as Deputy Governor, he seems to have been a very angel of uprightness. Harry Firebrace told me that the Army had to get him out of the island before they could abduct the King. I hope that he and his kind mother did not suffer for it.”

“I am sure you need have no anxiety on their behalf,” the tutor said. “Colonel Hammond is known to be a fine soldier and will undoubtedly be given some good military appointment, particularly as he is related to Oliver Cromwell, who rules the whole country.”

“This morning I took your advice, dear Master Lovall, and wrote him yet again entreating him to let Henry and me go to our sister in Holland,” Elizabeth told him.

“I think you were very wise. Now that public sympathy has been aroused by your father’s martyrdom they may listen.”

“Was that what you were spending such pains over?” asked Judith.

“Not wholly. There was something much more difficult and now that we are away from—all that,” Elizabeth waved a hand towards the massive pile of the castle rising from within the inner wall, “I would like to ask advice of you, my friends. As you know, before my father died Henry and I were allowed to say good-bye to him.” She stood up as if the more easily to speak of that painful scene and her small face, which had been flushed a moment or two ago, was now alarmingly pale. “He gave me some messages for my mother and for the rest of our family. I was only fourteen, but there was no one else—of his own. ‘Sweetheart, you are so young, you will forget,’ he said.”

Lovall laid a hand on her arm. “Do not distress yourself by trying to tell us—now that it is all over,” he urged gently.

“But I
must
tell you. It is important. More important than anything my father ever asked me to do. You see, these were his last words to those whom he loved. And I promised. I said I would write down all that he said and let them know. But at Penshurst I was too ill. You remember, do you not, Judith, that at first I could not even hold a pen? And afterwards as time went on I could not bring myself to it—it felt like living that terrible hour all over again. The way he took Henry on his knee, and tried to speak cheerfully for our sakes, the way his hands could not part with us and then how he came back to embrace us again because, in my desolation, I could not stop crying.” Elizabeth squared her thin shoulders and made an effort to speak less emotionally. “This morning I made myself write it all down as well as I could remember. But how am I to send it? That is what I want your advice about. I am not even allowed to write to my mother in Paris.”

“Bishop Juxon, perhaps,” suggested Judith.

“But how can I be certain that he would be allowed to send it out of the country?” She turned to Mary and caught at her hand. “I thought perhaps Mary, who sent all those letters for my father, might know of someone—of some way.”

“There is Mistress Jane Whorwood,” suggested Mary, after a moment’s thought. “She would have done anything for his Majesty, and it was she to whom he entrusted those jewels he left you. I have her address because my aunt is staying with her in Oxfordshire.”

“But, my dear child, the world has come to a pretty pass if such sacred messages must be sent clandestinely,” the tutor reminded Elizabeth. “They were not in any way political, I take it?”

“Oh no, Master Lovall. They were just the personal messages which any man condemned to death might send to his wife and children.”

“Then why not give your record of them to Master Mildmay as you gave that other packet—openly, officially?”

“He is very kind,” added Mary. “Although he never entered into our plans against Parliament he has more than once warned us of danger, and whatever he may have seen he never gave away.”

“I do not doubt him. It is those fiends who employ him,” Elizabeth sighed, consideringly. “But I will do as you think best, Master Lovall.”

They got up to play again, but the sky had darkened while they had been discussing the Princess’s problem. There was a rumble of thunder and she was at the far end of the green when the storm broke suddenly in heavy drops, which soon became a downpour. Lovall took off his doublet and put it about her shoulders, but the storm increased so that they were obliged to run the last part of the way across a soaked courtyard. By the time they reached the Governor’s house, laughing and panting, the girls’ frocks were all bedraggled and the tutor, in his shirt sleeves, was soaked to the skin. Elizabeth’s wet hair clung to her cheeks and the water squelched in her thin shoes.

“Oh, my poor new flowered gown!” lamented Judith, who had recently had it as a present from her father.

“Go and change it and Libby will iron it out for you,” called Mary. “I will see to the Princess.”

Wet as she was, she stopped to change every garment Elizabeth had on and sent for a basin of hot water to bathe her feet. She herself took no harm, but at supper Elizabeth ate nothing. She sat shivering, and went to bed early with two bright feverish spots on her cheeks.

“Her Highness got very hot playing, and then the rain came and she must have caught a chill,” Lovall explained to Mildmay, when he and the Duke returned from Nunwell.

“She was upset talking about her father’s farewell,” added Judith, who knew how strongly the Princess’s emotions could affect her.

All next day Mary cosseted her and put hot bricks to her feet, but as the feverishness did not abate Mildmay sent for Doctor Bagnell. His care and kindness were of great comfort, but her condition did not improve. Every day her brother would come in and talk to her as soon as his lessons were done, and although his high spirits and drollery delighted her, she tired far too soon. She had been at Carisbrooke less than a month when Mildmay, now thoroughly alarmed, sent an urgent message to London asking the Stuarts’ family physician to come. The celebrated Doctor Mayerne was an old man and could not face the journey, but sent a younger man who had treated her before. He would be arriving immediately, the messenger said.

“Though what this Doctor Treherne can do for her that our beloved Doctor Bagnell has not already done, I do not know,” sighed Mary.

It would be better not to leave her Highness alone, Bagnell had said, so they took turns at sitting with her. And one evening when Judith was at supper and Mary went into the sick room she found the Princess propped up against her pillows and looking a little stronger. “Oh, Mary, I have been waiting for you,” she said. “It is about my letter—with those messages—”

“You must not worry about that. Master Mildmay sent it to Parliament days ago,” said Mary, smoothing the sheets.

“Oh, I know you all think they will forward it,” said Elizabeth, with the querulousness of sickness. “But how can you expect me to trust the men who murdered my father? Perhaps they will just destroy it as they ignored my brother Charles’s offer of terms?”

“I know how you feel. It is hard that you should have been the only one to whom those messages were given.”

Elizabeth put out a hot, imploring hand. Her eyes burned in her small face. “Mary, in case my letter should never reach them I should like you to know what was in it.”

“Why not tell Judith or Master Lovall?”

“He does not know what it is to lose a father, and she might forget.”

“But how could anyone as unimportant as I—”

“I have so much time in which to think, lying here. And I remembered last night that you once said you might one day go to Holland.”

Mary could not deny the possibility. “Richard Osborne asked me to marry him, and he hopes to join your brother, the new King.”

“You mean the man who helped in both my father’s attempts at escape? And whose uncle was our loyal Governor of Guernsey?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Mary, I am so glad for you! Only sad for all the trouble and danger we Stuarts have caused him.”

“Without it Richard and I could never have met.” Although she smiled and spoke lightly, Mary began to pace back and forth between bed and window. “Our walks in life were so different. It is true that now he will be poor—and probably soldiering. Oh, Elizabeth, should I do right to marry him, do you suppose? Though my aunt was married to a knight, I am only a sergeant’s daughter, with so little experience of life. You are younger than I, I know, but you must know more about such things.”

“But what do I know of love?” For the first time Mary heard bitterness in Elizabeth’s sweet voice, and realized more fully all she had lost. “Had life gone on happily as it used, I suppose I should have been betrothed to some important European prince by now.” A smile passed over the patient’s pale face, to be followed by a fleeting sigh. “But I am sure my brother Charles would say that any man would be more than lucky to have you. Your tender heart, your good looks and—ah, how I envy you!—your good health.”

“For all his wild reputation, I think it is Richard who has the tender heart,” boasted Mary, with a happy smile. “But I must not weary you with my own affairs. Tell me about his late Majesty’s messages, and you will feel easier.”

“In case I should not—as Charles used to say—‘last out’? Henry, I am sure, will always remember what our father said to him. Never to let them crown him while his two elder brothers were alive. Young as he is, Henry swore so valiantly that he would not.

“For the rest, listen carefully. My father said I was not to grieve too much because it was a glorious death he would die for the laws and religion of our land. He had forgiven all his enemies, he said, and exhorted all of us his children to do the same. I have tried and tried, but, oh, it is so difficult, Mary! He said he felt sure God would restore the throne to Charles; and then we, and this poor torn country, would all be happy again.”

The steady, childlike voice was growing weaker. “He blessed me,” she went on as softly as if she were at her prayers, “and sent his blessing to all his family and friends. And above all he bade me tell my mother that his thoughts had never strayed from her and that his love for her would be the same to the last. Somehow I feel that it is that, most specially, which I must make sure is sent for her comfort and never forgotten.”

“I will never forget. And I promise you—if I ever get to Holland—” It was Mary’s voice which failed now.

“Specially, I think I want James to know that our father sent him his love and blessing. Poor James! He was so shamed when he first joined me in London because he had given away some code. He is not the sort of person to do that. I shall always think they threatened to torture him. We young Stuarts have had much to put up with. But like St. Peter’s denial, his youthful lapse and remorse may strengthen his extraordinary loyalty to Charles.” Elizabeth gazed across the small quiet room out to the blue sky above the gatehouse as though she were looking into the future. But presently her head turned on the pillows and she closed her eyes. “I cannot talk any more now—”

“Sleep if you can,” said Mary gently.

“Take Rogue now, and give me my Bible,” murmured Elizabeth. “My father gave it to me and—before I fall asleep—I must try to forgive those enemies as he did.”