Mary of Carisbrooke (11 page)

Mary made no great effort to free herself. “If anyone came along unexpectedly as I did, you would just seem to be standing there—reading a letter, perhaps, by the light of the passage lantern,” she concluded with excusable triumph. She had no idea how she would find means to cut the tapestry, she was desperately afraid of all this new exciting secrecy; but to be held close against him with the warmth of his approval flowing over her was ample recompense for the wildest risks she might be called upon to run.

Yet her companion’s mind was already back with his master. “Consider what it will mean to him, having letters from his family, even if we cannot yet arrange anything,” he said. “The young Duke of York is in Cromwell’s hands. And his Majesty often longs for news of little Princess Elizabeth and the boy, Henry of Gloucester, who are always being moved from place to place.”

“What do you mean by ‘arrange anything’?” asked Mary, a trifle tartly. She would have liked more of his attention herself, and for once other people’s misfortunes left her unmoved.

He did not answer her directly. He had twisted his head away from her so as to see the beginning of the next flight of stairs. “Did you say the housekeeper’s room was up there? And are there no guards?” he asked.

“Of course not. They are our private quarters. My father comes there when he is off duty.”

“Do you suppose your aunt would allow me to come up and visit you sometimes?”

Mary nodded, her eyes shining.

“And to bring some of my friends?”

“You mean—because—of all this?”

“To have some place where we can all meet.”

“I think she would,” said Mary, more soberly. “She and Mistress Trattle are both Royalists.”

“I know. I met the Trattles, you remember. And Master Newland.”

A new and chastening idea came to her. “Was that why you wanted to come with me on Christmas Eve?”

He was aware of the hurt hardness in her voice, but liked her too well to lie. “I asked permission to come here in order to serve the King,” he said gravely. “But even if there were no question of king or captivity—if life were simple again for both of us—I should always be absurdly happy in your company. You do believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Mary, you are adorable! But besides your company I need your help.”

“How can anyone so unimportant as I help you?” she asked.

He took one of the hands lying folded in her lap and began gently pushing back her fingers one by one. “Do you not see, my sweet? You have lived here all your life. Everyone—soldiers and servants alike—will do anything for you. You know every cranny in the castle. You can come and go unsuspected. You look so young—so guilelessly young—Hammond probably thinks of you as still a child.”

Exasperated, Mary pulled her hand away. “And how do
you
think of me?” she wanted to ask, as she felt sure Frances would have done. But coquetry was not in her. “I will take whatever letters the King has given you and try to see the messenger at the ‘Rose and Crown’ again, if that is what you want and if it will keep the King happy,” she promised, with a cool perspicacity which belied his stressing of her guileless youth.

Firebrace handed the letters over to her admiringly and watched her tuck them into the bosom of her gown. “Probably he is particularly depressed just now because of poor Burley,” he said. “Did they ever meet?”

“A few days before you came. It was Burley’s dearest wish to see the King, and when he came up to the castle with all the other gentry his Majesty was particularly gracious to him, my father says. It must be terrible for kings when men die for them.”

“They must get used to it, I suppose. So many men die for them in battle.” Firebrace stood up, pulling her to her feet with him, so that they stood facing each other at the end of the narrow passage. “It is more than keeping the King happy in captivity now,” he told her abruptly. “There are some who think that what Parliament did to Burley they may try to do to his Majesty.”

“Harry!” Mary caught at his arm, incredulous. She pictured that gentle, dignified figure—now so familiar to them all—walking briskly on the battlements, watching the master-gunner’s small son playing at soldiers, writing letters by candlelight in his bedroom, as he probably was now. Letters which he, unlike his subjects, was denied means of despatching. Suddenly, poignantly, she saw the possibility of his danger. “Oh, but they could not!” she cried pitifully. “What cruelty has he ever done?”

“Power, in the hands of men who have not had time to learn how to use it, is divorced from reason. They become drunk with it,” he told her. “And now Parliament is driven on by the Army, which has already tasted blood.”

“You do not really believe that they will ever seek to kill him?”

Firebrace was looking back along the passage towards the State Room. Whether he believed it or not, his face had that pale, withdrawn look which could momentarily quench his gaiety. “It has been done before—every time a sovereign has been imprisoned,” he said, as if trying to pile up a backing for his own thoughts. “Edward the Second at Berkeley, Richard the Second at Pontefract, Henry the Sixth in the Tower of London—”

From watching his face, Mary turned, too, to look along the passage towards the King’s door. “Then it is more than merely—letters,” she whispered. “You mean, he must—”

“Escape.”

His firm hands had gripped hers, and they were still standing there when a convivial voice at the foot of the stairs brought them back to the smaller necessity of immediate action. “Titus!” said Firebrace, preparing to take up his stance outside the King’s door.

“You sound glad,” accused Mary, for whom the intimate moments had sped all too rapidly.

He turned and grinned at her, his ordinary cheerful self again. “I am hungry. I missed my supper,” he explained.

“So did I,” she confessed. Their healthy young hunger, their exchanged smiles and the warm excitement of shared conspiracy seemed to have exorcized the cold ghost of impending tragedy. With her foot on the first stair of the upper flight and her skirts gathered ready for flight, Mary called back to him in a laughing whisper. “Come up to my aunt’s room
now
,” she invited, “and I will coax the new bride, Libby Rudy, to bring us some supper by the fire!”

The housekeeper’s room, with its homely atmosphere of domesticity, was the last place likely to be associated in people’s minds with intrigue. It was cheerfully bright with dormer windows facing east and west, and sweet with the scent of samples of drying herbs. On a solid work table neatly written laundry lists and notes about needful household stores gave evidence of Mistress Wheeler’s prosaic daytime activities, and the discreetly tapestried four-poster suggested only a place for well learned repose.

But as the new year began to slip by the room sometimes took on a different guise. Between dusk and supper, as soon as the curtains were drawn, strangely assorted guests stole quietly up the backstairs. Mary would go round snuffing the candles so that from outside the room appeared to be untenanted, the last arrival would shoot the bolt, and the great bed would be drawn out a little from the wall so as to afford a hiding place in case of any unforeseen interruption. As Druscilla Wheeler poured heartening red wine into her best Venetian glasses and Mary handed it round to the little company the quietly spoken toast would be “The King, God save him!” There would be a warm smile and a nod above each raised glass, and a drawing together of recently acquainted people in a close bond of good comradeship. These were the most exciting gatherings Mary had ever attended, and she no longer envied Frances the gay, inconsequent parties she was invited to in Newport.

While the seven people present finished their wine on an evening early in February, Mary settled herself on a low stool by the hearth and looked round at them, seeing the faces of most of them interestingly illuminated by the firelight. Aunt Druscilla, upright in her high-backed chair, with her white lace collar and severe black gown and a spot of colour on either prominent cheekbone. Captain Titus, the Conservator so implicitly trusted by Parliament, hovering uneasily by one of the windows. Cresset, the Treasurer, and Dowcett, Clerk of the Kitchen, sitting side by side in their fashionable Court clothes on the well-worn settle; with the King’s barber and Napier, one of the royal tailors, squatting on the floor near them. And Harry Firebrace, who had answered to his hostess for the reliability of all of them, perched on a corner of her table. At first each of them had been surprised to meet some of the others in that secret coterie; but however different their political professions or their social status, in the housekeeper’s room all voiced their opinions freely. Being united in so risky and important an enterprise, each depended upon the absolute loyalty of the rest. “It must be hard for Harry Firebrace,” thought Mary, noting Richard Osborne’s absence, “if he cannot trust his own friend sufficiently to bring him.”

“You say, Madam, that Monday is the best day for us to meet?” the swarthy little tailor was saying.

“Because it is Court day,” confirmed Druscilla Wheeler.

“The Governor has to spend most of it trying cases down in the Court Room—millers who have overcharged for grinding people’s corn or men caught plundering a wreck,” explained Mary, who knew that the little man had only recently come across from London with Cromwell’s permission to make the King a generous supply of new clothes.

“Even now, although it is almost dark, they are still coming in,” added Titus, holding back a corner of the heavy curtain and peering out. “Judging by the number of lanterns I can see bobbing about, Hammond should be kept down there safely until supper time.”

“And what about Busybody Rolph?” asked Dowcett.

“Last time I saw him he was in the officers’ quarters talking to Dick Osborne,” said Firebrace, with a hint of amused satisfaction in his voice.

Mary looked at him in puzzled surprise. “They are always together nowadays, thick as thieves,” she said. “I had supposed Master Osborne was
your
friend.”

“My invaluable friend! ” replied Firebrace. “Keeping the gallant Captain of the Guard occupied and no doubt learning things at the same time.”

“What sort of things?” asked Mary, feeling that he was making fun of her.

“Oh, how best to wheedle a pass to go outside the gates, and when and where normally humane men of the original garrison are likely to be on guard,” replied Firebrace airily.

“And Rolph is like to be learning a variety of things too, if I know Osborne!” chuckled Francis Cresset. “How to pick a wench, for instance—saving your presence, Mistress Wheeler—and how
not
to pick his teeth at table.”

“It is odd how these self-righteous, jumped-up Puritans secretly hanker after the very things they affect to despise,” agreed Druscilla Wheeler contemptuously. “Master Osborne’s good birth and wild reputation with women make even easier bait in that direction than we dared to hope. And the impressive fact that his uncle is Deputy Governor of Guernsey.”

Mary was surprised at the reference to Osborne’s reputation, but from her lowly stool she looked up at her aunt admiringly. Although older than all of them Druscilla Wheeler had, without fuss or Royalist protestations, entered into their scheme with the same matter-of-fact efficiency that she brought to bear upon her extra household burdens. Several of them smiled at her incongruous duplicity; but their time was precious, and while Titus kept watch from time to time from either window, they came abruptly to the matters for which they were met.

“For the passing of the King’s private correspondence Witherings, the newly appointed postmaster, can by no means be trusted,” announced Cresset, who had sounded him while arranging for the forwarding of financial accounts to Parliament. “Did Hammond appoint him purposely in place of some honest island fellow, Madam?”

“We never had a postmaster before,” his hostess told him. “The few letters we wrote before you all came were taken across by the coney man who sells our rabbits in the mainland markets.”

“How exquisitely casual!” laughed Firebrace. “But mercifully we have other means now. Before coming over here I made sure of two trusty messengers between Southampton and London and so far every letter in or out has arrived safely.”

“And Bosvile is often in Newport in some fantastic disguise or other. Friend Trattle always knows where to find him,” said Cresset.

“And our Mary here is invaluable, with letters from half the Stuart family neatly folded in the King’s clean linen!” declared Dowcett, drawing her back in friendly fashion so that she leaned against his knee.

“In code, I hope!” put in Titus anxiously.

“His Majesty has been using one for months, and since figures are my
metier
I have been helping him to keep it up to date,” Cresset assured him. “And besides the code numbers for ordinary words, all those whom he corresponds with—his family, his friends in Scotland, even we here who are prepared to help him escape—are known by letters of the alphabet. Did you know, Mary, that you are called ‘B’ in the King of England’s code?”

“And sometimes referred to as ‘asparagus’ or ‘artichokes’,” teased Dowcett, noting how she blushed with pleasure. “You would laugh to hear our conversation at dinner, all of the King’s devising, and held quite openly under the Governor’s very nose. ‘An it please your Majesty I have been able to get some
asparagus
from London,’ I say, as a careful Clerk of the Kitchen should. Which means that I have passed a packet of his letters on to you. And if I should add ‘Knowing how your Majesty dotes on them, I have also ordered some
artichokes
,’ then he understands that you have been able to pass them on to Major Bosvile, and looks inordinately pleased.”

“Why, I did not know that he so much as noticed me when I go in to make the bed or bring the linen!” gasped Mary.

“His Majesty is remarkably observant, but for safety’s sake must pretend not to be. For the same reason he often looks sourly at me when the Governor or other members of the household are present, and then of his graciousness asks my forgiveness afterwards.” Cresset turned more soberly to Firebrace. “Who would you say, of the household, can be counted upon not to betray us even though they take no active part, Harry?”

“Anthony Mildmay and certainly Thomas Herbert,” decided Firebrace, after a moment’s consideration.

“And, of the garrison, my brother,” promised Mistress Wheeler.

“And among the servants old Brett, who can pretend to be deaf as an adder when it suits him. And I think my aunt’s maid, Libby,” added Mary.

“But you told me she is married to that long Cromwellian fellow, Rudy,” objected Firebrace.

“I doubt if Libby notices what a man’s politics are so long as his body pleases her,” said her Mistress, with an almost tolerant smile.

“It is just that she thinks I was once kind to her,” murmured Mary. “And Brett goes in and out of the State Room several times a day to see to the fires. I think I could persuade him—”

Firebrace slid down from the table and came to join her by the hearth. “The castle must be full of people you have been kind to!” he laughed. “What ingenious plan have you been hatching now, Mary Floyd?”

“I thought perhaps if he and the King changed clothes when he goes in last thing in the evening and the King is alone—they are both little men—” In her modesty, Mary glanced round the room, half expecting the simplicity of her idea to meet with ridicule; but seven pairs of eyes were regarding her attentively. And presently they were all discussing the project with animation.

His Majesty would have to pass one of the Conservators,” pointed out his tailor.

“It could be Captain Titus,” Mistress Wheeler reminded them.

“The plan sounds feasible,” agreed Dowcett eagerly. “His Majesty, carrying the empty coal hod, would then walk towards the servants’ quarters, I take it? And then make for the little postern gate near the keep.”

“How would he get past the sentries there?” two of them asked in unison.

“Brett has a sister in the village whom he is allowed to visit of an evening when his work is done. He wears an old hooded cloak when he goes out and limps a little like the King does when he is tired,” Mary told them. “And if the King would deign to smear his face with wood ash—”

“If your plan worked it would give his Majesty a whole night’s start,” admitted Titus, impressed.

“But what would they do to poor Brett when they found him in the State Room next morning?” At thought of that inevitable sequel the colour faded from Mary’s face. She could have bitten her tongue for speaking so glibly on the spur of the moment. Her one thought had been to please Harry Firebrace; but bent old Brett, who had shown her small kindnesses since her childhood, meant more to her than any king. “No, no, we cannot ask the poor old man to do that! ” she cried, catching at Firebrace’s hand as he stood beside her. “Please, please, forget what I said!”

Firebrace squeezed her hand reassuringly. Besides realizing her distress, he doubted his royal master’s ability to act the part or to improvise quickly enough in strange surroundings. Moreover, he had for days been trying to work out a plan of his own. “It seems to me that we who serve his Majesty and wish to save him should bear the risks ourselves,” he said, and turned towards the two men seated on the floor. “What was the idea you two were beginning to speak of when we were down in the courtyard and Captain Rolph came prying by?” he asked.

The King’s assistant barber, who had so far contributed nothing to the conversation, rose from the hearth and began pressing at the floorboards with his foot as though to test their thickness. “From where we were standing it seemed to us that this room must be the one above his Majesty’s bedroom,” he said.

“Immediately above,” confirmed Mary.

He nodded in the direction of the bolted door. “And outside, on this floor, there would be no guards at all?”

“No. These are our own private quarters,” Mistress Wheeler told him. “Why?”

“It occurred to Napier and me that if we could cut a hole in the State Room ceiling—”

“Which no one would notice, of course!” scoffed Titus.

“Neither would they. Not if it was made over the disused music gallery,” snapped the little tailor, his eyes shining in the firelight as he sat cross-legged by the hearth. “First thing I saw when I was fitting his Majesty was that gallery, and that no one coming in and out of the room ever thinks of looking up there. A man working right at the back of it would scarcely be seen.”

“There is no way up to it since the backstairs passage has been built,” Mistress Wheeler told him.

“I could take a length of rope in my bag, and a saw hidden in a bale of cloth. As Groom-of-the-Bedchamber, Master Firebrace is usually the only person in attendance while his Majesty is being fitted.”

“And early one morning while I am shaving his Majesty I could choose my opportunity to call up to you and some of you could draw him up,” said the barber.

They discussed the fantastic plan and found it over-weighted with difficulties. “If by the ceiling why not by the window?” suggested Cresset.

“And if it be possible by the window, why not straight down into the courtyard and be done with it?” asked Firebrace.

“In full view of the guardhouse?” pointed out Titus.

“We should have to choose a very dark night,” conceded Firebrace.

“You have a definite plan?” asked Dowcett.

“Osborne and I have a half-made one.”

“Tell us.”

“Wait! There is someone outside the door,” warned Mary.

Some of them sprang silently to their feet and for a moment or two all stood tense, listening to a faint scratching sound. “It
is
Osborne!” said Firebrace, relaxing. And as the others resumed their places with a sigh of relief, he hurried to admit him.

“I have held your Captain enthralled with all my best bawdy stories for the best part of an hour. He abhors liquor and I am parched,” announced the King’s tall Usher. “A glass of wine, I beseech you Mistress Wheeler, before I wilt.”

He took the wine from Mary, smiled down at her with a quirk of his strongly marked brows and lounged over to the window seat. All the little company turned eagerly towards him. “We hear you have a plan,” they said. But he merely waved his glass in the direction of his friend. “It is Harry who is gifted with powers of invention,” he told them, disclaiming all merit in the matter. “I merely clown or play watchdog as I am bid.”