Lady in Waiting

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  He sent no word to Bess, waiting while the weary days went by, in her own lodging in the house of the Head Gaoler. At first she was tortured by the fear that his silence was because he thought she had failed him; but in a little, she rid herself of that fear. He had failed her, yes; faced with the choice between them, he had chosen unhesitatingly to break faith with her that he might keep faith with his dream; but she was possessed of a broad enough charity to accept that without bitterness, though not without hurt; and she acquitted him of the injustice of holding her guilty for what happened. No, he sent no word simply because for the present, he had forgotten her. She realised that whatever the outcome of the present coil, he would spend much of his life forgetting her, and she would spend much of hers waiting until he remembered her again.

  She got through the days somehow; she was allowed to exercise in the garden, pacing up and down the walks where the grey towers frowned down on roses and pinks that gave way presently to goodbye-summer. She had books and her embroidery; she was allowed to see Nicholas who was lodging in the City so as to be at hand. Nicholas who had come to her on her first day as a prisoner, half like a sack-clothed penitent, half like a very wrathful brother, saying, ‘Oh Bess, I would not have done such a thing for the world! I could tear myself to shreds when I think that it is all my fault: but how was I to know? Why did you not tell me, you silly wench? God’s life, Bess, I think you might have told me what was in the wind!’

  And Bess had said: ‘I longed to tell you — you do not know how much; but I feared to embroil you in the Queen’s displeasure. Oh, that was coming sure enough; you did but hasten it, my dear.’

  Nicholas came almost every day, and since he had often been with Ralegh before he came to her, it was from him that she gained all her news of her husband. News of his wing-beating, his passionate loverlike letters to the Queen. ‘A veritable Orlando Furioso,’ said Nicholas. There was something faintly ridiculous about it all; but Bess knew that to Ralegh there was nothing ridiculous; and her heart ached for him — and a little, for herself.

  On a day early in September, Nicholas burst upon her at an unusually early hour, obviously big with news which he could scarcely hold back until he had greeted her. ‘Bess, Oh Bess! Ralegh’s ships have come in! They’ve taken two East India carracks, and brought them into Dartmouth! Ralegh is bating like a haggard hawk because he’s mewed up here and cannot get to them!’

  It was not the full and overwhelming vengeance for Sir Richard Grenville that his cousin had hoped for, but it was not be sneezed at all the same. Already Sir John Borough, the Vice-Admiral of the Fleet had written exultantly to the Queen, that they had taken such a prize as never had been seen before. And now they rode at anchor under the guns of Dartmouth Castle, the Santa Cruz and the Madre de Dios, cut out from the Plate Fleet as sheep are cut out from a flock by the shepherd’s dog, and towering many-decked like floating castles among the smaller, lighter craft of an English harbour.

  The Queen was pleased. Royal commissioners were appointed to secure to her the lion’s share of the prize, which she took to be her due; but quick as she was to act, the men of the West Country were quicker. Before the commissioners could lay a finger on the rich cargoes, a large part had disappeared, and more followed every hour, carried off by seamen and merchants, gentle and simple. The whole West Country gathered to the spoil like a flock of joyful ravens to a kill, and the Queen’s commissioners were powerless to stop the looting.

  Robert Cecil, sent down post-haste by the Privy Council, wrote to his father that every traveller he met on the road carried a bag that smelled of musk or amber. He descended on Dartmouth like a whirlwind, and the Queen’s commissioners were only too thankful to shift the burden of responsibility on to his thin, crooked shoulders. He demanded to know where the missing treasure chests were hidden, and finding the people stubborn, remitted two innkeepers to gaol. That had some effect, but not much. He ransacked Dartmouth and Plymouth, bringing to light a good deal of booty under beds and up chimneys, including a large pot of musk and a bag of seed pearls. He intercepted letters from public-spirited citizens to their friends in London, bidding them come down without delay and promising to do what they could for them. But all this was of little real avail. ‘Fouler weather, more desperate ways, more obstinate people did I never meet with,’ he wrote home.

  Word of all this trickled through to Ralegh in the Tower, and sent him into a fever of rage and frustration. To hear of the richest cargo that the world had ever seen, running through the hands of incompetent zanies, while he, who alone could have dealt with the situation, was mewed within stone walls at the other side of England, was enough to drive a man mad. He changed his tactics with the Queen; he ceased to write her the letters of a spurned lover, and instead, concentrated on convincing her that he and he alone could save her share of the Madre de Dios for her.

  He was not alone in this belief, for unknown to him, Sir John Hawkins was even then writing to Burghley to the effect that no one but Ralegh could deal with the Devon and Cornish men looting the treasure carracks.

  Early on the morning of September 16th, the Lieutenant of the Tower himself brought Bess the news that she was free. Ralegh’s letters to the Queen, or Hawkins’ to Burghley, or a combination of both, had borne fruit, and her husband was to be released immediately and sent down to Dartmouth, albeit with a Keeper. The Lieutenant was a courteous soul; he offered his felicitations, bowed over Bess’s hand, and departed, twiddling a clove carnation.

  When he had gone, Bess turned to the Head Gaoler’s wife, who was with her, smiling a little uncertainly. ‘It is so long since I had my liberty, that I have forgot how to use it. What shall I do now?’

  ‘If it were me, I’d wait,’ said her companion judicially. ‘I’d wait quietly here until my man came for me,’ and she bustled away to attend to her napery.

  Left to herself, Bess did not summon her henchwoman, but herself gathered her few possessions together, and tied them in a cloak, that she might not keep Ralegh waiting when he came. That done, she went to the window, and stood looking out. She could glimpse trees above a grey rampart, trees turning dun and golden against a harebell sky, and a blue waft of bonfire smoke drifting across the morning.

  Someone pushed open the door behind her, and she whirled about. ‘Walter!’ — she began, and broke off. Nicholas stood in the doorway. She looked beyond him, but he was alone.

  He came in, leaving the door wide. ‘Bess! I’ve but now heard the news!’ He slid an arm round her and kissed her loudly. ‘You have your bundle ready? Good girl. We’ll have you out of here in ten minutes.’

  Bess hesitated, uncertain. ‘Is Walter coming to me here, or am I to go to him?’

  Nicholas, looking suddenly uncomfortable, said with false heartiness; ‘Ralegh bade me take you home to Beddington, and keep you there until he comes for you.’

  ‘But — am I not to see him before he goes?’

  She was searching his face with eyes grown more shadowy than usual. He shook his head. ‘He is already gone. He was leaving as I arrived.’

  *

  So Bess rode down to Beddington with her brother, and was greeted with worried kindness by her Uncle Francis Carew. She slipped into her usual place there; she rode hawking with Nicholas and their Uncle, helped the housekeeper in the still-room, sat over her embroidery or played the virginals in the evening. Save for Joan’s ceaseless scolding, it was as though the ride to Islington had never been; as though Ralegh had never stood at his stairfoot, looking up and telling her ‘I have been waiting for that all my life — to see you come downstairs with a rose in your girdle.’

  She was waiting now.

  It was well into the next month before any further word of Ralegh came to her; and then, being told by a servant that there was a gentleman wanting speech with her, who had come a long way seemingly, she hurried to the gallery where the stranger had been left, and found a thick-set man standing by the table, lightly fingering over a posy of autumn violets i
n a crystal cup which she had set there earlier in the day.

  He wore a plain, dark doublet and hose, old, but well cut, and a case of rapiers at his hip; and it was not until he heard her step and looked up, that she recognised Lawrence Kemys; and the sick disappointment that had swept over her as she realised that it was not Ralegh ebbed a little.

  ‘These are pretty,’ he said, with a final touch to the dark petals, and came to bow over her hand. ‘Lady Ralegh.’

  ‘They smell less sweet than in the spring,’ Bess said. ‘You bring me a letter from my husband, Captain Kemys?’

  He flushed, suddenly ill at ease, as Nicholas had been. ‘I — Not exactly. He had no time to write one.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bess; and another small bud of hope died in her. ‘He sent me some message by you instead?’

  ‘A message — yes.’ Lawrence Kemys recovered himself at once, but for one instant he had looked completely blank; and the blankness told Bess all too plainly that Ralegh had sent no message, had probably not even known that his Captain intended coming here. The man had come in the kindness of his heart, to bring her word of her husband, not word from him.

  She smiled into his troubled face consolingly. ‘He has been so very busy ... You have been down to Dartmouth, then? How did that come about?’

  He returned her smile, obviously thankful for the change of subject. ‘Sir Walter sent me word that he needed a man to his back, one who was not of the venture, to act as his Lieutenant, as ‘twere. So I left the Crane to herself awhile, and posted down to the West after him, and now I am on my way back.’

  They were seated by this time, she in a high-backed chair, he in the window-seat, and she looked up at him, seeing his pleasant, guileless face dark against the sunlight of the autumn afternoon. ‘This is well off your direct road to Deptford; have you turned so far out of your way, to bring me news?’

  ‘I thought you would be glad of news.’

  ‘That was very kind of you,’ Bess said. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Working like a man possessed of the devil. You will know what like he is, when he has a venture on his hands, or an idea in his head. And just now the idea in his head is to save every seed pearl and drop of musk that is humanly or inhumanly possible, out of the West Indies cargo — above all, to save the Queen’s share for her.’

  ‘The Queen’s share, yes, that before all,’ Bess said. ‘And how does the work go?’

  ‘Well enough,’ Kemys told her. ‘He has every seaman in the West eating out of his hand. I did not see his first coming among them, but those who did, told me that the men who had been acting like bloody Barbary corsairs came tossing up their bonnets and shouting round him as they had been little lads out of school.’ He sat silent a moment, and then added thoughtfully: ‘That is a passing strange thing about Sir Walter; he is not what you could call popular — not the people’s darling, as My Lord of Essex —’ Bess appreciated the understatement, knowing well that she had married one of the best hated men in England. ‘But where West Country folk — West Country seamen above all — are concerned, he has but to whistle, and they are his, body and soul!’

  ‘He is a West Countryman and a seaman himself,’ Bess suggested.

  The other shook his head. ‘So was Sir Richard Grenville, so are Drake and Hawkins, but none of them could count the whole West as his demesne, and every man who goes down to the sea from Seaton round to Minehead for his liegeman.’

  Bess said nothing, but warmed to her husband’s Captain still further.

  Kemys gave a reflective chuckle. ‘Sir Robert Cecil would have had him keep his gaoler in the background, thinking it might harm his prestige if it were seen that he was not yet wholly free. But Sir Walter knew better than that. He kept the man well to the fore, all the while, and when any congratulated him on his liberty, he shook his head and said that he was still the Queen of England’s poor prisoner. He — I think he enjoyed that very much.’

  Their eyes met in complete understanding. Both of them knew and loved Ralegh. ‘I am very sure he did,’ Bess said, with the sudden laughter twitching at the corners of her mouth. ‘But you speak of all this as in the past. Has he finished that which he went to do?’

  ‘Very near. It is so, that I am on my way back.’

  ‘And will he be coming back soon, too?’

  ‘Any day. I should think any day; but one can never count one’s chickens with Sir Walter.’

  They sat talking for a while, until Lawrence Kemys got up, saying that he must be on his road. Remembrance of her duties as a hostess woke belatedly in Bess, and she prayed him to stay to supper; at least to drink a cup of wine before he went. He accepted the stirrup cup, but refused supper, saying that he wished to be in Deptford before dark. Heaven alone knew what those fools at the Dockyard had done to the Crane in his absence. He drank to her happiness, took a grave and courteous leave of her, and departed.

  Three days later, Bess came down the great staircase to find Ralegh shedding a wet riding-cloak in the hall.

  She had been at the back of the house, and had heard no bustle of arrival to warn her of his coming, and at sight of him her heart lurched into her throat, and began to race, wildly, frantically, like something caged and battering for freedom in her breast. She checked an instant, and he looked up and saw her, flung his cloak to the old steward who stood by, and came striding to the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Bess!’ he cried. ‘Bess, my heart!’ and held up his arms to her.

  She had thought so much about the manner of their next meeting. She had resolved to be so careful, to wait to be claimed, making no claim herself; but at sight of him, all that was forgotten, and she gathered her wide skirts, and ran down the last flight to him like a child running home.

  Ralegh caught and kissed her, loudly and possessively, sublimely indifferent to the presence of the steward and several other members of the household who were by this time appearing on the scene. She clung to him, half crying with the blessed sense of sanctuary which his nearness brought her, repeating his name over and over again. ‘Walter! Oh Walter!’

  Suddenly he held her off a little, looking with quick concern into her face. ‘Bess, you have grown thinner than ever! I feel as though my hands would meet through you, and you are all eyes. What have you done to yourself?’

  ‘It has been so long — so long — and no word from you all the while,’ Bess said.

  He was puzzled. ‘Did you want me to send you word? I was busy, and really there was little enough to tell — save that I love you.’

  ‘You might even have told me that.’

  His voice shot up in ludicrous indignation. ‘God’s life, woman, you know I love you! ... And now what are you laughing at?’

  ‘You,’ said Bess, dissolving into soft, helpless mirth.

  He stared with puckered brows at this beloved, incomprehensible woman who appeared to find him funny. ‘But I do,’ he said.

  Chapter 7 - The Crock of Gold

  IN the end, the treasure carracks yielded £80,000 to the Queen, lesser profits to the other shareholders, and to Ralegh himself a clear loss. The Queen’s share gained him his freedom, but not his return to grace. And while Robin Devereux, having rid himself as far as might be, of his own wife, had been recalled from Navarre’s train and restored to the full favour of Belphoebe, Ralegh retired with Bess, to Sherborne.

  It was a soft, blustery autumn afternoon when Bess first saw Sherborne; a day of drifting skies, and distances deeply blue as bittersweet flowers. But even on that grey day, warmth seemed to linger in the golden stones of the castle, built to be his fortress palace by Bishop Roger, five hundred years before; and all around it, the gently rolling parkland stretched away down the quiet Blackmore Vale. The peace of the place seemed to hold out its arms to her. ‘This is a happy place,’ she thought, and did not wonder that Ralegh loved it.

  Ralegh was like a boy on the first day of the holidays, bright-eyed and eager, full of questions and greetings for every member of the assembled
household; and when the evening meal was scarcely over, he swept Bess off to explore her realm, upstairs and down through the old castle, from the Keep-turret to the little Norman Chapel that seemed made for defence, rather than worship, and back at last to the lower chamber of the Keep, which was now the living room, where wide windows — jewelled Tudor windows — gave to the place something of the air of a grim old Norman knight decked out in the silks and damascening of the seventh Henry.

  ‘Do you wonder at the love I have for it?’ Ralegh asked her, laying a hand against one of the squat columns that upheld the groined roof, as though it were a sentient thing. ‘Ever since I saw it from the road yonder, as I rode up to London for the first time, it has been the home of my heart, and since that day I have never passed it by, but it pulled at my heartstrings. I have loved every curve of the encircling hills, every shadow of a tree on the grass for so long a time that I can scarce believe it is but nine months since it came to me.’

  ‘Since the Queen gave it to you,’ Bess said. ‘Walter, will you ever regret all that you have lost by me? Will you ever find the price you paid for me too high?’

  ‘By God’s grace, I shall win all back, one day,’ Ralegh said. ‘But whether I do or no, you are beyond all price to me, Bess.’

  And she was content.

  But the old castle was not, after all, to be her home and Ralegh’s very long. Save for the Tudor windows, Sherborne was much as Bishop Roger had left it, but in considerably worse repair; and even in good repair, a Norman castle scarcely reached the standard of comfort of Ralegh’s and Bess’s day. There was no privacy, and the domestic arrangements were deplorable. There was nowhere to house a guest, certainly nowhere to put the children that might presently need house room. So not many weeks after that first homecoming, a site on the far side of the deer park had been chosen, and workmen were digging the foundations of a new house.