Lady in Waiting

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘You thought! You thought!’ he cried out. ‘It is a most sad pity, Captain Kemys, that you did not think of other matters beside; a pity that you did not think to obey my orders; that you did not think more to find the mine, as you were sent to do.’

  ‘Sir?’ Kemys said, puzzled, and no more, for the moment; for he had explained his reason for disobeying his orders; he had explained about the mine.

  Ralegh swung half round from the table, the control of which he had not been conscious, snapping and swept away before a surge of sickening rage, such as he had never known before. He had never troubled himself to feel, let alone express, such deadly bitterness towards an enemy, certainly never to anyone who meant nothing to him; it was the shared comradeship of thirty years, the bond of an old and deep friendship that added corrosive poison to his anger now, as he turned and rent the faithful Lieutenant who had so tragically failed him.

  Lawrence Kemys, standing like a prisoner before his judge, tried once to justify himself, pointing out how little else there was that he could have done in the matter of the mine, asking not for mercy, but for justice. But Ralegh, almost beside himself with pain and grief, conscious only that Watt was dead and had died in vain, would not even hear him. ‘By your wilful folly you have brought this whole enterprise to ruin. You have sacked a Spanish settlement in direct disobedience to the King’s commission, and you have failed to persevere in seeking out the mine whose riches might have redeemed San Thome in the King’s eyes. You could scarce have bettered all our undoing had you been Gondomar himself!’

  ‘Sir,’ Kemys persisted, ‘I think that later, you will maybe give more weight to the reasons for my failure. They are, in truth, reasons that have weight and substance, as I am assured that the Earl of Arundel and his fellow sponsors of the enterprise will admit, if all be made clear to them, and will set before the King. Will you give me leave to set down in a letter to them, all those things that I have told you, and when it is written, give me your endorsement to it?’

  Ralegh’s head was in his hands, his rage had grown cold in him, cold as death. He raised a grey and sweat-streaked face with dreadful, red-rimmed eyes. ‘I will lend no favour nor colour by any endorsement of mine, to the things that you have done, and the things that you have not done, Captain Kemys,’ he said deliberately. ‘You have ruined me.’

  Suddenly very white, Lawrence Kemys asked: ‘That is your final resolution?’

  ‘That is my final resolution.’

  ‘I know then, Sir, what course to take,’ Kemys said, very quietly. He bowed, and turning, left the Admiral’s quarters, putting out a hand to the doorpost in passing, as though he were blind.

  Left alone, Ralegh sat a while with his head still in his hands, staring at the small scarlet feather, that lay like a splash of bright heart’s blood on the table before him; then pulled himself together and tried to busy himself with some papers that Kemys had brought out of San Thome.

  He was still engaged with the first of them when he heard a shot which seemed to come from the adjoining cabin. He listened a few moments, then rose, and going to the blanket-hung doorway, called to a seaman standing close by. ‘Tengelly, find out what that shot meant,’ and went back to his papers.

  The man returned at once. ‘Captain Kemys says he fired off his pistol to clean it because it had long been charged, Sir.’

  But half an hour later, fetched there by a scared ship’s boy, Ralegh stood in the adjoining cabin, looking down at the body of his friend and Lieutenant, lying outstretched on the narrow cot of planks against the wall. A discharged pistol lay beside him, but the ball seemed to have glanced off a rib, breaking it but doing little other harm; and Lawrence Kemys, more stead-fast of purpose than Ralegh had been, fifteen years ago, had finished the work with his dagger.

  News of the sack of San Thome reached London, via Madrid, in May; and within an hour of its coming, Count Gondomar burst in upon the King in his Palace of Whitehall, brandishing the dispatch, and shouting ‘Pirate! Pirate! Pirate!’

  But it was not until a day or two later, when Roger North returned with another of the pinnaces, and the matter became public knowledge, that it reached Bess. North brought home Ralegh’s report to the Secretary of State, and with it a letter to Bess, the hardest letter that he had ever had to write.

  Roger North was one of the many who, by that time, had turned against Ralegh, and was intent on making his peace with the King; but he brought Bess’s letter to her himself, and she found him waiting for her when she returned from a morning’s marketing, with a young maidservant behind her, carrying the big rush basket. Eggs, she had bought, and beef and cinnamon: and because it came from the country, a nosegay of early summer flowers. On hearing from Joan that he was in the parlour, she sped upstairs, and without even waiting to shed her light cloak, plucked open the parlour door and was half across the room with her hands held out to greet him where he stood beside the empty hearth, before she saw his face, and checked.

  ‘It is my husband,’ she said.

  He bowed to her. ‘I left Sir Walter at Nevis in the Leeward Islands; he sent me ahead with dispatches and — a letter for you.’

  He was holding out the letter as he spoke, but she made no move to take it. She was looking into his face, normally a pleasant face, but just now troubled and at the same time defiant; and it was as though something cold had clenched itself round her heart, making it hard to breathe. ‘It is Watt, then,’ she said.

  ‘Will you — will you read your letter, Lady Ralegh.’

  He was still holding it out, and she took and opened it with oddly clumsy fingers, turning to the light of the garden window.

  Roger North, left forgotten, hesitated, glancing at the door and clearly very eager to be gone; glanced at the stricken woman, and finally moved to the far window and became engrossed in the doings of a stray cat in the street below.

  ‘I was loth to write, because I knew not how to comfort you,’ Ralegh had written, after briefly giving her the facts. ‘And God knows I never knew what sorrow was until now. Comfort your heart, dearest Bess, and I shall sorrow for us both ... My brains are broken, and it is torment for me to write. The Lord bless you and comfort you that you may bear patiently the death of your valiant son.’ And his bold signature sprawled across the page. And then, changing his mind, he had written her a detailed account of the tragic venture, page after page of it. She read it through to the last word, realising almost nothing of what it told her, save that Little Watt was dead.

  Little Watt had been dead four months. It seemed strange that she had not known — not even when she read his letter. Something should have told her; some empty dragging at her womb that had given him birth. ‘I should have known,’ she thought dully. ‘I should have known.’

  She stood perfectly still, looking out into the narrow sunlit garden. How strange that the sun was still shining. The white-throat was singing in the ilex tree too; and it was summer; and Little Watt was dead.

  Chapter 21 - The Passover

  IN the pleasant, panelled parlour of Mr. Harris’s house in Plymouth, Bess was standing by another window, looking out and down. Beyond the garden where the bees were busy among the roses, the crowded roofs dropped away, and the Sound was a sheet of pearl in the evening light. And Bess’s gaze went searching to and fro among the ships lying at anchor, searching for the Destiny.

  Just a week before, two and twenty years to the day since Cadiz, the Destiny had returned to Plymouth — alone. It was a great gesture, greater than the trumpets at Cadiz had been; but Bess could feel no pride in it. She was too spent, too weary to the depths of her soul.

  News of Ralegh’s return had brought her posting across England to join him; and less than an hour since, she had arrived, to be welcomed by the old steward, and greeted with the news that her host and hostess were at their country house a few miles outside Plymouth, and that Mrs. Harris had left a letter for her. She was holding that letter now. ‘Dear Lady Ralegh,’ Mrs. Harris had written. �
�Our house and household are yours for as long as they are of the least use to you. Pray use them as your own. It has seemed to my husband and myself that you may be more glad to be alone than you would be of our company, at this time. If, however, we are wrong in this, do you send me word by Thomas the groom, and I will be with you as swiftly as horses may bring me.’

  Bess was touched and warmed by the kindness of this woman almost unknown to her, so touched that without warning, she began to cry. She had not cried since she knew that Watt was dead. It had seemed as though all her tears were drained away into the cold numbness that had been like carrying something dead within her. Now, the dead thing was shuddering back to life and intolerable pain.

  She began to shiver from head to foot; and the kind note slipped from her fingers and fluttered to the floor.

  Leaning against the angle of the window embrazure, she shut her eyes while the waves of returning life and anguish flowed over her. The child! Dear God, the child! Of what avail to bring a child into the world, in blood and agony, only that, with his manhood scarce dry upon him, in blood and agony he might go out of it again? — and all for the serving of a dream; a bright, devouring dream. Standing there in the sunlit window, her despairing question seemed beating against the very knees of God.

  Presently the door opened, and Ralegh was standing on the threshold. She looked at him in silence, with straining eyes, seeing the rigid figure and haggard face; seeing that because of Watt, he was afraid to come to her. And for a long moment, because of Watt, because his dream had killed Watt, she could not bring herself to go to him.

  And then suddenly she knew quite clearly that all was well with Watt, and he no longer needed her; but the man in the doorway needed her as never before, and she went to him.

  It was a long while later that a knock sounded on the door, and a servant brought in candles, a great branch of candles, flaring in the dusk. They had been talking very quietly, of Watt — never of Lawrence Kemys — and Bess had not seen the twilight deepen, but she cried out against the sudden light. And then, as the servant hesitated, Ralegh rose from the window bench where he had been sitting beside Bess, saying: ‘Set them on the mantel, so — Now light the others. We will have a fanfare of light to shame the darkness!’

  And when the servant was gone, he turned back to her and caught her hands and drew her to her feet. ‘Not the sad summer twilight for Watt,’ he said. ‘He had no kin with the twilight. A galaxy of candles, a whole Milky Way of candles would not be light enough for Watt. I wish that you were wearing the bravest gown you ever had, and rubies in your ears; and you with a lute in your hands, playing Greensleeves!’

  ‘I am not made of the stuff of Spartan mothers,’ Bess said.

  ‘It was not so that I meant it.’ He was holding her hands still, looking down at her. ‘Let him live, Bess; he loved life very greatly, so is he become a part of life. There should be no sable pall of grief to smother out his flame.’

  Bess said wonderingly: ‘You said that — almost that — long ago, for Philip Sidney.’

  ‘Did I? I felt it, long ago, for Philip Sidney. But not as I do now, Bess.’

  No, not as he did now. But from that evening thirty years ago, another memory, linked to the first, touched Bess as with a cold finger, flicking her whole mind over from Watt to his father. ‘Not for me — dear God, not for me when my time comes,’ the Queen’s Captain had said that evening; and now, how near had that time come? ‘Walter,’ she said urgently. ‘Why did you come home? You should not have come home.’

  ‘I should not indeed, but that my crews wearied of a doomed Admiral,’ Ralegh said. ‘I should have gone to Jamestown to refit, and tried again; but with one ship and one ship’s company left to me, I had no course left but to come home.’

  ‘You could have gone to France! The French would have received you gladly; you know it! — You can still go — we will find means; and once you are safe overseas, the Queen will mediate for you; only go, my dear, before it is too late!’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll not show my scut to the likes of Daft Jamey. Beside, if I ran it would blacken my case; it would be as though I admitted to some guilt, and before God, I admit to none.’

  ‘What does the King care for your guilt or your innocency? Your head is promised to Spain, like John the Baptist’s, on a charger. The King would do anything, anything to bring about a marriage between Prince Charles and the Infanta; he is completely under Gondomar’s thumb, and you know how dearly Count Gondomar hates you!’ She was pouring out the words with frantic urgency, her fingers clutching at his sleeve. ‘Walter, the King has even promised to send you to be executed at Madrid if Philip so wishes it. Before ever you landed, he had issued a proclamation of his affection for his Dear Brother of Spain and his detestation of what he calls your atrocious acts of violence!’

  ‘Sweet, that is no news to me,’ Ralegh said. ‘There is an order out for my arrest. Indeed I have expected Lewis Stucley at every moment since I dropped anchor. I hear he has bought my sloughed Vice-Admiralty of Devon, and so the task will be for him to carry out.’

  ‘Walter, will you not listen to me?’

  ‘Neither to you, nor to anyone who counsels me to run for it — not even to my kinsman George Carew who sits in the Privy Council with his nose in the nation’s affairs.’ As he spoke, he brought out a folded paper from the breast of his doublet, and held it out to her. She took and unfolded it, seeing above the signature, only three words, written with slashing vehemence. ‘Get you gone.’

  She refolded and handed it back to him. ‘You will take no heed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then in God’s name what will you do?’

  ‘In four days time, the work which keeps me here with the Destiny will be finished. In four days, if Lewis still tarries by the way, I shall set out for London. If I can but gain audience with the King, and put my case to him, face to face, I may even now win through. He is a man ever swayed by the nearest presence and the last speaker.’

  ‘And do you suppose that he does not know that, and will not guard against it by refusing you the opportunity?’ Bess cried. ‘He means your death! Walter, he means your death! and you — oh, it may seem to you that the Block is a fine dramatic exit for the last of Elizabeth’s champions — but it is not you alone who will suffer when the axe falls! — And I have already lost Little Watt to this devouring dream of yours!’

  There was a long silence, and then Ralegh said softly: ‘That was a woman’s weapon. I had not thought that you would stoop to handle such.’

  She made a small hopeless gesture. ‘I think that I am beyond caring for my choice of weapons.’

  A voice sounded outside, speaking to one of the servants, and Ralegh’s head went up. ‘Ah, here is Captain King. I bade him bring me certain lists this evening.’ He limped to the door and plucked it open, calling ‘Come in here, King. My wife is here and waits to bid you welcome.’ Then as the familiar piratical figure appeared in the doorway, he turned back to Bess, who had not moved. ‘A faithful few I have left unto me, even now, you see, Bess; and here is one of them.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bess. ‘Yes — I see.’ She acknowledged the man’s salute, and watched him as he tramped forward to the table and laid several papers on it.

  ‘That’s a poor welcome, Bess,’ Ralegh said.

  ‘Captain King knows the greeting I would give to anyone who still counts himself your friend.’ She turned full to the newcomer. ‘Captain King, I have been trying to make him go away — for a little, just for a little; but I can do nothing. Can you not make him listen to you?’

  Captain King looked from her beseeching face to the set and haggard features of the man beside her, and back again. His small round eyes were dark with trouble.

  ‘Captain King, will you not try?’

  He shook his head. ‘Lady Ralegh, I am as powerless as you — and as the agents of France, who have also approached him. Three days since, I sought out a French pilot and engaged him in Sir W
alter’s name, for the trip across the Narrow Seas. This very night, they would have sailed. He would not go.’

  *

  There had still been no sign of Sir Lewis Stucley when, four days later, the little company set out on their journey; Ralegh and Bess and Captain King, riding light, for such gear as they possessed had been sent on ahead. They were a silent company, Ralegh looking about him as he rode, with a swift intensity that seemed to rest like a leave-taking on the deep coombes set with apple orchards, on every glimpse of the sea and the moor. This was his own country, the hills that had bred him, through which he rode for the last time.

  Towards evening the road began to climb steadily, the country on either side grew bleaker, harder, and the skies more wide, as they neared Ashburton on the skirts of the moor. They were to spend the night at the little moorland town, long since grown familiar to Bess from the many times she had come that way at Ralegh’s chariot wheels. Always, until today, it had seemed a friendly place, and she had been glad to reach it at the day’s end. But now, tired as she was, hot-eyed and thirsty, powdered with the red wayside dust, she found that she was dreading the place, the familiar rooms of the Mermaid Inn, the friendly faces of Mine Host and his wife; dreading the end of the day’s journey that would bring them so much the nearer London.

  Almost within sight of Ashburton, a shallow coombe led upward from the road towards the moors, and Ralegh, who had been riding half a length in front, reined back his horse to hers, turning in his saddle. ‘It is too fair an evening to waste within walls,’ he said. ‘Sweet, shall we send William King on for supplies, and sup out here under God’s sky, with the linnets for company?’

  Bess caught thankfully at the delay, and so, while Captain King rode on into Ashburton, Ralegh dismounted, and leading her horse and his own, turned up the coombe, following the thread of white water that came purling down over trout-speckled stones to join the Yeo. A hundred yards upstream they came to a place that seemed made for their purpose; a sheltered hollow opening to the south, with the dark tors rising beyond it, soft with young heather, murmurous with bees. And there Ralegh checked the horses. and stood smiling up at her, his eyes narrowed against the light. ‘Behold, our banqueting hall! Down with you, Bess.’