“You invited me here,” she said, “but to provide an excuse for your absence from that place where they play the music. That’s all it was!”
“Only in part, I assure you. The pleasure of your company—”
“I am of no use or service to anyone, least of all to him. Well, I know that; I don’t complain! But I think I had better leave.”
“Come!” said the King. “It would be most unseemly, madam, were I forced to show sternness and issue commands. I had flattered myself that I was behaving as a noble fellow should; don’t destroy the consolation. God’s fish, what’s this? Here are two young people on a summer evening …”
“Bah! Twice bah! three times bah!”
“You have well over two hours before midnight. You have the whole broad palace to roam in; you have a set of rooms at your disposal. If you fail to employ the time profitably, madam, you are not the woman I think you are. And I have but one last word.” Hearing a stir in the Great Bedchamber below, he raised his voice. “Mr. Chiffinch!”
Up the steps from the Great Bedchamber marched a hook-nosed Hercules in a brown periwig, somewhat bleary around the eyes.
“This is Will Chiffinch, my First Page of the Back-Stairs, whom you may intrust absolutely. Will, may I make you known to Mistress Dorothy Landis, Mr. Roderick Kinsmere, Mr. Bygones Abraham?—Do you follow me, Mr. Chiffinch?”
“Attentively, sire.”
“See to it that one of my glass-coaches shall be ready for Madam Landis in the Great Court at midnight, to convey her to her lodgings off Bow Street. Let it be near the place where Mr. Kinsmere’s horse is tethered. For the moment, Mr. Chiffinch, kindly escort this lady, and these gentlemen to the Shield Gallery. I pass all my hours in a shady old grove. Hey, St George for England!”
The king chuckled to himself. He sat down at the desk. In the last glimpse they had of him, turned dark and cryptic once more, he had stretched out a hand towards the pen tray, and was humming the tune of the distant strings.
Chiffinch led them across the Great Bedchamber and the withdrawing room. When he had bowed them out into the dusky Shield Gallery, shutting the double doors, they stood for a moment in silence. Dolly, cloak across her arm, looked sulkily at a pair of dying wall candles.
“Within two and a quarter hours,” announced Bygones Abraham, “a boat o’ brisk boys will call for this old hulk and take him down to my old friend and bottle companion, Captain Nick Murch of the Saucy Ann. Meanwhile, as befits a man of reflection, I betake myself to the Gallery; I drink a cup or two at leisure; I ’em at their cards. What of you two?”
“Now wherefore,” demanded a ladylike Dolly, “does this man say ‘you two’ as though Mr. Kinsmere and I were together?”
“Because we are together,” said the villain of that name, “and for as long as may be. Dolly, will you walk with me?”
“No, I will not.”
“Dolly!”
“We-el … Walk where?”
“Surely there must be gardens here? Gardens, that’s to say, apart from that cursed Volary one of knives-in-the back, where two of minds attuned may gain a breath of air and a look at the moon in peace and comfort?”
“There are gardens in plenty,” returned Bygones. “There’s the whole of St. James Park. There are also knives behind trees.”
“If you mean Dolly’s friend Salvation Gaines …”
“My friend Salvation Gaines?”
“I affected sarcasm, madam, as you affect things that are foreign to your nature. As for Salvation Gaines, they will have him at any minute!”
“Will they, lad? How if they don’t?”
“They will take him, I say! He is a murdering hypocrite; he would kill me if he could; but he is no ghoul or warlock to alter shape and walk past the guards. Can he escape, do you think?”
“It may be not,” snapped Bygones, firing up. “Still! Venture this night into open spaces, any open spaces; you’ll go scarce ten paces ere you are again detained and examined by the military, which is no notion o’ pleasure for anybody. If so deeply you crave air and the moon, minds attuned or not, get you both to the balcony overlooking the private landing stairs!”
“Where is that?”
“Oh, ecod! I drew it to your attention this morning. Straight along to the eastern end of the Shield Gallery here, and open the door. ’Tis where the maids of honour stand to throw flowers during water processions; but at this hour ’twill be as deserted as any place you could wish for, strike me dead!”
“Bygones, my compliments and thanks. Madam, this way; accompany me.”
Dolly swore she would not, and then promptly went with him. She put on her cloak and adjusted the vizard mask. In silence, Dolly flinching away when their arms touched, they marched to the other end of the gallery and found the door.
They were on a balustraded balcony high above water. For all the fact that smoke drifted at them, that the river could be called little less than a stately sewer, it was a spot to stir anyone. Small craft slid past against the dark Thames, with little lanthorns burning at masthead; the distant Surrey shore lay unveiled in pale light; and above Whitehall Palace hung the old chipped battle lanthorn of the moon.
“Dolly, what’s the matter?”
“There is nothing the matter! And what do we do here? Do you so truly desire to look at the moon?”
“I desire to look at you.”
He removed her mask, which she snatched away and thrust into a pocket of her cloak. In that light her face was pale and her eyes, at close range, seemed enormous.
“As though anyone,” Dolly cried, “could wish to look at me! When I am only blundering and silly—when I am of no use or value—”
“You are of the world’s value, sweet heart. Because you are the loveliest sight in God His creation; because you are all good nature and dear nature; because head and heart were both lost when I saw you; because …”
“Don’t do that!”
He disregarded her. “Would you prefer that I refrained from touching you?”
“No, you know I would not! Continue, dear idiot; for ever and ever! But what do we do here, I say? You have rooms at the palace, someone remarked?”
“I have, though I never asked for ’em, and they are not far away. Would you go there with me?”
“Would I go there with you? Dear God, would I not go there with you? Try me, then; oh, please try me!”
And so, it appears, they stumbled their way back along the Shield Gallery. Of the ensuing two hours I have never heard a precise description, nor is one required. But it was an interval of ecstasy, which neither of them ever forgot. Certain persons are so well suited to each other that nothing else seems at all important. They made discovery of this; they discovered it again, and yet again. Time fled past on exchanged wings, or stood still when necessary.
“Is it so ill a thing, Dolly, that I am not a penniless wandering mountebank? That I have no need of frilled shirts or any shirts; and, to say a truth, would not be seen dead in a cloak with a pink satin lining? Is this so ill a thing?”
“No, it is not. I thought it was, but it is not. Nothing matters, dear heart, except—”
“Dolly …”
“Yes! Yes, yes, yes!”
It was with a shock as of cold water that they heard Old Tom ring the quarter hour to midnight. Presently, after a series of farewells, Dolly got up and scrambled into her clothes by moonlight.
“Are you in such haste to leave, madam?”
“Haste to leave? I would stay for ever! But you cannot. Strike a light and dress yourself. You are late already; the time—”
“Where do you go?”
“But to inquire if the coach be ready. I will see you away; never fear. And yet, sweet heart …”
“No; you have said it; time presses; go!”
Kinsmere, now more in love than he would have believed possible, found that this interfered with speed of dressing. But other clothes were in the saddlebags: a leather jerkin, fustian breeches, and boots
to which he affixed the spurs. He wore his usual sword belt, but slung a dagger sheath under his left arm. Finally he buckled a cloak round his shoulders, and discarded his periwig for a broad-leafed hat which fitted his own hair.
It had finished striking midnight when he strode out into the Shield Gallery, on his way to get last instructions from the king. Just outside the door he met Bygones Abraham, dressed in much the same fashion except for spurs, and lumbering in the same direction.
“Well?” Bygones demanded, with a somewhat sinister inflection.
“Mighty well!”
“I am glad ye find it so. I don’t, nor do many others. They have not taken Gaines.”
“Not taken Gaines?”
“Nay, or any man who might ha’ killed Butterworth. Is the fellow a ghoul or a warlock, ecod, that he can alter shape and fly out the window? If so, my fine adventurer, look sharp on the Dover road!”
“It will be best to look sharp in any case. Here we are.”
They scratched at the double doors of the withdrawing room outside the Great Bedchamber. They did not see the king. But in the withdrawing room they met Will Chiffinch, who told them they were fifteen minutes late but that the king said it did not matter.
Each received the half of a thick sheet of foolscap: folded over, sealed, wrapped in oilskin, and fitted into a pouch with leather thongs which they slung round their necks under the shirt. Each received back his ring. Then they were returning, along the Shield Gallery and belowstairs, by the same way they had come that morning. On the ground floor, near the doorway to the brick arches beside the Great Court, Bygones hesitated.
“Ayagh!” he said. “The king may not be vexed, no; but those tars from the Saucy Ann will show a most almighty vexation to be kept waiting. Well, lad, good luck!” Gauntlet slapped gauntlet as they shook hands. “O-rev-war and ah-lah-been-too! If all goes well and we cock a snook at the Enemy, we’ll be drinking a dram in Calais tomorrow afternoon.”
Then he was gone.
Into the Great Court moonlight poured a deathly radiance. String music still skipped and jingled behind the closed curtains of the Banqueting House; there was a stir as of many people. The Great Court, save for coach and horses with the driver sound asleep on the box, seemed deserted. It was not so. Kinsmere had no sooner stepped out under the arches than the glimmer of a lanthorn sprang up; a sentry challenged him. He displayed his ring; the lanthorn light dwindled away and vanished.
Dolly was waiting for him near the coach. Though he had seen her so short a time ago, he felt his heart beating so powerfully that at first he could not speak. Every one of her humours, her tricks of laughter or intensity, her breathless little ingenuous speeches in the dark, returned to overwhelm him. He took her inside the fold of his cloak, stammering that he must see her into the coach; but she only shook her head, slowly and quietly, with her arms round his neck.
Then he moved over towards a horse that was tethered nearby: a black mare seventeen hands high, restive and skirting its tail in the court. There were saddlebags here too, and saddle holsters for pistols as well. He quietened the mare, inspected the bit, saw to saddle and girths, all without conscious knowledge of what he was doing. In the saddlebags he found a pouch of money, bread and cheese wrapped in oiled paper, with a small flask of rum; last of all, a supply of powder, ball, and wadding for the pistols.
From a holster he drew one of these weapons: the dragoon’s heavy wheel-lock, with a barrel over a foot long. The music had ceased; but in night-stillness a great rustling of trees swept from the direction of the park. Bending over to look at the wheel-lock, its silvered mechanism glistening by moonlight, he caught sight of Dolly’s face. He returned the wheel-lock to his holster, and swung back to her.
“Oh, I am so afeared!” Dolly whispered.
“Afeared?”
“You are such a fool: which is to say you run such enorm hazard and would pull the beard of Old Nick himself if you thought he would try to daunt you. I would not have you different, yet I fear I may never see you again!”
“You will see me again. Great pity though you may regard it, it can’t be helped.”
“Great pity, do I regard it? Dear heart, you will take care?”
“I will take care.”
“When do you return?”
“In a day or two, not much more. Since the business is pressing, say forty-eight hours in all. And then, my dear, and then …”
“Will you look at French women, while you are gone?”
“I will not, even should I see any. But you, Dolly! Will you be waiting, when I do return?”
“You know I will.”
Suddenly she put her head down and spoke very low and rapidly, slurring the words together as though she could not get through it fast enough.
“Godbless you and—and guard you, and—and keepyousafe—from harm.”
Putting her away from him, he swung into the saddle. The black mare reared, whinnying, and came down with a strike of sparks from cobbles. Then they were off through the gateway. At the top of King Street, near Charles the First’s statue, he was to meet Captain Somebody, of the Horse Guards Blue, who would guide him through the City and across London Bridge. What he felt was no triumph, but a great wrench at the heart and almost a sting of tears behind the eyes, as the mare thundered up King Street in pursuit of the Grand Design.
XIV
THE MOON WAS SETTING, sickly and with a faint yellowish colour round its edges, as though it were dying too. A wind far away made faint roaring noises; there was a whisper among sedge and coarse grass. But it did not disturb the mist in hollows of the road.
Kinsmere shifted in the saddle of the fourth horse he had ridden between London and here. The clocks had gone three-thirty; the short night was beginning to pale; he was nearing the Channel.
To have covered above seventy miles in three and a half hours was a pace more rapid than he had ever expected to travel. A salt smell drifted across marshes. Long strips of sea water had got in among the grass, and lay as though stagnant with a flicker of the moon across them. He thought he had never seen so dead or lonely a spot. It was cold, and unutterably still. The latest horse settled to a steady gallop; the sound of its hoofs pounded out against empty spaces where the wind answered with the only noise. Loosening the cord on his hat, he dropped it down his back to let the chill air stream in his face and keep him, awake. He was conscious of saddle soreness, of an ache in his joints, and his back and shoulders were tired too. The insistence of sleep crept over him with a kind of rhythm like the hoofbeats. Worse than any of this, he had commenced to feel apprehensive. He must be almost within sight of Dover, and nothing had happened so far.
Nothing at all. Not a blockade or a challenge from the road. Not a shot fired from behind a tree, or a decoy to lure him into dismounting. Only loneliness, and the uncanny road winding out ahead. Yet there was good reason to know the enemy had not abandoned the chase.
For the first part of his journey, after Captain Mather of the Horse Guards Blue had put him on the right road, he spurred in silence. Next, with the memory of Dolly’s voice in his ears and the touch of Dolly’s lips still on his cheek, he awoke to great exhilaration, and he sang. It was,
Good store of good claret supplies every thing,
And the man that is drunk is as great as a king,
Or,
When in silks my Julia goes …
Rollicking and roaring, or adrip with sugared sentiment—such is the kind of song I myself have always preferred—out it trolled into the wide night, substituting “Dolly” for “Julia,” and, in the earlier one, expressing his mood with, “I who am drunk am as great as a king.”
He was not drunk, save with the memory of Dolly, but it served. He made a frugal supper off the bread and cheese in the saddlebag, and washed it down with a swallow of rum.
In addition to stopping for a fresh horse at the three posting stations whose names were written on the scrap of paper, Captain Mather had told him, he must also
stop and show his ring at any turnpike where the turnpike keeper had remembered to bar the road for the night. It might be troublesome, Captain Mather admitted, but it could provide him with directions if he needed them.
And he did need them. Twice he almost lost his way: once outside Rochester and again beyond a grey town—city, rather—which, by the loom of its great cathedral against the moon, could only have been Canterbury.
For the most part he enjoyed it. He liked to clatter through sleeping villages, stirring up birds and echoes and sometimes the watchman, who stood in the middle of the street and shook an ancient fist. He liked to hear the solitary barking of dogs in farmyards. He liked the oak tree before country inns, with the oak seat running round it. Little grey houses flashed past, or a silvered church spire amid beeches. Only once did he check his gallop without cause. A pretty farm girl, returning from some assignation in barn or grove, had sat down under a hedgerow to put on her shoes before returning home. Since he was seeing Dolly everywhere, she reminded him of Dolly.
“A fine night, my dear. And how are you?”
“Tired,” said the girl, making a face at him. “Most bloodily tired! Still, if you’d care to step down—”
“No, my dear. Thank you kindly, but I have other business if worse business. God for King Charles!”
And yet …
Few turnpike gates were closed. And yet, somewhere in the flat Kentish lands as a distant church clock tolled two, he rode up hard against a white bar across the road before a plank bridge over a stream. Kinsmere reined in, and hallo’d loudly at the little house beside it. This turnpike keeper, sleepier than most, made much clamour at unbolting and unbarring before he thrust a lanthorn past the open door.
“Hold your damn noise,” yelled a surly voice. “And stand out in the glim, there, if you’re honest enough to do it. What d’ye want?”
For answer my grandfather held his ring into the light.
“Nearer,” snarled the voice, as though working towards a paroxysm. “Nearer, I say!”
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