“It is scarcely flattering, I admit,” grinned Osborne. “But it seems he has already found someone who will. He has not yet trusted me with our fellow-conspirator’s name; but there are to be three of us, I understand.”
“Heaven defend us, have we another murderer in our midst?” said Dowcett.
“I wonder if it could be Thomas Rudy, whom he brought over with him and who so cheerfully runs all his errands?” speculated Mary. “My father says that although the man is popular he stirs up more trouble than anyone else in the barracks and is never short of money—though the plausible wretch seldom gives a groat to his wife!”
“If so, you should be in fine company, Osborne!” Dowcett went to the door of the pavilion to make sure that no one was about. “What did you tell Rolph?”
“That I would do my utmost to encourage his Majesty’s escape and that he would hear more about it later. He wanted me to take an oath on it.”
“And did you?” asked Mary; and for a moment had a glimpse of his contemptuous anger.
“I told him that for centuries his betters had accepted the bare word of an Osborne. Whereat he became disgustingly servile. Ah well,” he went on, recapturing his usual debonair manner, “Titus will be ready at any time with horses on the other side, and Harry knows of our new dilemma and will be working from London, so we ought to bring off an escape, and Rolph will certainly hear of it—although too late for him to interfere, please God!”
They could see Major Cromwell’s square-shouldered figure descending the long flight of steps from the keep, and dared stay no longer. With Gallic politeness Dowcett transferred his cloak to Mary’s shoulders and they went out into the rain. “We should like you to tell Mistress Wheeler of this,” he said, as they walked back towards the castle. “And I am sure she will be relieved to know that the ship Mistress Whorwood has chartered lies ready in the Medway. Explain to her that since the Prince of Wales left Jersey for France in accordance with the King’s wishes, the hospitality of my country is more strained; and it is thought best to convey his Majesty to his eldest daughter’s court in Holland.”
“What is this energetic Mistress Whorwood like?” asked Mary, finding herself more able to take an interest in the lady than she had been when Harry Firebrace first mentioned her.
“A tall, forthright, dependable sort of woman. Everything, in fact, that the treacherous Lady Carlisle is not. In riding breeches, Jane Whorwood might well pass for a man. Not unhandsome either, though unfortunately her face is covered with—how do you say them?—taches de rousseur.”
“Freckles.” Osborne supplied the word absently, his mind evidently on his plans; and before reaching the postern gate they parted company and went their separate ways.
Several days passed before Mary saw either of them to speak to again, and still fresh difficulties presented themselves. The darkest night and the most likely guard never seemed to synchronize. Jane Whorwood had been obliged to change the berth of the ship when suspicion fell on her skipper because of the length of time he had spent unloading; but Firebrace sent word that he would meet the King’s party at a certain point on the road and direct them to the new and more secluded mooring. Trattle had managed to convey the reassuring message to the housekeeper along with his account for yeast delivered to the castle bakery.
News of Firebrace’s doings, however impersonal, was precious to Mary. News that he was working in conjunction with Jane Whorwood meant that he had not yet returned to his wife—and that, to her shame, she found doubly precious. When all the bustle of the King’s moving was over, she was able to return to her normal occupations with a better heart. Seeing the Reverend Troughton in earnest theological discussion with the King reminded her that it was days since she had cleaned the altar plate, a duty of which she had lately relieved her aunt. And because she had a longing to be alone she gathered up some soft linen rags and went across the courtyard to the old chapel of St. Nicholas.
But it seemed she was not to be alone. As her eyes accustomed themselves to dim light after sunshine she became aware of a man kneeling in the quiet shadow of a pillar, and glancing a second time at the tall figure with the reverently bent brown head she saw to her surprise that it was Richard Osborne. It seemed difficult to connect his usual careless pose with devoutness; but she supposed that he might be asking a blessing on their coming enterprise. Not wishing to disturb him she picked up the ewer from the font and withdrew to a narrow bench in the porch. She could feel the warmth of the sun and hear the birds singing as she worked, and before long Osborne joined her there.
“So my being here has driven you outside?” he said, as taken aback as she.
“No, no. It was just that—I was surprised to see you.”
“To see me praying?”
I suppose so.”
“Though who should need more desperately than I to seek a better way of life?” he said. So perhaps it had not been the King’s escape that he had been praying about after all. He stood bareheaded, watching her with that quizzical lift of an eyebrow. “I suppose people have warned you that my reputation is dangerous?”
Mary breathed upon the ewer and gave its fat sides a final rub. Though other women might fear for their virtue in his company, she herself had always felt remarkably safe. “Perhaps it is mostly their invention,” she suggested.
“They do not underestimate my vices, of course.”
“Neither do you encourage the world to do so.”
“Touché,” he admitted with a smile, and sat down beside her. “For their sins my forebears have always held important positions at Court, and like most young men in that sort of family I was sent far too young on a tour of Europe with a tutor who had little control over me. And then—like most younger sons—I was placed in a nobleman’s household with a view to a position at Court. My father persuaded that fabulously rich old libertine, Lord Wharton, to take me. It was considered a very good move socially, but my mother begged almost with her dying breath that I should not be sent there.” He stopped short, as though aghast at his own garrulity. “I assure you I have never before tried to excuse myself to anyone—”
Mary sat with bent head, compassion and understanding in her heart. Compassion had always flourished there, but a measure of understanding had seeded itself from her own new suffering. Even if God had denied her the lover of her choice, she thought, He had been generous in allowing her to inspire liking in a variety of people. “Did you adore her?” she asked, not knowing what else to say.
“My mother?”
“Yes.”
“She was the only woman who has ever really meant anything to me. She had a tender-hearted goodness which I have been seeking ever since—until now.” He added the last two words so softly that Mary was not quite sure whether she had heard aright. For the first time she wondered half incredulously whether he had sought her out of late for his own sake and not, as she had supposed, because he was sorry for her for vicariously accepting a situation which was in some sort his friend’s responsibility. Osborne sat silent a while and then, as if to contradict the serious mood which lingered with him from his prayers, he challenged her flippantly. “Surprised as you may have been to find me in church on a Monday morning, you cannot accuse me of being altogether godless. Consider how patiently I sat last Sunday through one of those denunciatory sermons Rolph delights in, and how edified they all were when I commended the preacher afterwards! His text, if I remember rightly, was ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.’ If God is really as vindictive as they make out there can be little chance for sinners like me!”
“Are you so great a sinner?” smiled Mary, comparing him with her hateful recollections of Rolph. “Surely kindness and tolerance count for something? Frances and I were once reprimanded by the vicar of Newport for dancing in the Square, and she was brave enough to remind him that Miriam danced before the Lord. I thought it clever of her, but he only told her not to be pert. These Puritans are so certain they are right!”
&
nbsp; “But so, for that matter, is the King,” pointed out Osborne. “There might have been no civil war had he not tried to force the Church of England Prayer Book on the Presbyterian Scots.”
Mary had heard the same opinion expressed far more crudely in courtyard and kitchen of late, but she was surprised and not a little shocked to hear it from the lips of a Royal cavalier. Her aunt and the Trattles never had criticized the King, nor would they ever say a good word for the Parliamentarians, and until recently she had accepted their opinions unquestioningly. Before the King came the whole rebellion had seemed so remote—just something that was happening over on the mainland. But now, having seen the extremes of hatred and fervour and danger to which men were driven by the strength of opposing convictions, she felt that it was something which a grown woman should understand. She had heard people discussing the Long Parliament and the Rump Parliament, and the removal of the Court to Oxford, and the battles at Marston Moor and Nazeby, of course; but even her father, who admired certain aspects of Cromwell’s discipline, had not really been able to explain to her the rights of it all. Whenever she had ventured to discuss the King with Harry that dedicated look had come into his face. For him the King could do no wrong; or if he could, it was one’s duty to defend it. But here beside her was Richard Osborne, a man who must have heard other people’s views in London and in foreign countries and who always spoke with cool detachment. Perhaps he could explain what had always puzzled her—how one side or the other could be completely wrong when each felt so passionately. If only he did not laugh at her, and had the patience to put things simply…
“Of course I know about the war, but how did it all begin!” she asked, laying down the ewer. “I am not clever like Frances, and can only read the simplest things. We scarcely ever see the London news-sheets here, and when we do they are so violently for one side or the other that I can make little sense of them.”
“Oh, my precious Mary, which of us can? I suspect that if some of us pretend to understand all the forces which have brought England to this bitter pass it is only because we lack your refreshing honesty.”
He was not laughing at her at all. There was no jibling on that wide, reckless mouth of his and she had noticed, when she first met him, the kindness of his eyes. Womanlike, she was more interested in the protagonists than in the facts. “It seems so strange that a king who beheaded his wives should have been allowed to go on reigning, and yet all this cruelty should have been shown to a good man like King Charles.”
“A good man does not always make the best kind of king. For instance, the late King Jamie’s ways may have been coarse, but he was a realist. He knew just how far he could push his subjects, both here and in Scotland. Whereas King Charles has always been so hedged about by ideals and dignity that he does not understand when he is pushing them too far. It is only fair, of course, to remember that he was not trained for kingship.”
“You mean until his elder brother died?”
“Yes. I have heard my father say that before then Charles was left up in Scotland with his tutor. He stammered and his leg always dragged a bit. But when he became Prince of Wales and came down to London he made valiant efforts to conquer both disabilities. By sheer determination he made himself the best horseman in the two kingdoms, so that seeing him mounted one forgets that he is a little lame or small. That is the kind of courage he has. The kind that draws out the devotion of men in personal touch with him like Harry. And yet his Majesty can be so painfully irresolute over some things.”
This was the sort of thing Mary wanted to hear—the personal aspect of the struggle rather than the political. “He has never loved any woman but the Queen, they say. Is she so very beautiful?”
“Not beautiful. But charming and vivacious and—a little too capable.”
“Then why do people hate her so?”
“Because she is French and a Catholic—both obviously unfair reasons. But also because she was always meddling and trying to get the best appointments for her friends. Parliamentarians like Hampden who really had the good of the country at heart deplored her influence at Court.”
“Then was it she who caused most of the trouble?”
“I would say that money and religion were the two main causes. I am sure no sovereign ever wanted more earnestly to rule well than King Charles, but he believed so firmly in his divine right that everything had to be cut to his pattern and kept under his personal authority. So he tried to rule without Parliament, with the result that he was never voted adequate money to carry through his reforms, and the still more dangerous result that he began levying taxes in all manner of arbitrary and unpopular ways. There was all that trouble, for instance, about Ship Money being levied on inland towns.”
“I remember the outcry about Tonnage and Poundage. The Customs men were always talking about it.”
“Yes. But the bitterest quarrels always seem to grow out of differences in religion. He and Archbishop Laud tried to force everyone—in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales as well—to worship according to the rubric of the Church of England. They wanted the churches to have dignity and beauty—candles and vestments and the altar in the sanctuary instead of the Communion being taken from a table in the middle of the church as many people wanted it. The Puritans accused his Majesty—quite unjustly—of favouring Rome because he was civil to his wife’s Catholic friends. And so God-fearing families, sooner than attend the Established Church, began holding prayer meetings of their own. Laud interfered and the bitterness grew.”
“We heard about the Presbyterian women up in Scotland throwing the kirk stools at the Anglican preacher’s head.”
“Of course there were many more issues after that. And then we had all those years of civil war.”
“With so many young men killed! And even now—”
“Now, as we all know, the whole thing has rolled beyond the control of those who began it, and the power is often in the hands of men who either want it only for revenge or at best are not sufficiently accustomed to it to use it without cruelty.”
Mary sat thinking over what he had said while outside the sound of marching feet from barracks to guardroom seemed to emphasize the King of England’s sorry plight. She got up from the bench with a sigh, remembering that she had still the altar plate to clean. From where she stood she could see inside the little chapel which had remained so peacefully outside the worst of such stormy arguments, and thinking of the kind of sermon that Osborne had had to listen to she was thankful that here, at least outwardly, things had been left unchanged. Things which the King stood for and which the Governor, whatever his personal preferences, had not suffered his chaplain to alter very much. Then her gaze came back speculatively to her companion. “You do not regard the King with the same devotion as Harry does,” she said.
Since they were alone, he answered without caution. “Not with the kind of devotion which blinds me.”
“Yet you risk so much for him.”
“For the monarchy—the Stuart cause—for the civilized order of existence to which my kind is accustomed. You must remember that I was never a Parliamentarian like Harry. They say that converts to any cause outrun the rest.” Osborne stopped being serious and went on speaking with a kind of exasperated amusement. “I could wish sometimes that his Majesty did not complicate our efforts by writing so many letters and instructions—or that he had the common touch as well as the Stuart charm. Like the younger Charles—”
Like any other girl, Mary was full of curiosity about the young Prince of Wales whose adolescence and young manhood had been so full of unfortunate adventures. “Did you know him?” she asked.
“I fought with him when he was a lanky lad of sixteen—before he was sent to Jersey. He was dragged from battlefield to battlefield, but he never lost his cheerful sense of the ridiculous.”
There was a warmth in Osborne’s voice which made her look up quickly. His smile showed reminiscent affection for a fellow human being rather than any blind devotion. “And n
ow as an exile I suppose he will be dragged from country to country,” he said regretfully. “It will probably mar him much as I was marred.”
Chapter Twenty
On the last Sunday in May Osborne left the castle early. He was supping with the Leighs at Thorley Manor, so he had told all and sundry, and he had leave to spend the night. And before going he made as much commotion as possible. Just as he reached the gatehouse he remembered that he had a long ride before him and sent his servant back for his thickest riding cloak. Captain Rolph sauntered over from his quarters to twit him about forsaking gay colours for an elegant new suit tailored in black like his royal master’s, and the two of them stood talking and laughing familiarly. Islanders on guard pricked up their ears hopefully when they overheard Osborne remind their Captain facetiously that he ought to allow them an extra pint of liquor next day because it would be the Prince of Wales’ birthday, and some of the Model Army men looked sourly disapproving when he went on to describe the luscious charms of Barnabas Leigh’s young sister. Before the cloak could be found the new horse Osborne had bought was plunging and rearing impatiently. So after all he rode off by himself, calling to the guard that he would not need the cloak and that his man could have the evening off.
Once at the bottom of the lane and on the road to Thorley, he branched off left in the direction of Gatcombe and rode leisurely to sup with Edward Worsley. And as he went his expression sobered and he looked to his brace of pistols.
He hated having to leave the two women and Dowcett to see through the first part of the scheme, but there were only the four of them left now. “Keep about as late as possible in case there should be anything you can do to hearten Dowcett,” he had advised Mistress Wheeler and her niece. And already he regretted having said that because if any heartening were needed it should have been for them. He had almost quarrelled with Harry once because of the risks he had allowed Mary to run. But she was so quick and calm and sensible, whereas Dowcett, for all his zeal and courage, was excitable and highly strung.
Mary of Carisbrooke Page 20
