by E R Eddison
The King laughed in his great black beard. ‘You have confirmed my very resolve, and so shall it be. But with two provisoes. First, I’ll not, like an unskilful boor, kill my good hawk ’cause she turns haggard: I’ll tame my Horius Parry, not end him.’
‘I’m sorry, then,’ said the Chancellor. ‘He is a buzzard: he is of bad carry: you can make him do nothing.’
‘Who are you, to prescribe and measure my ability?’
‘It should not be for my honesty to flatter you. Moreover, your highness hath proved him a man that neither believeth anything that another man speaketh, nor speaketh anything himself worthy to be believed.’
‘I say to you,’ said the King, ‘I’ll bring him to lure. As some reclaim ravens, kestrels, pies, what not, and man them for their pleasure, have I not so used him as my own these years and years? I would not lose him for twice the purchase of that dominion he holdeth for me.’
Beroald said, ‘If my words be too thin to carry so tough a matter, let your serene highness be advised further: require of my lord Admiral, or Earl Roder, or old Bodenay, your knight marshall in Rialmar, their opinions; or your tributary princes in north Rerek: they’ll say the same.’
But the King answered him, ‘Not all of you, Beroald, on your bended knees, nor all my liege subjects up and down the Three Kingdoms, might move me in this. Besides,’ he said, halting and turning to look Beroald in the eye, ‘(and here’s second proviso): to be King, as I have ever opinioned and ever set my course according, should be by competency, not by privilege. If I of myself be not competent of this thing to perform it, better goodnight then and a new king i’ the land.
‘Hearken, therefore, and note it well. ’Twas not by chance I guested with him in Laimak two weeks since in such loving-kindness, in my progress, and well forced; nor by chance that I removed thence with great show of pomp south hither into Meszria. It was to lull them. For all this I did, knowing secretly that he is to meet one night, in some convenient place remote among the upper waters of the Zenner, with five or six (the same I spoke on), there to complete and make up their plot for seizing of Rerek to be a kingdom of itself, with him king thereof. Of time, place, and other particulars of this meeting set, I expect information hourly. You and I, we two alone, will keep that tryst with ’em: wherein if I bring not the rest to destruction and him to his obedience, at least I’ll die attempting it.
‘Well? Will you go, or bide behind?’
The Chancellor very pale and proud of mien, gazing as if into some distance, said after a minute: ‘I’ll go, my Lord the King.’ The King took him by both hands and kissed him. ‘And yet,’ said the Chancellor, facing him now squarely, ‘I would, with your serene highness’ leave, say one word.’
‘Say on, what thee lust.’
‘This, then: I think you are stark mad. And yet,’ he said and drew up his lip, ‘I may well humour my master in this, to suffer myself to be murdered along with him; for I am not afraid of my death.’
The King looked strangely at him: so might some eagle-baffling mountain look upon its own steadfastness imagined dim in some lake where rufflings of the water mar the reflection: so, it may be, might Zeus the cloud-gatherer look down, watching out of Ida. ‘If such fate expect my life, then better so. This must be for us a master-hour, an hour that judgeth all others. I’ll not turn back, Beroald.’
III
A MATCH AND SOME LOOKERS ON
‘TIME, you know, is a curious business’, said Lord Anmering, tilting his head forward a little to let the brim of his panama hat shade his eyes; for it was teatime, and the afternoon sun, from beyond the cricket field below, blazed out of cloudless blue full in their faces. ‘Love of money, we’re told – root of all evil. Gad! I think otherwise. I think Time strikes deeper.’
Lady Southmere replenished the vacuum with one of the more long-drawn, contemplative, and non-committal varieties of the inimitable transatlantic ‘Aha’.
‘Look at Mary,’ he said. ‘Look at me. If I wasn’t her father: wasn’t thirty-two years her senior. Wouldn’t I know what to do with her?’
‘Well, I dare say you would.’
‘Easy enough when they’re not your own,’ he said, as they walked on slowly, coming to a halt at the top of two flights of shallow steps that led down to the field from the gardens. ‘But when they are – By Jove, that’s the style!’ The ball, from a magnificent forward drive, sailed clean over the far fence, amid shouts of applause, for six. ‘If you let your boy go and smash my melon-houses, knocking the bowling about like that, I’ll tell you, I’ll have no more to do with him. We mustn’t forget,’ he said, lower again: ‘she’s very young. Never force the pace.’
‘O but don’t I just agree? And the very dearest, sweetest—’
‘You know her, well as I do. No, you don’t, though. Look there,’ putting up his eye-glass to examine the telegraph board: ‘Eighty. Eighty: a hundred and sixty-three: that’s eighty-four to win. Not so bad, with only three wickets down. It’s that boy of yours is doing it: wonderful steady play: nice style too: like to see him make his century. You know our two best bats, Chedisford and that young Macnaghten, didn’t add up to double figures between ’em: Hugh’s got his work cut out for him. Look at that! Pretty warm bowling. A strong team old Playter’s brought us over this time from Hyrnbastwick: Jove, I’d like to give ’em a whacking for a change. Well, Hugh and Jim seem settled to it. Would you like to come down over there: get a bit of shade?’
‘I would like to do anything anybody tells me to. This is just too perfect.’ She turned, before coming down the steps, to look back for a minute to the great west front of Anmering Blunds, where it ranged beyond green lawns and flower-beds and trim deep-hued hedges of clipped box and barberry and yew: long rows of mullioned windows taking the sun, whose beams seemed to have fired the very substance of the ancient brickwork to some cool-burning airy essence of gold. This wing, by Inigo Jones, was the newest part, masking from this side the original flint-built house that had been old Sir Robert Scarnside’s whom Henry VIII made first Earl of Anmering. Round to the right, in the home park, stood up, square and grey, Anmering church tower. A sheltering wood of oak, ash, beech and sycamore was a screen for hall and church and garden against the east; and all the midsummer leafage of these trees seemed, at this hour, impregnate with that golden light. Northwards, all lay open, the ground falling sharply to the creek, salt marshes and sand-dunes and thence-away, to the North Pole, the sea. Southwards and landwards, park and wood and meadow and arable rose gently to the heaths and commons: Bestarton, Sprowswood, Toftrising. Lady Southmere, waiting on the silence a minute, might hear as under-tones to the voices of the cricket field (of players and lookers on, click of wood against leather as the batsman played) the faint far-off rumour of tide-washed shingle, and, from trees, the woodpigeon’s rustic, slumbrous, suddenly started and suddenly checked, discourse: Two coos, tak’ two coos, Taffy, tak’ two coos, Taffy tak— From golden rose to larkspur a swallowtail butterfly fluttered in the heat. ‘Just too perfect for words,’ she said, turning at last.
They came down the steps and began walking, first north, and so round by the top end of the cricket field towards the tents. ‘I’ll make a clean breast of it,’ she said: ‘twenty-six years now I have been English and lived in the Shires; and yet, Blunds in summer, well, it gets me here: sends me downright home-sick.’ Just as, underneath all immediate sounds or voices, those distant sea-sounds were there for the listening, so in Lady Southmere’s speech there survived some pleasant native intonations of the southern States.
‘Home-sick?’ said Lord Anmering. ‘Virginia?’
‘No, no, no: just for Norfolk. Aren’t I English? And isn’t your Norfolk pure England as England ought to be?’
‘Better get Southmere to do an exchange: give me the place in Leicestershire and you take Blunds.’
‘Well and would you consent to that? Can you break the entail?’
‘My dear lady,’ he said, ‘there are many things I would do for you—’
‘But hardly that?’
‘I’m afraid, not that.’
‘O isn’t that just too bad!’ she said, as Jim Scarnside, playing forward to a yorker, was bowled middle stump.
Fifty or sixty people, may be, watched the game from this western side where the tents were and garden chairs and benches, all in a cool shade of beech and chestnut and lime and sycamore that began to throw shadows far out upon the cricket field: a pleasant summer scene as any could wish, of mingled sound and silence, stir and repose: white hats and white flannels and coloured caps and blazers contrasting here and there with more formal or darker clothes: a gaiety of muslin frocks, coloured silks, gauzes and ribbons, silken parasols and picture hats: the young, the old, the middle-aged: girls, boys, men, women: some being of the house-party; some, the belongings of the eleven that had driven over with Colonel Playter from Hyrnbastwick; some, neighbours and acquaintance from the countryside: wives, friends, parents, sisters, cousins, aunts. Among these their host, with Lady Southmere, now threaded his way, having for each, as he passed, the just greeting, were it word, smile, formal salutation or private joke: the Playter girls, Norah and Sybil, fresh from school: old Lady Dilstead, Sir Oliver’s mother, and his sister Lucy (engaged to Nigel Howard): young Mrs Margesson, a niece of Lord Anmering’s by marriage: Romer, the bursar of Trinity: Limpenfield of All Souls’: General Macnaghten and his wife and son: Trowsley of the Life Guards: Tom and Fanny Chedisford: Mr and Mrs Dagworth from Semmering: Sir Roderick Bailey, the Admiral, whose unpredictable son Jack had made top score (fifty) for the visiting eleven that morning: the Rector and his wife: the Denmore-Benthams: Mr and Mrs Everard Scarnside (Jim’s parents) and Princess Mitzmesczinsky (his sister): the Bremmerdales from Taverford: the Sterramores from Burnham Overy: Janet Rustham and her two little boys: Captain Feveringhay; and dozens besides.
‘Sorry, uncle,’ said Jim Scarnside, as their paths met: he on his way to the pavilion. ‘Ingloriously out for three.’
‘I was always told,’ Lady Southmere said, ‘you ought to block a yorker.’
‘My dear Lady Southmere, don’t I know it? But (I know you won’t believe this), it was all your fault.’
‘That’s very very interesting.’
‘It was.’
‘And please, why?’
‘Well. Just as that chap Howard was walking back the way he does to get properly wound up for one of those charging-buffalo runs that terrify the life out of a poor little batsman like me—’
‘Poor little six foot two!’ she said.
‘Just at that instant, there, on the horizon, your black and white parasol! And I remembered: Heavens! Didn’t Mary make me promise that Lady Southmere should have the first brew of strawberries and cream, because they’re so much the best? and isn’t it long past tea-time, and here she comes, so late, and they’ll all be gone? So there: and Nigel Howard sends down his beastly yorker. Is it fair? Really, Uncle Robert, you ought not to allow ladies to look on at serious cricket like ours. All very well at Lord’s and places like that; but here, it’s too much of a distraction.’
‘But dreadfully awkward,’ said she, laughing up at him, ‘not to have us to put the blame on? Jim!’ she called after him as they parted: he turned. ‘It was real noble and kind of you to think about the strawberries.’
‘I’m off to rescue them.’ And, using his bat like a walking-stick, he disappeared with long galloping strides in the direction of the tea-tent.
St John, next man in, was out first ball. This made an excitement, in expectation that Howard should do the hat-trick; but Denmore-Bentham, who followed, batted with extreme circumspection and entire success (in keeping his wicket up, though not indeed in scoring).
‘Who’s this young fellow that’s been putting up all the runs? Radford? Bradford? I couldn’t catch the name?’ said an old gentleman with white whiskers, white waistcoat, and that guinea-gold complexion that comes of long living east of Suez. His wife answered: ‘Lord Glanford, Lord Southmere’s son. They’re staying here at the house, I think. And that’s his sister: the pretty girl in pink, with brown hair, talking now to Lady Mary.’
His glance, following where hers gave him the direction, suddenly came to rest; but not upon Lady Rosamund Kirstead. For Mary, chancing at that instant to rise and, in her going, look back with some laughing rejoinder to her friends, stood, for that instant, singled; as if, sudden in a vista between trees, a white sail drawing to the wind should lean, pause, and so righting itself pass on its airy way. A most strange and singular look there was, for any perceiving eye to have read, in the eyes of that old colonial governor: as though, through these ordinary haphazard eyes, generations of men crowded to look forth as from a window.
Glanford, with a new partner, seemed to settle down now to win the match by cautious steady play, never taking a risk, never giving a chance. When, after a solid half hour of this, a hundred at last went up on the board, the more cavalierly minded among the onlookers began to give rein to their feelings. ‘Darling Anne,’ Fanny Chedisford said, arm in arm with Lady Bremmerdale, ‘I simply can’t stick it any longer: poke, poke, poke: as soon look on at a game of draughts. For heaven’s sake, let’s go and drown our sorrows in croquet.’
‘Croquet? I thought you agreed with Mary—’
‘I always do. But when?’
‘When she said it was only fit for curates and dowagers, and then only if they’d first done a course in a criminal lunatic asylum.’
‘O we’re all qualified after this. Try a foursome: here’s Jim and Mr Margesson: ask them to join in.’
‘Did I hear someone pronounce my name disrespectfully?’ said Jim Scarnside. Fanny laughed beneath her white parasol. ‘Ah, it was my much esteemed and never sufficiently to be redoubted Miss Chedisford. You know,’ he said to Cuthbert Margesson, ‘Miss Chedisford hasn’t forgiven us for not making it a mixed match.’
‘Broom-sticks for the men?’ said Margesson.
‘Not at all,’ said Fanny.
Jim said, ‘I should think not! Come on: Margesson’s in next wicket down. It does seem rather cheek, when he’s captain, but after all it’s his demon bowling made him that, and his noted diplomacy. Let’s take him on and coach him a bit: teach him to slog.’
Anne Bremmerdale smiled: ‘Better than croquet.’ They moved off towards the nets.
‘Are you a bat, Miss Chedisford? Or a bowler?’ said Margesson.
‘Well, I can bat more amusingly than this.’ Fanny cast a disparaging glance at the game. ‘My brothers taught me.’
‘All the same,’ Margesson said, ‘Glanford’s playing a fine game. We shall beat you yet, Lady Bremmerdale. How is it you didn’t bring your brother over to play for Hyrnbastwick?’
‘Which one? I’ve five.’
‘I’ve only met one. The youngest. Your brother Edward, isn’t it?’
‘She couldn’t bring him because she hasn’t got him.’
Fanny said, ‘I thought he was staying with you now at Taverford?’
‘Not since early May.’
‘He’s the kind of man,’ said Jim, ‘you never know where he is.’
Fanny looked surprised. ‘I’d have sworn,’ she said, ‘it was Edward Lessingham I saw this morning. Must have been his double.’
‘Antipholus of Ephesus,’ said Jim: ‘Antipholus of Syracuse.’
‘About eight o’clock,’ said Fanny. ‘It was such a dream of a morning, all sopping with dew. I’d got up with the lark and walked the dogs right up onto Kelling Heath before breakfast. I’d swear no one in these parts had that marvellous seat on a horse that he has. So careless. My dear, I’ll bet you anything you like it was he: galloping south, towards Holt!’
‘Really, Fanny, it couldn’t have been,’ said Anne.
‘There are not many young men you’d mistake for him,’ said Fanny.
Jim said to them, ‘Talking of Kelling Heath, I’ll tell you an idea of mine; why can’t we get up a point-to-point there this autumn? What do you say, Cuth
bert?’
‘I’m all for it.’
‘I tackled Colonel Playter about it today at lunch: very important to get him, as M.F.H., to bless it: in fact, he really ought to take it over himself, if it’s to be a real good show. He likes the idea. Did you sound Charles, Anne?’
‘Yes I did: he’s awfully keen on it, and means to get a word with you this evening. Of course you could have a magnificent run right over from Weybourne Heath to Salthouse Common, and back the other way; pretty rough and steep, though, in places.’
Fanny accepted the change of subject. May be she thought the more.
Bentham was out: caught at the wicket: six wickets down for a hundred and nine, of which Glanford had made sixty off his own bat. Margesson now went in, and (not because of any eggings on of impatient young ladies – unless, indeed, telepathy was at work – for Glanford it was who did the scoring), the play began to be brisk. Major Rustham, the Hyrnbastwick captain, now took Howard off and tried Sir Charles Bremmerdale, whose delivery, slowish, erratic, deceptively easy in appearance, yet concealed (as dangerous currents in the body of smooth-seeming water) a puzzling variety of pace and length and now and again an unexpected and most disconcerting check or spin. But Glanford had plainly got his eye in: Margesson too. ‘We’re winning, Nell,’ said Lord Anmering to his niece, Mrs Margesson. ‘A dashed fine stand!’ said Sybil Playter. ‘Shut up swearing,’ said her sister. ‘Shut up yourself: I’m not.’ People clapped and cheered Glanford’s strokes. Charles Bremmerdale now could do nothing with him: to mid-off, two: to mid-on, two: a wide: a strong drive, over cover’s head, to the boundary, four: to long-leg in the deep field, two – no – three, while Jack Bailey bungles it with a long shot at the wicket: point runs after it: ‘Come on!’ Four: the fieldsman is on it, turns to throw in: ‘No!’ says Margesson, but Glanford, ‘Yes! come on!’ They run: Bremmerdale is crouched at the wicket: a fine throw, into his hands, bails off and Glanford run out. ‘Bad luck!’ said Jim Scarnside, standing with Tom and Fanny Chedisford at the scoring table: Glanford had made ninety-one. ‘But why the devil will he always try and bag the bowling?’
