Mary of Carisbrooke (28 page)

Mary sat sewing in the parlour of the “Rose and Crown,” using the last of the January afternoon sunlight. The inn was her home now. The only home she had. And now that Frances was married, Agnes Trattle was doubly glad of her company and help. “More help than that dear, undomesticated daughter of mine ever gave me,” she would say, laughingly. “And with all the fine folk from London gone, I might as well go out junketing or sit with folded hands as I used to do in my father’s manor.”

Mary was happy enough with such kind friends, and the cheerful coming and going of an inn kept her from brooding over her recent bereavement; but she missed the new friends she had made and all the exciting conspiracy that had gone on up at the castle, so that the past two months in Newport seemed like some strange backwater of existence which did not belong to her former life.

She seldom went out except to the shops or to visit Frances in her fine new home in Harbour Street. Major Rolph was back and she did her utmost to avoid him. At first she had worried very much about her aunt’s welfare and natural anxiety on her behalf, but Jane Whorwood had been able to set their minds at rest. Soon after the King’s arrival at Hurst Druscilla Wheeler had been allowed to visit Titchfield, taking letters from his Majesty in which he had written to his friends there that he was civilly used, and Jane had been able to tell her that Mary was with the Trattles. The first arrival at Hurst had been horrifying, Druscilla had said. Lieutenant Colonel Ayres was as brutish as her brother had described him; and the roughness of his manners might have been abetted by Rolph, but Colonel Cobbett, who had been sent by Cromwell, had insisted upon reasonable respect and comfort for the King. His Majesty had been allowed to take his daily exercise along the two miles of sandy causeway to the mainland—which information had, of course, immediately fired Jane’s and Harry’s fertile minds with thoughts of rescue.

But whatever hopes they had entertained must be damped down by now, for three weeks later Charles had been taken to Windsor. How glad he must have been to get there, thought Mary, embroidering a crown-encircled rose on one of the inn’s best tablecloths. But what a lonely homecoming, unless they had allowed his two younger children to be with him for Christmas. She had liked to picture him walking on the lovely terrace he had once described to her. But before long they had taken him from Windsor to closer captivity at St. James’s Palace in London.

“What made them move the King like that just when he must have felt a little happier?” she asked of Mistress Trattle, who had come into the room followed by her husband bearing two lighted candles. Whatever their ordinary occupations those days, the minds of all of them were upon the momentous events going on from day to day on the mainland, from whence reliable news came so exasperatingly slowly. And whenever they met again after a short separation they would go on discussing them.

“I do not think it was done out of spite, but rather as a necessary safeguard for their own ends,” said Trattle, answering for his wife. “Parliament had protested that the abduction of the King from here to Hurst was against their orders, and some firebrand named Colonel Pride led a troop of soldiers to Westminster and forcibly prevented any Members from entering who were likely to vote for the rescue of the King from military custody. ‘Pride’s Purge,’ the Londoners called it. William Hopkins calls it a trick for bringing the King illegally to trial.”

‘‘Then was there not some trouble about some letters from the Queen?” asked Agnes Trattle, seating herself near Mary and picking up her own needlework.

“William Hopkins says that she persuaded the French Ambassador to deliver a letter to General Fairfax imploring him to let her come and see her husband before the trial.”

“And the inhuman wretch would not? I used to think he was the kindest of the generals.”

“He might have done, had she not secretly sent a second letter to the King full of last-minute suggestions for his escape. The prying bloodhounds found it in his Majesty’s State Room, it seems, and that was the final argument for his being brought to London. They did not mean to lose their quarry just before their hard-fought-for trial began.”

“And now it is going on,” sighed Mary, letting her work fall upon her lap. “What
can
they bring against him?”

“Every wickedness that is mentioned in the Old Testament, if I know anything about them,” said Trattle, getting up restlessly and going to the window. “It began last Saturday, so we should be hearing the result any day now.”

“Never have I minded so much living on an island!” lamented Agnes.

“‘Hearing the result’,” echoed Mary. “Just as one hears the result of a bowling competition or a wrestling match! How can a pack of subjects find their King guilty? And if they should—what will the result be?”

Both the Trattles looked at her in silence. Whatever they feared, they could not put it into words. Least of all to Mary, who had seen the King every day for a year, who had laundered and mended his linen and given him her dog—who knew him as a vulnerable human being who had likes and moods and habits as other men. “We shall know soon,” muttered Edward Trattle. “Sooner than we thought,” he added, suddenly alert as he caught sight of a familiar figure turning into the Square. “For here comes our new son-in-law, hurrying as if a bull was after him!”

A minute later John Newland burst into the room. He was not much younger than his father-in-law and more heavily built, and had been hurrying hatless all the way from the river. He sat down on the nearest chair and buried his greying brown head in his hands.

“They are going to behead him,” he said.

The terrible words came out between his laboured panting, and were spasmodically expelled as though he had scarcely managed to hold them in so long. And no one needed to ask of whom he spoke.

Presently he lifted his head. “The court adjudged that the said Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy, should be put to death by the severing of his head from his body,” he quoted, staring before him as though the words were written visibly on the parlour wall.

The two women sat motionless, speechless. Trattle went to him and shook him by the shoulder. “How do you know?” he asked, almost angrily.

“One of my skippers. Just come up on the tide with a Gravesend barge. London is shocked silent as if they had the plague, he says.” Newland mopped his sweating forehead and Trattle automatically poured some wine into a glass and pushed it into his hand. “The travesty of a trial was all over by Friday,” Newland told them, gradually recovering his breath. “His Majesty had no chance from the first. They would not let him speak.”

“How has he taken it?”

“I know no details. Only what my man told me.”

Agnes, white-faced as the sheet she had been hemming, tried to put into words the question in the minds of all. “And when—when will they—”

“To-morrow. The last day of January.” Newland passed a hand through his hair and set down his empty glass. “They have taken him back to St. James’s. Only Master Herbert and the Bishop of London are allowed to be with him now.”

“There could be a reprieve. If the Londoners are so shocked they could
do
something! It is their turn. They could rise up and kill those cruel murderers—” It was tender-hearted Mary who was speaking, half-hysterically, with the fine linen napery screwed up like a dishclout in her shaking hands.

“Unfortunately the murderers are armed. The best-armed force we have had within living memory,” Newland reminded her bitterly. He got wearily to his feet, looking round for the hat which he must have left somewhere down at the harbour. “I must be going home to tell my poor, pretty Frances—”

“Who gave him the rose,” added Agnes, and burst into tears.

The terrible news was soon confirmed officially by the Mayor, and unofficially by every ship putting in from the mainland. It was known up at the castle, and Rolph posted small detachments of soldiers in market squares and at cross roads to prevent demonstrations. No one talked of anything else. Or thought of anything else. Even the Puritans who had shouted loudest for Parliament during the Newport Treaty were awed and shocked. Many of them, however firmly assured of the righteousness of their convictions, would not have shouted at all had they known it would end like this. On the day which was fixed for the King’s execution men went about their business as heavily as though a plague had struck the Wight, women whispered fearfully in little groups, and families who were known to be strong supporters of Mayor Moses and the rabid preachers now had sufficient sense—or shame—to stay indoors.

Mary went about as though stunned, her thoughts far away across the Solent. What must Harry and Jane and the rest of them be feeling, who had done everything humanly possible to save their master from such a tragic fate? And men like Thomas Herbert and Anthony Mildmay, who had always loved him in spite of their unswerving loyalty to Parliament? By now, she supposed, the poor Queen might know in France. And his Majesty’s daughter and exiled sons in Holland. And what of those two lonely children left in England? Because the King himself had talked to her about his beloved Bess, and because she herself knew so well how it felt to lose a father by violent death, Mary found herself thinking frequently of the young Princess Elizabeth.

“If only we knew whether it has really happened! Whether someone tried to avert it, and whether his children were allowed to see him,” she said over and over again to Agnes Trattle.

“We are bound to hear in time,” Agnes comforted her, “because some of those Royalists who were with you in the castle must be in London.”

“Do you suppose Aunt Druscilla is with them?”

“If she is she will be able to tell us everything.”

But it was not Aunt Druscilla who brought them the news they were so anxiously waiting for.

A few evenings later, after the inn doors were closed for the night, the three of them with John Newland and Frances were sitting round the parlour fire. William Hopkins and his wife were with them, having come over to know if Trattle had picked up any news from his customers. They had not lit the candles and were, as usual, speculating about what must be going on in London. “Will Cromwell let them bury him in Westminster Abbey like a king?” asked Frances.

“And will they—Uncle Trattle, when someone who has been executed is buried—is the head—” Mary’s voice trailed off into silence. She closed her eyes against the rising tears, caught by the memory of Charles’s comely head above the wide, lace-edged collars which she used to launder so carefully, and shrinking from the thought of how it must look now—severed, separate and bloody.

And at that moment, before anyone could answer, there came the knocking on the wooden window shutter. Everyone started, and then sat rigidly silent. Trattle pulled himself together and went out to unbar the street door, and they heard his voice warm and hearty with surprised welcome. And the next moment a small white dog streaked across the floor and sprang into Mary’s lap.

“It is Rogue!” she exclaimed incredulously, gathering him into her arms and kissing his silky head. And when she looked up there was Richard Osborne standing in the doorway watching her delight. “Spare some of the welcome for me!” he called to her laughingly.

“Oh, Richard!” she cried, too much surprised to hide her feelings.

The others were crowding about him, pressing him for news—asking him if he had been in London and why he had come so quickly.

“I came to bring that foolish little dog back to Mary,” he said lightly, and came and sat down beside her and—to Frances’s surprise and envy—calmly removed one of her fondling hands from Rogue and held it in his own.

“Were you—there—on Tuesday, sir?” asked Trattle.

“No. I was pursuing his Majesty’s spaniel through the packed streets of London.” Osborne’s voice lost its habitual note of levity. “But I was able to see Thomas Herbert afterwards.”

“Could you please tell us?” asked Frances, from the settle where she sat within the shelter of her husband’s arm.

Their unexpected guest went to the hearth to warm his hands, and she would have risen to light the candles, but her mother stayed her with a gesture, sensing that they might hear things which it would be easier to bear by firelight. Osborne stood absently fingering an hour-glass which stood upon a little ledge above the chimney-piece. By the look of his mud-splashed boots he must have been riding hard. It seemed as if, in the expectant silence, he was turning his mind back to those harrowing scenes at Westminster, and trying to condense into a few ordinary sentences a drama which must have moved him to the soul—sentences with which he could make these loyal people gathered in a faraway inn parlour see them too.

During the expectant silence Mary found time to recover from the joyful surprise of seeing him and from her happy embarrassment at the way in which he had made no secret of his interest in her. She was able to forget her own affairs in the vast importance of his news. “It was unbearably sad seeing his Majesty taken away to Hurst Castle,” she said.

“It was at Hurst that he seemed to realize it was the end and to compose his mind, Herbert said. At Windsor, it was more like a homecoming. The King had his own rooms. But the army got the upper hand after Pride’s purge. You will have heard of that even over here?”

Most of those present made a sound of assent and Osborne swung round, with his face in shadow and the firelight outlining his tall, loose-limbed body. “So they took him to St. James’s Palace that he might be at hand for that travesty of a trial,” he said, absently turning the hour-glass up and down between his hands. “I have little time to tell you of it now. Bradshaw, a Lancashire man, was President, and most of the judges were new. In any case, I saw only a part of it.”

“I was told that they would not let the King speak in his own defence,” said Newland.

“I think it was more that his Majesty refused to recognize their authority to try him and—at the beginning at any rate—refused to plead. By refusing to defend himself before an illegal court he was upholding the rights of his people, he said.”