Mary of Carisbrooke (6 page)

“You can wear the thing when you go into Newport—or when you are alone with me. Let me put them on for you,” he urged. He was a long time fumbling with the clasp and she could feel his hands exploring the smooth whiteness of her neck.

“I do not want to go to the mainland,” she said, jerking herself away. “And why should you, the Captain of the Guard, need kindness?”

The ingenuousness of the words drew something of the truth from him. “It is not only my men who miss their home life. You do not suppose, do you, that I
wanted
to leave London and be stuck on this God-forsaken island?”

“Do you suppose
we
wanted any of
you
?” she flashed back at him, stung to local loyalty.

She was a lovely young thing when the colour came into her cheeks, and the sparkle into her golden-brown eyes. Rolph decided to take the Governor’s message himself, and walked close behind her as she began to mount the stairs. “At least we liven things up,” he chuckled, clutching at her in the darkness.

But Mary was too fleet for him. “Why are you following me?” she demanded breathlessly, having reached the security of her aunt’s doorway.

He straightened his belt and resumed his normal air of authority. “Because I, too, have occasion to see Mistress Wheeler.”

Inside the housekeeper’s room they found Silas Floyd, tunic unbuttoned, taking his ease before the fire, while his sister stood by the table fashioning some garment. Both occupants of the room looked surprised to see the overner, and Floyd, off duty, rose to his feet just deliberately enough to convey the impression that his presence was an intrusion. “Do you want something of me, Captain?” asked Mistress Wheeler.

“It is Colonel Hammond who wants you, Mistress,” said Rolph, with cheerful civility. “It seems that all the trouble royalty has caused you is as nothing compared with what is yet to come.”

“You are pleased to speak in riddles, Captain.”

“To be more explicit, a batch of courtiers are coming from Hampton.”

The sorely tried housekeeper laid down her measuring tape and stared at him across the table. “How do you know this?” she asked.

“The Governor himself told me just now, and I thought it only kind to prepare you before you see him. Moreover, I myself have just come from London.”

“From London?” exclaimed Floyd. “Then they know that the King—”

“Sooner or later they had to know. In my opinion, the man who advised him to come here was a fool.”

“But surely having his own people sent here means that his Majesty will be properly treated, sir?”

“If you ask me, Sergeant, it means that the trap is closed,” grinned Rolph, lifting Mary’s cloak from her shoulders with an exaggerated air of gallantry. “An island twenty-four miles long by fourteen wide can be very effectively patrolled.”

Druscilla Wheeler sank into a chair and Mary went as far from her admirer as she could and sat upon the window seat. Edmund Rolph would have liked to sit down among them, but no one invited him to do so. Thick-skinned as he was, he was uncomfortably aware that although these islanders always spoke to him politely, they never did anything to make him feel welcome.

“How many are coming?” asked Mistress Wheeler, averse from showing him their anxiety for the King.

“About thirty, I understand. But do not fear that you and Mary will be over-worked. Most of them will bring their own servants.”

“We are not afraid of work, but where shall we sleep them all?”

“I imagine that is what the Governor wants to talk with you about.”

“I will go down now. We shall have to turn some of the servants’ quarters into guest rooms, I suppose.”

“The barracks are half empty. I could let you have the top floor for the men servants.”

Silas Floyd was looking thoughtfully at his daughter. He could wager she had not heard a word they had been saying, and he noticed her heightened colour. When the Captain had taken her cloak her hand had gone quickly to her throat, and now the firelight was sparkling on a string of expensive-looking beads. “There is also Mary’s room,” he said. “She had better come in here, Druscilla, and sleep with you.” The words sounded like an order. They were addressed to his sister, but as he said them he turned and looked straight at the Captain of the Guard.

Rolph reddened angrily and moved towards the door. “You might remind the Governor,” he said to Mistress Wheeler, “that accommodation in the barracks will be available only
until General Fairfax sends our reinforcements
.”

“Reinforcements?” Mary spoke for the first time as soon as he was gone.

“A sensible precaution—for the King’s safety,” said her father quietly. It would mean more overners. Other Sergeants, poking about contemptuously among his outdated cannon. Cromwell’s Model Army types, out to teach old dogs new tricks. And he himself was not so young. All the same he took up the Captain’s half-spoken challenge. He crossed the room and laid a hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “How did you come by the fine necklace, Mary?”

Her clear eyes looked up straightly into his. “Captain Rolph gave it to me just now. He bought it for me in London. I think he and Tom Rudy must have had some sort of reward, because Rudy is going to marry Libby, Aunt Druscilla. I—I did try not to take it, father,” she added. “But the Captain reminded me that you were under his command.”

“The swine!” He swung away with an oath and began pacing the floor, but soon came back to her. “And so you thought you had to obey him—for my sake.” Very gently he cupped her troubled face in his hands. “My little tenderheart! But you must give them to me.”

Reluctantly Mary unclasped her first piece of jewellery. “They are very beautiful,” murmured her aunt, with womanly understanding.

“But very dangerous,” said Floyd, still holding out his hand.

“What will you do with them?” asked Mary, laying them upon his open palm.

“Give them back to him, of course. And tell him that if my daughter wants for trinkets before she gets herself a good husband, I will give them to her. To me you seem still a child…I blame myself for not thinking of it before.”

Mary was on her feet immediately, her arms about him. “It is not the beads I am thinking of, but you. I saw him kick Patters once because she snarled at him for treading on one of her pups. Such men can be vengeful.”

“Do not worry, my dear,” said her aunt. “At least the Governor is a just man and your father knows his trade.”

“And how to look after my own!” laughed the Sergeant, pulling his daughter against him in a rough embrace. “But I must get back to the barracks. Now go and bring your gear down here and get you to bed.”

They watched her go and then, before parting, turned back to their own urgent thoughts. “God help his Majesty, they lost no time in betraying him!” cried Druscilla Wheeler.

Sergeant Floyd crunched the beads almost absently in his muscular hand. He had been in a Stuart’s army since he was a lad, but he had never been so consciously a Royalist before. “If Rudy came back with money enough to make an honest woman of that Libby of yours, and this lechering bootmaker can buy amber in the hopes of raping my daughter, how much did the Governor get?” he demanded savagely.

The King’s Laundress!” repeated Agnes Trattle, her amused voice lending warmth to the comfortable inn parlour. “Little did I think, when we were learning our lessons together, that prim little Druscilla Floyd would ever be called anything so imposing!”

For the first time since the King’s return from Nunwell Mary had found time to visit her friend’s family, and she was enjoying an unaccustomed sense of importance because they were all agog to hear news from the castle.

“And what do they call
you
?” teased Frances, fluttering round her with offers of refreshment.

“The King’s Laundress’s Assistant, I suppose,” laughed Mary. “At least I do all his Majesty’s washing and mending.”

“And do all the important people from Hampton have fancy titles like that?” asked Mistress Trattle.

Mary nodded as her strong white teeth bit into a tempting apple. “There is a list of them hanging in the great hall.” She began checking them off on her fingers. “Master Mildmay, Carver—Master Murray, Groom of the Bedchamber—Master Cressett, Treasurer—oh, I cannot remember the half of them!”

“Then his Majesty is treated properly in spite of all his attendants having been chosen by Parliament?” concluded Captain Burley, from his place beside the fire.

“Indeed, yes, Captain,” Mary assured him. “The Parliament people have even sent over some of his furniture. You never saw such changes, Mistress Trattle! The best bedroom is now the State room and has fine rugs on the floor and a new red-and-blue tapestry against the serving passage wall, and when I take in his Majesty’s clean nightshirt of an evening Master Ashburnham himself takes it from me and warms it before the fire. His Majesty’s meals are served in the great hall and we have to call it the Presence Chamber. And one of the gentlemen who is called a Sewer tastes each dish before the King touches it!”

“As if honest islanders would poison him!” muttered Burley.

“Poor Cheke could not if he would,” laughed Mary. “He is like to burst himself with fury, poor man, because a Roundhead cook from Hampton has been put over him. Though in fact, with so many to feed, there must be work enough for both.”

“I hear from the ‘Bull’ that all their rooms are full up with Parliamentary Commissioners from London,” said Trattle, who had come into the parlour with Master Newland to hear the Carisbrooke news.

“Aye, and some from Scotland as well. You’ll be having some of them along here to-night, Mistress Trattle,” added John Newland. “They came over in my brig
Vectis
. It seems that as soon as his Majesty found Colonel Hammond had given away his whereabouts, he wrote openly to Parliament, urging some further negotiations by which he hoped to come to terms with them. And now, so my skipper tells me, both these Scots and our own Commissioners have brought Bills for the King to sign.”

“Does he owe them a great deal of money?” asked Frances, and flushed with annoyance when her father laughed and said, “Not that kind of bill, my pretty.”

“Terms of agreement, Frances, in exchange for which they will give him their support,” explained Newland, who was no mean driver of bargains himself.

“And if his Majesty signs them perhaps we shall have peace at last, and they will let him go back to Whitehall,” sighed Agnes Trattle.

“Anything that comes from Cromwell now is more likely to be in the nature of a victor’s ultimatum,” said her husband less hopefully.

“What right have such scum to dictate terms to an anointed king?” burst forth the irascible Burley.

“We should not forget that he
did
levy taxes without consulting them,” pointed out Newland.

His words started off a heated discussion, and Mary remembered that her aunt would be needing her and kissed Mistress Trattle good-bye. “I wish I could stay over Christmas,” she said, looking round the hospitable room already decked with holly. “The castle is so full of strangers. We used to roam about wherever we liked, but now it does not seem at all like home.”

“But it must be much more exciting. More exciting than anything we ever dreamed of,” said Frances, going with her to the street door. With a glance over her shoulder to make sure that John Newland was still talking too heatedly to overhear her, she asked eagerly, “What are they like, these courtiers?”

“I scarcely know them apart as yet,” confessed Mary. “They all bow a lot and wear huge plumes in their hats and talk differently from us. But truly, Frances, I do not think that you are missing much; for all of them are appointed by Parliament and most of them are middle-aged.”

But that evening Mary encountered one who was young. In his early twenties, at most. He was tall and slender and almost red-headed. And he was laughing as he called back some bantering remarks to someone in the King’s ante-room. Everyone had been so worried that there had been little laughter in the castle for weeks, and Mary’s unusual depression lifted suddenly at the sound of it.

The cheerful young man came into the deserted hall where she had supped carrying a pile of papers with an inkhorn poised precariously on top. And suddenly all was confusion. A servant, carrying out the last of the dishes, let the opposite door slam and a draught blew the papers all over the floor and sent the inkhorn flying. “Devil take all clerking!” yelled the young man, diving after them. In trying to save the inkhorn from upsetting over a chair he trod on Floyd’s bitch Patters, who lay suckling her latest litter before the hearth. The bitch yelped and flew at his ankles. And Mary noticed with approval that instead of kicking at her as Captain Rolph had done he gathered her up and felt each of her paws with dog-wise hands, seeming more concerned lest he had injured her than because a black splash of ink was spreading over the seat of the chair. “I doubt if she is really hurt. She always flies out like that,” said Mary, crossing to the hearth. A week or two ago she would have been too shy to address anyone in so modish a coat, but her world had enlarged since then.

Together they examined the foolish little animal, who was already struggling to lick the young man’s face. He put Patters down and they considered the chair. “We Parliament people will be less popular than ever,” he said ruefully.

“Perhaps I can embroider over the stain,” suggested Mary. “It is the chair my aunt sits in at meals.”

He took the empty inkhorn from her and threw it into the fire and, in spite of her protests, began wiping her ink-stained fingers with a flamboyant silk handkerchief. “Your aunt is Mistress Wheeler, isn’t she?” he asked. “And you are Mary?”

“How did you know?”

“Colonel Ashburnham told me. He said how beautifully you laundered the King’s shirts.”

“He is very kind. I did not know he was a Colonel.”

“He commanded a regiment in the King’s army. But that is all over now.” Having wiped each of her fingers very carefully, he tucked the handkerchief back into his cuff. They were standing very close together and, being young, took stock of each other. “My name is Firebrace,” he said. “Harry Firebrace.”

Mary smothered a little spurt of laughter. “It is rather an odd name,” she said apologetically.

“A very good name,” he countered. “Obviously of Norman vintage.
Bras de Feu
, you know. Or Strong Arm.”

“Your arm could not have been particularly strong when you dropped all those papers,” smiled Mary. “Where were you taking them?”

“To the Court room.” Together they began gathering them up and between grovelling under benches and agile dives beneath the empty supper tables he tried to explain. “The Parliamentary Commissioners are to wait upon his Majesty to-morrow, and they will need a room where they can hold their private discussions and write their reports. Colonel Hammond asked me to see that it is in readiness for them. I was to have got one of the servants to help me, but they all seem to have gone to their suppers.” As Mary handed him a bunch of quill pens she had retrieved he scratched his smoothly shaven cheek doubtfully with the feathered ends of them. “Come to think about it, I do not even know where the Court room is.”

“I will show you,” offered Mary.

She led him down a flight of stairs to a large room on the ground floor. “The Governor holds sessions here and people come from all over the island,” she told him. “As it is not often used between times, I had better have someone light a fire.”

Harry Firebrace regarded the room with interest. It was barely furnished with old chairs and a long table but coats of arms carved round the fireplace gave it an air of official importance. “This would be exactly under the King’s bedroom, would it not?” he asked. “And where does that outer door lead?”

“To the back of the castle, by the old keep. The people come in that way. It saves their muddy feet traipsing all through the house. This stone floor can easily be scrubbed.”

His mind seemed to be upon less domestic considerations. He crossed the room, unbolted the outer door, and looked out into the darkness. He appeared to be a very inquisitive young man. “Do
you
find our island God-forsaken?” she asked, still sore from the slighting way in which the Captain of the Guard had spoken of it.

“God-forsaken? Lord save us, no! ” He had bolted the door again and come back to her all in what seemed to be one swift movement, and she supposed that anyone with such unbounded vitality would scarcely find a desert dull. “But then,” he added reasonably, “I have only just arrived. My friend Osborne and I came over with the Scottish Commissioners.”

“Aboard the
Vectis
?”

“How did you know?”

“She belongs to Master Newland, and he said that she was in.”

He seemed to be readily interested in the affairs of others. “Is he a particular friend of yours?” he asked.

“Oh no. But he is betrothed to my best friend, Frances Trattle. It was she,” added Mary proudly, “who stepped out of the crowd the day the King arrived and gave him a rose.”

He gave her a swift searching look, then began doling out some of his papers along the table. “The
Vectis
was a trim little craft. Built for speed,” he remarked casually. “I suppose this Newland would have others?”

“Oh yes. There are usually several being laden or unladen in Medina river. He is one of the busiest merchants in Newport.”

“Then I suppose your friend lives in Newport too?”

“Her father keeps the ‘Rose and Crown’.”

“And you often go to see her there?”

“About once a week. But no one has had time for visiting lately.”

He jerked forward a stool for her and perched himself on the edge of the table. It was as if he threw off some preoccupation of his own in order to offer her a more personal and sympathetic interest. “One forgets that this is your home and we have invaded it,” he said more gently. “Have you hated our coming very much?”

Mary found herself answering him as though he were a friend of long standing. “Everything is so formal and different,” she said. “To-morrow will be Christmas Eve. Other years we have had the men bringing in a yule log and the maids and I have been decorating the hall with holly. The last Governor used to let us get up a masque. Everybody would have been joking and laughing. That was why when I heard you laughing just now—”

He leaned forward and took one of her hands. “You poor disappointed child!” he said.

“I am seventeen,” she told him with dignity.

Immediately he let go her hand with a friendly pat. “And now everybody seems to have forgotten it is Christmas time and instead of masques we shall have only a posse of solemn lawyers and Elders of the Kirk making a lot of long speeches. Though I daresay they will manage to be quite as amusing.”

For a custodian sent by Parliament he was remarkably irreverent. “I daresay you Puritans would not have permitted the masque anyway,” she sighed.

“Everybody who works for Oliver Cromwell is not a kill-joy,” he said, and because he sounded really hurt and had been concerned for Patters she made him the most friendly overture she could think of. “Would you care to come and watch the well-house donkeys one morning?”

“The donkeys?”

“They work the great wheel. Old Brett and I trained them.”

“Is he the bent old man who brought in the logs for the Presence Chamber this evening?”

Mary nodded, thinking how observant he was.

“I will come to-morrow,” he said. “Or rather, the next day. To-morrow, being Christmas Eve, we will go gathering holly and you must take me to the ‘Rose and Crown’ to meet your friend.”

“But you will not have time,” objected Mary, although her eyes were bright with anticipation.

“Even a royal attendant has
some
hours off duty. Or perhaps Richard Osborne will take my place and help us decorate the hall.”

A sudden thought sobered the happiness of her face. “No, I think not,” she said quietly. “It would be too sad for the poor King.”

“The contrast with other Christmases, you mean?”

“He will be thinking of his children.”

He looked at her with very real liking. “Mary, how sweet you are!” he said. “We will just go and drink a Christmas wassail at the ‘Rose and Crown’.”

Perhaps he was missing his home life, she thought. “I suppose everything here must seem very strange to you, too,” she said. “I know the soldiers who came over with the new Governor feel as if they were in exile.”

Harry Firebrace stood up and took a final look at the table where matters of such vast importance to the King would be argued out. “It is not so strange to me as you would think,” he said. “You see, I have been his Majesty’s page of the backstairs before—at Holmby and at Hampton.”

His voice sounded quite different, as if all the laughter had gone out of it—almost as if he were worshipping in church. She looked up and saw his face serious and dedicated in the candlelight, and an odd little pulse of excitement stirred in her. “And now?” she whispered, scarcely knowing what she meant.

“Now I have been promoted to be groom of the bedchamber,” he said. Suddenly he smiled at her gaily. “So since my royal master is here, I do not feel at all as if I were in exile, little tender-heart,” he assured her, unconsciously using the name by which her father so often called her.