*
Ralegh had expected, on reaching London, to be committed to the Tower, but instead he was allowed to return to the little house in Broad Street. He was not even troubled with Master Partridge or another of his kind.
The story of the affair at Salisbury, ably spread by Dr. Manourie who had left them at Staines, was in London as soon as he was, if not sooner. Stucley appeared almost inarticulate with indignation, and reproached himself bitterly for having brought the Frenchman into their party. But Ralegh was completely unabashed at the publishing of his ruse. He had never blushed for himself in all his life, and saw no reason to begin now, when so little of his life was left to run. Had not King David feigned madness and dribbled in his beard to save himself from his enemies? And should he be ashamed to follow in the footsteps of King David? And somehow the laughter that was to have been such a powerful weapon against him, lessening him in the eyes of all men, never materialised. Sir Lewis had under-estimated his kinsman, for there was about Ralegh a power of personality that could invest even purple blotches with his own distinction.
Day followed day, and still Ralegh was left in the little house in Broad Street. Truth to tell, James did not quite know what to do with him; did not quite know what Philip of Spain wanted doing with him, and was writing muddled letters to his brother monarch to find out. Meanwhile, if left to his own devices, the old Queen’s Captain might incriminate himself in some way.
And then, very late one night. Ralegh received a visit from Le Clerk, the French Resident.
Bess would have gone to her bed and left the two men alone, but Ralegh had bidden her remain and bear them company. and so throughout the interview she sat beside the fire — for the summer night had turned chilly — her gaze moving constantly between the two at the table, resting always on the last speaker. They were a dramatic contrast; the tall grey Englishman, ill and haggard, yet with something of the old fire burning in him still; and across the table from him the darkly dapper French Resident, with his mobile, expressive Gallic face and quick-gesturing hands.
‘When we approached you before you left Plymouth, you would not accept our offer,’ Le Clerk was saying. ‘But now, since this most sorry affair at Salisbury, it has seemed to us that you may well have changed your mind; and behold, I come, Mon Ami, to make the offer again. His Majesty King Louis is anxious — so very anxious — concerning this projected English-Spanish alliance, and it would give him so great pleasure to offer sanctuary to the Scourge of Spain.’ He made a little complimentary bow to Ralegh.
‘I will not take service under a foreign flag,’ Ralegh said.
The expressive hands were deprecating. ‘But no! There is no need; all that can be settled later, in leisure — and in safety. For the present it is only that we offer sanctuary until — how you say it? — until the storm is blown out. Listen Mon Ami, the anti-Spanish faction here at Whitehall are as eager to aid you away as the same faction at the Louvre to receive you. You have but to say the word — one so little word, and I will engage to bear you safely to a channel port and across the Narrow Seas.’
There was a long pause, in which Bess could hear the whisper of the flames and the soft, heavy breathing of Hodge, asleep before the fire, and the sudden sharp spatter of rain against the window. Ralegh was sitting with his head in his hands.
‘When your agents approached me in Plymouth, I believed against all reason that there might still be for me a slim hope of justice at the hands of my own King,’ he said at last. ‘Also I was strung to a fine heroic pitch. That is all over now, the one with the other; and I am past caring overmuch for the niceties of my honour. I accept the sanctuary you offer.’ He dropped his hands and sat up, his eyes suddenly very blue in his grey face. ‘But I have my own means of escape, and I will come to it under my own sail.’
Presently, when Le Clerk had departed as quietly as he came, into the silent City, Ralegh returned to the parlour, and found Bess waiting for him before the dying fire. ‘What’s amiss, Sweet?’ he asked.
‘Walter, this other means of escape that you spoke of — I am afraid of it.’
‘Why Bess, it was you and King yourselves who beat up that old boatswain of his, and arranged him to stand ready to ferry me across the Narrow Seas; and you have been urging me to make use of him ever since. You do not mistrust Hart, surely?’
‘No no, not Hart. I — wish that you had not spoken of it to Sir Lewis.’
‘Lewis? But if I am to go forward with this plan, as now seems to be the case, I shall need Lewis’s help; someone who can come and go freely and unsuspect, about our own arrangements, as you and King cannot do.’
‘I know, but ...’
‘But what?’
‘I am not sure. His eyes are narrow-pupilled, like a goat’s.’
He laughed. ‘Is that all? Bess, you will be mistrusting your own shadow next.’
‘It is maybe only that I am tired — and afraid — afraid of everything and everyone.’ She shivered a little. ‘I wish to God that you were relying instead on Monsieur Le Clerk for your escape. Lewis has been so long your enemy.’
‘No, never quite that. There has been bad blood between us in the past, but no friend could have stood by me more truly, in this tangle.’
‘Despite Dr. Manourie?’
‘Despite Dr. Manourie. Lewis was gulled by that gentleman, and so was I.’
So Bess tried to believe that she was merely overwrought, and Sir Lewis Stucley, having borrowed from Ralegh the needful money to oil the wheels of the escape mechanism, continued to be a friend indeed.
The evening came; and in the parlour of the house in Broad Street, Ralegh stood ready to go. Carew, newly home from Oxford, was waiting in the hall with Captain King. Carew seemed much older, these days; he had taken his brother’s death, as he had taken all else, very quietly; but at thirteen, he was suddenly no longer a boy.
Ralegh was clasping his black cloak. Outside the windows, the heat-drained August day still hung colourless behind the dark masses of the ilex tree, but in the parlour the shadows were gathering thick and fast; and to Bess it seemed that the tall, cloaked figure was merging into them, sinking away from her, further — further ... She cried out in sudden panic, reaching out as though to catch and hold him back. Her terrified hands were caught in his hard, vital ones. ‘Bess,’ Ralegh said; and then, ‘Sweetheart, there is no call for that! It is but for a little while.’
‘Yes, only for a little while,’ she said breathlessly. ‘The Queen will intercede for you with the King. I will go to her as soon as I know that you are safely away. And if that fails, then I am to join you in France, and bring Carew with me. Monsieur Le Clerk will arrange it.’ It had all been settled in advance, to the last detail. She was repeating it now as one repeating a charm in a dark place.
Ralegh held her close; but even now, there seemed no substance in him, and his mouth on hers was remote, as though some vital part of him was already elsewhere. They had put off their leave-taking until now there was no time for leave-taking at all. ‘God keep you, dear Bess,’ Ralegh said, ‘until we meet again. No, do not you come down with me. Wait here.’
He released her abruptly. And then he was gone, shutting the door behind him, and she heard his retreating footsteps on the stair; heard his voice below, and Carew’s; another leave-taking, quickly over. Then the house door shut.
The rattle of the falling latch sounded unnaturally loud in the silent house; sounded with an appalling finality. And to Bess, it brought suddenly the hideous presagement of something else falling, flashing down with death in its sweep. Once before, on her wedding night, she had glimpsed that horror, but then it had been far off, down a long corridor of future years; now the years were in the past, and the horror was almost here, leaping on her out of a bleak autumn morning with all the clocks of London striking eight, and the headsman’s axe crashing down in Old Palace Yard.
Chapter 23 - Traitor’s Gate
WITH the sound of the falling latch in his ears, Ral
egh walked forward into the twilight. Captain King, feeling instinctively that the man wished to be alone, dropped back a little, walking into exile with his old Admiral, but leaving his solitude inviolate. So, threading their way through the maze of mean streets and alleyways, they went, one behind the other, wrapped in the anonymity of their dark cloaks, of the deepening dusk and the teeming city.
The streets and alleyways grew more squalid as they went, the houses jostled each other more closely, the lanterns before doorways grew fewer and fewer, and presently the smells of the river began to creep chill into the reek of running kennels and crowded humanity. Soon the river smells began to overpower those of the land, and they were in a strange hinterland where bowsprits peered in at windows and masts mingled with crazy chimneys, and ships seemed to have run aground and houses to have launched themselves, and everywhere was the dark glint of water.
And so they came at last to the agreed rendezvous, not far from the Tower. There was a faint and ragged mist down here, hanging low over the water and veiling with mystery the lower stories of the pile-propped waterside buildings. A wherry rocked gently at the foot of the short flight of weed-slippery river stairs, and a figure loomed out of the shadows as Ralegh and King appeared.
‘Thank God you are come,’ said Stucley.
‘Why so vehement?’ Ralegh asked quickly. ‘Is there anything amiss?’
‘No no, what should be amiss? But I have been imagining all manner of horrors and mischances, waiting here for you.’ The other sounded nervy, a little fretful.
Ralegh turned to the stairs. ‘You should not have arrived before your time, my coz; indeed there is no need that you come at all. You have already done all, and more than all, that I had a right to expect from you.’
‘I’ll see you safely to Gravesend,’ Stucley said, less fretfully. ‘I like not to leave a task half accomplished. Mind how you go. The steps are slippery.’
‘Thank you, Lewis,’ Ralegh said with asperity. ‘A wreck I may be, but I can still negotiate a few river steps and come aboard a boat unaided.’ He cast one glance up at the sky, which was beginning to glimmer with the rising moon. ‘We shall have a fine night; a fine white night for leaving by the back door, my friends,’ Then he went steadily down the river steps, one hand against the slimy wall of the jetty.
The coxswain of the wherry rose to meet him, and he set his hand on the man’s wrist, and stepped aboard. ‘God den to you, Hart.’
‘Sir,’ said Hart, and as Ralegh made his way aft, turned to Captain King as he also came aboard. ‘Everything shipshape and Bristol fashion, Sir; the lugger is moored off Gravesend, and we shall be aboard her before dawn.’
Sir Lewis Stucley followed the other two; the passengers settled themselves aft, and at a word from Hart, the painter was slipped and the rowers thrust off.
The wherry edged out into the stream, the dark gap widening between her side and the jetty, and at another order, the rowers brought her round, her bows downstream, and settled down to a long steady pull. They were making what time they could now, for the tide would be turning in not much over an hour, and after that they would be pulling against it all the way to Gravesend. It would have been better if they could have taken the tide at the turn, and had it with them the whole way, but that would have meant broad daylight at one or other end of the journey, and they quite understood that their passenger, leaving as they had been told for foreign parts after a quarrel with the Spanish Ambassador, might find it inconvenient to do so except in the dark.
In the stern of the wherry, between his kinsman and his old Captain, Ralegh sat, unmoving and aloof, wrapped in his own peculiar solitude as in the folds of his cloak. The other two glanced at him from time to time, but he seemed unaware of their existence, his whole attention given to the river itself. London River, flowing to the sea; and who should say when, if ever, he should come up London River again on a making tide? The faint mist was growing luminous under the rising moon, and out of the glimmering gauzy swathes of it swam the tall ships at anchor in the Pool; here a poop lantern, there the dark thrust of a bowsprit looming overhead as the wherry slid by. In one vessel, a dog barked, aboard another, a fiddler was playing, and the tune followed them a long way across the water: ‘Time to go — time to go.’
They were clear of much of the shipping now, clear of the mist, too; and the rising moon cast a living fish-scale of light into every ripple of London River, as it flowed — more slowly now, for the tide was near its turning — to the sea.
Once or twice, as the shipping of the upper reaches fell astern, Stucley glanced behind him, unwillingly, almost furtively, as though expecting to see something. Presently he looked back yet again, and a faint escape of breath and a tensing of his figure caught at Ralegh’s attention, so that for the first time he also turned and looked back. A long way astern, but clearly visible on the moonlit water, another boat was travelling down river.
Well, there was nothing unusual about that. Ralegh watched the boat intently for a few moments, then turned face-forward again without a word. But Captain King, who had also seen the following boat, spoke under his breath to Hart, and the rowers quickened their stroke. The wherry thrust forward at an increased rate, but already it was slack water, and soon the tide would be against them. And Captain King, looking back again after a while, said uneasily: ‘They are overhauling us steadily. I do not like this, Sir Walter.’
Stucley glanced over his shoulder. ‘Yon boat? Why, man, the Thames is not our private waterway.’
‘None the less,’ Ralegh spoke for the first time. ‘I should be the easier in my mind if it were clear of other users in our wake.’
‘Hey day! This is not like you,’ his kinsman told him, laughing a little, but with an edge to his laughter. ‘We shall get but a short way in this venture if you turn faint-heart already!’
Ralegh turned on him with a flash of disdain. ‘I do not think that I am one who can be accused of that, Lewis. I am running for my life; is it then so wonderful that I mislike unknown runners on my heels?’
‘Nay now, I did not think to call your courage in question. I meant merely that there is no need for any of us to feel alarm. This boat comes in our wake surely by the merest chance that has nothing to do with us. It is maybe some soul bound for a jovial night at Greenwich, or a sea captain going to join his ship in Limehurst Reach — a thousand different people bound on a thousand different errands. Think now, how should the Spanish faction have winded our trail?’
There was something in his low, hurried whispering, in the piling up of unnecessary detail, which failed to carry conviction, and Ralegh turned and looked at him very straightly in the moonlight. ‘Aye, Cousin Lewis, I am wondering that,’ he said slowly. ‘There is but one way, that I can think of.’
A long, tingling pause followed his words; and then Stucley said in a tone almost of horror, ‘Walter, no! You cannot mean that! Good God! We were boys together!’ He reached out as though on a sudden impulse, and laid his arm across the other’s shoulders in a rough, oddly boyish gesture, and kissed him.
Ralegh did not return the kiss, but after a moment’s further pause, he said: ‘Forgive me, Lewis. A hunted man is apt to snap at shadows.’
‘That boat is overhauling us hand over fist,’ King put in urgently. ‘She’s a fast rowing barge. If her business is with us, we have not a chance, with the tide turning.’
Again Hart spoke to the rowers, and again the men quickened their stroke; but at the state of the tide, the wherry was no match for the barge behind. After a short while Stucley said hurriedly: ‘If by some appalling mischance this should be the hunt on our trail, our best chance will be for you to claim that you are already under my arrest, in that way we may well persuade them to leave us alone. Do you hand over to me quickly all that you have in your pockets; that will lend colour to the claim.’ He hesitated. ‘Unless —’
‘Unless?’
‘Unless you still mistrust me.’
‘That is ungenerous,’
Ralegh said, ‘when I have already asked forgiveness that I mistrusted you at all.’ He began to turn out his pockets. He had still a boy’s attitude to pockets; among loose money and lengths of cord and scraps of paper, he produced his tobacco box and silver bowled pipe, a small and very ugly idol of gold and copper, a naval officer’s whistle, a jaccynth seal; another seal with, fastened to it. the piece of rose-quartz that he had brought home from Guiana because it was kin to his quartz mask — that tiny, terrible quartz mask which had gone home to its own country, and now lay with Little Watt in his grave under the ruins of San Thome; charts of the Orinoco delta; a map of Guiana. Strange personal luggage for a man to carry with him into exile, but typical of this particular man. He handed the things over silently, the Guiana map last of all. The moon on the yellowing paper showed the fine network of lines that meant rivers and mountain ranges, showed even some of the names printed so carefully by Lawrence Kemys, five and twenty years ago. ‘Manoa, that the Spaniards call El Dorado,’ he read. It was the landscape of a dream.
He handed it to Stucley, who stowed it with the rest, in his pockets.
Past the lights of Deptford and the shipping of the Royal Dockyard they went, with still the unknown barge behind them. They were coming down to Greenwich now, and the following barge was closing steadily in their wake; very near now, and somehow there had ceased to be any doubt on board the wherry as to its business. It was Ralegh himself who ordered Hart to bring her in to the Greenwich shore; Ralegh with his actor’s instinct for the right gesture at the right moment, disdaining to be run down like a panting hare by a greyhound, terrified and without dignity. He had his one last card to play, but he would play it decently, and if he lost, lose in decent and seemly fashion.
‘We might still have a chance, Sir,’ Captain King protested.
‘You judged otherwise, a while back, when the distance between us and them was half as great again as it is now. We have as much chance of winning across to France in a sieve as we have of shaking off a fast rowing barge in this wherry, with the tide against us,’ Ralegh said; and then to Hart: ‘Bring her alongside the lower Palace Steps.’