Most Secret (13 page)

“Nay, when have I ever pretended to be virtuous? Indeed, I think I was born otherwise.”

“Then what—?”

Even Harker broke off. Dolly was laughing.

She stood there, head back, ringlets-a-dance, and chortled with honest mirth. Her shoulders, rising in polished pink-white shapeliness from the bodice of the blue-and-orange gown, shook and trembled. The brown eyes were half shut up as though again with tears. Her roguish look—half ingenuous, half hoyden-knowing—reanimated a face rapt, flushed, and lovely enough to turn a man’s brain.

“I was sore afeared,” she said, “but I am afeared no longer. I’ll not do this, Pem, because I’ll not be put upon. I can’t say why, but you have abused my confidence. You have mocked me; you have jeered me; you have told me a very nosegay of lies!”

“Lies, madam?” exploded Harker. “Lies concerning the man Bygones Abraham or the oafish youth whose name we don’t even know?”

“Nay; concerning the King of England and the manner of man you think he is. Are you truly acquainted with the king, Pem? Have you ever exchanged ten words with him?”

“Have I ever …?”

Harker, so taken aback he could not continue, merely lifted a hand to adjust his wig.

Dolly was not even listening. Always at her best in comedy, she played comedy by making her eyes appear long and sleepy-looking. She rubbed her nose as though that also were long, and walked her fingers across her upper lip in the manner of one feeling at a thin line of moustache. Finally, she drew in her chin to mimic a very deep voice.

“God’s fish, sir!”
This from far down in her throat.
“Let me have fiddle music, with bawdy songs. And a wench. God’s fish, Mr. Chiffinch,
fetch me a new wench!”

Then all mimicry dropped away.

“Mistake me not!” Dolly cried in her natural voice. “I use no disrespect towards the king, or at least not much. He hath a good heart, and is no zany. ‘He could see things if he would,’ as the exiled Lord Clarendon is reputed to have said. He is but a lazy idle saunterer, with little to occupy him save sport or whoring. Yet he owns good enough natural wits, all declare, could he be persuaded to turn ’em towards seriousness.”

“How penetrating is this,” said Harker, “that you in your wisdom should find him not
altogether
a fool!”

“A fool? Nay, I expressly denied it! Shall you change his nature, though? Was it not my Lord Rochester, that most insolent young wit in the fair periwig, who wrote a mock epitaph and affixed it to the bed curtains in the Great Chamber? I think it was; I remember the epitaph, and sure never was character better summed up.

“Here lies Our Sovereign Liege the King,

Whose word, no man relies on—

Who never said a foolish thing,

Nor ever did a wise one.”

“There you have it, true-writ by an intimate friend. Pem, Pem, why do you jeer me?”

“Jeer you?”

“‘Unthinking Charles!’ ‘Old Rowley!’ The idle good-for-nothing who chased a moth with my Lady Castlemaine while Dutch guns came up the Medway! Yet this is the man you would limn for me as ceaselessly employing his wits, as deep in hidden craft, as one who may outwit a plotter-in-chief at Whitehall and might even outwit the King of France himself.”

“In truth he might,” said Harker. “It has not occurred to you, I see, that Charles Stuart is the shrewdest man in Europe?”

“Oh, bah! Out upon it! If you would persuade me …”

“As I am not here to persuade or cajole, madam, neither am I here to argue. You have received your orders.”

“‘Plotter-in-chief!’ ‘Group of malcontents!’ God’s death, a truce to such moonshine! If there should truly be in any sort a plotter-in-chief, who is it?”

“Perhaps I may tell you, since you find it so fantastical. Meanwhile, you will obey my commands. You will throw yourself at this young oaf from the country. You will conquer him, lie with him, drain him of what he knows. And, then this shall prove to be nothing …”

“Ay, what then? That
he
may be followed by bullyrocks and knocked on the head from behind?”

“No, madam. He shall have more honour. Him I will meet in Leicester Fields by moonlight, since I challenged him too. Only at the second or third pass, being merciful, will I run him through the guts and leave him to die as he deserves.”

“Because he dared raise his hand to this sacred presence? God, Pem, what a low foul bitch’s spawn you are!”

“Now if I am so, madam, what of you? Whore you may be or no, since you make fine distinctions in such things, but this is mighty high posing for an unhanged thief.”

“Pem, I …”

“Dorothy Landis,” said Harker, pointing a long finger into her face, “how old are you?”

“I am twenty, near to twenty-one.”

“When you were thirteen or fourteen, like your near friend Madam Gwyn—‘Madam’ Gwyn, save the mark!—a drunkard mother ’prenticed you as table servant in a brothel, to serve strong waters to the gentlemen. Is this so?”

“Indeed, it is! What then?”

“At sixteen, as I also think, you became an orange wench at the King’s Playhouse. While still an orange wench, even as old Michael Mohun began to instruct you in the craft of acting, you one night picked the pocket of young Sir Aubrey Fairchild.”

“
I was hungry
.”

“No matter for that; you picked his pocket Sir Aubrey knew this, and wrote a complaint against you …”

“Because you compelled him to! Because poor, well-meaning Aub Fairchild feared you so much, and grovelled before you as all others seem to do. Am I a strumpet and a poor thing? Well! Did I but meet a man of good heart who cared a little for me, and was not one whit afraid of you or your great sword, I think I would love him until I died. And
he
should learn whether in truth I am like unto a dead woman. As for the written complaint against me, ’tis burnt and destroyed.”

“It is not destroyed, as you know well or you’d not have been so complaisant. I have it here.” Harker tapped the left side of his chest. “In sheath pocket inside the coat, where others bear a dagger,
I
carry evidence for the magistrate and the hangman. An end of cavilling, you foolish woman! This means Tyburn Tree, and your slut’s corpse handed over to the knives of surgeons, unless straightway you are content to obey my commands. What do you say?”

“I say again that I’ll not do it! I am utterly weary and sick of you!”

“Then a magistrate had best be summoned. Since
I
say again, and for the last time, that I am not here to argue.”

Harker moved to one side of the table. With his open hand, scarcely looking at her, he struck her hard across the mouth. Dolly’s arms flew out; she herself flew back into the chair; and chair and girl went over backwards with a crash on the oak floor.

And, at the same moment, Kinsmere lifted his fist and rapped sharply with his knuckles on the communicating wall.

Harker whirled round. He was no longer quite so impassive. For a moment or two he stood motionless, a frozen, sly, almost half-witted look framed in the curls of his peruke.

“Who’s there?”

“I am the country bumpkin,” Kinsmere said to the knothole, “who is to have steel through his guts. And the time for it is now come. Need I go in there to your dinner table, Captain Brag-and-Blow, or have you still sufficient huff to dare meet me here?”

Harker cast up his eyes in delight, nose lifting above the thick upper lip. He did not condescend to speak. He took his sword baldric from the extra chair, draping it over his coat from right shoulder to right hip; he wheeled round, and walked at an unhurried pace towards the door.

“Ecod!” breathed Bygones Abraham. “Oh, ecod!”

Kinsmere stalked out of cupboard into the Hebe Room, with Bygones following. Though the air of
this
semi-darkness was a little less close, the reek of stale tobacco fumes and arrack punch closed round like a hand at the throat My grandfather stopped by the mantel-shelf above the cobblestone fireplace, on which shelf stood a tinder box and a tallow dip in a pewter candlestick. He kicked at one of the andirons in the fireplace, disturbing dead ashes.

“Lad, lad!” rumbled an overwrought Bygones. “Body o’ Pilate! If there needs must be fighting, here and now and damn the consequences, ’tis no part of yours to be foremost.
I’ll
meet him.”

“You will not. I have taken a great fancy to the wench in there, and this bold captain is mine for a measuring.”

“But … but not here in this room, surely? Or at least open the shutters! ’Tis all but dark! You’ll barely be able to see him.”

“Or he to see me. If he is in fact as formidable a fellow as he boasts of being …?”

“Ay, he’s an uncommon good swordsman. Braggarts are not always liars and cowards, as so soothingly we find ’em in legend.”

“Then it may be just as well. No, don’t touch the shutters!”

“Lad, lad! I have put no questions heretofore. Since you are Buck Kinsmere’s son, I had thought ye trained to swordplay as soon as you could walk. Tell me truth and speak home:
have
you skill?”

“I am no master of the blade, as was my uncle Godfrey ere he put on so much weight. But my fencing is more than respectable.”

“How many times have you been out? Measured points on a green? Met your enemy in true duello?”

“Faith, sir, there must be a first time for all of us.”

“
Never
before? NEVER, ecod? Rot me, I’ll not allow …”

“By God, you will!—Go and see to Dolly Landis! If he hurt my Dolly, hurt her even in the least degree …”

“Lad, lad, where’s the need for fighting at all? He has spoke enough treason to damn him ten times over. If we fetch a Foot Guard officer from Whitehall Palace, or even a magistrate of the civil law …”

“And have Dolly taken in custody as well? Go and see to her, won’t you?”

Muttering and cursing hard under his breath, Bygones lumbered towards the door. There were footsteps in the passage outside. The door was flung wide open; it struck the wall and rebounded. In the aperture stood Pembroke Harker: towering, little more than a blur to be seen, right hand across on his rapier hilt.

“Two of you, then?” he shouted. “
Two
of you to set on me in ambush?”

“Only one, Captain Loud-Mouth,” Kinsmere yelled back. “Or at all events one at a time. Your own concern for fair dealing has already been noted. Mr. Bygones Abraham, whom you would have had assassinated, will be close at hand but to attend you should you put an end to me.”

“Which will be almost immediately, dog.”

Harker, without seeming to notice Bygones, took two steps inside. Bygones stalked by him into the passage and clapped shut the door. Kinsmere, tightening his sword belt, moved out from the fireplace, between the table with its punch bowl in the middle of the room and the thin, dusty little spears of light through closed shutters at the back. But he turned sideways, so as not to be too much silhouetted.

They were alone now. Harker must come round the table and face him sideways. Neither would have advantage from what blurred light existed. Kinsmere could hear the breath whistling in Harker’s nostrils. He could sense like a presence or an odour the delight with which Harker closed in for the kill. Again there was a great hollow in his chest and a lightness about the legs, with a pulse beating somewhere …

(Dolly! Little Dolly!)

Harker stopped beside the table, still facing forward.

“This is the end of you, bumpkin. If you would pray, do it now. If you would cry quits, you can’t. This is the very last—”

“Save your breath to help your swordplay! Lug out!”

Both of them did so. The light ran along the blades.

“Do you know what will happen to you, oaf? Can you guess or conceive this? You will be …”

Still as he faced forward, the fingers of Harker’s left hand slid down underneath the glass punch bowl with its sticky dregs. And he sent that heavy bowl flying to the left. There was a bursting crash of glass as it struck the chimneypiece just above the fireplace opening; fragments rained and rattled on the hearth.

“Smashed,” he roared. “Smashed and smashed and
forever
smashed.”

“A damned error, Captain Loud-Mouth. You should have thrown it at me. Or are you like the ancient Chinese—Chinese, Japanese, which?—who thought to conquer their enemies by making noise?”

“Is it only noise, oaf? Think well: is it
only
noise?”

Then he was round the edge of the table. The instant they faced each other, bodies sideways at guard position, Harker flung out his great reach at full-length lunge for the middle of the belly.

The blades clacked together. Kinsmere, jerking his wrist to the left, parried beyond the centre line and drove back in riposte for the left side of his opponent’s chest. He heard the stamp of his own foot, then the recurrent stamp and steel slither of full engagement—thrust, parry, riposte, thrust, parry, riposte—as a great dust rose round snaky light flashes on the swords.

Rapier play in my grandfather’s time was much brasher and cruder than the polished business we learned towards the end of the eighteenth century. What it lacked of skill or finesse it made up in murderous fury. And yet these two could not go on at such a pace: all out, near-blind, breathing poisoned air, with every thrust aimed at a vital spot.

Kinsmere, no doubt overreckless, had begun to press his man back towards the wall which held the royal proclamation against health-drinking. And Harker nicked him.

For Kinsmere had tried a feint, his eye clouding. Harker, anticipating this by instinct, broke it and shot forward in vicious full-length lunge for the heart. But his foot slipped, or
his
eye clouded too. Though the point pierced, it struck high and wide of the mark.

Instantly Harker disengaged and drew back. His boots did not clack or thump; he took little shuffling steps; the tall figure seemed almost to melt and disappear. Then it did disappear. Death and damnation, where was he?

Kinsmere felt no consciousness of hurt. Sweat stung his forehead, his eyes, his ribs. From somewhere at the top of the left shoulder spread a warm, thickish wetness which could not be sweat at all.