Most Secret (20 page)

That look, so pleading and ingenuous and yet proud, would have moved anyone. Yet all it did was turn Kinsmere’s brain.

“No, you may not!”

“Sweet, sweet! And wherefore not, prithee?”

“Because already you have been too much in fear and hazard. Because this is no small or trifling thing. Be not moved, Dolly, by any sudden and foolish feeling of gratitude, simply for the reason that… that …”

“As God sees me,” said Dolly, “you have no notion how I feel towards you, or what I would not do for you if I could! This is not gratitude, foolish one. And I run no hazard; truly I don’t Let me feel—oh, let me feel!—that in some idiot’s way I can serve and assist you! Is there nothing, nothing at all, I can do for you?”

“Yes. You can give me a kiss.”

“Oh, body o’ God!” roared Bygones Abraham.

He stumped over to the windows, cursing viciously, and then returned.

“I am a long-suffering man, mark’ee. My patience is of the angels. I would see all young people happy and at fornication. But here’s a man murdered with a knife in his neck, here’s a hangman awaiting both of us unless the king interferes; and what
she
can do, ecod and strike me blind, is to ‘give you a kiss.’ Lad, lad, your destination would be Bedlam if it wasn’t Tyburn. And there’s good sense in what the girl tells us.”

“No, I say!”

“But I say yes,” pleaded Dolly, clinging to Kinsmere and speaking at Bygones past his shoulder. “Indeed, there is the most wondrous good sense, and you at least will agree I’m in the right.”

“Ay, lass, it may be so. Still! Should the king think it not prudent to concern himself—”

“Do you read him so?
I
don’t And this I tell you too. You have spoke much of a wicked jester would run any hazard or do any act. But what of the king’s self? He is a careless man, belike. Yet he sails so close to the wind, even by ordinary, his councillors must shake in their shoes and clap hands to their periwigs lest the whole craft overset. Save that he would have no violence and order no man’s death, there is not an imprudent deed on earth he would not risk either. Be of good heart, both of you. I will do what I propose; I will be of some use and service; I will do it!”

And so, of course, it was eventually decided.

Dolly left them at half past three, not even permitting Kinsmere to accompany her belowstairs. He and Bygones must stand guard in the Hebe Room, as both were agreed. Dolly, rapt and exalted and starry-eyed, flew into the next room and returned with several still-unopened bottles of claret. Then she was away in her grey cloak. She would send them word by note, she said; and, should it be necessary to refer to the king in writing, she would show herself conspirator-subtle by designating him as “R” for old Rowley.

Afterwards they waited.

They gathered up the scattered playing cards of the carouse last night. They set right the overturned chair. They lighted the tallow candle in its pewter holder, and put it on the table. And so, while the dead man lay in his cupboard and the flies still quested for his blood, they sat down with the cards to play at piquet.

“Well, lad, here it is. We may fillip up, cross or pile, as to what shall happen now. If that comical fellow did in fact seek out a magistrate, and send him with a couple of constables to seek us out
…
”

“Well, if he did,” says Kinsmere, “we shall know soon enough—and see gaol soon enough too. Meanwhile, there’s no damned measure we can use save to keep our heads.”

“Ay, lad, fair enough! Spoken like a true King’s Messenger!”

“What’s this again of King’s Messengers? Cut for deal, can’t you?”

At just past four o’clock the rain tore down. Doors banged belowstairs; footsteps stamped and voices rose; once they heard a drunken man being put into the street. On another occasion foot-falls approached their door, but went past to the Cupid Room and returned without stopping.

The minutes crawled by, and then the hours. No magistrate arrived, but no word from Dolly either. St. Dunstan’s clock went on striking interminably. It had just banged out the quarter hour past six when there were more footsteps, and a light rap at the door. My grandfather leaped up as though burnt; then controlled himself and strolled across to it. The servile tapster, his forehead all but touching the floor, handed in a sealed note addressed in painful lettering to “Young Gentlman in Hebby Room.”

“Ay, lad? What’s the word?”

Kinsmere broke open the note and spread it out on the table.

“‘Deare boy,’” said Dolly’s crooked handwriting, which sprawled all over the paper, “‘Deare boy I dount knowe yr name. Dount feare, all is well. Goe back with A. to his lodgings. Leve H. where he ys, he will be taken care of by R.’s order. Staye with A. till you have word from R., you have don well he saith. Much love, D.’”

Bygones Abraham expelled a deep breath.

“‘He will be taken care of,’” Bygones quoted in a heavy voice, “‘by R.’s order.’ Y’know, lad, the man
could
have left us stranded.”

“He could. I much feared he would.”

“Well! He
could
ha’ done that, I say. And yet, arrive what may for the future, he hath behaved with much exactness as the lass said he would. That’s a fine brisk honest lass too!”

“Am I not sensible of it?”

“Come then!” said Bygones, wheezing still more as he poured out two bumpers of claret. “Considering certain remarks of yours a while ago … Will ye drink, can ye drink, the toast I proposed this morning? Here it is, then: God for King Charles! Can ye drink that?”

“I can, with all my heart. Dolly above all, but—God for King Charles!”

Again they both looked at Dolly’s note. While Kinsmere, at last permitted to pay for something, went to the door and bawled for the tapster so that he could settle their score, Bygones Abraham pushed aside the cards, fetched out his dagger, and fell to carving a large VIVAT REX in the top of the table.

And so, as the great bell called Old Tom struck eight in one corner of Whitehall Palace Yard, that same note from Dolly lay on another table, but a round table and not a square one. It was the table in the withdrawing room of Bygones’s lodgings off the Shield Gallery, where they had drunk their first toast that morning.

Spacious and pleasant the room was, with its tapestries, its French carpet, and the sideboard between two dark windows looking down on the Volary Garden below. Under the stone hood of the chimneypiece against the east wall, a fire of Scotch coal had been lighted against the damp. Someone had cleaned and tidied the place since morning; on the table near the note, where two wax candles burned in silver holders, stood a new and freshly opened bottle of sack, together with the two tankards and Bygones’s brass-bound tobacco box.

Bygones himself—mottled face fresh-shaven, his periwig combed and a clean fall of lace at his throat—sat at the far side of the table, smoking a long clay pipe.

“Six, seven, eight.” He counted the strokes of the clock, heard through softly falling rain. “Time a-getting on; and no word yet, ecod, as to what I’m to do this night! Come, then!”

Kinsmere himself felt pretty comfortable. He also had got a shave; and washed all over with water out of a tub in his companion’s bedchamber adjoining. His bloodstained shirt had been exchanged for one of Bygones’s most resplendent shirts. His shoulder pained very little; nothing to speak of. Having just finished a pipe of tobacco, he put it down on the table. “Well?” says he.

“Where’s the lass now, I should like to know? What did she say to the king?”

With the stem of his pipe Bygones pushed round the note so that Kinsmere could read it from the other side.

“‘Go back with A. to his lodgings. … Stay there till you have word from R.’ And, ‘You have done well.’ That means, as safe as anything you can bet, we shall both be summoned to see the king. But what did she
say
to him? Stop, stop; what are you at now?”

For Kinsmere had picked up the note, folded it, and stowed it away in an inside pocket beside his sapphire ring.

“It’s the only thing I have that belongs to Dolly. I am keeping it safely, by your leave.”

“Oh, ecod! You’ll see the lass herself soon enough: can’t you guess that?”

“It’s devoutly to be hoped so. Meanwhile—”

“These outpourings o’ sentiment may be proper enough and excusable enough,” snorted Bygones, “but when they become moonstruck sickliness they vex all nature and give me a pain in the behind. Come, let’s be practical men!”

Bygones drew smoke into his lungs and hoisted himself to his feet. Then, pipe cradled across his left arm, he began to pace back and forth, tugging at his moustache and tuft of chin whisker.

“We may be sure the king (God bless him!) knows there’s a conspiracy against him. Ayagh! But what do we know, or think we know from Harker’s speaking too much, of that same conspiracy?”

“Well …”

“Imprimmus, there’s a band of malcontents. Who they are, or how many of ’em, we can’t say. The only name Harker mentioned—”

“The only name,” interrupted Kinsmere, “was of a canting Puritan named Salvation Gaines. Salvation Gaines, Harker said, had employment as a scrivener at court.”

“Has he so, lad?
I
am acquainted with no such man, and I know everybody at court.”

“Yet somebody employs him! He exists; Dolly is acquainted with him. Did you mark what Dolly said? ‘Most lewd with his hands,’ she said, ‘when he can put a woman into a corner.’ Now burn my soul in the bonfire,” yelled Kinsmere, who was simmering with rage, “when
I
think of a clammy-fisted Roundhead …”

“Lad, lad, enough o’ this maundering! Take your mind for two seconds from the wench, and pay some heed to business!”

Bygones stopped briefly to look at the red-leather fire bucket hanging beside the mantelpiece; according to palace regulations, you were subject to a ten-shilling fine if you let a chimney catch fire. But immediately he resumed his pacing, drawing deep lungfuls of smoke from the pipe.

“At the head of this band,” he continued, “there’s a plotter-in-chief. Body o’ Pilate, it might be anybody! We’ve no means of knowing who he is …”

“No; but we know something of what he did.”

“Ay, lad? What did he do?”

“The plotter-in-chief was suspicious of Harker. Others, including yourself, have been suspicious of him. A hired bullyrock was sent to follow Harker and observe him. When Harker’s tongue wagged too freely, because he thought Dolly would not dare betray him, the bullyrock—”

“Stopped his tongue with a bone-handled knife?” supplied Bygones. “No, lad! Never in this world!”

“Wherefore not, o Sounder of Mysteries?”

“Imprimmus, hired bullyrocks kill on hire,
and
on instructions. They don’t take it into their own heads to make decisions o’ that nature; and Harker had given satisfaction, you may depend on’t, up to the time his tongue wagged before us. Eyetem, hired bullyrocks are not described as ‘gentlemen’ by tapsters who meet ’em in the dark. They make no merry jests touching things in cupboards that must be carried downstairs. They—”

“Oh, burn everything! Do you tell me,” demanded Kinsmere, “that the comical fellow on the staircase must have been the plotter-in-chief himself?”

“No, not that either! It might ha’ been, and yet I doubt it. Shall I say why?”

“If you can.”

“Ayagh!” snorted Bygones, puffing more smoke. “I pose not as Sir Oracle; and, when I speak, let no dog bark. Still! There’s coruscating conclusions to be drawn here. Eminent men do in fact visit common taverns; this is not France; ’tis a free-and-easy society. But they don’t let their hands be seen so fully and freely; they don’t mock and jeer with tapsters in public, as this comedian did when he’d used his knife.

“No, I would lay my life on it! The man who stabbed Harker is someone else in the band of malcontents: not so highly placed as the plotter-in-chief, but concerned enough and knowing enough to make his own decision when he found Harker could blab.”

“You may
have
to lay your life on it,” says Kinsmere. “These people kill as quickly as a dog gnaws bones or as you and I drink. And both of us—yes, and Dolly too!—have acquired more information than is good for health’s sake. At risk of being cast again into outer darkness, shall I name the one thing we assuredly know about the plotter-in-chief?”

“Ay, lad?”

“He wants a document in cipher, setting forth certain terms in a secret treaty, of which Harker was to have carried one half and you the other half. Yet you say you have received no instructions about a mission to France?”

“Nay, friend, you know I have not! That is: not yet.”

“Harker said he took
his
instructions from someone called Butterworth, Rab Butterworth.”

“Mr. Robert Butterworth,” Bygones reared up and rolled out the name, “is Second Page of the Back-Stairs to His Majesty. Will Chiffinch, the First Page, meddles not in affairs of the body politic.”

“Do you get your instructions from Mr. Robert Butterworth?”

“No, though I have seen him once or twice in the king’s private cabinet.”

“Then how do you get ’em?”

Bygones halted abruptly and made a fierce gesture for silence, finger to lip.

And it was of silence that Kinsmere became most aware. The rain had ceased; it pattered no more against windows or into the dark Volary Garden. At the back of it you were conscious of a vague stir and mutter from this great hive called Whitehall Palace. Otherwise silence had descended like an extinguisher cap on the room, on the Shield Gallery, on the palace itself.

Silence, that is, except for a padding of soft little footsteps that approached in the Shield Gallery outside the closed door. There was a rustle of paper; something white was pushed under the door sill.

Bygones lumbered over, picked it up, and returned to the table. He displayed a letter—another letter!—but this one of a sort somewhat different from Dolly’s. Large, clean, and oblong, having no superscription, it was folded over once and closed with black wax bearing a plain seal.

“Come!” said Bygones. He put down his pipe, which had gone out. He broke open the paper and held it near one candle flame to be read. “Come, this is something like business!”