Most Secret (21 page)

The note, unsigned and in small neat writing, was very short. It requested that at nine o’clock that night, if convenient, Bygones Abraham, Esq., and the young gentleman accompanying him (name unknown) would present themselves at the westernmost door on the south side of the Shield Gallery. To no one would they mention this communication, which they would be good enough to destroy as soon as read.

“Well!” continued Bygones.

As Kinsmere had dealt with Sir Aubrey Fairchild’s deposition against Dolly, so Bygones dealt with this letter. He touched its edge to the candle flame. It flared up into a sheet of fire, throwing wild yellow light across the walls, and crumpled to black flimsiness. Bygones crushed it in his fist, letting the ashes sift down on the table.

“Aha!” he added, with a triumphant look and a conspiratorial wink. “I would offer ye two guesses as to who sent this, save that ye may save one of ’em for future use. Eh?”

“True enough. We need no Sir Oracle to tell us who sent it. But what’s its meaning?”

“Why, it may mean only that His Majesty would desire to learn details of what befell this afternoon. Or, which is a thing far more likely, it means his plan for France will go forward this night. I carry one half the cipher dispatch: well and good! Then, by the claws of the Eternal, who should carry the other half but you?”

“
Me?
”

“Ay, lad, and who better?”

“But he has no knowledge whatever of me! Since he intrusts so few people, would he intrust a total stranger?”

“Come! From what the lass must ha’ told His Majesty, he’s not the man I think if he has many doubts. For one thing, you’ve shown you are a loyal king’s man—”

“Am I?” says Kinsmere, in some perplexity. “I suppose I am. All my family have been, God knows.”

“Well, are you not?” demanded the other. “If not, ecod, you take mighty strange ways o’ showing it! Why have you behaved as you have done this day, then? ’Twas not all the wench, surely. Why have you behaved as you have done?”

“In all candour, I don’t know. It must be laid at the cause, in all likelihood, of an utter inability to keep out of trouble. And yet, looking back on the events of the day, I fail to see I could have behaved in any other way. The king (God bless him! as you would say) …”

“Lad, lad, whose side
are
you on? A plain question, now! Should His Majesty graciously request you to carry one half of this document, would you do it?”

“I would. Mark this, Bygones! If you are right touching the terms of this secret treaty to be proposed …”

“I am right; depend on’t!”

“Then the king (God bless him) would appear to be almost as great a rogue as the enemies leagued against him. But that,” Kinsmere added sharply, “is beside the point and signifies nothing.”

“Beside the point, ecod? Signifies nothing?”

“Or at least very little, damn me. Let him make a treaty with King Louis or with Prester John or with the worms that shall feed on us after death! For I am on the side of my friends. And, if you and Dolly Landis are loyal king’s men—why, then, by the sixty-eight bonfires of hell, so am I.”

“Now here falls on our ears,” observed Bygones, “the sound of a most handsome sentiment. To this old hulk it calls for libations, which shall distil the lucubrations of a manly heart, and make blooming the sandy wastes of the throat. Lad, tilt the bottle.”

Kinsmere poured sack. There was not enough to fill both tankards. But they clinked pewter together, drank off the wine, and had set down the tankards when Bygones made another fierce gesture. “Hush!” he whispered.

“Burn me, but is this more mysteriousness? Is everything mysteriousness?”

“I don’t know what it is. Hush, for God’s sake!”

More footsteps could be heard in the Shield Gallery. They did not sound the same as those of whatever person had brought the letter a little while ago. They were brisk, questing steps, as of square-toed shoes a-clack. They approached from an easterly direction, not a westerly, and passed. There was the noise of somebody knocking at a door not too far away. Then a long silence.

Bygones, lifting his shoulders to dismiss this, had started for the sideboard in search of another bottle when the footsteps returned and stopped just outside. There was a sharp, self-important fusilade of knocks at the withdrawing room door.

“Ay?” called Bygones, turning. “Who knocks there? And ’tis not locked; set it open, if that please you.”

The door swung wide. Only a few wall candles were burning down the length of the Shield Gallery, making a dusk in which the figure on the threshold showed only as a silhouette.

“No tipstaff is on guard here,” said a snappish voice. “Or anywhere else, it seems.” Then the snappish tone changed. “Good souls, good souls, will you surfer a poor sinner to enter? My name is Salvation Gaines.”

I
N SWEPT A LEAN,
middle-sized man with an iron-grey periwig.

“Now
His
ways be praised!” intoned the newcomer, uprolling his eyes. “He shall be pleased to take the crafty in their own net, yet set the feet of the righteous upon paths of godliness and peace.”

Mr. Salvation Gaines hurried to the middle of the room. There he stopped, peering at each of the others in turn.

“Think not that He is mocked!” the newcomer said. “As hell and Rome contrive snares for the unwary, so the Lord in His own time shall circumvent the one and chastise the other for their souls’ good. Do I address Mr. Bygones Abraham?”

“You do.”

“The man Bygones Abraham, hanger-on at Whitehall? Of no known occupation, yet in receipt of a certain income from the Privy Purse itself? Are these things true?”

“They’re true and I can’t deny ’em, though they might be put with more civility.”

“Now what have I to do with civility?” snapped Salvation Gaines.

There were several contradictions here. Though his phrasing was the usual cant of the old-line Roundhead, Independent or perhaps Fifth-Monarchy man, he had none of that through-the-nose twang by which “Lord” became “Laard” and “God” became “Goad.” His speech and pronunciation were those of culture. If bearing, clothes, and periwig indicated an elderly man, his actual age could have been no older than the very early forties. He would give a little run forward, as though to peer closely at something, and then dart away. After a snuffle of humility, he would throw back his shoulders and send a glance anything but humble from sharp little red-rimmed eyes.

Then he rounded on my grandfather.

“And you, young man! You are Roderick Edward Kinsmere, of Blackthorn Hall in Somerset?”

“Just Blackthorn will suffice.”

“Now tell me, young man! Hath your soul been plucked from Satan as a brand is plucked from the burning? Are you saved and among the elect?”

“I can’t say. But I should think it most unlikely.”

“So young! So young! And yet already a man of blood. Oh, the pity of this!” Gaines snuffled, moaned, and then flung away his hands from his own eyes. “You must be chastised, I fear; yes, you must be chastised! Further tell me: how have you employed your day in this sink of abomination called London? Not in pursuit of lewd women, I hope?”

“If ’tis any of your business …”

“It is the Lord’s business, boy, and therefore mine. Speak home; don’t think to evade! How have you employed your time in this very stench of abomination?”

“I passed most of today at the Devil tavern.”

“Indeed you did, as I know. Oh, the pity of
that!
‘And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever’”—Gaines stopped. “I have sought you everywhere in this wicked town. I have this moment come from seeking you in your lodgings here at the palace, and you were not even there!”

“My lodgings here at the palace?” exploded Rowdy Kinsmere. “You are very free with damnation, Mr. By-God Gaines, but what hell’s nonsense is
this?”

Gaines whipped round.

“Man Abraham,” he said, “can you deny that adjoining these rooms there is another set of chambers until today unoccupied?”

“If I could deny it, you canting ninnyhammer,” roared Bygones, “be sure I would!—”

“A worse man of blood! Shall not the godly expect this?”

“But I can’t deny it,” said Bygones, pointing to a closed door in the west wall, “because I told the lad about ’em this morning.”

Gaines whipped back.

“And
you,
I dare suppose, will deny you occupy those chambers now?”

“Though it’s no concern of yours, I never so much as set eyes on ’em!”

“Indeed?” said Salvation Gaines.

For some reason he bustled to the chimneypiece, where he examined the red-leather fire bucket hanging on a nail beside it. Then he went to the table. After looking hard at the black ash fragments where Bygones had burnt the king’s letter, he caught up one of the silver candlesticks. Snuffling and blowing, holding the light high, Gaines scurried across to the door in the west wall.

It was closed, but not locked or bolted. Gaines threw it open and crossed threshold, with Bygones and my grandfather following.

The rays of the taper disclosed another withdrawing room almost exactly like Bygones’s, hung and carpeted and furnished in the same way. A round table bearing candlesticks stood in the middle; there were chairs with body cushions. Another sideboard stood between two windows looking down on the Volary Garden. The sky above the rooftops had cleared; before long, as night deepened, a full moon would rise above Whitehall Palace.

“Here are few signs of occupancy,” cried Salvation Gaines, “and no fire or lights. But let us look a little beyond!”

He gestured with his taper towards another door opposite the one by which they had entered. It must lead, Kinsmere thought, to a bedchamber corresponding with that in the other set of rooms, save that Bygones’s bedchamber opened towards the east and this second towards the west. Gaines scurried towards it.

“If they have told lies because they are misguided, there may perhaps be mercy after chastisement! But if they have told lies sinfully, and of their wicked malice …! Oh, and in tears I say it, what is here?”

Kinsmere, hastening after him, looked into the bedroom. And, not for the first time that day, he found his wits whirling.

The room, though small and stuffy, was very comfortable. It had a neat carpet. One tiny window showed a glimpse of the sky. Otherwise it was almost filled by a large bed with a tester, a dressing table bearing bowl and ewer for hot water, and a big chair beside the bed. Across the chair hung Kinsmere’s own well-filled saddlebags, having the initials R.K. burned into one corner of the leather with a red-hot poker.

It was towards Bygones that he turned. “How came the saddlebags here? I took up quarters at the Grapes, near Charing Cross, because Uncle Godfrey recommended it and said my father was used to visit there. I have not seen my possessings since early morning. Had I known they were here, I had scarce need to borrow your shirt.”

“Well! It was none o’
my
doing or knowing,” roared Bygones. “Can
I
command lodgings at the palace, being here only on sufferance myself? As for the shirt, be pleased to keep it. ’Tis a tastefuller shirt than any you’d choose for yourself. Still, all the same—!”

Salvation Gaines went back to the table in what unexpectedly appeared to be Kinsmere’s own withdrawing room. He set down the lighted candle beside the two unlighted ones. The palms of his hands were damp; he rubbed them together, and wiped them down the sides of his neat dark-grey coat. But his little eye did not waver.

“Not know they were here?” said Gaines, with a sneer whistling through his nose. “A likely story, is it not, with which to affront the ears of pious men? Beyond there, or so I understand,” he waved his arm towards the west and south, “beyond there, all but surrounding us, lie the state apartments of the king himself. And tonight, in the Gallery—” when any person said
the
Gallery, and not Stone Gallery or Matted Gallery, he meant the great Banqueting House—“tonight, in the Gallery, they play at their accursed games, ombre or basset or the like, for gaming stakes which stink in the nostrils of the Lord Most High. Oh, what a godless court is all this!”

“Is it so?”

“And
you,
young Master Roderick Kinsmere! What do you do here and wherefore imperil your immortal soul with the filth of lies? You must expound this; expound it at once, I command you, else there shall be no hope for you now or hereafter!”

“Expound it, must I? By whose authority must I expound it? And who are you?”

“The same question,” said Bygones, “had occurred once or twice to a cooler head than either of yours. Who in exactness are you, Salvation Gaines, that you impose your presence as though you had a very right to be here? State your business, if any, and then begone.”

“Did I address
you,
man of Wood? Nay, not so! I spoke only to this wretched addlepated boy, so misguided that—”

“Speak to him, then,” interrupted Kinsmere, temper again beginning to simmer. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“In
this
life, which is as grass and lasteth but a day, I am chief clerk to the household of His Grace the Duke of Buckingham. His Grace, you will say, is a man of loose and immoral life. So he is; you are in the right; and so I have told him to his face. Yet there is hope for him,” gabbled Gaines, “there is hope for him notwithstanding! He hath the kindest feelings towards men of the true faith, Independents all, who are God’s Chosen and shall win eternal life. Above aught else, he will have no truck or traffic with the bloody designs of Popery. We have laws against these Papists—”

“I call to mind,” said Bygones Abraham, “that we have also laws against Independents and other fanatics.”

“Tchaa! Now what are such laws to me?”

“You are above ’em, that’s to say?”

“It is only to say,” and Gaines drew himself up, “that I have no words for
you.
I address this young man. Attend to me, poor boy; mark well what I tell you!”

The flame of the candle wavered a little in a draught, sending great weights of shadow sliding across the tapestries and across the white plaster ceiling with its black crossbeams. Gaines raised an admonitory forefinger.