Most Secret (26 page)

“It will be best to look sharp in any case. Here we are.”

They scratched at the double doors of the withdrawing room outside the Great Bedchamber. They did not see the king. But in the withdrawing room they met Will Chiffinch, who told them they were fifteen minutes late but that the king said it did not matter.

Each received the half of a thick sheet of foolscap: folded over, sealed, wrapped in oilskin, and fitted into a pouch with leather thongs which they slung round their necks under the shirt. Each received back his ring. Then they were returning, along the Shield Gallery and belowstairs, by the same way they had come that morning. On the ground floor, near the doorway to the brick arches beside the Great Court, Bygones hesitated.

“Ayagh!” he said. “The king may not be vexed, no; but those tars from the
Saucy Ann
will show a most almighty vexation to be kept waiting. Well, lad, good luck!” Gauntlet slapped gauntlet as they shook hands. “O-rev-war and ah-lah-been-too! If all goes well and we cock a snook at the Enemy, we’ll be drinking a dram in Calais tomorrow afternoon.”

Then he was gone.

Into the Great Court moonlight poured a deathly radiance. String music still skipped and jingled behind the closed curtains of the Banqueting House; there was a stir as of many people. The Great Court, save for coach and horses with the driver sound asleep on the box, seemed deserted. It was not so. Kinsmere had no sooner stepped out under the arches than the glimmer of a lanthorn sprang up; a sentry challenged him. He displayed his ring; the lanthorn light dwindled away and vanished.

Dolly was waiting for him near the coach. Though he had seen her so short a time ago, he felt his heart beating so powerfully that at first he could not speak. Every one of her humours, her tricks of laughter or intensity, her breathless little ingenuous speeches in the dark, returned to overwhelm him. He took her inside the fold of his cloak, stammering that he must see her into the coach; but she only shook her head, slowly and quietly, with her arms round his neck.

Then he moved over towards a horse that was tethered nearby: a black mare seventeen hands high, restive and skirting its tail in the court. There were saddlebags here too, and saddle holsters for pistols as well. He quietened the mare, inspected the bit, saw to saddle and girths, all without conscious knowledge of what he was doing. In the saddlebags he found a pouch of money, bread and cheese wrapped in oiled paper, with a small flask of rum; last of all, a supply of powder, ball, and wadding for the pistols.

From a holster he drew one of these weapons: the dragoon’s heavy wheel-lock, with a barrel over a foot long. The music had ceased; but in night-stillness a great rustling of trees swept from the direction of the park. Bending over to look at the wheel-lock, its silvered mechanism glistening by moonlight, he caught sight of Dolly’s face. He returned the wheel-lock to his holster, and swung back to her.

“Oh, I am so afeared!” Dolly whispered.

“Afeared?”

“You are such a
fool
: which is to say you run such enorm hazard and would pull the beard of Old Nick himself if you thought he would try to daunt you. I would not have you different, yet I fear I may never see you again!”

“You will see me again. Great pity though you may regard it, it can’t be helped.”

“
Great pity,
do I regard it? Dear heart, you will take care?”

“I will take care.”

“When do you return?”

“In a day or two, not much more. Since the business is pressing, say forty-eight hours in all. And then, my dear,
and then
…”

“Will you look at French women, while you are gone?”

“I will not, even should I see any. But you, Dolly! Will you be waiting, when I do return?”

“You know I will.”

Suddenly she put her head down and spoke very low and rapidly, slurring the words together as though she could not get through it fast enough.

“Godbless you and—and guard you, and—and keepyousafe—from harm.”

Putting her away from him, he swung into the saddle. The black mare reared, whinnying, and came down with a strike of sparks from cobbles. Then they were off through the gateway. At the top of King Street, near Charles the First’s statue, he was to meet Captain Somebody, of the Horse Guards Blue, who would guide him through the City and across London Bridge. What he felt was no triumph, but a great wrench at the heart and almost a sting of tears behind the eyes, as the mare thundered up King Street in pursuit of the Grand Design.

T
HE MOON WAS SETTING
, sickly and with a faint yellowish colour round its edges, as though it were dying too. A wind far away made faint roaring noises; there was a whisper among sedge and coarse grass. But it did not disturb the mist in hollows of the road.

Kinsmere shifted in the saddle of the fourth horse he had ridden between London and here. The clocks had gone three-thirty; the short night was beginning to pale; he was nearing the Channel.

To have covered above seventy miles in three and a half hours was a pace more rapid than he had ever expected to travel. A salt smell drifted across marshes. Long strips of sea water had got in among the grass, and lay as though stagnant with a flicker of the moon across them. He thought he had never seen so dead or lonely a spot. It was cold, and unutterably still. The latest horse settled to a steady gallop; the sound of its hoofs pounded out against empty spaces where the wind answered with the only noise. Loosening the cord on his hat, he dropped it down his back to let the chill air stream in his face and keep him, awake. He was conscious of saddle soreness, of an ache in his joints, and his back and shoulders were tired too. The insistence of sleep crept over him with a kind of rhythm like the hoofbeats. Worse than any of this, he had commenced to feel apprehensive. He must be almost within sight of Dover, and nothing had happened so far.

Nothing at all. Not a blockade or a challenge from the road. Not a shot fired from behind a tree, or a decoy to lure him into dismounting. Only loneliness, and the uncanny road winding out ahead. Yet there was good reason to know the enemy had not abandoned the chase.

For the first part of his journey, after Captain Mather of the Horse Guards Blue had put him on the right road, he spurred in silence. Next, with the memory of Dolly’s voice in his ears and the touch of Dolly’s lips still on his cheek, he awoke to great exhilaration, and he sang. It was,

Good store of good claret supplies every thing,

And the man that is drunk is as great as a king,

Or,

When in silks my Julia goes …

Rollicking and roaring, or adrip with sugared sentiment—such is the kind of song I myself have always preferred—out it trolled into the wide night, substituting “Dolly” for “Julia,” and, in the earlier one, expressing his mood with, “I who am drunk am as great as a king.”

He was not drunk, save with the memory of Dolly, but it served. He made a frugal supper off the bread and cheese in the saddlebag, and washed it down with a swallow of rum.

In addition to stopping for a fresh horse at the three posting stations whose names were written on the scrap of paper, Captain Mather had told him, he must also stop and show his ring at any turnpike where the turnpike keeper had remembered to bar the road for the night. It might be troublesome, Captain Mather admitted, but it could provide him with directions if he needed them.

And he did need them. Twice he almost lost his way: once outside Rochester and again beyond a grey town—city, rather—which, by the loom of its great cathedral against the moon, could only have been Canterbury.

For the most part he enjoyed it. He liked to clatter through sleeping villages, stirring up birds and echoes and sometimes the watchman, who stood in the middle of the street and shook an ancient fist. He liked to hear the solitary barking of dogs in farmyards. He liked the oak tree before country inns, with the oak seat running round it. Little grey houses flashed past, or a silvered church spire amid beeches. Only once did he check his gallop without cause. A pretty farm girl, returning from some assignation in barn or grove, had sat down under a hedgerow to put on her shoes before returning home. Since he was seeing Dolly everywhere, she reminded him of Dolly.

“A fine night, my dear. And how are you?”

“Tired,” said the girl, making a face at him. “Most bloodily tired! Still, if you’d care to step down—”

“No, my dear. Thank you kindly, but I have other business if worse business. God for King Charles!”

And yet …

Few turnpike gates were closed. And yet, somewhere in the flat Kentish lands as a distant church clock tolled two, he rode up hard against a white bar across the road before a plank bridge over a stream. Kinsmere reined in, and hallo’d loudly at the little house beside it. This turnpike keeper, sleepier than most, made much clamour at unbolting and unbarring before he thrust a lanthorn past the open door.

“Hold your damn noise,” yelled a surly voice. “And stand out in the glim, there, if you’re honest enough to do it. What d’ye want?”

For answer my grandfather held his ring into the light.

“Nearer,” snarled the voice, as though working towards a paroxysm. “Nearer, I say!”

“Do you turn your gate, Little Brother of Good Cheer? Or shall I jump it?”

“Oh, b’God! Here’s a pretty state o’things for honest men! Another of you, is it?”

“Another?” Kinsmere asked coolly enough, though a qualm shot through him. “What other?”

In a minute or two more he clattered over the bridge and onwards with much to think about. Hours before, the turnpike keeper was bedevilled into saying, a man had ridden past displaying the ring of a King’s Messenger. His appearance? He had not noticed this man’s appearance, the turnpike keeper snarled, and wouldn’t have remembered it if he had.

What with the late hour and the strain of the day, my grandfather’s wits were not at their best. But one conclusion clearly emerged.
The man who stabbed Pembroke Harker had also stolen his ring.
This had not been investigated; it had occurred to nobody at the time. And yet the king must have remarked it, since he had asked whether that was not Harker’s ring my grandfather wore.

Two sides of Kinsmere’s mind were at argument, one side putting questions and the other seeking answers.

‘Come!’ said one silent voice. ‘Salvation Gaines killed Harker because the man’s usefulness was over; and he killed Butterworth, who had betrayed himself, for the same reason. After Butterworth’s murder, surely, he could have escaped from the palace by displaying the ring of a King’s Messenger?’

‘No, nonsense!’ retorted the other voice. ‘Ring or no ring, they looked in particular for Gaines. Gaines has a distinctive appearance; he is known to Ensign Westcott, who would have described him. He could not possibly have escaped from the palace.’

‘Oh, but he could!’ said the first voice. ‘He could have done so with ease, and with his inevitable luck, if he took care to bolt immediately after the murder, in the short time before the alarm for him was raised. And the guard who let him pass would be very reluctant to admit it afterwards.’

Gaines, Gaines, ever and always Gaines? That being the case, what would he do?

And so at three-thirty in the morning, with Dover somewhere ahead and sleep stealing on him like a footpad, Kinsmere tried to hold himself alert against other footpads.

A rope stretched between two trees, at about the height of a rider’s neck: that was one possibility. He looked to his pistols and loosened the sword in its scabbard. The cloak flew out behind him, thrumming like a flag in the wind. He rode low when they flashed through belts of woodland, or eased his grip in the stirrups as he imagined he detected movement at the roadside.

His latest horse, a hard-mouthed but not overfresh stallion, was blowing hard and flirting back foam into its rider’s face. After what seemed interminable hours, and was in fact less than half an hour, he found the approaches to a grey old cobbled town with hills rising east to the left and west to the right. Turnpike gate ahead, and a flicker of light.

More than one light. When he dismounted, so cramped that he seemed to have no spine, he had an impression that he had walked to the edge of a windy gulf. He thought he could make out reflections on water; a stir and swinging, with black shapes in motion. Outlines were strengthening through the murk; he could see the shape of the castle on the left-hand hill. Dover.

Did the turnpike keeper (already astir, and broiling his morning fish) know the Easy Mariners, Grand Neptune Wharf? He did. He had a son, going out shortly with a fishing sloop, who would be pleased to escort the visitor there. Son, still fuddled from the night before, was tumbled down a ladder; after wheedling the price of a morning nipperkin, he beckoned and ran solemnly beside the stirrup.

At four in the morning, with deep-voiced bells clanging and clashing across rooftops, Kinsmere handed over his horse to an ostler at a tavern on the waterfront. Three chipped and half-beheaded figures, holding up flagons in a horrible kind of gaiety, swung bow-legged on a sign inscribed: “Ye Ea ie Mari e s, by Jos Pennwinke e. 16 1.” Its red lattice was alight. He pushed open the door and went in.

They were trying to wake up the derelicts of last night, most of whom rested where they had fallen. One bewhiskered seafarer, sprawled on his back like a dead man, had his face and beard covered with a coat of tallow drippings: apparently the humorous device of more sober friends. Another, whose dirty blue headkerchief had come loose, rose suddenly to a sitting position with his eyes closed, said something about slitting somebody’s belly, and then flopped back and snored.

The landlord, who could do nothing with these, kicked at his dog and retired. At a bench-table by the fireplace sat a huge barrel-chested man with rings in his ears, consuming cheese and small beer for breakfast. Occasionally he would glance in pitying fashion at the weaker brethren on the floor. Then he would spit in his beer for luck and go on eating.

Dust-covered, weary, and a little dazed, Kinsmere addressed a pot-boy who was hanging up blackjacks from the rafters.