Most Secret (6 page)

“Clothes, sir?”

“They were well enough, past doubt, at Blackthorn amid the folks of Somerset. They will not serve, pray credit me, for the galleries and withdrawing rooms at Whitehall.” Again a look of satire and cynicism pinched down Mr. Stainley’s eyelids. “Not that I care, God knows, or that the king will care. His Majesty, notoriously, is the most slovenly man at court. But I hold myself to some degree responsible for you. And I must give you the outward seeming of a man of fashion; I must see you fitted out with foretopped peruke, with satin waistcoats, with clouded cane and Venice-point and finger watch, to save my very conscience!”

There was much more in this strain. Mr. Stainley talked at some length, answering the questions he himself asked, while the morning sun strengthened on the river and the bright flower beds. They must first do much buying, Mr. Stainley said. They must visit tailors, and wigmakers, and jewellers, and swordsmiths, and hosiers, and heaven knew whom else, until his listener’s head began to reel.

All such suggestions were pleasing rather than otherwise to my grandfather. He was resolved never to become a spark of fashion. But he rather looked forward to bedecking himself (briefly) in this manner, as he would have looked forward to donning some wildly outrageous costume, just once, for a masquerade ball.

And then, the banker declared in some anguish, they must find him proper quarters to live in. It must
not
be known that he was lodged, even for one day, at a common tavern. Mr. Stainley suggested (somewhat uneasily, you might have thought) that Kinsmere should come to lodge with himself and his wife and daughter in Lombard Street, until such time as he should find a place in the fashionable world.

But this offer my grandfather opposed with heat. For you must know he had his eye out to certain amusements for that night, not unconnected with wine bottles and willing dames. Prim and elderly people, however kindly, are almost always opposed to such diversions; he wanted no watchful eye upon him. So he protested with warm civility that he couldn’t, burn him in hell if he could, so inconvenience his good friend, and the rest of it, burn him to a cinder.

He had a pretty fair notion that Mr. Stainley suspected his reasons; but the banker only shut up one eye and nodded, with what looked like relief, and they were mighty considerate of each other. Well, then, the banker said, no doubt conscious of having done his duty; well, then, at least his young friend would sup with him at nine o’clock? His young friend would, with pleasure.

“Enfin, as it may be,” Mr. Stainley concluded, adjusting his flat-crowned hat as he prepared to depart. “I shall be much preoccupied with business for the rest of today. At best of it, you will allow, we can’t go a-buying until the morrow. Meanwhile, young sir, will you take advice from one who is older and pehaps wiser than yourself?”

“I will take advice from
you
.”

“Come, that’s better! That’s seeming hopeful!” And the banker pondered. “You must see the sights, I suppose. But keep to yourself, I conjure you, as much as may be. Go not a-buying at the New Exchange; mingle little with your equals among the quality until such time as
I
, though of humble birth and small consequence in this world, shall be close at hand to give counsel. Above all things, since you seem not oversupplied with prudence, I would urge upon you the need for self-control. These impulses of yours, when you think yourself jeered or insulted, to knock somebody’s head against a wall …”

“What of the impulses, Mr. Stainley?”

“They are unworthy; they are unseemly; resist them! A last word in your ear, Roderick Kinsmere. Do you honour your father’s memory?”

“I honour it and I cherish it, sir, with all my heart.”

“Would ever Alan Kinsmere have behaved as you desired to behave? Would Alan Kinsmere have stooped oafishly to assault a dragoon captain and knock his head against the wall?”

“My father, rot me?
He’d
have measured the jackanapes with a sword blade.”

“But not, I think, for an offence which may only have been of accident or heedlessness? Never, never without just cause?”

“No, never without just cause.”

“Upon your father’s memory, my boy, will you give me a pledge to walk warily?”

“Upon my father’s memory,” cried Kinsmere, lifting his hand to take the oath, “upon my father’s memory, damn me, I swear I will.”

And he meant this, too, when he said it.

“Well!” observed Mr. Stainley, and fetched up a deep sigh. “The rest must be left to fortune and to your own native good sense. There are some safeguards which God Himself must provide. I can’t provide ’em. Until nine o’clock this evening, then! Mr. Kinsmere, I bid you good day.”

My grandfather was not altogether sorry to see him go, the little man walking with great precision and stateliness up that series of terraces, to hire a sedan chair at the entrance of York House. Kinsmere remembered that he had money in his pouch, which was a good thing; and that he was free of observation now, which was a better. Whistling, he set out on foot for Charing Cross, followed the crowd, and came presently to Whitehall Palace.

Round the Palace Gate rose a great dust of commotion. And to his ears floated the music of fifes in a quick-step march. From the Horse Guards down the road a company of foot soldiery, flintlocks on their shoulders, swung out through King Street to the lilting clear fife music and a rattlety-tap of drums at every tread.

Kinsmere thought them very fine indeed. He liked listening to music; he liked watching well-drilled troops; he wondered if it would repay trouble to follow them. But, since the press of people had elbowed him, almost through the Palace Gate, he decided to go in. And so, amiably sauntering, he entered the Great Court.

“Now hang me,” he said to himself, “hang me, but this is rather a curious sort of palace, if in fact it
is
the palace?”

For the place steamed with dirt and offal, as I have indicated at another time, and this Abram-seeming crew had scarcely the appearance of courtiers. But it was dinginess and splendour all jumbled together. Under the arches of a brick gallery you could see several great gilded coaches, and a number of private sedan chairs with varicoloured silk curtains. Over the way from the kitchens the noble spire of the Chapel Royal rose up high above a glow of stained-glass windows in the sun.

“Come!” says Rowdy Kinsmere, to nobody in particular, “
is
this the palace?”

A loud, hoarse, wheedling voice spoke somewhere behind him.

“Attend to
me
!” cried the voice. “Oh, good gentlemen, oh, brave gentlemen, oh, all sharp wits and steely hearts of the true breed, do pray for sport’s sake attend to
me
!”

My grandfather turned round.

Bright sunlight streamed through a rain of soot flakes from the smoke of so many chimneys. Near the arches of the brick gallery, where the sunshine lay warmest, a greasy man with a pitted face stood leering and ducking his head. Round his neck, on leather straps, he carried a wooden board like a pieman’s tray. Several greasy playing cards lay on it. The man with the pockmarked face spoke as though to a multitude, though he addressed Kinsmere alone.

“Behold,” he continued in a kind of passion. “Here’s the do; here’s the game; here’s the challenge. I vouchsafe this, for sport’s sake, at great risk of loss or beggary to a poor man. Yet I offer it, though it ruin me! And what is’t I offer?”

“Well, my bucko? Eh, yes, halloa? What is’t you offer?”

“Find the lady!”

“Find the lady?”

“Ay, in all conscience,” cried out the other, fixing Kinsmere with a hypnotic eye. “I have here three right royal cards.” And he snatched them up. “You mark ’em, brave sir? Knave of clubs, king of diamonds, queen of hearts? Queen of hearts above all: that’s the lady. They are put face down: in this fashion. They move, they mingle, they alter their places:
so.
Now I would hazard a sixpence … a shilling … ay, even the half of a crown piece … you can’t say which is the lady. Would
you
hazard this wager, most noble gentleman?”

They were attracting some attention. Other ragtag figures had gathered round to stare. Up to the mountebank hurried a stout, blowsy girl with fixed smile and a leer of great would-be lewdness. Dirty, bepainted, in a battered straw hat and draggled finery, she edged between Kinsmere and the three-card man.

“Oh, he would!” cried this newcomer. “He would, Tom, but you must not!”

“I tell you, Chelsea Bess …”

“Nay, Tom, you must not! ’Twould be no trick at all for
him
to find the lady. He’ll outwit you, Tom; you’ll starve!”

And then another voice spoke.

“Country bumpkins, it would seem, are come to town in great numbers.”

My grandfather had never heard that voice before. Yet he almost guessed whose it was. He whipped round with greater quickness than he had turned the first time.

Not far behind him, as though fated to be there from the first, stood the tall dragoon captain who had thumped him aside so unseeingly at York House.

The captain still did not look at Kinsmere, or seem to look, though his eye may have strayed to the glitter of the big sapphire ring. On the coils of his periwig he wore a dragoon’s beaver hat with a flat plume round the brim. His nose was lifted above the thick upper lip, the narrow mouth, and the congealed sneer; he stared blankly, incuriously, above my grandfather’s head.

An argument had burst out between the three-card man and the stout slut in the draggled finery.

“What you say, Chelsea Bess, may be gospel truth …”

“It is, Tom; I vow it is!”

“Should he have a good eye, as no doubt he has, I venture much and rashly against a fine noble gentleman with a full purse. Still and all, Bess! ’Tis a short life, and what’s money? Then I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” declared this generous-minded mountebank, as though with sudden inspiration. “Shall it be a first wager of one shilling, now, to make a tack at finding the lady? What d’ye say, sir? Will you bet, sir?”

“No,” replied Kinsmere, “I will not.”

“
You’ll
not bet, by the Hilts?”

“On all else, yes. On the lady, never again. At Pie Powder Court in Bristol, once, when half a dozen of us had spent fifty pounds in an endeavour to find that lady, we commenced to suspect something must be wrong. How we served the rogue who mulcted us, after he had been turned upside down and the coins shaken from his clothes, you will be spared the pain of hearing. Yet the lesson was a salutary one. By which I would intimate, good friend,” says my grandfather, “that the charitable offer on which you pride yourself can be little else save a bubble and a cheat.”

The mountebank uttered a hoarse scream.

“Bubble, is it? Cheat, is it? By the Hilts, Bess, here’s impudence! Tom o’ Bedlam am I, with my license under the hand and seal of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels to His Most Sacred Majesty. Tom o’ Bedlam am I, most honest of all the honest, who—”

The dragoon captain spoke again, this time addressing the three-card man and the doxy.

“Hold your clack, carrion,” he said in his harsh, bored voice. “Now be off, and no skreeking about it, lest I summon guards to take you in custody.”

“Tom o’ Bedlam am I, by God’s death and Christ’s body, the most honest of all the honest …”

“D’ye question
my
orders, fellow? Or you either, wench? Must I be at pains to repeat it? Go!”

It completed their demoralization; both turned and fled.

Now the captain faced towards my grandfather, but still would not look at him. In the sun-and-smoky courtyard, as antagonism flared, something sizzled between these two like a match to a powder train. The captain, nose higher still, kept his glazed little eye fixed at a point somewhere past Kinsmere’s shoulder. He spoke as though to an invisible third party.

“Rogues and trulls of such kidney are not welcome at Whitehall Palace. But less welcome, it may be, are country bumpkins too grasping or cowardly to risk their poor shillings at a wager. Country bumpkins have no place in a world of fashion; they also had best begone too.”

“Had they so? And who will compel this?”

“They had best be off, I said. Country bumpkins must not threaten.”

“Do
you
threaten, my bold dragoon?”

“It is not needful”—still the captain addressed his invisible auditor—“to make threats against oafs and clods. Who threatens a poor blackbeetle in a kitchen? It is ignored, no more, until stamped upon and squashed. I have given myself the trouble to say: DEPART.”

“And I am still here.”

“If there be any poor clod who thinks himself jeered and insulted, who aches and burns to settle a score with his betters …”

“Oh, come!” said Roderick Kinsmere, with a little pulse jigging in his arm. “
You
are the man desirous of trouble, my bucko. You will force a quarrel at any cost. Yet why should you wish this, against one you never saw before. Why?”

“If there be any such lout, and he should have anything he would desire to say to me, let him walk quietly at my side and say it. Let him not raise hand like a stableboy; let him try to behave, though he can’t, as a gentleman might. Let him walk beside me, I repeat.” Then the bored voice grew louder and harsher. “This way. This way.
This way
!”

F
OR THE FIRST TIME
the captain looked full at him, bending forward a little to do so. They measured each other. The glazed dark eye, the long nose, the thick upper lip to narrow mouth: all these, framed in the coils of a great periwig, were thrust almost into Kinsmere’s face.

Then the captain, muscular and sneer-poised in his long red coat, baldric and rapier gleaming against it, lifted one shoulder and stalked carelessly towards the southeast part of the Great Court.

At the southeast end of the courtyard an open passage—perhaps a dozen feet wide, with muddy cobblestones underfoot—stretched between blank walls towards the public water stairs above the Thames.

On one side of this passage, your left as you entered it, ran the brick wall of the palace kitchens. On the other side rose up the stone wall of the Great Hall itself. It would be only an hour until midday-dinner time. Though no sound issued from the Great Hall, which they used as a playhouse, the whole length of the kitchens clanked and smoked at meal heat.