Most Secret (8 page)

“Under favour, Mr. Abraham,” says he, “but who’s here and what’s here? Where, in precision, are we bound?”

“Abovestairs; where else? Past the Guard Chamber, and through … Great body o’ Pilate, lad!” The other man broke off. “You’re familiar with the palace, to be sure?”

“To speak a truth, and between ourselves: not over-familiar, I fear.”

“Well! Well!” Bygones Abraham relished this jest. “But you are new; you are unfledged; this is none so surprising. This morning’s levees are all but finished, you’ll observe. If you would learn, hearken well. I am the man to guide you; I will be your sisserony. Hey?”

Bustling, almost at a strut, lowering his voice to a confidential growl, he continued to speak volubly as they mounted the staircase; and he pointed out every detail.

It is all dust, now. Near to three decades after my grandfather first saw it, a huge fire destroyed all of Whitehall Palace save only the Banqueting House. In these halls, in the maze of galleries surrounding them, there had been an end of revelry long before the fire. The fiddle strings were all snapped, the candles blown out, on a grey February morning when Charles the Second died.

But it would be fifteen years until that evil winter. Here at the top of the stairs rose spacious windows, and arches of wood so polished that they threw out gleams of red. Here were the doors to the Guard Chamber, a lofty room with a gilt ceiling. Beyond this, an inner room, lay the Presence Chamber of the king, where those allowed entry must preserve the strictest behaviour.

The doors to the Guard Chamber were closed as Bygones Abraham and my grandfather went by, the king’s levee being over. But they had actually to pass the queen’s Presence Chamber, and the old soldier bade Kinsmere glance in.

Half a dozen maids of honour, in taffeta gowns, were playing at cards round little tables. Over the back of one chair lounged a handsome stripling who Bygones Abraham said was the young Duke of Monmouth, the king’s natural son by an old affair with a brown-faced Englishwoman in Holland. But Queen Catherine herself sat facing the windows, near a hanging cage of canaries, and they could not see her face.

However, as they passed the door, a dark-haired woman with a train of handmaidens came sweeping and rustling out of the room. Bygones Abraham, looking stunned, made a deep obeisance which she ignored. She was not (as you will see her in the portrait by Sir Peter Lely) pensive and languishing, head against one shoulder, looking up with deep, heavy-lidded brown eyes. She carried her head high, the face as haughty and dusky as a Spaniard’s. Round her mouth there were lines of anger as faint as though drawn with a needle. Dark and plump, all a flash and fire of eyes half shut up, she whirled past in her gown of yellow satin. Her hair was set in the short wired ringlets called heartbreakers, and trembled against her cheeks.

“Eh! Now it’s a very odd day,” said Bygones Abraham, at a kind of musing rumble, “it’s a very odd day when my Lady Castlemaine pays her devwar to the queen. Ecod, lad, there walks a fine woman!”

“My Lady Castlemaine?” says Kinsmere. Even in Somerset they had heard much of this charmer, who for a full decade—in part, at least—had captivated the king’s fancy. “The Countess of Castlemaine, was it? Why, damme, though, sir: she’s
fat
.”

He said that because he refused to admit how much he had been struck. For she had an allure, all fleshly and lewd-suggesting, which spread round her as she walked.

“I would not asperse her,” says he, “and such words are plaguey ill to breathe. But the woman’s
FAT
, damme, and there’s an end on’t.”

“Pish!” roared Bygones Abraham. “Pish, tush, and what d’
you
know o’ fine women? A fig, say I, for all your thin jillflirts with no more shape than a washboard. Give
me
a woman I can lay hold of.”

“Oh, granted. At the same time …”

“Stay, though!” interrupted Bygones, checking himself and shaking his head. “I must not forget Dulcinea. My passion for Dulcinea,” cries he, with a watery and sentimental light blurring his eye, “is
spirituelle.
Ah, Dulcinea! Sound of lutes and—er—lutes. It’s a deep secret, yet I confide in you.”

“Dulcinea who? Not Dulcinea del Toboso, I suppose?” says Kinsmere, who knew and loved
Don Quixote.
“Which Dulcinea, then? What’s her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Nay, how should I? Having seen her but at a distance, and finding none acquainted with her to present me? But many times I have drunk her health in ink. And once in a mixture of barley water and soot.”

“Come, friend, these are strange tipplings for an old soldier! Ink? Barley water and soot? Wherefore such japes as that?”

“Because ’tis ah la mode,” returned Bygones. “I am a man of the mode; I have ever resolved to be one, though God He knoweth why.”

“Well, then?”

“Well!” said Bygones, huffing a little. “With a love spiritual or ennobling, hark’ee, it’s the new fashion to drink your Dulcinea’s health in some compound … not nauseous or
too
disgustful, it may be, but one no man o’ parts would think to quaff for his pleasure. And you must write her verses telling her how cruel she is and how much she won’t love you.

“But my Lady Castlemaine,” he pursued, “needs no verses to fetch her down. Report saith they’re to give her a duchess’s coronet ere long. Yet she’s a damned fine woman; it’s a pity.”

“Well, but,” protested my grandfather, “where’s the pity in it?” He still would not have admitted he was thinking of that yellow gown going past, of the eyes sweeping left and right, of a black patch near the small, heavy, duskily red mouth. “Where’s the pity,” says he, “in the awarding of a coronet for devoir well and truly done?”

“Oh, as to that! Her enemies say this is no more than a pension, since she hath outlived her usefulness. ’Tis not as in old days, they say, when the king cared much and was tied to her shift strings. If she shows open fondness for Mr. Wycherley or for Charles Hart, the actor, they say it’s all one to our Charles of Whitehall Palace. We live in a maze o’ galleries, each one a whispering gallery.
They
say … always they say …”

“Do they say true?”

“Well!” retorted Bygones, and began a complicated oratorical gesture. “The king is but forty years old; he still knows hot humours; what would they have? Certes there are others. Here’s Nelly (the play-actress, d’ye see?) being this month brought to bed of a child. And Moll Davies as well.

“But what’s that to my Lady Castlemaine, who can ever whistle him back when she’s a mind to? There’s none to compare with her, ecod, there’s not! She is still mistress-in-chief, strike me blind and don’t you forget it; of all amorous zhongloors she is still the woman.”

Here he broke off, with some pride, to draw attention to his lodgings.

Having negotiated many more passages, they had emerged into another gallery: a long, dusky gallery which ran east and west just above the private landing stairs to the river. The Shield Gallery, it was called, because of certain remaining shields and banners—from the ancient times of tournaments in King Harry the Eighth’s day—which were still hung up along the walls.

Sunlight touched stained-glass windows at the eastern end, where a balcony had been built out over the water stairs; the maids of honour, on state occasions, stood en this balcony to throw flowers at the royal barges coming to mooring below. Here the singing of birds in the queen’s volary rose at its loudest.

“You’ll observe, hey?” Bygones swept out his arm. “The queen’s apartments are on
that
side, the north. The king’s apartments are
here,
the south—where I also (mark’ee, lad) have the honour to be. Here’s the door, and this fellow with the staff, we’ll send about other business. Come! Rare fine lodgings, or so I think?”

There were two rooms, guarded outside by a porter with a tip-staff. Though the bedchamber might be small and stuffy, the withdrawing room was a spacious place of panelled walls adorned with tapestries. Its two windows looked down on a little garden full of statues, the Volary Garden, round which stretched the private apartments of the king.

There were chairs in some dark polished wood, much carved, with seats and backs of woven straw having body cushions for comfort. Silver candlesticks stood on a round table scored over with the marks of glasses. Between the windows was a sideboard bearing tankards, goblets, a brass-bound tobacco box, three or four long clay tobacco pipes, even a few books. It was rather warm here; dust motes danced above the sideboard.

“Come, here it is,” cries Bygones, indicating a chair beside the centre table. “Sit you merry, friend; take ease! Rare fine quarters or so I think?”

“Yes, most noble of aspect.”

“And, now I call it to mind, there’s another set o’ chambers vacant to the west o’ these. No doubt, matters standing as they do, they’ll invite you to occupy ’em?”

“Invite
me?
Why a pox should they lodge
me
at the palace?”

“Is this another mystery? Bend your wits to the question; you’ll divine it. Now, then!”

Fetching up a deep sigh and shaking himself, he loosened his coat, his waistcoat, and the fall of lace at his throat He removed hat and peruke, revealing stubbly grey hair that made another contrast with the red or purplish hues of his face. The peruke he draped across a wig block on the sideboard.

They must drink sack, he said, meaning the wine we now call sherry. From the top of the sideboard he took two pewter tankards each holding a pint; from the lower part he fetched out an armful of bottles. With these he marched back to the table.

“Ayagh!” said Bygones Abraham, clearing his throat and opening bottles. “I had thought, d’ye see, we should first descend to business. But we will not. We will drink a health to the king, as loyal men should, and pledge him long life. Hey?”

“We will.”

Bygones filled the two tankards and pushed one across the table. The gurgle of the wine as he poured seemed to fire him with eloquence. Said he, striking a great attitude:

“I have drunk his health, lad, in prosperity and in exile: as an excuse to start and as a reason to continue. I have drunk it out of tankards, mugs, goblets, glasses, pint pots, quart pots, great jacks, small jacks, gingleboys, and other receptacles whose names for the moment escape me. Down this throat have flowed libations in which England’s star ascends, so to speak, with reverse motion. Long life; down she goes; God for King Charles!”

Up tilted the tankard; back went his head. His Adam’s apple had scarcely wriggled twice before his face, redder than ever, flipped back into view. He puffed out his moustache. Beaming, he turned the tankard upside down and ticked its edge against his left thumb. One drop slid from the empty vessel and exactly covered the thumbnail.

“Ha!” And he snorted with pleasure. “There’s the proper way, d’ye mark it? One drop on the nail. No more, no less. Now, lad what do
you
say?”

Not to be outdone, my grandfather rose to his feet and stood straight.

“You have said it, Friend Bygones; I have but to make echo. May he live long years, and … God for King Charles!”

He lifted his own tankard. In four swallows he drained off the ful., mellow, not-too-sweet wine, which sent a pleasant warmth through him as though waiting until it reached his stomach before it cried “Huzza!” He drew a deep breath for air, ticking over the tankard and leaving one drop on his left thumbnail. Then he threw out his chest under Bygones’s approving glance.

“Sir,” said Kinsmere, with much earnestness, “I come of a cavalier family which, whatever its other failings, has paid distinguished service in the matter of health-drinking and all loyal toping. There was a Kinsmere,” says he, stretching his imagination, “there was a Kinsmere dead-drunk under the table at the signing of Magna Charta. A Kinsmere saw the Spanish Armada all over Plymouth Hoe ere they persuaded him ’twas a vision born of a bottle.—Thank you. Since you seem so insistent, I
will
take another.”

Bygones stayed his hand in the act of pouring again, and stared.

“Hey?” he demanded. “Your name, now! Your name, you said, was … ?”

“It is Kinsmere. Roderick Kinsmere.”

“Kins—” And Bygones smote his forehead. “And your father’s name, his Christian name! Was it the same as yours?”

“No. My father, whom they called Buck, was named Alan.”

“Of the West Country, or so I think?”

“Of Blackthorn, in Somerset, near Bristol.”

“And commanded his own troop of horse at Naseby fight? Ay! Left arm shattered, and they cut it away …”

Bygones Abraham sat down. He put his elbows on the table and his fists against his temples. For that brief time sombreness had come on him; his battered face wore a look of pathos near the comical.

“Buck Kinsmere’s son!” he said. “And with no better luck at Whitehall than to meet a posturing old hunks like … Into what drunkard’s boasts do I betray myself, at my age?
Your
father, Roderick Kinsmere, was the noblest of the noble. How is he, lad? He fares well, I trust?”

“He fares well, I am sure, though he has been dead almost ten years.”

“God rest him, Roderick Kinsmere!”

“Amen to that, Bygones Abraham!”

“He never knew—?”

“Ah, but he did! He lived to see the Stuarts restored to their own, and took much comfort thereby. You knew my father, then? You were acquainted with him?”

The wigless man threw himself back in the chair.

“I am out of old times, lad. I am passy. Even these,” and he touched moustache and chin tuft, “are passy and not ah la mode. Nay; I had no acquaintance with your father, save by sight. I was no fashionable beau then, whatever I may affect to be now. I carried a pike in Langdale’s Yorkshire Foot, the ones who lost us that last battle. Your father was of Prince Rupert’s Horse; and they helped much in the losing of it, as the hell-riders they were so proud to be. When they’d broke Ireton’s line, as they designed to do, not a man would stop or draw rein until he got to the baggage wagons. By the time they were back again at full gallop, Black Tom and Oliver had piled horse and foot against our centre, and some fool gave command to march to the right …”