Sea Change (36 page)

Then, with a flash and a roar, the mine exploded. The whole upper half of the tower vanished in a gout of flame and smoke and flying stone. And Spandrel's last thought, before something struck him near his right ear and darkness swallowed him, was that Mcllwraith could not be hanged, drawn and quartered now. Nor would his head need rescuing from Temple Bar. He was out of Walpole's reach. For good and all.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Full Circle

Spandrel had a dim awareness of a wound above his ear being washed and dressed and of a bandage being wrapped round his head, but it was some unmeasurable time after that when he regained consciousness to find himself lying in bed in a bare, twilit chamber. The granular light from the window suggested either dusk or dawn, but he had no clear idea which and felt a strange lack of curiosity on the point. He fell asleep.

When he woke, the light was stronger and his mind once more in command of logical thought. The bed was soft and generously blanketed and there were no bars at the window, but nevertheless there was something celllike about the chamber. He rose, slowed by a dull, pounding headache, and fingered the bandage round his head, faintly surprised to discover that he still had a head to be bandaged. Then he walked unsteadily to the window and looked out.

A high wall and a steep escarpment below it combined into a sheer and vertiginous drop beyond the mullioned panes. The river at the foot of the escarpment was surely the Thames and the town huddled on the other side Eton, to judge by the ecclesiastical building seeming to float above it that could only be the college chapel. He was in Windsor Castle. And not, the bareness of the room suggested, as an honoured guest. He crossed to the door and tried the latch. But the door was locked, as he had expected. So, he was a prisoner, as he had also expected.

He banged on the door loudly and for long enough to rouse any guard who might be near. But there was no response. Perhaps they had not supposed he would wake so soon. He went back to the window and pushed it open.

Church bells were ringing. It was Sunday morning. The events of the day before lay in the past. But they were fresh in his memory. In his mind's eye, clearer by far than the vista below of river and field and chapel, Spandrel saw Mcllwraith standing on Blind Man's Tower, sword in hand, the instant before he and it were blasted into oblivion. 'You'll never take me,' he had said. And he had been as good as his word.

He was gone now, that strange, curmudgeonly warrior. He had used up the last of his lives. Spandrel wandered back to the bed and lay down, tears stinging his eyes as a grief he had never thought he would feel swept over him. It was a grief, he realized, sharpened by fear. Mcllwraith had rescued him once before, when no-one else could. What would happen to him now? Who — if anyone — would rescue him this time?

The church bells had fallen silent, and the angle of the sun across the rooftops of Eton had altered with the advance of the day, when the door of Spandrel's room was at last opened, to an overture of jangling keys. A grim-faced guard, built like a bear but clearly not given to dancing, looked in at Spandrel, then made way for a kitchen-boy, who brought in a meal that smelt surprisingly good, deposited it at Spandrel's feet and scuttled out.

'What am I—' But Spandrel's admittedly tardy question was cut off by the slamming of the door. And a further jangling of keys.

Half an hour later, the door opened once more. Expecting the kitchen-boy, Spandrel picked up the licked-clean plate and held it out for collection. Only to find himself confronted by the corpulent, scowling, Sunday-suited figure of Robert Walpole.

'Put the plate down, sir. Do you take me for a turnspit?' Walpole looked round at the guard. 'Close the door behind you. And stay within call.'

'Yes, sir.' The door closed.

'Well now, Spandrel, how do I find you? Barely scratched, according to the doctor.' Walpole ambled across to the window and gazed out. 'And handsomely accommodated, I see.'

'Am I a prisoner, Mr Walpole?'

'Certainly you are, sir. But a well fed and softly bedded one, thanks to Mrs Davenant. She assures me you did your best to rescue my son. And he was rescued. But since you bear a large measure of responsibility for the peril he was placed in—'

'I had nothing to do with it.'

'Don't interrupt me.' Walpole turned and glared at him. 'You knew Mcllwraith was still alive, yet you said nothing. I suspect you also knew what he intended to do, but still you said nothing, calculating that his plan, if it succeeded, would bring me down. Only when you realized that I would not yield to his demands and that you would therefore be complicit in my son's murder did you attempt to retrieve the situation. In which attempt you were only partially successful.'

'Your son is alive.'

'Indeed he is. But Colonel Negus's adjutant and two other members of his detachment of troops are not, having been killed by flying lumps of stone of the kind that merely grazed you. Nor are my son's kidnappers available for questioning. Two are dead and one is in hiding. How am I to prove Atterbury's involvement in this plot without the evidence only they could have supplied?'

'But your son is alive,' Spandrel hopelessly repeated.

'Yes. And if I believed you'd tried to save him out of Christian charity rather man a concern for your own skin, I'd thank you fulsomely enough. But I don't believe it. And I doubt you have the gall to try to persuade me otherwise.'

'I did my best, sir.'

'To serve two masters and outwit each of them in turn. That's what you did your best to accomplish, Spandrel, and you failed, as you were bound to. Well, there's a price for failure. And you'll have to pay it. Mrs Davenant tells me she gave Mcllwraith some sort of undertaking to save your neck, but I have to tell you she was in no position to give such an undertaking. Your neck is at my disposal, not hers. And her whims are not my will. That is something both of you need to understand. She seems to think I should set you free. But then Kelly would squeeze the truth out of you and Atterbury would know better than to carry on with his treasonable designs. As it is, he still doesn't know the extent to which I've seen through them and I mean to keep him in ignorance as long as possible. I also mean to teach you — and Mrs Davenant — that disobeying me is a grievous offence.'

'What are you going to do with me?'

'Send you to Amsterdam.'

'To hang?'

'That'll be a matter for the Dutch court to decide.'

'But you know what they'll decide.'

'Not at all.' For a moment, Walpole seemed about to smile. Then his face hardened. 'You must address yourself to your own salvation, Spandrel. I'm done with you. Tomorrow, you'll be moved to the Tower of London and held there while a message is sent to the Sheriff of Amsterdam and a reply awaited. You'll be allowed no visitors, I'm afraid. I can't have your situation becoming the talk of the city. As for letters, you may send one to your mother if you wish. I'll read it before it's delivered, of course, courtesy of the Postmaster-General, so you'll need to watch what you say in it. A flight to foreign parts might be a merciful lie to tell in the circumstances. Your mother needn't know anything of events in Amsterdam. I shan't inflict them upon her. Nor, if you conduct yourself with suitable reticence at your trial, will my wife's jewellery ever be found about her. You have my word on that.'

'Your word… as a statesman?'

'That blow clearly hasn't addled your memory. Yes. My word as a statesman.' Walpole walked slowly across the room towards the door, then stopped and looked round at Spandrel. 'We shan't meet again. Nor will you and… Mrs Davenant. If you have a message for her…'

'There's no message.'

'Good.' Walpole permitted himself a grin. 'I wouldn't have passed it on if there had been.'

Spandrel was surprised by the mildness of his own reaction. This was, after all, the plight he had been struggling to evade, one way or another, for more than a year. Perhaps that was the reason for the fatalistic lethargy that held him in its grasp. He could do nothing. There was no escape. He was done for. Days would pass, journeys be undertaken, procedures followed. But the end was fixed and known. In that certainty lay a strange kind of comfort. He did not have to think any more. He did not need to struggle. Everything would be done for him. Except dying, of course. He would have to do that for himself.

Looking through the window, he thought how easy it would be to scramble out onto the chamfered sill and decree his own end, falling through the Windsor air to the ground far below. It would spare him a deal of suffering later. But he had not the courage for that. And his store of hope, he realized, was not quite exhausted, though why not he failed to understand. 'While there's life,' his father had often said, 'there's hardship.' And so it seemed there was.

Spandrel pulled his bed across to the window and sat by it to write the one letter Walpole had said he could write and for which a single sheet of paper had been provided. He would tell the lie Walpole had suggested. He would let his mother go on believing that she might yet see him again. At least she did not have to do so as a washerwoman living within the rules of the Fleet Prison. As a well set up widow, she might find a new husband and forget her wayward son. She might, indeed, be better off without him. She could hardly be worse off.

The letter written, he lay down on the bed and stared out at the sky, watching the afternoon wear towards evening. How odd it was, he thought, that a man who has never done anything wrong, nor borne anyone the least ill will, should nevertheless be required to pay with his life for the crimes and conspiracies of others. It was not fair. It was not right. But it was how the world turned. From light to dark. And back again. For some.

Robert Walpole's arrival that evening at the Townshends' London residence was a surprise, though a pleasant one, for the Viscountess. The Viscount pretended for his wife's benefit that he shared her surprise. The truth was, however, that Walpole had said he would call upon his return from Windsor, to speak of matters which his sister knew nothing about.

After an exchange of family gossip which the Viscountess found disappointingly short and shallow, Walpole and his brother-in-law retired to the Viscount's study, where, behind closed doors, fortified by port and tobacco, they turned at once to urgent debate.

'Edward is well?' Townshend asked, knowing already that his nephew-in-law was safe, but not yet certain that safe also meant sound.

'Oh yes,' said Walpole, smiling the broad smile of a relieved parent. 'He doesn't seem to have had to endure anything worse than I was put through at Eton in the normal course of a typical day. You oppidans never knew the brutalities we collegers were subjected to.'

'I did, Robin. You complained to me of them in unfailing detail at the time and have often reminded me since.'

'Lest you forget.' Walpole laughed. 'Edward will be able to entertain you with tales of his incarceration when you see him in the summer. He's likely to mention a dark-haired lady who'll sound confoundedly like Mrs Davenant.' He held up a hand. 'I know you've always wanted to know nothing about my mistresses, Charles. I blame your prudery on a happy marriage. And I thank God for it as well, of course. You and Dolly are luckier than you know. It was because of your… sensibilities … that I failed to tell you of the lady's involvement in this matter.'

'Say no more.' Townshend gave his brother-in-law a knowing look. 'I gather there was… some kind of explosion.'

'The tower where Edward was held turns out to have been mined. It was blown to blazes.' Walpole chuckled. 'My son seems to have enjoyed the fireworks.'

'Were many killed?'

'Negus's adjutant and two soldiers. Along with two of the kidnappers. A third made off. I needn't tell you I'd like to have had at least one of them to squeeze for evidence. As it is, we're back where we started so far as Atterbury's concerned. The fugitive's called Plunket. He's known to the Secret Service as a Jacobite hanger-on. The smallest of fry, but worth landing if we can catch bigger fish in the same net.'

'This dishes your efforts to tempt Atterbury with the Green Book, I assume.'

'I fear it does, Charles. That, as you might say, is now a closed book.' Walpole smiled wryly. 'We must make the best of what we have.'

'Should we show our hand, then?'

'Not yet. I want our discredited emissary safely lodged in a Dutch gaol before we make the threat to the King public. Horace is ready to leave for The Hague tomorrow. How many troops do you think he can persuade Hoornbeeck to promise us?'

'Not as many as Heinsius would have done.' (The previous Grand Pensionary of Holland had indeed been an unswerving ally. His successor was a notably cooler one.)

'Hoornbeeck may feel more accommodating when Horace tells him that the Englishman who murdered one of Amsterdam's most eminent citizens last year and then escaped from custody can now at last, thanks to us, be made to answer for his crime. We've neatly, if inadvertently, attended to the destruction of the blackguard responsible for his escape as well. All in all, I reckon the burghers of Amsterdam are greatly indebted to us.'

'So, it's the noose for your redundant mapmaker?'

'Indeed. Which is nothing less than he deserves.' Walpole took a thoughtful puff at his pipe. 'Irksome as the fellow is, though, I've done my best for him. Horace will ask for an assurance that he won't be tortured into confessing.'