Authors: Royal Escape
Georgette Heyer (48 page)
She let him lead her to a chair, but said with a very speaking look cast up into his face: 'Sire, that is not so, for you have a Kingdom in the hearts of your loyal subjects, and there you will ever reign absolutely.'
The laugher vanished from his eyes; a tinge of colour stole into his lean cheeks; he raised her hand to his lips, and kissed it. 'Madam, none has ever said a kinder thing to me than that, nor one more comfortable to mine ears in my present straits.'
'My son, you have heard no less than the truth,' said Henchman. 'If there are rebels in England, there are also many loyal subjects, as I think your Majesty knows.'
'Ay, and the day will come when every snuffling Puritan will be utterly confounded,' said the Colonel. 'I shall live to see your Majesty at Whitehall, that's sure.'
The King sat down in a chair beside Mrs Hyde's, and laid his hands on the carved wooden arms. 'Why, I believe you will, Colonel, but first get me out of England! Dr Henchman, what's the news from my Lord Wilmot?'
'Not as good as I had expected to be able to tell you, sir, but still hopeful. Colonel Phelips will doubtless have informed you of the unhappy miscarriage of the South ampton plan. My lord being sadly cast-down, and not knowing which way to turn, I bethought me of a loyal gentleman of my acquaintance, one George Gounter of Racton, in Sussex.' He inclined his head towards Mrs Hyde. 'Your good hostess, sir, will answer for his faithful ness, for he is married to her sister-in-law, and she knows him well.'
'Yes, indeed,' Mrs Hyde said. 'He fought for your Majesty's sainted father throughout the late Wars, and has suffered grievously in your cause.'
'Ay, and that is what has cast some new rubs in the way,' said the Colonel. 'It's not fourteen days since Gounter was confined upon pain of imprisonment not to stir five miles from Racton, sir; but at the very time the doctor here hit upon the notion of using him to your service, he was summoned to appear before the Commissioners in London to pay his fine of two hundred pounds. And the devil's in it, as the doctor has been telling me, that he is still jaunting betwixt London and Chichester, first seeking to compound with the blood-suckers for a hundred pounds, and then to borrow the money, which is not easily done in these sickly times.'
'The marrow of the matter, sir, is this: that my lord has not yet been able to meet with Colonel Gounter. But a young kinsman of the Colonel, one Thomas Gounter, to whom I made my lord known, under the name of Mr Barlow, does positively expect to see the Colonel at his own house again tomorrow, and thither will escort my lord. I do not doubt he will find the Colonel very apt and ready to serve you. He will send to tell me how the business progresses, and I, in my turn, will engage to keep your Majesty punctually informed.'
'And your Majesty will stay hid in his house until we have all in train for your embarking for France,' interpolated Phelips anxiously.
'I seem to have heard these words before,' said the King, with a humorous cock of one eyebrow.
'This time there shall be no miscarriage, sir, I promise you.'
Mrs Hyde, who had listened in silence, suddenly said: 'I must think! This must not be carelessly contrived. None but my sister and myself must know of his Majesty's presence in the house. I will not trust such a secret to any of my servants.' She paused, her brow puckered. After a moment she nodded briskly, and sat bolt upright in her chair. 'Your Majesty must seem to leave the house tomorrow, in company with the Colonel. I will give my servants leave to go to the fair in Salisbury, and so have none here to spy upon your return. That must not be until dusk, if you please, sir, when I will instantly convey you to the chamber I spoke of. There my sister and I can wait upon your Majesty, and none be the wiser, for we do not use that chamber.'
'Ay, but where must I take his Majesty?' said Phelips dubiously. 'I dare not go to Salisbury, nor to any house in the neighbourhood.'
Dr Henchman raised his eyes from the contem plation of a ring upon his finger. 'Nay, that would be too perilous, certainly. But you might take his Majesty where it will be strange indeed if you encounter anyone, and that is upon the Downs, towards Stonehenge.'
'But what if it should be a rainy day, and his Majesty be thus exposed to the weather?' objected the Colonel. 'And where shall he dine?'
The King remembered the dripping of the rain in Spring Coppice, and the mess of butter and milk and eggs that was brought him in a wooden cup by Eleanor Yates. It seemed a long time ago, but his face grew sombre as he thought of it, and a little shiver ran through him, as though he could still feel the chill in his flesh.
He looked up. 'Nay, I like it very well, and will engage to eat bread and cheese for my dinner at Stone henge.'
The Colonel, with a lively recollection of his obsti nacy in riding into Mere for his dinner, looked scep tical, but raised no further objections. It was, however, in the expectation of being commanded to lead his master to a decent inn for dinner that he set out with him from Heale next morning, and he was not a little relieved to find, presently, that Charles was apparently in a docile mood, ready to be escorted as far from any village as the Colonel thought proper.
The day was fine, though with a sharpness in the air; and when their horses climbed the chalk downs to the north of Salisbury, a strong wind met them. For as far as the eye could see, nothing but the lift and fall of the bare downs was visible. The King sat with one hand resting on his saddle-bow, looking about him. The wind slapped the brim of his hat against his cheek, and whipped his horse's mane into a tangle. He turned his head towards the Colonel remarking: 'Well! You have certainly brought me to a very remote place, Robin Phelips!'
'It is very bleak, sir, and I fear there is no shelter to be found from this wind.'
'I like it,' said the King. 'I have been so cooped-up of late that this suits my humour exactly. Lead me to Stonehenge! I have never seen it, which is, I think, a shocking thing for a King of England to be obliged to confess.'
'If we follow this track, sir, we shall come upon it over the next rise. Your Majesty must count the stones, for there is an old saying in these parts that they can never be told twice alike.'
'I will put that to the test,' the King promised, and pricked his horse to a canter.
His arithmetic gave the lie to the fable, presently, which, he said, was a sad disappointment. He sat down by one of the huge stones and in its grim shadow ate his dinner of bread and cheese. The Colonel sat beside him, sharing his meal. At first a little stiff, and ill at ease, his tongue grew gradually looser, and his manner less stilted. He found the King very merry and conversable, and by the time they set out to retrace their steps to Heale he had forgotten that Charles could be obstinate, and foolhardy, and would have been ready to swear that he had the sweetest and most reasonable disposition of any prince in Christendom.
There was not a soul to be seen at Heale House but Mrs Hyde and her sister, and Dr Henchman. After delivering the King into their charge, the Colonel kissed hands, and rode away, taking the King's horse to be stabled against his future need at the house of a friend living some nine miles distant from Heale.
Twenty
'I Must Endeavour'
When Colonel Phelips escorted the King to Heale, my Lord Wilmot was gnawing his nails at Hinton Daubnay. The eleven days he had spent in alternating fits of hope and despair had left their mark upon him. He had lost weight, and his weak, handsome face was beginning to wear a perpetual look of strain. A frown lived in his eyes; he found it hard to sit still; and every day knew that his temper was growing shorter. Lawrence Hyde and his lady bore with his humours with great good nature, but found him a difficult guest, for he could neither divorce his mind from the terrible responsibility resting upon him, nor decide upon any one course of action to be followed. No sooner had he sent to implore Southamp ton's aid, than he became obsessed with the fear that the Earl was too noted a figure to engage upon the business without attracting unwelcome attention. He eagerly embraced Henchman's plan of confiding in Colonel Gounter, yet when Henchman put him in the way of meeting Captain Thomas Gounter, he took fright, and, regardless of the fact that the Captain had once served under his command, would not permit Henchman to disclose his identity to him. While the King remained at Trent, dreadful nightmares of his being searched for there made him start up night after night out of his troubled sleep, his body bathed in sweat, his limbs rigid with horror. The thought that sixty miles lay between him and Charles filled him with self-reproach at having consented to leave him at Trent; the face of the ostler at Charmouth, the blur of red-coats encountered in Bridport, the thick black characters of a proclamation nailed to a wall in Lyme, haunted his mind. He began to think of Trent, not as a secure refuge, but as a trap out of which he must somehow contrive to steal the King. But when he had despatched Phelips to fetch Charles to Heale, doubts assailed him. Wyndham he could trust, but what, after all, did he know of Mrs Hyde? The need to set the King safely aboard a vessel bound for France seemed to be more urgent than ever before, and Colonel Gounter's continued absence from his home filled him with an irrational fury that made his hands shake, and his voice rise to a shrill note.
Thomas Gounter, an unimaginative young man with a strong sense of duty, thought him an odd, impatient creature, but forbore to pry into his affairs. It was quite evident that he was engaged upon some secret and dangerous business, for no man, thought Tom Gounter, could live in such a sweat of fear merely because he was being hunted by Roundheads. He called himself Barlow, and said that he was a native of Devonshire, but Tom Gounter did not think that his name was Barlow, or that he came from Devonshire. His countenance seemed to him vaguely familiar, but since he did not wish to be known, Tom Gounter was not the man to try to discover his identity.
Upon the 7th October, the day following the King's arrival at Heale, Gounter arrived at Hinton Daubnay, late in the afternoon, for the purpose of escorting my lord to Racton, which lay four miles from Chichester, and was the home of the kinsman, Colonel George Gounter. He found my lord in a fret of impatience, and was greeted by a testy demand to know what had made him so late.
Captain Gounter explained, for perhaps the fourth time, that since his kinsman was not expected to reach Racton until the evening no good purpose would be served by their making an early start. 'My cousin will come home for his supper, I daresay, and will be glad to house us for the night,' he said. 'You'll remember that so it was agreed between us, Mr Barlow.'
Wilmot tried to curb his impatience, but soon fell to walking about the room, every now and then pulling out his watch to compare it with the bracket-clock on the mantelpiece. Captain Gounter, who would have been pleased to have smoked a pipe with Lawrence Hyde, decided, after a very little of this restlessness, that the only thing to be done was to set out for Racton at once and let Mr Barlow do his pacing there.
Robert Swan, impassive as ever, rode with them, with my lord's yellow-hair sumpter-trunk strapped on to the crupper behind him. The distance, which was less than ten miles, was soon covered, and the travellers came within sight of Colonel Gounter's house at a little before seven o'clock. It was a rambling, two-storeyed mansion, standing in its own orchards some way back from the south bank of the river Ems. It was enclosed by flint walls, and approached by an avenue of pollard ash trees, stretching to the Chichester road.
When the visitors entered the house it was to find, as Tom Gounter had expected, that the Colonel had not returned yet, but was looked-for in an hour or so. His wife, a thin, anxious-eyed woman, seemed rather taken-aback at the arrival of company. She explained that she had given her servants leave to go out for the day, but if she cherished a hope that the visitors might decide not to put her to the trouble of providing for their entertainment that evening, she was soon disap pointed. With an airy, male lack of comprehension, Captain Gounter begged her not to put herself out, for they would be content with the simplest fare, and desired her to make no change in her arrangements upon their account. She was too well-bred a woman to disabuse his mind of its evident belief that three men could be as easily fed as one, and putting a good face on it, invited him and Wilmot into one of the parlours, and fetched some sack and biscuits for their immediate refreshment.
She looked curiously at Wilmot, and, upon hearing that he wished most particularly to have speech with her husband, grew rather pale. An attempt to elicit from him the nature of his business failed. After a pause, she said in a faltering voice: 'My husband has only just been released from his parole, and that upon payment of a fine that can only be raised through his going to an usurer. I do trust, sir, that your errand to him is not such as must again undo him?'
'No, no!' Wilmot said hastily. 'But it is about a refer ence which none but he can decide. I am directed to him by Mr Hyde of Hinton Daubnay, who is, I believe, related to you.'
'He is my cousin,' she said, not appearing to derive much comfort from this introduction.
Other books
The World is a Carpet by Anna Badkhen
The Best American Travel Writing 2011 by Sloane Crosley
Come Away With Me by Kristen Proby
Psicokillers by Juan Antonio Cebrián
A Thunder Canyon Christmas by RaeAnne Thayne
The Billionaire's Pledge by Rachel Bond
Anno Zombus Year 1 (Book 8): August by Rowlands, Dave
Cross My Heart by Abigail Strom
Everything but the Squeal by Timothy Hallinan
Links by Nuruddin Farah