Georgette Heyer (6 page)

  'John Penderel? Are there more of you, then?' asked the King of Richard.

  'Ay, my liege. There be five of us, and one that's dead. Will, we'd best speak with John.'

  'Ay,' said William, and opened the door.

  As it closed again behind the two brothers, Wilmot exclaimed: 'I cannot leave you with such clods as these!'

  'I like them very well,' said the King, stripping off his shirt. 'See what they have brought me to wear, Harry, and do not look so glum!'

  The Penderels had brought the King a coarse linen shirt, a pair of old green breeches which, since they belonged to William, fell below the King's knees; a leather doublet with pewter buttons; a pair of down at-heel shoes; a greasy, steeple-crowned hat, innocent of lining, and a green coat, which Charles Giffard told the King was called a jump-coat. Since stockings seemed to have been forgotten, the King wore his own with the embroidered tops cut off them.

  He pushed his feet into the clumsy shoes, grimacing as he did so, for they were an ill fit; and bade Wilmot cut his hair short, after the country fashion.

  Wilmot, already aghast at the appearance he presented, cried out against such a sacrifice, but the King said: 'Harry, do as I bid you!' and sat down on a stool to have his love locks hacked off with a knife.

  When it was done, he remarked that he was sorry there was no mirror for him to see the figure he must cut, and bade Giffard summon Richard Penderel.

  Richard came in with Mrs Andrews. Neither seemed to find anything to amuse or to horrify them in the King's changed looks, but Richard, after a moment's scrutiny, turned and walked out of the room; and Mrs Andrews said briskly: 'Well, and is there never one of you with the sense to hide those white hands of his blessed Majesty? The goodyear! It needs a woman to attend to every tittle of business. Rare to let that lovesome boy go forth with his hands and face crying, "I am the King!" '

  The King laughed, and slid his arm about her waist. 'Is my face so white? When I was born, my mother cried out that God had sent her a black baby.'

  'I warrant she was the proud woman that day! Nay, give over! Is this a time for merrymaking? Rub your hands in the soot back of the chimney! That a poor widow must think of all!'

  He obeyed her, and, under her direction, smeared them over his face, protesting as he did so that there was never a lass would kiss him now.

  She was busy rubbing the soot on to the back of his hands, but glanced up to say shrewdly: 'Handsome is as handsome does: you'll never lack for lasses' kisses, I'm thinking – not with that pair of eyes! Fie on you, my liege! I'll have you know I'm an honest woman!'

  Richard Penderel came back into the parlour with a pair of shears in his hand.

  'Oddsfish, what now?' demanded the King.

  'The noble lord has botched your hair, sir,' said Richard. 'It hangs all ends. Let your honour sit down, and I'll trim it.'

  'Richard, I swear I love you well!' the King said, sitting down upon a joint-stool.

  Colour rushed up into Richard's face. He snipped at the King's locks, without saying anything. When he had finished, he laid aside the shears, and said: 'It's daylight. We mun be going.'

  The King rose, and gathered his discarded clothes into a bundle. 'I'll throw these in the privy-house,' he said.

  Mrs Andrews clawed them out of his hold. 'You'll not! George shall bury them, lazy lout that he is!'

  'See it done,' the King warned her. 'They will bring you very ill-fortune if they are found.' He turned to Wilmot, and held out both his hands, and grasped Wilmot's delicate ones in them. 'At the sign of the Three Cranes, in the vintry, Harry. God keep you safe!'

  Wilmot fell on his knees, and kissed the blackened hands. 'God keep
you
!' he whispered.

  'Your honour had best be stirring,' said Richard phlegmatically. 'We'll slip out by the back way, and no one the wiser.'

  The King raised Wilmot, and clasped him in his arms a moment. 'You hear my careful guardian. Farewell! If I can contrive it, you shall hear from me. Lead on, Trusty Dick!'

  In another moment he had gone. Wilmot put his hand into his pocket, and felt the watch there, and stood holding it, looking at the shut door.

Richard Penderel led the King out of the house by a back-door, no one observing their departure. A dull light – for although the sun was rising, the sky was overcast, with sullen black clouds in it promising rain to come – allowed the King to see the country to which he had ridden all through the painful night. It was a pleasant, kindly land, well-watered and as well wooded. White-Ladies lay secluded a little way down a rough track leading from the lane which ran north from the Newport highway to join the road linking Brewood and Tong. A mile farther up it, Richard told the King, Boscobel House was situated, over the brow of a slight hill. His own house, Hobbal Grange, lay a little way to the west of White-Ladies, but the wood in which the King was to spend the day stretched to the east, half a mile from White-Ladies, its outskirts clearly visible from the house across a succession of open hay and cornfields.

  The crops had been gathered in, and the stubble made rough walking. The King's borrowed shoes hurt him a little. He said: 'I trust I may not have to trudge far in these shoes of yours, good Dick, for I find them very incommodious.'

  Richard looked distressed. 'They be not fit for your liege to wear, but I had no better.'

  'My liege is a scurvy ingrate,' remarked the King, shifting the heavy wood-bill with which Richard had provided him from one hand to the other. He saw by the doubtful look on Richard's face that he was not understood, but felt too tired to explain his words. He smiled instead, which seemed to satisfy Richard, for he smiled back at him, and volunteered the information that they had not far to go.

  In a short while, the shelter of the first outlying trees of Spring Coppice was reached, and a few minutes later they had penetrated a good way into the wood, which was very thick, but without much undergrowth, the ground being covered with a tangle of tall bracken, rusted by autumn. The trees were mostly oaks, but some larches grew between them, with here and there a belt of dark spruce firs. The King remarked, as he followed Richard through the bracken which brushed his knees and clutched at his ankles, that the coppice seemed to be a very safe place. Richard was pleased, and said, yes, it was as safe as any other, since a man who did not know it might easily lose his way in it. He led the King into the heart of it, explaining that it was bounded on the eastern side by the road from Cotsall, where a troop of rebels was quartered. He was a little dismayed when Charles announced his intention of taking up a position within hail of the road, and tried to dissuade him. For all his bluntness, he was evidently very much in awe of his Royal companion, and when he found that his respectful representations failed to turn the King from his purpose, did not dare to continue arguing, but reluctantly led the way towards the lane.

  'I like to see danger before danger sees me,' said the King.

  'Ay, my liege, but I do mean to set brother Humphrey and Francis Yates to scout about for news, and so warn your honour of any danger.'

  'What, another brother?' murmured the King. 'Yes, I do recall now that there are five of you. What does Humphrey do for a living?'

  'Humphrey is a miller, please your Majesty. Francis is my sister Eleanor's good-man, and will be mighty sprag to serve you, I warrant you.'

  They had reached by this time almost to the confines of the coppice. A good many bushes grew there, bordering the lane, which, as the King pointed out to Richard, would afford him excellent cover. Richard agreed rather dubiously, but found a resting-place for his charge at some little distance from the lane, and begged him so earnestly not to venture farther that the King laughed, and submitted. He sat down on a bank, and gave a sigh of relief. His whole body ached with weari ness, and his feet, unused to rough and ill-fitting shoes, were already rather chafed. Richard hovered anxiously about him, thinking how pale he looked under the smearing of soot, and wondering whether he would swoon, and what to do for him if he did. He left him for a few moments to take a hasty survey of the road. There was no one in sight, and he went back to the King, who was sitting with his chin in his hand. In repose, his face set into haggard lines, and his dark eyes made Richard feel uncom fortable, so deep was their melancholy. He understood that the King was cast down by his defeat, and wished that he were a lettered man who would be able to offer words of comfort. For himself, crowns and kingdoms were so remote that he could not well appre ciate what it must mean to be a King, and to lose both. All he could think of to say was: 'I do fear that your honour is very discomfortable.'

  The King looked up, and forced a smile to his lips. 'No, I like it very well. I am only a little tired.'

  'Ay, and if your honour would like to sleep I'll keep safe watch, only it would be best I fetch Humphrey and Francis first, I was thinking.'

  'Do so, by all means. You have no need to fear for me: I shan't go to sleep.'

  A disturbing suspicion that he ought not to be left alone crossed Richard's mind, but as his common sense told him that the wisest course would be to enlist his brother and Yates as scouts, he decided to take the King at his word, and to go as quickly as he could, and be back again before any but farm-hands could be expected to be abroad.

  Accordingly, he took his leave, relieved that the King was so calm and, apparently, unafraid.

  For a long time after he had departed, Charles sat motionless, his tired brain working over every stage of the previous day's battle. Until this moment, he had found himself unable to think clearly, for although he had ridden through the night in profound abstraction, his thoughts had kept the rhythm of the hoof-beats, and, instead of sober consideration, useless phrases had drummed repeatedly in his head. Voices had seemed to clamour ceaselessly all about him; and the need to keep his attention fixed on his horse, who at any moment might have stumbled and come down in the darkness, had precluded the possibility of consecutive thought.

  Nothing could be more painful, or to less purpose, than a revision of his misfortunes at Worcester. From the moment of his realization that the Scots horse had failed him, events had moved with a tragic and irre vocable swiftness which seemed to set this hour and yesterday's same hour an age apart. Perhaps Leslie had been an ill choice for General, yet whom else could he have appointed? 'A natural graceless man whom the Lord would never bless with success,' a fellow-officer had called him once.

  But his misfortunes dated farther back than yesterday. The English levies, whom he had expected to join him upon his crossing the border, had hung back. His brain slid to the day of his muster at Pitchcroft, beyond the walls of Worcester. So few had come to the raising of his standard! The English did not like the Scots who accompanied him; they mistrusted the Covenant ing part of his army. Massey was largely to blame for that. He had been sent ahead with his troops on the road south from Carlisle to recruit the English, but his stern Presbyterianism had caused him to flaunt the Covenant, and before he could be checked the mischief had been done.

  The vista of ill-luck seemed to widen, to stretch slowly backwards, unfolding itself before the King's eyes. He lived again the moment of hearing of his brother-in-law's death, and, now that his desperate bid for his inheritance had failed, knew a feeling of blankness. William of Orange had been a good friend to him; indeed, to all his unhappy family. With a wry smile, the King remembered that it had been William who had paid for the mourning he had worn after his father's death. William's purse, William's wise counsel, had throughout been at his service. The future, bleak enough in all conscience, would be the bleaker for his death.

  Dunbar: but that defeat had not seemed to him at the time an unalloyed disaster, for he had come by then to count Argyll and his faction amongst the chief of his enemies. He did not want to think of the bitter year he had spent in Scotland, but his brain could not be wrenched from it. There was no humiliation he had not been forced to bear before the Covenanters could be induced to crown him. He had done penances for himself, for his mother, for his father, until he had cried out, goaded beyond endurance: 'I think I must repent too that ever I was born!'

  He remembered, upon his first coming into Scotland, how a poor woman, seeing him with Argyll beside him at Aberdeen, had shouted: 'God bless your Majesty and send you to your ain! but they on your left hand who helped to tak' aff your father's heid, if ye tak' na care, will tak' aff yours neist!'

  His Chancellor ought to have heard that, he thought. Hyde had advised him steadily against trusting Argyll. None of the Cavalier party had wished him to embrace the Scottish plan. But the Queen, his mother, and all the Louvrians, had urged him to trust Argyll. Even the Engagers, who hated Argyll, had con sidered that in him lay the King's only hope of regaining his throne. He had allowed himself to be guided by them, for how could he sit still and dream out his life? Yet, in the end, that had been very much what Argyll had wanted him to do. Argyll wanted him for a figurehead, himself and his Covenant to rule Scotland. When he had visited the Army, and Argyll had seen how popular he was growing with the soldiers, he had swept him off in a hurry. It was no part of Argyll's scheme to let the King make the army his own.