Fire Over England E-Book

A. E. W. Mason

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In 1588, relations between Spain and England are at the breaking point. British sea raiders regularly capture Spanish merchantmen bringing gold from the New World with the support of Queen Elizabeth I. „Fire Over England” is the story of Robin Aubrey, a supposedly orphaned Etonian whose ambition in life is to both serve his queen and avenge his father who fell foul of the „The Spanish Inquisition”. He assembles a small fleet with a view to help fight off the Spanish Armada. However, his apparent free-hand in his own destiny is over-ridden by Elizabeth’s advisor, Walsingham, who targets young Aubrey and sends him off to Spain as a spy for Her Majesty. A fun, romantic spy story full of action and intrigue and set in an interesting period of history.

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

CHAPTER I. A Knot of Ribbons for Robin Aubrey

CHAPTER II. The Rehearsal

CHAPTER III. The Secret Visitor

CHAPTER IV. The Signet Ring

CHAPTER V. Not Foreseen in the Plan

CHAPTER VI. Robin Dines in Strange Company

CHAPTER VII. Metamorphosis of Captain Fortescue

CHAPTER VIII. The Better Plan

CHAPTER IX. The Winged Mercury

CHAPTER X. The Gallows’ Mark

CHAPTER XI. The Renunciation

CHAPTER XII. Robin Takes Service

CHAPTER XIII. The Knot of Ribbon Again and a Supper at Barn Elms

CHAPTER XIV. Master and Man

CHAPTER XV. Giuseppe the Valet

CHAPTER XVI. Dangerous Moments

CHAPTER XVII. Death of Santa Cruz

CHAPTER XVIII. Meanwhile

CHAPTER XIX. A Bridport Dagger

CHAPTER XX. Plots and Conspiracies

CHAPTER XXI. On the Edge of the Grass

CHAPTER XXII. The Device of the Italian Singers

CHAPTER XXIII. A Vain Pursuit

CHAPTER XXIV. In the Garden of Abbot’s Gap

CHAPTER XXV. Gregory Becomes Noticeable

CHAPTER XXVI. At the Escorial

CHAPTER XXVII. The Beggar on the Church Steps

CHAPTER XXVIII. George Aubrey

CHAPTER XXIX. Old Tricks are Good Tricks

CHAPTER XXX. Anthony Scarr

CHAPTER XXXI. Robin Pays His Fare

CHAPTER XXXII. Thursday

Preface

IN HIS Napoleon Monsieur Bainville wrote: “Each generation believes that the world began with it, and yet whoever broods over the past sees that many things were much as they are today.”

This is particularly true of the Elizabethan age. The differences between then and now are in the main superficial–differences of dress, of entertainments, of transport, of government, of machinery. But in the deeper circumstances of character and opinion, and the conduct which springs from them, these two turbulent epochs have much in common which they manifest in the same way. Youth takes to the new element of the air in the same eager and adventurous spirit in which it then took to the new element of the sea. Fear of the introduction of papistical practices rouses Protestant England to the same fervour of refusal as it did then. The same passion for peace is accompanied by the same quiet and staunch belief that if war must come the nation cannot be beaten. There is the same reluctance to meddle with the entanglements of the Continent. And the freedom of the Low Countries is still the chief principle of foreign policy.

Even in minor matters the resemblance stands. The swift and wide expansion of Walsingham’s secret service and its swift contraction when the need was past find a parallel in the history of our late war. At so many other points, such as the love of sport, the revival of music, and the friendly country life, the two ages touch so closely that in writing this book I seemed to be writing a book of our own times–and so have been led to break the reticence of a lifetime and begin it with a preface.

A preface, however, gives me the opportunity of acknowledging a special debt to Mr Conyers Read for his Mr. Secretary Walsingham and to Professor J. E. Neale for his enthralling Queen Elizabeth.

A. E. W. Mason.

CHAPTER I

A Knot of Ribbons for Robin Aubrey

THROUGH two drowsy hours of a golden afternoon the scholars of the foundation droned their Latin odes in the lower school; and the Queen’s Grace sat upright in her high chair and listened. The door stood open to the disturbing invitations of summer: an oblong of sunlight on the dark floor, the clear notes of birds, a rustle of wind in the trees, the distant cries of labourers in the fields, the scent of hay. But the queen had neither eye nor ear for them. She sat with her great farthingale spread about her, her bodice of blue and silver with the open throat and the high collar at the back all slashed and puffed and sewn with pearls the size of beans; and she bore with schoolboys’ Alcaics and Sapphics and dicolons and distrophons and monoclons as though July were her favourite month for such diversions. A dragonfly buzzed into the long room, a noisy, angry flash of green and gold beat fiercely against the walls and was gone again. The queen never so much as turned her head.

This was the year 1581 and Elizabeth’s third visit to the school at Eton, and the odes to do her honour were her appointed occupation for the day. So she gave her whole mind to it. Also she enjoyed it; which is more than can be said for her court behind her, with the exception perhaps of her secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, who had a passion for learning. At one moment the voice of a boy cracked as he recited his piece and ran up into a squeak. The queen caught the eye of another boy in the second row and exchanged the glimmer of a smile with him as though the pair of them had a little private joke of their own, and so made him her slave for life. This was the last of the recitations, and when it was finished the provost stepped forward in his scarlet gown. He made a little speech, he too using his best Latin, and presented Her Grace with a printed copy of the odes bound in covers with ornaments of scarlet and gold. Elizabeth raised her hand to take the book, and her arm caught upon the carving of her chair. A knot of silk ribbon with a gold button in the middle of it was half torn from her sleeve and hung dangling. Anywhere else she would have sworn a good round trooper’s oath, but today she was in her most gracious mood, and, seeing the look of agony on the provost’s face, she burst out laughing.

“Nay, good Doctor, you shall keep that look for my funeral. If I leave a bow behind me, you have twenty-five pretty scholars here who will string it for me at my need.”

Readiness is the better half of wit, and the little quip served its turn. A full-throated yell of applause rewarded her. She rose to her feet with the book still in her hands and addressed the school.

“There was a day when I could have bartered verses with you and perhaps not had the worst of it. But the business of government has so rusted my Latin and abolished my Greek that you can have nothing but my mother tongue from me. Ah, if only I had the leisure I once enjoyed!” And she closed her eyes and fondled the book and sighed.

There had been an occasion when Philip’s ambassador had complained to her that she had stolen all the wages of his master’s troops on their way up the Channel. She had sighed disconsolately then and answered that if only she could sit in a nun’s cell and tell her beads quietly for the rest of her days she would be happy. The ambassador had been neither impressed nor amused. He had written off angrily to his master that she was a woman possessed of a hundred thousand devils. However, she had an easier audience in the scholars of Eton. They believed in her yearning for the simple life. Little murmurs of sympathy broke out. Not one but would have given years to ease the load of government from her shoulders.

“But you will forgive me my lack of scholarship,” she continued, “if I ask in plain English for a holiday for you to commemorate the day.” And as the cheers burst out again she turned to Dr Thomas, the school’s master, who could do nothing but bow his consent.

“I thought that would commend me to your hearts,” she added drily, and indeed holidays were shining rarities in those days at Eton. “Yet with no less warmth take this old saying of Demosthenes to your bosoms. The words of scholars are the books of the unlearned. So persist in your studies for the good of those less fortunate than you.”

And so, having delivered her little necessary tag of erudition, she handed the book to a maid of honour and stepped down from her dais.

In the court outside the school a very different scene greeted her eyes. Gone were the frieze gowns and sober habiliments of the scholars. Her coaches, her lackeys, her red halberdiers waited, and slanting outwards from the door like the spokes of a painted wheel, the oppidans were ranged to speed her on her going. They had no place that day in the lower school. It was only by a breach in the old charter that they got their education there at all. They lived in appointed houses in the village under the tutelage of dames or hostesses, as they were called then. Now, with their private tutors amongst them, they stood gracious in their youth and eagerness, and glowing in silks and velvets and the bravery of their best attire. Elizabeth’s eyes shone and her heart quickened as she looked at them–the buds, lusty and colourful, on that tree of England whose growth she had tended with such jealous care for three-and-twenty years. It is true that she pruned a bough here and there with a sharp axe when she needs must, but for the most part she watched that it grew, its bark untapped, spaciously and freely and turbulently to its own shape. All the scraping and paring that her people might not be taxed, all her long vigils with her statesmen, all the delicate, perilous corantos she trod–now with the emperor, now with the Valois in Paris, now with Philip in Madrid–here in the sunlit yard were proved to her well worth the while even if she had not enjoyed every minute of them. These lads, tall and sturdy, with the shining eyes, as she was their glory, were her prop and her pride.

She looked along the row to her right, and a movement stayed her eyes. A tutor was thrusting one boy forward into the front of the line and dragging another boy back out of it.

“Stand you back, Robin, behind me,” he said in an impatient whisper which reached the queen’s ears. “And you, Humphrey, in your proper place in front.”

A favourite pupil was being set where he might catch the queen’s eye if he were fortunate, and that favourite pupil was smiling contentedly with little doubt that he would be so favoured.

The other lad, Robin, fell back without a struggle and without a sign of resentment. He was used to the second place, but not because he was stupid or dull or inferior or the worse-looking of the two. A single glance at his face proved that. But for him humiliation would have lain in making a to-do over an affair so small. He fell back, eager to see rather than to be seen. The great queen who held their hearts in her hand was to pass them by on her way to her coach. To watch her as she went was contentment enough, and he watched with shining eyes and parted lips a goddess rather than a woman.

But a woman she was, and very much of a woman. She had no taste for busy and officious people who must be giving orders when they should be standing modestly in their places. A grim little smile tightened her mouth. She would put that forward tutor in his place. Moreover, she liked beauty and straight limbs and the clean look of race; and all those qualities were plain to see in the young oppidan now forced back and half hidden behind the tutor. She turned to the master with a smile.

“Call me out that young dorado, good master,” she said.

Her voice in ordinary talk was thin, but it reached across the yard to the tutor, and that unhappy man rushed upon his undoing.

“It’s you, Humphrey, whom Her Grace calls,” he said, pushing his favourite forward from the line. “Be quick! It’s you,” he urged excitedly, and the queen’s voice rang out, strong now and alarming, whilst her black eyes widened and hardened till the tutor drooped his head and quailed before them.

“No, it is not!” she cried. “What! You will hold out against me, will you? And expound my meaning to me like a lawyer? Know, Mr Ferret–” She had a pretty gift for nicknames, and she could have invented none apter than this one. The tutor was a thin, long creature, with small, twinkling, reddish eyes and a little nibbling mouth ridiculous in a man; and what with a steep sloping forehead and a sharp receding chin, his face seemed to be drawn to a point at the end of a long nose.–“Mr Ferret”–Elizabeth repeated the name with relish, and a ripple of laughter ran along the ranks of the boys. Even the provost and the master smiled. The tutor’s face was bent towards the ground, so that no one could see the malignant fury which swept across it. But he was never to forgive her the phrase and never to forgive one, at all events, of those boys for the gust of joyous laughter which welcomed it.

“–Know, Mr Ferret, that in this realm it’s I who say which one shall stand forward and which one stand behind. God’s wounds! Dr Provost, there are tutors at Eton who need a stiffer schooling than your pupils, and let Mr Ferret see to it that I don’t take the cane in hand myself.”

She could play tricks like a tomboy on her courtiers, she could exchange a jest with any peasant in the fields, but she could be right King Harry when she chose, and she chose now. The tutor cringed before her. His mortification was drowned in a wave of fear. She was terrifying, and there was no one to gainsay her. The sweat gathered upon his forehead; his knees shook. She had made a public fool of him. She could set him in the stocks like a rogue if she would.

But she was content with the lesson she had given him. She looked again towards the master.

“Call me out that brown lad.”

“Robin Aubrey,” cried the master, and the ranks parted and Mr Ferret, with a gasp of relief, stood aside. But he kept his head still lowered, lest his eyes might be seen even in their fear to hold a threat.

Robin Aubrey himself was hardly in a happier state. A boy of fourteen years, he was made up of one clear purpose and great dreams, and at the heart of those dreams the great queen was enshrined. Now she had chosen him from amongst his companions. She had called him out from them. He would never be able to cross that patch of sunlit ground to her, he felt sure. His heart so clamoured within his breast that he would stifle before he had gone half the way. His tears so blinded him that he would never see her. The most that he could hope for was that he would swoon and die at her feet. Yet by some magic–how he could never explain–he was there on his knees before her. He dared not lift his eyes to her face, but he felt her slim hand upon his shoulder and heard her voice–oh, miracle! just a woman’s voice, but very warm and friendly–in his ears.

“Robin Aubrey,” she said slowly, relishing the English sound of the name.

“Of Abbot’s Gap in the County of Dorset.”

Was it really his voice he heard so clear and steady? Someone started as he spoke, a pale, black-bearded, sickly man who stood a couple of paces behind the queen and at one side.

“What!” she cried gaily. “My good Moor knows you. Were you his page at the court of the emperor?”

Her good Moor was her principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham; he was more fortunate in his nickname than Sir Christopher Hatton, her vice-chamberlain, who was her “mutton,” but he did not relish it overmuch. He smiled without any amusement.

“Your Majesty, Mr Aubrey’s father was my friend,” he said sedately, and Robin knew who he was.

“Robin Aubrey,” Elizabeth repeated. “Mere English, then!”

“And on my knees to England.”

Had Robin sat up of nights for a twelvemonth conning phrases he could have lit upon none which could so delight his queen as this one spoken in an honest burst of passion. That she was mere English was her pride, and no doubt she owed something of the witchcraft with which she drew so many hearts to her kinship with her people, her liking for their sports, her share in their homely humour.

“These lads, Sir Francis,” she said with a sigh of pleasure. “And how old are you, boy Robin?”

“Fourteen, Your Majesty,” and then in a hurry: “But I shall be fifteen next month.”

“God bless my soul, a man!” cried she. “And whither go you from Eton?”

“To Oxford.”

Perhaps Elizabeth had had enough of scholarship for one day. Perhaps she saw in Robin a page who would set off her presence chamber pleasantly. He was of the make she liked. Brown waving hair, a white, broad forehead, brown eyes set wide apart, the nostrils fine, the chin firm, the hands and feet long and slim–lady-faced a little, perhaps, but without weakness; one who had lived amongst dreams, but with spirit and strength enough to make of his dreams a living truth. Something of the dandy, too, in his fine doublet and breeches of cloth of gold, his long stockings of white silk, his cloak of deep-blue velvet slung from his shoulders and the flat scarlet cap which he held in his hand. Certainly, as Elizabeth looked down at him, she thought he would make a shapely figure at Whitehall.

“Oxford!” she said with a little grimace. “To put your eyes out with a book.”

“Nay, Your Majesty, I shall hope to keep my eye in with a sword and use it in the Queen’s service.”

“No doubt,” she returned drily. “You’ll conquer a world and hand it as a Christmas present to a poor woman who wants nothing but to live in peace and amity with her neighbours. You would do better, after all, to write me an ode bidding me marry and have a mort of children, like the scholars in the Hall.”

“Your Grace,” and Robin threw back his head as he knelt and cried, “were I a grown man and a great prince besides, I would have written one already which would have outscholared all the scholars.”

Again he marvelled. Was this he, Robin Aubrey, exchanging pleasantries with so bold a face and so free and joyous a voice, and exchanging them with the world’s wonder and paragon! And they came to his lips unrehearsed! He was in that tense mood which duplicates a person so that one self acts and speaks whilst the other stands at his side, notes each gesture and word and accent, and criticizes or approves. How would Her Grace take his audacity? Would she give him a taste of Mr Ferret? He held his breath. Her Grace laughed roundly and patted his shoulder.

“A courtier!” she cried, well pleased. “Monsieur d’Alençon has a rival and must look to himself,” and as her hand fondled his shoulder that plaguy knot of ribbon dangling on her sleeve caught her eye. Well, she had made many of the incommodities of life serve her turn in the great matters, now she would use one of them in the small. She snatched the knot quite off her sleeve.

“Boy Robin, if you tire of Oxford and your swordplay there, you shall bring this knot to me at Whitehall, and poor though I am, I shall make shift to find a place for you.”

Robin took the knot reverently and kissed the hand which gave it to him.

“Up with you, lad, for on my troth your knees must be growing sore with these pebbles for their cushion, and wait upon me to my coach.”

She took her leave of the provost and the master and mounted into her great litter, with her ladies in attendance. “God bless you, boy Robin,” she cried, waving her hand to the lad, and so drove off between cheering throngs up the hill to Windsor Castle. There she spoke a shrewd word or two to her Moor about Robin and straightway forgot him for many a day. But she left a boy behind her with his brain in a whirl–and a shameful recognition that the purpose to which his life was dedicated had suddenly grown unsubstantial as a shadow.

Elizabeth was forty-seven years old in this year of 1581, and though she had lived through perils and anxieties intricate enough to age an archangel, she had retained a superb look of youth and strength. She had run neither to angles nor to fat. She was majestical and homely; a great prince with her sex at her fingers’ ends; she was more English than she knew. For she was English of our day–English in her distaste for cruelty, English in her inability to nourish rancour against old enemies, English in her creed that poverty needed more than the empty help of kindly words. Enemies enough she had, even amongst those who most pretended their loyalty. But to the honest youth of her times she was the nonpareil. It is no wonder that Robin’s thoughts were drawn after her as by a magnet. Service to her would be a song upon the lips; death for her would be a golden door.

“What said she?”

“What did you answer?”

“You’ll be for the court tomorrow.”

“Aye, and for the Tower the day after.”

Robin found himself the centre of a group of his companions. Questions rained upon him, questions friendly and questions envious. Robin dusted his knees and clapped his scarlet hat on the top of his thick brown hair.

“We had some private talk,” he said with a magnificent indifference, and laughed as he spoke. But he looked about him eagerly, and his laughter stopped and a shadow dimmed the brightness of his face.

“Where’s Humphrey?” he asked.

But Humphrey Bannet and the Ferret, otherwise Mr Charles Stafford, of Jesus College, Cambridge, had crept away to their house at the end of the village.

Robin was a little disturbed. Because of him his friend had been put to a stinging humiliation, and in the face of the school.

“I shall have to make my peace with Humphrey at supper,” he reflected, and he added ruefully, “though with Mr Stafford at his elbow it will not be easy.”

Meanwhile he had a little battle to fight with himself. Little, perhaps, but still more serious than he had ever imagined that such a tussle could be until this afternoon. However, there it was upon him. It had got to be met, fought through, won and finished with, before he took his place at the supper table tonight.

CHAPTER II

The Rehearsal

HUMPHREY was the only son of the widowed Sir Robert Bannet, who lived in great state and magnificence at his big house of Hilbury Melcombe midway between Dorchester and Wareham and a little to the north of both of those towns. He was of an old Catholic family, but in these years suffered little disability on that account. More difficult times were to come. But the wise woman who sat upon the throne of England, looking over Europe torn with wars, was determined that in her realm, at all events, religion should not be the dividing line of politics.

Robin’s house of Abbot’s Gap was less than twenty miles away from Hilbury Melcombe, and though he was brought up in the Protestant faith, it seemed well to his uncle and guardian, who was busy with his own affairs at the western end of the county, as it did to Sir Robert Bannet, that the two boys should share the same tutor at Eton. The tutor, however, was Mr Charles Stafford, who was Sir Robert Bannet’s secretary. He was chosen by Sir Robert, and the good, easy uncle at the other end of the county acquiesced in the choice, since it saved him a deal of trouble.

The three of them occupied the last house in the long, single street of Eton. It was commodious enough to provide a study and a bedroom apiece, accommodation for their servants and a common room for their meals and recreations.

On this evening Robin slipped quietly into his study and sat down in his window seat above the meadows to fight his battle out. He had made plans, sacred plans, and had never thought for a moment that he could dream of forswearing them. But he had never dreamed that this glittering temptation of the queen’s favour would be dangled before his eyes as it had been this afternoon. He despised himself, but he was honest. He was tempted. The fame of Elizabeth’s court was high and splendid. There was none like it for gaiety and colour, for amusement and opportunity. It was presided over by a lady, herself of high spirits and gaiety. By a scratch of her pen she dispensed power and wealth. There was the dark side, of course, to that shining mirror, but how should a boy let it frighten him? A page at the queen’s court! Robin drew up his knees to his chin on the window seat and clasping his hands about them with a little wriggle of pleasure, saw the world opening like the dawn. There would be the months of progress during the summer, the tournaments, the great houses ringing with laughter.

“I could spare a few years,” he argued. “In any case, I must wait till I’m a man.”

But when he was a grown man, perhaps with a pleasant, profitable office, wouldn’t he put off year after year the thing he had sworn to do? Wouldn’t he gradually cease to feel the shame of a man forsworn, covering it all up under the fat of his indolence? Until middle age came and the chance was gone. He saw himself suddenly as in a distorting glass, mean, a fugitive from himself, despicable, and not knowing it.

“No!” he cried, and he got to his feet; and, having washed himself vigorously as though with that clean water he washed the foulness of his thoughts away, he went into the common room very late for his supper. He found Mr Stafford and Humphrey nearly at the end of theirs.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, with a bow to Mr Stafford, “I wasn’t noticing the time.”

Mr Stafford raised a protesting hand.

“Not a word, I pray you! Humble people like Humphrey and myself must not be so foolish as to expect good manners from a queen’s favourite. It is condescension enough if he takes his supper with us at all.”

Robin did not answer. He had indeed a sense of guilt rather than of triumph. He had always taken the second place without troubling his head about it. Sir Robert Bannet, of Hilbury Castle, was a much more important figure in the County of Dorset than fourteen-year-old Robin Aubrey. Mr Stafford, too, was a dependent of that house. It was in the natural order that Mr Stafford should set Humphrey forward and thrust Robin back, and for the humiliating consequences both to Humphrey and the tutor Robin was inclined to reproach himself. He looked unhappily across the table at Humphrey, a black-haired lad of Robin’s own height, handsome enough in his doublet of grey velvet, but with such a scowl upon his face as took all his good looks away. Robin tried again to make easier a difficult moment.

“I am very sorry,” he said. “Not sorry for what happened to me. There’s no boy in the world but would give a year of his life for so gracious a favour, but I wish with all my heart that it had happened without”–and he searched for a phrase which would not reopen wounds–“causing either of you pain.”

Humphrey Bannet worked his shoulders angrily.

“Let’s not talk of it,” he rapped out, and there the debate might have ended but for Mr Stafford. He could not let a resentment die. He must worry a grievance until it was once more raw. Smiling and suave as velvet he interrupted:

“No, but, my dear Humphrey, we must talk of it. This is Robin’s day. Very likely he will never know such another. It will be his annus Domini. He will reform his calendar to keep its memory green. It would be ungenerous to Robin not to make the most of it, as he will, we may be sure. For even now he must come back to it with a kindly hope that his triumph has not given the rest of us poor people pain.”

“Sir,” Robin stammered miserably, “you go out of your way to put me in the wrong. If I spoke of–of this afternoon again–”

“And you did, dear lad, you did!”

“It was merely to wish that it would make no difference between Humphrey and me, and that–”

“No, but you may be satisfied it will make none,” said Mr Stafford. He seldom let anyone finish a sentence, and as a rule prefaced his interruption with a “no, but,” even though the interruption was merely to repeat in other words what had already been said. “It is not now, Robin, that we listen to you with impatience. A little bragging and bravado is more than pardonable. But I pray you to be careful in afteryears. We shall have you saying: “When Walsingham had his head cut off–‘ ” and Mr Stafford’s face suddenly contracted with such a fury of rage in his eyes that Robin was startled. It was only for a second that the hatred showed and Mr Stafford was back in his vein of banter. But during that second a veil had dropped. A ferret indeed! Robin saw a man dangerous with the cold hatred of a snake. “ "When did Sir Francis die on the block?’ you will ask Robin. “Let me think, sir! A moment and I shall tell you. It was two years after the queen gave me a ribbon from her sleeve.’ ”

Humphrey Bannet laughed stridently, and Robin shifted his body in his chair.

“Or it will be,” continued Mr Stafford, again imitating waggishly some prosy old bore stuffed full of tedious reminiscences, “ "Humphrey Bannet went first as ambassador to France–a minute, and I have it. It was in the summer just fifteen years after Her Grace called me forward and was pleased to approve of my velvet cape and my pretty face.’ And then our Robin will sigh and pluck at his grey beard and tell for the thousandth time the story of that famous moment.”

Robin’s cheeks flamed. A schoolboy is as defenceless against the raillery of his tutor as a private on a parade ground against the sarcasms of a sergeant major. However poor and heavy the wit, Robin was the butt ready-made. He was wise enough not to answer, and the most uncomfortable meal which he could remember dragged miserably to its end. Mr Stafford rose at the end of it a little disappointed. He had always resented Robin’s ability to withdraw within a fortress of dreams and hold his own there against all invaders. Mr Stafford looked down at the young head of his pupil. The candlelight burnished the brown waves of hair; there was an odd contrast between the gaiety of his shining doublet, his stiffly starched white ruff, and the lonely brooding look of his face, which might have touched even an enemy to a gentler mood. But Mr Stafford only foresaw another opportunity of sport. He smiled suddenly.

“Come! We are wasting time,” he said genially. “We have work to do.”

He moved to the door, called aloud for the table to be cleared, and set himself to arrange the furniture at the other end of the long room. For a moment Robin and Humphrey were alone, and rather timidly Robin stretched out his hand across the table.

“Humphrey!” he pleaded in a low voice.

“Well, and what now?”

Humphrey would not see that outstretched hand.

“I think that if Mr Stafford had been less busy it is very likely you whom Her Grace would have called out–”

Humphrey interrupted him with a bitter cry:

“Her Grace! Her Grace! We hear too much of Her Grace, I am thinking. There are other names for her, I think, less polite but more apt. Wait but a little! They are only muttered now. We shall hear them in the street, be sure. “Mere English’–oh, no doubt, but born in Babylon, eh–”

Humphrey came to an abrupt stop. At the other end of the room, behind Robin’s back, Mr Stafford was flapping his hand up and down in the air in consternation. Humphrey was brought to his senses. He saw Robin staring up at him with startled, incredulous eyes.

“I was talking like a fool and meant not a word of it,” he said quickly. “It was lucky no one was listening but you, Robin. Else that fine appointment in France which Mr Stafford there has reserved for me would go to someone else.” He laughed heartily and clapped his hand into Robin’s. “There! We are friends again. Envy, Robin, envy! But not even Her Grace shall come between us”; and he held Robin’s hand until he saw that the dismay had faded out of his face and a smile had made it warm again.

The table was cleared. Mr Stafford set a chair for himself in the middle of the room and took up from a table a book of manuscript.

“That chair on the left-hand side is the garden door. The court cupboard at the back represents the exterior of the Prince of Padua’s palace. The chest on the right is a garden seat. Lorenzo, son of the Prince of Padua–that’s you, Humphrey–is discovered seated.”

It was the custom of the school to act a play before the summer holiday began, and this year the master had adapted, and at the same time duly mitigated, a comedy by Terence. The Greek landowner had become the Prince of Padua, his scapegrace son the prince’s heir, and the crafty slave, whose tricks and rogueries were the Roman poet’s stock in trade, was now a valet in the prince’s retinue. Mr Stafford was going to devote this evening to a rehearsal of the scenes which the two boys had together, and he looked forward to a considerable amount of enjoyment.

“Carlo Manucci–that’s you, Robin–the valet, cautiously opens the garden door, hisses out, “Sst! Sst!’ to attract his young master’s attention, and then sneaks in. Now begin!”

Robin pretended to open the door and thrust his head in. He whispered, “Sst! Sst!” and then crept onto the stage on tiptoe. No doubt the cunning was exaggerated; no doubt, on Robin’s entrance, the most unobservant of men must have smelt conspiracy a mile away–indeed, why Robin was ever cast for the artful valet no one but Mr Stafford could have explained. His knavery was so transparent, his shiftiness so explicit, that even a Prince of Padua must have taken a stick to him in the first hour of his service.

Mr Stafford, however, held the stick.

“No, but, Robin, the secrecy is overdone. Carlo Manucci sneaks in. Those are the directions of the master, writ in his own hand. He sneaks in. No more than that, Robin. If you are natural, that is all that he wants. Sneak in, Robin! Try it again. Be natural.”

Robin tried it again:

“Hist, my young lord!”

Mr Stafford set his book down on his knee and gazed despairingly about the room.

“Well,” he said at length in a hopeless voice, “go on! Lorenzo leaps up in terror.”

“My father?” cried Humphrey in dismay.

“Oh, very good!” exclaimed Mr Stafford. At last he had acting to content him. “My dear Humphrey, admirable! The true note of terror! Carlo Manucci takes him up, playing on his terror. You, Robin.”

The dialogue went on:

Carlo. Home he comes,

A Roman father with the down-turned thumbs.

Lorenzo. I’ll hide!

(“Bravo!” came from the mouth of Mr Stafford.)

Carlo. And lose your hide!

Mr Stafford uttered a groan.

“That’ll never do. It’s a jest, Robin, a play upon words! “I’ll hide,’ says he. “And lose your hide!’ you answer. The audience should laugh. Try it again, my boy!”

And the more he tried, the more self-conscious and awkward he became. He could not let his arms hang quietly at his sides. He must do something with them. He felt that his hands had swollen to the size of melons and that his feet were as clumsy as an elephant’s.

Mr Stafford shook his head.

“I am not sure but what you’d do it better on all fours. However, let it go! Now Carlo unfolds his plan. But cringe, sir, cringe! The supple back, the leering, unpleasant face! Let us see you bend, my good Robin! We know that you can. We saw you bending to the ground this afternoon, a proper lackey!”

Mr Stafford could not keep his thoughts long away from the humiliation of that afternoon. Mr Ferret, was he? He wanted schooling more than the scholars, did he? He heard the ripple of laughter running along the ranks of the boys, and he tingled with shame so that his feet beat upon the floor. Robin was to blame for it. If Robin had modestly effaced himself instead of thrusting forward in his fine new clothes–Mr Ferret indeed! He could get no redress from the queen–as yet, at all events. What was it that good Cardinal Allan at Rheims called her? “The beast that troubles the world.” Mr Stafford smiled as he recollected the words. A good phrase that! Better than Gloriana! Well, they would see what they would see. Meanwhile her exquisite young sycophant was not enjoying himself–there was consolation in that–Mr Stafford had managed to break through the boy’s armour at last. Robin was red one moment and white the next. His lips were trembling. Another turn or two of the levers and there might be tears. In fact, there ought to be tears. And since there ought to be, there should be. What else was a tutor for except to make sure that what ought to be should be?

“You would be the gallant, the gentleman cap-a-pie, would you, Robin? Oh, no, no, no! You’re the varlet, sleek and slippery, and mean. We must strip you of that pretty shining doublet. A leather jerkin, sir, and you’ll forget the ribbon knot within your shirt, as Her Grace has forgot it these many hours past.”

Mr Stafford was in full flight. On his rare visits from Hilbury Melcombe to London he had slipped away to Paris Garden and discovered a new and acute enjoyment in the baiting of bull and bear. He had felt himself pinched and tumbled with the mastiffs and yet still found himself upon his feet. He had shaken his ears with big Bruin, imagined his own flesh torn by the dogs and knew that it was not torn. The sharp teeth had crunched on the bone, yet there was never a mark, never a speck of blood. He had revelled in the thrill and not suffered from the pain. Tonight he was doing the baiting himself, and the enjoyment was more exquisite than any even to be got at Bankside. He was the mastiff, Robin the bear, chained by his silken leg and muzzled by his duty into the bargain. He could have hallooed himself on, like the rabble–he, Mr Stafford, the tutor. His little eyes sparkled, the long nose twitched; and then, when the sport was at its height, the boy who should be bursting into tears was looking over his head with such an expression of relief as filled the tutor with fury.

“What is this? You pay no heed to me now!” he cried, and he swung round in his chair.

The door in the corner of the room was open, and in the doorway stood an elderly man in the frieze jacket and cloth hose of a servant.

“Dakcombe!” said Mr Stafford angrily. “We have not done here. Off with you! Robin, you should order your servants better!”

Dakcombe stood his ground.

“A gentleman wants to see Master Robin.”

“Let him come, then, at a more reputable hour, and if Master Robin’s conduct has been seemly, he shall see him.”

“Mrs Parker says that Master Robin must not keep the gentleman waiting.”

“Oh, she does, does she?” Mr Stafford began very sarcastically and came to a dead stop. He had been set down once that day for taking too much authority upon himself. He had no wish that a second humiliation of this same kind should be his lot in the evening. He was merely the private tutor of the two boys. His charges were paid by Sir Robert Bannet of Hilbury Melcombe on the one hand and by Robin Aubrey’s uncle and guardian on the other. He had no independent prerogative. But Mrs Parker was the hostess appointed by the school. In the last resort she was the real authority. As Mr Stafford sat in doubt Robin stepped forward from the scene.

“By your leave, sir?” he asked, and the boy’s movement recalled to him another movement made by quite another person in the yard before the lower school that afternoon.

“Oh yes,” he said to himself.

Even in the midst of his resentment and shame Mr Stafford’s eyes had been alert. Someone in the queen’s neighbourhood had moved, had spoken. In a twinkling he was all honey and smiles.

“Certainly you must not keep your visitor waiting,” he said suavely. “And you will remember, Robin, that in the edge and stress of rehearsals, sharp things are said which are of no account afterwards.”

“I shall certainly remember, sir, that sharp things are said,” Robin answered gently; and he followed Dakcombe out of the common room and closed the door behind him.

Mr Stafford made sure that the door was closed. Then he went to Humphrey Bannet and said in a low voice:

“You let your tongue run away, boy. To talk of the queen so–it was madness.”

Humphrey nodded his head.

“Robin thought it just the froth of my humiliation. But I was mad. I can’t always guard my tongue when I’m talking to Robin,” and he added slowly, looking down upon the ground, “I hate him so.”

“Why?”

Humphrey did not answer. He beat gently upon the chest on which he sat with the palm of his hand and still looked at the floor.

“Why, Humphrey?” Mr Stafford insisted.

The answer came with a quiet malignancy which in a boy’s mouth came near to shocking even this partisan of a tutor.

“Because he’s always one place ahead of me. At our books, at our games, in our good-looks, in the favour we are received with. Always. Are we together? Who has a compliment, a smile, a glance for me until he has had his fill of them? And what is he after all, Robin Aubrey, compared with me? Why am I second always?” With a quick gesture he covered his face with his hands. “I’ll never forget this afternoon.”

Mr Stafford laid his hand upon his favourite’s shoulder.

“It’ll not be always so, Humphrey. Great changes are coming, great reversals. Robin Aubrey will be on his knees to you one of these days.” Mr Stafford grinned like a wolf, but Humphrey was still looking at the floor and got no comfort from his expression.

“One of these days,” Humphrey repeated impatiently. “The smallest difference made between us bites and stings me until I can’t sleep for thinking of it. I hate myself almost as much as I hate Robin.”

“Differences?” Mr Stafford asked, pressing him.

“Here’s a visitor tonight who mustn’t be kept waiting,” Humphrey explained sullenly. “For whom? Does any visitor of note ever come to see me? Who is it?” he cried, starting up in a fury. “I’m going to find out. Let him visit the two of us! I’m going to find out.”

But Mr Stafford thrust himself between Humphrey and the door.

“Not yet, Humphrey,” he said. “Listen!”

For a moment they stood over against one another, the tutor and the pupil. Then they heard a door close across the corridor.

CHAPTER III

The Secret Visitor

WHEN ROBIN went out from the common room he saw that the door of his study facing him stood open and that a single candle burned upon the mantelshelf. But he did not at once cross the passage. He leaned back against the wall by the side of the common-room door, with the light from the candle on the mantelshelf opposite flickering across his face. He looked so wan and tired that Dakcombe feared he was going to fall and moved to his side to support him. But Robin shook his head. He had been pressed by his tutor’s jeers to the limits of his endurance. He stood breathing deeply like a man who had run a mile. His hands fluttered at his sides. Then he raised them and hid his face in them. He wanted mothering at that moment; but there was no one there but an inarticulate servingman, no one who could understand the poignancy to a boy of little things. After a second or two, however, he dropped his hands.

“Thank you, Dakcombe,” he said gratefully.

He was imagining that Dakcombe, who had served his father before he had served him, had overheard Mr Stafford and had come to his rescue. He did not believe that any visitor had called upon him at ten o’clock of the night, or that Mrs Parker would have admitted him if he had.

He went forward into his study, shut the door and crossed the width of the room to the candle on the mantelshelf. It was a long room of dark panels and sombre curtains, and the solitary candle made one small pool of light in a wide place of shadows. Robin stood staring into the flame unaware that his eyes were fixed on it and lost in some world of his own imagining, until a quiet voice spoke from the seat in the window.

“I should have sought you out, Mr Aubrey, at a more convenient time. But secretaries are not their own masters and must seize occasion as it comes.”

Robin swung round on his heel and stared towards the window. His eyes, blinded by the candle flame, saw nothing but candle flame for a moment, and then through it, as though pushing a pair of tawny curtains apart, stepped that white-faced, black-bearded Italianate man whom the queen had called her Moor.

“You were watching me, sir,” said Robin very directly. He almost accused. He certainly asked for an explanation.

“I was recognizing you, Mr Aubrey,” said the other, advancing to the fireplace.

Robin smiled, and the warmth of his smile was not due to the ready aptness of the reply. He took a taper and lit the remaining three candles upon the mantelshelf; and after a moment’s pause he crossed to the window at the end of the room opposite to that where his visitor had been seated. By this window an old prie-dieu stood, and with the air of one reverently celebrating a great event he lit two other candles on the top ledge of it, between which an ivory crucifix of Italian workmanship hung upon two nails. Then he came back to his visitor, the smile still warm upon his mouth and a great friendliness in his eyes.

“I light all my candles to thank Sir Francis Walsingham for the kind heart which brought him here.”

“You know me, then?”

“I heard you say that you had been my father’s friend.”

Walsingham’s face was naturally cold and grave and harassed, but it lit up now and softened. He became very human, and amusement changed altogether the melancholy of his eyes, the amusement of a man recognizing his own defects.

“I owed a great deal to your father, Robin, when I was a Member of Parliament for Lyme and he the great gentleman of Bridport. I make friends with difficulty. It is my fault. I have some barrier of manner, not, I believe, of heart, which stands between me and others. I try to be genial and seem to be false. I make a jest and it has lost its savour before it is told. If I say to a man, “I like you,’ I make him ask, “Now what aim has he in saying that?’ If I tell a story, however short, I am aware long before I have done that I am winding up some dreary dead thing out of a deep well. I see men who jostle each other by chance in a doorway and go on arm in arm for the rest of their days. I envy such men. Only once has that happened to me, and the other man was your father. We had, to be sure, something in common. He was a great traveller; I spent much of my youth abroad. But in other things he was my opposite and complement, bold and free, with a great laugh which shook the rafters–”

“Until my mother died,” said Robin.

Sir Francis nodded his head.

“At your birth, Robin,” he added gently. “After that he left Bridport and built Abbot’s Gap in the Purbeck Hills at the other extremity of the county. He became, I am afraid, a restless and unhappy man. You should know better than I. For I saw him but once or twice during those later years. But my love of him has not diminished, and so, since Her Majesty was moved to speak a shrewd word about his son on her return to the castle this afternoon, I pushed my duties aside so that that son might hear what she said from my lips before I return tomorrow to Whitehall.”

Robin was moved by the great secretary’s consideration. He had been wincing through the evening under the disparagements of Mr Stafford, which stung none the less keenly because they were crude. The courtesy of the statesman was by contrast comforting as wine; and that the statesman was stirred by any reasons but kindness and old memories did not occur to him. To thrust his papers to one side and pay a visit to a mere schoolboy at ten o’clock of the night! Kindness and old memories could alone explain it.