In the King's Absence Read online

  The nurse paused with the door half open. Mistress Lucy yelled to her to run to Mother Schik; James yelled to her not to leave him. Alan called above the din, ‘Madam, why this agitation? Who have you seen? Who is the unwelcome visitor? How may I aid you?’

  Her agitation was growing. She abandoned all show of formal manners, which she had sustained with a fortitude that had surprised Alan thus far. She ran to his side and clasping his right arm with both hands said in a breathless whisper, ‘Can you not guess? We have just spoken of him. It is George Leslie. It is that second visit he threatened to make to me!’

  ‘Threatened! This is different news, madam!’

  ‘I am afraid of him! He tries to force me to give him scandalous news of the King that he may supply it to those monsters in England to turn the loyal subjects against His Majesty!’

  ‘I will hold the door against him if that is your wish,’ Alan said.

  The lady’s agitation, her warm clasp on his arm, her plump bosom touching his side, all had their effect in rousing his sense of chivalry, or so he marked it to himself. At that moment she became a real person to him for the first time, real, feminine and very little older than himself.

  ‘If you do not wish to see this man, madam,’ he promised her stoutly, ‘you shall not. I swear it!’

  But there were voices on the stairs, a man’s tones, cold,bitter, insulting; the nurse protesting, the Duke of Monmouth screaming; the old housekeeper from farther off pouring out curses in a continuous bawl.

  ‘It is too late,’ Lucy Walter said, suddenly dropping her hands and stepping away from Alan’s side. ‘Master Leslie must have his way, as always. I must speak, with him, but as always I shall tell him nothing. Perhaps with you here –’

  ‘No!’ Alan said, not loudly but with great determination. ‘He has not seen me since I was a lad. He must not know my face, to denounce me later in England.’

  ‘Where can you go?’ Lucy cried. ‘They are upon the stairs!’

  ‘Here!’ Alan cried, making for that second door he had seen closing at the moment he had entered the room.

  Mistress Walter cried out to stop him but he had reached, for and found the door handle and though she cried out again he was through it and had turned to close it as quickly and silently as he had seen it move earlier.

  He turned again. Facing him, his drawn sword in his hand, stood a man, a little shorter than himself, certainly broader and older, staring at him from steady grey eyes and with a smile on his lips.

  ‘I think that makes a trio of us, doth it not?’ the man said.

  Chapter Eight

  Alan’s sword was out before the man had finished speaking, but only to defend himself if necessary. Astonishment totally destroyed any anger he might have felt in being so addressed.

  ‘I am a messenger to Mistress Walter from the King of England,’ he said in a low voice, very civilly.

  The man’s mouth widened in soundless mirth.

  ‘Not a substitute?’ he asked, and seeing Alan flush and his sword hand move again, began coolly to put up his own blade.

  From the room Alan had left they heard a door close and a heavy tread across the floor. As Alan turned towards the advancing tread the other man seized his arm, whispered an emphatic ‘Hush!’ and drew him quickly to a part of the panelling that opened at a touch, disclosing a narrow stair.

  ‘Down!’ said the man, pushing Alan into the opening. Together they went quickly to ground level and through a narrow door into a small wash-yard with a central pump, a wide basin round it and various lines from which flapped drying linen.

  With a hand to his mouth, demanding silence, Alan’s guide went quickly and silently round two walls of this yard, keeping close in to the bricks, so that anyone watching from the windows above would be unlikely to see them. The side walls of the yard seemed to join similar parts of the same or other houses, while the outer wall, higher than these, presented merely the sky.

  Alan remembered that the house stood upon the quay at the central square of the town and that Dordrecht City lay upon the junctions of the rivers Maas and Rhine, with a canal system fed from these waters. Beyond that high wall, he guessed, was water and through it a means of exit from the house without disclosing his companion and himself to anyone watching the front entrance.

  He was right. In the corner of the little yard another narrow door proved to be unlocked. It opened easily, showing it was in frequent use, and gave upon a narrow pathway that lay beside a little smelly inlet from the main canal. A few yards along this path another joined it at right angles, while the water turned in the opposite direction. A small rowing boat lay in the angle, tied up to a ring at the edge of the path.

  Alan thought it was time for some explanation and that they were now far enough away from the house to make this safe. But as he opened his mouth to speak his guide said, ‘No!’ in the same near whisper, but added, ‘The boat is mine. Get in if you would know more. We cannot speak freely here. We can now be watched.’

  Alan, who had put up his sword in the empty yard, felt for the short dagger he also wore at his belt. Before he got down into the boat he loosened it in its sheath, noticing that the other man was observing him closely all the time and seemed to be amused by his behaviour. However he motioned Alan to the stern, got in himself and picking up the short sculls sat down on the forward thwart and began to row down a succession of narrow, channels where Alan rapidly lost his sense of direction and at last gave up all idea of regaining it.

  They stopped at last, after they had emerged upon a wider stream. Here they disembarked and here the guide said, ‘My name is Tom Howard. I have known Mistress Walter for some four months. You say you come from the King. I think my Lucy did not expect your visit.’

  Alan was shocked by this openly familiar way of speaking, but the circumstances in which he had met this man had made his purpose in Lucy Walter’s house quite plain. So he merely answered, ‘My name is Alan Ogilvy. My father is Colonel Francis Ogilvy, who has served in the armies of the United Provinces and the House of Orange for most of his life and his father before him. His Majesty hath made me a page in his household and sent me upon this errand to bring him news of His Grace, the Duke of Monmouth.’

  ‘So.’ Master Howard stared at Alan with some interest. ‘These names ring familiar. But we must not stand here like two old gossips. Come with me to that wine-shop on the quay. There are things – news – you should carry to the King, our Master, that he should know about his former love.’

  ‘About the fellow, George Leslie, would you not say?’

  ‘Not here!’ Tom Howard stopped him again. ‘Wait till we are sat where none can overhear us.

  There were two rooms in the shop, whose owner seemed familiar with Master Howard. In the outer one, the shop proper, the wine-merchant and a plump woman were serving customers. Behind a hanging curtain of a dirty brown colour, lay a second smaller chamber, an alcove one would have called it except it had a small grimy window, so smeared by dust, cobwebs and fly-dirt that it was impossible to see what lay beyond. At least no one could spy from without.

  The wine-merchant greeted Master Tom openly and upon the latter pointing a discreet finger at the brown curtain nodded his head with a cheerful, ‘The usual, master?’

  As Howard nodded in turn the shopkeeper gave an order to the woman and the two customers stepped into the dark little room where they sat down at a table and on chairs that had been swept clean, even polished, quite recently.

  ‘Hans will see to it we are not disturbed,’ Tom said, ‘but do not speak until we are supplied.’

  He meant the wine he had ordered, Alan thought, but was not very surprised when this turned out to be the strong ale of the country, of a clear deep brown with a shallow head upon it. Alan drew out his purse but Tom waved away the offer.

  ‘You may pay me later when I have set you on your journey safely from this town,’ he said. ‘Now explain to me this matter of Master Leslie. Of course I know he is a pa
rliamentarian and a dissenter of one kind or another –’

  ‘Of any kind that suits his purpose,’ Alan interrupted scornfully.

  ‘Which is?’

  Alan explained the self-made feud, compounded of thwarted love, jealousy, envy and hatred that had set his half-uncle upon his present course.

  ‘So he plans destruction upon all sides, doth me?’ Tom Howard asked. He seemed not at all shocked nor even surprised, as indeed he was not. For at this time of civil strife it was a common thing to find family quarrels turned to political advantage against private enemies.

  ‘But you and your own branch of the Ogilvy family have no direct part in this man’s enmity, I imagine?’ Howard went on.

  Alan hesitated. It was true his father refused to discover any real evil in George, They had shared the same mother but had no other link. In upbringing, by profession, in opinion, religion, by allegiance, they could be scarcely more different. As for himself, he doubted if he would recognize the man.

  ‘I doubt if I would know him,’ he said aloud, ‘but it seems he is determined to know me. Why else should he have followed so close to Mistress Walter’s house? Perhaps I should not have fled him but the lady was so agitated, eager to rid herself of my presence, not knowing how to –’

  ‘Not knowing how to prevent you finding me in the inner room. Which you were determined to succeed in, or find me already gone, you young dog!’

  They both laughed heartily and Alan confessed that he had waited all through the interview for some plausible excuse for opening that door he had seen closing so secretly.

  The wine-merchant, hearing their mirth, pulled aside the brown, curtain to offer them another tankard of beer. Tom accepted, but Alan refused. He explained that he must take horse and ride to The Hague, where he expected to find most of his family gathered.

  ‘I have promised my mother to give her my news,’ Alan said. ‘She is very anxious for her father. He lives in the country, very quietly, but his sons are loyalists, as he is too, of course, and one of them hath ill news of the old man, who cannot show discretion, never having truly learned it. They all fear he may find himself in the Tower.’

  Tom Howard raised his eyebrows, the wine-merchant his hands.

  ‘The Tower? Who is this grandfather of yours, young man, who may risk the block instead of the rope?’

  Alan told him briefly, but added that he understood Oliver Cromwell was against chopping off more heads or even using the rope for purely political views without planned violence.

  ‘You absolve your tyrant then?’ the wine-merchant teased him.

  ‘Never! It is not from any wish to spare lives but simply to avoid making more martyrs. George Leslie pursues my Lord Aldborough because my father married his lordship’s daughter.’

  ‘He cannot reach Colonel Ogilvy, but might injure him through his wife?’

  ‘Just so.’

  ‘This is but an extension of the civil war,’ Howard said impatiently. ‘But ill-devised and useless in the present cause of calming the people and giving supreme power over the army to Cromwell.’

  ‘Useless indeed,’ Alan added bitterly. ‘But spiteful, ill intentioned. Especially as regards –’

  He broke off, seeing how near he was to disclosing his knowledge of George’s most marked victim, the cloth merchant, Phillips. He had told Tom about George’s disappointment in losing the hand of his cousin, Cynthia Ogilvy, but not to whom he had lost it. And certainly not about the couple’s daughter Susan, whose image still came before him very often, though he had long ago abandoned hope of ever meeting the girl again.

  Lady Anne Ogilvy was both surprised and annoyed by Alan’s report of his conversation with Master Tom Howard.

  ‘You will not tell me how or why you came upon such a fellow,’ she complained. ‘Nor in whose company?’

  ‘None but my own, madam,’ he answered, quietly. ‘Surely my father hath spoken to you of my present employment at the King’s Court. ’

  ‘So you would have me believe you are in Holland upon Court business. Or upon the King’s business?’

  She had heard the usual stories about Charles’s many mistresses, including those relating to the recent indiscretions of his early favourite, but she did not wish to discuss such matters with her son.

  As she expected Alan made no answer to her last question. But instead he asked her if she had any betters news of Lord Aldborough.

  ‘Alas, my poor father!’ she answered. ‘He stumbles into indiscretion ever more dangerously, nor does my mother give him much help in avoiding it, being a Villiers herself, with much of the reckless thrust of that family, though I should not speak of her with such disrespect.’

  She smiled at Alan as she said it, for they were close in spirit, unlike his brother Gordon, who showed not only the ambition of a Buckingham, and the military single-mindedness of his father, but the wildness of his earlier Scottish ancestry.

  ‘Can nothing be done to persuade my Lord Aldborough to leave England until the King comes to his own again?’ Alan asked.

  ‘Can we be sure that will ever be?’ Lady Anne said sadly. ‘Or in my father’s lifetime?’

  They fell silent. It was a situation shared by many well-born families, where an ageing head clung to his native land and estate, struggling to remain where he was born, in a place he had loved all his life and which he longed to hand on to his heir, even if the true heir had already fallen in battle, slain by those he considered rebels and murderers.

  Alan stayed two days at The Hague with his mother and sisters. He was presented to the Princess Mary of Orange, Charles the Second’s sister, who seemed both depressed and anxious over her little son. The merchants did not approve of her as Regent; they were inclined to rid themselves of the House of Orange. For the Stuart connection seemed to carry nothing but ill-luck with it. That former marriage of James the First’s daughter Elizabeth, to Frederick Elector Palatine, had brought disaster through incompetence and gross misjudgement. Now the second William of Orange was dead, a young man, leaving a very young boy for heir and a Stuart widow in charge of him.

  ‘Our inheritance is marked with misfortune,’ she said to Alan in a brief audience. ‘You are in our brother’s service, my Lady Anne Ogilvy tells me. You may tell him we cannot give him any assistance. We have little enough ourself to support our Court. He must continue to rely upon France. After all Louis is his cousin, his mother is the French King’s aunt.’

  All this peevish complaint made a very poor impression upon Alan and lost nothing of its character when he relayed it to Charles in private audience upon his return to Paris.

  The King flushed angrily as he listened to Alan’s careful account of his meeting with the dowager Princess of Orange.

  ‘Our sister hath not gained in dignity or prudence from her life with these shopkeepers,’ he said in exasperation. ‘You will repeat nothing of this,’ he added, staring haughtily at Alan from his large black eyes.

  ‘Your Majesty is the first to hear it,’ Alan answered, ‘and will certainly be the last.’

  He felt sure that the King’s anger was as much caused by his sister’s disclosure of the whole family’s poverty to a mere commoner, a youth even younger than himself, as to her implied rebuff. He felt too that Charles was justified, for young as he was, quite inexperienced in the ways of the great ones of the earth, the deficiencies of the English King’s Court were only too plain. So he stood silent, having made his promise, unhappy at the turn the interview had taken. But it was not his fault that Charles had asked first about the Princess, not about Lucy.

  As if he understood what was passing in Alan’s mind, Charles dropped the regal manner and leaning casually back in the great chair upon which he had been sitting bolt upright he asked, in a very different voice, ‘What of your mission, boy? What of his Grace of Monmouth and the whore, his mother?’

  ‘The little Prince, sire –’ began Alan, but Charles stopped him with a hard laugh.

  ‘No Prince, Alan,
though mine and of royal blood.’

  ‘The little Duke, Your Majesty, is very well grown for his age, most lively, in excellent health and spirits. He is living in the very good care of a devoted nurse. The household is well maintained by a capable Dutch housekeeper –’

  ‘A bawd? To serve the whore?’

  ‘A cook, sire.’

  Charles laughed again, not unkindly, simply because he found Lucy Walter’s situation comical, so long as it did not affect him.

  ‘Madam Walter is in good health too, sire. I delivered your Majesty’s written instruction.’

  ‘What answer did she give to it?’

  Alan thought it best to describe the whole story of the end of the meeting, including his escape with Tom Howard upon the arrival of George Leslie.

  ‘Who is this man, Howard? Apart from being Madam Walter’s latest lover?’

  ‘I do not know, sire. He seemed to be aware I came from Your Majesty, but of nothing else. I told him nothing but the tale of my family’s connection with Leslie. He as good as told me the man is a spy for the Parliament.’

  Charles was silent for so long that Alan feared he had spoken too familiarly or too personally. He had in fact engaged the King’s interest most keenly, as he discovered a few days later when he was sent for by Sir Edward Hyde, the Chancellor, soon to be created the Earl of Clarendon.

  Sir Edward was affable, but grave as befitted his important office. To none was this importance so clear as to himself, Alan had been told. He had read it in the Chancellor’s manner and was the more surprised that his interview began so mildly and with a compliment to his father’s splendid service behind the scenes in France and his mother’s grace and beauty in attendance upon King Charles’s widowed sister,

  ‘And now His Majesty informs me of your personal attendance upon him in the matter of his young bastard son,’ Sir Edward went on smoothly. The child thrives, you found?’