Chapter 13 The Hounds of God by Rafael Sabatini
THE QUEEN
Along a gallery, with windows on their right through the blurred glass of which they caught the green sheen of the foliage in the privy garden, Walsingham led them to a closed door, kept by two stalwart young Yeomen of the Guard in scarlet with the Tudor rose embroidered in gold upon their backs. At the approach of Sir Francis they ordered their tasselled halberts, whose polished blades shone like mirrors. At a nod from him, one of them threw open the door and held it wide. In silence he crossed the threshold, his companions following. The door closed after them, and they proceeded some little way along the farther gallery into which they had now stepped, until Sir Francis brought up at a door on his left, which again was guarded by two yeomen.
Sir Gervase observed that, like the others, these, too, were tall, athletic, young and handsome. The tongue of rumour certainly appeared justified when it said that the Queen liked to have splendid-looking men about her. It was asserted that the loss of a front tooth by one of these magnificent guards entailed his removal from about the Queen's person.
They went through the doorway instantly opened to Sir Francis, and found themselves in a lofty antechamber, very richly furnished, the golden rose everywhere conspicuous upon scarlet fabrics. Half a dozen resplendent gentlemen lounged here. A chamberlain with a wand advanced to meet Sir Francis, and at a word from him, bowing profoundly, withdrew through a small door which again was guarded by a pair of yeomen who might have been cast in the same mould as the others. He returned a moment later to announce that Her Majesty would at once receive Sir Francis and his companions.
Through the open doorway came the tinkling sound of a virginal. Her Majesty's occupations of state, thought Sir Gervase, might be manifold and important, as Sir Francis had stated; but it was clear that they were not engaging her at the moment, which may, indeed, have accounted for the promptitude of their admission to her gracious presence.
They entered. Sir Francis went down on one knee, and with his left hand covertly signalled to the others to imitate his genuflexion.
They found themselves in a small room, three of whose walls from ceiling to floor were hung with rich tapestries, illustrating scenes which Sir Gervase would not have identified even if he had had leisure to examine them. A tall mullioned window overlooked the river and the Palace steps, where the great gilded royal barge was moored amid a flock of lesser craft.
This in a glance he saw as he entered. Thereafter his eyes were upon the Queen, to whom he knelt now for the second time. She was in rose-pink to-day. That at least was the background of the shimmering brocade she wore, which was all embroidered with eyes, so that you might have conceived that Her Majesty looked at you from every point of her person at once. For the rest she was as richly, as monstrously bejewelled as on the last occasion when Sir Gervase had beheld her, and the great erect collar of lace, spreading like a fan behind her head, reached almost to the summit of her pearl-entwined wig.
For a moment after the gentlemen entered, she continued, engrossed in the virginals, bringing her musical phrase to a conclusion. It was one of her many vanities to be accounted a fine performer, and she deemed no audience too trivial.
A tall, fair lady stood immediately behind her. Two others, one fair the other dark and the dark one of a singular loveliness, were seated near the window.
The Queen's beautiful hands came to rest upon the keys, then one of them, aflash with gems, was extended to take a delicate gold-edged kerchief from the polished top of the instrument. Her dark eyes peered at them short-sightedly, deepening the web of wrinkles about her pencilled brows. She may have noticed that Walsingham's companions were fine fellows both, such as she loved to look upon. Both above the common height, if Sir Oliver were by a little the taller and more athletic, the other had the greater beauty of countenance. It is possible that the coldly-calculating Sir Francis may have weighed this circumstance in introducing them thus without preliminaries into her presence. He may have been persuaded that Her Majesty could of herself do nothing to assist them beyond entrusting their grievance to him for redress; but at least their persons would ensure him from any royal resentment at having brought them to her so that they might convince themselves of what he told them.
"What's this, Frank?" she rasped in her mannish voice. "What do you bring me, and why?" And then, without waiting for the answer, she abruptly addressed Gervase.
Sir Oliver slightly behind him, copying Walsingham, had risen already from the genuflexion. Sir Gervase, not observing this, remained humbly upon one knee.
"Od's Eyes!" she exclaimed. "Get up, man. D'ye take me for a Popish image that yell kneel to me all day?"
He rose, tongue-tied and a little embarrassed, with no thought of any such fond speech as that for which her exclamation had given him an opening and such as were dear to her overweening vanity. But his looks made amends in her eyes for his lack of adulatory glibness.
"Why have you brought them, Frank?"
Briefly Walsingham recalled them to her memory as two of the knights she had lately created in token of her favour, for their achievements in the fight with the Armada.
"As some slight recompense for the service that already they have rendered England and as some earnest for what may yet be to come for future service, they have a boon to crave."
"A boon?" Alarm flickered in her eyes. She looked up at the tall lady beside her, wrinkling her high, pinched nose. "I might have guessed it, Dacres. God's wounds, man! If it be money, or aught that's costly, I prithee save thy breath. We are beggared by this Spanish war already."
"It is not money, your grace," said Sir Gervase, speaking boldly now.
Her relief was manifest. She reached for a basket of silver filigree that stood upon the virginal, and gave her care to the selection of a Portingal. It was this love of sweetmeats which may have been responsible for the dark ruin of her teeth. "What is it, then? Speak out, man. Art not shy, belike?"
That, if shy, he had by now conquered his shyness, his answer proved: "It is no boon, as Sir Francis says, your grace. I am come for simple justice."
She looked at him with sudden, sharp suspicion, the selected Portingal suspended delicately between finger and thumb. "Ay, I know the phrase well. Cordieu! 'Tis on the lips of every place-seeker. Well, well! Out with this tale of it, a God's name, and let us ha' done." The sweetmeat disappeared between her thin, raddled lips.
"First, madam," said Sir Gervase, "I am the bearer of a letter." He advanced, instinctively went down on his knee again, and proffered it. "Will your highness be graciously pleased to receive it."
Walsingham frowned and stirred forward a pace or two. "What's this of a letter?" said he. "You said naught to me of any letter."
"No matter for that," she told him curtly. She was examining the seal. "Whose arms are these? She was frowning." Whence is your letter, sir?"
"From my Lord Garth, so please your grace."
"Garth? Garth?" She spoke as one fumbling in her memory. Suddenly her expression quickened. "Why, that will be Roger Trevanion. Roger..." She caught her breath, and looked at him again, searchingly. "What is Roger Trevanion to thee, child?"
"My friend, I hope, madam. I know myself his. I love his daughter."
"Ha! His daughter! So? He has a daughter? If she favours him you're fortunate in your choice. He was a comely fellow in his youth. And he married, eh? I never heard of it." Her voice grew wistful. "But, indeed, I've never heard aught of him for years. Roger Trevanion!" She sighed, and fell thoughtful a moment, the expression of her face incredibly softened. Then, as if recollecting herself, she abruptly broke the seal, and spread the sheet. She read it with difficulty.
"Why here's a vile scrawl, by God!"
"It was writ in deep agitation and sorrow, madam."
"Was it so? Ay, so it was; so it must have been. Yet it does little more than announce the fact, commend you to me and implore my favour for you and for him, who are one in the aims of which you are to tell me. So Roger is in trouble, eh? And in trouble he remembers me at last! That is the common way. But hardly Roger's." She was musing now. "Cordieu! He might have remembered me before, remembered the debt I have owed him these many years. How many years, dear God!" She sighed, and fell into thought. There was no hardness now in that pinched, lined face. The dark eyes seemed to Sir Gervase to have grown moist and wistful. Her thoughts may well have been with the past, the gallant Lord Admiral who had loved her and who had paid with his head for the temerity of that love, and the man who had loved him and because of that love had risked his own head freely to serve him and to serve her. Then she roused herself, to command the waiting gentleman before her. "What is this tale you have to tell me? Out with it, child. I am listening."
Sir Gervase told it, briefly, eloquently, passionately. Once only was he interrupted, and then by Walsingham when he mentioned the Spaniard's surrender and its acceptance which made of him nominally a prisoner, actually a guest, at Trevanion Chase.
"Now that was ill-done," Sir Francis had cried. "We should take steps to..."
"Take steps to hold your tongue, man," the Queen silenced him.
There were no further interruptions. Sir Gervase proceeded to the end with ever-increasing anger in the tale he was relating, so that he imparted some of his own heat to his audience—to the Queen, her ladies and even the cold Walsingham. When, at last, he had done, she smote her hands upon the arms of her chair, and heaved herself to her feet.
"Now, by God's death!" she cried in a fury that' had turned her livid under her paint. "Does the audacity of these Spaniards dare so much? Is there to be no end to their insolences? Shall we suffer these things, Walsingham? One of them comes shipwrecked into this realm of mine and commits this outrage! By Heaven's light, they shall yet learn the length of a maid's arm to shield a maid; they shall feel the weight of a woman's hand to avenge a woman. They shall so, by God! Walsingham, summon me...No, no. Wait!"
She moved across the room, brushing past the two ladies near the window, who had risen. From somewhere she drew a little silver bodkin. Fragments of the Portuguese comfit were inconveniencing her. Having used the instrument, she fell to tapping with it one of the little panes.
The narrative had moved her more deeply than Gervase could have hoped. However much this may have been due to the outrage itself, there can be no doubt that a contributory factor lay in the circumstance that Roger Trevanion's daughter was the victim. The tale may have gathered poignancy and impressiveness, too, because it fell upon a mood of softness and tenderness invoked by the memory of that dear friend of her girlhood and of her girlhood's lover, and further, even, because the narrator was a stalwart, handsome fellow and a lover.
At length she swung from the window, her manner almost harsh with impatience, but an impatience of which clearly he whom she addressed was not the object.
"Come hither, child!"
He was prompt to approach her, and stood respectfully before her, apart from those others who looked on with interest and one of them with uneasiness. This was Walsingham. Knowing her as he did, he perceived that the lioness in her was aroused, and foresaw trouble for himself from such a mood. He felt a little aggrieved with Sir Gervase Crosby for having taken an advantage of him in the matter of that letter. But this at the moment was a light thing compared with the anxieties which the Queen's humour awakened in him.
"Tell me, child; tell me," she was urging the long-limbed Gervase. "What, precisely, do you seek of me? What is in your mind that I should do? Exactly what justice do you desire?"
She asked for guidance; asked it from this West-Country youngster, converted, no doubt, into a firebrand by his anguish on behalf of his mistress. Here, thought Walsingham, was madness. He groaned inwardly; indeed, almost aloud. His countenance was lugubriously startled.
The answer did nothing to allay his fears. The lad's words proved him indeed a firebrand, of a rashness almost beyond the Secretary of State's belief, and the Secretary of State had great experience of human rashness.
"It is my intent, your grace, to cross at once to Spain. To go after Don Pedro de Mendoza."
She interrupted him. "By God! The intent is a bold one! If you are to take matters thus into your own hands, what is there for me to do?" There was in her tone the suspicion of a sneer, as well there might be at the avowal of such stark madness.
"It has been my hope, madam, that your grace—I scarce know how—would provide means to shield me on this journey, and to ensure my safe return. It is not that I go in fear for myself..."
"You were wiser and you did," she interrupted him again. "But to shield you? I?" She made a wry face. "My arm is long enough for much. But to protect you within the dominions of King Philip at this present time..." She broke off, and because she could not see the way to do as he desired of her, and felt herself humiliated by her impotence, she fell to cursing like a roaring captain.
When at length she paused, Sir Francis Walsingham sleekly interposed. "I have already told Sir Gervase that your grace will command me to pursue the proper course, and to send letters to King Philip by the channel offered by the French Envoy."
"Ha! And what doth Sir Gervase answer."
"In all humility, your grace, the thing is of an urgency..."
"Why so it is, child. Sir Francis needs to learn things by experience. If he had a daughter in Spanish hands he would be less cool and simpering. The devil damn such paltry counsel."
The Secretary of State was not discomposed. "The poor wits with which I serve your grace are waiting to discern a more effective way of availing this unfortunate lady."
"Are they so?" She glared at him. His coolness had upon her an effect quite contrary from that which he hoped. She turned her shoulders to him, and fell to tapping the window again with her bodkin. "There should surely be some way. Come, child, ply your wits. I care not how rash be your proposal. We may strike sense from it if we but hear it."
There fell a pause, Sir Gervase having no settled plan of action, or thought of how that which he sought from Her Majesty might be obtained. To break the silence came the big rough voice of Sir Oliver Tressilian.
"Have I your grace's leave?" He advanced a step or two as he spoke, and drew all eyes upon his dark resolute countenance.
"A God's name!" she barked at him. "Speak out if you've aught in mind that will help."
"Your Highness asks for rashness, else I should scarce dare."
"Dare and be damned, man," quoth the lioness. "What's in your mind?"
"Your Highness may not remember that the honour of knighthood which I received at your grace's hands was for my part in the capture of the flagship of the Andalusian squadron, the only Spanish vessel seized. We took prisoner her commander, Don Pedro Valdez, who is the greatest and deservedly the most valued of all Spain's captain's upon the seas. With him we took among others seven gentlemen of the first houses in Spain. These gentlemen at this present moment all lie under your grace's hand. They are lodged here in the Tower."
He said no more than that. But his tone was grim and full of suggestion. It expressed, like the thing he hinted, the ruthlessness of his nature and the lawlessness that were to make him what he was destined to become. It performed the miracle of startling Walsingham at last out of his imperturbability.
"In the name of Heaven, man! What is't ye're implying?"
But it was the Queen who answered him, with a short laugh and a grimness akin to Sir Oliver's own, which sent a shiver down the spine of the Secretary. "God's light! Is't not plain?" Her tone said as clearly as any words could have done that the suggestion was eminently to her taste and mood. "Dacres, set my chair to the table yonder. The King of Spain shall learn the length of my arm."
The tall lady-in-waiting pushed forward the padded, crimson chair The Queen swept to it and sat down. "Give me a pen. So! Walsingham, recite me the names of the seven gentlemen who are with Valdez in the Tower."
"Your Grace intends...?" Walsingham was white; his long beard was observed to quiver.
"Shalt know my intentions soon enough; you and that other knock-kneed fellow, Philip of Spain. Their names, I say!"
Her peremptoriness was almost savage. Walsingham quailed and surrendered the names. She set them down in that big angular writing of hers in which later ages have discovered beauty. The list completed, she sat back conning it with narrowed eyes and thoughtfully gnawing the feathered end of her quill.
Her Secretary of State leaned over her, with fearful urgent mutterings. But she blighted him with a glance and an oath. So that he fell back again. A patient man and an opportunist, he resolved to wait until her royal rage should have cooled sufficiently to render her amenable to reason. Of the unreasonable thing, the outrageous thing which upon the suggestion of that outrageous black-browed Oliver Tressilian she was about to perform Sir Francis had no slightest doubt.
She bent to her task which was to indite a letter to the brother-in-law who at one time had so ardently aspired to become her husband, and may since have had many an occasion to thank God that he had not numbered Elizabeth among his several successive wives. She wrote rapidly, scarcely pausing to consider the shaping of a phrase, and there was something of savage determination in the way her pen bit the parchment, so that her sprawling characters were engraved upon it rather than written. It was soon done.
She signed the document with a vicious flourish that was in itself like a piece of sword-play, and called for wax and a taper that she might seal it. Her ladies moved to obey. Sir Francis endeavoured once again to remonstrate.
"If in that letter, madam, the comity of nations..."
Harshly she cropped his speech. "The comity of nations!" She laughed fiercely in the grave long face and snowy beard of him. "I have said a word about the comity of nations in this letter. It counts for naught in this affair. I've warned his Spanish majesty of that."
"'Tis what I feared, madam..."
"Lord! Walsingham, when will you cease to be a woman?" She sank her seal into the wax.
Walsingham, now terror-stricken, murmured of the Privy Council. At that she rose in fury, the letter in her hand, to inform him that she was no ward of the Privy Council; that the Privy Council existed but to interpret her sovereign will. The outrage committed by a Spanish noble upon the person of an English maid, was an insult to England. She herself was England's incarnation, she informed the Secretary, and it was for her to answer that insult. It was answered in the letter, and Sir Gervase should deliver it.
Walsingham fell back appalled but daring nothing further. The circumstances were all unfortunate and against him. He was himself to blame for his rashness in having introduced that young hot-head and his worse companion to audience with Her Majesty. The harm was done. Let him provide as best he could for the consequences, whatever they might be. Further intervention here might but curtail his power of doing even so much when the time came.
The Queen proffered the letter to Gervase. "There is your weapon, sir. Get you to Spain with all speed. This shall be sword and buckler to you. Yet should it chance to fail you, depend upon me to avenge you right nobly. And so God speed thee on this knightly errand. Away with him, Sir Francis. Let me know anon how he hath fared. I charge you not to fail me, on your life."
Gervase went down on his knees to receive the package. She held out her hand to him. He kissed it respectfully and in some awe, whereupon her other hand lightly touched his rippling auburn locks.
"Art a bonnie lad and a loving heart," said she in a softened voice, and lightly sighed. "God bring thy mistress scatheless home and thee with her."
He stumbled out of her presence with Sir Oliver and Sir Francis. All three of them had more than guessed what she had written.
Sir Francis sourly took his leave of them. He would have interfered had he dared. But he was on the horns of a dilemma and was constrained to the prudence of inaction. So he suffered them to depart, bearing a package that might set the world on fire.