Blood Royal: A Novel

During the four days that remained before the trip to Oxford, Mr. Wells wouldn’t hear of Richard’s doing any more work in the shop than was absolutely necessary. He must spend all his time, the good man said, in reading Hume and Smollett – the latest historical authorities of whom the Chiddingwick bookseller had any personal knowledge. Dick availed himself for the most part of his employer’s kindness; but there was one piece of work, he said, which he couldn’t neglect, no matter what happened. It was a certain bookbinding job of no very great import – just a couple of volumes to cover in half-calf for the governess at the Rectory. Yet he insisted upon doing it.

Somehow, though he had only seen Mary Tudor once, for those few minutes in the shop, he attached a very singular and sentimental importance to binding that book for her. She was a pretty girl, for one thing – an extremely pretty girl – and he admired her intensely. But that wasn’t all; she was a Tudor, as well, and he was a Plan-tagenet. In some vague, half-conscious way he reflected more than once that ‘it had gone with a Tudor, and with a Tudor it might come back again.’ What he meant by that it he hardly knew himself. Certainly not the crown of this United Kingdom; for Dick was far too good a student of constitutional history not to be thoroughly aware that the crown of England itself was elective, not hereditary; and he had far too much common-sense to suppose for one moment that the people of these three realms would desire to disturb the Act of Settlement and repeal the Union in order to place a local dancing-master or a bookseller’s assistant on the throne of England – for to Scotland he hadn’t even the shadowy claim of an outside pretender. As he put it himself, ‘We were fairly beaten out of there once for all by the Bruce, and had never at the best of times any claim to speak of.’ No; what he meant by It was rather some dim past greatness of the Plantagenet family, which the bookseller’s lad hoped to win back to some small extent in the noblest and best of all ways – by deserving it.

The days wore away; Stubbs and Freeman were well thumbed; the two books for Mary Tudor were bound in the daintiest fashion known to Chiddingwickian art, and on the morning of the eventful Wednesday itself, when he was first to try his fate at Oxford, Dick took them up in person, neatly wrapped in white tissue-paper, to the door of the Rectory.

Half-way up the garden-path Mary met him by accident. She was walking in the grounds with one of the younger children; and Dick, whose quick imagination had built up already a curious castle in the air, felt half shocked to find that a future Queen of England, Wales, and Ireland (de jure) should be set to take care of the Rector’s babies. However, he forgot his indignation when Mary, recognising him, advanced with a pleasant smile – her smile was always considered the prettiest thing about her – and said in a tone as if addressed to an equal:

‘Oh, you’ve brought back my books, have you? That’s punctuality itself. Don’t mind taking them to the door. How much are they, please? I’ll pay at once for them.’

Now, this was a trifle disconcerting to Dick, who had reasons of his own for not wishing her to open the parcel before him. Still, as there was no way out of it, he answered in a somewhat shamefaced and embarrassed voice: ‘It comes to three-and-sixpence.’

Mary had opened the packet meanwhile, and glanced hastily at the covers. She saw in a second that the bookseller’s lad had exceeded her instructions. For the books were bound in full calf, very dainty and delicate, and on the front cover of each was stamped in excellent workmanship a Tudor rose, with the initials M. T. intertwined in a neat little monogram beneath it. She looked at them for a moment with blank dismay in her eye, thinking just at first what a lot he must be going to charge her for it; then, as he named the price, a flush of shame rose of a sudden to her soft round cheek.

‘Oh no,’ she said hurriedly. ‘It must be more than that. You couldn’t possibly bind them so for only three-and-sixpence!’

‘Yes, I did,’ Dick answered, now as crimson as herself. ‘You’ll find the bill inside. Mr. Wells wrote it out. There’s no error at all. You’ll see it’s what I tell you.’

Mary fingered her well-worn purse with uncertain fingers.

‘Surely,’ she said again, ‘you’ve done it all in calf. Mr. Wells can’t have known exactly how you were doing it.’

This put a Plantagenet at once upon his mettle.

‘Certainly he did,’ Dick answered, almost haughtily. ‘It was a remnant of calf, no use for anything else, that I just made fit by designing those corners. He said I could use it up if I cared to take the trouble. And I did care to take the trouble, and to cut a block for the rose, and to put on the monogram, which was all my own business, in my own overtime. Three-and-sixpence is the amount it’s entered in the books for.’

Mary gazed hard at him in doubt. She scarcely knew what to do. She felt by pure instinct he was too much of a gentleman to insult him by offering him money for what had obviously been a labour of love to him; and yet, for her own part, she didn’t like to receive those handsome covers to some extent as a present from a perfect stranger, and especially from a man in his peculiar position. Still, what else could she do? The books were her own; she couldn’t refuse them now, merely because he chose to put a Tudor rose upon them – all the more as they contained those little marginal notes of ‘localities’ and ‘finds’ which even the amateur botanist prizes in his heart above all printed records; and she couldn’t bear to ask this grave and dignified young man to take the volumes back, remove the covers on which he had evidently spent so much pains and thought, and replace them by three-and-sixpence worth of plain cloth, unlettered. In the end she was constrained to say frigidly, in a lowered voice:

‘They’re extremely pretty. It was good of you to take so much trouble about an old book like this.

There’s the money; thank you – and – I’m greatly obliged to you.’

The words stuck in her throat. She said them almost necessarily with some little stiffness. And as she spoke she looked down, and dug her parasol into the gravel of the path for nervousness. But Richard Plantagenet’s pride was far deeper than her own. He took the money frankly; that was Mr. Wells’s; then he answered in that lordly voice he had inherited from his father:

‘I’m glad you like the design. It’s not quite original; I copied it myself with a few variations from the cover of a book that once belonged to Margaret Tudor. Her initials and yours are the same. But I see you think I oughtn’t to have done it. I’m sorry for that; yet I had some excuse. I thought a Plantagenet might venture to take a little more pains than usual over a book for a Tudor. Noblesse oblige.’

And as he spoke, standing a yard or two off her, with an air of stately dignity, he lifted his hat, and then moved slowly off down the path to the gate again.

Mary didn’t know why, but with one of those impulsive fits which often come over sympathetic women, she ran hastily after him.

‘I beg your pardon,’ she said, catching him up, and looking into his face with her own as flushed as his. ‘I’m afraid I’ve hurt you. I’m sure I didn’t mean to. It was very, very kind of you to design and print that monogram so nicely. I understand your reasons, and I’m immensely obliged. It’s a beautiful design. I shall be proud to possess it.’

As for Richard, he dared hardly raise his eyes to meet hers, they were so full of tears. This rebuff was very hard on him. But the tell-tale moisture didn’t quite escape Mary.

‘Thank you,’ he said simply. I meant no rudeness; very much the contrary. The coincidence interested me; it made me wish to do the thing for you as well as I could. I’m sorry if I was obtrusive. But – one sometimes forgets – or perhaps remembers. It’s good of you to speak so kindly.’

And he raised his hat once more, and, walking rapidly off without another word, disappeared down the road in the direction of the High Street.

As soon as he was gone Mary went back into the Rectory. Mrs. Tradescant, the Rector’s wife, was standing in the hall. Mary reflected at once that the little girl had listened open-eared to all this queer colloquy, and that, to prevent misapprehension, the best thing she could do would be to report it all herself before the child could speak of it. So she told the whole story of the strange young man who had insisted on binding her poor dog-eared old botany-book in such regal fashion. Mrs. Tradescant glanced at it, and only smiled.

‘Oh, my dear, you mustn’t mind him,’ she said. ‘He’s one of those crazy Plantagenets. They’re a very queer lot – as mad as hatters. The poor old father’s a drunken old wretch; come down in the world, they say. He teaches dancing; but his mania is that he ought by rights to be King of England. He never says so openly, you know; he’s too cunning for that; but in a covert sort of way he lays tacit claim to it. The son’s a very well-con-ducted young man in his own rank, I believe, but as cracked as the father; and as for the daughter, oh, my dear – such a stuck-up sort of a girl, with a feather in her hat and a bee in her bonnet, who goes out and gives music-lessons! It’s dreadful, really! She plays the violin rather nicely, I hear; but she’s an odious creature. The books? Oh yes, that’s just the sort of thing Dick Plantagenet would love. He’s mad on antiquity. If he saw on the title-page your name was Mary Tudor, he’d accept you at once as a remote cousin, and he’d claim acquaintance off-hand by a royal monogram. The rose is not bad. But the best thing you can do is to take no further notice of him.’

A little later that very same morning, however, Richard Plantagenet, mad or sane, was speeding away across country, in a parliamentary train, towards Reading and Oxford, decided in his own mind now about two separate plans he had deeply at heart. The first one was that, for the honour of the Plantagenets, he mustn’t fail to get that Scholarship at Durham College; the second was that, when he came back with it to Chiddingwick, he must make Mary Tudor understand he was at least a gentleman. He was rather less in love with her, to be sure, after this second meeting, than he had been after the first; but, still, he liked her immensely, and in spite of her coldness was somehow attracted towards her; and he couldn’t bear to think a mere Welsh Tudor, not even really royal, should feel herself degraded by receiving a gift of a daintily-bound book from the hands of the Heir Apparent of the true and only Plantagenets.

CHAPTER V. GOOD SOCIETY

Dick knew nothing of Oxford, and would hardly even have guessed where in the town to locate himself while the examination was going on, had not his old head-master at Chiddingwick Grammar School supplied him with the address of a small hotel, much frequented by studious and economical young men on similar errands. Hither, then, he repaired, Gladstone bag in hand, and engaged a modest second-floor room; after which, with much trepidation, he sallied forth at once in his best black suit to call in due form on the Reverend the Dean at Durham College.

By the door of the Saracen’s Head, which was the old-fashioned name of his old-fashioned hostelry, two young men – mere overgrown schoolboys of the Oxford pattern – lounged, chatting and chaffing together, as if bent on some small matter of insignificant importance. Each swung a light cane, and each looked and talked as if the town were his freehold. One was a fellow in a loose gray tweed suit and a broad-brimmed slouch-hat of affectedly large and poetical pretensions; the other was a faster-looking and bolder young person, yet more quietly clad in a black cut-away coat and a billycock hat, to which commonplace afternoon costume of the English gentleman he nevertheless managed to give a touch of distinctly rowdy and rapid character.

As Dick passed them on the steps to go forth into the street, the young man in black observed oracularly: ‘Lamb ten to the slaughter to which his companion answered with brisk good-humour in the self-same dialect: ‘Lamb ten it is; these meadows pullulate; we shall have a full field of them.’

By a burst of inspiration Dick somehow gathered that they were referring to the field for the Durham Scholarships, and that they knew of ten candidates at least in the place who were also going in for them. He didn’t much care for the looks of his two fellow-competitors, for such he judged them to be; but the mere natural loneliness of a sensitive young man in such strange conditions somehow’ prompted him, almost against his will, to accost them.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said timidly, in a rather soft voice, ‘but I – that is to say – could you either of you tell me which is the nearest way to Durham College?’

The lad in the gray tweed suit laughed, and surveyed him from head to foot with a somewhat supercilious glance as he answered with a curious self-assertive swagger: ‘You’re going to call on the Dean, I suppose. Well, so are we. Durham it is. If you want to know the way, you can come along with us.’

Companionship in misery is dear to the unsophisticated human soul; and Richard, in spite of all his father’s lessons in deportment, shrank so profoundly from this initial ordeal of the introductory visit that he was really grateful to the supercilious youth in the broad-brimmed hat for his condescending offer. Though, to be sure, if it came to that, nobody in England had a right to be either supercilious or condescending to a scion of the Plantagenets.

‘Thank you,’ he said, a little nervously. ‘This is my first visit to Oxford, and I don’t know my way about. But I suppose you’re not in for the Scholarship yourself?’ And he gazed half unconsciously at his new acquaintance’s gray tweed suit and big sombrero, which were certainly somewhat noisy for a formal visit.

The young man in the billycock interpreted the glance aright, and answered it promptly.

‘Oh, you don’t know my friend,’ he said, with a twinkle in his eye and a jerk of the head towards the lad in gray tweed; ‘this is Gillingham of Rugby – otherwise known as the Born Poet. England expects every man to do his duty; but she never expects Gillingham to dress or behave like the vest of us poor common everyday mortals. And quite right, too. What’s the good of being a born poet, I should like to know, if you’ve got to mind your P’s and Q’s just like other people?’

‘Well, I’m certainly glad I’m not an Other Person,’ Gillingham responded calmly, with a nonchalant air of acknowledged superiority.

‘Other people, for the most part, are so profoundly uninteresting! But if you’re going to walk with us, let me complete the introduction my friend has begun. This is Faussett of Rugby, otherwise known as the Born Philistine. Congenitally incapable of the faintest tincture of culture himself, he regards the possession of that alien attribute by others as simply ridiculous.’ Gillingham waved his hand vaguely towards the horizon in general. ‘Disregard what he says,’ he went on, ‘as unworthy a serious person’s intelligent consideration, and dismiss him to that limbo where he finds himself most at home – among the rowdy mob of all the Gaths and Askelons!’

Dick hardly knew how to comport himself in such unwonted company. Gillingham’s manner was unlike anything else to which he had ever been accustomed. But he felt dimly aware that politeness compelled him to give his own name in return for the others’; so he faltered out somewhat feebly, ‘My name’s Plantagenet,’ and then relapsed into a timid silence.

‘Whew! How’s that for arme?’ Gillingham exclaimed, taken aback. ‘Rather high, Tom, isn’t it? Are you any relation to the late family so called, who were Kings of England?’

This was a point-blank question which Dick could hardly avoid; but he got over the thin ice warily by answering, with a smile:

‘I never heard of more than one family of Plantagenets in England.’

‘Eton, of course?’ Gillingham suggested with a languid look. ‘It must Le Eton. It was founded by an ancestor.’

To Dick himself the question of the Plantagenet pedigree was too sacred for a jest; but he saw the only way to treat the matter in the present company was by joking; so he answered with a little laugh:

‘I believe there’s no provision there for the founder’s kin, so I didn’t benefit by it. I come only from a very small country grammar school – Chiddingwick, in Surrey.’

‘Chiddingwick! Chiddingwick! Never knew there was such a place,’ Gillingham put in with crushing emphasis. And he said it with an air which showed at once so insignificant a school was wholly unworthy a Born Poet’s attention.

As for the Philistine, he laughed.

‘Well, which are you going in for?’ he asked, with a careless swing of his cane: ‘The science, or the classics?’