Shrewsbury: A Romance

Now, you understand?"

"I understand, my lady, that you are saying things which are not fitting for me to hear," the man answered, in a tone of cold displeasure. "The King, thank God, is well. When he ails, it will be time to talk of his succession."

"It will be a little late then," she retorted. "In the meantime, and to please me-"

He raised his hand in protest. "Anything else," he said.

"You have not yet heard what I propose," she cried, her voice shrill with anger. "It is a trifle, and to please me you might well do it. Set your hand to a note which I will see delivered in the proper quarter; promising nothing in the Prince's life-time-there! but only that in the event of his death you will support a Restoration."

"I cannot do it," he answered.

"Cannot do it?" she rejoined with heat. "Why not? You have done as much before."

"It maybe: and been forgiven for it by the best master man ever had!"

"Who feels nothing, forgives easily," she sneered.

"But not twice," he said gravely. "The King-"

"Which King?"

"The only King I acknowledge," he answered, unmoved. "Who knows, believe me, so much more than you give him credit for, that it were well if your friends bethought them of that before it be too late. He has winked at much and forgiven more-no one knows it better than I-but he is not blinded; and there is a point, madam, beyond which he can be as steadfast to punish as your King. If Sir John Fenwick, therefore, who I know well, is in England-"

But at that she cut him short, carried away by a passion, which she had curbed as long as it was in her impetuous nature to curb anything. "Odds my life!" she cried, and at the sound of her voice uplifted in a shriek of anger, the woman listening beside me raised her face to mine, and smiled cruelly-"Odds my life, your King and my King! Kings indeed! Why, mannikin, how many Kings do you think there are! By G-d, Master Charles, you will learn one of these days that there is but one King, sent by God, one King and no more, and that his yea and nay are life and death! You fool, you! I tell you, you are trembling on the edge, you are tottering! A day, a week, a month, at most, and you fall-unless you clutch at the chance of safety I offer you! Sign the note! Sign the note, man! No one but the King and Middleton shall know of it; and when the day comes, as come it will, it shall avail you."

"Never, madam," was the cold and unmoved answer.

So much I heard and my lady's oath and volley of abuse; but in the midst of this, and while she still raged, my companion, satisfied I suppose with what she had learned, and assured that her lady would not get her way, twitched my sleeve, and softly taking up the lamp, signed to me to go before her. I obeyed nothing loth, and regaining the small ante-room by which I had entered, found the man Smith awaiting us.

When they had whispered together, "I'll see you home, Mr. Taylor," said he, somewhat grimly. "And to-morrow I will call and talk business. What we want you to do is a very simple matter."

"It is simply that my lady's son is a fool!" the woman cried, snappishly.

"Well," he said, smiling, "I should hardly call my Lord Shrewsbury that!"

The woman screamed and clapped her hand to his mouth. "You babbling idiot!" she cried, in a passion. "You have let it out."

He stood gaping. "Good lord!" he said.

"You have let it out with a vengeance now!" she repeated, furiously.

He looked foolish; and at last, "He did not hear," he said.

"Hear? He heard, unless he is deaf!" she retorted. "You may lay your account with that. For me, I'll leave you. You have done the mischief and may mend it."

CHAPTER XVIII

But as the spoken word has sometimes the permanence which proverbs attach to the Littera scripta, and is only confirmed by bungling essays to erase it, so it was in this case; Mr. Smith's endeavours to explain away the fact which he had carelessly blabbed only serving to impress it the more deeply on my memory. It would seem that he was partly aware of this; for not only did his attempts lack the dexterity which I should have expected from one whose features augured much experience of the world, but he quickly gave up the attempt as labour in vain, and gruffly bidding me go before to the coach, followed me and took his seat beside me. We rumbled away. The night was overcast, the neighbourhood seemed to be rural; and, starting from an unknown point, I had less chance than before of tracing the devious lanes and streets through which we drove; so that when the coach presently stopped in a part of the town more frequented, I had not the least idea where we were, or where we had been.

"You can get home from here," said he, still ruffled, and scarce able to speak to me civilly.

Then I saw, as I went to descend, that we were near the end of Holborn, in the Tyburn Road, where it grows to country. "I will see you to-morrow," he cried. "And, mind you, in the meantime, the less you say to Ferguson the better, my man!" With which the coach drove away towards Kensington, leaving me standing against the wall of St. Giles's Pound.

Thus released, alone, and free to consider what had happened to me, I found a difficulty in tracing where I had been, but none in following the drift of the strange scene and stranger conversation at which I had been present. Even the plans of those who had conveyed me to that place were transparent. It needed no Solomon to discern that in the man Smith and the woman Monterey the young lord had two foes in his mother's household, as dangerous as foes could be; the woman moved, as I conjectured, by that spretæ injuria formæ, of which the great Roman poet speaks, and the man by I know not what old wrong or jealousy. It was plain that these two, to obtain their ends, were urging on the mother a most perilous policy: that, I mean, of committing the son to the Jacobite Court, that so he might be cut off from St. James's; moreover, that, as he could not be induced, in propriâ persona, to such a treasonable step as would serve their ends, advantage was to be taken of some likeness that I bore to him (which Smith had observed the previous evening in Covent Garden) to personate him in a place or company where his presence would be conclusive both for and against him.

I could believe that the mother contemplated but vaguely the power over him which the incident would give her; and dreamed of using it only in the last resort; rather amusing herself in the present with the thought that short of this, and without bringing the deception to his notice, the effect she desired would be produced-since he would be held at St. Germain's to be well affected, and at St. James's the matter would not be known. So, in his own despite, and without his knowledge, he could be reconciled to the one court, while remaining faithful to the other!

But, as in the mass of conspiracies-and this was especially true of the conspiracies of that age-the acute eye can detect the existence of an inner and outer ring of conspirators, whereof the latter are commonly the dupes of the former, so I took it that here Smith and the woman meditated other and more serious results than those which my lady foresaw; and, thinking less of my lord's safety in the event of a Restoration than of punishing him or obtaining a hold upon him-and more of private revenge than of the Good Cause-had madam for their principal tool. Such a consideration, while it increased my reluctance to be mixed up with a matter so two-faced, left me to think whether I should not seek out the victim, and by an early information, gain his favour and protection.

I stood in the darkness of the street doubtful, and weighing the matter. Clearly, if I had to do the thing, now was the time, before I saw Smith, or exposed myself to an urgency which in spite of his politeness might, I fancied, be of a kind difficult to resist. If by going straight to Lord Shrewsbury I could kill two birds with one stone-could at once free myself from the gang of plotters under whom I suffered, and secure for the future a valuable patron-here was a chance in a hundred, and I should be foolish to hesitate.

Nor did I do so long. True, it stuck me a little that I knew nothing of my Lord Shrewsbury's whereabouts in London; nor whether he lived in town, or in the great house among the lanes and gardens which I had visited, but of the road whereto I had no more knowledge than a blind man. This, however, I could learn at the nearest coffee-house: and impulse rather than calculation directing my steps, I hurried hot-foot towards Covent Garden, which lay conveniently to my hand.

It was not until I was in the Square and close to the Piazza that I bethought me how imprudent I was to re-visit the scene of last night's adventure; a place where it was common knowledge that the Jacobites held their assignations; and where I might be recognised. To reinforce this late-found discretion, and blow up the spark of alarm already kindled, I had not stood hesitating while a man could count ten, before my eye fell on the very same soldierly gentleman, with the handkerchief hanging out of his pocket, to whom I had been sent the evening before. He was alone, walking under the dimly-lighted Piazza, as he had walked then; but as I caught sight of him two others came up and joined him: and in terror lest these should be the two I had met before, I retreated hastily into the shadow of St. Paul's Church, and so back the way I had come.

However, I was not to get off so easily. Though the hour was late, the market closed, and the pavement in front of the taverns deserted, or fringed only by a chair waiting for a belated gamester, I ran a greater risk of being recognised, as I passed, than I thought; and had not gone ten paces along King Street before I heard a light foot following me, and a hand caught my arm. Turning in a fright I found it was only a girl; and, at first sight, was for wresting myself from her, glad that it was no worse: but she muttered my name, and looking down I recognised to my astonishment the girl I had seen at Ferguson's earlier in the evening.

At that, I remember, a dread of the man and his power seized me and chilled my very heart. This was the third time this girl, whom I never saw at other seasons, had arisen out of the ground to confront me and pluck me back when on the point of betraying him. I stared at her, thinking of this, with I know not what of affright and shrinking; and could scarcely command either voice or limbs.

And yet as she stood looking at me with the dark length of the street stretching to the market behind her, it must be confessed that there was little in her appearance to cause terror. The night being cold, and a small rain falling, she had a shawl drawn tightly over her head, whence her face, small and pale as a child's, peered at me. I thought to read in it a sly and elfish triumph such as became Ferguson's minion: instead I discerned only a weariness that went ill with her years-and a little flicker of contempt in eye and lip. The weariness was also in her voice when she spoke. "Well met, Mr. Price," she said. "I am in luck to light on you."

I shivered in my shoes; but without seeming to mark me, "I want this note taken to Mr. Watkins," she continued, rapidly pressing a scrap of paper into my hand. "He is in the tavern there, the Seven Stars. Ask for the Apollo Room, and you will find him."

"But, one minute," I protested, as in her eagerness she pushed me that way with her hand, "did Mr. Ferguson-Is it from him?"

"Of course, fool," she answered, sharply. "Do you think that I have been standing here for the last half-hour in cold and wet for my own pleasure?"

"But if he sent it?" I remonstrated, feebly, "perhaps he may not like me to interfere-to-"

"Like me to?" she retorted, sharply, mocking my tone. "Who said he would? Cannot you understand that it is I who do not like to? That I am not going into that place at this time of night, and half in the house drunken brutes? It is bad enough to be here, loitering up and down as if I were what I am not-and free to be spoken to by every impudent blood that passes! Go, man, and do it, and I will wait so long. What do you fear?"

"The rope," said I, "to be plain with you." And I looked with abhorrence at the scrap of paper she had given me. "I have taken too many of these," I said.

"Well, you will take one more!" she answered, doggedly. "Or you are no man. See, there is the door. Ask for the Apollo Room, give it to him, and the thing is done!" And with that she set both hands to me and pushed me the way she would have me move-I mean towards the tavern. "Go!" she said. "Go!"

Hate the thing as I might, and did, I could not resist persuasions addressed to me in such a tone; nor fail to be moved by the girl's shrinking from the task, which had to be done, it seemed, by one of us. After all, it was no more than I had done several times before; and my reluctance having its origin in the resolution, to which I had just come, to break off from the gang, yielded to the reflection that the design lay as yet in my own breast, and might be carried out as well to-morrow as to-day. In a word, I complied out of pity, went to the tavern, and walked boldly in.

I had been in the house before, and knew where I should find a waiter of whom I might enquire privately; I passed by the public room, therefore, and was for going to the place I mean. I had scarcely advanced three paces beyond the threshold, however, before a great noise of voices and laughter and beating of feet met my ears and surprised me; the hubbub was so loud and boisterous as to be unusual even in places of that kind. I had no more than taken this in, and set it down to an orgy beyond the ordinary, when I came on a pale-faced group standing at gaze at the foot of the stairs, the landlord, two or three drawers, and as many women being among them. It was easy to see that they were in a fever about the noise above; for while the host was openly wringing his hands and crying that those devils would ruin him, a woman who seemed to be his wife was urging first one and then another of the drawers to ascend and caution the party. That something more than disorderliness or a visit from the constable was in question I gathered from the host's pale face; and this was confirmed when on seeing me they dispersed a little, and affected to be unconcerned. Until I asked for the Apollo Room, whereon they all came together again and fell on me with complaints and entreaties.

"'Fore God, sir, I think your friends are mad!" the host cried, in a perfect fury. "Go up! Go up, and tell them that if they want to be hanged, and to hang me as well, they are going the right way about it."

"It is well it is night," said the head waiter grimly, "or the Market porters would have broken our windows before now."

"And got us all in the Compter!" the women wailed. And then to me, "Go up, sir, go up and tell them that if they would not have the mob pull the house down-"

But the tumult above, waxing loud at that moment, drowned her words, and certainly took from me what little good-will to ascend I had. However, the host, having me there, a person who had enquired for the room, would take no denial, but, delighted to have found a deputy, he fairly set me on the stairs and pushed me up. "Go up and tell them! Go up and tell them!" he kept repeating. "You asked for the room and there it is."

In a word I had no choice, and with reluctance went up. The noise was such I could not fail to find the door and the room; I knocked and opened, a roar of voices poured out, and even before I entered the room I knew what was afoot, and could swear to treason. Such cries as "Down with the Whigs and damn their King!" "The 29th of May and a glorious Restoration!" "Here's to the Hunting Party!" poured out in a confused medley; with half-a-dozen others equally treasonable, and equally certain, were they overheard in the street, to bring down the mob and the messengers on the speakers.