But Lucy did not want to look at Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. “Grandfather, give me paper and pen and one of your wafers,” she commanded.
He waved his hand towards his writing table and she sat down in front of his big silver standish, and chose a quill pen with care. Apart from a couple of ill-spelt ink-blotted letters to her father this was the first letter she had ever written, and she found the big sheet of paper in front of her rather daunting. It was clean as a field covered with snow and it seemed to her wrong to put footsteps on it. And written words were footsteps, feet running hard to another person. Then she dipped the pen in the ink and smiled, for she wanted to write to this person, even though at the same time she was very angry with him.
“Sir,” she wrote slowly and laboriously, “You promist to take me to see the lions at the Tower of Lundun but you hav not dun so. You sed it was a bargin but you hav not kept your bargin.” She paused, searching in her mind for a long and impressive word whose meaning she had learned lately. “I think you are a perfidyus man but I am not happy at presunt and I wood like to see the lions at the Tower of Lundun. I am Sir your obedient servunt Lucy Walter.”
As she picked up the silver castor and sprinkled the fine sand on the ink a breath of fresh air seemed to come to her, the breath of a man’s outdoor world, of cheery laughter, horses and dogs, sowing and reaping, the world she had known at Roch. She must get back to it, away from the chattering ailing women, or she would explode and die. She folded her letter, sealed it with a wafer from the silver box, wrote Robert Sidney’s name and then realized that she did not know where he lived and could write no address. She feared to ask her grandfather in case he should disapprove of her forwardness. Tom Howard would know but she saw Tom so seldom now. She was wondering what to do when she heard the parlour door open, letting out a shrill outcry of female distress, and then came the swish of skirts in the passage and onslaught upon the locked library door.
This was the one thing that roused Mr. Gwinne to mild anger, especially if perpetrated by one of his step-daughters, for whom his affection was not strong. He straightened himself and his voice rang out with all the vigour of his youth. “I am engaged in study and beg that I may remain undisturbed.”
“Is Lucy with you, sir?” cried out Margaret Gosfright, and she dared to rattle the latch of the door.
He cleared his throat and was prepared to perjure himself but Lucy thrust the letter inside the bodice of her dress and went to the door and unlocked it. She was not going to let one of Aunt Margaret’s scenes loose upon her grandfather, and besides, her own blood was up. She launched herself through the door and very nearly succeeded in knocking her aunt over. There was no love lost between herself and Aunt Margaret. Pretty Aunt Anne, amused and affectionate, she was fond of but not Aunt Margaret. “Come here at once, you naughty girl,” said Mrs. Gosfright, and with her hand gripped tightly round Lucy’s wrist she raced her back to the parlour.
It was a scene of varied emotion. Elizabeth was in a flood of desperate tears, Aunt Anne in fits of laughter, Mrs. Gwinne pale and shaken with the stress of divided sympathies, her arm round Elizabeth and her eyes twinkling at Anne. Elizabeth’s beautiful embroidery lay in ribbons on the floor and Jacob was chattering with fury on top of the cupboard, and as he chattered he plucked the flowers from the beau-pot beside him and flung them on the carpet one by one. So great was the sympathy between them that he had reached breaking point at exactly the same moment as Lucy herself. Their eyes met in a passion of mutual affection, and flinging a chrysanthemum high in the air, to descend upon Aunt Margaret’s head, he leaped from the cupboard into Lucy’s arms.
Then all the Welshness of the Welsh ladies present soared up to bring a marvellous dramatic climax to the emotional scene. Their blood demanded of them that the thing must be finished off in style. Elizabeth cried out that the work of years was ruined, that Lucy loved a hateful little monkey more than her own mother, that Jacob must be got rid of somehow, anyhow, she did not care how, but he must go. Margaret’s voice, sometimes rising with dramatic power above her sister’s outcry, sometimes sinking below it as though two violins strove together for mastery, told Elizabeth what she thought of spoilt children in general, and Lucy in particular, passing on to denunciation of the whole monkey tribe and, with a falling cadence, to a moving description of the irritation she was this moment suffering in consequence of insect bites upon her person. Aunt Anne’s musical laughter ran up and down like a peal of bells and Mrs. Gwinne, though seen to be speaking, was not heard. Nan-Nan appeared, wringing her hands and exclaiming over she knew not what, her celtic lament sounding among the bells and violins like the music of the double harp.
Lucy, the tears pouring down her face, cried out in passionate repudiation of the only two remarks she had been able to comprehend in the hubbub, that Jacob had fleas, and that he was in danger of being taken from her and done away with. Her eyes sought Mrs. Gwinne’s and she believed that her grandmother was speaking to her, but she could not hear what she said, and she remembered how unsmiling she had been when confronted with Jacob on London Bridge. Her grandmother, she intuitively knew, did not like monkeys. With Jacob gripped to her chest she left the room so quickly that she was scarcely seen to go. Flying down the passage she passed the open library door and was aware of her grandfather standing there, listening with enormous enjoyment, but with his hand upon the latch, ready to retreat as instantly as a hermit crab should the disturbance approach nearer. Lucy had no time to exchange glances with him. She wrenched open the door at the end of the passage and sped out into the rose garden behind the house, then through the vegetable patch and out through the wicket-gate into the fields beyond.
2
She was running through amber sunshine, and the leaves from the elm trees were drifting past her as once the birds had done on the cliffs at Roch, and she remembered the little bird whose tiny claw had encircled her finger like a wedding ring. She had been espoused then to the world of woods and fields and water. At the far end of the first field there was a coppice and she ran into it and sat down on leaves and grasses that were warm and dry, for it had been a dry season. All about her the nut trees and maple trees were pale gold and amethyst, like royal tapestry, festooned here and there with the pink and orange of spindle-berries. It was like a bower and suddenly she felt supremely safe. The apparent security of a loved world can be an illusion, as Lucy had discovered when the family nest fell to pieces, but every time the badger returns to his holt he believes himself to be safe.
Her breathing steadied and presently she was crooning to Jacob as though she had not a trouble in the world, and she had still not considered what she was to do when the sound of the horn came to her, slanting down a beam of sunlight that was turning the spindle-berries to jewels on the branch. She listened at first in sleepy delight, and then with a thrill of excitement, for there was enchantment about her. She was back in the bower at Roch, with her mother sitting on the floor beside her reading from the Mabinogion. The memory of that closeness with her mother, gone now for ever, was a stab of sudden pain. In this bower she was alone. Mother, Mother, she cried within herself, but Elizabeth was changed and did not hear, and the horn was calling again and she must go.
With Jacob in her arms she came to the farther end of the copse and ran under arching boughs into fairyland, where the very air was golden and the green grass spangled with gold. The gold trees reached to heaven and all the birds of paradise were singing in them. There was a bird singing over her head and she stopped under a branch to listen to him, craning her head back to see the speckled breast and throbbing throat and wild bright eyes of the golden thrush. “Look, look, look!” he said. “Look where the green and the blue are one.”
She saw then how the green grass at her feet sloped down to an azure blue that lapped the meadow’s end like water, and above made a smoky mystery of the fairy wood where the horn was sounding, now near, now far. She went a little forward an
d then stopped, for she could hear laughter in the wood and she was in awe as well as ecstasy. Who were they, laughing? They were riders, certainly, for she heard twigs cracking beneath horses’ hoofs, and she saw, or thought she saw, a white unicorn appear through the haze and vanish again. But it was all muted by the blueness and distant like a dream.
Then, with a clear call, a boy in a green coat, on a black horse, came riding out of the dream, calling her name. “Lucy, Lucy, Lucy!” And behind her the thrush cried, “Look, look, look!” and it was her dear Tom Howard whom she had not seen since Richard and Justus went to boarding school. Then she saw that this was not fairyland after all, just one of the fields she knew, dandelion-spangled, the tall elms golden in the autumn sunlight. Tom jumped from his horse and clinging to him she did not mind that the dream had vanished. Indeed it seemed more wonderful, not less, to have been so enchanted by the commonplace, for it meant that the fields and trees one knew so well were not commonplace at all but had, each of them, their own profound mystery. She knew now that she had always suspected this, and she laughed for joy as Tom pulled her hair and teased her, and teased Jacob, and then swung them up on his horse and turned it back again towards the wood.
But then it was the fairytale again, for just within the wood was the unicorn and he had a straight slim boy on his back, dark-haired, wearing a coat of shadowed amethyst, the colour of the maple leaves in the dell, a silver hunting horn slung over his shoulder. On either side of him were two of the most beautiful boys she had ever seen, dressed alike in azure and riding pale chestnut ponies, their bright hair so lit by the sun that they seemed aureoled. Yet sons of the morning though they appeared they did not eclipse the dark boy with the horn.
“He had it as a gift,” Tom told Lucy as he led his horse forward. “And nothing would content him but we must ride out from Westminster and let him wind his horn in the woods. Then nothing would content him but we must give Lord Newcastle and his gentlemen the slip. So we did, Buckingham and Lord Francis and I. But, oh lord, the storm there will be when the Earl catches up with us!”
She had known who it was at once. Who else could it be? When the door had opened into fairyland from her mother’s bower at Roch she had found Prince Kilhwch, and it was the same door that had opened within the bower of the copse.
“See, sir, the nymph I’ve caught!” cried Tom. He was excited and breathless, and in his heart a little scared. The Prince was carefully guarded these days both in his own household and at Whitehall, and the Earl of Newcastle had allowed him to come out riding only with great reluctance and after much pleading, and with a considerable retinue. The many armed gentlemen obscuring the view, and making adventure of any sort totally impossible, had vexed the Prince and the boys who were his companions today; the Duke of Buckingham and his brother Francis Villiers, who shared his lessons, Tom Howard and a few others. Following a plan hatched by the Prince they had suddenly broken loose in the fields and galloped away in different directions into the woods. They had reunited at a certain oak tree known to them, where the Prince had changed his black pony for a white one and his crimson coat for the amethyst coat of another boy. A rider on a black pony, wearing a crimson coat, and followed by three more, had then ridden at top speed out of the woods and in again, the gentlemen in frantic chase, and the Prince, the Duke, Francis Villiers and Tom had ridden off in the opposite direction. But Tom as the eldest of them knew only too well that the punishment likely to be meted out to collaborators in the near future would be severe.
The Prince slid from the white unicorn, who on a clearer view was seen by Lucy to have no projecting horn, and stood waiting, his dark eyes full of merry recognition. The two sons of the morning also dismounted and stood one on each side of him, and at Tom’s whispered command Lucy too dismounted and knelt and kissed his hand. Neither then nor at any time did she ever feel in awe of Charles. As she kissed his long brown fingers she showed no emotion stronger than contentment. She had been sore and miserable for so long and now she was healed and happy again. She got to her feet and looked him straight in the eyes, her head back and her hands behind her. Her blue gaze did not put him out of countenance for his own black eyes could probe without blinking for as long as hers could. “I saw you on the bridge,” he said. They laughed and his eyes went beyond her to the little creature clinging to the saddle of Tom’s pony and chattering with annoyance at being left behind. “Is that your marmoset?” he asked eagerly.
Tom fetched Jacob and Charles took him in his arms, handling him as a boy does who loves animals with understanding and affinity, and Jacob was graciously content to be caressed by him and made no attempt to scramble back to Lucy. The other boys crowded round, and Lucy told them how Robert Sidney had given Jacob to her on the same day that she had seen the Prince come up the river, and it was she and not the Prince who was now the centre of admiring attention. Untidy though she was, with ruffled hair and the usual rent in her gown, she was as unselfconscious as she was untidy. Used as these boys were to demure little girls with careful ringlets and unblemished silken skirts, her tattered gaiety was enchanting. Tom, seeing the impression she was making, was proud to say she was his little wife, but Buckingham interrupted to say that she should be his. “But I am jealous,” he said. “Love letters already?”
The letter that she had written and thrust into the front of her gown was showing. The young duke took hold of the protruding edge and pulled it out. “So Robert Sidney is the lucky dog,” he laughed. “May I see, Lucy, what sort of love letter you write?”
“You may not, my lord,” said Lucy hotly. “The letter is sealed. And it is not a love letter. Mr. Robert Sidney promised to show me the lions at the Tower of London and he has not done so. I have written to tell him he is a perfidious gentleman.”
“He has been at Penshurst, Lucy, not in London,” Tom explained. “He could not help himself.”
“Then he should have written to tell me he could not help himself,” said Lucy.
“She must see the lions,” said Charles. “I have myself seen the lions and they are very handsome. George,” he commanded the Duke, “see that the letter is delivered.”
“Command me, sir,” said Tom. “I am the more trustworthy.” And he took the letter.
“You did not ask me, any of you, whether I wished to have this lady for my little wife,” said Charles, and asserting his royal rights he seized her hand and ran with her into the wood, Jacob still in the crook of his left arm. The other three followed slowly, leading the ponies and laughing. It might have been spring, not autumn, in the woods, they were so gay and so forgetful. Winter and retribution had become a double impossibility.
Charles halted where blackberry bushes grew about a fallen oak. They sat down on the tree trunk and ate the ripe berries together, and between bites they talked a little of Jacob and of Charles’s dogs, murmuring to each other of this thing and the other thing, a jay with blue on his wings, a toadstool like a scarlet cup that grew upon a twig at their feet. They did not know of what they talked and did not afterwards remember. They had instantaneously loved each other, as two children so often do, without emotion but with complete satisfaction. The wood was warm and golden and together they found rest for their souls. She had known no peace like this since she had sat in the church with Old Sage. Charles, privacy and quiet scarcely known to him, marvelled at the silence and having only the one person beside him, and that person apparently unaware that he was a prince. Yet she had waved to him from the bridge and kissed his hand when bidden. He chuckled, knowing suddenly that if she had not been told to kiss his hand she would not have done it. He looked round and kissed her with great simplicity and she returned the kiss with maternal tenderness. “I am four days older than you are,” she explained. She was aware that in spite of all appearances to the contrary he was not entirely happy. Perhaps he knew too much too soon, even as she did, about the tangle of this world. “I would like to comfort you,” she said, but b
efore he had time to answer they were interrupted by the running feet of the three older boys.
“Sir,” cried Tom breathlessly, “we can hear them crashing about in the wood. They are just about on us.”
Charles rose with dignity, less disconcerted than the collaborators, for his would be the lesser punishment, if any. “I shall command that you be brought to play with me,” he said to Lucy. “Look! Jacob is asleep.”
At the sound of his name Jacob woke up, rubbed his small hands in his eyes and then cuddled back again in Charles’s arms. He was as happy with him as he was with Lucy. This immature man, his intuition told him, was possessed of a premature intelligence and knew already that faithful friends are more easily to be found in animals than men.
Lucy’s intuition too was very much alive just now, for she knew that whatever command he might give she would not be allowed to play with Charles. The only comfort that she had it in her power to give him was Jacob.
“Sir, I would like you to keep Jacob for your own,” she said. Then she paused and added, “If your Royal Highness will deign to accept him it would give me great pleasure.”
The words she heard herself saying did not seem her own. Afterwards she wondered how she had managed to say them, for the pain of parting with Jacob was very great. Charles was unaware of the cost of the gift. He was used to accepting presents wherever he went, usually of an educational character; Mr. Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding had lately presented him with a large illustrated bible; a monkey made a nice change. He expressed his delight with his invariable tact and charm and, this time, with sincerity, but his flow of words was cut short by the cracking of twigs and the sudden shout of a very angry man.
“My Lord of Newcastle,” said Tom. “Run, Lucy.”
She did as she was told and ran fast out of the wood, but not in fear; she ran so that she should not have to see Jacob’s velvet face again. She sped across the field and into the little copse and sat down again beneath the gold and amethyst leaves. She did not know how she was going to live without Jacob. She was glad she had given him to Charles, yet together with the gladness there was the loss and the one did not banish the other. She was too miserable even to cry. How could she go on living without Jacob?