Читать книгу The King's Minion - Рафаэль Сабатини - Страница 8

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Mr. Thomas Overbury, gentleman, scholar, and poet, sometime gentleman-commoner of Queen's College, Oxford, where he had taken a degree in arts, and law student of the Middle Temple, was homing from foreign wanderings. Enriched in worldly experience, but in no other gear, he was lured back to England by the hope of finding employment worthy of his undoubted talents and exceptional accomplishments.

Whilst not himself a Scot—he was the son of a Gloucestershire squire and bencher of the Middle Temple, who in the old days had enjoyed the patronage of Sir Robert Cecil—he had several high-placed Scottish friends, made during a visit to Edinburgh three years before the old Queen's death. On his return from that visit, Mr. Overbury had been charged with a delicate mission from the King of Scots to Elizabeth's Secretary of State, which he had fulfilled zealously, discreetly, and intelligently. Sir Robert Cecil thereafter had employed him for a while, hoping much from a man of his attainments. But Overbury's restlessness and desire to widen his knowledge of the world had sent him upon those foreign wanderings.

Mr. Overbury's ambitions were not immodest, and he hoped by the aid of some of his possible patrons to gratify them in securing some appointment about the court, in which he might stay his own necessities with anything that the Scottish locusts might have spared.

He put up at the Angel in Cheapside, a house of indifferent comfort but modest charges, attuned to the modest means at his command, and thence reconnoitred the position he intended to attack. In this his patience was not greatly taxed. The landlord of the Angel was garrulous as all his kind, and perceiving in certain details of gear and manner that this guest was newly landed from foreign parts, accounted him a suitable victim. Again after the fashion of his kind, his talk was chiefly of the doings of the great world, the events at court and the minutiæ of courtly life. True, he began his discourse with a lament on the subject of the plague, the ravages it had wrought in the city in the year of his gracious majesty's accession, and the wise measures by which the city fathers had at last stamped it out. Thence at a stride he reached Whitehall and its gay doings, and drew a parallel, which he intended should be flattering to King James, between the present court and that of the old Queen, which in the later years of her reign had been what the Scots would have called dour. But there was no dourness he vowed about King James. That was a man after the heart of any honest vintner, a great trencherman and a prodigious drinker of strong wine.

Mr. Overbury rose from his breakfast of salt herrings and Scottish ale, a tall wiry gentleman of a deceptive slenderness that lent him an appearance almost of delicacy. His pale saturnine face was long and narrow, with a good nose and chin, a lofty brow about which the brown hair clustered crisply, and full eyes, wide-set and observant, whose keenness he had a trick of dissembling by a sleepy droop of the lids. The comely whole was saved from asceticism by the red fullness of his lips. By the discerning he was to be read at a glance as a man strong in all things: strong in his passions and desires, and as strong in his power to curb them. In his carriage there was an indefinable aloofness, a stateliness that offered barriers to presumption; in his movements and gestures, in the way he turned his head and used his hands, there was a grace that was inherent. He was in his twenty-eighth year, but he looked older, having lived hard, and worked hard in lucubrations from his Oxford days. He had immolated his youth on the altar of ambition, and, ignoring the lures which life offers to the young, he had laboured at equipping mind and spirit with the scholarly knowledge which he regarded as the necessary weapons of one who looks to prevail by his wits alone.

He rose, then, from his salt herrings and Scottish ale, and looked down his aquiline nose at the vintner.

'You tell me, sirrah, that King James is a drunkard and a glutton.'

The landlord's fat body quivered like a jelly, being shaken by a sudden gust of terrified indignation.

'Sir, sir! Here's wanton twisting of my words!'

'Your words? I heard no words from you touching the King save in commendation of his vast appetite and unquenchable thirst. These may be goodly virtues in a vintner's eyes, but in plain terms they are no better than I've named them. Nay, never sweat, man. I am no spy of Cecil's as you may be supposing now; neither am I in the pay of Spain as you may have supposed before.'

The man quailed before that lofty, almost contemptuous manner.

'Your worship,' he faltered, 'the very words I used were scarcely my own. They were the talk of almost every man in the city since the banquet at the Guildhall, offered by the Lord Mayor to his gracious majesty.'

Mr. Overbury sneered. 'Faith! It may be worthy of you city hucksters to ask a gentleman to dinner, and then weigh the food he eats, measure the wine he drinks.' Abruptly he dropped the subject. 'When was this banquet?'

'A week ago, worshipful sir. You might have seen the procession from these windows: as brave a show as the city's seen for many a day; the velvets and satins and the jewels and the housings of the horses. There was the King's grace on a white palfrey, and there was Sir James Hay in cloth of gold, and my Lord of Montgomery, and my Lord Chamberlain, and—bravest of them all—there was Sir Robert Carr riding at the King's right hand, with a smile for everybody, and ...'

'Whom did you name?' So sharp was the tone of Mr. Overbury's interjection, so taut on a sudden was his tall, slim figure, that the vintner checked at the very beginning of the catalogue he was proposing to rehearse.

'Sir Robert Carr I said, worshipful sir: the new favourite on whom they say his majesty dotes as on a son. And, faith, no man who sees the gentleman could grudge him his good fortune. A frank-faced, winsome, golden-headed lad, with as honest a blue eye and as merry a laugh as ever you saw.'

The vintner rambled on in eulogies. But Mr. Overbury was not listening. His breath had quickened a little; there was even a stir of colour in his pale cheeks. Presently he interrupted again, to ejaculate the single word: 'Impossible!'

The vintner checked to stare at him.

'Impossible does your worship say? But I assure you, sir, that I tell you no more than ...'

Mr. Overbury waved him contemptuously into silence. 'I answered my own thoughts, master landlord, not any words of yours. This Robert Carr, whence is he, do you know?'

'Why, from Scotland, to be sure.'

'From Scotland, ay: whence else with such a name? But from where in Scotland? Do you happen to have heard?'

'Why, yes. I've heard tell.' He scratched his bald pate to stimulate recollection. 'They do name him Sir Robert Carr of Fernieside, or Furniebank, or Fernie-something.'

'Would it be Ferniehurst?' There was a faint excitement now in the calm gentleman's tone.

The vintner smacked fist into palm. 'Ferniehurst it is. That's it. You have it, sir. Ferniehurst it is.'

Mr. Overbury startled him by such a burst of laughter as you would never have expected from a man of his countenance.

'Robin Carr o' Ferniehurst! And the King's favourite? Come, landlord, tell me more of this.' He sat down again. 'Tell me all you know.'

Readily enough the vintner rehearsed for him the town talk on the subject. The sum of it was that whoever had a suit to prefer at court should prefer it nowadays, not to my Lord Chamberlain as heretofore, nor to my Lord Treasurer or my Lord Montgomery, powerful though they both were, but to Sir Robert Carr, whose influence with the King was the weightiest of all.

To Mr. Overbury this news was fantastic. Robert Carr, the stripling with whom he had been acquainted, in Edinburgh, had in those days sat at his feet and offered a brotherly love to the older man, who, although then but two and twenty, had seemed of a full maturity to the boy of fifteen. And mature Overbury had been even then; a scholar, a lawyer, and with the airs already of an accomplished man of the world, or at least so they appeared to the raw Scots lad. That he should have taken notice of this boy, and treated him in every sense as an equal had transmuted into worship the awe and wonder with which Robin had at first regarded him. This Robin had been a sweet lovable lad, as Mr. Overbury remembered him. What changes, he wondered, had been wrought by the six years that were sped? How would Robin regard now the man whom once he had esteemed so highly? In those days he had been constrained to look up at Mr. Overbury; now, from the eminence to which a turn of Fortune's wheel had hoisted him, he would of course look down, and his perspective would of necessity be different.

Speculation Mr. Overbury realised was idle. His course lay in ascertaining.

He spread out the meagre contents of his saddlebags, and selected, without difficulty where the choice was so restricted, a suit of dark purple velvet which had already seen much service. He brushed it carefully, and arrayed himself. Jewels he had none wherewith to set it off; not so much as a gold chain. But the collar of fine Mechlin, which in France was already superseding the starched ruff, lent him a certain modishness, and his fine figure, graceful carriage, and air of assurance must do the rest.

He sallied forth into the noisy street and the gusty airs of that March morning, and made his way to Paul's. Here he found a place in one of the new hackney-coaches that drove to Westminster, carrying four for a shilling. His companions were a merchant bound for the court and two gentlemen from the country on a sight-seeing visit to the capital, all of whom he chilled by his aloofness.

Set down at Charing Cross, he proceeded on foot along Whitehall, past the bourne posts and into the broader space set off by gilt railings and dominated by the imposing tessellated gateway which Holbein had built for Henry VIII.

After that he was for some time tossed like a tennis-ball, as it seemed to him, from yeomen of the guard to lackeys, and from lackeys to ushers, and had he not in one of the galleries by great good fortune come upon the new Earl of Salisbury, it is odds that he would have had all his pains for nothing.

A gentleman usher armed with a wand had ordered him none too courteously to make way, and as he stepped obediently aside and half-turned to face the little limping gentleman who with two attendants following him was bustling to audience, he found himself confronting the first Secretary of State.

The little gentleman's keen eyes returned his glance. The little gentleman checked in his stride, and named him in accents of surprise.

Mr. Overbury was justified of his faith in Sir Robert Cecil's memory.

In answer to my lord's swift probing questions, Mr. Overbury rendered a brief account of himself. He had arrived but yesterday, and was intending to wait upon his lordship to-morrow.

'And why not to-day?'

Mr. Overbury offered a truthful explanation. The handsome, sensitive face of the deformed, splay-footed little earl was lighted by a smile of bitter-sweet understanding. Mr. Overbury, answering this, explained further that he was urged rather by his memory of his old friendship for Robert Carr than by any news of the position the young Scot now held in the King's favour. Yet his lordship's smile persisted.

'The latter would quicken the former, not a doubt,' said he. Then, abruptly, he added: 'Come you now with me. I am on my way to the King; and where the King is, there shall you find Carr.'

It was as he promised. His majesty was moving down the privy gallery when they entered it, and Robin Carr—a full-grown resplendent Robin Carr in whom Mr. Overbury barely perceived traces of the Scots lad who had been his friend—stepped beside him. As he moved or stood, the King leaned heavily upon him, his left arm flung about the favourite's shoulders. This was not merely, and as it may have seemed to many, in token of his maudlin affection, but actually as a measure of support rendered necessary by the weakness of his royal legs. Yet maudlin only was his habit of permitting his gross fingers to toy with the lad's red-gold ringlets, or pinch his cheeks, what time he stood to hear one suitor or another.

They were pausing thus before the vulture-headed old Earl of Northampton, when Sir Robert's wandering and rather vacant gaze alighted on Mr. Overbury, straight and tall beside the little Secretary.

Instantly that gaze quickened into life, and in a flash the handsome young face was aflush and irradiated by delighted surprise. If the old affection had lain dormant for years, so strong was its call in the moment of undergoing this abrupt awakening, that Sir Robert unceremoniously disengaged the royal arm from about his neck, and flung forward with both hands outheld to greet his friend.

The King broke off his speech in amazement to look after him, and a frown rumpled his brow. Instantly Haddington, one of those who followed in attendance, stepped into the place at his majesty's side which Sir Robert had so abruptly vacated. The King took his arm in silence, what time his big eyes continued to stare after Sir Robert and to con the man who had drawn him as a magnet draws a sliver of steel.

Northampton's crafty face was slewed round on his scraggy neck, and he too followed the course of the young Scot with dark old eyes that seemed to smoulder in his parchment face.

Meanwhile Sir Robert, ever in boyish oblivion of all but this old friend, this paragon about whom his earliest illusions had been woven, was wringing his hands and asking him a dozen questions in a breath.

Mr. Overbury laughed at so much and such generous impetuosity. Then, observing the King's aggrievedly indignant stare, he realised the breach of manners into which Sir Robert's eagerness had betrayed him. He observed also, for his eyes missed nothing, the evil leer of Northampton and the tight-lipped, satisfied smile of my Lord Haddington. It imported at once to repair this situation. Therefore he laughed as he replied:

'My answers shall be full in season, Robin. Presently his majesty claims your attendance.'

Sir Robert looked over his shoulder, met the royal glance, and grew conscious of his fault. Lord Salisbury saved the situation by advancing with him and drawing Mr. Overbury after him to be presented.

The King's curiosity, being awakened, required no less. His reception of this stranger, however, was cold, and upon hearing him named, he punned upon the name as execrably and cruelly as once he had punned upon Raleigh's.

'Overbury? Ah! And a thought overburying in his port, I think.'

That said he turned his shoulder upon the bowing gentleman. But Salisbury would not leave it there.

'May it please your majesty, Mr. Overbury is no newcomer to your service or to mine.'

The King's brows went up in chill inquiry.

'Once he was your majesty's trusted messenger to me, and diligently he discharged his trust.' And his lordship added a mention of the occasion.

Now it was an amiable trait in the character of King James that he never forgot—unless there were strong reasons why he should—the debt to any who had served him in those hungry anxious days of waiting for the English crown, or to any who had contributed in however slight a measure to his ultimate translation from the wilderness into this Land of Plenty. Fortunate was it for Mr. Overbury that my lord could name him for one of those, else it is certain that his first appearance at court would have been his last.

The King turned and scanned again the pale saturnine face more closely and less coldly.

'I don't recall him, which is odd, for my remembrance is the kingliest part of me. But since it's as you say, little beagle, we shall look to see him here again.' He took his arm from Haddington's. 'Come, Robin,' he commanded, and with Robin once more to lean upon, he passed on.

But Sir Robert had whispered a word to Lord Salisbury, and this word was a message which his lordship now delivered.

As a consequence, some hours later, when the audience was over and when his majesty, having dined, had retired to sleep as was his wont in the afternoon, the friends met again in Sir Robert's lodging, whither Mr. Overbury had gone to await him.

No mean suspicion—such as might have beset another in his place—touched young Carr's frank generous nature that he was being sought from motives of worldly advancement. Warmly he embraced his friend and demanded to know why his Tom had not sought him earlier. Mr. Overbury, more self-contained, as his nature was, quietly explained that he had only just arrived in England. His saturnine eye conned the young man closely and commented at once upon his fine vigorous growth and dazzling appearance. The full-skirted doublet of dull red velvet with its waspish waist was in the height of fashion; his silk stockings, each gartered with a bunch of ribbons, were drawn over the knees of his cannioned breeches; a starched ruff made his golden head, in the word of Mr. Overbury, look like that of John the Baptist on a charger. There were jewels in his ears and a rich gold chain upon his breast.

He called for cake and wine to regale his visitor, who had fasted whilst awaiting him, and Mr. Overbury was again enabled to admire the rich blue-and-silver liveries of Sir Robert's lackeys, the costly service of gold plate which was set before him, the wrought gold cup and the golden jug containing the choicest of sweet Frontignac. Here, indeed, was a change from the Northern fare of small beer served in pewter and oatcakes presented on a wooden platter.

They sat and talked far into the afternoon, until the March daylight was fading, and the spacious, richly hung chamber was aglow in the light of the great sea-coal fire that blazed under the wide chimney-cowl. At first there had been reminiscences of Scotland in the days of their first meeting. Then Mr. Overbury talked of his travels and of foreign ways with a dry-witted liveliness that made sharp pictures leap to the eye. At last they came to consider the fortunes of Robin Carr; and Mr. Overbury learnt the stages by which his friend had climbed to the vertiginous heights on which he found him perched.

But oddly enough this narrative of achievement, which should have glowed in the telling, grew more and more sombre as it approached its end. There was, Mr. Overbury discerned, a shadow over the sun of this romantic emprise. Bluntly he said as much, and desired to know its nature.

Sir Robert fetched a sigh. He passed a hand over his brow in a gesture of weariness. He stared into the fire as he answered haltingly.

'I am enviable only in appearance and to the vulgar. To be as I am is to be a toy, a minion; and that's unworthy, unmanly. I am well enough to walk with the King, to hunt with him, to carouse with him. He'll lean upon my shoulder, pull my hair as if I were a lap-dog, or pinch my cheek as if I were a woman. He loads me with gifts. I am finely lodged, as you see. I may command what moneys I require. Were I a king's son I could not lie more soft. For all this the unthinking maybe envy me; the charitable pity me, perhaps; but certain it is that the worthy despise me. I never meet Pembroke's eye, or Salisbury's, but I meet frank and undisguised contempt. In Suffolk's and Northampton's I meet the same, but thinly veiled, because they are men whose stomachs are above their hearts. Mean tool though they account me, they know that I may serve them, and the knowledge keeps them striving to be civil. The Queen never looks on me but she sneers openly, and Prince Henry, who is accounted—ay and rightly—the noblest lad in England, follows the example of his mother. So that no friend of the Prince's—and his friends are many and of worth—can be anything but enemy of mine.

'At times I am tempted to strip myself of all and go my ways. I am weary of it, too, on other grounds. The King is exacting. My presence is too constantly required, my attention must all be at his command. I can have no friends, no associates of my own choosing. He's sulky as a jealous woman now, because I was overfree with my joy at seeing you. God help me, Tom, the burden of it grows at times intolerable.'

Moved by passion he had risen, and now he leaned his arm upon the chimney-cowl, his brow upon his arm.

Mr. Overbury sat silently aghast at these revelations.

'What I've said to you, Tom, I've never yet said to any but myself; indeed, scarcely to myself. It's as frank a confession as ever Papist made to priest. And it was a necessary confession; necessary to my sanity, letting out some of the humours that fester in me. I think God must have sent you, so opportunely you are come.'

'Opportune to what?' wondered Mr. Overbury.

'To advise me, Tom.'

Mr. Overbury sighed. 'From what you've said I opine your heart advises you already.'

Sir Robert groaned. 'Ay!' He swung round to face his companion, who sat grimly thoughtful, elbow on knee, chin on clenched hand. The interview was taking a turn very different from all that Mr. Overbury could have supposed, and, for his own sake, hoped. 'If the King needed me for aught that matters, all would be so different.'

'Aught that matters?' quoth Mr. Overbury. To a sensitive ear his tone might have implied a doubt of the real consequence of anything in this curious business of living.

Sir Robert explained himself. 'If I could be of use in affairs; do honest work; fulfil some position of service, real service; discharge some office.'

'What hinders? You are a recognised fountain of patronage, they tell me. You can obtain such things as these for others. Why not for yourself?'

'Because I lack the ability, so the King supposes. I am not scholarly. I haven't much Latin.' He spoke bitterly.

'Latin?' Mr. Overbury laughed. 'What Latin has Tom Howard, whom I find Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, in addition to being Lord Chamberlain and Earl of Suffolk? You may become a man of affairs without Latin.'

'It is objected that I have no knowledge of affairs.'

'Yet of all knowledge that is the most easily acquired. Why, Robin, I vow you're needlessly dejected. If you've the will, a way were easily found.'

'Not as easily as it is for you to assert it. You have advantages. You were at Oxford and ye're learned in law.'

'What I know, I learnt from books; and those are free to all.'

'Books, ay! I ken. I've been at books. The King himself has been my Latin tutor. But progress is slow. And meanwhile, I am what I am. Admitted to the King's Council, I have to recognise that every man who fawns upon me for my patronage and favour with his majesty is my better. I sit silent, like a silly bairn or feckless woman, when affairs are being discussed. But yesterday it was this Dutch business to which I had to listen shamed by my own ignorance.'

Mr. Overbury smiled tolerantly. 'Whilst others talked who knew perhaps as little. The first art ye've to learn, Robin, which it needs no books to teach you, is the art of dissembling this same ignorance that afflicts you. Ignorance is more common than you think.'

'Pretence would not have served me then.'

'Why not? What was the business?'

Sir Robert shrugged almost impatiently. The nature of the business seemed an irrelevancy to his grievance. Briefly, nevertheless, he stated it.

'The King's in sore distress for money. His debts are something over a million pounds, and the new taxes devised by Salisbury since he became Lord Treasurer are but a drop in the ocean.'

'Come now! This alone shows some knowledge of affairs.'

'I but rehearse what yesterday I heard. The King, it seems, has a claim on the Netherlands for some eight hundred thousand pounds, for services rendered by the old Queen in the war with Spain. He holds as security the towns of Flushing, Brell, and ... another.'

'Rammekens,' said Mr. Overbury.

'Rammekens; that's it. I see ye ken.'

Mr. Overbury smiled to himself. Sir Robert continued: 'Since the Dutch cannot pay and the King must have the money, it is his notion that he should sell the towns to Philip of Spain.'

Mr. Overbury laughed outright. 'And how did that crack-brained notion fare at the hands of his majesty's advisers?'

Sir Robert was startled by the promptitude with which Mr. Overbury had qualified the business. But he answered his question.

'They talked from dinner until supper, some for and others against it; but they reached no conclusion.'

Mr. Overbury's face wore a curious look as seen in the firelight. 'What reasons did those urge who opposed it?'

'That the sale would be regarded as a betrayal of the Protestant cause, and would give rise to bitter discontent in England.' Then, dismissing the matter, he reverted to his own personal grievance. 'I could but sit there mute, a useless fribble without opinion to offer.'

'Why should you not have had an opinion?'

'Because I have had no means of forming one.'

'Neither had they. But it skilled not with them. Ha! You rail at others for faults that are your own. It's human enough; but it leads a man nowhere. The matter, you say, is to be discussed again. Now mark me closely. I am newly out of Holland, and I lack no warrant for what I am to tell you. Make your own use of it. Convert it into your own. By which I mean, do not recite it merely as a lesson learnt.'

Thereafter at length, in detail and deliberately, Mr. Overbury expounded the state of things Spanish in the Netherlands, whilst the young man listened avidly. 'With that knowledge,' he concluded, 'advise boldly. As a last resource, you may cite me as your authority. But if you do, remember to make it plain that you drew the information from me because you accounted that thus you might serve the King's interests. All information of affairs must be derived from some source or other. He is fittest for the control of affairs who knows how to discern the sources and how to reach them.'

He rose and held out his hand. Night was closing in by now, and still there was no light in the room save the glow of the fire.

Sir Robert clasped that hand eagerly and firmly. His voice was anxious.

'You'll come again?'

'Whenever you require me. I am your servant, Robin. I am lodged at the Angel in Cheapside where at need you'll find me.'

Sir Robin passed an arm through Mr. Overbury's, and went with him from the room along the gallery leading to the stair-head. Here at last he surrendered him to an usher who was to reconduct him.

Thus Mr. Overbury might appear to take his leave without having discharged any part of the business which had brought him. He had made no mention of employment for himself. That was because his methods were more subtle. The man who can discover himself to be required is in no need to offer himself. He can better serve his ends by waiting to be sued.