CHAPTER XXI

OF LION ROAR AT THE TOWER

THE ROAR OF A LION, not far away as distance goes, was answered by an even throatier roar from another cage. The squall of a catamountain pierced through both.

The menagerie at the Tower of London, housed inside the Lion Gate but outside both the main gate under the Byward Tower and then the western moat, was open to the public on payment of a small fee. High rose the babble of Jack and Jill, with their friends, as they clamoured towards the long, low menagerie house under a sky darkened even here by chimney smoke and soot from the City.

Colonel Howard heard the uproar as he strolled along the sentry walk of the battlements on the wall, southwards, beside the river. Colonel Howard, Deputy Governor of the Tower, should never have been of the military despite his good service. His face, delicate, with shiny cheekbones and a domed skull half-hidden by his grey periwig, was the face of a scholar or a dreamer. Colonel Howard was both.

Though the late afternoon had become hot, he wrapped closer round him the long cloak from collar to boot ankle. Long ago he had caught an ague in the Low Countries, and was often cold. Colonel Howard’s short pointed beard and small moustaches, against the thin face, also suggested Spain and subtlety. After him tramped one of the warders, a fat fierce man as most tried to look, clad in the red doublet and hose, with the flat black-velvet cap, which had been the traditional dress of warders since the time of Henry the Eighth.

“Colonel Howard, sir!” hissed the warder, with all mystery in his voice. Greatly daring, he touched the Deputy Governor’s arm and advanced a good carbuncle of a nose.

“What’s amiss?” the warder whispered. “What cully’s work’s afoot for this night? Is it murder, or the like? Tip me the wink, sir!”

Colonel Howard regarded him with a mild frown.

“Latine loqui elegantissime,” he said in his soft voice, and shook his head sadly. “Or your English speech, I should have said.” The frown grew still more mild. “Have you heard report of murder, then? If so, you speak late.”

The warder shrank back, protesting hastily. He lacked the words to explain that through this old fortress, among the warders and the redcoat military garrison as well, there ran a swift rumour, a word behind hand. It said that something of dire import, like the blazing star which heralded the plague, would strike here tonight.

“Come,” invited Colonel Howard, patient but with narrowed eyes. “Speak your mind!”

The warder, wildly at guess, pointed ahead. Along the sentry walk they were approaching the round, rough-stone squatness of the Middle Tower, with a heavy barred door opening on the sentry walk.

“Sir Nick Fenton, the devil in velvet,” he said hoarsely, “is shut up in there since a fortnight. Ecod, sir! When they fetched him here, I thought him an old man.”

“And so did I,” the other said thoughtfully.

“Ah! But a fortnight’s good food and wine? Why, he’s fleshed out again, fighting-muscled, all a-prowl like the leopard at the menagerie. And with a look … a look …”

Colonel Howard, who had almost forgotten his companion, nodded with the same thoughtfulness.

“As though he had passed through some horror?” murmured the Deputy Governor. “And walked amid flame and foulness, like the Italian of Florence, and was his own man again, yet kept the memory of horror behind his eyes?”

Again the warder was deeply perplexed, as were others, by this Englishman with the Spaniard’s face. As a weapon the warder carried only a short partisan, which the public always miscalled a halberd; and he stamped its shaft on the old stones.

“Under favour, colonel, a black ugly look is a black ugly look; no more! But which of us ha’ heard,” and he pointed, “of a prisoner in the Middle Tower? Why not the Beauchamp Tower, as is usual? There you hold him safe and fast. But here’s the Middle Tower with a door opening straight to this sentry walk where we stand! And look you there, under favour!”

The fat red-clad warder leaned through an opening between two of the battlements on the riverside. Below there was a heavy wharf, stretching the entire southern side. It was mounted with a long line of heavy ordnance, great cannon of iron or brass, against attack from the river.

But, so that the river should serve as a natural moat, the wharf had been built out a little distance from the wall. Under its smoke pall the Thames ran dark and placid. Inside the piles of the wharf and this wall, the water yet boiled and hissed white.

“There’s but one door,” said the warder, “between the devil in velvet and a leap from here. We could cross him with musket fire; ay. But …”

Wheezing, he turned round the battlements, and stopped short.

Colonel Howard was not even listening. He was looking back, musingly, over the inside premises of the fortress; harsh, yet touched with greenery; the Bell Tower at the angle of the inner ballium wall; and all dominated by the huge square bulk, grey-white stone with a lookout pinnacle at each corner, which was then called Julius Caesar’s Tower.

“These stones are too old, and full of bones,” said Colonel Howard. “Too many men have died and then walked here. William Brown, are you never affrighted?”

The warder gaped at him. “Me, sir?”

“You are a fortunate man. I am oft affrighted.”

More lions roared from the menagerie, their noise mingling with the laughter of children. Subtly the Deputy Governor’s face altered; and Warder Brown, who knew this cloudy-cove’s fame in battle, felt disquiet.

“As to your warnings,” murmured Colonel Howard, “I fear you must address them to Sir Robert.” He meant the Governor of the Tower, a stern martinet. “Now unlock and unbar me this door to the Middle Tower. Stand your guard outside, while I speak with the prisoner.”

It was done. Inside, as the bars again clanged behind him, the Deputy Governor stood in a circular room of stone blocks, very hot and oppressive, yet spacious and with windows. Prisoners at the Tower seldom suffered as they suffered at Newgate.

“I am the bearer of news,” Colonel Howard said to Fenton.

Fenton, his periwig discarded for his own black hair, stood in a cambric shirt, with old velvet breeches and gold buckles to his shoes, beside a table in the middle of the stone room.

“I have long guessed your news,” he said without amusement. “On the night they took me, I was too shaken to think. But a friend—call him Mr. Reeve—had already warned me of exactly what might happen. Now I am charged with leading a Catholic conspiracy (God save such nonsense!) to rise against London with blood and fire. Mark how every stone falls into place, from a so-called Catholic mistress to a French Catholic cook named Madame Taupin. I was even advised to seek audience with the King. He sought audience with me. Well, I am here.”

Colonel Howard, without replying, drew out a chair beside the table and sat down. His sword scabbard rattled against the floor, but he did not unfasten his cloak. On the table were several long clay pipes, an earthen bowl of tobacco, and piles of books.

“No,” he replied, “that is not my news.” As though irrelevantly he added: “I believe I have visited you upon every day since your imprisonment?”

“For which I am deeply grateful.”

“We have discoursed of history, literature, architecture, astronomy …” Colonel Howard all but sighed. A red-clad arm reached from inside his cloak and sought the books on the table. “Nay, the pleasure was mine! Yet we have never spoken of your—personal affairs?”

“No. Never.”

“Yet I venture to think,” said Colonel Howard, and lifted sharply penetrating eyes, “that you now mistrust all persons on this earth?”

Fenton merely lifted his shoulders again, but did not reply. He was as tense, as watchful, as a hunting leopard.

“Come, I would not pry!” protested Colonel Howard, and meant it. “But I dare suppose,” he added casually, “you have at least once met with the devil?”

Fenton, staring back at him, felt the first qualm in many days. Involuntarily he put up his hand to his face, shading it. Though he was permitted no razor, not even a blunt knife to cut meat (which enraged him, because of his secret determination), each day he was shaved by the Governor’s own barber.

“Never fear betrayal from me!” said Colonel Howard. His voice grew soft again. “Though, since with you all men’s credit is stabbed, you’ll not believe me.” He mused. “Now I have never met with the devil. But I am sensible he exists, and walks the earth, and might appear beside us at any moment.”

Fenton merely smiled, as though at a modest pleasantry.

“You said,” he answered politely, “that you brought news for me?”

“True, true.” Colonel Howard glanced quickly round, and rose to his feet with an air of haste. “Let us go apart to the window.”

The old arrow slits had been fashioned into windows in Tudor times. They were still small, and heavily barred. Colonel Howard beckoned Fenton towards a window facing west, above a moat stagnant and malodorous because it did not join the river. A causeway crossed the moat to the Byward Tower; and beyond rose the babble of the crowd round the menagerie house.

“Now do you forget the devil,” said Colonel Howard in a very low tone. He snapped his fingers, as though flicking out the devil like a bird over the ill-smelling moat. “I bring you word, privately, from Sir Robert himself. Very late this night you will have a visitor.”

“Indeed?” Fenton’s heart quickened. “What visitor?”

“A lady. Or perhaps say only a woman. Her name or quality I know not.”

“A woman?”

“S-ss-t! There is a window close to the door giving on the sentry walk, and, outside, a warder fire-consumed with curiosity.”

“Nay, but this visitor! Inside the Tower? After the drums beat the tattoo?”

“I can but tell you what I was told,” said Colonel Howard. A breeze stirred his grey periwig. Lightly he touched his moustaches and pointed beard, more brown than grey; a thin amusement gleamed in his eyes and died. “Sir Robert knows little more, or so I think. Yet this piece of gullery (you espy?) could have been managed only by someone in high place and command.”

Beyond the moat, not far away, a mountebank was amusing the crowd by playing two flutes at once, with a flute stuck in each corner of his mouth. Many persons hurried to him, away from a parson who had been preaching a sermon beside the gallows on Tower Hill. The parson was waving his arms and seemed to be calling down wrath.

“But what is this woman’s errand?” demanded Fenton. “I can’t imagine,” he added dryly, “that mine host of this good inn will even provide a wench for my comfort.”

“No. That goes too far.” Then Colonel Howard’s tone changed. “I am instructed to say only that she will bring you a message of great import. You will listen, and obey her. She is trustworthy—”

“Indeed.”

“—and in your interest. That is all.” Colonel Howard dropped his half-whisper and spoke in a normal tone. “Now would you hear news of a friend you but recently mentioned; and who, I hear, laboured mightily for you in a certain cause? Mr. Jonathan Reeve?”

“Mr. Reeve!” said Fenton, gripping the bars of the window. His warmth of eagerness was apparent. “What news have you of him?”

“He hath been rewarded, Sir Nicholas. Precisely as once you desired.”

“Oh? And by whom?”

“By His Majesty the King.”

“Your pardon, Colonel Howard. But I beg leave to doubt that.”

“Have a care, Sir Nicholas,” his companion said softly. “I can pardon much, conjecturing as I do that you have fought the devil and won your soul …”

On the iron bars Fenton’s hands tightened and wrenched.

“… yet still I hold the King’s commission; and I am Deputy Governor of the Tower.”

Fenton spun round from the window.

“Now how you terrify me!” he said pleasantly. “A fortnight gone, I was sick and much ashamed. In candour, I would now administer a dose of the same physick to someone else. Summon your guards, good sir. Let us see what a man may do against them with a table leg or a chair.”

Colonel Howard was not even listening.

“‘Hunc igitur terrorem animi, tenebrasque necessest—’” he muttered; then he paused suddenly and looked up. “Then you would not hear how your good and steadfast friend came at last to his reward?”

Fenton hesitated, looked at the floor, and nodded. Colonel Howard went back to the chair by the table, where he sat down and took up a copy of Juvenal’s satires.

“I was myself a witness,” he said, touching the book as though idly. “Though I go but seldom from the Tower, I was dispatched two days gone with a communication from Sir Robert to His Majesty’s self. The King, with some others, did play at pêle-méle in the Mall below the green terraces and in the Park. Mightily they smote the ball, shouting like schoolboys, amid the yellow dust.”

Colonel Howard turned the book over in his hands.

“Presently,” he went on, “the King made a sign, as one who cries stop. The dust settled down. The mallets were put by. I saw this Jonathan Reeve approaching, on his swollen gouty legs, and on the arm of my Lord Danby.

“He did not know what was in store for him. But you conceive how he looked? All in patched black, with his great belly and his old sword, and his countenance like a soiled archbishop’s in the long white hair? So he limped straight to the King, very proudly until he was there. Whereat, in a thing not seen in public these many years, he went down on one gouty knee, and bent his white head low.

“One or two there were who would have smiled; but that the King looked at them, and they ceased. His Majesty’s self, with the dust on his coat and periwig, seemed embarrassed. Yet, when I did glance again, he seemed like unto his father.

“‘Nay, I am not knighting you,’ said he. And then his great voice was like a drum. ‘But rise up, Earl of Lowestoft, Viscount Stowe, and take your rightful place among men. The return of your title and estates is but a poor repayment to one among many.’

“And this Jonathan Reeve, Earl of Lowestoft, whispered but one word, which was, ‘Sire!’ All crowded about him, that they might set him upon his feet and speak civilly to him. And yet, scarce a quarter-hour after his great happiness, Jonathan Reeve was dead.”

Colonel Howard paused. Juggling with the volume of Juvenal’s satires, he threw it on the table with a slap which roused the half-hypnotized Fenton.

“Dead?” repeated Fenton, raising a hand to his eyes.

“Truly.”

“But how?”

“Come, the man was eighty.” Colonel Howard spoke carelessly. “Such honours, after decades of poverty and jeers, overcame him. In the King’s own coach, on the way home to some blowsy tavern in Red Lion Fields, he seemed to drowse until the coachman heard a weak cry of, ‘God for King Charles!’ And so he died.”

Fenton went slowly across to the improvised wooden bunk with the straw mattress. He sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands.

“It occurs to me too, though perhaps to no purpose,” mused Colonel Howard, “that you have another good friend. You name him Giles Collins. Nay; don’t start up! He is safe enough. But are you sensible of who he really is?”

“Why,” said Fenton, pressing his hands to his temples, “I recollect Giles did once ask me the same question, when we were at swordplay practice. Did my father never tell me who he was? Or something of like meaning.”

“Heard you ever,” asked Colonel Howard, “of Woodstock Palace?”

Fenton sat up straight.

“In October of the year ’49,” his companion continued slowly, “some eight or nine months after the murder of King Charles the First, a group of Roundhead Commissioners went down to Woodstock Palace. Their work was to dilapidate or destroy. And yet, by November 2nd, they were driven forth in terror by what seemed (I say seemed) the antics of evil spirits.”

Fenton uttered an exclamation. He remembered the incident now.

“Ah!” murmured Colonel Howard, giving him a sideways glance. “Then I need not recount the Roundhead Commissioners’ unhappy experiences, which they drew up in a solemn statement as comical as any play by Mr. Shadwell. There were in truth no enorm spectres to drench them with foul water, kick over their candles, fly away with their breeches, fire cannon, set great logs a-rolling in locked-up bedchambers.

“The author of all the mischief was their pious scrivener-clerk­, a concealed Royalist. With two confederates, a trap door, some chymical salts and gunpowder, he had made a blue flame rise even from the pot-de-chambre. He called himself Giles Sharp. His true name was Joseph Collins, sometimes called Funny Joe, and all the countryside round Oxford still honours him.

“He was also a gentleman,” said Colonel Howard, “first swordsman of Sir Thomas Draycott’s troop of horse at Worcester fight in ’50! Yet, being poor, he took menial service with the valiant. Can you put me together that man’s two names?”

“Oh, without doubt,” answered Fenton, gripping the sides of the wooden bed. “Giles Collins, who in my hearing hath played both Puritan clerk and Funny Joe, can distinguish between good and evil spirits.”

Again Colonel Howard gave him a swift glance. Fenton’s eyes were shining, but not with enjoyment.

“Pray let me tell you,” said Fenton, “what those Roundhead Commissioners had done. They would besmirch all that belonged to King Charles the First. His bedchamber they used for a kitchen, his dining room for a woodyard. They smashed the stained-glass windows, mutilated the statues, knifed the great paintings.” His voice deepened. “All that was of beauty, all that was of dignity and grace …”

Fenton stopped abruptly. Colonel Howard’s long fingers tightened round the stem of a tobacco pipe and snapped the pipe in two pieces.

“Good!” cried Fenton.

“What! You call that sacrilege good?”

“Nay, you mistake me. In all our discourse together, for the first time you have shown some heart or human feelings.”

“Heart? Human feelings?” Colonel Howard was perplexed. “Upon my word, what have these to do with me? Indeed I have felt none for many years, since my wife died shrieking in the Great Fire.”

“Is it so?” demanded Fenton. “You had a wife?”

Rising up from the bed, he went to the table and clutched its edges on either side, looking down strangely on his companion.

“I also had a wife,” he added. “She too is dead. She was poisoned.”

“Poisoned?”

It was plain, by the startled look on Colonel Howard’s face, that this secret had been well kept. None of authority knew it.

“In this cell of yours,” said Fenton, breathing hard, “I have thought much and much. I can tell you who poisoned my wife. Nay, I can prove it! But I cannot do so unless I be permitted to write or communicate with my friends outside the Tower. I am allowed no visitors; not even pen and ink and paper. Why am I not allowed these?”

“I can’t tell. It is not within my orders.”

Fenton shook the table until books tumbled off and spattered face down on the floor.

“You have heard, sir, that I guess the charges brought against me. Let me add to this Tam o’ Bedlam list. Come! Did I not speak, in Spring Gardens and to a false Frenchman called Duroc, with admiration of the French? Did I not cry out, before a clot of the mobile party who attacked my house, that I might well be a Catholic? ‘Have you knowledge to foretell the future?’ said their leader. And I must reply, ‘Yes.’”

“Hum! Did you make mention,” inquired Colonel Howard, “of any pact with the devil?”

“No. But I might have done so.”

“That I can credit. But not to the least degree in anger.”

“Colonel, put by this sorry stuff of treason! In our world I desire only justice for the person who poisoned my wife. May I not send a letter, even a spoken message, from here?”

“It is not in my orders.”

“May I have speech with the Governor of the Tower?”

“Certes, Sir Nicholas, you may apply for it.”

“Which must mean,” said Fenton, bending over him, “that I’ll not get it?”

“I have no orders.”

Though not in the least afraid of the prisoner, Colonel Howard pushed back his chair, stood up, and moved behind the chair.

“I regret,” he said, “my time here is spent.” For the first time he raised his voice and called sharply. “Warder! Open me the door!”

Outside the door to the sentry walk there was a scurry and a rattle of keys.

“I have been much diverted,” remarked Colonel Howard, with a kind of maddening wistfulness, “by our discourses on history and poetry. I bear you no ill will. Remember what I have said; a woman will visit you late. Do as she shall bid.”

A heavy door lock snapped after the bars were rung back. In the quarter-opening of the door appeared the sharp, polished blade of the partisan, with the red chest of Warder Brown behind it.

“Remember!” Colonel Howard said for the second time. When he raised one finger, he was uncannily like Charles the First on the scaffold. “You have less time than you think.”

The door closed, and was locked and barred once more, as the Deputy Governor left him. Fenton stood staring at the door, his hopes gone as though he had swallowed moat water. Throughout a fortnight, never speaking of himself, he had tried to gain the confidence of Colonel Howard.

He went back to the improvised bed and sat down.

His gaze travelled round the hot room, which was not overclean despite its size, past a pile of his clothes on the floor. In the wall opposite him there was a second door, also locked and heavily barred. Outside the door there was a winding stair in the wall; Fenton’s fancy followed it down to the room below, always full of warders and on its walls the heavy muskets of the military.

As Fenton’s consciousness opened again, the noises from outside rolled over him. He could even hear from below—on the path under the arch which led to the other side of the Middle Tower—the trampling and merriment of visitors, who might see the sights if they were escorted by a warder.

From the menagerie a hyena coughed and barked. The long afternoon light, smoke-darkened, drew towards evening amid grey stones. The crowds must go soon. Apparently the flute player had already gone. But three other mountebanks, with fiddles and fury, struck up a tune which made Fenton raise his head quickly. “There’s a tyrant known as MOB, sir, in this town of soot and mud, Sitting green-faced by the hob, sir, with his hands imbrued in blood …”

It was no great coincidence, since everywhere in the City they now sang it. But the old Earl of Lowestoft was dead.

Let him sleep well. For Lydia, who was always with Fenton in imagination, returned to soothe him now. As a rule he saw her as he had seen her on that last night at the dinner, amid silver and wax lights, while Mr. Reeve made the cittern tinkle softly to Ben Jonson’s old love song.

He knew he saw Lydia only in fancy, else he would have come to madness. But Lydia sat in the chair lately occupied by Colonel Howard. Lydia’s blue eyes were open and eager, but sorrowful. A light was about her brown hair. Her half-parted lips made attempt to smile. Her hands were clasped together, arms a little raised towards him.

And Fenton spoke to her aloud.

“Wait for me; you’ll remember that?” he asked. “This day’s work was bitter, when I would persuade the Deputy Governor, but failed. No matter! I am not yet defeated. Since I know the name of the poisoner …”

Fenton paused, regretting his words. Lydia, despite what seemed a frantic attempt to touch his hand, fled from him at that word “poisoner,” as she would have fled in life. His mind would not allow him to see her when he thought of poison.

But the poisoner, of course, was Kitty Softcover, his former cook.

Kitty, the Alsatian bawd, must be very much alive. Nevertheless Fenton pictured her as standing near him: small, grubbily clad, with her fine red hair and her fine white skin, but with bad teeth and greedy eyes. Her eyes darted everywhere for diamonds, for emeralds.

“My good slut,” said Fenton, “it was you I suspected from the first, and spoke my mind to Giles. I found in the lock of the front door the soap traces of the mould you took for a key. Immediately I ordered a bar to be put up inside that door. But someone forgot it. As I saw myself, when Captain O’Callaghan took me in arrest, there was no bar inside that door.”

It was as though Kitty lifted her upper lip, hating and yet writhing to cozen him.

“But where, good slut, could you have found another great heap of arsenic to poison my lady? Only here in the Tower did I call to mind the shop of William Wynnel, the apothecary, in Dead Man’s Lane. And the occasion upon which I went there with Lord George Harwell.”

In fancy the figure of Kitty laughed at him.

“I gave you good character,” said Fenton. “I said naught was amiss. Even when George must fall a-ranting with talk of murder, I bade him be silent and confirmed my words by guineas in the apothecary’s hand. You sought him first (I vow?) since ’twas plain the old man doted on you? Had you returned, he would have given you as much more poison as you wished.

“Upon that I lay my wager, little claw-hand. You hated me; you hated my wife. Did you not poison a bowl of sack posset before my eyes, with arsenic in sugar? On the night of June 10th you crept into my house. Didst come to steal? You remained to kill. My friends have but to seize Master Wynnel, choking truth from him; and we hold you fast for the law.”

But Kitty had vanished, because Fenton’s thoughts faltered.

He passed a hand over his damp forehead. The fiddlers were silent, their tune ended. Fenton, drawing himself back on the side of the bed, rested his back against the wall.

The intense heat was fading, though there remained the ill odour of the western moat. Fenton let his head fall forwards, again attempting to think. …

Almost immediately, or so it seemed, a voice in his brain seemed to cry out. “Take care, take care, take care!” it noiselessly keened.

Fenton sat up straight, with a twist of pain in his cramped shoulders. Momentarily he thought he was in pitch-darkness. Then, as he blinked his eyes open, he saw that the stone room was deathly clear in all its outlines from the light of a full moon through barred windows.

Admittedly he had been asleep, as though storing up energies for some combat. In all the rabbit warren of the Tower there seemed no sound, not even a whisper, except the faint lapping of water below.

In that quiet there was the emptiness and even skin-crawl of a late hour, perhaps even in the morning. He had not heard the steady tramp-tramp-tramp along the path below, and the ceremony of the keys as the portcullis was lowered at the Byward Tower. He had heard no roll of drums from the parade ground. Nothing.

With a quietness he could not explain even to himself, Fenton edged forward and stood up. He walked on tiptoe, moving round and round as though some enemy might lurk in a shadow.

(“Take care! Take care! Take care!”)

There were three windows: westwards, southwards over the river, and northeastwards near the sentry walk of the battlements. The air was chilly now. Moving soundlessly, Fenton stole over to the northeastwards window.

The sentry walk was just beyond his line of vision however he tried to look, as it was meant to be. He could see the path below, but no firefly lanthorn bobbed in a sentry’s hand. He could see the Bell Tower at the angle of the inner ballium wall, then the inner battlements set in a line towards the Bloody Tower and the Wakefield Tower, where the Governor had his lodgings.

Unearthly moonlight darkened the old stones to blackness, but set among them glimmers of white. Even the ravens must be asleep in the trees on Tower Green. Rearing above all was the square shape of Julius Caesar’s Tower, grey-white, dead, as though dead since a dust age when above its pinnacles flew the red-leopard banner of Normandy.

Fenton shivered. Softly, again without noise, he stole back to the southern window above the river. Even the Thames seemed empty, except for a few craft moored against the Surrey shore across the river, some three hundred yards away. One larger ship, a square-rigger in shadow, carried two green-glowing lanthorns from her mainmast yard. Now Fenton could hear the hiss of white water under the wharf and against the wall. But nothing else.

Stop! There was another sound.

Someone, very softly, was moving along the sentry walk towards the door.