CHAPTER XXII

THE WOMAN AT MIDNIGHT:
A NAME IS PUT TO THE POISONER

ON FENTON’S TABLE there was a great trencher of food and a bottle of wine, evidently left for him while he slept; the food as cold as charity. He picked up the heavy chair, weighed it in his hands, and decided it would do as a weapon.

Tiptoeing across to half-shadow beyond the western window, he held the chair at his side, and waited.

Someone, with determination to make no noise, slowly eased back one bar with a grinding slur of iron. Then the second bar outside the door began to move.

“Gently!” thought Fenton, and quivered with eagerness as he gripped the chair.

His first notion had been secret assassination. And yet, though he had been shut irrevocably into the past, it was the reign of Charles the Second, not that of Richard the Third. No longer did the rack creak, with a snap of joints torn from their sockets, as some wretch screamed in the dungeons below Julius Caesar’s Tower. No black-clad men, faces dark except for teeth, crawled up the death-narrow stairs of the Bloody Tower.

The bar on the door went back. A large key rattled in the lock; when it turned, even slowly, the lock snapped like the hammer of an empty musket.

Briefly he saw a vertical line of moonlight shine and vanish as the door opened and closed. He could hear his visitor breathe. And the visitor was a woman, in a long black cloak with a round hood edged in fine lace.

Fenton loosened his grip on the chair and set it down. He should have anticipated this, and guessed who she might have been.

It was Meg York, yet a Meg in some subtle way altered: perhaps by moonlight. Putting down the key on the table, she threw back the hood of the cloak. Her hair, dressed in a new style, fell in long black curls about her shoulders. And her face, with no touch of hardness or irony, was the face of Mary Grenville.

Fenton went cold, because this must be a mask. Meg kept one hand inside her cloak, as though holding a weapon. His hands moved again to the chair, watchfully. She at least was flesh and blood.

Without sound she swept towards Fenton, and stopped close to him. In horrible grotesque, to his eyes, as a mask of flesh, her face seemed warm with pity and sympathy. She spoke in a voice just above a whisper.

“You can have no fondness for me, I know,” she said. “Yet you must do as I bid, for I am here to aid you.”

Fenton merely looked at her.

“I tell you,” cried Meg in a whispery voice, and stamped her foot audibly on the floor, “you must make haste! You have not a night, not an hour, to lose; else you will die. I swear this!”

“Come, I think not. They hold me on a charge of treason, I grant …”

“But—!”

“But, in consideration of Sir Nick’s high name and place, and also as sitting in Parliament, they cannot fling me into Newgate as a felon. They must bring against me a Bill of Attainder in the House of Commons. Parliament will not be convoked, my sweet, until the year ’77.”

“If you make not your escape within this hour,” said Meg, “all hope is gone.” Meg yearned towards him. “Can you not intrust me?”

Though Fenton did not laugh, his jaws and lips went through the movement of it.

“Again?” he asked politely.

Meg closed her eyes, pressing one hand over her face, as though with fierce effort she would draw to herself some mighty power.

“Am I again fallen in love with my winding sheet,” said Fenton, “that I should intrust your warmth and your desire? What are you but a succubus of the underworld, whose true touch is as cold as ice? And where is your master?”

“My …?”

“I refer to the devil. Surely he must be near us. Stay, I have a new notion: summon him up, my pet! I would have audience with him for the third time, and defeat him as I did before!”

Meg, now shaken by deadly terror, glanced everywhere about her and all but fell on her knees.

“Stop!” she whispered. “You must not say those words! I beg it!”

“Why, then,” and Fenton smiled like a death’s head, “is he so very near us?”

“He is far and far away. He hath forgotten you. He thinks no more on you than on thousands of life in a drop of water. He did promise …”

“Promise?”

“Promise me,” said Meg, “that he would trouble you no more, since he knoweth history must run out its sands. But if you do call him, or say that you defeated him—”

“Let him catch a pox in his own domain,” said Fenton, “for I did at least half-defeat him. True, his gibes and wrath drove me in fear from the house, while you sat half-naked on a couch and hated me that I did yield. But my fear was fear for Lydia. It was history won; not the devil. You heard your master own that I kept my soul, which so enraged him. That was the victory. ‘For what shall it profit …?’”

“Stop! Stop! Stop!”

But it was Meg herself who stifled her own muttering tone.

“What was that noise?” she asked, turning her head from one side to the other.

Fenton had heard it too, though only the moonlight seemed real.

“I think,” he said, “that the lions out there, or it may be other beasts, are restless. I have heard them before. Or perhaps they scent your presence, great and small cats alike.”

“Call me what you please,” said Meg. “Yet at heart I am Mary Grenville, as you are Nicholas Fenton of Cambridge. I, who followed you back into the past, cannot but love you. I’ll not see you die.” Again Meg pressed one hand to her face. “Nay, now are all my wits scattered! But, if I offer proof of good intent as well, will you hear me?”

She moved closer. Unnervingly, Meg raised clear grey eyes (or so it seemed), untouched by craft or elusiveness.

“I … I will hear you.”

“Well! Is not the door of your prison cell unlocked?” Meg threw out her free left hand to point. “You are a far stronger swimmer than I, though I was accounted good when in dim days we swam together at Richmond. Jump from the battlements, swim beneath the wharf, and you are free!”

“Free? To go … where?”

“Have you glanced this night from the southern window of your cell?”

“I have.”

“Then did you mark a great ship against the opposite bank? With two green lanthorns at the … at the … nay, I cannot remember men’s names for these things!”

“No matter; I marked the ship. What do you say of it?”

“It is his Majesty’s line-of-battle ship Prince Rupert,” said Meg, “carrying forty, sixty: foh, I forget the number of guns. It was ordered there for your sake. You have but to swim three hundred yards and be safe. The ship will convey you to any port in France you shall choose.”

Fenton stared at her. He began to speak, but Meg darted the palm of her hand across his mouth.

“More!” she told him, and her voice throbbed. “This night all warders and military in the Middle Tower, as also in St. Thomas’s Tower at the end of the sentry walk, are summoned to a great drunken banquet at the Governor’s lodgings in the Wakefield Tower. They are there now, behind muffled windows at a whim of the Governor. This secret is intrusted only to him, and in part to Colonel Howard. Unless some sentry should descry you, the way is cleared!”

“I am fascinated,” declared Fenton, without expression. “Now who hath ordered here a line-of-battle ship, for my poor sake, and also made the Governor of the Tower corrupt his duty?”

“The King himself.”

After speaking those three words, Meg shrank back before Fenton’s cold, courteous smile.

“Why, then,” and he laughed, “the King plays a most confounded­ game against himself. With one hand he claps me into the Tower; with the other he builds a perplexed structure to get me out. Would it not have been more simple merely to release me?”

“No! No! Oh, you would rather toy with words than deal in sense! You have had audience with the King, I think?”

“True.”

“Then you are sensible he will not allow his hand to appear publicly in any measure? Any measure! And my Lord Shaftesbury is returned to town since more than a fortnight? Dear fool, the King did not put you into the Tower to harm you. He did this to save you!”

“Save …” Fenton paused. “Almost you persuadeth me,” he said.

“Dear heart,” said Meg, startling him, and with her eyes darkening in all her strength of appeal, “I had hoped you’d intrust me. I was stupid. Would you have proof now?”

“Yes!”

Meg’s left hand darted inside her cloak, where it was plain she held some weapon. Instantly Fenton swung upwards the heavy chair, to crush her head if she struck with dagger or sword. Then the chair wavered and wobbled in his hands.

What Meg held out to him, though still keeping something back, was a folded sheet of heavy paper. Fenton, torn between half-belief and a cold disbelief, lowered the chair.

“Once before,” whispered Meg, with a shaken smile, “you all but killed me with a chair in my bedchamber at your house. And I, for my jealousy, would have slain you with a dagger. No matter.” She shook the paper. “There’s light enough to read what is writ here.”

He took the paper hastily to the white radiance through the western window. Though there was no signature, unmistakably it was the handwriting of the King.

“‘Sir N.F.,’” Fenton read aloud. “‘You might have intrusted me. In candour, you are too useful to me to fall into the hands of my Lord S. Also I owe you something for deceiving you, as I was deceived and much wroth when I learned it, as to the false charge (against) your wife. M.Y. will tell you of a great villain. Obey her. You may return soon. Destroy this letter.’”

Fenton lowered his head.

Slowly he tore the letter into very small pieces, letting them go through the bars and float out over the moat. He had several times to clear his throat before he spoke.

“Meg, I do not understand all this. In some fashion I am gathered into a dance of statecraft, like a small puppet in a raree show. But you are in the right of it. I must go.”

Meg, with tears trickling down her cheeks, put her hand again inside the cloak. What she held out to him was his Clemens Hornn sword, in the old shagreen-covered scabbard, with the thin chains tinkling to the swordbelt.

“Meg!”

Fenton drew a deep breath. As he buckled the sword belt round him, he felt such exhilaration as he had never known. He took two long strides towards that unlocked door, bumping into the table amid shadow bars on the floor. But he hesitated, and returned to Meg.

“My dear, I must deal fairly with you,” he said. “I will make escape, yes. But—but I have no intent to swim to the warship.”

Meg’s eyes widened. Her expression had become one of sheer horror.

“No!” she cried aloud, so that the sound rang and echoed in the stone drum. Fenton wondered whether some invisible sentry had heard it. Meg clasped her hands round his arms.

“You must not!” she whispered. “You cannot! Else you will undo all!”

“Meg, hear me. My first design, when they brought me here, was to dispatch letters to Giles or even George Harwell. I would have shewn the poisoner of Lydia: Meg, this poisoner was Kitty Softcover; no other! Having done that, I would find some weapon; fly at my guards; die in fair fight. Thus to … well, to be with Lydia. What else have I?”

Violently Meg shook at his arms in the cambric shirt, but she could not move them.

“No! No! No!”

“But now,” whispered Fenton, “I have a sword. I can make escape, prove the guilt of the Alsatian bawd, and taunt a dozen Green Ribbon swordsmen into fight for my own end. ’Tis writ in Giles’s manuscript that I shall not die until 1714. Out upon it! The document hath told me nothing, nothing. I think it is a forgery or else a hoax.”

“It is,” replied Meg, shocking him despite his own words.

But this was swept away. “Tell me,” said Meg, in so strange and intense a tone that he faltered, “tell me, by any oath! Have I proved my good faith? Have I?”

“Why … who could deny it?”

Releasing his arms, Meg ran to the westwards window. Strangely, he heard no noise of silken or satin petticoats in that hush. Meg seemed to study the position of the moon, and wrung her hands. But she ran back to him.

“The hour is going, and your life with it. But there is still time left. If I tell you all, you will seek the warship and not swim to land.” Meg’s eyes, greyish-black now, held him motionless. “I loathe to tell you all. But I must.”

“All?”

“Listen well, and give fair answer. When did last you see me?”

“I have told you. I … well, you sat half-naked and hated me because I fled from the devil.”

“On that night,” said Meg, “there was within me all spite and horridness. And this because I feared the closeness of … of …”

“Your master?”

Her whisper, though close to him, was so faint he scarcely heard it.

“I’ll not call him master,” she said, “when you are here. Have you no notion why I am come to the Tower? I would renounce him. I would renounce him, since—” Tears blurred her eyes as she looked at him. “Nay, no matter.”

“Can you renounce him?”

“I know not. I can but try.” Meg’s sharp fingernails wrenched at her breast above the gown inside her cloak. “You forget what aforetime was my faith. If I be received back, whatever my penance, he cannot touch that faith. For against it the gates of hell shall not prevail.”

Meg lowered her head, so that the glossy curls trembled against her cheeks. But she looked up, quickly, urgently, and spoke again in that ghost of a voice.

“And yet I am still his creature. If his great eye and ear should not now be turned to other inchantments far away, as once he watched you like a toy, his hand would stretch from the end of the earth to …”

“Let him try,” said Fenton.

“No! Think not on’t! Would you have me hurt and at torture?”

“Now God forbid!” snarled Fenton, and pressed his arm round her.

“Stay, my wits are all addled again. ’Tis you I must persuade. You saw me last, then, on that loathesome night in Love Lane. But I saw you …”

“When?”

“At your own house, on the night you were taken as prisoner by the dragoon captain. I bit my lips in blood to observe how ill were you. I saw you fling away, with contempt, the ring His Majesty had given you.”

“Meg, how were you acquainted with this knowledge? That I had received such a ring?” Fenton paused suddenly. “Was it knowledge from the dev … from him?”

Meg nodded.

“On that foul night in Love Lane, when you had gone, he told me all your thoughts; what was to happen to you, then and in future. Before the relation of all this, he … but that’s of no account.” Meg shuddered. “Dear heart, I can prophesy the future.”

“You know what is destined to befall me?”

“Yes. It is not pleasant. At last do you glimpse my purpose? I would aid you to change history, for your sake, as you yourself made high attempt to do.”

“And failed.” Fenton merely pressed Meg more closely to him with his right arm. His voice was steady. “Continue your relation. You saw me fling away King Charles’s ring …?”

“True. The servants being much preoccupied with Mrs. Pamphlin, by roguery I stole the ring from the floor and went forth with it. Next morning I was at Whitehall, desiring audience with His Majesty.”

Fenton, despite unimagined dangers closing round him like a ring of partisan blades, felt only a piercing of jealousy.

“I dare suppose,” he said, “as in so many romances, the King immediately fell captive to your charms? And did your bidding?”

“Nay, ’twas no such thing,” replied Meg, with a faint touch of injury or even anger. “For days I could gain no audience; and for shame’s sake durst not pluck at his sleeve when he walked each morning in the Park to set his watch by the sundial. At length, becoming desperate, I did force and wheedle my way into his very council chamber.”

“And then?”

“Why, there he sat, with only two or three gentlemen about him, at the end of the council table, signing a great store of papers. His eye did kindle when he saw me, to be sure; and he dismissed the others. Yet he said but: ‘Madam, a looking glass will shew you how much I regret my lack of leisure. What is your errand?’

“Whereat I recounted as much as was necessary, indicating I was aware of as much as he knew himself. ‘I am sensible,’ said I, ‘that you condemned Sir Nick Fenton to the Tower to safeguard his life; since,’ said I, ‘you know my Lord Shaftesbury is returned to town. And your spies tell you that my lord hath a great and evil design against Sir Nick.’”

Fenton spoke huskily.

“What design?” he demanded. “What design of my Lord Shaftesbury?”

“His Majesty,” Meg rushed on, with her hair against Fenton’s cheek, but without putting her arms around him, “His Majesty was amazed when I spoke thus. Yet he concealed it as well as might be. I can see him yet, with his black face and blacker periwig, knees crossed, eyes all a-studying you without seeming so, and the sun on painted windows …”

“Meg! Hold your clack! What is the design?”

He felt a shiver through Meg’s whole body.

“But the King was in pliant mood, having discovered by questioning that the charges against Lydia were baseless.” On ran Meg in frantic whisper. “You no longer believe, I hope, that Lydia ‘lured’ you into Spring Gardens?”

“Meg, for God’s sake!”

“When I myself informed you that Lydia, at the dressmaker’s, spoke of Spring Gardens in a loud aside for anyone to hear? More! There was a great villain, as the King said, who pretended to have seen a letter from Lydia; and there was none such letter. Have you heard his name?”

The quick question took Fenton off balance.

“I have heard of the man and the nonexisting letter,” he said. “Giles spoke of it, but would not tell the man’s name. Who was he?”

“A man who thought you had shamed him before the Green Ribbon lords. When he was free of his leg injury (which was soon, as he said in Spring Gardens), he did slink away and offer his service to Whitehall. Being discovered in this cheat of the letter, he is now returned to the Green …”

“Not Captain Duroc?”

“My—my aforetime protector. Captain Duroc.”

Over Fenton went such a pressure of rage that it seemed to him he could hardly draw breath. His left hand dropped to the sword pommel at his side. In fancy he saw the very tall figure, all in white, mouthing at him with Duroc’s suave sneer.

“Thus I persuaded His Majesty,” Meg’s voice was louder, if no less rapid, “that he must dispatch a ship, any ship, to bear you hence. This day I had but to walk into the Tower, ogled killingly by a warder at my side, and seek refuge with Colonel Howard until—”

Without warning Meg went limp, and would have fallen if he had not caught her.

“Nay,” she whispered, gasping but steady again, “I can no longer prattle this idle talk! I must tell you of my Lord Shaftesbury’s design. Well! he plans to use …”

Meg stopped short.

The roar of a lion, shaking silence like a physical force, burst up in rumbling tremors from the menagerie house. Another lion answered, then a third and a fourth. Squalls, snarls, ran snakily beneath.

Both Meg and Fenton stood motionless. An upriver breeze, freshing off the Thames, stirred through the cell and set rustling the trees on Tower Green. But across the upper part of the northeastern window flashed a faint line of yellow light.

Fenton ran to the window. From an upper window in Wakefield Tower, undoubtedly the room where the Governor held warders and Foot Guards at banquet, a heavy muffling curtain had been drawn back so that the light pierced out. Someone’s shadow appeared there. Since it was not a hundred yards away, the voice carried clearly in breeze and night hush.

“Ecod!” roared the voice of a Foot Guards officer, shouting as men will when uplifted in strong waters. “King Charles hath a good voice this night!”

“King Charles?” blurted Meg, at Fenton’s side.

“Gently! Have no fear!” said Fenton, though his flesh crawled hot and cold. “The largest lion in the menagerie is named always for the reigning monarch.”

The lion roared again.

“Stab my belly,” yelled another voice from the window of the Wakefield Tower, “but too long we’ve abused Sir Robert’s hospitality. It must be the quarter-hour to midnight.”

A bellowing chorus denied this, like the sounds from the menagerie.

“Bear up, friend, and here’s a last bumper to a cursed good war!”

“Ah bah lays fransay!” thundered the Foot Guards officer, evidently thinking he spoke a foreign language. “Eh, though, where’s our guest? Ecod, he’s under the table; else ecod he’s vanished like Lady Jane’s ghost!”

Meg whispered frantically at Fenton’s ear:

“Sir Robert, being a sober man, cannot hold them past midnight. Else he will be suspect when you are found escaped. You …”

The breeze had strengthened through the stone room. And the heavy door to the sentry walk, its latch imperfectly caught when Meg closed it, blew open and crashed against the round wall with a noise like a culverin shot.

From the Wakefield Tower, now crowded with figures, there was sudden dead silence.

Fenton hurried to the cell door. Outside he could see part of the sentry walk, the breast-high battlements with their openings waist high. He could feel the free wind in his face and hear the seething of the water below. Two strides, a leap, and …

“God’s beard! What’s amiss at the Middle Tower?”

“Middle Tower? ’Tis the keepers a-clapping-to their doors at the beasts’ den!”

And what, thought Fenton, would happen to Meg if he left her? Deliberately he shut the door and turned back to her.

High up on Tower Green moved the lanthorn of a sentry.

“Lord Shaftesbury’s design?” asked Fenton, breathing hard. “Or be more short! What death hath history in store for me?”

Meg’s knees shook like her lips. She must grasp the bars of the window.

“Either you will be cut down in making escape from here,” she said, “or else …”

“Come, there can’t be two deaths!”

“You—you are familiar with the devil’s diverting humorousness,” Meg faltered. “’Tis one or the other, and you must change history and turn away both! For the devil would not tell me which.”

“What’s the other death? Speak short!”

“Oh, God help me!” cried the penitent.

“Meg!”

“You will be pelted with stones and filth, half-dead as you sit on your coffin in the cart from Newgate to Tyburn; and at Tyburn, amid more showers of stones, you will strangle slowly from the high gallows! Now do you see why you must haste to the ship?”

“No!”

“Kitty Softcover, the cook-wench, was in your house on the night when Lydia died. True, true, even as you have thought! But this cook-wench did not poison Lydia!”

“Not … Then who did?”

“You poisoned her,” gasped Meg. “It is Kitty Softcover who hath denounced you to the magistrate and to my Lord Shaftesbury.”