Rafael Sabatini

“ Why should a Roman priest support the claim of a prince to the throne of a country devoted to the Greek faith?
At last all was clear indeed to Boris. Rome was at the bottom of this business, whose true aim was the Romanization of Russia; and Sigismund had fetched Rome into it, had set Rome on. Himself an elected King of Poland, Sigismund may have seen in the ambitious son of Stephen Bathory one who might perhaps supplant him on the Polish throne. To divert his ambition into another channel he had fathered—if he had not invented—this fiction that the pretender was the dead Demetrius. ”

“ The other was tall and lean, stooping slightly at the shoulders, haggard and pale of countenance, with deep-set, luminous dark eyes, and a tender, wistful mouth. This was the Queen’s confessor, Frey Tomas de Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor of Castile. He approached her, leaving Ojeda in the background, and stood a moment regarding her with eyes of infinite kindliness and compassion.
“You are the daughter of that misguided man, Diego de Susan,” he said, in a gentle voice. “God help and strengthen you, my child, against the trials that may be in store for you. What do you seek at our poor hands? ”

“ You have exasperated her Majesty; you have driven her in despair to seek and act upon the councils of this scoundrel Concini. There never was an attachment of yours that did not beget trouble with the Queen, but never such trouble as I have been foreseeing from your attachment to the Princess of Conde. Sire, will you not consider where you stand?”
“They are lies, I tell you,” Henry stormed. But Sully the uncompromising gravely shook his head. “At least,” Henry amended, “they are gross exaggerations. Oh, I confess to you, my friend, that I am sick with love of her. ”

“ And then Frey Miguel sucked in his breath sharply. “My God!” he cried, and set a hand upon the fellow’s shoulder, looking deeply into those bold, grey eyes. “What make you here?”
“I am a pastry-cook.”
“A pastry-cook? You?”
“One must live, and it is a more honest trade than most. I was in Valladolid, when I heard that your paternity was the Vicar of the Convent here, and so for the sake of old times—of happier times—I bethought me that I might claim your paternity’s support.” He spoke with a careless arrogance, half-tinged with mockery. ”

“ That afternoon the faithful Captain King, sorely afflicted by the news, came to visit his master, and was introduced to Sir Walter’s chamber by Manourie, who was in attendance upon him. To the seaman’s amazement he found Sir Walter sitting up in bed, surveying in a hand-mirror a face that was horrible beyond description with the complacent smile of one who takes satisfaction in his appearance. Yet there was no fevered madness in the smiling eyes. They were alive with intelligence, amounting, indeed, to craft. ”

“ Yet she contrived to answer him with the proper icy dignity due to her position as a princess of Spain, now Queen of France.
“Monsieur, you forget yourself. The Queen of France does not listen to such words. You are mad, I think.”
“Yes, I am mad,” he flung back. “Mad with love—so mad that I have forgot that you are a queen and I an ambassador. Under the ambassador there is a man, under the queen a woman—our real selves, not the titles with which Fate seeks to dissemble our true natures. ”

“ It was in the thought that the nobility of Poland was flocking to the house of Wisniowiecki to do honour to this false son of Ivan the Terrible, that Boris found the chief cause of uneasiness. There was famine in Moscow, and empty bellies do not make for loyalty. Then, too, the Muscovite nobles did not love him. He had ruled too sternly, and had curbed their power. There were men like Basil Shuiski who knew too much—greedy, ambitious men, who might turn their knowledge to evil account. The moment might be propitious to the pretender, however false his claim. ”

“ He must have known that if danger of assassination threatened him from any quarter it was most to be feared from those whose influence with the Queen was almost such as to give them a control over her—the Concinis and their unavowed but obvious ally the Duke of Epernon. If he were dead, and the Queen so left that she could be made absolute regent during the Dauphin’s minority, it was those adventurers who would become through her the true rulers of France, and so enrich themselves and gratify to the full their covetous ambitions. ”

“ The Queen herself, however, overwrought by the events, and perhaps conscience-stricken by the tragedy which in the eleventh hour she had sought to avert, burst into tears at sight of Sully, and brought in the Dauphin, who flung himself upon the Duke’s neck.
“My son,” the Queen addressed him, “this is Monsieur de Sully. You must love him well, for he was one of the best and most faithful servants of the King your father, and I entreat him to continue to serve you in the same manner.”
Words so fair might have convinced a man less astute that all his suspicions were unworthy. ”

“ She swayed a little; the room swam round her, she felt as she would swoon. Then blind indignation against that forsworn betrayer surged to revive her. If it was through her weakness and undutifulness that her father had been destroyed, through her strength should he be avenged, though in doing so she pulled down and destroyed herself.
“And he confessed to his own sin?” she was repeating slowly, ever on that musing, incredulous note. “He dared confess himself a Judaizer?”
“A Judaizer!” Sheer horror now overspread the friar’s grim countenance. “A Judaizer! Don Rodrigo? Oh, impossible!” ”

“ In his bath, then, sat the People’s Friend on that July evening, immersed to the hips, his head swathed in a filthy turban, his emaciated body cased in a sleeveless waistcoat. He is fifty years of age, dying of consumption and other things, so that, did Charlotte but know it, there is no need to murder him. Disease and Death have marked him for their own, and grow impatient. ”

“ Was the liberation of a kingdom, the deliverance of a nation from servitude, the happiness of a whole people, to weigh in the balance against the fates of a natural daughter of Don John of Austria and a soldier of fortune turned pastry-cook? Frey Miguel thought not, and his plot might well have succeeded but for the base strain in Espinosa and the man’s overweening vanity, which had urged him to dazzle the Gonzales at Valladolid. That vanity sustained him to the end, which he suffered in October of 1595, a full year after his arrest. ”

“ The lean, swarthy face of Frey Miguel grew pensive. He did not impatiently scorn the suggestion as she had half-feared he would.
“In Portugal,” he answered slowly, “it is firmly believed that he lives, and that one day he will come, like another Redeemer, to deliver his country from the thrall of Spain.”
“Then... then...”
Wistfully, he smiled. “A people will always believe what it wishes to believe.” ”

“ All night the revolutionary rabble, in angry grief, surged about and kept watch upon the house wherein the People’s Friend lay dead.
That night, and for two days and nights thereafter, Charlotte Corday lay in the Prison of the Abbaye, supporting with fortitude the indignities that for a woman were almost inseparable from revolutionary incarceration. She preserved throughout her imperturbable calm, based now upon a state of mind content in the contemplation of accomplished purpose, duty done. She had saved France, she believed; saved Liberty, by slaying the man who would have strangled it. ”

“ Over the mind and will of King Charles his ascendancy became even greater than it had been over that of King James; and it were easy to show that the acts of George Villiers’ life supplied the main planks of that scaffold in Whitehall whereupon Charles Stuart came to lose his head. Charles was indeed a martyr; a martyr chiefly to the reckless, insolent, irresponsible vanity of this Villiers, who, from a simple country squire with nothing but personal beauty to recommend him, had risen to be, as Duke of Buckingham, the first gentleman in England. ”

“ Stukeley combed his beard in thought. He had little comfort to offer.
“It was not expected,” said he, “that you would return.
“Not expected?” Sir Walter’s bowed white head was suddenly flung back. Indignation blazed in the eyes that age had left undimmed. “What act in all my life justified the belief I should be false to honour? My danger here was made quite plain, and Captain King would have had me steer a course for France, where I had found a welcome and a harbour. But to consent I must have been false to my Lords of Arundel and Pembroke, who were sureties to the King for my return. ”

“ Should I withhold pity who stand myself in need of pity, being a sinner—as are we all.”
“It is for my father that I come to beg your mercy.”
“So I supposed.” A shade crossed the gentle, wistful face; the tender melancholy deepened in the eyes that regarded her. “If your father is innocent of what has been alleged against him, the benign tribunal of the Holy Office will bring his innocence to light, and rejoice therein; if he is guilty, if he has strayed—as we may all stray unless fortified by heavenly grace—he shall be given the means of expiation, that his salvation may be assured him.” ”

“ He sighed, and settled down again to face the poop lights, dancing there above the invisible hull of the ship that was to carry Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, lately Lord Chancellor of England, into exile. As a dying man looks down the foreshortened vista of his active life, so may Edward Hyde—whose career had reached a finality but one degree removed from the finality of death—have reviewed in that moment those thirty years of sincere endeavour and high achievement since he had been a law student in the Temple when Charles I. was King. ”

“ Sebastian, after his defeat and escape, had made a vow upon the Holy Sepulchre to lay aside the royal dignity of which he deemed that he had proved himself unworthy, and to do penance for the pride that had brought him down, by roaming the world in humble guise, earning his bread by the labour of his hands and the sweat of his brow like any common hind, until he should have purged his offense and rendered himself worthy once more to resume the estate to which he had been born. ”

“ But will you tell me what reasons there can be in punishing a whole city for an offence which, if it exists at all, is mine alone?—and in punishing it by a curse so terrible that all the consolations of religion are denied those true children of Mother Church, that no priestly office may be performed within the city, that men and women may not approach the altars of the Faith, that they must die unshriven with their sins upon them, and so be damned through all eternity? ”

“ Otrepiev came in fear this time. It is not good to be the uncle of a man who is giving so much trouble to a great prince.
Boris glared at him from blood-injected eyes. His round, white face was haggard, his cheeks sagged, and his fleshly body had lost all its erstwhile firm vigour.
“I have sent for you to question you again,” he said, “touching this lewd nephew of yours, this Grishka Otrepiev, this unfrocked monk, who claims to be Tsar of Muscovy. Are you sure, man, that you have made no mistake—are you sure?” ”

“ Oh!” Once more the colour suffused her cheeks, and her eyes glowed, her expression became radiant. “Where is he?”
“Here. Here in Madrigal.”
“In Madrigal?” She was all amazement. “But why in Madrigal?”
“He was in Valladolid, and there heard that I—his sometime preacher and counsellor—was Vicar here at Santa Maria la Real. He came to seek me. He comes disguised, under the false name of Gabriel de Espinosa, and setting up as a pastry-cook until his term of penance shall be completed, and he shall be free to disclose himself once more to his impatiently awaiting people.” ”

“ He had chanced one day to ask the Papal Nuncio what Rome thought of this war.
“Those who have the best information,” the Nuncio answered boldly, “are of opinion that the principal object of the war is the Princess of Conde, whom your Majesty wishes to bring back to France.”
Angered by this priestly insolence, Henry’s answer had been an impudently defiant acknowledgment of the truth of that allegation.
“Yes, by God!” he cried. “Yes—most certainly I want to have her back, and I will have her back; no one shall hinder me, not even God’s viceregent on earth.” ”

“ He knew how the justice of Castile was kept on the alert by the persistent plottings of the Portuguese Pretender, Don Antonio, sometime Prior of Crato. He was intimate with the past life of Frey Miguel, knew his self-sacrificing patriotism and passionate devotion to the cause of Don Antonio, remembered the firm dignity of his prisoner, and leapt at a justifiable conclusion. The man in his hands—the man whom the Princess Anne addressed in such passionate terms by the title of Majesty—was the Prior of Crato. ”

“ In Sir Lewis he saw only his kinsman—his very good friend and kinsman, to insist upon Stukeley’s own description of himself—at a time when of all others in his crowded life he needed the support of a kinsman and the guidance of a friend.
You know the story of this Sir Walter, who had been one of the brightest ornaments of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and might have added lustre to that of King James, had not his Sowship—to employ the title bestowed upon that prince by his own queen—been too mean of soul to appreciate the man’s great worth. ”

“ Unless Madame de Lannoi were the most circumspect of women, here was a fine tale for Court gossips, and for the King’s ears, a tale that must hopelessly compromise the Queen. For that, Buckingham, in his self-sufficiency and arrogance, appears to have cared nothing. One suspects that it would have pleased his vanity to have his name linked with the Queen’s by the lips of scandal. ”

“ With adolescence he had gone out into the world to seek the broader education which it offered to men of quality and spirit. He had fought bulls in Madrid, and the infidel overseas; he had wooed adventure wherever it was to be met, until romance hung about him like an aura. Thus Sophia met him again, a dazzling personality, whose effulgence shone the more brightly against the dull background of that gross Hanoverian court; an accomplished, graceful, self-reliant man of the world, in whom she scarcely recognized her sometime playmate. ”

“ On the stones beyond the gates, where lackeys were wont to await their masters, sat a lean fellow of some thirty years of age, in a dingy, clerkly attire, so repulsively evil of countenance that he had once been arrested on no better grounds than because it was deemed impossible that a man with such a face could be other than a villain.
Whilst the coach was being got ready, Henry re-entered the Louvre, and startled the Queen by announcing his intention. With fearful insistence she besought him to countermand the order, and not to leave the palace. ”

“ Espinosa had been a soldier, and had seen the world. During the war between Spain and Portugal he had served in the armies of King Philip, had befriended Frey Miguel when the friar’s convent was on the point of being invaded by soldiery, and had rescued him from the peril of it. Thus they had become acquainted, and Frey Miguel had had an instance of the man’s resource and courage. Further, he was of the height of Don Sebastian and of the build to which the king might have grown in the years that were sped, and he presented other superficial resemblances to the late king. ”