Short Fiction · The Liers In Wait (1/2)

Yes, Jack Wilmot wrote so concerning me, and rallied me, saying these lines he would cut upon my monument; and now he is dead at thirty-three, while I live at fifty, none so merry a monarch as folks deem me. Jack’s verse makes me out a coxcomb, but he knew me not in my youth. He was but four, and sucking sugarplums, when his father and I were fugitives after Worcester. Judge from this story, if he rhymes the truth of me.

I think it was then, with the rain soaking my wretched borrowed clothes and the heavy tight plough-shoes rubbing my feet all to blisters, that I first knew consciously how misery may come to kings as to vagabonds. Egad, I was turned the second before I had well been the first. Trying to think of other things than my present sorry state among the dripping trees of Spring Coppice, I could but remember sorrier things still. Chiefly came to mind the Worcester fight, that had been rather a cutting down of my poor men like barley, and Cromwell’s Ironside troopers the reapers; How could so much ill luck befall⁠—Lauderdale’s bold folly, that wasted our best men in a charge? The mazed silence of Leslie’s Scots horse, the first of their blood I ever heard of before or since who refused battle? I remembered too, as a sick dream, how I charged with a few faithful at a troop of Parliamentarian horse said to be Cromwell’s own guard; I had cut down a mailed rider with a pale face like the winter moon, and rode back dragging one of my own, wounded sore, across my saddle bow. He had died there, crying to me: “God save your most sacred Majesty!” And now I had need of God to save me.

“More things than Cromwell’s wit and might went into this disaster,” I told myself in the rain, nor knew how true I spoke.

After the battle, the retreat. Had it been only last night? Leslie’s horsemen, who had refused to follow me toward Cromwell, had dogged me so close in fleeing him I was at pains to scatter and so avoid them. Late we had paused, my gentlemen and I, at a manor of White-Ladies. There we agreed to divide and flee in disguise. With the help of two faithful yokels named Penderel I cut my long curls with a knife and crammed my big body into coarse garments⁠—gray cloth breeches, a leathern doublet, a green jump-coat⁠—while that my friends smeared my face and hands with chimney-soot. Then farewells, and I gave each gentleman a keepsake⁠—a ribbon, a buckle, a watch, and so forward. I remembered, too, my image in a mirror, and it was most unkingly⁠—a towering, swarthy young man, ill-clad, ill-faced. One of the staunch Penderals bade me name myself, and I chose to be called Will Jones, a wandering woodcutter.

Will Jones! ’Twas an easy name and comfortable. For the nonce I was happier with it than with Charles Stuart, England’s king and son of that other Charles who had died by Cromwell’s axe. I was heir to bitter sorrow and trouble and mystery, in my youth lost and hunted and friendless as any strong thief.

The rain was steady and weary. I tried to ask myself what I did here in Spring Coppice. It had been necessary to hide the day out, and travel by night; but whose thought was it to choose this dim, sorrowful wood? Richard Penderel had said that no rain fell elsewhere. Perhaps that was well, since Ironsides might forbear to seek me in such sorry bogs; but meanwhile I shivered and sighed, and wished myself a newt. The trees, what I could see, were broad oaks with some fir and larch, and the ground grew high with bracken reddened by September’s first chill.

Musing thus, I heard a right ill sound⁠—horses’ hoofs. I threw myself half-downways among some larch scrub, peering out through the clumpy leaves. My right hand clutched the axe I carried as part of my masquerade. Beyond was a lane, and along it, one by one, rode enemy⁠—a troop of Cromwell’s horse, hard fellows and ready-seeming, with breasts and caps of iron. They stared right and left searchingly. The bright, bitter eyes of their officer seemed to strike through my hiding like a pike-point. I clutched my axe the tighter, and swore on my soul that, if found, I would die fighting⁠—a better death, after all, than my poor father’s.

But they rode past, and out of sight. I sat up, and wiped muck from my long nose. “I am free yet,” I told myself. “One day, please our Lord, I shall sit on the throne that is mine. Then shall I seek out these Ironsides and feed fat the gallows at Tyburn, the block at the Tower.”

For I was young and cruel then, as now I am old and mellow. Religion perplexed and irked me. I could not understand nor like Cromwell’s Praise-God men of war, whose faces were as sharp and merciless as, alas, their swords. “I’ll give them texts to quote,” I vowed. “I have heard their canting war-cries. ‘Smite and spare not!’ They shall learn how it is to be smitten and spared not.”

For the moment I felt as if vengeance were already mine, my house restored to power, my adversaries chained and delivered into my hand. Then I turned to cooler thoughts, and chiefly that I had best seek a hiding less handy to that trail through the trees.

The thought was like sudden memory, as if indeed I knew the Coppice and where best to go.

For I mind me how I rose from among the larches, turned on the heel of one pinching shoe, and struck through a belt of young spruce as though I were indeed a woodcutter seeking by familiar ways the door of mine own hut. So confidently did I stride that I blundered⁠—or did I?⁠—into a thorny vine that hung down from a long oak limb. It fastened upon my sleeve like urging fingers. “Nay, friend,” I said to it, trying to be gay, “hold me not here in the wet,” and I twitched away. That was one more matter about Spring Coppice that seemed strange and not overcanny⁠—as also the rain, the gloom, my sudden desire to travel toward its heart. Yet, as you shall see here, these things were strange only in their basic cause. But I forego the tale.

“So cometh Will Jones to his proper home,” quoth I, axe on shoulder. Speaking thus merrily, I came upon another lane, but narrower than that on which the horsemen had ridden. This ran ankle-deep in mire, and I remember how the damp, soaking into my shoes, soothed those plaguey blisters. I followed the way for some score of paces, and meseemed that the rain was heaviest here, like a curtain before some hidden thing. Then I came into a cleared space, with no trees nor bush, nor even grass upon the bald earth. In its center, wreathed with rainy mists, a house.

I paused, just within shelter of the leaves. “What,” I wondered, “has my new magic of being a woodcutter conjured up a woodcutter’s shelter?”

But this house was no honest workman’s place, that much I saw with but half an eye. Conjured up it might well have been, and most foully. I gazed at it without savor, and saw that it was not large, but lean and high-looking by reason of the steep pitch of its roof. That roof’s thatch was so wet and foul that it seemed all of one drooping substance, like the cap of a dark toadstool. The walls, too, were damp, being of clay daub spread upon a framework of wattles. It had one door, and that a mighty thick heavy one, of a single dark plank that hung upon heavy rusty hinges. One window it had, too, through which gleamed some sort of light; but instead of glass the window was filled with something like thin-scraped rawhide, so that light could come through, but not the shape of things within. And so I knew not what was in that house, nor at the time had I any conscious lust to find out.

I say, no conscious lust. For it was unconsciously that I drifted idly forth from the screen of wet leaves, gained and moved along a little hard-packed path between bracken-clumps. That path led to the door, and I found myself standing before it; while through the skinned-over window, inches away, I heard noises.

Noises I call them, for at first I could not think they were voices. Several soft hummings or purrings came to my ears, from what source I knew not. Finally, though, actual words, high and raspy:

“We who keep the commandment love the law! Moloch, Lucifer, Bal-Tigh-Mor, Anector, Somiator, sleep ye not! Compel ye that the man approach!”

It had the sound of a prayer, and yet I recognized but one of the names called⁠—Lucifer. Tutors, parsons, my late unhappy allies the Scots Covenentors, had used the name oft and fearfully. Prayer within that ugly lean house went up⁠—or down, belike⁠—to the fallen Son of the Morning. I stood against the door, pondering. My grandsire, King James, had believed and feared such folks’ pretense. My father, who was King Charles before me, was pleased to doubt and be merciful, pardoning many accused witches and sorcerers. As for me, my short life had held scant leisure to decide such a matter. While I waited in the fine misty rain on the threshold, the high voice spoke again:

“Drive him to us! Drive him to us! Drive him to us!”

Silence within, and you may be sure silence without. A new voice, younger and thinner, made itself heard: “Naught comes to us.”

“Respect the promises of our masters,” replied the first. “What says the book?”

And yet a new voice, this time soft and a woman’s: “Let the door be opened and the wayfarer be plucked in.”

I swear that I had not the least impulse to retreat, even to step aside. ’Twas as if all my life depended on knowing more. As I stood, ears aprick like any cat’s, the door creaked inward by three inches. An arm in a dark sleeve shot out, and fingers as lean and clutching as thorn-twigs fastened on the front of my jump-coat.

“I have him safe!” rasped the high voice that had prayed. A moment later I was drawn inside, before I could ask the reason.

There was one room to the house, and it stank of burning weeds. There were no chairs or other furniture, and no fireplace; but in the center of the tamped-clay floor burned an open fire, whose rank smoke climbed to a hole at the roof’s peak. Around this fire was drawn a circle in white chalk, and around the circle a star in red. Close outside the star were the three whose voices I had heard.

Mine eyes lighted first on she who held the book⁠—young she was and dainty. She sat on the floor, her feet drawn under her full skirt of black stuff. Above a white collar of Dutch style, her face was round and at the same time fine and fair, with a short red mouth and blue eyes like the clean sea.

Her hair, under a white cap, was as yellow as corn. She held in her slim white hands a thick book, whose cover looked to be grown over with dark hair, like the hide of a Galloway bull.

Her eyes held mine for two trices, then I looked beyond her to another seated person. He was small enough to be a child, but the narrow bright eyes in his thin face were older than the oldest I had seen, and the hands clasped around his bony knees were rough and sinewy, with large sore-seeming joints. His hair was scanty, and eke his eyebrows. His neck showed swollen painfully.

It is odd that my last look was for him who had drawn me in. He was tall, almost as myself, and grizzled hair fell on the shoulders of his velvet doublet. One claw still clapped hold of me and his face, a foot from mine, was as dark and bloodless as earth. Its lips were loose, its quivering nose broken. The eyes, cold and wide as a frog’s, were as steady as gun-muzzles.

He kicked the door shut, and let me go. “Name yourself,” he rasped at me. “If you be not he whom we seek⁠—”

“I am Will Jones, a poor woodcutter,” I told him.

“Mmmm,” murmured the wench with the book. “Belike the youngest of seven sons⁠—sent forth by a cruel step-dame to seek fortune in the world. So runs the fairy tale, and we want none such. Your true name, sirrah.”

I told her roundly that she was insolent, but she only smiled. And I never saw a fairer than she, not in all the courts of Europe⁠—not even sweet Nell Gwyn. After many years I can see her eyes, a little slanting and a little hungry. Even when I was so young, women feared me, but this one did not.

“His word shall not need,” spoke the thin young-old fellow by the fire. “Am I not here to make him prove himself?” He lifted his face so that the fire brightened it, and I saw hot red blotches thereon.

“True,” agreed the grizzled man. “Sirrah, whether you be Will Jones the woodman or Charles Stuart the king, have you no mercy on poor Diccon yonder? If ’twould ease his ail, would you not touch him?”

That was a sneer, but I looked closer at the thin fellow called Diccon, and made sure that he was indeed sick and sorry. His face grew full of hope, turning up to me. I stepped closer to him.

“Why, with all my heart, if ’twill serve,” I replied.

“ ’Ware the star and circle, step not within the star and circle,” cautioned the wench, but I came not near those marks. Standing beside and above Diccon, I felt his brow, and felt that it was fevered. “A hot humor is in your blood, friend,” I said to him, and touched the swelling on his neck.

But had there been a swelling there? I touched it, but ’twas suddenly gone, like a furtive mouse under my finger. Diccon’s neck looked lean and healthy. His face smiled, and from it had fled the red blotches. He gave a cry and sprang to his feet.

“ ’Tis past, ’tis past!” he howled. “I am whole again!”

But the eyes of his comrades were for me.

“Only a king could have done so,” quote the older man. “Young sir, I do take you truly for Charles Stuart. At your touch Diccon was healed of the king’s evil.”

I folded my arms, as if I must keep my hands from doing more strangeness. I had heard, too, of that old legend of the Stuarts, without deeming myself concerned. Yet, here it had befallen. Diccon had suffered from the king’s evil, which learned doctors call scrofula. My touch had driven it from his thin body. He danced and quivered with the joy of health. But his fellows looked at me as though I had betrayed myself by sin.

“It is indeed the king,” said the girl, also rising to her feet.

“No,” I made shift to say. “I am but poor Will Jones,” and I wondered where I had let fall my axe. “Will Jones, a woodcutter.”

“Yours to command, Will Jones,” mocked the grizzled man. “My name is Valois Pembru, erst a schoolmaster. My daughter Regan,” and he flourished one of his talons at the wench. “Diccon, our kinsman and servitor, you know already, well enough to heal him. For our profession, we are⁠—are⁠—”

He seemed to have said too much, and his daughter came to his rescue. “We are liers in wait,” she said.

“True, liers in wait,” repeated Pembru, glad of the words. “Quiet we bide our time, against what good things comes our way. As yourself, Will Jones. Would you sit in sooth upon the throne of England? For that question we brought you hither.”

I did not like his lofty air, like a man cozening puppies. “I came myself, of mine own good will,” I told him. “It rains outside.”

“True,” muttered Diccon, his eyes on me. “All over Spring Coppice falls the rain, and not elsewhere. Not one, but eight charms in yonder book can bring rain⁠—’twas to drive your honor to us, that you might heal⁠—”

“Silence,” barked Valois Pembru at him. And to me: “Young sir, we read and prayed and burnt,” and he glanced at the dark-orange flames of the fire. “In that way we guided your footsteps to the Coppice, and the rain then made you see this shelter. ’Twas all planned, even before Noll Cromwell scotched you at Worcester⁠—”

“Worcester!” I roared at him so loudly that he stepped back. “What know you of Worcester fight?”

He recovered, and said in his erst lofty fashion: “Worcester was our doing, too. We gave the victory to Noll Cromwell. At a price⁠—from the book.”

He pointed to the hairy tome in the hands of Regan, his daughter. “The flames showed us your pictured hosts and his, and what befell. You might have stood against him, even prevailed, but for the horsemen who would not right.”

I remembered that bitter amazement over how Leslie’s Scots had bode like statues. “You dare say you wrought that?”