But the king turned his back on the bench, and looked all around the hall, at the people in the stands, at the judges, at the people who had paid for their seats, some who had risen at his entry and now stood again, looking awkward. He looked at them all, as if he were inspecting a guard of honor. James ducked his head as the mournful dark gaze raked the hall. He did not trust the king not to exclaim in recognition. He did not trust him at all.
The king turned back to the front and seated himself again, and everyone who had risen with him and taken off their hats also subsided again into their places.
A man rose to address the court.
“Who’s that?” James asked his neighbor, a well-to-do London merchant.
“John Cook,” came the muttered reply. “Prosecutor.”
Cook rose to his feet and started reading a list of charges, facing the Lord President and the table with the ornate tapestry, his back half turned to the king.
“Hold a little,” the king said. He had never sat behind anyone, since the death of his father, James, the previous king. Court etiquette demanded that everyone face the king to make their bow, and walk backwards, bowing once more at the door. He had not seen the back of a head for twenty-three years. James himself, humiliated and afraid, had awkwardly reversed out of the door at Newport. He flushed at the memory and realized that he must have looked ridiculous. Every time anyone left Charles’s presence, the king was reminded of their inferiority, and his own greatness. At this, the lowest point of his life, he was still insisting on deference.
“Hold a little,” the king said, raising his voice to Cook’s back.
Determinedly deaf to the greatest man in the world, Cook carried on reading the charges, a little breathless as if he were anxious to get through them all. James found he was gritting his teeth as the prosecutor steadfastly ignored his king, continuing to list that the king had traitorously and maliciously . . .
“Hold a little,” the king interrupted again, and then shockingly, leaned forwards, lifted his black ebony cane, and poked the prosecutor, hard, in the back.
“God, no,” James said to himself.
Cook caught his breath but continued with accusations, the king poked at him again, and again, then, like the slow unfolding of a nightmare, the silver tip at the end of the cane fell to the floor with a heavy thud and rolled loudly to a standstill. Cook paid no attention to the stick against his shoulder, nor to the king’s interruption, but as the silver ring rolled to a standstill he froze, as still as the ferrule, as if he were afraid to look round to see what the king would do next. He took a breath as if to continue with the prosecution case. But he did not speak.
Nobody moved. James realized he was gripping his wooden seat, stopping himself getting up and picking up the silver ferrule for the king. Half the audience were holding themselves rigid so that they did not betray themselves by getting to their feet to serve the man who had never had to do anything for himself. Nobody was attending to the prosecutor anymore. Everyone was looking from the shining tip of the cane on the floor, to the king, who had never in his life picked up anything.
The silver ring lay on the floor beside the prosecutor’s polished shoes, the prosecutor standing like a statue beside it. The bench of judges was still, the Lord President frozen. Nobody knew what to do, and everyone felt it was strangely important.
Slowly, in the long silence, Charles himself rose from his chair, opened the little door to his enclosure, came out, bent down, and picked up the heavy cane tip, twisting it back into place on the handsome stick. He looked from the Lord President to the prosecutor as if he could not understand that they had not stopped everything to serve him. All his life someone had bent and fetched and carried for him, but here, with more than a thousand subjects in the room, nobody had moved. He smiled slightly, inclining his head a little, as if he had learned something important and disagreeable, and then he went back to his chair in a silence so profound that James thought they could have been passing a sentence of death.
James left the hall at the end of the day’s hearing, sick to his belly from lack of food and at what he had heard and seen. He went back to his safe house and, with his head thumping, wrote his report, translated it into the code that they had agreed, and took the letter down to Queenhithe. The master of a ship was waiting for him.
“We sail with the tide,” he warned.
“Go now,” James said. “This is all I have to send. Someone will be waiting for you when you dock. They’ll ask for the paperwork from Monsieur St. Jean.”
“I’m guessing it’s not good news,” the captain said, looking at James’s darkened face.
“Just give him the letter,” James said wearily, and turned away from the river and the bobbing ships and his own longing to go with them.
