“Doesn’t he know the danger he’s in? That we’re in? How could he let us go through all this for him, and then not come? We’ve been planning this for weeks!”
“Months. He thinks they will make an agreement.”
“Why didn’t you insist?”
“He’s the king. What could I say?”
“When parliament comes, what if they can’t agree?”
“He’s sure they will,” James said through his clenched teeth. “I begged him to come. I warned him. I did everything that I could. He was determined. I pray to God that he’s right.”
“But why not come? Why run away from imprisonment at Hampton Court, breaking his word of honor, his parole, but not run from here? When we’ve got a ship waiting and his son at sea?”
“In the name of God, I don’t know!” James swore, driven to despair. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it was the right thing, the safest thing, the only thing for him to do. But how could I make him come! How could I?”
The second man had not taken off his hat, nor even unfastened his cloak. “I’m off,” he said savagely. “I won’t do this again. Don’t try to find me or invite me. Don’t call on me for help. This has been a night I won’t repeat. This is my last time. I am finished in his cause. He has lost me. I cannot serve him. They warned me he was changeable and talkative as a woman. But I would never have thought he would let his friends, men sworn to his cause, stand in the street in mortal danger while he chose not to bother.”
James nodded in silence as the man let himself out of the door and they heard his footsteps go quietly across the hall and the front door open and close.
“Shall you come back?” the first man asked unhappily. “Try again?”
“If I’m ordered, I must obey. But not like this again. Never like this again. Forcing men to serve him, swearing them to his cause. I even brought two boys into this danger to hide the plot. I put my life at risk, yours, even the villain on the
“Good night,” the man said abruptly. “I pray to God that we never meet again. I will swear that we never met, and I will never speak of it. If I am captured I will deny all this, and you will do the same.”
“Amen,” James said, slumped in his chair.
The man paused at the door. “Even if they burn you, I trust you not to say my name, and I will not speak yours. I don’t want to die for nothing.”
“Agreed,” James said bitterly, as if it was all nothing, as if loyalty was nothing, as if death by burning was nothing. The man let himself out into the night.
James sat in silence by the dying fire, sick with the draining away of his courage. He found his hands were shaking and that all he could see, as he watched the embers, was the triumphantly gloomy face of the king with his dark sorrowful eyes. James thought himself to be a fool to have given his life to such a man and such a fanciful web of plots. The king he had sworn to serve wanted none of his loyalty, and the woman he desired was a whore to the faeries and had murdered the wife and baby of a mortal man. He thought he was very far from God, and very far from grace, and a long, long way from his home.
At dawn in the morning when a man might reasonably be up and about, James went down to the quayside. The air was cool and smelled of salt in the light breeze. The sky was peach pink. It was going to be a beautiful day. If they had sailed overnight as they had planned, they would have had a good wind homeward and the sun on their backs. They would have moored on a peaceful quayside, paid off Zachary, and gone their own ways to their homes. No one would have known that the king was gone until they served his breakfast, late in the morning. The king would have been breakfasting in France, the Stuart monarchy safe in exile, certain to invade; Cromwell’s rebellion doomed. James looked to pink clouds at the east and thought that never in his life had he seen a sun rise and felt such darkness.
Zachary was asleep, curled up under a sail in the stern of the little trading ship. He opened his eyes and sat up as he heard the sound of James’s riding boots on the stone quay.
“Miscarried,” he observed. “Like the babies she says she will deliver that come out blue. Unsatisfied—as she always is.”
“Yes,” James said shortly. “But I know nothing about any babies.”
Zachary hawked and spat over the side. “Her hands are stained with them,” he said conversationally. “She smells of them: dead babies. Had you not noticed? But—anyway—what happened to you? Nothing good. Were you caught? Doing whatever you were doing?”
“No.”
“Probably half the island knows anyway,” Zachary said pessimistically. “He’s not famously discreet, your master. Everyone I know has taken a letter from him and learned his ever-so-secret code.”
“I don’t think so.”
