Read Mary of Carisbrooke Online
Authors: Margaret Campbell Barnes
Mary of Carisbrooke
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Originally published in Great Britain in 1956 by Macdonald & Co. Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnes, Margaret Campbell.
Mary of Carisbrooke / Margaret Campbell Barnes.
p. cm.
1. Charles I, King of England, 1600-1649—Fiction. 2. Carisbrooke Castle (England)—Fiction. 3. Women household employees—Fiction. 4. Isle of Wight (England)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6003.A72M37 2011
823’.912—dc22
2010052890
In the early hours of a November morning four horsemen drew rein outside the village of Bishop’s Sutton on the road to Southampton. Their horses were sweating and their dark cloaks sodden with rain, but they knew that fresh mounts awaited them and that only twenty miles separated them from the Solent. As the sun rose redly through the mist the thoughts of each of them strained forward hopefully across the water to the low, wooded coastline of the Isle of Wight.
“It is the safest place from which to bargain with Cromwell,” urged John Ashburnham, who had done his share of fighting in the beaten Royalist army. “Although the new Governor was appointed by Parliament, surely he cannot forget that his father was one of your Majesty’s chaplains?”
“All the s-same I would have you and Berkeley go ac-c-cross and sound him first,” said the small man with the slight stammer. He had need of caution because, being the King of England, he had everything to gain or lose. “Meanwhile Colonel Legge and I will make for Titchfield House,” he decided, “and beg a night’s hospitality from the Countess of Southampton.”
They had escaped from the lenient bondage of Hampton Court and been in the saddle all night. All four of them were half dead with weariness, but behind them Cromwell’s Ironsides might be in hot pursuit. So Berkeley whistled cautiously outside the inn for their waiting accomplice, and they changed horses without waste of words.
“What are the islanders like?” asked the man called Legge, as the four of them were about to part company.
“Loyal, I should say. My father once sent me over there to review their militia,” recalled King Charles the First, with a touch of nostalgia for those carefree days. “Sir John Oglander, the Deputy Governor, was certainly a genial host. It was a summer’s day and from the keep of Carisbrooke Castle the whole island seemed to be spread out like a lovely sunlit map. I was little more than a lad, and after dinner they let me fire off some of their ordnance. There was a young gunner who loaded for me, I remember—a pleasant-spoken, curly haired fellow not much older than myself…”
Whatever further recollections Charles Stuart may have had were cut short by the urgency of his plight, or lost in the beat of hooves as he and Legge turned aside towards Titchfield while their two companions spurred onwards towards the coast.
In the servants’ quarters at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, the housekeeper’s niece, Mary Floyd, was tucking a frightened little chambermaid into a truckle bed. “I’ll send the slut packing!” Mistress Wheeler, the housekeeper, had declared as soon as it became evident that the hired wench was pregnant. But Sergeant Floyd, Mary’s father, had gone on imperturbably checking the morning’s supplies from Newport. “What can you expect, with Roundheads being brought into the garrison?” he had asked of no one in particular.
Mary herself, whose tender heart yearned over every sick dog on the island, had made no comment. She had picked up the pieces of a water pitcher the girl had dropped and quietly helped her up the backstairs and put a hot brick to her feet.
“Where shall I go if Mistress Wheeler turns me out?” sobbed the erring, orphaned Libby.
“Why not to your lover’s folk?” suggested Mary. “Where does he live?”
“Somewheres over on the mainland,” moaned Libby, retching over the bowl which her employer’s niece had produced. “He be one o’ the escort who came over from London with the new Governor and Captain Rolph.”
“An
overner
,” snorted Mary, very conscious that there had been Floyds and Wheelers on the Isle of Wight for generations. “When I give myself to a man I’ll make right sure he’s an islander!”
At seventeen it is so easy to be sure.
But Libby had lived two years longer, and with no solidly respected relatives to care for her. “Tom’s a right persuasive sort of man. And this love-making isn’t anything a girl decides about. It just happens,” she stated, out of her dearly bought experience.
Mary stood wondering about it. She recalled the slick-tongued Londoner whom the other soldiers called Tom Rudy, and involuntarily her mind made pictures. What secret trysts had these two kept, slipping out into the darkness from warm kitchen and rowdy guardroom? What ecstasies had bright-eyed Libby found out there in the shadows of some bastion or hayloft? And had the magic of those encounters been worth all this apprehension and shamed morning sickness? To a girl who had been strictly brought up by Sergeant Floyd’s widowed sister, such passionate moments were as yet but figments of occasional curiosity.
As if to dispel such unaccustomed thoughts Mary crossed to the small attic window, and, pushing open the lattice, let the sweet air of an autumnal morning sweep through the stuffiness of the room. “Aunt Druscilla’s roses are still out,” she remarked, looking down into the herb garden. But in the mild climate of an island nestling beneath the southern shires of England there was nothing remarkable about roses blooming in November, and Libby’s interest was focused upon immediate necessity.
“There’s the Governor’s bedroom to be done,” she muttered, struggling to get up; for although Colonel Hammond, the new Governor, might be quiet in manner, soldiers and servants alike were beginning to mind his quietness more than the hearty blustering of any of his predecessors.
“Lie still awhile. I will do it,” promised Mary, taking pity on her plight.
“And you’ll try to persuade your aunt to let me stay?”
“I will ask my father to,” promised Mary.
Libby slid gratefully back against the straw-filled pillow. Silas Floyd might be Sergeant of the Garrison, but she was far less afraid of him than of his sharp-tongued sister, Mistress Wheeler. “Tell them Tom Rudy says he’ll marry me if ever he has the money,” she urged, with small conviction.
On the floor below Mary knocked on the small service door between backstair passage and best bedroom. Having lived in the castle all her life she knew the room well, but now she would have preferred to find it empty. Light streamed through the five arched lights of the big west window. Facing it was a tapestry-covered wall and above it, set back over the backstair passage, a disused music gallery. In the far corner a larger door led into the long living room. To Mary the big state bed looked very grand, and long familiarity blinded her to the fact that its hangings were faded. It was a lovely room, she thought, needing only the cheerfulness of a fire crackling in the fine fireplace. But Colonel Hammond was a man of austere taste. He sat at his writing desk dealing with official documents, a tall, plainly dressed man whose soldierly bearing was belied by a sensitive face. No book or picture betrayed some private facet of his mind, no trailing garment lent the place a homeliness. Only a pair of immaculately polished riding boots stood ready by the empty hearth.
As unobtrusively as possible Mary made the almost unrumpled bed, and swept the broad oak floorboards. While drawing the hangings again so that they should not show the place which she had darned so laboriously last winter, she recalled how the last Governor but one, Lord Portland, had been wont to pinch her cheek and call her “Floyd’s little wench.” She had been little more than a child then, of course. But this new Governor, sent by that all-powerful body of men called Parliament, had no merry quips for children—nor for women either, the maidservants said. Although he had married an important Parliamentarian’s daughter, he must have left her behind in London or be a widower like her own father, Mary supposed, for only his sweet-faced mother graced the foot of his table in hall.
She was glad enough to climb the stairs again to tidy the housekeeper’s room, which was immediately above. And glad to find her aunt deep in conversation with Mistress Trattle from the “Rose and Crown,” since a friend’s gossip might distract her from noticing that it was her niece, and not Libby, who did the work.
“And what is the new Governor really like?” Mistress Trattle was asking, as everybody did who came in from the nearby town of Newport.
The high-backed settle before the fire hid all but the two women’s laps from Mary’s view, but she could imagine the judicious pursing of Aunt Druscilla’s lips. “A quiet-living man,” was the verdict. “Keeps a good table, but none of the roystering supper parties milord Portland used to have. This one is all for discipline and seeing that the bolts and portcullises work smoothly, my brother says.”
“His father was one of the royal chaplains,” recalled the hostess of the “Rose and Crown.”
“So he may have been. But Parliament appointed him, and father and son often take different sides now.”
“But surely the Colonel’s sympathy must be with the poor King, dictated to by a lot of traitors and separated from all his children. He’s kept almost a prisoner at Hampton Court now, my relatives on the mainland say, and the Queen fled back home to France to have her last baby—”
“I heard she had it in Exeter before she sailed.”
It was evidently going to be one of those long discussions about the civil war over on the mainland, and someone called Oliver Cromwell who had usurped the power of King Charles. The bitter arguments which had caused so much bloodshed were beyond Mary’s ken. Edgehill, Marston Moor, Nazeby, and Hampton were no more than names to her. All she knew was that the King stood firm for the Church of England and that Parliament refused to grant him enough money. The Puritan’s side of the matter she had scarcely heard. She stood by the window looking out upon her simpler and more immediate world. Down in the courtyard her father’s spaniel, Patters, lay scratching herself in the sunshine, and the horse upon which Mistress Trattle had ridden pillion behind her servant was tethered to the gate of the herb garden. Soldiers came and went unhurriedly between guardroom and stables, or sat in the shadow of the arched gateway whistling as they cleaned their accoutrements. The great iron-studded doors stood wide, and from the top storey of the Governor’s lodgings which butted out into the courtyard she could catch an enchanting glimpse of green fields beyond the drawbridge. Within the wide girdle of the battlements the familiar scene was leisurely and sun-washed. Even the gilded weathervane above the chapel scarcely stirred.
Coming out of her reverie she realized that the voices of the two women on the settle were murmuring on. “Safer to keep one’s real sympathies to oneself these days,” Mistress Trattle was saying.
“Or suffer for it like poor Sir John Oglander,” agreed Aunt Druscilla. “The best Deputy Governor we ever had. And imprisoned twice and almost ruined by those Roundhead traitors in London!”
“Well, at least he came back to Nunwell House alive.”
“But the strain of it killed his poor wife, Bess Oglander says.”
Because Agnes Trattle was the daughter of a knight impoverished in the wars and Druscilla Wheeler was the widow of one, they liked it to be known that they were on visiting terms with Sir John’s cousin, who kept house for him. There was a creak of the settle as buxom Mistress Trattle leaned forward to admire her friend’s collar. “A treat to see such lovely lace after the hideous plain collars of these sour-faced Puritans!” she said. “And how beautifully laundered!”
“I never allow anyone but Mary to launder my caps and collars.”
“I had no idea she was so clever.”
“Oh, she is clever enough with her
hands
.”
Mary heard the faint disparagement in her aunt’s voice. She knew without envy that she was not quick and gay like pretty Frances, the Trattles’ daughter, who met so many interesting people in her father’s inn.
“But your Mary is so kind,” defended Frances’s mother, with her usual generosity.
“Too kind—to any mangy cur or lazy good-for-nothing with a likely story! Why, only this morning when that brazen strumpet Libby began swooning and vomiting—” The clatter of a falling warming-pan reminded her that someone was tidying the room, so that she looked round the corner of the settle and added in vexation, “Why, Mary, surely you are not foolish enough to be doing the drone’s work for her! At least I hope you have not been making the Colonel’s bed?”
“Libby was sick, and I have nothing special else to do,” said Mary. She spoke with deference, but her aunt recognized the same steady voice and level gaze which had won the day when the foolish girl had insisted upon setting free a lamed doe the men had been baiting. For one so gentle, she could be amazingly persistent, and her aunt thought it deplorable the way her father allowed her to roam about the place talking to the soldiers and servants. Mistress Wheeler rose angrily. “Do you suppose I like a niece of mine performing such menial tasks for a mere Parliamentarian? I, whose husband was killed fighting for the King at Nazeby?” she scolded.
Warming-pan in hand, Mary stood silently rebuked, and was grateful when Mistress Trattle intervened good-naturedly. “If Colonel Hammond is as diligent as you say, I wager he did not notice
which
wench it was,” she laughed, gathering up her cloak. “And since Mary says she has no special duties this morning why not let her ride back with me and spend the day with Frances? I think she has some outing in mind. You have not been down into Newport all this week, Mary, and Frances counts you her best friend.”
Mary Floyd flushed with pleasure. Although she and Frances had played and gossiped together since childhood, she had always been filled with shy admiration for the innkeeper’s daughter whose graceful vivacity made her feel uncouth and whose dark, carefully tended hair seemed a reproach every time she remembered to brush out her own mop of tawny curls. And her aunt, she knew, approved the friendship, inventing small errands so that the girls should meet at least once a week. For was not Edward Trattle a member of the Corporation of Newport, with its busy wharves along the Medina river whence laden ships sailed out to sea at Cowes?
Down in the stables one of the men-at-arms stopped grooming his horse to saddle her white pony. Any one of them would have done the same for her. To them, as to the previous Governor, she was “Floyd’s little wench” who always asked after their wives and cared for their sick children. Although now she had grown into the slender girl who smiled at them all impartially as she gentled her mount through the gloom of the guardroom gatehouse.
So large a part of Mary’s life was confined to the twenty acres within the castle walls that setting forth into the outside world never failed to seem something of an adventure. Down the steep lane close under the fortifications she went, following Mistress Trattle and the manservant, until their mounts splashed through the, clear, brown brook at the bottom. Through Carisbrooke village and along a mile of country road, and then into the bustle and excitement of the island’s principal town. Cattle were being driven in to market, and boys, newly released from their books, came running and shouting from the doors of Newport Grammar School. About the doors of the “Bull Inn” and the “George” clustered farmers and drovers, and in the Square beside the church stood the “Rose and Crown,” a comfortable-looking hostelry with dormers projecting from the sloping roof, and the greenery of a climbing rose softening the grey stone of its walls.
Outside in the sunshine Edward Trattle was superintending a delivery of casks from his brewhouse in Lugley Street, Frances was already mounted, and a tall, mettlesome-looking black horse was being walked up and down by Jem, the red-headed ostler. Trattle helped his wife down from the saddle, and called a cheery greeting to Mary.
“I am so glad you have come,” said Frances. “Captain Burley is going up to Brighstone Down to inspect the look-out post and help plan out this month’s manoeuvres for the militia, and he says he will take us with him.”
“He seems to think all our defences will fall to pieces now he has retired,” laughed the innkeeper indulgently.
“Time hangs heavy for him after being in charge of Yarmouth castle, I expect,” said Agnes Trattle. “What with a Governor sent by Parliament and the ranting kind of Mayor we’ve got, it’s good to see so loyal a servant of the King! Ah, here he comes, all booted and spurred at seventy.”
With a pleasant mixture of affection and anxiety she turned to berate a stocky, naval-looking man who was emerging from the inn door and whose weather-beaten face looked all the ruddier because of his crisply curling white hair. “You know very well that Dr. Bagnell says you should rest and not excite yourself with such things, Captain Burley. Where’s the good of my letting you my quietest room and giving you the most comfortable bed in the house if you can’t leave someone younger to look over the militia?”