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FORTUNE’S FOOL
BY
RAFAEL SABATINI
_Author of “Scaramouche,” “Captain Blood,” “The Snare,”
“The Sea-Hawk,” etc._
[Illustration: Logo]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1922 AND 1923, BY THE McCALL COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY RAFAEL SABATINI
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
SECOND IMPRESSION, AUGUST, 1923
THIRD IMPRESSION, AUGUST, 1923
FOURTH IMPRESSION, OCTOBER, 1923
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE: MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
CONTENTS
I. THE HOSTESS OF THE PAUL’S HEAD 3
II. ALBEMARLE’S ANTECHAMBER 13
III. HIS GRACE OF ALBEMARLE 23
IV. CHERRY BLOSSOMS 36
V. THE MERCENARY 53
VI. MR. ETHEREDGE PRESCRIBES 65
VII. THE PRUDE 78
VIII. MR. ETHEREDGE ADVISES 85
IX. ALBEMARLE PROPOSES 90
X. BUCKINGHAM DISPOSES 101
XI. A WOMAN SCORNED 110
XII. BUCKINGHAM’S HEROICS 123
XIII. BUCKINGHAM’S GRATITUDE 138
XIV. DESPAIR 147
XV. THE SHADOW OF THE GALLOWS 156
XVI. THE SEDAN-CHAIR 175
XVII. THE ABDUCTION 187
XVIII. THE PARLEY 195
XIX. THE BATTLE 205
XX. THE CONQUEROR 212
XXI. UNDER THE RED CROSS 219
XXII. THE CRISIS 228
XXIII. THE WALLS OF PRIDE 237
XXIV. EVASION 247
XXV. HOME 255
XXVI. THE DEAD-CART 265
XXVII. THE PEST-HOUSE 277
XXVIII. JESTING FORTUNE 287
XXIX. THE MIRACLE 299
FORTUNE’S FOOL
CHAPTER I
THE HOSTESS OF THE PAUL’S HEAD
The times were full of trouble; but Martha Quinn was unperturbed.
Hers was a mind that confined itself to the essentials of life: its
sustenance and reproduction. Not for her to plague herself with the
complexities of existence, with considerations of the Hereafter
or disputations upon the various creeds by which its happiness
may be ensured--a matter upon which men have always been ready to
send one another upon exploring voyages thither--or yet with the
political opinions by which a nation is fiercely divided. Not even
the preparations for war with Holland, which were agitating men so
violently, or the plague-scare based upon reports of several cases in
the outskirts of the City, could disturb the serenity of her direct
existence. The vices of the Court, which afforded such delectable
scandal for the Town, touched her more nearly, as did the circumstance
that yellow bird’s-eye hoods were now all the rage with ladies of
fashion, and the fact that London was lost in worship of the beauty and
talent of Sylvia Farquharson, who was appearing with Mr. Betterton at
the Duke’s House in the part of Katherine in Lord Orrery’s “Henry the
Fifth.”
Even so, to Martha Quinn, who very competently kept the Paul’s Head,
in Paul’s Yard, these things were but the unimportant trifles that
garnish the dish of life. It was upon life’s main concerns that she
concentrated her attention. In all that regarded meat and drink her
learning--as became the hostess of so prosperous a house--was probably
unrivalled. It was not merely that she understood the mysteries of
bringing to a proper succulence a goose, a turkey, or a pheasant; but
a chine of beef roasted in her oven was like no chine of beef at any
other ordinary; she could perform miracles with marrow-bones; and
she could so dissemble the umbles of venison in a pasty as to render
it a dish fit for a prince’s table. Upon these talents was her solid
prosperity erected. She possessed, further--as became the mother of
six sturdy children of assorted paternity--a discerning eye for a
fine figure of a man. I am prepared to believe that in this matter
her judgment was no whit inferior to that which enabled her, as she
boasted, to determine at a glance the weight and age of a capon.
It was to this fact--although he was very far from suspecting it--that
Colonel Holles owed the good fortune of having lodged in luxury for the
past month without ever a reckoning asked or so much as a question on
the subject of his means. The circumstance may have exercised him. I do
not know. But I know that it should have done so. For his exterior--his
fine figure apart--was not of the kind that commands credit.
Mrs. Quinn had assigned to his exclusive use a cosy little parlour
behind the common room. On the window-seat of this little parlour he
now lounged, whilst Mrs. Quinn herself--and the day was long past in
which it had been her need or habit with her own plump hands to perform
so menial an office--removed from the table the remains of his very
solid breakfast.
The lattice, of round, leaded panes of greenish, wrinkled glass, stood
open to the sunlit garden and the glory of cherry trees that were
belatedly in blossom. From one of these a thrush was pouring forth a
_Magnificat_ to the spring. The thrush, like Mrs. Quinn, concentrated
his attention upon life’s essentials, and was glad to live. Not so
Colonel Holles. He was a man caught and held fast in the web of life’s
complexities. It was to be seen in his listless attitude; in the
upright deep line of care that graved itself between his brows, in the
dreamy wistfulness of his grey eyes, as he lounged there, shabbily
clad, one leg along the leather-cushioned window-seat, pulling vacantly
at his long clay pipe.
Observing him furtively, with a furtiveness, indeed, that was almost
habitual to her, Mrs. Quinn pursued her task, moving between table and
sideboard, and hesitated to break in upon his abstraction. She was
a woman on the short side of middle height, well hipped and deep of
bosom, but not excessively. The phrase “plump as a partridge” might
have been invented to describe her. In age she cannot have been much
short of forty, and whilst not without a certain homely comeliness,
in no judgment but her own could she have been accounted beautiful.
Very blue of eye and very ruddy of cheek, she looked the embodiment of
health; and this rendered her not unpleasing. But the discerning would
have perceived greed in the full mouth with its long upper lip, and sly
cunning--Nature’s compensation to low intelligences--in her vivid eyes.
It remains, however, that she was endowed with charms enough of person
and of fortune to attract Coleman, the bookseller from the corner of
Paul’s Yard, and Appleby, the mercer from Paternoster Row. She might
marry either of them when she pleased. But she did not please. Her
regard for essentials rendered the knock-knees of Appleby as repulsive
to her as the bow-legs of Coleman. Moreover, certain adventitious
associations with the great world--to which her assorted offspring bore
witness--had begotten in her a fastidiousness of taste that was not
to be defiled by the touch of mercers and booksellers. Of late, it
is true, the thought of marriage had been engaging her. She realized
that the age of adventure touched its end for her, and that the time
had come to take a life companion and settle soberly. Yet not on
that account would Martha Quinn accept the first comer. She was in a
position to choose. Fifteen years of good management, prosperity, and
thrift at the Paul’s Head had made her wealthy. When she pleased she
could leave Paul’s Yard, acquire a modest demesne in the country, and
become one of the ladies of the land, a position for which she felt
herself eminently qualified. That which her birth might lack, that in
which her birth might have done poor justice to her nature, a husband
could supply. Often of late had her cunning blue eyes been narrowed in
mental review of this situation. What she required for her purposes was
a gentleman born and bred whom fortune had reduced in circumstances and
who would, therefore, be modest in the matter of matrimonial ambitions.
He must also be a proper man.
Such a man she had found at last in Colonel Holles. From the moment
when a month ago he strode into her inn followed by an urchin
shouldering his valise and packages, and delivered himself upon his
immediate needs, she had recognized him for the husband she sought, and
marked him for her own. At a glance she had appraised him; the tall,
soldierly figure, broad to the waist, thence spare to the ground; the
handsome face, shaven like a Puritan’s, yet set between clusters of
gold-brown hair thick as a cavalier’s periwig, the long pear-shaped
ruby--a relic, no doubt, of more prosperous days--dangling from his
right ear; the long sword upon whose pummel his left hand rested with
the easy grace of long habit; the assured poise, the air of command,
the pleasant yet authoritative voice. All this she observed with those
vivid, narrowing eyes of hers. And she observed, too, the gentleman’s
discreditable shabbiness: the frayed condition of his long boots, the
drooping, faded feather in his Flemish beaver, the well-rubbed leather
jerkin, worn, no doubt, to conceal the threadbare state of the doublet
underneath. These very signs which might have prompted another hostess
to give our gentleman a guarded welcome urged Mrs. Quinn at once to
throw wide her arms to him, metaphorically at present that she might do
so literally anon.
At a glance she knew him, then, for the man of her dreams, guided to
her door by that Providence to whose beneficence she already owed so
much.
He had business in town, he announced--at Court, he added. It might
detain him there some little while. He required lodgings perhaps for a
week, perhaps for longer. Could she provide them?
She could, indeed, for a week, and at need for longer. Mentally she
registered the resolve that it should be for longer; that, if she knew
her man and herself at all, it should be for life.
And so at this handsome, down-at-heel gentleman’s disposal she had
placed not only the best bedroom abovestairs, but also the little
parlour hung in grey linsey-woolsey and gilded leather, which
overlooked the garden and which normally she reserved for her own
private use; and the Paul’s Head had awakened to such activity at
his coming as might have honoured the advent of a peer of the realm.
Hostess and drawer and chambermaid had bestirred themselves to
anticipate his every wish. The cook had been flung into the street
for overgrilling the luscious marrow-bones that had provided his
first breakfast, and the chambermaid’s ears had been soundly boxed
for omission to pass the warming-pan through the Colonel’s bed to
ensure of its being aired. And although it was now a full month since
his arrival, and in all that time our gentleman had been lavishly
entertained upon the best meat and drink the Paul’s Head could offer,
yet in all that time there had been--I repeat--neither mention of a
reckoning, nor question of his means to satisfy it.
At first he had protested against the extravagance of the
entertainment. But his protests had been laughed aside with
good-humoured scorn. His hostess knew a gentleman when she saw one,
he was assured, and knew how a gentleman should be entertained.
Unsuspicious of the designs upon him, he never dreamed that the heavy
debt he was incurring was one of the coils employed by this cunning
huntress in which to bind him.
Her housewifely operations being ended at last--after a prolongation
which could be carried to no further lengths--she overcame her
hesitation to break in upon his thoughts, which must be gloomy, indeed,
if his countenance were a proper index. Nothing could have been more
tactful than her method, based upon experience of the Colonel’s
phenomenal thirst, which, at all times unquenchable, must this morning
have been further sharpened by the grilled herrings which had formed a
part of his breakfast.
As she addressed him now, she held in her hand the long pewter vessel
from which he had taken his morning draught.
“Is there aught ye lack for your comfort, Colonel?”
He stirred, turned his head, to face her, and took the pipestem from
between his lips.
“Nothing, I thank you,” he answered, with a gravity that had been
growing upon him in the last fortnight, to overcloud the earlier
good-humour of his bearing.
“What--nothing?” The buxom siren’s ruddy face was creased in an
alluring smile. Aloft now she held the tankard, tilting her still
golden head. “Not another draught of October before you go forth?” she
coaxed him.
As he looked at her now, he smiled. And it has been left on record by
one who knew him well that his smile was irresistible, a smile that
could always win him the man or woman upon whom he bestowed it. It had
a trick of breaking suddenly upon a face that in repose was wistful,
like sunshine breaking suddenly from a grey sky.
“I vow you spoil me,” said he.
She beamed upon him. “Isn’t that the duty of a proper hostess?”
She set the tankard on the laden tray and bore it out with her. When
she brought it back replenished, and placed it on a coffin-stool beside
him, he had changed his attitude, but not his mood of thoughtfulness.
He roused himself to thank her.
She hovered near until he had taken a pull of the brown October.
“Do you go forth this morning?”
“Aye,” he answered, but wearily, as if reduced to hopelessness. “They
told me I should find his grace returned to-day. But they have told me
the same so often already, that....” He sighed, and broke off, leaving
his doubts implied. “I sometimes wonder if they but make game of me.”
“Make game of you!” Horror stressed her voice. “When the Duke is your
friend!”
“Ah! But that was long ago. And men change ... amazingly sometimes.”
Then he cast off the oppression of his pessimism. “But if there’s to
be war, surely there will be commands in which to employ a practised
soldier--especially one who has experience of the enemy, experience
gained in the enemy’s own service.” It was as if he uttered aloud his
thoughts.
She frowned at this. Little by little in the past month she had drawn
from him some essential part of his story, and although he had been far
from full in his confidences, yet she had gleaned enough to persuade
herself that a reason existed why he should never reach this duke upon
whom he depended for military employment. And in that she had taken
comfort; for, as you surmise, it was no part of her intention that he
should go forth to the wars again, and so be lost to her.
“I marvel now,” said she, “that you will be vexing yourself with such
matters.”
He looked at her. “A man must live,” he explained.
“But that’s no reason why he should go to the wars and likely die.
Hasn’t there been enough o’ that in your life already? At your age a
man’s mind should be on other things.”
“At my age?” He laughed a little. “I am but thirty-five.”
She betrayed her surprise. “You look more.”
“Perhaps I have lived more. I have been very busy.”
“Trying to get yourself killed. Don’t it occur to you that the time has
come to be thinking o’ something else?”
He gave her a mildly puzzled glance, frowning a little.
“You mean?”
“That it’s time ye thought o’ settling, taking a wife and making a home
and a family.”
The tone she adopted was one of commonplace, good-humoured kindliness.
But her breathing had quickened a little, and her face had lost some of
its high colour in the excitement of thus abruptly coming to grips with
her subject.
He stared a moment blankly, then shrugged and laughed.
“Excellent advice,” said he, still laughing on a note of derision that
obviously was aimed at himself. “Find me a lady who is well endowed and
yet so little fastidious in her tastes that she could make shift with
such a husband as I should afford her, and the thing is done.”
“Now there I vow you do yourself injustice.”
“Faith, it’s a trick I’ve learnt from others.”
“You are, when all is said, a very proper man.”
“Aye! But proper for what?”
She pursued her theme without pausing to answer his frivolous question.
“And there’s many a woman of substance who needs a man to care for her
and guard her--such a man as yourself, Colonel; one who knows his world
and commands a worthy place in it.”
“I command that, do I? On my soul you give me news of myself.”
“If ye don’t command it, it is that ye lack the means, perhaps. But the
place is yours by right.”
“By what right, good hostess?”
“By the right of your birth and breeding and military rank, which is
plain upon you. Sir, why will you be undervaluing yourself? The means
that would enable you to take your proper place would be provided by
the wife who would be glad to share it with you.”
He shook his head, and laughed again.
“Do you know of such a lady?”
She paused before replying, pursing her full lips, pretending to
consider, that thus she might dissemble her hesitation.
There was more in that hesitation than either of them could have come
near imagining. Indeed, his whole destiny was in it. Upon such light
things do human fates depend that had she now taken the plunge, and
offered herself as she intended--instead of some ten days later, as
eventually happened--although his answer would have varied nothing from
what it ultimately was, yet the whole stream of his life would have
been diverted into other channels, and his story might never have been
worth telling.
Because her courage failed her at this moment, Destiny pursued the
forging of that curious chain of circumstance which it is my task to
reveal to you link by link.
“I think,” she said slowly at last, “that I should not be sorely put to
it to find her. I ... I should not have far to seek.”
“It is a flattering conviction. Alas, ma’am, I do not share it.” He
was sardonic. He made it clear that he refused to take the matter
seriously, that with him it never could be more than a peg for jests.
He rose, smiling a little crookedly. “Therefore I’ll still pin my
hopes to his grace of Albemarle. They may be desperate; but, faith,
they’re none so desperate as hopes of wedlock.” He took up his sword
as he spoke, passing the baldric over his head and settling it on his
shoulder. Then he reached for his hat, Mrs. Quinn regarding him the
while in mingling wistfulness and hesitation.
At last she roused herself, and sighed.
“We shall see; we shall see. Maybe we’ll talk of it again.”
“Not if you love me, delectable matchmaker,” he protested, turning to
depart.
Solicitude for his immediate comfort conquered all other considerations
in her.
“You’ll not go forth without another draught to ... to fortify you.”
She had possessed herself again of the empty tankard. He paused and
smiled. “I may need fortifying,” he confessed, thinking of all the
disappointment that had waited upon his every previous attempt to see
the Duke. “You think of everything,” he praised her. “You are not Mrs.
Quinn of the Paul’s Head, you are benign Fortune pouring gifts from an
inexhaustible cornucopia.”
“La, sir!” she laughed, as she bustled out. It would be wrong to say
that she did not understand him; for she perfectly understood that he
paid her some high and flowery compliment, which was what she most
desired of him as an earnest of better things to follow.