CHAPTER I._The hounds of God

THE HOUNDS OF GOD

_A Romance_

RAFAEL SABATINI

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

[COPYRIGHT]

THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM

CONTENTS

I. The Misanthrope

II. The Lover

III. In Calais Roads

IV. Sir Gervase

V. Flotsam

VI. Surrender

VII. Margaret’s Prisoner

VIII. Don Pedro’s Letter

IX. The Assault-at-Arms

X. The Ransom

XI. The Departure

XII. The Secretary of State

XIII. The Queen

XIV. Frey Luis

XV. Scylla

XVI. Charybdis

XVII. The Holy Office

XVIII. Domini Canes

XIX. Philip II

XX. The King’s Conscience

XXI. The Cardinal’s Conscience

XXII. The Royal Confessor

XXIII. The Auto de Fé

XXIV. Recognition

THE HOUNDS OF GOD

CHAPTER I.

THE MISANTHROPE

/It/ was Walsingham who said of Roger Trevanion, Earl of Garth, that

he preferred the company of the dead to that of the living.

This was a sneering allusion to the recluse, studious habits of his

lordship. His lordship, no doubt, would have regarded the sneer as a

thunderbolt of lath; that is, if he regarded it as a thunderbolt at

all. It is much more likely that he would have accepted the statement

in its literal sense, admitted the preference and justified it by

answering that the only good men were dead men. This because, being

dead, they could no longer work any evil.

You conceive that the experience of life which brings a man to such a

conclusion cannot have been pleasant. His misanthropy dated from his

adolescence, arose out of his close friendship for the gallant Thomas

Seymour, who was brother to one queen and husband to another, and who,

under the spur of ambition and perhaps indeed of love, would, upon the

death of Katherine Parr, have married the Princess Elizabeth. As

Seymour’s devoted and admiring friend, he had seen at close quarters

the slimy web of intrigue in which the Lord Admiral was taken, and he

had narrowly escaped being taken with him and with him sent to the

block. He had witnessed the evil working of the envious ambition of

the Protector Somerset, who, fearful lest fruition of the affair

between the Lord Admiral and the Princess should lead to his own

ultimate supersession, had not scrupled to bring his own brother to

the scaffold upon a fabricated charge of high-treason.

It was pretended that the Admiral was already the lover of the

Princess and that he conspired with her to overthrow the established

regency and to seize the reins of power with his own hands. Indeed,

the full pretence was that his courtship of the Princess was no more

than a step in the promotion of his schemes. The two offences were

made so interdependent that either might be established upon evidence

of the other.

Young Trevanion suffered arrest, together with all the principal

persons in the household of the Princess Elizabeth, and all who were

in close relations with the Admiral, whether as servants or as

friends. Because he was at once a member of the household of the

Princess and probably more in Seymour’s confidence than any other man,

he became the subject of assiduous attention on the part of the

Council of Regency. He was brought repeatedly before that council,

examined and reëxamined, questioned and probed _ad nauseam_, with the

object of tricking him into incriminating his friend by admissions of

what he had seen at Hatfield whilst living there and of what

confidences his friend might have reposed in him.

Although years later, when the admission could do no harm to any, his

lordship is known to have confessed that the Admiral’s passion for the

young Princess was very real and deep with roots in other than

ambition, and that once at Hatfield he had surprised her in the

Admiral’s arms--from which it may reasonably be concluded that she was

not indifferent to his passion, yet before the Council, young

Trevanion could remember nothing that might hurt his friend. Not only

did he stubbornly and stoutly deny knowledge, direct or indirect, of

any plot in which Seymour was engaged; but, on the contrary, he had

much to say that was calculated to prove that there was no substance

whatever behind this shadow of treason cast upon the Admiral. By his

demeanour he put the members of the Council in a rage with him on more

occasions than one. It was an education to him of the lengths to which

human spite can go. The Protector, himself, went so far once as to

warn him savagely that his own head was none so safe on his shoulders

that by pertness of words and conduct he should himself unsettle it

further. Their malevolence, begotten as he perceived of jealous fear,

made these men, whom he had accounted among the noblest in England,

appear despicable, mean, and paltry.

Under the shadow of that malevolence, Trevanion was sent to the Tower,

and kept there until the day of Seymour’s execution. On that

blustering March morning, he was granted a favour which he had not

ventured to solicit; he was conducted to the chamber in which his

doomed friend was imprisoned and left alone with him to take his

leave.

He was one-and-twenty at the time, an age in which life is so strong

in a man and death so abhorrent that it is almost terrifying to look

upon another who is about to die. He found the Admiral in a state of

composure which he could not understand, for the Admiral too was still

young, scarcely more than thirty, tall, vigorous, well-made, and

handsome. He sprang up to greet Trevanion almost gladly. He talked

volubly for the few moments they were together, scarcely allowing the

younger man to interject a word. He touched almost tenderly upon their

friendship, and, whilst moved by Garth’s sorrow, desired him to be

less glum, assured him that death was no great matter once you had

brought yourself to look it in the face. He had taken a full leave, he

announced, of the Lady Elizabeth, in a letter which he had spent most

of the night in writing to her; for although denied pen and ink by the

Lords of the Council, he had plucked an aglet from his hose and

contrived to write with that, and with the ink supplied by his own

veins. This letter, he told Trevanion, speaking boldly and loudly, was

concealed within the sole of his shoes, and a person of trust would

see to its safe delivery after he was gone. There was an odd smile on

his lips as he made the announcement, a singular slyness in his fine

eyes, which puzzled Trevanion at the time.

They embraced and parted, and Trevanion returned to his own prison to

pray for his friend and to resolve the riddle of that unnecessary and

indeed incautious confidence touching the letter in his shoes. Later

he understood.

With the knowledge of men which the Admiral possessed, he had been

quick to conclude that it was out of no kindly feelings Trevanion had

been permitted to pay him this last visit. It was the hope of the

Lords of the Council that Seymour might seize the opportunity to send

some message to the Princess which would be incriminating in

character, and their spies were posted to overhear and report. But

Seymour, guessing this, had taken full advantage of it to inform them

of the existence of letters which he desired them to find, letters

which had been written so that they might be found, couched in such

terms that their publication must completely vindicate the Princess.

That was the last act of Seymour’s devotion. Although the letters were

never published, they may have done their work by limiting the

persecution to which the Lady Elizabeth was thereafter subject. But

the jealous spite which had spilled Seymour’s blood left the honour of

the Princess besmirched by the foul tales that were current of her

relations with the Admiral.

It was Trevanion, himself, some months later, after his release and

when about to withdraw from the scene of events which had killed his

faith in men, who, in going to take his leave of the Princess

Elizabeth, informed her of the letter. And that slim girl of sixteen,

with a sigh and a sad smile that would have been old on a woman twice

her years, had repeated, perhaps in a different tone, the cautious

words she had used of the Admiral on an earlier occasion.

‘He was a man of much wit but very little judgment. God rest him!’

It was perhaps because he accounted this requiem so inadequate that,

when she would have had him resume his place in her household, he was

glad to be able to answer her that this the Lords of the Council had

already expressly denied him. Besides, his one desire was to remove

himself from the neighbourhood of the Court. He had been through the

valley of the shadow, and he had been permitted to perceive the vile

realities, the unscrupulous ambitions, the evil greed, the unworthy

passions festering under the fair surface of Court life. It had filled

him with loathing and disgust, and had put a definite end to all

courtly aspirations in himself.

He withdrew to his remote Cornish estates, there to devote himself to

husbandry and to the care of his people, matters which his father and

grandfather had entrusted to their stewards. Nor was he to be lured

thence by an invitation from the Princess Elizabeth when she became

queen and desired to reward those who had served her in her time of

tribulation.

He married, some ten years later, one of the Godolphins, a lady of

whom repute says that she was so beautiful that to behold her was to

love her. If that is true of her, it would appear to be the only

commendation she possessed. She was destined to carry the

disillusioning of the Earl of Garth yet a stage farther. A foolish,

empty, petulant creature, she made him realize once again that the

fairest skin may cover the sourest fruit, whereafter she departed this

life of a puerperal fever within a fortnight of the birth of their

only child, some five years after their ill-matched union.

Just as his one glimpse below the surface of Court life had sufficed

him, so his one experience of matrimony surfeited him. And although

only thirty-six at the time of her ladyship’s death, he undertook no

further adventures in wedlock, nor indeed adventures of any kind. He

was soul-weary, a distemper that not infrequently attacks the

thoughtful and introspective. He took to books, by which he had always

been attracted; he amassed at Trevanion Chase a prodigious library,

and as the years slipped by, he became more and more interested in the

things that had been and the things which philosophy taught him might

be, and less in those that actually were. He sought by study to probe

the meaning, purpose, and ultimate object of life, than which there is

no pursuit likelier to alienate a man from the business of living. He

became more and more aloof, took less and ever less heed of events

about him. The religious dissensions by which England was riven left

him unmoved. Not even when the menace of Spain hung like a black cloud

over the land, and everywhere men were arming and drilling against the

day of invasion, did the Earl of Garth, now well-advanced in years,

awaken to interest in the world in which he lived.

His daughter, who had been left more or less to bring herself up as

she chose, and who by a miracle had accomplished the task very

creditably, was the only living person who really understood him,

certainly the only one who loved him, for you conceive that he did not

invite affection. She had inherited a considerable portion of her

mother’s good looks, and most of the good sense and good feeling that

had distinguished her father in his youth, with just enough of her

mother’s perversity to give a spice to the mixture. If she reached--as

she eventually did--the age of twenty-five unmarried the fault was

entirely her own. There had been suitors to spare at any time after

her seventeenth year, and their comings and goings at times had driven

his lordship to the verge of exasperation. She was credited with

having broken several hearts. Or, to put it more happily, since that

untruly implies an undesirable activity on her part, several hearts

had been broken by her rejection of their infatuated owners. She had

remained as impassive as one of the rocks of that Cornish coast

against which ships might break themselves if hard-driven by weather

or ill-handled.

She loved her liberty too well to relinquish it. Thus she informed her

suitors. Like the Queen, she was so well satisfied with her maiden

estate that she accounted it the best estate in the world and was of

no mind to change it for any other.

This was no mere pretext upon which mercifully to dismiss those wooers

who did not commend themselves. It was, there is every reason to

believe, the actual truth. The Lady Margaret Trevanion had been

reared, as a result of her father’s idiosyncrasies, in masculine

freedom. Hers from the age of fifteen or sixteen to come and go

unquestioned; horses and dogs and hawks had engrossed her days; she

was as one of the lads of her own age with whom she associated; her

frank boyishness kept her relations with them on exactly the same

plane as that which marked the association of those boys with one

another. If the advent of her first suitor when she had reached the

age of seventeen produced the result of setting a check upon her

hoydenishness, arousing her to certain realities and imposing upon her

thereafter a certain circumspection, she did not on that account

abandon her earlier pursuits or the love of personal liberty which

their free indulgence had engendered in her. The odd thing is that she

was nowise coarsened by the masculinity with which her unusual rearing

had invested her. Just as the free and constant exercises of her tall,

supple body appeared but to have enriched it in feminine grace, so the

freedom of mental outlook upon which she had insisted had given her a

breadth and poise of mind from which she gathered a dignity entirely

feminine, as well as command over herself and others. She afforded

perhaps a remarkable instance of the persistence of inbred traits and

how they will assert themselves and dominate a character in despite of

environment and experience.

At the time at which I present her to you she had reached her

twenty-third year firmly entrenched in her maidenhood; and, with the

plainly asserted intention of remaining in that estate, she had so far

successfully discouraged all suitors but one. This one was an amiable

lad named Gervase Crosby, of a considerable Devon family, a kinsman to

Lord Garth’s neighbour, Sir John Killigrew of Arwenack, and a

persistent fellow who could not take ‘no’ for an answer. He was a

younger son with his way to make in the world, and Killigrew, a

bachelor, with no children of his own, had taken an interest in him

and desired to promote his fortunes. As a result of this the boy had

been much at Arwenack, that stately castellated house above the

estuary of the Fal. Killigrew was closely connected with the

Godolphins, and therefore looked upon the Earl of Garth as a kinsman

by marriage and upon Margaret as a still closer kinswoman on the

maternal side. He was one of the few among the surrounding gentry who

ventured freely to break through the seclusion in which the old earl

hedged himself about, and who was not to be discouraged by the

indifference of his welcome at his lordship’s hands. It was under his

ægis that young Crosby was first brought to Trevanion Chase, when a

well-grown, handsome lad of sixteen. Margaret liked him and used him

with a frank, boyish friendliness which encouraged him to come there

often. They were much of an age, and they discovered a similarity in

tastes and an interest in the same pursuits which made them fast

friends.

Killigrew, after much deliberation, had resolved that his young

kinsman should study law, with a view to a political career. He argued

that if young Crosby’s brains were any match for his long, comely body

there should be a brilliant future for him at the Court of a queen who

was ever ready to promote the fortunes of a handsome man. Therefore he

brought tutors to Arwenack and set about the lad’s education. But, as

often happens, the views of young and old did not here coincide.

Crosby was of a romantic temperament, and he could perceive no romance

in the law, however much Killigrew might labour to demonstrate it for

him. He desired a life of adventure; to live dangerously was in his

view the only way to be really alive.

The world was still ringing with the echoes of the epic of Drake’s

voyage round the globe. The sea and the sailor’s opportunity to probe

the mysteries of the earth, penetrating uncharted oceans, discovering

fabulous lands, called him; and finally Killigrew yielded, being wise

enough to perceive that no man will make a success of a career in

which his heart is not engaged.

Sir John took the boy to London. That was in 1584, just after his

twentieth birthday. Before setting out upon that voyage of adventure,

Gervase had desired to establish moorings at home against his return,

and he had offered himself, heart and hand and the fortune which he

was to make, to the Lady Margaret.

If the offer did not dazzle her ladyship, it certainly startled her.

From their fairly constant association she had come to regard him

almost as a brother, had come to permit him those familiarities which

a sister may permit, had even upon occasion allowed a kiss or two to

pass between them with no more than sisterly enthusiasm. That,

unsuspected by her, there should have been anything more than

brotherliness on his part seemed ludicrous. She said so, and brought

down upon herself a storm of reproaches, pleadings, and protestations

which soared in moments to heights of terrifying vehemence.

The Lady Margaret was not terrified. She remained calm. The

self-reliance which her rearing had imposed upon her had taught her

self-control. She took refuge in that phrase of hers about her

preference for a maiden estate. What was good enough for the Queen,

she announced, was good enough for her, as if making of virginity a

point of loyalty.

Shocked and dejected, Gervase went to take his leave of her father.

His lordship, who had just discovered Plato and was absorbed in that

philosopher’s conception of the cosmos, desired to cut these

valedictions short. But Gervase deemed it incumbent upon him to

enlighten the Earl on the subject of his daughter’s unnatural views of

life. No doubt he hoped, with the irrepressible optimism of the young,

to enlist his lordship’s aid in bringing her ladyship to a proper

frame of mind. But his lordship, irritated perhaps by the

interruption, had stared at him from under shaggy eyebrows.

‘If she chooses to lead apes in hell, what affair is that of yours?’

If Master Crosby had been shocked already by the daughter’s attitude

towards what he accounted the most important thing in life, he was far

more deeply shocked by her sire’s. This, he thought, was a nettle to

be grasped. So he grasped it.

‘It is my affair because I want to marry her.’

The Earl maintained his disconcerting level stare. He did not even

blink.

‘And what does Margaret want?’ he asked.

‘I have told your lordship what she says she wants.’

‘Since she says what you say she says, I wonder that you think it

worth while to trouble me.’

This would have discouraged any young man but Gervase Crosby. He drew

a swift, shrewd inference favourable to himself. I suspect that

Killigrew had good reasons besides the lad’s looks and inches for

intending him for the law, just as I suspect that a good lawyer was

lost in him when he took to the sea.

‘Your lordship means that I deserve your approval, and that if I can

bring Margaret to a change of views…’

‘I mean,’ his lordship interrupted him, ‘that if you bring Margaret to

a change of views, I will then consider the situation. It is not my

habit to deal with more than I find before me, or to plague myself

over possibilities which may never become realities. It is a habit

which I commend to you now that you are about to go forth into the

world. Too much good human energy is wasted in providing for

contingencies that never arise. I make you in these words, if you will

trouble to bear them in your memory, a parting gift of more value than

you may at present discern. I shall hope to hear of your good fortune,

sir.’

Thus the misanthrope dismissed the lover.