Two boats with cushions and banners at the stern were moving up-stream while the day was still in its April hours. They were nearing Richmond, stately in memories and in trees, and Sheen also, where the last of the Tudors delivered up her queenship unto God. The two boats had pulled out from Whitehall stairs that morning, carrying a river-party to my Lord Gore’s house at Bushy. Discretion and the voice of some “back-stairs friend” had hinted that my lord and his son would discover the country preferable to the town until my Lord of Pembroke’s recovery should be assured. The King had lately assumed a prejudice against brawls, and my lord had left this chance indiscretion in the hands of Hortense, who was—for the while—the King. Stephen Gore had collected a few especial friends to go by river and spend some days with him at Bushy. His deaf sister from Kensington had been appointed state duenna for the week. With my lord were two gentlemen of the same political tendencies as himself; my Lady Purcell, fresh and fragrant as a Provence rose; a certain Sir Peter Marden’s wife and daughter, blood relatives of the Gores; and Captain John, his son. Moreover, in the same boat as her mother, with a scarlet cushion under her arm, sat Mistress Barbara, solemn, and dark as some Proserpine to whom the breath of the summer day presaged the shadows of a sadder world. Her mother would probably have left her at the house in Pall Mall had not the girl displayed a sudden tractable cheerfulness that had surprised Lady Anne into searching for motives. Nor had the fertile and intuitive brain of woman far to seek. My Lady Purcell drew her own amused conclusions, nor was she sorry to suspect the girl of such reasonable yet uncharacteristic softness. It so happened that Barbara and John Gore were not shipped in the same boat, the son having taken charge of the second and smaller of the two, with a cargo of luggage and servants, to say nothing of Master Sparkin, who had scrambled into the bow, and amused himself alternately by tickling the neck of the nearest waterman with a feather and dabbling his hands in the water over gunwale. John Gore’s boat proved the faster of the two, and though she started half a mile behind my lord’s, she had drawn up by the time that they had reached Mortlake, much to the satisfaction of Sparkin, who had urged the men on to a race. For a while they pulled stroke and stroke, John Gore laughing and talking to the guests in his father’s boat.