Monmouth, James Scott, Duke of, 1649-1685 -- Fiction
As we went, I looked up at the inn balcony, from which several heads
looked down upon us. Behind them, in the lighted room, in profile, in
full view, was the lady of the fierce eyes. I knew her at once, in spite
of the grey Spanish (man's) hat she wore, slouched over her face. She
was all swathed in a Spanish riding cloak. One took her for a handsome
young man. But I knew that she was my enemy. I knew her name now, too;
Aurelia. She was looking down at me, or rather at us, for she could not
have made out our faces. Her face was sad. She seemed uninterested;
she had, perhaps, enough sorrow of her own at that moment, without
the anxieties of others. A big, burly, hulking, handsome person of the
swaggering sort which used to enter the army in those days, left the
balcony hurriedly. I saw him at the window, speaking earnestly to her,
pointing to the square, in which, already, the darkness hid us. I saw
the listlessness fall from her. She seemed to waken up into intense life
in an instant. She walked with a swift decision peculiar to her
away from the window, leaving the hulking fellow, an elderly,
dissolute-looking man, with the wild puffy eyes of the drinker, to pick
his teeth in full view of the square.
When we left watching our enemies, Mr. Jermyn bade me walk on tiptoe. We
scurried away across the square diagonally, pausing twice to listen for
pursuers. No one seemed to be following. There was not much sense in
following; for the guard was busy searching for suspicious persons. We
heard them challenging passers-by, with a rattle of their halberds
on the stones, to make their answers prompt. We were safe enough from
persecution for the time. We went down a dark street into a dark alley.
From the alley we entered a courtyard, the sides of which were vast
houses. We entered one of these houses. The door seemed to open in the
mysterious way which had puzzled me so much in Fish Lane. Mr. Jermyn
smiled when I asked him how this was done. “Go on in, boy,” he said.
“There are many queer things in lives like ours.” He gave me a shove
across the threshold, while the door closed itself silently behind us.
He took me into a room which was not unlike a marine store of the better
sort. There were many sailor things (all of the very best quality) lying
in neat heaps on long oak shelves against the walls. In the middle of
the room a table was laid for dinner.
Mr. Jermyn made me eat a hearty meal before starting, which I did. As
I ate, he fidgeted about among some lockers at my back. Presently, as I
began to sip some wine which he had poured out for me, he put something
over my shoulders.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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