“I have spoken with the King. I had thought that I should strike a new courage into him, that he would be shamed, stung to the quick. Well, it is not so. Do what your wisdom desires. I have no more to say.” Salisbury stood forward and bowed his head before her. “Madame, trust us. The case must be desperate when we use so desperate a disguise. You yourself have suffered at the hands of these common men, and they have grown more savage since they have grown in strength. Let us remember that the King is but a lad.” She turned away from him and went and stood by the window, her eyes hot with tears. “Do not seek to soften it. What must be must be, and yet was ever a woman’s pride so humbled!” She grew inarticulate, stood awhile with one hand at her throat, and then swung round and faced them. “Gentlemen, to save a son and a kingdom I pluck my child out of the throne, and like a hen I hide him under my feathers. The secret must be kept, well kept.” They answered her together: “Madame, it shall be. All our lives depend on it.” “Then let it be done quickly. I have spoken with the two women I have chosen; they are in my closet and can be trusted to the death.” Salisbury looked at her questioningly. “Would it please you to see this young man—to assure yourself?” Her face flushed. “See him—this—this——! Sir, are you blind to what my pride bears in suffering? Let me never set eyes on the young man.” Her voice choked in her throat, and feeling like men convicted of some great meanness, they passed out and left her. A squire was on guard outside the King’s door—a grizzled man, lame of one leg from a wound in the French wars, taciturn, with a mouth that shut like a trap. Salisbury spoke to him, with a hand gripping his arm below the shoulder. “There is great trust placed in you, Cavendish. Has Sir Robert Knollys made it plain?” The squire nodded. “I would have listened to no other man.” “Thunder, think you we play such a game as this for the joy of it? By my soul, Cavendish, we are like to lose our King, and our heads, unless we have a King with some blood in him. You have eyes and a shrewd head, and the devil’s own courage. Play the game through. Is Sir Robert Knollys within?” “He has been there this half-hour.” “Open, and let us pass.” They found Knollys standing with his back to the window, arms folded, teeth biting at his moustache, his eyes watching the King, who sat half-dressed in a gilded chair, his hair over his face, his whole body shaking. The lad might have had St. Vitus’s dance by the way he twitched and fidgeted. His eyes had a scared and empty look. There was no shadow of kingliness upon him, nothing but the terror of an animal that seeks to slink into a corner. “Sire, will you come with us to Madame, your mother?” He stood up, fingers twitching, staring at them stupidly. “Put a cloak about him.” Knollys took a red cloak from a stool, threw it over the King’s shoulders, and wrapped it round him.