第55章 THE MARPLOT(1)

At a little after six o'clock on the evening of Saturday, 12th October, in the year 1678, the man known commonly as Edward Copshaw came to a halt opposite the narrow entry of the Savoy, just west of the Queen's palace of Somerset House.He was a personage of many names.In the register of the Benedictine lay-brothers he had been entered as James Singleton.Sundry Paris tradesmen had known him as Captain Edwards, and at the moment were longing to know more of him.In a certain secret and tortuous correspondence he figured as Octavius, and you may still read his sprawling script in the Record Office.His true name, which was Nicholas Lovel, was known at Weld House, at the White Horse Tavern, and the town lodgings of my lords Powis and Bellasis, but had you asked for him by that name at these quarters you would have been met by a denial of all knowledge.For it was a name which for good reasons he and his patrons desired to have forgotten.

He was a man of not yet forty, furtive, ill-looking and lean to emaciation.

In complexion he was as swarthy as the King, and his feverish black eyes were set deep under his bushy brows.A badly dressed peruke concealed his hair.His clothes were the remnants of old finery, well cut and of good stuff, but patched and threadbare.He wore a sword, and carried a stout rustic staff.The weather was warm for October, and the man had been walking fast, for, as he peered through the autumn brume into the dark entry, he mopped his face with a dirty handkerchief.

The exercise had brought back his ailment and he shivered violently.

Punctually as autumn came round he had these fevers, the legacy of a year once spent in the Pisan marshes.He had doped himself with Jesuits' powder got from a woman of Madame Carwell's, so that he was half deaf and blind.

Yet in spite of the drug the fever went on burning.

But to anyone looking close it would have seemed that he had more to trouble him than a malarial bout.The man was patently in an extreme terror.His lantern-jaw hung as loose as if it had been broken.His lips moved incessantly.He gripped savagely at his staff, and next moment dropped it.He fussed with the hilt of his sword....He was a coward, and yet had come out to do murder.

It had taken real panic to bring him to the point.Throughout his tattered life he had run many risks, but never a peril so instant as this.As he had followed his quarry that afternoon his mind had been full of broken memories.Bitter thoughts they were, for luck had not been kind to him.Achildhood in cheap lodgings in London and a dozen French towns, wherever there was a gaming-table and pigeons for his father to pluck.Then drunken father and draggletailed mother had faded from the scene, and the boy had been left to a life of odd jobs and fleeting patrons.His name was against him, for long before he reached manhood the King had come back to his own, and his grandfather's bones had jangled on a Tyburn gibbet.There was no hope for one of his family, though Heaven knew his father had been a stout enough Royalist.At eighteen the boy had joined the Roman Church, and at twenty relapsed to the fold of Canterbury.But his bread-and-butter lay with Rome, and in his trade few questions were asked about creed provided the work were done.He had had streaks of fortune, for there had been times when he lay soft and ate delicately and scattered money.But nothing lasted.He had no sooner made purchase with a great man and climbed a little than the scaffolding fell from his feet.He thought meanly of human nature for in his profess he must cringe or snarl, always the undermost dog.Yet he had some liking for the priests, who had been kind to him, and there was always a glow in his heart for the pale wife who dwelt with his child in the attic in Billingsgate.Under happier circumstances Mr.Nicholas Lovel might have shone with the domestic virtues.

Business had been good of late, if that could ever be called good which was undertaken under perpetual fear.He had been given orders which took him into Whig circles, and had made progress among the group of the King's Head Tavern.He had even won an entrance into my Lord Shaftesbury's great house in Aldersgate Street.He was there under false colours, being a spy of the other camp, but something in him found itself at home among the patriots.Aresolve had been growing to cut loose from his old employers and settle down among the Whigs in comparative honesty.It was the winning cause, he thought, and he longed to get his head out of the kennels....But that had happened yesterday which scattered his fine dreams and brought him face to face with terror.God's curse on that ferrety Justice, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey.

He had for some time had his eye on the man.The year before he had run across him in Montpelier, being then engaged in a very crooked business, and had fancied that the magistrate had also his eye on him.Taught by long experience to watch potential enemies, he had taken some trouble over the lean high-beaked dignitary.Presently he had found out curious things.The austere Protestant was a friend of the Duke's man, Ned Coleman, and used to meet him at Colonel Weldon's house.This hinted at blackmailable stuff in the magistrate, so Lovel took to haunting his premises in Hartshorn Lane by Charing Cross, but found no evidence which pointed to anything but a prosperous trade in wood and sea-coal.Faggots, but not the treasonable kind! Try as he might, he could-get no farther with that pillar of the magistracy, my Lord Danly's friend, the beloved of Aldermen.He hated his solemn face, his prim mouth, his condescending stoop.Such a man was encased in proof armour of public esteem, and he heeded Mr.Lovel no more than the rats in the gutter.

But the day before had come a rude awakening.All this talk of a Popish plot, discovered by the Salamanca Doctor, promised a good harvest to Mr.