“Reward!” said the King, who had been looking at the mug, “reward! when you have cracked my mug—my own only mug, with ‘A present for a good King’ on it. Reward indeed! a stamp from the Great Seal would be more——”
But Tony was gone. He ran home to tell his grandfather—but his grandfather was not there—only a letter lay on the kitchen table.
“Dear grandson,” it said, “the King has found out that my name was entered in the register as Anthony Antrobus, and he refuses to believe that the alteration to Sydney Cecil Ernest Watchett was made at my birth. So I am seeking safety at a distance. I have only one piece of advice to give you. Do so too.—Your loving Grandfather.”
This seemed such good advice to Tony, whose name was also in the register, that he was just going to take it when the door was flung open, and in rushed the King and the Army. They hustled and bustled and rustled round the house, breaking and tearing everything, and when there was nothing more to spoil they carried Tony off to prison.
“So this is my reward for getting the milk for him,” said poor Tony to himself, as he sat in prison, loaded with chains, and waiting for his trial. “I wish I had drunk the milk myself. This is what comes of loyalty. But I don’t care, my name is Tony, and his is not, and I will say so too, if I hang for it.”
Acting on this resolution next day, at his trial, Tony said so, and what is more, he came very near indeed to hanging for it. For King Anthony XXIII. was furious. He absolutely danced with rage, and it took six Prime Ministers to restrain his emotion while the trial went on. Tony was tried for an attempt to murder the King. The whole thing, said the Public Persecutor, was nothing but a plot. The prophecy of Henry Birkbeck, which nobody had seen, till Tony found it; the Blue Mountain, which nobody but Tony had seen at all; the thick milk so mysteriously obtained, all pointed to dark treason and villainy. The crack in the mug was a peculiarly incriminating circumstance. (I cannot help the long words—Public Persecutors will use them.) It was a vile plot, the Persecutor said, but it had failed. The Public Analyst gave evidence that the milk was not milk at all, but some explosive substance too dangerous to analyse.
Tony looked at the Jury and he looked round the Court, and he saw that the case did indeed look black against himself. When he was asked what was his defence, he said—
“There is no pleasing some people.”
“It is my duty to caution you,” said the Persecutor, “that everything you say will be used against you.”