"You will have difficulty in getting off again if the Spaniards once enter the city," the captain said. "There will be such a rush to the boats that they will be swamped before they leave shore."
"I have a boat hidden away in which I hope to bring off the governor with me," Ned replied. "As to myself, I can swim like a fish."
"Mind and get rid of your armour before you try it. All the swimming in the world could not save you if you jumped in with all that steel mail on you."
"I will bear it in mind," Ned said. "Goodbye, countess. Good-bye, Fraulein Gertrude. I trust to see you at nightfall, if not before."
"That is a very gallant young officer," Captain Enkin said as the two ladies sat watching Ned as he rowed to the shore.
"You addressed him as Captain Martin?" the countess said.
"Yes, he has been a captain in the prince's service fully three years," the sailor said; "and fought nobly at Alkmaar, at the naval battle on the Zuider Zee, and in the sea fight when we drove Romero's fleet back in Bergen. He stands very high in the confidence of the prince, but I do not think he is in our service now. He is often with the prince, but I believe he comes and goes between England and Holland, and is, men say, the messenger by whom private communications between the queen of England and the prince are chiefly carried."
"He is young to have such confidence reposed in him," the countess said.
"Yes, he is young," Captain Enkin replied. "Not, I suppose, beyond seven or eight and twenty. He was a captain and high in the prince's confidence when I first knew him three years ago, so he must surely have been four or five and twenty then; and yet, indeed, now you speak of it, methinks he is greatly bigger now than he was then. I do not think he was much taller than I am, and now he tops me by nigh a head. But I must surely be mistaken as to that, for the prince would scarcely place his confidence in a mere lad."
The countess made no reply, though she exchanged a quiet smile with her daughter. They knew that Ned could not be much more than twenty. He was, he had said, about three years older than Gertrude, and she had passed seventeen but by a few months.