Jerome Caryl had no thought for company save of failure; he had played for a high stake and the price for losing it was heavy. Personally he looked ahead with calm eyes; the prospect for him was utterly hopeless: Tyburn as soon as they could hurry his trial through; his guilt was obvious, beyond dispute. And when those papers were opened at Kensington the thousands who had been prompted by his persuasions and their own rashness to sign them would be sent in his footsteps to glut the government revenge.
At this reflection Jerome Caryl did flinch, at the bloodshed there would be; the sneer of the French at his clumsiness, and King James’s bewail that he was so badly served. He knew that his wholesale failure could not be judged lightly at St. Germains, even though he hanged for it.
He had been fooled; that unforgivable thing that carried the scorn of his enemies and the curses of his friends: he had fallen headlong to his own destruction and dragged after him those who had trusted him; a bitter reflection for his solitude.
Of his dead friend’s sister, Caryl could not trust himself to think. He could not know if she had heard of his arrest, but he did know that whether warned in time or not, she would stay and share the common fate.
Some might try and fly to France, but not Delia Featherstonehaugh.
But these thoughts he thrust from him as he was conducted from his solitude along the quiet rooms of the palace. His face grew disdainful as he reflected the examination he must be put to was a mere flourish. They knew everything. Did they want him to betray secrets in their possession already? The government held in its hand the plot and all concerned in it. Jerome Caryl felt contemptuous of this slow dealing. Why did they not strike and have done? The power was theirs.
Added to this, the soldier conducting him, a Dutchman, who seemed to have no English, roused Jerome’s ire curiously; the prisoner noticed how the fellow’s uniform sat in creases on his fat figure, how he wheezed and moaned to himself as he mounted the stairs, and how he eyed his charge from time to time with a glance of heavy aversion. At every doorway a sentinel was posted, and with him the fat Dutchman exchanged slow speech in his own language, while Jerome waited his pleasure, swordless, helpless, in a cold wrath at these lumpish foreign intruders.
“Have you, sir, no English here?” he demanded at last. “Or is Kensington entirely filled with your countrymen?”
The Dutchman looked at him insolently and made no answer; it was doubtful if he understood.
They had reached now a small ante-chamber at the end of a long gallery; it was very ill-lit; the soldier’s blue uniform showed dimly through the gloom; a high-nosed, pale-faced young man was engaged in tying up papers at a side table. He came forward and spoke in a suppressed manner to the soldier, who, Jerome gathered from the address, was Count Solmes of the famous “Blues.”