As she spoke, Sir William came in, fresh from a gallop across the fields, and smiling; but at the sight of Betty’s white face and the frown between old Madam’s brows, he stopped.
“What means this?” he asked; “you look as if you had seen a corpse-light.”
“There be tidings from London,” Lady Crabtree answered; “Lord Raby hath gone to the Tower accused of high treason.”
Amazement tied Sir William’s tongue; he seated himself opposite his cousin and waited for an explanation, his honest face much clouded. Lady Crabtree spread out a letter on her knee and prepared to read the news.
“This comes from Mistress Gaynsford, Queen Anne’s maid,” she said, her open hand resting on the long roll of parchment; “she is a gossip, but I doubt not the truth of the matter.”
“Let us hear it, Zenobia,” Carew returned impatiently.
“She says of the arrest,” began my lady, reading, “‘Lord Raby was taken on a charge, secretly preferred to my lord privy seal, and on examination, a packet was found on his person, filled with treasonable papers, and exposing the network of a huge conspiracy. Many names were on a list therein; whose we know not, but Cromwell and the king’s grace have the papers, and doubtless many tremble in the fear of apprehension. No one knows where the lightning hath struck or who is spared, but ’tis said the gentlemen in the northern counties are many of them singed. The strangest part of the matter is that there runs a story that Raby gave this budget to my lord privy seal himself with every show of innocence, and when it was thought that he did it through an error, having two upon his person, he was searched, but none other was found; and what madness made him give this to Cromwell, no man can devise.’”
“’Tis passing strange,” remarked Sir William; “where was my packet?”
“‘These papers,’” continued old Madam, reading, “‘contained such full betrayal of the wizard Sanders, who so frightened the late queen, that the order for his arrest was given. The fashion in which he was taken will furnish you with entertainment withal. The man who played the informer, in the first instance, before Raby’s arrest, had mastered almost every secret of the strange house upon the river. He told the officers of the guard who went to take the astrologer that there was a tunnel from the cellar of the house, and that they must guard first the outlet of that before they strove to force the upper part. The entrance in the house he had never found, but the outlet by the river he knew. They said ’twas scarce larger than a mole-hill and cleverly concealed. Well, here sat down three of the king’s men, while others went and searched the house. There they were transfixed by terror, for when each one looked in that magic mirror, he saw the devil, horns and hoofs and tail, but when they all looked, it was blank. A young page with them had a fit from fright. ’Tis said by some that it is only too faithful a glass. They found not the wizard, nor was there a bit of writing there. But the trio by the hole in the ground had better luck. Out of it the magician appeared so suddenly, and was so near the color of the earth in his russet cloak, that he frightened them so much that two fell sprawling in the river mud, and had not the third been a big man and valiant, my lord wizard would have escaped. They have him now safe in the Tower, though ’tis said he rides out of it each night upon a moonbeam and returns when the cocks are crowing.
“‘How came my Lord Raby to conspire with this man? I remember that he and Francis Bryan were ready to slit his throat the night the queen took her fright. Yet ’tis said that the case is clear enough, and there is some wonder when the trial will come off.