“Saw you not that fool, the Earl of Wiltshire,” old Madam asked, “with a towel tied around his neck, and carrying my Lord Cranmer’s silver pots, the christening present? Lord! why did he not go fetch his daughter’s head? The drivelling idiot would dance at his own funeral, if he could crook his legs, with the hope to please the king’s grace. ’Tis such a courtier that upsets an honest stomach. Were I the king, I’d send him home with a merry flogging, as an ass.”
CHAPTER XXVII
THE WIZARD IN THE TOWER
Superstition works its own miracles, and strangely enough, even in the Tower of London, its spell took effect. The royal officers had secured the person of the wizard and had suffered no harm from the contact. It was true that one young man had fallen in a fit at some strange vision in the wizard’s house, but the others were unscathed. Yet the power of the little man’s strange eyes and stranger manner worked upon them, and no prisoner in the Tower was better treated or with more reverence. The warder locked him in with shaking hands, his knees knocking together, and but for the sharper terror of the rope at Tyburn, he might have failed to turn the key upon his captive. The sentinels within the Traitor’s Gate declared that at midnight the small man in a russet cloak passed between them, not in natural shape, but floating past them like a vapor, going through the close-barred wicket to the river and returning again at dawn. Of food, the wizard had an abundance; he had but to express the wish for some new viand, accompanying it with a gruesome prophecy in regard to his keeper’s future, and the dish was immediately forthcoming. They denied him nothing; when other prisoners shivered, he had a fire; when better men languished in the dark, he had twenty tall tapers burning around his room. He was freely supplied with pen and paper, and he filled the sheets with cabalistic signs which froze the blood of his attendants. One of the bolder warders refused to tend his fire for him; the wizard looked up with a strange face and passed his hands before his eyes.
“Thy wife has a fit,” he said calmly; “the baby is born dead.”
The man hurried from the room, grumbling at the prisoner as an evil croaker, and at the door he heard the news confirmed. After that he almost grovelled in his anxiety to serve the evil little man who only laughed and mocked his terror. Nothing but a wholesome fear of Cromwell’s anger kept such a prisoner in the Tower; a thousand times he could have escaped, but that, at the last moment, the thought of the privy seal stayed the hands of his would-be liberators. Cromwell could not be trifled with; his arm was long, his vengeance swift, his eye that of a hawk looking for prey. Between the two, the magician and the king’s minister, the warders of the Tower lived as men do between the devil and the deep sea.
It was the day after Prince Edward’s great christening, and the wizard sat in his prison watching the blaze leap from the logs piled in his chimney. The wind was chill without, but he was warm, thanks to the terror of his jailers. He sat on a low stool, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, gazing at the flames as if he loved them; the red glow of the fire flaring on his wizened face and in his wonderful eyes. He was dressed in russet-colored damask, a cape of Flanders lace about his neck, and on his head a pointed scarlet cap with an opal in the front, clasping the one stiff feather. He wore velvet shoes, scarlet like his cap, and on his thin, long-fingered hands were some curious rings, all strangely wrought and fantastic in design. He had but recently stirred the fire, and the blaze leaped up the chimney with a merry roar and crackle. So intent was he in his study of it that he never turned his head when the warder opened his door and admitted two closely muffled women. The visitors came in a little way and stopped, looking at him without speaking, while the warder, after staring in with wide-mouthed curiosity, retreated in fear of provoking the wizard’s displeasure. When he had closed the door, the scene remained for some moments unchanged; the two women standing together, evidently watching the magician, though their mantles concealed their faces, and he still gazing fixedly at the blaze as if he read some story in it. There was no sound but the sharp crackle of the wood, and there was something unpleasantly awe-inspiring in the stillness of the gloomy place, where no light shone but the red one of the flames. Presently the wizard broke the silence. He had not shown by any sign or movement that he had seen his visitors, but he addressed them now, though without turning his head or glancing in their direction.
“My Lady Crabtree and Mistress Carew, you are welcome,” he said calmly; “come to the fire and be seated.”
Old Madam laughed harshly.
“What is the use to wear a mask?” she said; “the creature hath eyes in the back of his head like a spider.”
As she spoke, she drew nearer the fire and seated herself on a settle opposite the astrologer, and Betty came over and stood beside her, looking eagerly at the weird figure before them.