And Margaret read the message.
"In five days more I'll come with my ships.
"JOHN BRAND."
XX
VICTORY
"In five days more I'll come with my ships."
Five days had passed since Brand's promise reached the Queen, it was the twenty-first of the Terror, and the master was not come.
Trooper Browne had been on duty all night, slept through the morning, and now at two in the afternoon came hungry to the mess-room for luncheon. The tables were gone since daybreak, surgeons and nurses had taken possession, the pavement, the aisles, even the triforium gallery, were crowded with the beds of the sick and the dying taken from the streets. In the ante-chamber he found some biscuits, and with these and a glass of water fled to the guard-room.
That beautiful gallery was at least unchanged, its precious columns of azurite and malachite reflected in the polished slabs of the floor. The alabaster stairs came up from the portico, and went on to the chambers of state, now turned into hospital wards and Government offices. One man was on guard, Sergeant Jack Branscombe, fat, lazy old Jack sole garrison of the Palace, and him Browne relieved that he might get his breakfast. So the trooper sat on a bench eating biscuits, and watched the endless procession of sufferers being carried past upon the stairway.
One man on guard! Of the two hundred gentlemen-at-arms, and their two hundred orderlies, only seventy were left—all as brothers now—to ride with her Majesty. She would come back with her riders at four o'clock, tired out, and here on the table stood a gold cup, and a flagon of wine left by Miss Temple, for our Lady's refreshment.
Stealthily Browne lifted the cup, and pressed his lips against the rim. Even as he did that a little chuckle sounded close at his elbow—so startlingly like our Lady's laugh that he set down the cup in haste.