Her voice choked in her throat, and feeling like men convicted of some great meanness, they passed out and left her.
A squire was on guard outside the King’s door—a grizzled man, lame of one leg from a wound in the French wars, taciturn, with a mouth that shut like a trap.
Salisbury spoke to him, with a hand gripping his arm below the shoulder.
“There is great trust placed in you, Cavendish. Has Sir Robert Knollys made it plain?”
The squire nodded.
“I would have listened to no other man.”
“Thunder, think you we play such a game as this for the joy of it? By my soul, Cavendish, we are like to lose our King, and our heads, unless we have a King with some blood in him. You have eyes and a shrewd head, and the devil’s own courage. Play the game through. Is Sir Robert Knollys within?”
“He has been there this half-hour.”
“Open, and let us pass.”
They found Knollys standing with his back to the window, arms folded, teeth biting at his moustache, his eyes watching the King, who sat half-dressed in a gilded chair, his hair over his face, his whole body shaking. The lad might have had St. Vitus’s dance by the way he twitched and fidgeted. His eyes had a scared and empty look. There was no shadow of kingliness upon him, nothing but the terror of an animal that seeks to slink into a corner.