“Kenneth Montagu, at your service.”
Cumberland ordered the room cleared, then turned on Volney a very grim face. “I’ll remember this, Sir Robert. You knew him all the time. It has a bad look, I make plain to say.”
“’Twas none of my business. Your troopers can find enough victims for you without my pointing out any. I take the liberty of reminding your Highness that I’m not a hangman by profession,” returned Volney stiffly.
“You go too far, sir,” answered the Duke haughtily. “I know my duty too well to allow me to be deterred from performing it by you or by anybody else. Mr. Montagu, have you any reason to give why I should not hang you for a spy?”
“No reason that would have any weight with your Grace,” I answered.
He looked long at me, frowning blackly out of the grimmest face I had ever fronted; and yet that countenance, inexorable as fate, belonged to a young man not four years past his majority.
“Without dubiety you deserve death,” he said at the last, “but because of your youth I give you one chance. Disclose to me the hiding-place of the Pretender and you shall come alive out of the valley of the shadow.”
A foretaste of the end clutched icily at my heart, but the price of the proffered safety was too great. Since I must die, I resolved that it should be with a good grace.
“I do not know whom your Grace can mean by the Pretender.”
His heavy jaw set and his face grew cold and hard as steel.