Crockett Samuel Rutherford
Joan of the Sword Hand

CHAPTER XXXV
A PERILOUS HONEYMOON

Never was day so largely and gloriously blue since Courtland was a city as the first morning of the married life of Maurice and Margaret von Lynar, Count and Countess von Löen. The summer floods had subsided, and the tawny dye had gone clean out of the Alla, which was now as clear as aquamarine, and laved rather than fretted the dark green piles of the Summer Palace.

The Princesses (so they said without) were more than ever inseparable. They were constantly talking confidentially together, for all the world like schoolgirls with a secret. Doubtless Prince Louis's fair sister was persuading the unruly wife to return to her duty. Doubtless it was so – ah, yes, doubtless!

"Better that Prince Louis should do his own embassage in such a matter in his proper person," said the good-wives of Thorn. "For me, I would not listen to any sister if my man came not to my feet himself. The Lady Joan is in the right of it – a feckless lover, no true man!"

"Aye," said the men, agreeing for once, "a paper-backed princeling! God wot, were it our Conrad we should soon hear other of it! There would be none of this shilly-shallying back-and-forth work then! We would give half a year's income in golden gulden for a good lusty heir to the Principalities – with that foul Muscovite Ivan yearning to lay the knout across our backs!"

"There is something toward to-day," said a decent widow woman who lived in the Königstrasse to her neighbour. "My son, who as you know is a chorister, is gone to practise the Wedding Hymn in the cathedral. I am going thither to get a good place. I will not miss it, whatever it is. Perhaps they are going to make the Princess Joan do penance for her fault, in a white sheet with a candle in her hand a yard long! That would be rare sport. I would not miss it for so much as four farthings!"

And with that the chorister's mother hobbled off, telling everybody she met the same story. And so in half an hour the news had spread all over the city, and there began to be the makings of quite a respectable crowd in the Dom Platz of Courtland.

It was half-past eleven when the archers of the guard appeared at the entrance of the square which leads from the palace. Behind them, rank upon rank, could be seen the lances of the wild Cossacks of Prince Ivan's escort who had remained behind when the Muscovite army went back to the Russian plains. Their dusky goat-hair tents, which had long covered the banks of the Alla, had now been struck and were laded upon baggage-horses and sumpter mules.

"The Prince of Muscovy delays only for the ceremony, whatever it may be!" the people said, admiring at their own prevision.

And the better sort added privately, "We shall be well rid of him!" But the baser grieved for the loss of the largesse which he scattered abroad in good Muscovite silver, unclipped and unalloyed, with the mint-master's hammer-stroke clean and clear to the margin. For with such Prince Ivan knew how to make himself beloved, holding man's honour and woman's love at the price of so few and so many gold pieces, and thinking well or ill of them according to their own valuation. The rabble of Courtland, whose price was only silver, he counted as no better than the trodden dirt of the highway.

Meanwhile, in the river parlour of the Summer Palace, the two Princesses were talking together even as the people had said. The Princess Margaret sat on a low stool, leaning her elbow on her companion's knee and gazing up at him. And though she sometimes looked away, it was not for long, and Maurice, meeting her ever-recurrent regard, found that a new thing had come into her eyes.

Presently a low tapping was heard at the inner door, from which a passage communicated with the rooms of the Princess Margaret. The Sparhawk would have risen, for the moment forgetful of his disguise, but with a slight pressure of her arm upon his knee the Princess restrained him.

"Enter!" she called aloud in her clear imperious voice.

Thora entered hurriedly, and, closing the door behind her, she stood with the latch in her hand. "My Princess," she said in a voice that was little more than a whisper, "I have heard ill news. They are making the cathedral ready for a wedding. The Cossacks have struck their tents. I think a plot is on foot to marry you this day to Prince Ivan, and to carry you off with him to Moscow."

The Sparhawk sprang to his feet and laid his hand on the place where his sword-hilt should have been.

"Never," he cried; "it is impossible! The Princess is – "

He was about to add, "She is married already," but with a quick gesture of warning Margaret stopped him.

"Who told you this?" she queried, turning again to Thora of Bornholm.

"Johannes Rode of the Prince's guard told me a moment ago," she answered. "He has just returned from the Muscovite camp."

"I thank you, Thora – I shall not forget this faithfulness," said Margaret. "Now you have my leave to go!" The Princess spoke calmly, and to the ear even a little coldly.

The door closed upon the Swedish maiden. Margaret and Maurice turned to each other with one pregnant instinct and took hands.

"Already!" said Margaret faintly, going back into the woman; "they might have left us alone a little longer. How shall we meet this? What shall we do? I had counted on this one day."

"Margaret," answered the Sparhawk impulsively, "this shall not daunt us. We would have told your brother Louis one day. We will tell him now. Duchess Joan is safe out of his reach, Kernsberg is revictualled, the Muscovite army returned. There is no need to keep up the masquerade any longer. Whatever may come of it, let us go to your brother. That will end it swiftly, at all events."

The Princess put away his restraining clasp and came closer to him.

"No – no," she cried: "you must not. You do not know my brother. He is wholly under the influence of Ivan of Muscovy. Louis would slay you for having cheated him of his bride – Ivan for having forestalled him with me."

"But you cannot marry Ivan. That were an outrage against the laws of God and man!"

"Marry Ivan!" she cried, to the full as impulsively as her lover; "not though they set ravens to pick the live flesh off my bones! But it is the thought of torture and death for you – that I cannot abide. We must continue to deceive them. Let me think! – let me think!"

Hastily she barred the door which led out upon the corridor. Then taking Maurice's hand once more she led him over to the window, from which she could see the green Alla cutting its way through the city bounds and presently escaping into the yet greener corn lands on its way to the sea.

"It is for this one day's delay that we must plan. To-night we will certainly escape. I can trust certain of those of my household. I have tried them before… I have it. Maurice, you must be taken ill – lie down on this couch away from the light. There is a rumour of the Black Death in the city – we must build on that. They say an Astrakhan trader is dead of it already. For one day we may stave it off with this. It is the poor best we can do. Lie down, I will call Thora. She is staunch and fully to be trusted."

The Princess Margaret went to the inner door and clapped her hands sharply.

The fair-haired Swedish maiden came running to her. She had been waiting for such a signal.

"Thora," said her mistress in a quick whisper, "we must put off this marriage. I would sooner die than marry Ivan. You have that drug you spoke of – that which gives the appearance of sickness unto death without the reality. The Lady Joan must be ill, very ill. You understand, we must deceive even the Prince's physicians."

The girl nodded with quick understanding, and, turning, she sped away up the inner stair to her own sleeping-chamber, the key of which (as was the custom in Courtland) she carried in her pocket.

"This will keep you from being suspected – as in public places you would have been," whispered Margaret to her young husband. "What Thora thinks or knows does not matter. I can trust Thora with my life – nay, what is far more, with yours."

A light tap and the girl re-entered, a tall phial in her hand. With a swift look at her mistress to obtain permission, she went up to the couch upon which the Sparhawk had lain down. Then with a deft hand she opened the bottle, and pouring a little of a colourless liquid into a cup she gave it him to drink. In a few minutes a sickly pallor slowly overspread Maurice von Lynar's brow. His eyes appeared injected, the lips paled to a grey white, beads of perspiration stood on the forehead, and his whole countenance took on the hue and expression of mortal sickness.

"Now," said Thora, when she had finished, "will the noble lady deign to swallow one of these pellicles, and in ten minutes not a leech in the country will be able to pronounce that she is not suffering from a dangerous disease."

"You are sure, Thora," said the Princess Margaret almost fiercely, laying her hand on her tirewoman's wrist, "that there is no harm in all this? Remember, on your life be it!"

The placid, flaxen-haired woman turned with the little silver box in her hand.

"Danger there is, dear mistress," she said softly, "but not, I think, so great danger as we are already in. But I will prove my honesty – "

She took first a little of the liquid, and immediately after swallowed one of the white pellicles she had given Maurice.

"It will be as well," she said, "when the Prince's wiseacre physicians come, that they should find another sickening of the same disease."

Thora of Bornholm passed about the couch and took up a waiting-maid's station some way behind.

"All is ready," she said softly.

"We will forestall them," answered the Princess. "Thora, send and bid Prince Louis come hither quickly."

"And shall I also ask him to send hither his most skilled doctors of healing?" added the girl. "I will despatch Johannes Rode. He will go quickly and answer as I bid him with discretion – and without asking questions."

And with the noiseless tread peculiar to most blonde women of large physique, Thora disappeared through the private door by which she had entered.

The Princess Margaret kneeled down by the couch and looked into the face of the Sparhawk. Even she who had seen the wonder was amazed and almost frightened by the ghastly effect the drug had wrought in such short space.

"You are sure that you do not feel any ill effects – you are perfectly well?" she said, with tremulous anxiety in her voice.

The Sparhawk smiled and nodded reassuringly up at her.

"Never better," he said. "My nerves are iron, my muscles steel. I feel as if, for my Margaret's sake, I could vanquish an army of Prince Ivan's single-handed!"

The Princess rose from her place and unlocked the main door.

"We will be ready for them," she said. "All must appear as though we had no motive for concealment."

And, having drawn the curtains somewhat closer, she kneeled down again by the couch. There was no sound in the room as the youthful husband and wife thus waited their fate hand in hand, save only the soft continuous sibilance of their whispered converse, and from without the deeper note of the Alla sapping the Palace walls.

CHAPTER XXXVI
THE BLACK DEATH

The Princes of Courtland and Muscovy, inseparable as the Princesses, were on the pleasant creeper-shaded terrace which looks over the rose garden of the palace of Courtland down upon the sea plain of the Baltic, now stretching blue black from verge to verge under the imminent sun of noon.

Prince Louis moved restlessly to and fro, now biting his lip, now frowning and fumbling with his sword-hilt, and anon half drawing his jewelled dagger from its sheath and allowing it to slip back again with the faintly musical click of perfectly fitting steel. Ivan of Muscovy, on the other hand, lounged listlessly in the angle of an embrasure, alternately contemplating his red-pointed toes shod in Cordovan leather, and glancing keenly from under his eyelids at his nervous companion as often as his back was turned in the course of his ceaseless perambulations.

"You would desert me, Ivan," Prince Louis was saying in a tone at once appealing and childishly aggressive: "you would leave me in the hour of my need. You would take away from me my sister Margaret, who alone has influence with the Princess, my wife!"

"But you do not try to court the lady with any proper fervour," objected Ivan, half humouring and half irritating his companion; "you observe none of the rules. Speak her soft, praise her eyelashes – surely they are worthy of all praise; give her a pet lamb for a playmate. Feed her with conserves of honey and spice. Surely such comfits would mollify even Joan of the Sword Hand!"

"Tush! – you flout me, Ivan – even you. Every one despises me since – since she flouted me. The woman is a tigress, I tell you. Every time she looks at me her eyes flick across me like a whip-lash!"

"That is but her maiden modesty. How often is it assumed to cover love!" murmured Ivan, demurely smiling at his shoe point, which nodded automatically before him. "So doth the glance of my sweet bride of to-day, your own sister Margaret. To all seeming she loves me as little as the Lady Joan does you. Yet I am not afraid. I know women. Before I have her a month in Moscow she will run that she may be allowed to pull my shoes off and on. She will be out of breath with hasting to fetch my slippers – together with other little domestic offices of that sort, all very profitable for women's souls to perform. Take pattern by me, Louis, and teach the tigress to bring your shoes and tie your hose points. In a little while she will like it and hold up her cheek to be kissed for a sufficient reward."

At this point an officer came swiftly across the parterre and stood with uncovered head by the steps of the terrace, waiting permission to ascend. The Prince summoned him with a movement of his hand.

"What news?" he said; "have the ladies yet left the Summer Palace?"

"No, my lord," answered the officer earnestly; "but Johannes Rode of the Princess Margaret's household has come with a message that the plague has broken out there, and that the Lady Princess is the first stricken!"

"Which Princess?" demanded Ivan, with an instant incision of tone.

"The Lady Joan, Princess of Courtland, your Highness," replied the man, without, however, looking at the Prince of Muscovy.

"The Lady Joan?" cried the Prince Louis. "She is ill? She has brought the Black Death with her from Kernsberg! She is stricken with the plague? How fortunate that, so far, I – "

He clapped his hand upon his brow and shut his eyes as if giving thanks.

"I see it all now!" he cried. "This is the reason the Kernsberg traitors were so willing to give her up. It is all a plot against my life. I will not go near. Let the court physicians be sent! Cause the doors of the Summer Palace to be sealed! Set double guards! Permit none to pass either way, save the doctors only! And let them change their clothes and perfume themselves with the smoke of sulphur before they come out!"

His voice mounted higher and higher as he spoke, and Ivan of Muscovy watched him without speaking, as with hands thrust out and distended nostrils he screamed and gesticulated.

Prince Ivan had never seen a thorough coward before, and the breed interested him. But when he had let the Prince run on far enough to shame him before his own officer, he rose quietly and stood in front of him.

"Louis," he said, in a low voice, "listen to me – this is but a report. It is like enough to be false; it is certain to be exaggerated. Let us go at once and find out."

Prince Louis threw out his hands with a gesture of despair.

"Not I – not I!" he cried. "You may go if you like, if you do not value your life. But I – I do not feel well even now. Yesterday I kissed her hand. Ah, would to God that I had not! That is it. I wondered what ailed me this morning. Go – stop the court physicians! Do not let them go to the Summer Palace; bring them here to me first. Your arm, officer; I think I will go to my room – I am not well."

Prince Ivan's countenance grew mottled and greyish, and his teeth showed in the sun like a thin line of dazzling white. He grasped the poltroon by the wrist with a hand of steel.

"Listen," he said – "no more of this; I will not have it! I will not waste my own time and the blood of my father's soldiers for naught. This is but some woman's trick to delay the marriage – I know it. Hearken! I fear neither Black Death nor black devil; I will have the Lady Margaret to-day if I have to wed her on her death-bed! Now, I cannot enter your wife's chamber alone. Yet go I must, if only to see what all this means, and you shall accompany me. Do you hear, Prince Louis? I swear you shall go with me to the Summer Palace if I have to drag you there step by step!"

His grasp lay like a tightening circle of iron about the wrist of Prince Louis; his steady glance dominated the weaker man. Louis drew in his breath with a choking noise.

"I will," he gasped; "if it must – I will go. But the Death – the Black Death! I am sick – truly, Ivan, I am very sick!"

"So am I!" said Prince Ivan, smiling grimly. "But bring his Highness a cup of wine, and send hither Alexis the Deacon, my own physician."

The officer went out cursing the Muscovite ears that had listened to such things, and also high Heaven for giving such a Prince to his true German fatherland.

Prince Ivan and Prince Louis stood at the door of the river parlour. The peculiar moving hush and tepidly stagnant air of a sick-room penetrated even through the panels. Ivan still kept hold of his friend, but now by the hand, not compulsively, but rather like one who in time of trouble comforts another's sorrow.

At either end of the corridor could be seen a guard of Cossacks keeping it against all intrusion from without or exodus from within. So Prince Ivan had ordered it. His fellows were used to the plague, he said.

At the Princess's door Prince Ivan tapped gently and inclined his ear to listen. Louis fumbled with his golden crucifix, and as the Muscovite turned away his head he pressed it furtively to his lips. Ever since he set foot in the Summer Palace he had been muttering the prayers of the Church in a rapid undertone.

"The Prince Louis to see the Princess Joan!" Ivan answered the low-voiced challenge from within. The door opened slightly and then more widely. Ivan pushed his friend forward and they entered, Louis dragging one foot after the other towards the shaded couch by which knelt the Princess Margaret. Thora of Bornholm, pallid and blue-lipped, stood beside her, swaying a little, but still holding, half unconsciously, as it seemed, a silver basin, into which Margaret dipped a fine linen cloth, before touching with it the foam-flecked lips of the sufferer. Prince Ivan remained a little back, near to where the court physicians were conferring together in stage whispers. As he passed, a tall grey-skirted long-bearded man, girt about the middle with a silver chain, detached himself from the official group and approached Prince Ivan. After an instinctive cringing movement of homage and salutation, he bent to the young man's ear and whispered half a dozen words. Prince Ivan nodded very slightly and the man stole away as he had come. No one in the room had noticed the incident.

Meanwhile Louis of Courtland, almost as pale as Thora herself, his lips blue, his teeth chattering, his fingers clammy with perspiration, stood by the bedside clutching the crucifix. Presently a hand was laid upon his arm. He started violently at the touch.

"It is true – a bad case," said Ivan in his ear. "Let us get away; I must speak with you at once. The physicians have given their verdict. They can do nothing!"

With a gasp of relief Prince Louis faced about, and as he turned he tottered.

"Steady, friend Louis!" said Prince Ivan in his ear, and passed his arm about his waist.

He began to fear lest he should have frightened his dupe too thoroughly.

"See how he loves her!" murmured the doctors of healing, still conferring with their heads together. "Who would have believed it possible?"

"Nay, he is only much afraid," said Alexis the Deacon, the Muscovite doctor; "and small blame to him, now that the Black Death has come to Courtland. In half an hour we shall hear the death-rattle!"

"Then there is no need of us staying," said more than one learned doctor, and they moved softly towards the door. But Ivan had possessed himself of the key, and even as the hand of the first was on the latchet bar the bolt was shot in his face. And the eyes of Alexis the Deacon glowed between his narrow red lids like sparks in tinder as he glanced at the whitening faces of the learned men of Courtland.

Without the door Ivan fixed Prince Louis with his will.

"Now," he said, speaking in low trenchant tones, "if this be indeed the Black Death (and it is like it), there is no safety for us here. We must get without the walls. In an hour there will be such a panic in the city as has not been for centuries. I offer you a way of escape. My Cossacks stand horsed and ready without. Let us go with them. But the Princess Margaret must come also!"

"She cannot – she cannot. I will not permit it. She may already be infected!" gasped Prince Louis.

"There is no infection till the crisis of the disease is passed," said Prince Ivan firmly. "We have had many plagues in Holy Russia, and know the symptoms."

("Indeed," he added to himself, "my physician, Alexis the Deacon, can produce them!")

"But – but – but – " Louis still objected, "the Princess Joan – she may die. It will reflect upon my honour if we all desert her. My sister must continue to attend her. They are friends. I will go with you… Margaret can remain and nurse her!"

A light like a spear point glittered momentarily under the dark brows of the Muscovite.

"Listen, Prince Louis," he said. "Your honour is your honour. Joan of the Sword Hand and her Black Plagues are your own affair. She is your wife, not mine. I have helped you to get her back – no more. But the Princess Margaret is my business. I have bought her with a price. And look you, sir, I will not ride back to Russia empty-handed, that every petty boyar and starveling serf may scoff at me, saying, 'He helped the Prince of Courtland to win his wife, but he could not bring back one himself.' The whole city, the whole country from here to Moscow know for what cause I have so long sojourned in your capital. No, Prince Louis, will you have me go as your friend or as your enemy?"

"Ivan – Ivan, you are my friend. Do not speak to me so! Who else is my friend if you desert me?"

"Then give me your sister!"

The Prince cast up his hand with a little gesture of despair.

"Ah," he sighed, "you do not know Margaret! She is not in my gift, or you should have had her long ago! Oh, these troubles, these troubles! When will they be at an end?"

"They are at an end now," said Prince Ivan consolingly. "Call your sister out of the chamber on a pretext. In ten minutes we shall be at the cathedral gates. In another ten she and I can be wedded according to your Roman custom. In half an hour we shall all be outside the walls. If you fear the infection you need not once come near her. I will do all that is necessary. And what more natural? We will be gone before the panic breaks – you to one of your hill castles – if you do not wish to come with us to Moscow."

"And the Princess Joan – ?" faltered the coward.

"She is in good hands," said the Prince, truthfully for once. "I pledge you my word of honour she is in no danger. Call your sister!"

Even as he spoke he tapped lightly, turned the key in the lock and whispered, "Now!" to the Prince of Courtland.

"Tell the Princess Margaret I would speak with her!" said Prince Louis. "For a moment only!" he added, fearing that otherwise she might not come.

There was a stir in the sick chamber and then quick steps were heard coming lightly across the floor. The face of the Princess appeared at the door.

"Well?" she said haughtily to her brother. Prince Ivan she did not see, for he had stepped back into the dusk of the corridor. Louis beckoned his sister without.

"I must speak a word with you," he said. "I would not have these fellows hear us!" She stepped out unsuspectingly. Instantly the door was closed behind her. A dark figure slid between. Prince Ivan turned the key and laid his hand upon her arm.

"Help!" she cried, struggling; "help me! For God's grace, let me go!"

But from behind came four Cossacks of the Prince's retinue who half-carried, half-forced her along towards the gates at which the Muscovite horses stood ready saddled. And as Margaret was carried down the passage the alarmed servitors stood aloof from her cries, seeing that Prince Louis himself was with her. Yet she cried out unceasingly in her anger and fear, "To me, men of Courtland! The Cossacks carry me off – I will not go! O God, that Conrad were here! I will not be silent! Maurice, save me!"

But the people only shrugged their shoulders even when they heard – as did also the guards and the gentlemen-in-waiting, the underlings and the very porters at the Palace gates. For they said, "They are strange folk, these Courtland princes and princesses of ours, with their marriages and givings in marriage. They can neither wed nor bed like other people, but must make all this fuss about it. Well – happily it is no business of ours!"

Then at the stair foot she sank suddenly down by the sundial, almost fainting with the sudden alarm and fear, crying for the last time and yet more piercingly, "Maurice! Maurice! Come to me, Maurice!" Then above them in the Palace there began a mighty clamour, the noise of blows stricken and the roar of many voices. But Ivan of Muscovy was neither to be hurried nor flurried. Impassive and determined, he swung himself into the saddle. His black charger changed his feet to take his weight and looked about to welcome him – for he, too, knew his master.

"Give the Princess to me," he commanded. "Now assist Prince Louis into his saddle. To the cathedral, all of you!"