“But why not come? Why run away from imprisonment at Hampton Court, breaking his word of honor, his parole, but not run from here? When we’ve got a ship waiting and his son at sea?”

“In the name of God, I don’t know!” James swore, driven to despair. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it was the right thing, the safest thing, the only thing for him to do. But how could I make him come! How could I?”

The second man had not taken off his hat, nor even unfastened his cloak. “I’m off,” he said savagely. “I won’t do this again. Don’t try to find me or invite me. Don’t call on me for help. This has been a night I won’t repeat. This is my last time. I am finished in his cause. He has lost me. I cannot serve him. They warned me he was changeable and talkative as a woman. But I would never have thought he would let his friends, men sworn to his cause, stand in the street in mortal danger while he chose not to bother.”

James nodded in silence as the man let himself out of the door and they heard his footsteps go quietly across the hall and the front door open and close.

“Shall you come back?” the first man asked unhappily. “Try again?”

“If I’m ordered, I must obey. But not like this again. Never like this again. Forcing men to serve him, swearing them to his cause. I even brought two boys into this danger to hide the plot. I put my life at risk, yours, even the villain on the Jessie. I have been a mortal fool for a man who does not want my service, who didn’t even ask my name, who didn’t even give me a message for his wife, who sold her jewels to pay for this. I shall have to go back to her and tell her he would not come. I have failed. I have failed him, and I have failed her because of him.”

“Good night,” the man said abruptly. “I pray to God that we never meet again. I will swear that we never met, and I will never speak of it. If I am captured I will deny all this, and you will do the same.”

“Amen,” James said, slumped in his chair.

The man paused at the door. “Even if they burn you, I trust you not to say my name, and I will not speak yours. I don’t want to die for nothing.”

“Agreed,” James said bitterly, as if it was all nothing, as if loyalty was nothing, as if death by burning was nothing. The man let himself out into the night.

James sat in silence by the dying fire, sick with the draining away of his courage. He found his hands were shaking and that all he could see, as he watched the embers, was the triumphantly gloomy face of the king with his dark sorrowful eyes. James thought himself to be a fool to have given his life to such a man and such a fanciful web of plots. The king he had sworn to serve wanted none of his loyalty, and the woman he desired was a whore to the faeries and had murdered the wife and baby of a mortal man. He thought he was very far from God, and very far from grace, and a long, long way from his home.