The King's General (22 page)

"Lord Robartes is not an ill-looking man," I said. "I might invite him to share cold pie with me another evening."

Matty snorted and lifted me to bed. "I'd like to see Sir Richard's face if you did," she snapped.

"Sir Richard would not mind," I answered, "not if there was something to be gained from it."

I feigned a lightness I was far from feeling, and when she had blown the candles and was gone I lay back in my bed with my nerves tense and strained. The flames outside my window died away, and slowly the shouting and the laughter ceased and the trampling of feet and the movement of the horses and the calling bugles. I heard the clock in the belfry strike ten, then eleven, and then midnight. The people within the house were still and silent, and so was the alien enemy. At a quarter after midnight a dog howled in the far distance, and as though it were a signal I felt suddenly upon my cheek a current of cold chill air. I sat up in bed and waited. The draught continued, blowing straight from the torn arras on the wall.

"John," I whispered, and "John," I whispered again. I heard a movement from behind the arras like a scratching mouse; slowly, stealthily, I saw the hand come from behind the arras, lifting it aside, and a figure step out, dropping on all fours and creeping to my bed. "It is I, Honor," I said, and the cold froggy hand touched me, icy cold, and the hands clung to me and the dark figure climbed onto my bed and lay trembling beside me.

It was Dick, the clothes still dank and chill upon him, and he began to weep, long and silently, from exhaustion and from fear.

I held him close, warming him as best I could, and when he was still I whispered, "Where is John?"

"In the little room," he said, "below the steps. We sat there waiting, hour after hour, and you did not come. I wanted to turn back, but Mr. Rashleigh would not let me." He began to sob again, and I drew the covers over his head.

"He has fainted down there on the steps," he said; "he's lying there now, his head between his hands. I got hold of the long rope that hangs there above the steps and pulled at it, and the hinged stone gave way and I came up into this room. I did not care. I could not stay there longer, Honor; it's black as pitch and closer than a grave."

He was still trembling, his head buried in my shoulder. I went on lying there, wondering what to do, whether to summon Joan and thus betray the secret to another, or wait until Dick was calmer and then send him back there with a candle to John's aid. And as I waited, my heart thumping, my ears strained to all sounds, I heard from without the tiptoe of a footstep in the passage, the noise of the latch of the door gently lifted and then let fall again as the door was seen to be fastened, and a moment's pause; then the footstep tiptoeing gently away once more and the soft departing rustle of a gown. Someone had crept to the chamber in the stillness of the night, and that someone was a woman.

I went on lying there with my arms wrapped close about the sleeping boy, and the clock in the belfry struck one, then two, then three....

17

As the first grey chinks of light came through the casement I roused Dick, who lay sleeping with his head upon my shoulder like a baby, and when he had blinked a moment and got his wits restored to him I bade him light the candle and creep back again to the cell. The fear that gripped me was that lack of air had so caused John to faint and, he being by nature far from strong, anything might have happened. Never, in all the sixteen years I had been crippled, had I so needed the use of my legs as now, but I was helpless. In a few moments Dick was back again, his little ghost's face looking more pallid than ever in the grey morning light.

"He is awake," he said, "but very ill, I think. Shaking all over and seeming not to know what has been happening. His head is burning hot, but his limbs are cold."

At least he was alive, and a wave of thankfulness swept over me. But from Dick's description I realised what had happened. The ague that was his legacy from birth had attacked John once again with its usual ferocity, and small wonder after more than ten hours crouching beneath the buttress. I made up my mind swiftly. I bade Dick bring the chair beside my bed and with his assistance I lowered myself into it. Then I went to the door communicating with the gatehouse chamber and very gently called for Matty. Joan answered sleepily, and one of the children stirred.

"It is nothing," I said; "it is only Matty that I want."

In a moment or two she came from the little dressing room, her round plain face yawning beneath her nightcap, and would have chided me for rising had I not placed my finger on my lips.

The urgency of the situation was such that my promise to my brother-in-law must finally be broken, though little of it held as it was. And without Matty it would be impossible to act. She came in then, her eyes round with wonder when she saw Dick.

"You love me, Matty, I believe," I said to her. "Now I ask you to prove that love as never before. This boy's safety and life are in our hands."

She nodded, saying nothing.

"Dick and Mr. John have been hiding since last evening," I said. "There is a staircase arid a little room built within the thickness of these walls. Mr. John is ill. I want you to go to him and bring him here. Dick will show you the way."

He pulled aside the arras, and now for the first time I saw how the entrance was effected. A block of stone, about four feet square, worked on a hinge, moved by a lever and a rope if pulled from beneath the narrow stair. This gave an opening just wide enough for a man to crawl through. When shut, the stone was so closely fitting that it was impossible to find it from within the chamber, nor could it be pushed open, for the lever held it. The little stairway, set inside the buttress, twisted steeply to the cell below, which had height enough for a man to stand upright. More I could not see, craning from my chair, save for a dark heap that must be John lying on the lower step.

There was something weird and fearful in the scene with the grey light of morning coming through the casement, and Matty, a fantastic figure in her night clothes and cap, edging her way through the gap in the buttress. As she disappeared with Dick I heard the first high call of the bugle from the park and I knew that for the rebel army the day had now begun.

Soon the soldiers within the house would also be astir, and we had little time in hand. It was, I believe, some fifteen minutes before they were all three within the chamber, though it seemed an hour, and in those fifteen minutes the daylight had filled the room and the troopers were moving in the courtyard down below.

John was quite conscious, thank God, and his mind lucid, but he was trembling all over and in a high fever, fit for nothing but his own bed and his wife's care. We held rapid consultation in which I held firmly to one thing, and that was that no further person, not Joan, his wife, nor Mary, his stepmother, should be told how he had come into the house or that Dick was with us still.

John's story then was to be that the fishing boat came into one of the coves beneath the Gribbin, where he put Dick aboard, and then on returning across the fields he had seen the arrival of the troopers and hid until nightfall. But, his fever coming upon him, he decided to return and therefore climbed by the lead piping and the creeper that ran the south front of the house outside his father's window. For corroboration of this John must go at once to his father's room, where his stepmother was sleeping, and waken her and win her acceptance of the story. And this immediately, before the household were awake. It was like a nightmare to arrange, with Joan, his wife, in the adjoining chamber through which he must pass to gain the southern portion of the house. For if he went by the passage beneath the belfry he might risk encounter with the servants or the troopers. Matty went first, and when there was no question from Joan nor any movement from the children, we judged them to be sleeping, and poor John, his body on fire with fever, crept swiftly after her. I bethought me of the games of hide-and-seek I had played with my brothers and sisters at Lanrest as children and how now that it was played in earnest there was no excitement but a sickening strain that brought sweat to the forehead and a pain to the belly. When Matty returned and reported John in safety in his father's rooms the first stage of the proceeding was completed. The next I had to break to Dick with great misgiving and an assumption of sternness and authority that I was far from feeling. It was that he could remain with me in my apartment but must be prepared to stay, perhaps for long hours at a time, within the secret cell beneath the buttress and must have a palliasse there to sleep upon, if need be, should there be visitors to my room.

He fell to crying at once, as I had expected, and beseeching me not to let him stay alone in the dark cell; he would go mad, he said, he could not stand it, he would rather die.

I was well-nigh desperate, with the movement now within the house and the children beginning to talk in the adjoining chamber.

"Very well then," I said, "open the door, Matty. Call the troopers. Tell them that Richard Grenvile's son is here and wishes to surrender himself to their mercy. They have sharp swords and the pain will soon be over." God forgive me that I could find it in my heart to so terrify the lad, but it was his only salvation.

The mention of the swords sent the colour draining from his face, as I knew it would, bringing the thought of blood, and he turned to me, his dark eyes desperate, and he said, "Very well. I will do as you ask me. " It is those same dark eyes that haunt me still and will always do so to the day I die.

I bade Matty take the mattress from my bed and the stool beside the window and some blankets and bundle them through the open gap into the stair. When it is safe for you to come I will let you know," I said.

"But how can you," said Dick, "when the gap is closed?"

Here was I forced back again into the old dilemma of the night before. I could have wept with strain and weariness and looked at Matty in despair.

"If you do not quite close the gap," she said, "but let it stay open to three inches, Master Dick, with his ear put close to it, would hear your voice."

We tried it, and although I was not happy with the plan, it seemed the one solution, and we found, too, that with a gap of two or three inches he could hear me strike with a stick upon the floor, once, twice, or thrice, which we arranged as signals. Thrice meant real danger, and then the stone must be pulled flush to the wall.

He had gone to his cell with his mattress and his blankets and half a loaf that Matty had found for him, as the clock in the belfry struck six, and almost immediately little Jonathan from the adjoining room came pushing through the door, his toys under his arm, calling in loud tones for me to play with him. The day had started. When I look back now to the intolerable strain and anguish of that time I wonder how in God's name I had the power to endure it. For I had not only to be on guard against the rebels but against my friends, too, and those I loved. Mary, Alice, Joan must all three remain in ignorance of what was happening; and their visits to my chamber, which should have been a comfort and a consolation in this time of strain, merely added to my anxiety.

What I would have done without Matty I do not know. It was she, acting sentinel as she had done in the past, who kept them from the door when Dick was with me; and poor lad, I had to have him often, for the best part of the day. Luckily my crippled state served as a good excuse, for it was known that often in the past I had "bad days" and had to be alone, and this lie was now my only safeguard.

John's story had been accepted as full truth, and since he was quite obviously ill and in high fever he was allowed to remain in his father's rooms with Joan to care for him and was not removed to closer custody under guard. Severe questioning from Lord Robartes could not shake John from his story, and thank heaven Robartes had other cares upon his shoulders gathering fast to worry any further what had happened to Skellum Grenvile's son.

I remember Matty saying to me on that first day, Friday, the second of August, "How long will they be here, Miss Honor? When will the royalist army come to relieve us?" And I, thinking of Richard down at Truro and His Majesty already, so the rumour ran, entering Launceston, told her four days at the longest. But I was wrong.

And for four whole weeks the rebels were our masters.

It is now nearly ten years since that August of '44, but every day of that agelong month is printed firm upon my memory. The first week was hot and stifling, with a glazed blue sky and not a cloud upon it, and in my nostrils now I can recapture the smell of horseflesh and the stink of sweating soldiery, borne upwards to my open casement from the fetid court below.

Day in, day out, came the jingle of harness, the clattering of hoofs, the march of tramping feet, the grinding sound of wagon wheels, and ever insistent above the shouting of orders and the voices of the men, the bugle call hammering its single note.

The children, Alice's and Joan's, unused to being withindoors at high summer, hung fretful from the windows, adding to the babel; and Alice, who had the care of all of them, whilst Joan nursed John in the greater quietude of the south front, would take them from room to room to make distraction. Imprisonment made cronies of us all, and no sooner had Alice and the brood departed than the Sparke sisters would come enquiring for me, who had hitherto preferred cribbage to my company, both with some wild rumour to unfold, gleaned from a frightened servant, of how the house was to be burnt down with all its inmates when Essex gave the order, but first the women ravaged .I dare say I was the only woman in the house to be unmoved by such a threat, for God knows I could not be more bruised and broken than I was already. But for Deborah and Gillian it was another matter, and Deborah, whom I judged to be even safer from assault than I was myself, showed me with trembling hands the silver bodkin with which she would defend her honour. Their brother Will was become a sort of toady to the officers, thinking by smiling and by wishing them good morning he would win their favour and his safety, but as soon as their backs were turned he was whispering some slander about their persons and repeating snatches of conversation he had overheard, bits and pieces that were no use to anyone. Once or twice Nick Sawle came tapping slowly to my room, leaning on his two sticks, a look of lost bewilderment in his eyes and muddled resentment that the rebels had not been flung from Menabilly within four and twenty hours of their arrival; and I was forced to listen to his theories that His Majesty must be now at Launceston, now at Liskeard, now back again at Exeter, which suppositions brought our release no nearer. And while he argued poor Temperance, his wife, stared at him dully, in a kind of trance, her religious eloquence pent up at last from shock and fear so that she could do no more than clutch her prayer book without quoting from it.