The King's General Part 14

They had neither of them inherited her beauty, but were brown-haired and heavy looking like their dead father, Antony Denys.

"I don't know what to make of it," said Alice in my ear. "She is supposed to be a prisoner like us, but she is not treated so .I have watched her from my window walk in the walled garden beneath the summerhouse, talking and smiling to Lord Robartes, and the servants say he dines with her most evenings."

"She only does what many other women do in wartime," I said, "and has turned the stress of the day to her advantage."

"You mean she is for the Parliament?" asked Alice.

"Neither for the Parliament nor for the King but for Gartred Denys," I answered.

"Do you not know the saying--to race with the hare and to run with the hounds? She will smile on Lord Robartes and sleep with him, too, if she has a mind, just as long as it suits her. He would let her leave tomorrow if she asked him."

"Why, then," said Alice, "does she not do so and return in safety to Orley Court?"

"That," I answered, "is what I would give a great deal to find out."

And as we paced up and down, up and down, before the staring hostile eyes of the London officers I thought of the footstep I had heard at midnight in the pa.s.sage, the soft hand on the latch, and the rustle of a gown. Why should Gartred, while the house slept, find her way to my apartment in the northeast corner of the building and try my door unless she knew her way already; and, granting that she knew her way, what, then, was her motive?

It was ten days before I had my answer.

On Sunday, August the eleventh, came the first break in the weather. The sun shone watery in a mackerel sky and a bank of cloud gathered in the southwest. There had been much coming and going all the day, with fresh regiments of troopers riding to the park, bringing with them many carts of wounded who were carried to the farm buildings before the house. Their cries of distress were very real and terrible and gave to us, who were their enemies, a sick dread and apprehension. The shouting and calling of orders were persistent on that day, and the bugle never ceased from dawn to sundown.

For the first time we were given soup only for our dinner and a portion of stale bread, and this, we were told, would be the best we could hope for from henceforward.

No reason was given, but Matty, with her ears p.r.i.c.ked, had hung about the kitchens with her tray under her arm and gleaned some gossip from the courtyard.

"There was a battle yesterday on Braddock Down," she said. "They've lost a lot of men." She spoke softly, for with our enemies about us we had grown to speak in whispers, our eyes upon the door.

I poured half my soup into d.i.c.k's bowl and watched him drink it greedily, running his tongue round the rim like a hungry dog.

"The King is only three miles from Lostwithiel," she said; "he and Price Maurice have joined forces and set up their headquarters at Boconnoc. Sir Richard has advanced with nigh a thousand men from Truro and is coming up on Bodmin from the west. 'Your fellows are trying to squeeze us dry,' said the trooper in the kitchen, 'like a b.l.o.o.d.y orange. But they won't do it.'"

"And what did you answer him?" I said to Matty.

She smiled grimly and cut d.i.c.k the largest slice of bread.

"I told him I'd pray for him when Sir Richard got him," she answered.

After eating I sat in my chair looking out across the park and watched the clouds gathering thick and fast. There were scarce a dozen bullocks left in the pen out of the fine herds that had been the week before and only a small flock of sheep. The rest had all been slaughtered. These remaining few would be gone within the next eight and forty hours. Not a stem of corn remained in the far meadows. The whole had been cut and ground and the ricks pulled. The gra.s.s in the park was now bare earth where the horses had grazed upon it. Not a tree stood in the orchard beyond the warren. If Matty's tale was true and the King and Richard to east and west of Lostwithiel, then the Earl of Ess.e.x and ten thousand men were pent up in a narrow strip of land some three miles long with no way of escape except the sea.

Ten thousand men with provisions getting low and only the bare land to live on, while three armies waited in their rear.

There was no laughter tonight from the courtyard, no shouting and no chatter; only a blazing fire as they heaped the cut trees and the kitchen benches upon it, the doors torn from the larder and the tables from the steward's room, and I could see their sullen faces lit by the leaping flames.

The sky darkened and slowly, silently, the rain began to fall. And as I listened to it, remembering Richard's words, I heard the rustle of a gown and a tap upon my door.

18.

d.i.c.k was gone in a flash to his hiding place and Matty clearing his bowl and platter. I sat still in my chair with my back to the arras and bade them enter who knocked upon the door.

It was Gartred. She was wearing, if I remember right, a gown of emerald green, and there were emeralds round her throat and in her ears. She stood a moment within the doorway, a half-smile on her face.

"The good Matty," she said, "always so devoted. What ease of mind a faithful servant brings."

I saw Matty sniff and rattle the plates upon her tray while her lips tightened in ominous fashion.

"Am I disturbing you, Honor?" said Gartred, that same smile still on her face. "The hour is possibly inconvenient; you go early, no doubt, to bed?"

All meaning is in the inflexion of the voice, and when rendered on paper words seem harmless enough and plain. I give the remarks as Gartred phrased them, but the veiled contempt, the mockery, the suggestion that because I was crippled I must be tucked down and in the dark by half-past nine, these were in her voice and in her eyes as they swept over me.

"My going to bed depends upon my mood, as doubtless it does with you," I answered; "also, it depends upon my company."

"You must find the hours most horribly tedious," she said, "but then, no doubt, you are used to it by now. You have lived in custody so long that to be made prisoner is no new experience. I must confess I find it unamusing." She came closer in the room, looking about her, although I had given her no invitation.

"You have heard the news, I suppose?" she said.

"That the King is at Boconnoc and a skirmish was fought yesterday in which the rebels got the worst of it? Yes, I have heard that," I answered.

The last of the fruit picked before the rebels came was standing on a platter in the window. Gartred took a fig and began to eat it, still looking about her in the room.

Matty gave a snort of indignation which pa.s.sed unnoticed and, taking her tray, went from the chamber with a glance at Gartred's back that would have slain her had it been Perceived.

"If this business continues long," said Gartred, "we none of us here will find it very pleasant. The men are already in an ugly mood. Defeat may turn them into brutes."

"Very probably," I said.

She threw away the skin of her fig and took another.

"Richard is at Lanhydrock," she said. "Word came today through a captured prisoner. It is rather ironic that we have the owner of Lanhydrock in possession here.

Richard will leave little of it for him by the time this campaign is settled, whichever way the battle goes. Jack Robartes is black as thunder."

"It is his own fault," I said, "for advising the Earl of Ess.e.x to come into Cornwall and run ten thousand men into a trap."

"So it is a trap," she said, "and my unscrupulous brother the baiter of it? I rather thought it must be."

I did not answer. I had said too much already, and Gartred was in quest of information. "Well, we shall see," she said, eating her fig with relish, "but if the process lasts much longer the rebels will turn cannibal. They have the country stripped already between here and Lostwithiel, and Fowey is without provisions. I shudder to think what J ack Robartes would do to Richard if he could get hold of him. "

"The reverse equally holds good," I told her.

She laughed and squeezed the last drop of juice into her mouth. "All men are idiots," she said, "and more especially in wartime. They lose all sense of values."

"It depends," I said, "upon the meaning of values."

"I value one thing only," she said, "my own security."

"In that case," I said, "you showed neglect of it when you travelled upon the road ten days ago."

She watched me under heavy lids and smiled.

"Your tongue hasn't blunted with the years," she said, "nor tribulation softened you. Tell me, do you still care for Richard?"

"That is my affair," I said.

"He is detested by his brother officers; I suppose you know that," she said, "and loathed equally in Cornwall as in Devon. In fact, the only creatures he can count as friends are sprigs of boys who daren't be rude to him. He has a little train of them nosing his shadow."

Oh G.o.d, I thought, you b.l.o.o.d.y woman, seizing upon the one insinuation in the world to make me mad. I watched her play with her rings.

"Poor Mary Howard," she said, "what she endured.... You were spared intolerable indignities, you know, Honor, by not being his wife. I suppose Richard has made great play lately of loving you the same, and no doubt he does, in his vicious fashion. Rather a rare new pastime, a woman who can't respond."

She yawned and strolled over to the window. "His treatment of d.i.c.k is really most distressing," she said. "The poor boy adored his mother, and now I understand Richard intends to rear him as a freak just to spite her. What did you think of him when he was here?"

"He was young and sensitive, like many other children," I said.

"It was a wonder to me he was ever born at all," said Gartred, "when I think of the revolting story Mary told me. However, I will spare your feelings, if you still put Richard on a pedestal. I am glad, for the lad's sake, that Jack Robartes did not find him here at Menabilly. He has sworn an oath to hang any relative of Richard's."

"Except yourself," I said.

"Ah, I don't count," she answered. "Mrs. Denys of Orley Court is not the same as Gartred Grenvile." Once more she looked up at the walls and then again into the courtyard. "This is the room, isn't it," she said, "where they used to keep the idiot? I can remember his mouthing down at Kit when we rode here five and twenty years ago."

"I have no idea," I said. "The subject is not discussed among the family."

"There was something odd about the formation of the house," she said carelessly.

"I cannot recollect exactly what it was. Some cupboard, I believe, where they used to shut him up when he grew violent, so Kit told me. Have you discovered it?"

"There are no cupboards here," I said, "except the cabinet over yonder."

"I am so sorry," she said, "that my coming here forced you to give your room to Joan Rashleigh. I could so easily have made do with this one, which one of the servants told me was never used until you took it over."

"It was much simpler," I said, "to place you and your daughters in a larger room, where you can entertain visitors to dinner."

"You always did like servants' gossip, did you not?" she answered. "The hobby of all old maids. It whips their appet.i.te to imagine what goes on behind closed doors."

"I don't know," I said. "I hardly think my broth tastes any better for picturing you hip to hip with Lord Robartes."

She looked down at me, her gown in her hands, and I wondered who had the greater capacity for hatred, she or I.

"My being here," she said, "has at least spared you all, so far, from worse unpleasantness. I have known Jack Robartes for many years."

"Keep him busy, then," I said; "that's all we ask of you."

I was beginning to enjoy myself at last, and, realising it, she turned towards the door. "I cannot guarantee," she said, "that his good temper will continue. He was in a filthy mood tonight at dinner when he heard of Richard at Lanhydrock and has gone off now to a conference at Fowey with Ess.e.x and the chiefs of staff."

"I look to you, then," I said, "to have him mellow by the morning."

She stood with her hand on the door, her eyes sweeping the hangings on the wall.

"If they lose the campaign," she said, "they will lose their tempers too. A defeated soldier is a dangerous animal. Jack Robartes will give orders to sack Menabilly and destroy inside and without."

"Yes," I said, "we are all aware of that."

"Everything will be taken," she said, "clothes, jewels, furniture, food--and not much left of the inhabitants. He must be a curious man, your brother-in-law, Jonathan Rashleigh, to desert his home, knowing full well what must happen to it in the end."

I shrugged my shoulders. And then, as she left, she gave herself away.

"Does he still act as collector for the mint?" she said.

Then for the first time I smiled, for I had my answer to the problem of her presence.

"I cannot tell you," I said. "I have no idea. But if you wait long enough for the house to be ransacked you may come upon the plate you think he has concealed. Good night, Gartred."

She stared at me a moment and then went from the room. At last I knew her business, and had I been less preoccupied with my own problem of concealing d.i.c.k I might have guessed it sooner. Whoever won or lost the campaign in the West, it would not matter much to Gartred; she would see to it that she had a footing on the winning side. She could play the spy for both. Like Temperance Sawle, I was in a mood to quote the Scriptures and declaim, "Where the body lies, there will the eagles be gathered together." If there were pickings to be scavenged in the aftermath of battle, Gartred Denys would not stay at home in Orley Court. I remembered her grip upon the marriage settlement with Kit; I remembered that last feverish search for a lost trinket on the morning she left Lanrest, a widow; and I remembered, too, the rumours I had heard since she was widowed for the second time, how Orley Court was much burdened with debt and must be settled between her daughters when they came of age. Gartred had not yet found a third husband to her liking, but in the meantime she must live. The silver plate of Cornwall would be a prize indeed, could she lay hands on it.

This, then, was her motive, with suspicion already centred on my room. She did not know the secret of the b.u.t.tress, but memory had reminded her that there was, within the walls of Menabilly, some such hiding place. And with sharp guesswork she had reached the conclusion that my brother-in-law would make a wartime use of it.

That the hiding place might also conceal her nephew had, I was certain, never entered her head. Nor--and this was supposition on my part--was she working in partnership with Lord Robartes. She was playing her own game, and if the game was likely to be advantaged by letting him make love to her, that was only by the way. It was far Pleasanter to eat roast meat than watered broth; besides, she had a taste for burly men.

But if she found she could not get what she wanted by playing a lone hand, then she would lay her cards upon the table and d.a.m.n the consequences.

This, then, was what we had to fear, and no one in the house knew of it but myself.

So Sunday, August the eleventh, came and went, and we woke next morning to another problematical week in which anything might happen, with the three royalist armies squeezing the rebels tighter hour by hour, the strip of country left to them becoming daily more bare and devastated, while a steady sweeping rain turned all the roads to mud.

Gone was the hot weather, the glazed sky, and the sun. No longer did the children hang from the windows and listen to the bugles and watch the troopers come and go.

No more did we take our daily exercise before the windows of the gallery. A high bl.u.s.tering wind drove across the park, and from my tightshut cas.e.m.e.nt I could see the closed, dripping tents, the horses tethered line upon line beneath the trees at the far end, their heads disconsolate, while the men stood about in huddled, melancholy groups, their fires dead as soon as kindled.

Many of the wounded died in the farm buildings. Mary saw the burial parties go forth at dawn, a silent grey procession in the early morning mist, and we heard they took them to the Long Mead, the valley beneath the woods at Pridmouth.

No more wounded came to the farm buildings, and we guessed from this that the heavy weather had put a stop to fighting, but we heard also that His Majesty's Army now held the east bank of the Fowey River, from St. Veep down to the fortress at Polruan, which commanded the harbour entrance. The rebels in Fowey thus were cut off from their shipping in the Channel and could receive no supplies by sea, except from such small boats as could land at Pridmouth or Polkerris or on the sand flats at Tywardreath, which the heavy run from the southwest now made impossible.

There was little laughter or chatter now from the messroom in the gallery, so Alice said, and the officers, with grim faces, clamped back and forth from the dining chamber, which Lord Robartes had taken for his own use, while every now and then his voice would be raised in irritation and anger as a messenger would ride through the pouring rain bearing some counterorder from the Earl of Ess.e.x in Lostwithiel or some fresh item of disaster.

Whether Gartred moved about the house or not I do not know. Alice said she thought she kept to her own chamber. I saw little of Joan, for poor John's ague was still unabated, but Mary came from time to time to visit me, her face each day more drawn and agonised as she learnt of further devastation to the estate. More than three hundred of the sheep had already been slaughtered, thirty fatted bullocks, and sixty store bullocks. All the draught oxen taken and all the farm horses--some forty of these in number--some dozen hogs were left out of the eighty there had been; these would all be gone before the week was out. The last year's corn had vanished the first week of the rebel occupation, and now they had stripped the new, leaving no single blade to be harvested. There was nothing left, of course, of the farm wagons or carts or farming tools; these had all been taken. And the sheds where the winter fuel had been stored were as bare as the granaries. There was, in fact, so the servants in fear and trembling reported to Mary, scarce anything left of the great estate that Jonathan Rashleigh had left in her keeping but a fortnight since. The gardens spoilt, the orchards ruined, the timber felled, the livestock eaten. Whichever way the war in the West should go, my brother-in-law would be a bankrupt man.

And they had not yet started upon the house or the inhabitants.... Our feeding was already a sore problem. At midday we gathered one and all to the main meal of the day. This was served to us in Alice's apartment in the east wing, John lying ill in his father's chamber, and there some twenty of us herded side by side, the children clamouring and fretful, while we dipped stale bread in the mess of watery soup provided, helped sometimes by swollen beans and cabbage. The children had their milk, but no more than two cupfuls for the day, and already I noticed a stary look about them, their eyes overlarge in the pale faces, while their play had become listless, and they yawned often. Young Jonathan started his croup, bringing fresh anxiety to Joan, already nursing her husband, and Alice had to go below to the kitchens and beg for rhubarb sticks to broil for him, which were only given her because her gentle ways won sympathy from the trooper in charge. The old people suffered like the children and complained fretfully with the same misunderstanding of what war brings. Nick Sawle would stare long at his empty bowl when he had finished and mutter, "Disgraceful. Quite unpardonable," under his beard, and look malevolently about him as though it were the fault of someone present, while Will Sparke, with sly cunning, would seat himself amongst the younger children and, under pretence of making friends, sneak crumbs from them when Alice and her nurse had turned their backs. The women were less selfish, and Deborah, whom I had thought as great a freak in her own way as her brother was in his, showed great tenderness, on a sudden, for all those about her who seemed helpless, nor did her deep voice and incipient moustache discourage the smallest children.

It was solely with Matty's aid that I was able to feed d.i.c.k at all. By some means, fair or foul, which I did not enquire into, she had made an ally of the second scullion, to whom she pulled a long tale about her ailing crippled mistress, with the result that further soup was smuggled to my chamber beneath Matty's ap.r.o.n, and no one the wiser for it. It was this same scullion who fed us with rumours, too, and most of them disastrous to his own side, which made me wonder if a bribe would make him a deserter.

At midweek we heard that Richard had seized Restormel Castle by Lostwithiel and that Lord Goring, who commanded the King's horse, held the bridge and the road below St. Blazey. Ess.e.x was now pinned up in our peninsula, some seven miles long and two broad, with ten thousand men to feed and the guns from Polruan trained on Fowey Harbour. It could not last much longer. Either Ess.e.x and the rebels must be relieved by a further force marching to them from the East, or they must stand and make a fight of it. And we would sit, day after day, with cold hearts and empty bellies, staring out upon the sullen soldiery as they stood huddled in the rain outside their tents, while their leaders within the house held councils of despondency.

Another Sunday came, and with it a whisper of alarm among the rebels that the country people were stealing forth at night and doing murder. Sentries were found strangled at their posts; men woke to find their comrades with cut throats; others would stagger to headquarters from the highroad, their hands lopped from their wrists, their eyes blinded. The Cornish were rising....