The King's General Part 16

"I could do much," said Gartred, "if I were permitted. But Honor tells me it is better for the house to fall about our ears.... Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. My trick, I fancy."

She wrote her score on the tablet by her side.

"Honor," said Mary, "you know that it will break Jonathan's heart to see his home laid desolate. All that he has toiled and lived for, and his father before him, for nearly fifty years. If Gartred can in some way save us and you are trying to prevent her, I can never forgive you, nor will Jonathan when he knows of it."

"Gartred can save no one, unless she likes to save herself," I answered, and began to deal for the fourth hand.

"Five cards," called Gartred.

"Equal," I answered.

"A quart to a king."

"A quart to a knave."

We were in our last game, each winning two apiece, when we heard them crashing down the stairs, with the major in the lead.

The terrace and the courtyard were heaped high with wreckage, the loved possessions and treasures of nearly fifty years, even as Mary had said, and what had not been packed upon the horses was left now to destroy. They set fire to this remainder and watched it burn, the men leaning upon their axes and breathing hard now that the work was over; and when the pile was well alight the major turned his back upon it and, coming into the gallery, clicked his heels and bowed derisively to John.

"The orders given me by Lord Robartes have been carried out with implicit fidelity," he announced. "There is nothing left within Menabilly house but yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, and the bare walls."

"And you found no silver hidden?" asked Mary.

"None, madam, but your own--now happily in our possession."

"Then this wanton damage, this wicked destruction, has been for nothing?"

"A brave blow has been struck for Parliament, madam, and that is all that we, her soldiers and her servants, need consider."

He bowed and left us, and in a moment we heard him call further orders, and the horses were brought, and he mounted and rode away even as Lord Robartes had done an hour before. The flames licked the rubble in the courtyard, and save for their dull hissing and the patter of the rain, there was suddenly no other sound. A strange silence had fallen upon the place. Even the sentries stood no longer by the door. Will Sparke crept to the hall.

They've gone," he said. "They've ridden all away. The house is bare, deserted."

I looked up at Gartred, and this time it was I who smiled and I who spread my cards u Ppn the table.

"Discard for carte blanche," I said softly and, adding ten thus to my score, I led her for the first time and with my next hand drew three aces to her one and gained the Partie.

She rose then from the table without a word, save for one mock curtsey to me, and, calling her daughters to her, went upstairs.

I sat alone, shuffling the cards as she had done, while out into the hall faltered the poor weak members of our company to gaze about them, stricken at the sight that met their eyes.

The panels ripped, the floors torn open, the windows shattered from their frames, and all the while the driving rain that had neither doors nor windows now to bar it blew in upon their faces, soft and silent, with great flakes of charred timber and dull soot from the burning rubble in the courtyard.

The last rebels had retreated to the beaches, save for the few who still made their stand at Castledore, and there was no trace of them left now at Menabilly but the devastation they had wrought and the black, churning slough that once was road and park.

As I sat there listening, still shuffling the cards in my hands, I heard for the first time a new note above the cannon and the musket shot and the steady pattering rain.

Never clamouring, never insistent, like the bugle that had haunted me so long, but sharp, quick, triumphant, coming ever nearer, was the brisk tattoo of the royalist drums.

20.

The rebel army capitulated to the King in the early hours of Sunday morning. There was no escape by sea for the hundreds of men herded on the beaches. Only one fishing boat put forth from Fowey bound for Plymouth in the dim light before dawn, and she carried in her cabin the Lord General the Earl of Ess.e.x and his adviser Lord Robartes.

So much we learnt later, and we learnt, too, that Matty's scullion had indeed proved faithful to his promise and borne his message to Sir Jacob Astley at Bodinnick on the Friday evening, but by the time word had reached His Majesty and the outposts upon the road were warned, the Parliament horse had successfully broken through the royalist lines and made good their escape to Saltash. So, by a lag in time, more than two thousand rebel horse got clean away to fight another day, which serious mishap was glossed over by our forces in the heat and excitement of the big surrender, and I think the only one of our commanders to go nearly hopping mad at the escape was Richard Grenvile.

It was, I think, most typical of his character, that when he sent a regiment of his foot to come to our succour on that Sunday morning, bringing us food from their own wagons, he did not come himself but forwarded me this brief message, stopping not to consider whether I lived or died or whether his son was with me still. He wrote: You will soon learn that my plan has only partially succeeded.

The horse have got away, all owing to that besotted idiot Goring lying in a stupor at his headquarters and permitting--you will scarcely credit it--the rebels to slip through his lines without so much as a musket shot at their backsides. May G.o.d preserve us from our own commanders. I go now in haste to Saltash in pursuit, but we have little hope of overtaking the sods, if Goring, with his cavalry, has already failed.

First a soldier, last a lover, my Richard had no time to waste over a starving household and a crippled woman who had let a whole house be laid to waste about her for the sake of the son he did not love.

So it was not the father, after all, who carried the fainting lad into my chamber once again and laid him down, but poor sick John Rashleigh who, crawling for the second time into the tunnel beneath the summerhouse and, finding d.i.c.k unconscious in the b.u.t.tress cell, tugged at the rope, and so opened the hinged stone into the room.

This was about nine o'clock on the Sat.u.r.day night, after the house had been abandoned by the rebels, and we were all too weak to do little more than smile at them when the royalist foot beat their drums under our gaping windows on the Sunday morning.

The first necessity was milk for the children and bread for ourselves, and later in the day, when we had regained a little measure of our strength and the soldiers had kindled a fire for us in the gallery--the only room left livable--we heard once more the sound of horses, but this time heartening and welcome, for they were our own men coming home. I suppose I had been through a deal of strain those past four weeks, something harder than the others because of the secret I had guarded, and so, when it was over, I suffered a strange relapse, accentuated maybe by natural weakness, and had not the strength for several days to lift my head.

The scenes of joy and reunion then were not for me. Alice had her Peter, Elizabeth her John of Coombe, Mary had her Jonathan, and there was kissing, and crying, and kissing again, and all the horrors of our past days to be described, and the desolation to be witnessed. But I had no shoulder on which to lean my head and no breast to weep upon. A truckle bed from the attic served me for support, this being one of the few things found that the rebels had not destroyed. I do recollect that my brother-in-law bent over me when he returned and praised me for my courage, saying that John had told him everything and I had acted as he would have done himself had he been home.

But I did not want my brother-in-law; I wanted Richard. And Richard had gone to Saltash, chasing rebels.

All the rejoicing came as an anticlimax. The bells pealing in Fowey Church, echoed by the bells at Tywardreath, and His Majesty summoning the gentlemen of the county to his headquarters at Boconnoc and thanking them for their support--he presented Jonathan with his own lace handkerchief and prayer book--and a sudden wild thanksgiving for deliverance and for victory seemed premature to me and strangely sour. Perhaps it was some fault in my own character, some cripple quality, but I turned my face to the wall and my heart was heavy. The war was not over, for all the triumphs in the West. Only Ess.e.x had been defeated and his eight thousand men.

There were many thousands in the North and East of England who had yet to show their heels. And what is it all for? I thought. Why can they not make peace? Is it to continue thus, with the land laid waste and the houses devastated, until we are all grown old?

Victory had a hollow sound, with our enemy Lord Robartes in command at Plymouth, still stubbornly defended, and there was something narrow and parochial m thinking the war over because Cornwall was now free.

It was the second day of our release, when the menfolk had ridden off to Boconnoc to take leave of His Majesty, that I heard the sound of wheels in the outer court and preparation for departure and then those wheels creaking over the cobbles and disappearing through the park. I was too tired then to question it, but later in the day, when Matty came to me, I asked her who it was that went away from Menabilly in so confident a fashion.

"Who else could it be," Matty answered me, "but Mrs. Denys?"

So Gartred, like a true gambler, had thought best to cut her losses and be quit of us.

"How did she find the transport?" I enquired.

Matty sniffed as she wrung out a piece of cloth to bathe my back.

There was a gentleman she knew, it seems, amongst the royalist party who rode hither yesterday with Mr. Rashleigh, a Mr. Ambrose Manaton, and it's he who has Provided her the escort for today."

I smiled in spite of myself. However much I hated Gartred, I had to bow to the fashion in which she landed on her feet in all and every circ.u.mstance.

"pid she see d.i.c.k," I asked, "before she left?"

"Aye," said Matty. "He went up to her at breakfast and saluted her. She stared at him, amazed; I watched her. And then she asked him, 'Did you come in the morning with the infantry?' And he grinned like a little imp and answered, "I have been here all the time.'"

"Imprudent lad," I said. "What did she say to him?"

"She did not answer for a moment, Miss Honor, and then she smiled--you know her way--and said, 'I might have known it. You may tell your jailer you are now worth one bar of silver.'"

"And was that all?"

"That was all. She went soon after. She'll never come again to Menabilly." And Matty rubbed my sore back with her hard familiar hands. But Matty was wrong, for Gartred did come again to Menabilly, as you shall hear, and the man who brought her was my own brother.... But I run ahead of my story, for we are still in September '44.

The first week while we recovered our strength my brother-in-law and his steward set to work to find out what it would cost to make good the damage that had been wrought upon his house and his estate. The figure was colossal and beyond his means .I can see him now, seated in one corner of the gallery, reading from his great account book, every penny he had lost meticulously counted and entered in the margin. It would take months--nay, years--he said, to restore the house and bring back the estate to its original condition. While the war lasted no redress would be forthcoming. After the war, so he was told, the Crown would see that he was not the loser.

I think Jonathan knew the value of such promises, and, like me, he thought the rejoicings in the West were premature. One day the rebels might return again and next time the scales be turned.

In the meantime all that could be done was to save what was left of the harvest-- and that but one meadow of fourteen acres that the rebels had left uncut but the rain had well-nigh ruined.

His house in Fowey being left bare in the same miserable state as Menabilly, his family, in their turn, were become homeless, and the decision was now made amongst us to divide. The Sawles went to their brother at Penrice, the Sparkes to other relatives at Tavistock. The Rashleighs themselves, with the children, split up amongst near neighbours until a wing of Menabilly should be repaired. I was for] returning to Lanrest until I learnt, with a sick heart, that the whole house had suffered j a worse fate than Menabilly and was wrecked beyond hope of restoration.

There was nothing for it but to take shelter, for the time being, with my brother Jo at Radford, for although Plymouth was still held by Parliament, the surrounding country j was safe in royalist hands, and the subduing of the garrison and harbour was only, according to our optimists, a matter of three months at the most.

I should have preferred, had the choice been offered me, to live alone in one bare] room at Menabilly than repair to Radford and the stiff household of my brother, but' alas, I had become in a few summer months but another of the vast number of! homeless people turned wanderer through war, and must swallow pride and be grateful for hospitality, from whatever direction it might come.

I might have gone to my sister Cecilia at Maddercombe, or my sister Bridget at j Holbeton, both of whom were pleasanter companions than my brother Jo, whose I official position in the county of Devon had turned him somewhat cold and proud, butl I chose Radford for the very reason that it was close to Plymouth--and Richard was once more commander of the siege. What hopes had I of seeing him? G.o.d only knew, I but I was sunk deep now in the mesh I had made for myself, when waiting for a word j from him or a visit of an hour was to become sole reason for existence.

"Why cannot you come with me to Buckland?" pleaded d.i.c.k, for the tutor, Herber Ashley, had been sent to fetch him home. "I would be content at Buckland and notj mind my father if you could come, too, and stand between us."

"Your father," I answered him, "has enough work on his hands without keeping house for a crippled woman."

"You are not crippled," declared the boy with pa.s.sion. "You are only weak about the legs and so must sit confined to your chair. I would tend you and wait upon you, hour by hour with Matty, if you would but come with me to Buckland."

I smiled and ran my hand through his dark curls.

"You shall come and visit me at Radford," I said, "and tell me of your lessons.

How you fence, and how you dance, and what progress you make in speaking French."

"It will not be the same," he said, "as living with you in the house. Shall I tell you something? I like you best of all the people that I know--next to my own mother."

Ah well, it was achievement to be second once again to Mary Howard.

The next day he rode away in company with his tutor, turning back to wave at me all the way across the park, and I shed a useless sentimental tear when he was gone from me.

What might have been--what could have been--the saddest phrases in our English tongue, and back again, pell-mell, would come the fantasies: the baby I had never borne, the husband I would never hold. The sickly figures in an old maid's dream, so Gartred would have told me.

Yes, I was thirty-four, an old maid and a cripple; but sixteen years ago I had had my moment, which was with me still, vivid and enduring, and by G.o.d, I swear I was happier with my one lover than Gartred ever had been with her twenty.

So I set forth upon the road again and turned my back on Menabilly, little thinking that the final drama of the house must yet be played with blood and tears, and I kissed my dear Rashleighs one and all and vowed I would return to them as soon as they could have me.

Jonathan escorted me in my litter as far as Saltash, where Robin came to meet me .I was much shaken, not by the roughness of the journey, but by the sights I had witnessed on the road. The aftermath of war was not a pleasant sight to the beholder.

The country was laid waste, for one thing, and that the fault of the enemy. The corn ruined, the orchards devastated, the houses smoking. And in return for this the Cornish people had taken toll upon the rebel prisoners. There were many of them still lying in the ditches, with the dust and flies upon them. Some without hands and feet, some hanging downwards from the trees. And there were stragglers who had died upon the road in the last retreat, too faint to march from Cornwall--and these had been set upon and stripped of their clothing and left for the hungry dogs to lick.

I knew then as I peered forth from the curtains of my litter that war can make beasts of every one of us and that the men and women of my own breed could act even worse in warfare than the men and women of the Eastern counties. We had, each one of us, because of the civil war, streaked back two centuries in time and were become like those half savages of the fourteen hundreds who, during the Wars of the Roses, slit one another's throats without compunction.

At Saltash there were gibbets in the market square, with the bodies of rebel troopers hanging upon them scarcely cold, and as I turned my sickened eyes away from them I heard Jonathan enquire of a pa.s.sing soldier what faults they had committed.

He grinned, a fine tall fellow with the Grenvile shield on his shoulder. "No fault," he^said, "except that they are rebels and so must be hanged like the dogs they are."

"Who gave the order, then?"

"Our general, of course, Sir Richard Grenvile."

Jonathan said nothing, but I saw that he looked grave, and I leant back upon my cushions, feeling, because it was Richard's doing and I loved him, that the fault was somehow mine, and I responsible.

We halted there that night, and in the morning Robin came with an escort to conduct me across the Tamar, and so through the royalist lines outside the Plymouth defences, round to Radford.

Robin looked well and bronzed, and I thought again with cynicism how men, in s Pite of protestations about peace, are really bred to war and thrive upon it. He was not under Richard's command but was colonel of foot under Sir John Berkeley, in the army of Prince Maurice, and he told us that the King had decided not to make a determined and immediate a.s.sault upon Plymouth after all, but to leave it to Grenvile to subdue by slow starvation, while he and Prince Maurice marched east out of Devon towards Somerset and Wiltshire, there to join forces with Prince Rupert and engage the Parliament forces. .h.i.therto unsubdued. I thought to myself that Richard would reckon this bad strategy, for Plymouth was no p.o.o.ping little town, but the finest harbour in all England next to Portsmouth, and for His Majesty to gain the garrison and have command also of the sea was of very great importance. Slow starvation had not conquered it before; why, then, should it do so now? What Richard needed for a.s.sault were guns and men. But I was a woman and not supposed to have knowledge of these matters. I watched Robin and Jonathan in conversation and caught a murmur of the word "Grenvile" and Robin saying something about "harsh treatment of the prisoners" and "Irish methods not suiting Devon men," and I guessed that Richard was already getting up against the county. No doubt I would hear more of this at Radford.

No one hated cruelty more than I did, nor deplored the streak of it in Richard with greater sickness of heart, but as we travelled towards Radford, making a great circuit of the forts around Plymouth, I noticed with secret pride that the only men who carried themselves like soldiers were those who wore the Grenvile shield on their shoulders. Some of Goring's horse were quartered by St. Budeaux, and they were lolling about the village, drinking with the inhabitants, while a sentry squatted on a stool, his great mouth gaping in a yawn, his musket lying at his feet, and from the neary-by inn came a group of officers, laughing and very flushed, nor did the sentry leap to his feet when he observed them. Robin joined the officers a moment, exchanged greetings, and as we pa.s.sed through the village he told me the most flushed of the group was Lord Goring himself, a very good fellow and a most excellent judge of horses.

"Does that make him a good commander?" I asked.

"He is full of courage," said Robin, "will ride at anything. That is all that matters."

And he proceeded to tell me about a race that had been run the day before, under the very noses of the rebels, and how Lord Goring's chestnut had beaten Lord Went worth's roan by half a neck.

"Is that how Prince Maurice's army conducts its war?" I asked.

Robin laughed; he thought it all very fine sport.

But the next post we pa.s.sed was held by Grenvile men. And here there was a barrier across the road and armed sentries standing by it, and Robin had to show his piece of paper, signed by Sir John Berkeley, before we could pa.s.s through. An officer barked an order to the men, and they removed the barrier. There were perhaps a score of them standing by the postern, cleaning their equipment; they looked lean and tough, with an indefinable quality about them that stamped them Grenvile men. I would have known them on the instant had I not seen the scarlet pennant by the postern door, with the three golden rests staring from the centre, capped by a laughing griffin.

We came at length by Plymstock into Radford and my brother's house, and as I was shown to my apartment looking north over the river towards the Catt.w.a.ter and Plymouth, I thought of my eighteenth birthday long ago, and how Richard had sailed into the Sound with the Duke of Buckingham. It seemed a world ago, and I another woman.

My brother was now a widower, Elizabeth Champernowne having died a few years before the war in childbed, and my youngest brother Percy, with his wife Phillippa, was come to live with him and look after Jo's son John, a child of seven, they themselves being childless. I had never cared much for Radford, even as a girl, and now within its austere barrack precincts I found myself homesick, not so much for Lanrest and the days that were gone, but for my last few months at Menabilly. The danger I had known there and the tension I had shared had, in some strange fashion, rendered the place dear to me. The gatehouse between the courtyards, the long gallery, the causeway that looked out to the Gribbin and the sea seemed now to me, in retrospect, my own possession, and even Temperance Sawle with her prayers and Will Sparke with his high-pitched voice were people for whom I felt affection because of the siege we had each one of us endured. The fighting did not touch them at Radford, for all its proximity to Plymouth, and the talk was all of the discomfort they had to bear by living within military control.

I, straight from a sacked house and starvation, wondered that they should think themselves ill-used, with plenty of food upon the table, but no sooner had we sat down to dinner (I had not the face to demand it, the first evening, in my room) than Jo began to hold forth, with great heat, upon the dictatorial manners of the Army.

"His Majesty has thought fit," he said, "to confer upon Richard Grenvile the designation of General in the West. Very good. I have no word to say against the appointment. But when Grenvile trades upon the t.i.tle to commandeer all the cattle within a radius of thirty miles or more to feed his army, and rides roughshod over the feelings of the county gentry with the one sentence, 'Military necessities come first,' it is time that we all protested."

If Jo remembered my old alliance with Richard, the excitement of the moment had made him conveniently forget it; nor did he know that young d.i.c.k had been in my care at Menabilly the past weeks. Robin, too, full of his own commander Berkeley, was pleased to agree with Jo.

"The trouble with Grenvile," said Robin, "is that he insists upon his fellows being paid. The men in his command are like hired mercenaries. No free quarter, no looting, no foraging as they please, and all this comes very hard upon the pockets of people like yourself who must provide the money."

"Do you know," continued Jo, "that the commissioners of Devon have been obliged to allot him one thousand pounds a week for the maintenance of his troops? I tell you, it hits us very hard."

"It would hit you harder," I said, "if your house was burnt down by the Parliament."

They stared at me in surprise, and I saw young Phillippa look at me in wonder for my boldness. Woman's talk was not encouraged at Radford.