The King's General Part 18

"Since you would not come to Buckland," he said, "I had perforce to come to you."

''It is always a mistake," I said, "to fall out with a woman's brothers."

'Your brother Robin has ridden off with Berkeley's horse to Tavistock," he answered, "and Percy I am sending on a delegation to the King. That leaves only Jo to be disposed of. It might be possible to get him over to the Queen in France."

He tied a knot in his handkerchief as a reminder.

"And how long," I asked, "will it take before Plymouth falls before you?"

He shook his head and looked dubious.

"They have the whole place strengthened," he said, "since our campaign in Cornwall, and that's the devil of it. Had His Majesty abided by my advice and tarried here a fortnight only with his army, we would have the place today. But no. He must listen to Hyde and march to Dorset, and here I am, back again where I was last Easter, with less than a thousand men to do the job."

"You'll never take it then," I asked, "by direct a.s.sault?"

"Not unless I can increase my force," he said, "by nearly another thousand. I'm already recruiting hard up and down the county. Rounding up deserters and enlisting new levies. But the fellows must be paid. They won't fight otherwise, and I don't blame 'em. Why the devil should they?"

"Where," I said, "did you get this burgundy?"

"From Lanhydrock," he answered. "I had no idea Jack Robartes had laid down so good a cellar. I've had every bottle of it removed to Buckland."

He held his goblet to the candlelight and smiled.

"You know that Lord Robartes sacked Menabilly simply and solely because you pillaged his estate?"

"He is an extremely dull-witted fellow."

"There is not a pin to choose between you, where pillaging is concerned. A royalist does as much damage as a rebel. I suppose d.i.c.k told you that Gartred was one of us at Menabilly?"

"What was she after?"

"The duchy silver plate."

"More power to her. I could do with some of it myself to pay my troops."

"She was very friendly with Lord Robartes."

"I have yet to meet the man she dislikes."

"I think it very probable that she acts spy for Parliament."

"There you misjudge her. She would do anything to gain her own ends but that.

You forget the old saying that of the three families in Cornwall a G.o.dolphin was never wanting in wit, a Trelawney in courage, or a Grenvile in loyalty. Gartred was born and bred a Grenvile, no matter if she beds with every fellow in the duchy."

A brother, I thought, will always hold a brief for a sister. Perhaps Robin at this moment was doing the same thing for me.

Richard had risen and was looking through the window towards the distant Catt.w.a.ter and Plymouth.

"Tonight," he said quietly, "I've made a gambler's throw. It may come off. It may be hopeless. If it succeeds Plymouth can be ours by daybreak."

"What do you mean?"

He continued looking through the window to where the lights of Plymouth flickered.

"I am in touch with the second-in-command in the garrison," he said softly, "a certain Colonel Searle. There is a possibility that for the sum of three thousand pounds he will surrender the city. Before wasting further lives I thought it worth my while to essay bribery."

I was silent. The prospect was hazardous and somehow smelt unclean.

"How have you set about it?" I asked at length.

"Young Joe slipped through the lines tonight at sunset," he answered, "and will, by now, be hidden in the town. He bears upon him my message to the colonel and a firm promise of three thousand pounds."

"I don't like it," I said. "No good will come of it."

"Maybe not," he said indifferently, "but at least it was worth trying. I don't relish: the prospect of battering my head against the gates of Plymouth the whole winter."

I thought of young Joe and his impudent brown eyes.

"Supposing," I said slowly, "that they catch your Joseph?"

Richard smiled.

"That lad," he answered, "is quite capable of looking after himself."

But I thought of Lord Robartes as I had seen him last, with muddied boots and the rain upon his shoulders, sour and surly in defeat, and I knew how much he must detest the name of Grenvile.

"I shall be rising early," said Richard, "before you are awake. If by midday you hear a salvo from every gun inside the garrison, you will know that I have entered Plymouth after one swift and very b.l.o.o.d.y battle."

He took my face in his hands and kissed it and then bade me good night. But I found it hard to sleep. The excitement of his presence in the house had turned to anxiety and strain. I knew, with all the intuition in my body, that he had gambled wrong.

I heard him ride off with his staff about five-thirty in the morning, and then, dead tired, my brain chasing itself in circles, I fell into a heavy sleep.

When I awoke it was past ten o'clock. A grey day with a nip of autumn in the air. I had no wish for breakfast, nor even to get up, but stayed there in my bed. I heard the noises of the house and the coming and going of the soldiers in their wing, and at twelve o'clock I raised myself upon my elbow and looked out towards the river. Five past twelve. A quarter past. Half-past twelve. There was no salvo from the guns.

There was not even a musket shot. It rained at two, then cleared, then rained again.

The day dragged on, dull, interminable. I had a sick feeling of suspension all-the while. At five o'clock Matty brought me my dinner on a tray, which I picked at with faint appet.i.te. I asked her if she had heard of any ne was, but she said she knew of none.

But later, when she had taken away my tray, and come to draw my curtains, her face was troubled.

"What is the matter?" I asked.

"It's what one of Sir Richard's men was saying down there to the sentry," she answered. "Some trouble today in Plymouth. One of their best young officers taken prisoner by Lord Robartes and condemned to death by council of war. Sir Richard has been endeavouring all day to ransom him but has not succeeded."

"Who is it?"

"I don't know."

"What will happen to the officer?"

"The soldier did not say."

I lay back again on my bed, my hands over my eyes to dim the candle. Foreboding never played me wrong, not when I was seized with it for a whole night and day.

Maybe perception was a cripple quality.

Later I heard the horses coming up the drive and the sentries standing to attention.

Footsteps climbed the stairs, slowly, heavily, and pa.s.sed along to the rooms in the northern wing. A door slammed, and there was silence. It was a long while that I waited there, lying on my back. Just before midnight I heard him walk along the pa.s.sage, and his hand fumbled a moment on the latch of my door. The candles were blown, and it was darkness. The household slept. He came to my side and knelt before the bed. I put my hand on his head and held him close to me. He knelt thus many moments without speaking.

"Tell me," I whispered, "if it will help you."

'They hanged him," he said, "above the gates of the town where we could see him.

'sent a company to cut him down, but they were mown down by gunfire. They hanged him before my eyes."

Now that suspense was broken and the long day of strain behind me, I was aware of we feeling of detachment that possesses all of us when a crisis has been pa.s.sed and the suffering not one's own.

This was Richard's battle. I could not fight it for him. I could only hold him in the darkness.

"That rat Searle," he said, his voice broken, strangely unlike my Richard, "belayed the scheme, and so they caught the lad. I went myself beneath the walls of the garrison to parley with Robartes. I offered him any terms of ransom or exchange.

He gave no answer. And while I stood there waiting, they strung him up above the gate...."

He could not continue. He lay his head upon me, and I held his hands that clutched so fiercely at the patchwork quilt upon the bed.

"Tomorrow," I said, "it might have been the same. A bullet through the head. A thrust from a pike. An unlucky stumble from his horse. This happens every day. An act of war. Look upon it in that way. Joe died in your service, as he would wish to do."

"No," he said, his voice m.u.f.fled. "It was my fault. On me the blame, now, tonight, for all eternity. An error in judgment. The wrong decision."

"Joe would forgive you. Joe would understand."

"I can't forgive myself. That's where the torture lies."

I thought then of all the things that I would want to bring before him. How he was not infallible and never had been, and that this stroke of fate was but a grim reminder of the fact. His own harsh measures to the enemy had been repaid, measure for measure. Cruelty begat cruelty; betrayal gave birth to treachery; the qualities that he had fostered in himself these past years were now recoiled upon him.

The men of Parliament had not forgotten his act of perfidy in the spring, when, feigning to be their friend, he had deserted to the King, bearing their secrets. They had not forgotten the executions without trial, the prisoners condemned to death in Lydford Castle, nor the long line of troopers hanging from the gibbets in the market square in Saltash. And Lord Robartes, with his home Lanhydrock ravaged and laid waste, his goods seized, had seen rough justice and revenge in taking the life of the messenger who bore an offer of bribery and corruption in his pocket.

It was the irony of the devil, or Almighty G.o.d, that the messenger should have been no distant kinsman but Richard Grenvile's son. All this came before me in that moment when I held Richard in my arms. And now, I thought, we have come to a crisis in his life. The dividing of the ways. Either to learn from this single tragedy of a boy's death that cruelty was not the answer, that dishonesty dealt a returning blow, that accepting no other judgment but his own would in a s.p.a.ce of time make every friend an enemy; or to learn nothing, to continue through the months and years deaf to all counsel, unscrupulous, embittered, the Skellum Grenvile with a price upon his head, the Red Fox who would be pointed to forevermore as lacking chivalry, a hated contrast to his well-beloved brother.

"Richard," I whispered, "Richard, my dear and only love..." But he rose to his feet; he went slowly to the window and, pulling aside the curtains, stood there with the moonlight on his hands that held the sword but his face in shadow.

"I shall avenge him," he said, "with every life I take. No quarter any more. No pardons. Not one of them shall be spared. From this moment I shall have one aim only in my life, to kill rebels. And to do it as I wish I must have command of the Army; otherwise I fail. I will brook no dispute with my equals; I will tolerate no orders from those senior to me. His Majesty made me General in the West, and by G.o.d, I swear that the whole world shall know it."

I knew then that his worse self possessed him, soul and body, and that nothing I could say or do could help him in the future. Had we been man and wife or truly lovers, I might, through the close intimacy of day by day, have learnt to soften him; but fate and circ.u.mstance had made me no more than a shadow in his life, a phantom of what might have been. He had come to rne tonight because he needed me, but neither tears nor protestations nor a.s.surances of my love and tenderness to all eternity.

22.

Richard was constantly at Radford during the six months that followed. Although his main headquarters was at Buckland and he rode frequently through both Devon and Cornwall raising new recruits to his command, a company of his men was kept at my brother's house throughout, and his rooms always in preparation.

The reason given that watch must be kept upon the fortresses of Mount Batten and Mount Stampford was true enough, but I could tell from my brother's tightened lips and Percy's and Phillippa's determined discussion upon other matters when the general's name was mentioned that my presence in the house was considered to be the reason for the somewhat singular choice of residence; and when Richard with his staff arrived to spend a night or two and I was bidden to a dinner tte--tte immediately upon his coming into the house, havoc at once was played with what shred of reputation might be left to me. The friendship was considered odd, unfortunate; I think had I thrown my cap over the mills and gone to live with him at Buckland it might have been better for the lot of us. But this I steadfastly refused to do, and even now, in retrospect, I cannot give the reason, for it will not formulate in words.

Always, at the back of my mind, was the fear that by sharing his life with too great intimacy I would become a burden to him and the love we bore for each other slip to disenchantment. Here at Radford he could seek me out upon his visits, and being with me would bring him peace and relaxation, tonic and stimulation; whatever mood he would be in, weary or high-spirited, I could attune myself accordingly. But had I made myself persistently available in some corner of his house, little by little he would have felt the tug of an invisible chain, the claim that a wife brings to bear upon a husband, and the lovely freedom that there was between us would exist no more.

The knowledge of my crippled state, so happily glossed over and indeed forgotten when he came to me at Radford, would have nagged me, a perpetual reproach, had I lived beneath his roof at Buckland. The sense of helplessness, of ugly inferiority, would have worked like a maggot in my mind, and even when he was most gentle and most tender I should have thought--with some devil flash of intuition--This is not what he is wanting.

That was my greatest fault; I lacked humility. Though sixteen years of discipline had taught me to accept crippledom and become resigned to it, I was too proud to share the stigma of it with my lover. Oh G.o.d, what would I have given to have walked with him and ridden, to move and turn before him, to have liveliness and grace.

Even a gypsy in the hedges, a beggarwoman in the gutters had more dignity than I.

He would say to me, smiling over his wine: "Next week you shall come to me at Buckland. There is a chamber, high up in the tower, looking out across the valley to the hills. This was once my grandfather's, who fought in the Revenge, and when Drake purchased Buckland he used the chamber as his own and hung maps upon the wall. You could lie there, Honor, dreaming of the Past and the Armada. And in the evening I would come to you and kneel beside your "ed, and we would make believe that the apple tree at Lanrest was still in bloom and you eighteen."

I could see the room as he described it. And the window looking to the hills. And the tents of the soldiery below. And the pennant flying from the tower, scarlet and Sold. I could see, too, the other Honor, walking by his side upon the terrace, who might have been his lady.

And I smiled at him and shook my head.

"No, Richard," I said. "I will not come to Buckland."

And so the autumn pa.s.sed and a new year came upon us once again. The whole of the West Country was held firmly for the King, save Plymouth, Lyme, and Taunton, which three garrisons stubbornly defied all attempt at subjugation, and the two seaports, relieved constantly by the Parliament shipping, were still in no great danger of starvation. So long as these garrisons were unsubdued, the West could not be counted truly safe for His Majesty, and although the royalist leaders were of good heart and expressed great confidence, the people throughout the whole country were already sick and tired of war, which had brought them nothing but loss and high taxation. I believe it was the same for Parliament, that troops deserted from the Army every day. Men wanted to be home again upon their rightful business. The quarrel was not theirs. They had no wish to fight for King or Parliament, and "A plague on both your houses!" was the common cry.

In January, Richard became sheriff for Devon, and with this additional authority he could raise fresh troops and levies, but the way he set about it was never pleasing to the commissioners of the county. He rode roughshod over their feelings, demanding men and money as a right, and for the smallest pretext he would have a gentleman arrested and clapped into jail until such time as a ransom would be paid.

This would not be hearsay from my brother, but frank admissions on the part of Richard himself. Always unscrupulous where money was concerned, now that he had an army to pay, any sense of caution flew to the winds. Again and again I would hear, his justification: "The country is at war. I am a professional soldier and I will not command men who are not paid. While I hold this appointment from His Majesty I will undertake to feed, clothe, and arm the forces at my disposal, so that they hold themselves like men and warriors and not roam the countryside, raping and looting and in rags, like the i disorderly rabble under the so-called command of Berkeley, Goring, and the rest. To I do this I must have money. And to get money I must demand it from the pockets of the; merchants and the gentry of Cornwall and Devon."

I think, by them, he became more hated every day, but by the common people more respected. His troops won such credit for high discipline that their fame spread far'] abroad to the Eastern counties, and it was, I believe, because of this that the first seeds of jealousy began to sow themselves in the hearts and in the minds of his brother I commanders. None of them were professionals like himself but men of estate and'! fortune who, by their rank, had immediately, upon the outbreak of war, been given I high commands and expected to lead newly raised armies into battle. They were I gentlemen of leisure, of no experience, and though many of them were gallant and f courageous, warfare to them consisted of a furious charge upon blood horses,' dangerous and exciting, with more speed to it than a day's hawking, and when the fray was over, back to their quarters to eat and drink and play cards, while the men I they had led could fend for themselves. Let them loot the villages and strip the poor! inhabitants; it saved the leaders a vast amount of unpleasantness and the trouble that must come from organisation. But it was irritating, I imagine, to hear how Grenvile's I men were praised and how Grenvile's men were paid and fed and clothed; and Sir*

John Berkeley, who commanded the troops at Exeter and was forever hearing complaints from the common people about Lord Goring's cavalry and Lord Went-; worth's foot, was glad enough, I imagine, to report to his supreme commander, Prince Maurice, that even if Grenvile's men were disciplined, the commissioners of Devon and Cornwall had no good word to say of Grenvile himself, and that j in spite of all the fire-eating and hanging of rebel prisoners Plymouth was stilljj not taken.

In the despatches that pa.s.sed between John Berkeley and Richard, which from time to time he quoted to me with a laugh, I could read the veiled hint that Jo Berkeley at ^ Exeter, with nothing much to do, would think it far preferable for himself and for the royal cause if he should change commands with Richard.

"They expect me," Richard would say, "to hurl my fellows at the defences without! any regard for their lives, and having lost three quarters of them in one a.s.sault, recruit! another five hundred the following week. Had I command of unlimited forces and possessed G.o.d's quant.i.ty of ammunition, a bombardment of three days would reduce Plymouth to ashes, but with the little I have at my disposal I cannot hope to reduce the garrison before the spring. In the meanwhile I can keep the swine hara.s.sed night and day, which is more than Digby ever did."

His blockade of Plymouth was complete by land, but the rebels having command of the Sound, provisions and relief could be brought to them by sea, and this was the real secret of their success. All that Richard as commander of the siege could hope to do was to so wear out the defenders by constant surprise attack upon the outward positions that in time they would, from very weariness, surrender.

It was a hopeless, gruelling task, and the only people to win glory and praise for their stout hearts were the men who were besieged within the city.

It was shortly after Christmas that Richard decided to send d.i.c.k to Normandy with his tutor, Herbert Ashley.

"It's no life for him at Buckland," he said. "Ever since Joe went I've had a guard watch him day and night, and the thought of him so close to the enemy should they try a sally becomes a constant anxiety. He can go to Caen or Rouen, and when the business is well over I shall send for him again."

"Would you never," I said with diffidence, "consider returning him to London to his mother?"