The King's General Part 25

'.'Have my servants looked after you?" he said at once. "Given you all you want?

This is garrison fare, you know; you must excuse it."

And as he spoke I felt his bold eyes look me up and down in cool appraising fashion, as though I were a maid and not fifteen years his senior.

"Come, Jack," he said, "present me to your kinswoman," and I wondered what the devil of a story Jack had spun.

We ate and drank, and all the while he talked he stared, and I wondered if his boy's imagination was running riot on the thought of his notorious and rebellious general making love to me, a cripple.

"I have no claim to trespa.s.s upon your time, sir," I said at length, "but Sir Richard, Jack's uncle, is my dear friend, and has been so now over a span of years. His faults are many; I have not come to dispute them. But his loyalty to yourself has never, I believe, been the issue in question."

"I don't doubt it," said the prince, "but you know how it was. He got up against the council, and Sir Edward in particular. I like him immensely myself, but personal feeling cannot count in these matters. There was no choice but to sign the warrant for his arrest."

"Sir Richard did very wrong not to serve under Lord Hopton," I said. "His worst fault is his temper, and much, I think, had gone wrong that day to kindle it. Given reflection, he would have acted otherwise."

"He made no attempt, you know, sir," cut in Jack, "to resist arrest. The whole staff would have gone to his aid had he given them the word. That I have on good authority. But he told all of them he wished to abide by Your Highness's command."

The prince rose to his feet and paced up and down the room.

"It's a wretched affair all round," he said. "There's Grenvile at the Mount, the one fellow who might have saved Cornwall, while Hopton fights a hopeless battle up in, Torrington. I can't do anything about it, you know. That's the devil of it. I shall be whisked away myself before I know what is happening."

"There is one thing you can do, sir, if you will forgive my saying so," I said.

"What then?"

"Send word to the Mount that when you and the council sail for the Sallies Sir Richard Grenvile shall be permitted to escape at the same time and commandeer a fishing boat for France."

The Prince of Wales stared at me for a moment, and then that same smile I had remarked upon his face before lit his whole ugly countenance.

"Sir Richard Grenvile is most fortunate," he said, "to have so fidele an ally as yourself. If I am ever in his shoes and find myself a fugitive, I hope I can rely on half so good a friend." He glanced across at Jack. "You can arrange that, can't you?" he " said. "I will write a letter to Sir Arthur Ba.s.sett at the Mount, and you can take it there and see your uncle at the same time. I don't suggest we ask for his company in the'v frigate when we sail, because I hardly think the ship would bear his weight alongside, Sir Edward Hyde."

The two lads laughed, for all the world like a pair of schoolboys caught in mischief.

Then the prince turned and, coming to the couch, bent low and kissed my hand.

"Have no fear," he said, "I will arrange it. Sir Richard shall be free the instant we ' sail for the Scillies. And when I return--for I shall return, you know, one day--I shall hope to see you, and him also, at Whitehall."

He bowed and went, forgetting me, I dare say, forevermore, but leaving with me; an impression of black eyes and gypsy features that I have not forgotten to this day....

Jack escorted me to the castle entrance once again.

"He will remember his promise," he said; "that I swear to you. I have never known f him go back on his word. Tomorrow I shall ride with that letter to the Mount." $ I returned to Penryn, worn out and utterly exhausted now that my mission was fulfilled. I wanted nothing but my bed and silence. Matty received me with sour looks and the grim pursed mouth that spelt disapproval.

"You have wanted to be ill for weeks," she said. "Now that we are here, in a strng lodging, with no comforts, you decide to do so. Very well, I'll not answer for the! consequences."

"No one asks you to," I said, turning my face to the wall. "For G.o.d's sake, if I want to, let me sleep or die."

Two days later Lord Hopton was defeated outside Torrington and the whole Western army in full retreat across the Tamar. It concerned me little, lying in that lodging at Penryn with a high fever. On the twenty-fifth of February Fairfax had marched and taken Launceston and on the second of March had crossed the moors to Bodmin. That night the Prince of Wales, with his council, set sail in the frigate phoenix--and the war in the West was over.

The day Lord Hopton signed the treaty in Truro with General Fairfax, my brother-in-law, Jonathan Rashleigh, by permission of the Parliament, came down to Penryn to fetch me back to Menabilly. The streets were lined with soldiers, not ours, but theirs, and the whole route from Truro to St. Austell bore signs of surrender and defeat. I sat with stony face, looking out of the curtains of my litter, while Jonathan Rashleigh rode by my side, his shoulders bowed, his face set in deep grim lines.

We did not converse. We had no words to say. We crossed St. Blazey Bridge, and Jonathan handed his pa.s.s to the rebel sentry at the post, who stared at us with insolence and then jerked his head to let us pa.s.s. They were everywhere. In the road, in the cottage doors at Tywardreath, at the barrier, at the foot of Polmear Hill.

This was our future then, forevermore, to ask, in deep humility, if we might travel our own roads. That it should be so worried me no longer, for my days of journeying were over.

I was returning to Menabilly to be no longer a camp follower, no longer a lady of the drum, but plain Honor Harris, a cripple on her back.

And it did not matter to me; I did not care.

For Richard Grenvile had escaped to France.

28.

Defeat and the aftermath of war... Not pleasant for the losers. G.o.d knows that we endure it still, and I write in the autumn of '53, but in the year '46 we were new to defeat and had not yet begun to learn our lessons. It was, I think, the loss of freedom that hit the Cornish hardest. We had been used, for generations, to minding our own affairs, and each man living after his fashion. Landlords were fair and usually well liked, with tenant and labourer living in amity together. We had our local disagreements, as every man will with his neighbour, and our family feuds, but no body of persons had ever before interfered with our way of living, nor given us commands.

Now all was changed. Our orders came to us from Whitehall, and a Cornish County Committee, way up in London, sat in judgment upon us. We could no longer pa.s.s our own measures and decide by local consultation what was suited to each town and village. The County Committee made our decisions for us.

Their first action was to demand a weekly payment from the people of Cornwall to we revenue, and this weekly a.s.sessment was rated so high that it was impossible to find the money, for the ravages of war had stripped the country bare. Their next move *as to sequester the estate of every landlord who had fought for the King, and Decause the County Committee had not the time or the persons to administer these estates, the owners were allowed to dwell there, if they so desired, but pay to the . otnmittee, month by month, the full and total value of the property. This crippling ^junction was made the harder because the estates were a.s.sessed at the value they ad held before the war, and now that most of them were fallen into ruin through the Anting, it would take generations before the land gave a return once more.

,. A host of petty officials, the only men at these times to have their pockets well lned, and they were paid fixed salaries by the Parliament, came down from Whitehall to collect the sums due to the County Committee; and these agents were found in every town and borough, forming themselves in their turns in committees and subcommittees, so that no man could buy as little as a loaf of bread without first going cap in hand to one of these fellows and signing his name to a piece of paper. Besides these civil employees of the Parliament, we had the military to contend with, and whosoever should wish to pa.s.s from one village to another must first have a pa.s.s from the officer in charge, and then his motives were questioned, his family history gone into, detail for detail, and as likely as not he would find himself arrested for delinquency at the end of it.

I truly believe that Cornwall was, in that first summer of '46, the most wretched county in the kingdom. The harvest was bad, another bitter blow to landlord and labourer alike, and the price of wheat immediately rose to fantastic prices. The price of tin, on the contrary, fell low, and many mines closed down on this account.

Poverty and sickness were rife by the autumn, and our old enemy the plague appeared, killing great numbers in St. Ives and in the western districts. Another burden was the care of the many wounded and disabled soldiers who, half naked and half starved, roamed the villages begging for charity. There was no single man or; woman or little child who benefited, in any way, by this new handling of affairs by Parliament, and the only ones to live well were those Whitehall agents, who poked their noses into our affairs from dawn to dusk, and their wealthy masters, the big II Parliamentary landlords. We had grumbled in the old days at the high taxes of the if King, but the taxes were intermittent. Now they were continuous. Salt, meat, starch, lead, iron--all came under the control of Parliament, and the poor man had to pay accordingly.

What happened upcountry I cannot say--I speak for Cornwall. No news came to us much beyond the Tamar. If living was hard, leisure was equally restricted. Thel Puritans had the upper hand of us. No man must be seen out of doors upon a Sunday,! unless he were bound for church. Dancing was forbidden--not that many had the? heart to dance, but youngsters have light hearts and lighter feet--and any game o chance or village festival was frowned upon.

Gaiety meant licence, and licence spelt the abomination of the Lord. I often! thought how Temperance Sawle would have rejoiced in the brave new world, for allf her royalist traditions, but poor Temperance fell an early victim to the plague..,I The one glory of that most dismal year of '46 was the gallant, though, alas, s Ol useless, holding of Pendennis Castle for the King through five long months of siege. l The rest of us were long conquered and subdued, caught fast in the meshes off Whitehall, while Pendennis still defied the enemy. Their commander was Jac K Arundell, who had been in the old days a close friend as well as kinsman to '

Grenviles, and Sir John Digby was his second-in-command. My own brother Robil was made a major general under him. It gave to us, I think, some last measure of prid in our defeat that this little body of men, with no hope of rescue and scarce a boatloa of provisions, should fly the King's flag from March the second until August ' seventeenth, and even then they wished to blow themselves and the whole garrison to eternity rather than surrender, but starvation and sickness had made weaklings oft'" men, and for their sakes only did Jack Arundell haul down his flag. Even the enemy respected their courage, and the garrison were permitted to march out, so Robin tola us afterwards, with the full honours of war, drums beating, colours flying, trump sounding.... Yes, we have had our moments here in Cornwall....

When they surrendered, though, our last hopes vanished, and there was nothin now to do but sigh and look into the black well of the future.

My brother-in-law, Jonathan Rashleigh, like the rest of the royalist landlords, ha his lands sequestrated by the County Committee and was told, when he went dowr H Truro in June, that he must pay a fine of some one thousand and eighty pounds to the committee before he could redeem them. His losses, after the '44 campaign, we already above eight thousand, but there was nothing for it but to bow his head to The King's General I47 victors and agree to pay the ransom during the years to come. He might have quitted the country and gone to France, as many of our neighbours did, but the ties of his own soil were too strong, and in July, broken and dispirited, he took the National Covenant, by which he vowed never again to take arms against the Parliament. This bitter blow to his pride, self-inflicted though it was, did not satisfy the committee, and shortly afterwards he was summoned to London and ordered to remain there, nor to return to Cornwall until his full fine was paid. So yet another home was broken, and we at Menabilly tasted the full flavour of defeat. He left us one day in September, when the last of the poor harvest had been gathered in, looking a good ten years older than his five and fifty years, and I knew then, watching his eyes, how loss of freedom can so blight the human soul that a man cares no longer if he lives or dies.

It remained for Mary, my poor sister, and John, his son, to so husband his estate that the debt could month by month be paid, but we well knew that it might take years, even the remainder of his life. His last words to me before he went to London were kind and deeply generous.

"Menabilly is your home," he said, "for as long a time as you should so desire it.

We are, one and all, sufferers in this misfortune. Guard your sister for me, share her troubles. And help John, I pray you. You have a wiser head than all I leave behind."

A wiser head... I doubted it. It needed a pettifogging mind, with every low lawyer's trick at the finger's end, to break even with the County Committee and the paid agents of Parliament. There was none to help us. My brother Robin, after the surrender at Pendennis, had gone to Radford to my brother Jo, who was in much the same straits as ourselves, while Peter Courtney, loathing inactivity, left the West Country altogether, and the next we heard from him was that he had gone abroad to join the Prince of Wales. Many young men followed this example--living was good at the French court. I think, had they loved their homes better, they would have stayed behind and shared the burdens of defeat with their womenfolk. Alice never spoke a word of blame, but I think her heart broke when we heard that he had gone.... It was strange, at first, to watch John and Frank Penrose work in the fields side by side with the tenants, for every hand was needed if the land was to be tilled entirely and to yield a full return. Even our womenfolk went out at harvesting, Mary herself, and Alice and Elizabeth, while the children, thinking it fine sport, helped to carry the corn.

Left to ourselves, we would have soon grown reconciled and even well content with our labours, but the Parliament agents were forever coming to spy upon us, to question us on this and that, to count the sheep and cattle, to reckon, it almost seemed, each ear of corn, and nothing must be gathered, nothing spent, nothing distributed amongst ourselves, but all laid before the smug, well-satisfied officials in Fowey town, who held their licence from Parliament. The Parliament... The Parliament...

From day to day the word rang in our ears. The Parliament decrees that produce shall be brought to market only upon a Tuesday.... The Parliament has ordered that all fairs shall from henceforth be discontinued.... The Parliament warns every inhabitant within the above-prescribed area that no one, save by permission, shall walk abroad one hour after sunset.... The Parliament warns each householder that every dwelling will be searched each week for concealed firearms, weapons, and ammunition, from this day forward, and any holder of the same shall be immediately unprisoned.

'The Parliament," said John Rashleigh wearily, "decrees that no man may breathe ?od's air, save by a special licence, and then one hour in every other day. My G.o.d, Honor, no man can stand this long."

I said, "Cornwall is only one portion of the kingdom. The whole of England, before long, will suffer the same fate."

''They will not, they cannot, endure it," he said.

''What is their alternative? The King is virtually a prisoner. The party with the most jnoney and the strongest army rules the country. For those who share their views life is doubtless very pleasant."

"No one can share their views and call his soul his own."

"There you are wrong. It is merely a matter of being accommodating and shaking hands with the right people. Lord Robartes lives in great comfort at Lanhydrock. The Treffrys--being related to Hugh Peters and Jack Trefusis--live very well at Place. If you chose to follow their example and truckle to the Parliament, doubtless you would find life here at Menabilly so much the easier."

He stared at me suspiciously.

"Would you have me go to them and fawn, while my father lives a pauper up in London, watched every moment of his day? I would sooner die."

I knew he would sooner die and loved him for it. Dear John, you might have had more years beside your Joan and be alive today, had you spared yourself and your poor health in those first few months of aftermath... .I watched him toil, and the women, too, and there was little I could do to help but figure the accounts, an unpaid clerk with smudgy fingers, and tot up the debts we owed on quarter days. I did not suffer as the Rashleighs did, pride being, I believe, a quality long lost in me, and I was sad only in their sadness. To see Alice gazing wistfully from a window brought a pain to my heart, and when Mary read a letter from her Jonathan, deep shadows beneath her eyes, I think I hated the Parliament every whit as much as they did.

But that first year of defeat was, in some queer fashion, quiet and peaceful to me who bore no burden on my shoulders. Danger was no more. Armies were disbanded., The strain of war was lifted. The man I loved was safe across the sea in France, and then in Italy, in the company of his son, and now and then I would have word of him, from some foreign city, in good heart and spirits, and missing me, it would seem, not at all. He talked of going to fight the Turks with great enthusiasm, as if, I thought with a shrug of my shoulders, he had not had enough of fighting after three hard years of civil war. "Doubtless," he wrote, "you find your days monotonous in Cornwall."

Doubtless I did. To women who have known close siege and stern privation, monotony can be a pleasant thing....

A wanderer for so many months, it was restful to find a home at last and to share it with people whom I loved, even if we were all companions in defeat. G.o.d bless the Rashleighs, who permitted me those months at Menabilly. The house was bare and; shorn of its former glory, but at least I had a room I called my own. The Parliament ', could strip the place of its possessions, take the sheep and cattle, glean the harvest, but they could not take from me, nor from the Rashleighs, the beauty that we looked on every day. The devastation of the gardens was forgotten when the primrose came; in spring, and the young green-budded trees. We, the defeated, could still listen to the birds on a May morning and watch the clumsy cuckoo wing his way to the little wood > beside the Gribbin Hill. The Gribbin Hill... I watched it, from rny chair upon the.' causeway, in every mood from winter to midsummer. I have seen the shadows creep i on an autumn afternoon from the deep Pridmouth Valley to the summit of the hill, and j there stay a moment, waiting on the sun. I have seen, too, the white sea mists of early summer turn the hill to fantasy, so that I it becomes, in a single second, a ghost land of enchantment, with no sound coming i but the wash of breakers on the hidden beach, where, at high noon, the children gather -j cowrie sh.e.l.ls. Dark moods, too, of bleak November, when the rain sweeps in a curtain from the southwest. But quietest of all, the evenings of late summer, whenthe sun has set and the moon has not yet risen, but the dew is heavy in the long gra.s.s-J The sea is very white and still, without a breath upon it, and only a single thread off wash upon the covered Cannis Rock. The jackdaws fly homeward to their nests inthe warren. The sheep crop the short turf before they, too, rub together beneath the stone, wall by the winnowing place. Dusk comes slowly to the Gribbin Hill, the woods to black, and suddenly, with stealthy pad, a fox creeps from the trees in the thistle pa and stands watching me, his ears p.r.i.c.ked.... Then his brush twitches and he is gonej for here is Matty tapping along the causeway to bring me home; and another day i over. Yes, Richard, there is comfort in monotony....

I return to Menabilly to find that all have gone to bed and the candles extinguished in the gallery. Matty carries me upstairs, and as she brushes my hair and ties the curling rags I think I am almost happy. A year has come and gone, and though we are defeated, we live, we still survive. I am lonely, yes, but that has been my portion since I turned eighteen. And loneliness has compensations. Better to live inwardly alone than together in constant fear. And as I think thus, my curl rag in my hand, I see Matty's round face looking at me from the mirror opposite.

"There were strange rumours in Fowey today," she says quietly.

"What rumours, Matty? There are always rumours." She moistens a rag with her tongue, then whips it round a curl.

"Our men are creeping back," she murmurs, "first one, then two, then three. Those who fled to France a year ago."

I rubbed some lotion on my hands and face.

"Why should they return? They can do nothing."

"Not alone, but if they band together, in secret, one with another..."

I sit still, my hands in my lap, and suddenly I remember a phrase in the last letter that came to me from Italy. "You may hear from me," he said, "before the summer closes, by a different route." I thought him to mean he was going to fight the Turks.

"Do they mention names?" I say to Matty, and for the first time for many months a little seed of anxiety and fear springs to my heart. She does not answer for a moment; she is busy with a curl. Then at last she speaks, her voice low and hushed.

"They talk of a great leader," she says, "landing in secret at Plymouth from the Continent. He wore a dark wig, they said, to disguise his colouring. But they did not mention any names...."

A bat brushes itself against my window, lost and frightened, and close to the house an owl shrieks in warning.

And it seemed to me, that moment, that the bat was no airy mouse of midsummer, but the sacred symbol of all hunted things.

29.

Rumours. Always rumours. Never anything of certainty. This was our portion during the early autumn of '47 to '48. So strict was the Parliamentary hold on news that nothing but the bare official statements were given to us down in Cornwall, and these had no value, being simply what Whitehall thought good for us to know.

So the whispers started, handed from one to the other, and when the whispers came to us fifth-hand we had to sift the welter of extravagance to find the seed of truth. The royalists were arming. This was the firm base of all the allegations. Weapons were being smuggled into the country from France, and places of concealment were found for them. Gentlemen were meeting in one another's houses. The labourers were conversing together in the field. A fellow at a street corner would beckon to another, tor the purpose, it would seem, of discussing market prices; there would be a Question, a swift answer, and then the two would separate, but information had been Pa.s.sed, and another link forged.

Outside the parish church of Tywardreath would stand a Parliamentary soldier eaning on his musket, while the busybody agent who had beneath his arm a fold of ocurnents listing each member of the parish and his private affairs gave him good "Doming; and while he did so, the old s.e.xton, with his back turned, prepared a new grave, not for a corpse this time, but for weapons.... th y could have told a tale, those burial grounds of Cornwall. Cold steel beneath "Jp green turf and the daisies, locked muskets in the dark family vaults. Let a fellow 'irnb to repair his cottage roof against the rains of winter, and he will pause an instant, glancing over his shoulder, and, thrusting his hand under the thatch, feel for the sharp edge of a sword. These would be Matty's tales.... Mary would come to me with a letter from Jonathan in London. "Fighting is likely to start again at any moment," would be his guarded words. "Discontent is rife, even here, against our masters. Many Londoners who fought in opposition to the King would swear loyalty to him now. I can say no more than this. Bid John have a care whom he meets and where he goes. Remember, I am bound to my oath. If we meddle in these matters, I and he would answer for it with our lives." Mary would fold the letter anxiously and place it in her gown.

"What does it mean?" she would say. "What matters does he refer to?"

And to this there could be one answer only. The royalists were rising....

Names that had not been spoken for two years were now whispered by cautious tongues. Trelawney... Trevannion... Arundell... Ba.s.sett... Grenvile... Yes, above all, Grenvile. He had been seen at Stowe, said one. Nay, that was false; it was not Stowe, but at his sister's house near Bideford. The Isle of Wight, said another.

The Red Fox was gone to Carisbrooke to take secret counsel of the King. He had not come to the West Country. He had been seen in Scotland. He had been spoken to in Ireland. Sir Richard Grenvile was returned. Sir Richard Grenvile was in Cornwall....

I made myself deaf to these tales; for once too often, in my life, I had had a bellyful of rumours. Yet it was strange no letter came any more from Italy or from France....

John Rashleigh kept silent on these matters. His father had bidden him not meddle, but to work night and day on the husbanding of the estate, so that the groaning debt to Parliament be paid. But I could guess his thoughts. If there were in truth a rising and the prince landed and Cornwall freed once more, there would be no debt to pay. If the Trelawney s were a party to the plan, and the Trevannions also, and all those who in the county swore loyalty to the King, in secret, then was it not something like cowardice, something like shame, for a Rashleigh to remain outside the company?

Poor John. He was restless and sharp-tempered often, those first weeks of spring, after the ploughing had been done. And Joan was not with us to encourage him, for. her twin boys, born the year before, were sickly, and she was with them and the elder children at Maddercombe in Devon. Then Jonathan fell ill up in London, and though he asked permission of the Parliament to return to Cornwall, they would not grant it, so he sent for Mary and she went to him. Alice was the next to leave. Peter wrote to her from France, desiring that she should take the children to Trethurfe, his home, that was--so he had heard--in sad state of repair, and would she go there, now spring was at hand, and see what could be done?

She went the first day of March, and it became, on a sudden, strangely quiet at Menabilly. I had been used so long to children's voices, that now to be without them, and the sound of Alice's voice calling to them, and the rustle of Mary's gown, made me more solitary than usual, even a little sad. There was no one but John now for company, and I wondered what we should make of it together, he and I, through the long evenings.

"I have half a mind," he said to me, the third day we sat together, "to leave Menabilly in your care and go to Maddercombe."

"I'll tell no tales of you if you do," I said to him.

"I dislike to go against my father's wishes," he admitted, "but it is over six months now since I have seen Joan and the children, and not a word comes to us here of what j is pa.s.sing in the country. Only that the war has broken out again. Fighting in places as;; far apart as Wales and the Eastern counties. I tell you, Honor, I am sick of inactivity. '

For very little I would take horse and ride to Wales."

"No need to ride to Wales," I said quietly, "when there is likely to be a rising in your own county."

He glanced at the half-open door of the gallery. Queer instinctive move, unnecessary when the few servants that we had could all be trusted, yet since we were ruled the The King's General I5I Parliament this gesture would be force of habit.

"Have you heard anything?" he said guardedly. "Some word of truth, I mean, not idle rumour?"

"Nothing," I answered, "beyond what you hear yourself."

"I thought perhaps Sir Richard--" he began, but I shook my head.