The King's General (11 page)

"It is a lumber room, they tell me," she answered. "Mr. Rashleigh has the key and has valuables shut away."

My curiosity was piqued, though, and I bade her search for a crack in the door. She put her face to the keyhole but saw nothing. I gave her a pair of scissors, both of us giggling like children, and she worked away at the panelling for ten minutes or so until she had scraped a wide enough crack at which to place one eye.

She knelt before it for a moment or two, then turned to me in disappointment.

"There's nothing there," she said. "It is a plain chamber, much the same as this, with a bed in one corner and hangings on the wall."

I felt quite aggrieved, having hoped--in my idiot romantic fashion--for a heap of treasure. I bade her hang a picture over the crack and turned to my dinner. But later, when Joan came to sit with me at sunset and the shadows began to fall, she said suddenly, with a shiver: "You know, Honor, I slept once in this room when John had the ague, and I did not care for it."

"Why so?" I asked, drinking my wine.

"I thought I heard footsteps in the chamber next door."

I glanced at the picture over the crack, but it was well hidden. "What sort of footsteps?" I said.

She shook her head, puzzled. "Soft ones," she said, "like someone who walks with slippered soles for fear he shall be heard."

"How long ago was this?" I asked.

"During the winter," she said. "I did not tell anyone."

"A servant, perhaps," I suggested, "who had no business to be there."

"No," she said. "None of the servants have a key; no one has but my father-in-law, and he was from home then." She waited a moment and then she said, glancing over her shoulder, "I believe it was a ghost."

"Why should a ghost walk at Menabilly?" I answered. "The house has not been built fifty years."

"People have died here, though," she said. "John's old grandfather and his uncle John." She watched me with bright eyes, and, knowing my Joan, I wagered there was more to come.

"So you, too, have heard the poison story," I said, drawing a bow at a venture.

She nodded. "But I don't believe it," she said. "It would be wicked, horrible. He is too good and kind a man. But I do think it was a ghost that I heard, the ghost of the elder brother whom they call Uncle John."

"Why should he pace the room with padded soles?" I asked.

She did not answer for a moment, and then, guiltily, she whispered, "They never speak of it. John made me promise not to tell, but he was mad--a hopeless idiot--they used to keep him shut up in the chamber there."

This was something I had never heard before. I found it horrible.

"Are you certain?" I said.

"Oh, yes," she replied. "There is a bit about it in old Mr. Rashleigh's will, John told me. Old Mr. Rashleigh, before he died, made my father-in-law promise to look after the elder brother, give him food and drink and shelter in the house. They say the chamber there was set aside for him, built in a special way--I don't exactly know.

And then he died, you see, very suddenly of the smallpox. John and Alice and Elizabeth don't remember him; they were only babies."

"What a disagreeable tale," I said. "Give me some more wine and let's forget it."

After a while she went away, and Matty came to draw the curtains .I had no more visitors that night. But as the shadows lengthened and the owls began to hoot down in the warren I found my thoughts returning to the idiot Uncle John, shut up in the chamber there, year after year, from the first building of the house, a prisoner of the mind, as I was of the body.

But in the morning I heard news that made me forget for a while this talk of footsteps in the night.

8

The day being fine, I ventured forth in my chair once more upon the causeway, returning to the house at midday to find that a messenger had ridden to Menabilly during my absence, bearing letters from Plymouth and elsewhere to members of the household, and the family were now gathered in the gallery discussing the latest information from the war. Alice was seated in one of the long windows overlooking the garden, reading aloud a lengthy epistle from her Peter.

"Sir John Digby has been wounded," she said, "and the siege is now to be conducted by a new commander who has them all by the ears at once. Poor Peter--this will mean an end to hawking excursions and supper parties; they will have to wage war more seriously." She turned the page of scrawled writing, shaking her head.

"And who is to command them?" enquired John, who once more was acting as attendant to my chair.

"Sir Richard Grenvile," answered Alice.

Mary was not in the gallery at the time, and she being the only person at Menabilly to know of the romance long finished and forgotten, I was able to hear mention of his name without embarrassment, it being a strange truth, I had by then discovered, that we only become aware of hot discomfort when others are made awkward for our sakes.

I knew, from something that Robin had let slip, that Richard was come into the West, his purpose being to raise troops for the King, so I understood, and his now being placed in command of the siege of Plymouth meant promotion. He had already become notorious, of course, for the manner in which he had hoodwinked Parliament and joined His Majesty.

"And what," I heard myself saying, "does Peter think of his new commander?"

Alice folded up her letter.

"As a soldier he admires him," she answered, "but I think he has not such a great opinion of him as a man."

"I have heard," said John, "that he hasn't a scruple in the world, and once an injury is done to him he will never forget it or forgive."

"I believe," said Alice, "that when in Ireland he inflicted great cruelty on the people--though some say it was no more than they deserved. But I fear he is very different from his brother."

It made strange hearing to have discussed in so calm and cool a fashion the lover who had held me once against his heart.

At this moment Will Sparke came up to us, also with a letter in his hand.

"So Richard Grenvile is commanding now at Plymouth," he said. "I have the news here from my kinsman in Tavistock, who is with Prince Maurice. It seems the prince thinks highly of his ability, but my heaven--what a scoundrel."

I began to burn silently, my old love and loyalty rising to the surface.

"We were just talking of him," said John.

"You heard his first action on coming West, I suppose?" said Will Sparke, warming, like all his kind, to malicious gossip. "I had it direct from my kinsman at the time. Grenvile rode straight to Fitzford, his wife's property, turned out the caretakers, seized all the contents, had the agent flung into jail, and took all the money owed by the tenants to his wife for his own use."

"I thought," said Alice, "that he had been divorced from his wife."

"So he is divorced," replied Will. "He is not entitled to a penny from the property.

But that is Richard Grenvile for you."

"I wonder," I said calmly, "what has happened to his children."

"I can tell you that," said Will. "The daughter is with the mother in London-- whether she has friends in Parliament or not I cannot say. But the lad was at Fitzford with his tutor when Grenvile seized the place and by all accounts is with him now.

They say the poor boy is in fear and trembling of his father, and small blame to him."

"No doubt," I said, "he was brought up to hate him by his mother."

"Any woman," retorted Will, "who had been as ill-used as she, unhappy lady, would hardly paint her spouse in pretty colours."

Logic was with him, as it always was with the persons who maligned Richard, and presently I bade John carry me upstairs to my apartment, but the day that had started so well when I set forth upon the causeway turned sour on me, and I lay on my bed for the rest of it, telling Matty I would see no visitors.

For fifteen years the Honor that had been lay dead and buried, and here she was struggling beneath the surface once again at the mere mention of a name that was best forgotten. Richard in Germany, Richard in Ireland, was too remote a person to swim into my daily thoughts. When I thought of him or dreamt of him--which was often--it was always as he had been in the past. And now he must break into the present, being some thirty miles away only, and there would be constant talk of him, criticism and discussion; I would be forced to hear his name bandied and besmirched, as Will Sparke had bandied it this morning.

"You know," he had said before I went upstairs, "the Roundheads call him Skellum Grenvile and have put a price upon his head. The nickname suits him well, and even his own soldiers whisper it behind his back."

"And what does it signify?" I asked.

"Oh," he said, "I thought you were a German scholar, Mistress Harris, as well as learned in the Greek and Latin." He paused. "It means a vicious beast," he sniggered.

Oh yes, there was much reason for me to lie moody on my bed, with the memory of a young man smiling at me from the branches of an apple tree and the humming of the bees in the blossoms.

Fifteen years... He would be forty-four now, ten years older than myself.

"Matty," I said, before she lit the candles, "bring me a mirror."

She glanced at me suspiciously, her long nose twitching.

"What do you want a mirror for?" she asked.

"Damn you, that's my business," I answered.

We snapped at each other continually, she and I, but it meant nothing. She brought me the mirror, and I examined my appearance as though seeing myself as a stranger would.

There were my two eyes, my nose, my mouth, much as they had always been, but I was fuller in the face now than I had been as a maid--sluggish from lying on my back, I told myself. There were little lines, too, beneath my eyes, lines that had grown there from pain when my legs hurt me. I had less colour than I had once. My hair was the best point, for this was Matty's special pride, and she would brush for hours to make it glossy. I handed back the mirror to Matty with a sigh.

"What do you make of it?" she asked.

"In ten years," I said, "I'll be an old woman."

She sniffed and began to fold my garments on a chair.

"I'll tell you one thing," she said, drawing in her underlip.

"What's that?"

"You're fairer now as a woman than you ever were as a prinking blushing maid, and I'm not the only one that thinks it."

This was encouraging, and I had an immediate vision of a long train of suitors all tiptoeing up the stairs to pay me homage. A pretty fancy, but where the devil were they?

"You're like an old hen," I said to Matty, "who always thinks her poorest chick the loveliest. Go to bed."

I lay there for some time, thinking of Richard, wondering, too, about his little son, who must be a lad now of fourteen. Could it be true, as Will Sparke had said, that the boy went in fear of his father? Supposing we had wedded, Richard and I, and this had been our son? Would we have sported with him as a child, danced him upon our knees, gone down with him on all fours on the ground and played at tigers? Would he have come running to me with muddied hands, his hair about his face, laughing?

Would he be auburn-haired like Richard? Would we all three have ridden to the chase, and Richard showed him how to sit straight in the saddle? Vain idle supposition, drenched in sentiment, like buttercups by the dew on a wet morning. I was half asleep, muzzy with a dream, when I heard a movement in the next chamber. I raised my head from the pillow, thinking it might be Matty in the dressing room, but the sound came from the other side. I held my breath and waited. Yes, there it was again.

A stealthy footstep padding to and fro. I remembered in a flash the tale that Joan had told me of the mad Rashleigh uncle confined in there for years. Was it his ghost, in truth, that stole there in the shadows? The night was pitch, for it was only quarter moon, and no glimmer came to me from either casement. The clock in the belfry struck one. The footsteps ceased, then proceeded once again, and for the first time, too, I was aware of a cold current of air coming to my apartment from the chamber beyond.

My own casements were closed, save the one that looked into the inner court, and this was only open to a few inches; besides, the draught did not come from that direction. I remembered then that the closed-up door into the empty chamber did not meet the floor with its base but was raised two inches or so from the ground, for Matty had tried to look under it before she made the crack with the scissors.

It was from beneath this door that the current of air blew now--and to my certain knowledge there had never been a draught from there before. Something, then, had happened in the empty chamber next to mine to cause the current. The muffled tread continued, stealthy, soft, and with the sweat running down my face I thought of the ghost stories my brothers had recounted to me as a child, of how an earth-bound spirit would haunt the place he hated, bringing with him from the darker regions a whisper of chill dank air.... One of the dogs barked from the stables, and this homely sound brought me to my senses. Was it not more likely that a living person was responsible for the cold current that swept beneath the door, and that the cause of it was the opening of the barred window that, like my western one, looked out on to the outer court? The ghost of poor idiot Uncle John would have kept me in my bed forever, but a living soul treading furtively in the night hours in a locked chamber was something to stir to fire the curiosity of one who, it may be remembered, had from early childhood shown a propensity to eavesdrop where she was not wanted.

Secretly, stealthily, I reached my hand out to the flint that Matty from long custom left beside my bed, and lit my candle. My chair was also within reach. I pulled it close to me, and with the usual labour that years of practice had never mitigated lowered myself into it. The footsteps ceased abruptly. So I am right, I thought in triumph. No ghost would hesitate at the sound of a creaking chair. I waited perhaps for as long as five minutes, and then the intruder must have recovered himself, for I heard the faint pulling noise of the opening of a drawer. Softly I wheeled myself across the room.