The King's General (24 page)

This, then, was her motive, with suspicion already centred on my room. She did not know the secret of the buttress, 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 damn 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 blustering wind drove across the park, and from my tightshut casement 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 Essex 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 Dick 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 apron, 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. Essex 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 Essex 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....

On Tuesday, the twenty-seventh, there was no soup for our midday dinner, only half a dozen loaves amongst the twenty of us. On Wednesday one jugful of milk for the children, instead of three, and the milk much watered.

On Thursday, Alice and Joan and Mary and the two Sparke sisters and I divided our bread amongst the children and made for ourselves a brew of herb tea with scalding water. We were not hungry. Desire for food left us when we saw the children tear at the stale bread and cram it in their mouths, then turn and ask for more which we could not give to them. And all the while the southwest wind tore and blustered in the teeming sky, and the rebel bugle that had haunted us so long sounded across the park like a challenge of despair.

19

On friday, the thirtieth of August, I lay all day upon my bed, for to gather with the others now would be a farce, nor had I the strength to do so. My cowardly soul forbade me watch the children beg and cry for their one crust of bread. Matty brewed me a cup of tea, and even that seemed wrong to swallow. Hunger had made me listless, and, heedless of danger, I let Dick come and lie upon his mattress next my bed while he gnawed a bone that Matty had scavenged for him. His eyes looked larger than ever in his pale face, and his black curls were lank and lustreless. It seemed to me that in his hunger he grew more like his mother, and sometimes, looking down on him, I would fancy she had stepped into his place and it was Mary Howard I fed and sheltered from the enemy, who licked the bone with little pointed teeth and tore at the strips of flesh with small carnivorous paws.

Matty herself was hollow-eyed and sallow. Gone were the buxom hips and the apple cheeks. Whatever food she could purloin from her friend the scullion--and there was precious little now for the men themselves--she smuggled to Dick or to the children.

During the day while I slipped from one more tearing dream into another, with Dick curled at my feet like a puppy, Matty leaned up against the window, staring at the mist that had followed now upon the rain and hid the tents and horses from us.

The hoofbeats woke me shortly after two, and Matty, opening the window, peered down into the outer court and watched them pass under the gatehouse to the courtyard; some dozen officers, she said, with an escort of troopers, and the leader, on a great black horse, wearing a dark grey cloak. She slipped from the room and watched them descend from their horses in the inner court and came back to say that Lord Robartes had stood himself on the steps to receive them, and they all passed into the dining chamber with sentries before the doors.

Even my tired brain seized the salient possibility that this was the last council to be held and the Earl of Essex had come to it in person. I pressed my hands over my eyes to still my aching head. "Go find your scullion," I said to Matty. "Do what you will to him, but make him talk."

She nodded, tightening her lips, and before she went she brought another bone to Dick from some lair within her own small room and, luring him with it like a dog to his kennel, she got him to his cell beneath the buttress.

Three, four, five, and it was already murky, the evening drawing in early because of the mist and rain, when I heard the horses pass beneath the archway once again and so out across the park. At half-past five Matty returned, and what she had been doing those intervening hours I never asked her from that day to this, but she told me the scullion was without and wished to speak to me. She lit the candles, for I was in darkness, and as I raised myself upon my elbow I questioned her with my eyes, and she gave a jerk of her head towards the passage.

"If you give him money," she whispered, "he will do anything you ask him."

I bade her fetch my purse, which she did, and then, going to the door, she beckoned him within.

He stood blinking in the dim light, a sheepish grin on his face, but that face, like ours, was lean and hungry. I beckoned him to my bed, and he came near, with a furtive glance over his shoulder .I gave him a gold piece, which he pocketed upon the instant.

"What news have you?" I asked.

He looked at Matty, and she nodded. He ran his tongue over his lips.

" 'Tis only rumour," he said, "but it's what they're saying in the courtyard." He paused and looked again towards the door. "The retreat begins tonight," he said.

"There'll be five thousand of them marching through the darkness to the beaches.

You'll hear them if you listen. They'll come this way, down to Pridmouth and Polkerris. The boats will take them off when the wind eases."

"Horses can't embark in small boats," I said. "What will your generals do with their two thousand horse?"

He shook his head and glanced at Matty .I gave him another gold piece.

"I had but a word with Sir William Balfour's groom," he said. "There's talk of breaking through the royalist lines tonight when the foot retreat. I can't answer for the truth of it, nor could he."

"What will happen to you and the other cooks?" I asked.

"We'll go by sea, same as the rest," he said.

"Not likely," I said. "Listen to the wind."

It was soughing through the trees in the warren, and the rain spattered against my casement.

"I can tell you what will happen to you," I said. "The morning will come and there won't be any boats to take you from the beaches. You will huddle there, in the driving wind and rain, with a thundering great southwest sea breaking down at Pridmouth and the country people coming down on you all from the cliffs with pitchforks in their hands. Cornish folk are not pleasant when they are hungry."

The man was silent and passed his tongue over his lips once again.

"Why don't you desert?" I said. "Go off tonight before worse can happen to you. I can give you a note to a royalist leader."

"That's what I told him," said Matty. "A word from you to Sir Richard Grenvile would see him through to our lines."

The man looked from one to the other of us, foolish, doubtful, greedy. I gave him a third gold piece.

"If you break through to the King's Army," I said, "within an hour, and tell them there what you have just told me--about the horse trying to run for it before morning--they'll give you plenty more of these gold pieces and a full supper into the bargain."

He scratched his head and looked again at Matty.

"If the worst comes to the worst and you're held prisoner," I told him, "it would be better than having the bowels torn out of you by Cornishmen."

It was these last words that settled him. "I'll go," he said, "if you'll write a word for me."