The King's General (26 page)

We started upon the third hand of the partie, and "A tierce to a king," called Gartred, and "Good," I replied, following her lead of spades, and all the while I knew that the rebels were now come to the last room of the house and were tearing down the arras before the buttress.

I saw Mary raise her grief-stricken face and look towards us.

"If you would but say one word to the officer," she said to Gartred, "he might prevent the men from further damage. You are a friend of Lord Robartes and have some sway with him. Is there nothing you can do?"

"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 Essex 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 God 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 Dick unconscious in the buttress cell, tugged at the rope, and so opened the hinged stone into the room.

This was about nine o'clock on the Saturday 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 Essex 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 circumstance.

"pid she see Dick," 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 wasî once more commander of the siege. What hopes had I of seeing him? God 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.