The King's General (27 page)

"Why cannot you come with me to Buckland?" pleaded Dick, for the tutor, Herber Ashley, had been sent to fetch him home. "I would be content at Buckland and notj mind my father if you could come, too, and stand between us."

"Your father," I answered him, "has enough work on his hands without keeping house for a crippled woman."

"You are not crippled," declared the boy with passion. "You are only weak about the legs and so must sit confined to your chair. I would tend you and wait upon you, hour by hour with Matty, if you would but come with me to Buckland."

I smiled and ran my hand through his dark curls.

"You shall come and visit me at Radford," I said, "and tell me of your lessons.

How you fence, and how you dance, and what progress you make in speaking French."

"It will not be the same," he said, "as living with you in the house. Shall I tell you something? I like you best of all the people that I know--next to my own mother."

Ah well, it was achievement to be second once again to Mary Howard.

The next day he rode away in company with his tutor, turning back to wave at me all the way across the park, and I shed a useless sentimental tear when he was gone from me.

What might have been--what could have been--the saddest phrases in our English tongue, and back again, pell-mell, would come the fantasies: the baby I had never borne, the husband I would never hold. The sickly figures in an old maid's dream, so Gartred would have told me.

Yes, I was thirty-four, an old maid and a cripple; but sixteen years ago I had had my moment, which was with me still, vivid and enduring, and by God, I swear I was happier with my one lover than Gartred ever had been with her twenty.

So I set forth upon the road again and turned my back on Menabilly, little thinking that the final drama of the house must yet be played with blood and tears, and I kissed my dear Rashleighs one and all and vowed I would return to them as soon as they could have me.

Jonathan escorted me in my litter as far as Saltash, where Robin came to meet me .I was much shaken, not by the roughness of the journey, but by the sights I had witnessed on the road. The aftermath of war was not a pleasant sight to the beholder.

The country was laid waste, for one thing, and that the fault of the enemy. The corn ruined, the orchards devastated, the houses smoking. And in return for this the Cornish people had taken toll upon the rebel prisoners. There were many of them still lying in the ditches, with the dust and flies upon them. Some without hands and feet, some hanging downwards from the trees. And there were stragglers who had died upon the road in the last retreat, too faint to march from Cornwall--and these had been set upon and stripped of their clothing and left for the hungry dogs to lick.

I knew then as I peered forth from the curtains of my litter that war can make beasts of every one of us and that the men and women of my own breed could act even worse in warfare than the men and women of the Eastern counties. We had, each one of us, because of the civil war, streaked back two centuries in time and were become like those half savages of the fourteen hundreds who, during the Wars of the Roses, slit one another's throats without compunction.

At Saltash there were gibbets in the market square, with the bodies of rebel troopers hanging upon them scarcely cold, and as I turned my sickened eyes away from them I heard Jonathan enquire of a passing soldier what faults they had committed.

He grinned, a fine tall fellow with the Grenvile shield on his shoulder. "No fault," he^said, "except that they are rebels and so must be hanged like the dogs they are."

"Who gave the order, then?"

"Our general, of course, Sir Richard Grenvile."

Jonathan said nothing, but I saw that he looked grave, and I leant back upon my cushions, feeling, because it was Richard's doing and I loved him, that the fault was somehow mine, and I responsible.

We halted there that night, and in the morning Robin came with an escort to conduct me across the Tamar, and so through the royalist lines outside the Plymouth defences, round to Radford.

Robin looked well and bronzed, and I thought again with cynicism how men, in s Pite of protestations about peace, are really bred to war and thrive upon it. He was not under Richard's command but was colonel of foot under Sir John Berkeley, in the army of Prince Maurice, and he told us that the King had decided not to make a determined and immediate assault upon Plymouth after all, but to leave it to Grenvile to subdue by slow starvation, while he and Prince Maurice marched east out of Devon towards Somerset and Wiltshire, there to join forces with Prince Rupert and engage the Parliament forces hitherto unsubdued. I thought to myself that Richard would reckon this bad strategy, for Plymouth was no pooping little town, but the finest harbour in all England next to Portsmouth, and for His Majesty to gain the garrison and have command also of the sea was of very great importance. Slow starvation had not conquered it before; why, then, should it do so now? What Richard needed for assault were guns and men. But I was a woman and not supposed to have knowledge of these matters. I watched Robin and Jonathan in conversation and caught a murmur of the word "Grenvile" and Robin saying something about "harsh treatment of the prisoners" and "Irish methods not suiting Devon men," and I guessed that Richard was already getting up against the county. No doubt I would hear more of this at Radford.

No one hated cruelty more than I did, nor deplored the streak of it in Richard with greater sickness of heart, but as we travelled towards Radford, making a great circuit of the forts around Plymouth, I noticed with secret pride that the only men who carried themselves like soldiers were those who wore the Grenvile shield on their shoulders. Some of Goring's horse were quartered by St. Budeaux, and they were lolling about the village, drinking with the inhabitants, while a sentry squatted on a stool, his great mouth gaping in a yawn, his musket lying at his feet, and from the neary-by inn came a group of officers, laughing and very flushed, nor did the sentry leap to his feet when he observed them. Robin joined the officers a moment, exchanged greetings, and as we passed through the village he told me the most flushed of the group was Lord Goring himself, a very good fellow and a most excellent judge of horses.

"Does that make him a good commander?" I asked.

"He is full of courage," said Robin, "will ride at anything. That is all that matters."

And he proceeded to tell me about a race that had been run the day before, under the very noses of the rebels, and how Lord Goring's chestnut had beaten Lord Went worth's roan by half a neck.

"Is that how Prince Maurice's army conducts its war?" I asked.

Robin laughed; he thought it all very fine sport.

But the next post we passed was held by Grenvile men. And here there was a barrier across the road and armed sentries standing by it, and Robin had to show his piece of paper, signed by Sir John Berkeley, before we could pass through. An officer barked an order to the men, and they removed the barrier. There were perhaps a score of them standing by the postern, cleaning their equipment; they looked lean and tough, with an indefinable quality about them that stamped them Grenvile men. I would have known them on the instant had I not seen the scarlet pennant by the postern door, with the three golden rests staring from the centre, capped by a laughing griffin.

We came at length by Plymstock into Radford and my brother's house, and as I was shown to my apartment looking north over the river towards the Cattwater and Plymouth, I thought of my eighteenth birthday long ago, and how Richard had sailed into the Sound with the Duke of Buckingham. It seemed a world ago, and I another woman.

My brother was now a widower, Elizabeth Champernowne having died a few years before the war in childbed, and my youngest brother Percy, with his wife Phillippa, was come to live with him and look after Jo's son John, a child of seven, they themselves being childless. I had never cared much for Radford, even as a girl, and now within its austere barrack precincts I found myself homesick, not so much for Lanrest and the days that were gone, but for my last few months at Menabilly. The danger I had known there and the tension I had shared had, in some strange fashion, rendered the place dear to me. The gatehouse between the courtyards, the long gallery, the causeway that looked out to the Gribbin and the sea seemed now to me, in retrospect, my own possession, and even Temperance Sawle with her prayers and Will Sparke with his high-pitched voice were people for whom I felt affection because of the siege we had each one of us endured. The fighting did not touch them at Radford, for all its proximity to Plymouth, and the talk was all of the discomfort they had to bear by living within military control.

I, straight from a sacked house and starvation, wondered that they should think themselves ill-used, with plenty of food upon the table, but no sooner had we sat down to dinner (I had not the face to demand it, the first evening, in my room) than Jo began to hold forth, with great heat, upon the dictatorial manners of the Army.

"His Majesty has thought fit," he said, "to confer upon Richard Grenvile the designation of General in the West. Very good. I have no word to say against the appointment. But when Grenvile trades upon the title to commandeer all the cattle within a radius of thirty miles or more to feed his army, and rides roughshod over the feelings of the county gentry with the one sentence, 'Military necessities come first,' it is time that we all protested."

If Jo remembered my old alliance with Richard, the excitement of the moment had made him conveniently forget it; nor did he know that young Dick had been in my care at Menabilly the past weeks. Robin, too, full of his own commander Berkeley, was pleased to agree with Jo.

"The trouble with Grenvile," said Robin, "is that he insists upon his fellows being paid. The men in his command are like hired mercenaries. No free quarter, no looting, no foraging as they please, and all this comes very hard upon the pockets of people like yourself who must provide the money."

"Do you know," continued Jo, "that the commissioners of Devon have been obliged to allot him one thousand pounds a week for the maintenance of his troops? I tell you, it hits us very hard."

"It would hit you harder," I said, "if your house was burnt down by the Parliament."

They stared at me in surprise, and I saw young Phillippa look at me in wonder for my boldness. Woman's talk was not encouraged at Radford.

"That, my dear Honor," said Jo coldly, "is not likely to happen." And, turning his shoulder to me, he harped on about the outraged Devon gentry, and how this new-styled General in the West had coolly told them that he had need of all their horses and their muskets in this siege of Plymouth, and if they did not give them to him voluntarily he would send a company of his soldiers to collect them.

"The fellow is entirely without scruples, no doubt of that," said Percy, "but in fairness to him I must say that all the country people tell me they would rather have Grenvile men in their villages than Goring's. If Grenvile finds one of his own fellows looting he is shot upon the instant. But Goring's men are quite out of control and drunk from dawn to dusk."

"Oh, come," frowned Robin. "Goring and his cavalry are entitled to a little relaxation, now that the worst is over. No sense in keeping fellows standing to attention all day long."

"Robin is right," said Jo. "A certain amount of licence must be permitted to keep the^men in heart. We shall never win the war otherwise."

"You are more likely to lose it," I said, "by letting them loll about the villages with their tunics all undone."

The statement was rendered the more unfortunate by a servant entering the room upon this instant and announcing Sir Richard Grenvile. He strode in, with his boots ringing on the stone flags, in that brisk way I knew so well, totally unconscious of himself or the effect he might produce, and with a cool nod to Jo, the master of the house, he came at once to me and kissed my hand.

"Why the devil," he said, "did you come here and not to Buckland?"

That he at once put me at a disadvantage amongst my relatives did not worry him. I mumured something about my brother's invitation and attempted to introduce him to the company. He bowed to Phillippa but turned back immediately to me.

"You've lost that weight that so improved your person," he said. "You're as thin as a church mouse."

"So would you be," I answered, "if you'd been held prisoner by the rebels for four weeks."

"The whelp is asking for you all day long" said Richard. "He dins your praises in my ears till I am sick of them. I have him outside with Joseph. Hi, spawn!" He turned on his heels, bawling for his son.

I think I never knew of any man, save Richard, who could in so brief a moment fill a room with his presence and become, as it were, the master of a house that was in no way his. Jo stood at his own table, his napkin in his hand, and Robin, too, and Percy, and they were like dumb servants waiting for the occasion, while Richard took command. Dick crept in cautiously, timid and scared as ever, his dark eyes lighting at the sight of me, and behind him strode young Joseph Grenvile, Richard's kinsman and aide-de-camp, his features and his colouring so like his general's as to make me wonder, and not for the first time, God forgive my prying mind, whether Richard had been purposely vague about the relationship between them and whether he was not as much his son as Dick was. And damn you, I thought, begetting sons about the countryside before I was even crippled, and what woman in Cornwall or in Devon cradled this youngster some sixteen years ago?

"Have you all dined?" said Richard, reaching for a plum. "These lads and I could eat another dinner."

And Jo, with heightened colour and a flea in his ear, as the saying goes, called the servants to bring back the mutton. Dick squeezed himself beside me, like a small dog regaining his lost mistress, and while they ate Richard declaimed upon the ill advisability of the King having marched East without first seeing Plymouth was subdued.