The King's General (46 page)

He looked around the gallery as though in search of someone.

"Robin gone?" he asked. "I thought so. It was he then I saw, when I was skirtû the sands, engaged in fighting with five of the enemy or more. I dared not go to I assistance. My first duty was to you. What now then? Can we save ourselves?"

We all turned now to look at our commander. He stood before us, calm and cool, giving no outward sign that all he had striven for lay crushed and broken.

"Did you see their colours?" he asked swiftly. "What troops were they? Of whose command?"

"Some were from Bodmin, sir," said Peter, "the rest advance guards of Sir Hardress Waller's. There were line upon line of them, stretching down the road towards St. Austell. This is no chance encounter, sir. The enemy are in strength."

Richard nodded, turning quickly to Bunny. "Go to Pridmouth," he said; "make sail instantly. Set a course due south until you come in contact with the first outlying vessel of the French fleet. They will be cruising eastward of the Scillies by this time tomorrow evening. Ask for Lord Hopton's ship. Give him this message." He scribbled rapidly upon a piece of paper.

"Do you bid them come?" said Ambrose Manaton. "Can they get to us in time?" He was white to the lips, his hands clenched tight.

"Why, no," said Richard, folding his scrap of paper. "I bid them alter course and sail for France again. There will be no rising. The Prince of Wales does not land this month in Cornwall."

He gave the paper to his nephew. "Good chance, my Bunny," he said, smiling.

"Give greetings to your brother Jack, and with a spice of luck you will find the Scillies fall to you like a plum a little later in the summer. But the prince must say good-bye to Cornwall for the present."

"And you, Uncle?" said Bunny. "Will you not come with me? It is madness to delay if the house is likely to be surrounded."

"I'll join you in my own time," said Richard. "For this once I ask that my orders be obeyed."

Bunny stared at him an instant, then turned and went, his head high, bidding none of us farewell.

"But what are we to do? Where are we to go?" said Ambrose Manaton. "Oh God, what a fool I have been to let myself be led into this business. Are the roads all watched?" He turned to Peter, who stood shrugging his shoulders watching his commander. "Who is to blame? Who is the traitor? That is what I want to know," said Ambrose Manaton, all composure gone, a new note of suspicion in his voice. "None but ourselves knew the change in rendezvous. How did the sheriff time his moment with such devilish accuracy that he could seize every leader worth a curse?"

"Does it matter," said Richard gently, "who the traitor is? Once the deed is done?"

"Matter?" said Ambrose Manaton. "Good God, you take it coolly. Trevannion, the Trelawneys, the Arundells, and Bassett, all of them in the sheriff's hands, and you ask does it matter who betrayed them? Here are we, ruined men, likely to be arrested within the hour, and you stand there like a fox and smile at me."

"My enemies call me fox, but not my friends," said Richard softly. He turned to Peter. "Tell the fellows to saddle a horse for Mr. Manaton," he said, "and for you also. I guarantee no safe conduct for the pair of you, but at least you have a sporting chance, as hares do from a pack of hounds."

^You will not come with us, sir?"

No, I will not come with you."

Peter hesitated, looking first at him and then at me.

|It will go ill with you, sir, if they should find you."

J am well aware of that."

The sheriff, Sir Thomas Herle, suspects your presence here in Cornwall. His first Challenge, when he came before Carhayes and called Trevannion, was, 'Have you Sir Diehard Grenvile here in hiding? If so, produce him and you shall go free.'" i(A pity, for their sakes, I was not there."

. 'He said that a messenger had left a note at his house at Prideaux early before avvn, warning him that the whole party, yourself included, would be gathered later at Carhayes. Some wretch had seen you, sir, and with a devil intuition guessed your plans."

"Some wretch indeed," said Richard, smiling still, "who thought it sport to try the Judas touch. Let us forget him."

Was it his nephew Jack, who long ago at Exeter said once to me, "Beware my uncle when you see him smile?"

Then Ambrose Manaton came forward, his finger stabbing at the air.

"It is you," he said to Richard, "you who are the traitor, you who have betrayed us.

From the first to last, from beginning to the end, you knew it would end thus. The French fleet never were to come to our aid; there never was to be a rising. This is your revenge for that arrest four years ago at Launceston. Oh God, what perfidy!"

He stood before him, trembling, a high note of hysteria in his voice, and I saw Peter fall back a pace, the colour draining from his face, bewilderment, then horror, coming to his eyes.

Richard watched them, never moving, then slowly pointed to the door. The horses were brought to the courtyard; we heard the jingle of the harness.

"Put back the clock," I whispered savagely. "Make it four years ago, and Gartred acting spy for Lord Robartes. Let her take the blame. Fix the crime on her. She is the one who will emerge from this unscathed, for all her spoilt beauty."

I looked towards her and saw, to my wonder, she was looking at me also. Her scarf \ had slipped, showing the vivid wound upon her cheek. The sight of it and the memory of the night before filled me, not with anger or with pity, but despair. She went on looking at me, and I saw her smile.

"It's no use," she said. "I know what you are thinking. Poor Honor, I have cheated i you again. Gartred alone has the perfect alibi."

The horses were galloping from the courtyard .I saw Ambrose Manaton go first, his} hat pulled low, his cloak bellying, and Peter follow him, with one brief glance! towards our windows.

The clock in the belfry struck two. A pigeon, dazzling white against the sky, i fluttered to the court below. Gartred lay back against the couch, the smile on her lips a I strange contrast to the gash upon her face. Richard stood by the window, his hands^ behind his back. And Dick, who had never moved once in all the past half-hour, waited, like a dumb thing, in his corner.

"Do the three Grenviles," I said slowly, "wish to take council alone amongst J themselves?"

34

Richard went on standing by the window. Now that the horses were gone and the sound of their galloping had died away, it was strangely hushed and still within the house. The sun blazed down upon the gardens; the pigeons pricked the grass seeds on the lawn. It was the hottest hour of a warm summer day, when bumblebees go humming in the limes and the young birds fall silent. When Richard spoke he kept his back turned to us, and his voice was soft and low. 

 "My grandfather," he said, "was named Richard also. He came of a long line oil Grenviles who sought to serve their country and their King. Enemies he had in plenty, friends as well. It was my misfortune and my loss that he died in battle nine years before my birth. But I remember, as a lad, asking for tales of him and looking up to that great portrait which hung in the long gallery at Stowe. He was stern, they said, and hard, and smiled not often, so I have heard tell, but his eyes that looked down upon me from that portrait were hawk's eyes, fearless and far-seeing. There were many great names in those days--Drake, Raleigh, Sydney--and Grenvile was their company. He fell, mortally wounded, you may remember, on the decks of The King's General  own ship, called the Revenge. He fought alone with the Spanish fleet about him, and when they asked him to surrender he went on fighting still. Masts gone--sails one--the decks torn beneath his feet, but the Grenvile of that day had courage and preferred to have his vessel blown to pieces than sell his life for silver to the pirate hordes of Spain." 

He fell silent a moment, watching the pigeons on the lawn, and then he went on talking, with his hands behind his back. "My uncle John," he said, "explored the Indies with Sir Francis Drake. He was a man of courage too. They were no weaklings, those young men who braved the winter storms of the Atlantic in search of savage lands beyond the seas. Their ships were frail, they were tossed week after week at the mercy of wind and sea, but some salt tang in their blood kept them undaunted. He was killed there, in the Indies, was my uncle John, and my father, who loved him well, built a shrine to him at Stowe."

There was no sound from any one of us in the gallery. Gartred lay on the couch, her hands behind her head, and Dick stood motionless in his dark corner.

"There was a saying born about this time," continued Richard, "that no Grenvile was ever wanting in loyalty to his King. We were bred to it, my brothers and I; and Gartred, too, I think will well remember those evenings in my father's room at Stowe, when he, though not a fighting man, for he lived in days of peace, read to us from an old volume with great clasps about it of the wars of the past and how our forebears fought in them."

A gull wheeled overhead above the gardens, his wings white against the dark blue sky, and I remembered of a sudden the kittiwakes at Stowe riding the rough Atlantic beneath Richard's home.

"My brother Bevil," said Richard, "was a man who loved his family and his home. He was not bred to war. He desired, in his brief life, nothing so much as to rear his children with his wife's care and live at peace amongst his neighbours. When war came he knew what it would mean and did not turn his back upon it. Wrangling he detested, bloodshed he abhorred, but because he bore the name of Grenvile he knew, in I642, where his duty lay. He wrote a letter at that time to our friend and neighbour John Trelawney, who has this day been arrested, as you know, and because I believe that letter to be the finest thing my brother ever penned I asked Trelawney for a copy of it. I have it with me now. Shall I read it to you?"

We did not answer. He felt in his pocket slowly for a paper and, holding it before the window, read aloud: "I cannot contain myself within my doors when the King of England's standard waves in the field upon so just occasion, the cause being such as must make all those who die in it little inferior to martyrs. And for my own part I desire to acquire an honest name or an honourable grave. I never loved my life or ease so much as to shun such an occasion, which if I should, I were unworthy of the profession I have held, or to succeed those ancestors of mine who have so many of them, in several ages, sacrificed their lives for their country."

Richard folded the letter again and put it once more into his pocket.

''My brother Bevil died at Lansdowne," he said, "leading his men to battle, and his young son Jack, a lad of but fifteen, straightway mounted his father's horse and charged the enemy. That youngster who has just left us, Bunny, ran from his tutor last utumn, playing truant, that he might place himself at my disposal and hold a sword for this cause we all hold dear. I have no brief for myself. I am a soldier. My faults are many and my virtues few. But no quarrel, no dispute, no petty act of vengeance has ver turned me, or will turn me now, from loyalty to my country and my King. In the often bloody history of the Grenviles, not one of them until this day has proved a traitor."

His voice had sunk now, deadly quiet. The pigeons had flown from the lawns. The bees had hummed their way below the thistle park.

"One day," said Richard, "we may hope that His Majesty will be restored to his throne, or if not he, then the Prince of Wales instead. In that proud day, should any of us live to see it, the name of Grenvile will be held in honour, not only here in Cornwall, but in all England too. I am judge enough of character, for all my other failings, to know that my nephew Jack will prove himself as great a man of peace as he has been a youth of war, nor will young Bunny ever lag behind. They can tell their sons in the years to come, 'We Grenviles fought to bring about the restoration of our King,' and their names will rank in that great book at Stowe my father read to us, beside that of my grandfather Richard who fought in the Revenge." He paused a moment, then spoke lower still. "I care not," he said, "if my name be written in that book in smaller characters. 'He was a soldier,' they may say, 'the King's General in the West.' Let that be my epitaph. But there will be no other Richard in that book at Stowe. For the King's general died without a son."

A long silence followed his last words. He went on standing at the window, and I sat still in my chair, my hands folded in my lap. Soon now it would come, I thought, the outburst, the angry frightened words, or the torrent of wild weeping. For eighteen years the storm had been pent up, and the full tide of emotion could not wait longer now.

This is our fault, I whispered to myself, not his. Had Richard been more forgiving, had I been less proud, had our hearts been filled with love and not yet hatred, had we been blessed with greater understanding... Too late. Full twenty years too late. And now the little scapegoat of our sins went bleeding to his doom....

But the cry I waited for was never uttered. Nor did the tears fall. Instead, he came out from his corner and stood alone an instant in the centre of the room. The fear was gone now from the dark eyes, and the slim hands did not tremble. He looked older than he had done hitherto, older and more wise. As though, while his father had been speaking, a whole span of years had passed him by.

Yet when he spoke his voice was a boy's voice, young and simple.

"What must I do?" he said. "Will you do it for me, or must I kill myself?"

It was Gartred who moved first. Gartred, my lifelong foe and enemy. She rose from her couch, pulling the veil about her face, and came up to my chair. She put her hands upon it, and still with no word spoken she wheeled me from the room. We went out into the garden under the sun, our backs turned to the house, and we said no words to each other, for there were none to say. But neither she nor I nor any man or woman, alive or dead, will ever know what was said there in the long gallery at Menabilly by Richard Grenvile to his only son.