The King's General (7 page)

"This is Honor Harris of Lanrest," said Richard. "I think you gentlemen are possibly acquainted with her," and they one and all stood up and bowed to me, astonishment and embarrassment written plain upon their faces. "She has run away from home," said Richard, in no way put out by the situation. "Would you credit it, Tom? They want to marry her to Edward Champernowne."

"Indeed," replied Tom Treffry, quite at a loss, and he bent to stroke his dog's ear to hide his confusion.

"Will you have some bacon, Honor?" said Richard, proffering me a platter heaped with fatty pork, but I was too tired and faint to desire anything more than to be taken upstairs and put to rest.

Then Jonathan Rashleigh, a man of family and older than Richard and the others, said quietly, "Mistress Honor would prefer to withdraw, I fancy. I would summon one of your serving-women, Richard."

"Damn it, this is a bachelor household," answered Richard, his mouth crammed with bacon; "there isn't a woman in the place."

I heard a snort from Ranald Mohun, who put a handkerchief to his face, and I saw also the baleful eye that Richard cast upon him, and then somehow they one and all made their excuses and got themselves from the room, and we were alone at last.

"I was a fool to come," I said. "Now I have disgraced you before all your friends."

"I was disgraced long since," he said, pulling himself another tankard of ale, "but it was well you came after breakfast rather than before."

"Why so?" I asked.

He smiled and drew a document from his breast.

"I have sold Killigarth, and also the lands I hold in Tywardreath," he answered.

"Rashleigh gave me a fair price for them. Had you blundered in sooner he might have stayed his hand."

"Will the money pay your debts?" I said.

He laughed derisively. "A drop in the ocean," he said, "but it will suffice for a week or so, until we can borrow elsewhere."

"Why 'we'?" I enquired.

"Well, we shall be together," he answered. "You do not think I am going to permit this ridiculous match with Edward Champernowne?"

He wiped his mouth and pushed aside his plate, as though he had not a care in the world. He held out his arms to me and I went to him.

"Dear love," I said, feeling in sudden very old and very wise, "you have told me often that you must marry an heiress or you could not live."

"I should have no wish to live if you were wedded to another man," he answered.

Some little time was wasted while assuring me of this.

"But, Richard," I said presently, "if I wed you instead of Edward Champernowne my brother may refuse his sanction."

"I'll fight him if he does."

"We shall be penniless," I protested.

"Not if I know it," he said. "I have several relatives as yet unfleeced. Mrs. Abbot, my old aunt Katherine up at Hartland, she has a thousand pounds or so she does not want."

"But we cannot live thus all our lives," I said.

"I have never lived any way else," he answered.

I thought of the formalities and deeds that went with marriage, the lawyers and the documents.

"I am the youngest daughter, Richard," I said, hesitating. "You must bear in mind that my portion will be very small."

At this he shouted with laughter and, lifting me in his arms, carried me from the room.

"It's your person I have designs upon," he said. "Damn your portion."

O wild betrothal, startling and swift, decided on an instant without rhyme or reason, and all objections swept aside like a forest in a fire! My mother helpless before the onslaught, my brothers powerless to obstruct. The Champernownes, offended, withdrew to Radford, and Jo, washing his hands of me, went with them.

His wife would not receive me now, having refused her brother, and I was led to understand that the scandal of my conduct had spread through the whole of Devon.

Bridget's husband come posting down from Holbeton, and John Pollexefen from Maddercombe, and all the West, it seemed, said I had eloped with Richard Grenvile and was to wed him now through dire necessity.

He had shamed me in a room at Plymouth--he had carried me by force to Killigarth--I had lived there as his mistress for three months--all these and other tales were spread abroad, and Richard and I, in the gladness of our hearts, did nought but laugh at them.

He was for taking horse to London and giving me refuge with the Duke of Buckingham, who would, he declared, eat out of his hand and give me a dowery into the bargain, but at this moment of folly came his brother Bevil riding to Lanrest, and with his usual grace and courtesy insisted that I should go to Stowe and be married from the Grenvile home. Bevil brought law and order into chaos; his approval lent some smacking of decency to the whole proceeding, a quality which had been lacking hitherto, and within a few days of his taking charge my mother and I were safely housed at Stowe, where Kit had gone as a bridegroom nearly eight years before. I was too much in love by then to care a whit for anyone, and like someone who has feasted too wisely and too well, I swam through the great rooms at Stowe aglow with confidence, smiling at old Sir Bernard, bowing to all his kinsmen, in no more awe of the grandeur about me than I had been of the familiar dusty corners in Lanrest. I have small recollection now of what I did or whom I saw--save that there were Grenviles everywhere and all of them auburn-haired as Bridget had once told me--but I remember pacing up and down the great gardens while Sir Bernard discoursed solemnly upon the troubles brewing between His Majesty and Parliament, and I remember, too, standing for hours in a chamber, that of the Lady Grace, Bevil's wife, while her woman pinned my wedding gown upon me, and gathered it, and tuckered it, and pinned it yet again, she and my mother giving advice, while it seemed a heap of children played about the floor.

Richard was not much with me. I belonged to the women, he said, during these last days; we would have enough of each other by and by. These last days--what world of prophecy.

Nothing then remains out of the fog of recollection but that final afternoon in May, and the sun that came and went behind the clouds, and a high wind blowing. I can see now the guests assembled on the lawns, and how we all proceeded to the falconry, for the afternoon of sport was to precede a banquet in the evening.

There were the goshawks on their perches, preening their feathers, stretching their wings, the tamer of them permitting our approach, and further removed, solitary upon their blocks in the sand, their larger brethren, the wild-eyed peregrines.

The falconers came to leash and jess the hawks, and hood them ready for the chase, and as they did this the stablemen brought the horses for us, and the dogs that were to flush the game yelped and pranced about their heels. Richard mounted me upon the little chestnut mare that was to be mine hereafter, and as he turned to speak a moment to his falconer about the hooding of his bird I looked over my shoulder and saw a conclave of horsemen gathered about the gate to welcome a new arrival. "What now?" said Richard, and the falconer, shading his eyes from the sun, turned to his master with a smile.

"It's Mrs. Denys," he said, "from Orley Court. Now you can match your red hawk with her tiercel."

Richard looked up at me and smiled. "So it has happened after all," he said, "and Gartred has chose to visit us."

They were riding down the path towards us, and I wondered how she would seem to me, my enemy of childhood, to whom in so strange a fashion I was to be related once again. No word had come from her, no message of congratulation, but her natural curiosity had won her in the end.

"Greetings, sister," called Richard, the old sardonic mockery in his voice. "So you have come to dance at my wedding after all."

"Perhaps," she answered. "I have not yet decided. Two of the children are not well at home." She rode abreast of me, that slow smile that I remembered on her face.

"How are you, Honor?"

"Well enough," I answered.

"I never thought to see you become a Grenvile."

"Nor I either."

"The ways of Providence are strange indeed.... You have not met my husband."

I bowed to the stranger at her side, a big, bluff, hearty man, a good deal older than herself. So this was the Antony Denys who had caused poor Kit so much anguish before he died. Maybe it was his weight that had won her.

"Where do we ride?" she asked, turning from me to Richard.

"In the open country, towards the shore," he answered.

She glanced at the falcon on his wrist. "A red hawk," she said, one eyebrow lifted, "not in her full plumage. Do you think to make anything of her?"

"She has taken kite and bustard, and I propose to put her to a heron today if we can flush one."

Gartred smiled. "A red hawk at a heron," she mocked. "You will see her check at a magpie and nothing larger."

"Will you match her with your tiercel?"

"My tiercel will destroy her, and the heron afterwards."

"That is a matter of opinion."

They watched each other like duellists about to strike, and I remembered how Richard had told me they had fought with each other from the cradle. I had my first shadow of misgiving that the day would turn in some way to disaster. For a moment I wondered whether I would plead fatigue and stay behind. I rode for pleasure, not for slaughter, and hawking was never my favourite pastime.

Gartred must have observed my hesitation, for she laughed and said, "Your bride loses her courage. The pace will be too strong for her."

"What?" said Richard, his face falling. "You are coming, aren't you?"

"Why, yes," I said swiftly. "I will see you kill your heron."

We rode out to the open country, with the wind blowing in our faces, and the sound of the Atlantic coming to us as the long surf rollers spilt themselves with a roar onto the shore far below.

At first the sport was poor, for no quarry larger than a woodcock was flushed, and to this was flown the goshawks, who clutch their prey between their claws and do not kill outright like the large-winged peregrines.

Richard's falcon and Gartred's tiercel were still hooded and not slipped, for we were not yet come upon the herons' feeding ground.

My little mare pawed restlessly at the ground, for up to the present we had had no run, and the pace was slow. Hard by a little copse the falconers flushed three magpies, and a cast of goshawks were flown at them, but the cunning magpies, making up for the lack of wing power by shiftiness, scuttled from hedge to hedge, and after some twenty minutes or so of hovering by the hawks, and shouting and driving by the falconers, only one magpie was taken.

"Come, this is poor indeed," said Gartred scornfully. "Can we find no better quarry, and so let fly the falcons?"

Richard shaded his eyes from the sun and looked towards the west. A long strip of moorland lay before us, rough and uneven, and at the far end of it a narrow, soggy marsh, where the duck would fly to feed in stormy weather, and at all seasons of the year, so Richard told me, the sea birds came, curlews, and gulls, and herons.

There was no bird as yet on passage through the sky, save a small lark high above our heads, and the marsh, where the herons might be found, was still two miles away.

"I'll match my horse to yours, and my red hawk to your tiercel," said Richard suddenly, and even as he spoke he let fly the hood of his falcon and slipped her, putting spurs to his horse upon the gesture. Within ten seconds Gartred had followed suit, her grey-winged peregrine soaring into the sun, and she and Richard were galloping across the moors towards the marsh, with the two hawks like black specks in the sky above them. My mare, excited by the clattering hoofs of her companions, took charge of me, nigh pulling my arms out of their sockets, and she raced like a mad thing in pursuit of the horses ahead of us, the yelping of the dogs and the cries of the falconers whipping her speed. My last ride... The sun in my eyes, the wind in my face, the movement of the mare beneath me, the thunder of her hoofs, the scent of the golden gorse, the sound of the sea... Unforgettable, unforgotten, deep in my soul for all time .I could see Richard and Gartred racing neck to neck, flinging insults at each other as they rode, and in the sky the male and female falcons pitched and hovered, when suddenly away from the marsh ahead of us rose a heron, his great grey wings unfolding, his legs trailing. I heard a shout from Richard, and an answering cry from Gartred, and in an instant it seemed the hawks had seen their quarry, for they both began to circle above the heron, climbing higher and still higher, swinging out in rings until they were like black dots against the sun. The watchful heron, rising, too, but in a narrower circle, turned down-wind, his queer ungainly body strangely light and supple, and like a flash the first hawk dived to him--whether it was Richard's young falcon or Gartred's tiercel I could not tell--and missed the heron by a hair's breadth. At once, recovering himself, he began to soar again, in ever higher circles, to recover his lost pitch, and the second hawk swooped, missing in like manner.

I tried to rein in my mare but could not stop her, and now Gartred and Richard had turned eastward, too, following the course of the heron, and we were galloping three abreast, the ground ever rising towards a circle of stones in the midst of the moor.

"Beware the chasm," shouted Richard in my ear, pointing with his whip, but he was past me like the wind and I could not call to him.

The heron was now direct above my head, and the falcon lost to view, and I heard Gartred shout in triumph, "They bind--they bind--my tiercel has her," and I saw silhouetted against the sun one of the falcons locked against the heron and the two come swinging down to earth not twenty yards ahead.

I tried to swerve, but the mare had the mastery, and I shouted to Gartred as she passed me, "Which way the chasm?" but she did not answer me. On we flew towards the circle of stones, the sun blinding my eyes, and out of the darkening sky fell the dying heron and the blood-bespattered falcon, straight into the yawning crevice that opened out before me. I heard Richard shout and a thousand voices singing in my ears as I fell.