The King's General (40 page)

'The Parliament," said John Rashleigh wearily, "decrees that no man may breathe ?od's air, save by a special licence, and then one hour in every other day. My God, Honor, no man can stand this long." 

I said, "Cornwall is only one portion of the kingdom. The whole of England, before long, will suffer the same fate."

''They will not, they cannot, endure it," he said.

''What is their alternative? The King is virtually a prisoner. The party with the most jnoney and the strongest army rules the country. For those who share their views life is doubtless very pleasant."

"No one can share their views and call his soul his own."

"There you are wrong. It is merely a matter of being accommodating and shaking hands with the right people. Lord Robartes lives in great comfort at Lanhydrock. The Treffrys--being related to Hugh Peters and Jack Trefusis--live very well at Place. If you chose to follow their example and truckle to the Parliament, doubtless you would find life here at Menabilly so much the easier."

He stared at me suspiciously.

"Would you have me go to them and fawn, while my father lives a pauper up in London, watched every moment of his day? I would sooner die."

I knew he would sooner die and loved him for it. Dear John, you might have had more years beside your Joan and be alive today, had you spared yourself and your poor health in those first few months of aftermath... .I watched him toil, and the women, too, and there was little I could do to help but figure the accounts, an unpaid clerk with smudgy fingers, and tot up the debts we owed on quarter days. I did not suffer as the Rashleighs did, pride being, I believe, a quality long lost in me, and I was sad only in their sadness. To see Alice gazing wistfully from a window brought a pain to my heart, and when Mary read a letter from her Jonathan, deep shadows beneath her eyes, I think I hated the Parliament every whit as much as they did.

But that first year of defeat was, in some queer fashion, quiet and peaceful to me who bore no burden on my shoulders. Danger was no more. Armies were disbanded., The strain of war was lifted. The man I loved was safe across the sea in France, and then in Italy, in the company of his son, and now and then I would have word of him, from some foreign city, in good heart and spirits, and missing me, it would seem, not at all. He talked of going to fight the Turks with great enthusiasm, as if, I thought with a shrug of my shoulders, he had not had enough of fighting after three hard years of civil war. "Doubtless," he wrote, "you find your days monotonous in Cornwall."

Doubtless I did. To women who have known close siege and stern privation, monotony can be a pleasant thing....

A wanderer for so many months, it was restful to find a home at last and to share it with people whom I loved, even if we were all companions in defeat. God bless the Rashleighs, who permitted me those months at Menabilly. The house was bare and; shorn of its former glory, but at least I had a room I called my own. The Parliament ', could strip the place of its possessions, take the sheep and cattle, glean the harvest, but they could not take from me, nor from the Rashleighs, the beauty that we looked on every day. The devastation of the gardens was forgotten when the primrose came; in spring, and the young green-budded trees. We, the defeated, could still listen to the birds on a May morning and watch the clumsy cuckoo wing his way to the little wood > beside the Gribbin Hill. The Gribbin Hill... I watched it, from rny chair upon the.' causeway, in every mood from winter to midsummer. I have seen the shadows creep i on an autumn afternoon from the deep Pridmouth Valley to the summit of the hill, and j there stay a moment, waiting on the sun. \ I have seen, too, the white sea mists of early summer turn the hill to fantasy, so that I it becomes, in a single second, a ghost land of enchantment, with no sound coming i but the wash of breakers on the hidden beach, where, at high noon, the children gather -j cowrie shells. Dark moods, too, of bleak November, when the rain sweeps in a curtain from the southwest. But quietest of all, the evenings of late summer, whenthe| sun has set and the moon has not yet risen, but the dew is heavy in the long grass-J The sea is very white and still, without a breath upon it, and only a single thread off wash upon the covered Cannis Rock. The jackdaws fly homeward to their nests inthe| warren. The sheep crop the short turf before they, too, rub together beneath the stone, wall by the winnowing place. Dusk comes slowly to the Gribbin Hill, the woods to black, and suddenly, with stealthy pad, a fox creeps from the trees in the thistle pa and stands watching me, his ears pricked.... Then his brush twitches and he is gonej for here is Matty tapping along the causeway to bring me home; and another day i over. Yes, Richard, there is comfort in monotony....

I return to Menabilly to find that all have gone to bed and the candles extinguished in the gallery. Matty carries me upstairs, and as she brushes my hair and ties the curling rags I think I am almost happy. A year has come and gone, and though we are defeated, we live, we still survive. I am lonely, yes, but that has been my portion since I turned eighteen. And loneliness has compensations. Better to live inwardly alone than together in constant fear. And as I think thus, my curl rag in my hand, I see Matty's round face looking at me from the mirror opposite.

"There were strange rumours in Fowey today," she says quietly.

"What rumours, Matty? There are always rumours." She moistens a rag with her tongue, then whips it round a curl.

"Our men are creeping back," she murmurs, "first one, then two, then three. Those who fled to France a year ago."

I rubbed some lotion on my hands and face.

"Why should they return? They can do nothing."

"Not alone, but if they band together, in secret, one with another..."

I sit still, my hands in my lap, and suddenly I remember a phrase in the last letter that came to me from Italy. "You may hear from me," he said, "before the summer closes, by a different route." I thought him to mean he was going to fight the Turks.

"Do they mention names?" I say to Matty, and for the first time for many months a little seed of anxiety and fear springs to my heart. She does not answer for a moment; she is busy with a curl. Then at last she speaks, her voice low and hushed.

"They talk of a great leader," she says, "landing in secret at Plymouth from the Continent. He wore a dark wig, they said, to disguise his colouring. But they did not mention any names...."

A bat brushes itself against my window, lost and frightened, and close to the house an owl shrieks in warning.

And it seemed to me, that moment, that the bat was no airy mouse of midsummer, but the sacred symbol of all hunted things.

29

Rumours. Always rumours. Never anything of certainty. This was our portion during the early autumn of '47 to '48. So strict was the Parliamentary hold on news that nothing but the bare official statements were given to us down in Cornwall, and these had no value, being simply what Whitehall thought good for us to know.

So the whispers started, handed from one to the other, and when the whispers came to us fifth-hand we had to sift the welter of extravagance to find the seed of truth. The royalists were arming. This was the firm base of all the allegations. Weapons were being smuggled into the country from France, and places of concealment were found for them. Gentlemen were meeting in one another's houses. The labourers were conversing together in the field. A fellow at a street corner would beckon to another, tor the purpose, it would seem, of discussing market prices; there would be a Question, a swift answer, and then the two would separate, but information had been Passed, and another link forged.

Outside the parish church of Tywardreath would stand a Parliamentary soldier eaning on his musket, while the busybody agent who had beneath his arm a fold of ocurnents listing each member of the parish and his private affairs gave him good "Doming; and while he did so, the old sexton, with his back turned, prepared a new grave, not for a corpse this time, but for weapons.... th y could have told a tale, those burial grounds of Cornwall. Cold steel beneath "Jp green turf and the daisies, locked muskets in the dark family vaults. Let a fellow 'irnb to repair his cottage roof against the rains of winter, and he will pause an instant, glancing over his shoulder, and, thrusting his hand under the thatch, feel for the sharp edge of a sword. These would be Matty's tales.... Mary would come to me with a letter from Jonathan in London. "Fighting is likely to start again at any moment," would be his guarded words. "Discontent is rife, even here, against our masters. Many Londoners who fought in opposition to the King would swear loyalty to him now. I can say no more than this. Bid John have a care whom he meets and where he goes. Remember, I am bound to my oath. If we meddle in these matters, I and he would answer for it with our lives." Mary would fold the letter anxiously and place it in her gown.

"What does it mean?" she would say. "What matters does he refer to?"

And to this there could be one answer only. The royalists were rising....

Names that had not been spoken for two years were now whispered by cautious tongues. Trelawney... Trevannion... Arundell... Bassett... Grenvile... Yes, above all, Grenvile. He had been seen at Stowe, said one. Nay, that was false; it was not Stowe, but at his sister's house near Bideford. The Isle of Wight, said another.

The Red Fox was gone to Carisbrooke to take secret counsel of the King. He had not come to the West Country. He had been seen in Scotland. He had been spoken to in Ireland. Sir Richard Grenvile was returned. Sir Richard Grenvile was in Cornwall....

I made myself deaf to these tales; for once too often, in my life, I had had a bellyful of rumours. Yet it was strange no letter came any more from Italy or from France....

John Rashleigh kept silent on these matters. His father had bidden him not meddle, but to work night and day on the husbanding of the estate, so that the groaning debt to Parliament be paid. But I could guess his thoughts. If there were in truth a rising and the prince landed and Cornwall freed once more, there would be no debt to pay. If the Trelawney s were a party to the plan, and the Trevannions also, and all those who in the county swore loyalty to the King, in secret, then was it not something like cowardice, something like shame, for a Rashleigh to remain outside the company?

Poor John. He was restless and sharp-tempered often, those first weeks of spring, after the ploughing had been done. And Joan was not with us to encourage him, for. her twin boys, born the year before, were sickly, and she was with them and the elder children at Maddercombe in Devon. Then Jonathan fell ill up in London, and though he asked permission of the Parliament to return to Cornwall, they would not grant it, so he sent for Mary and she went to him. Alice was the next to leave. Peter wrote to her from France, desiring that she should take the children to Trethurfe, his home, that was--so he had heard--in sad state of repair, and would she go there, now spring was at hand, and see what could be done?

She went the first day of March, and it became, on a sudden, strangely quiet at Menabilly. I had been used so long to children's voices, that now to be without them, and the sound of Alice's voice calling to them, and the rustle of Mary's gown, made me more solitary than usual, even a little sad. There was no one but John now for company, and I wondered what we should make of it together, he and I, through the long evenings.

"I have half a mind," he said to me, the third day we sat together, "to leave Menabilly in your care and go to Maddercombe."

"I'll tell no tales of you if you do," I said to him.

"I dislike to go against my father's wishes," he admitted, "but it is over six months now since I have seen Joan and the children, and not a word comes to us here of what j is passing in the country. Only that the war has broken out again. Fighting in places as;; far apart as Wales and the Eastern counties. I tell you, Honor, I am sick of inactivity. '

For very little I would take horse and ride to Wales."

"No need to ride to Wales," I said quietly, "when there is likely to be a rising in your own county."

He glanced at the half-open door of the gallery. Queer instinctive move, unnecessary when the few servants that we had could all be trusted, yet since we were ruled the The King's General I5I Parliament this gesture would be force of habit.

"Have you heard anything?" he said guardedly. "Some word of truth, I mean, not idle rumour?"

"Nothing," I answered, "beyond what you hear yourself."

"I thought perhaps Sir Richard--" he began, but I shook my head.

"Since last year," I said, "rumour has it that he has been hiding in the country. I've had no message."

He sighed and glanced once more towards the door.

"If only," he said, "I could be certain what to do. If there should be a rising and I took no part in it, how lacking in loyalty to the King I then would seem. What trash the name of Rashleigh."

"If there should be a rising and it fail," I said, "how damp your prison walls, how uneasy your head upon your shoulders."

He smiled, for all his earnestness.

"Trust a woman," he said, "to damp a fellow's ardour."

"Trust a woman," I replied, "to keep war out of her home."

"Do you wish to sit down indefinitely, then, under the rule of Parliament?" he asked.

"Not so. But spit in their faces before the time is ripe, and we shall find ourselves one and all under their feet forever."

Once again he sighed, rumpling his hair and looking dubious.

"Get yourself permission," I said, "and go to Maddercombe. It's your wife you need and not a rising. But I warn you, once you are in Devon, you may not find it so easy to return."

This warning had been repeated often during the past weeks. Those who had gone into Devon or to Somerset upon their lawful business, bearing a permit from the local Parliamentary official, would find great delay upon the homeward journey, much scrutiny and questioning, and this would be followed by search of their persons for documents or weapons, and possibly a night or more under arrest. We, the defeated, were not the only ones to hear the rumours....