The King's General

  I saw Dick's white face watching me. What is he telling me, I wondered, with his dark eyes? What is he trying to say?

  "Take me back," I said to Richard. "I have to talk to you."

  He carried me to the room above, and it seemed to me, as I sat their breathing deep, that the bare boards and smoky ceiling were paradise compared to the black hole from which we had come. Had I in truth forced Dick to lie there, hour after hour, as a lad four years ago? Was it because of this that his eyes accused me now? God forgive me, but I thought to save his life. We sat there by the light of a single candle, Richard, and Dick, and I, while Matty kept watch upon the door.

  "Jonathan Rashleigh has returned," I said.

  Dick threw me a questioning glance, but Richard answered nothing.

  "The fine is paid," I said. "The County Committee have allowed him to come home. He will be able to live in Cornwall henceforth, a free man, unencumbered, if he does nothing more to rouse the suspicions of the Parliament."

  "That is well for him," said Richard. "I wish him good fortune."

  "Jonathan Rashleigh is a man of peace," I said, "who, though he loves his King, loves his home better. He has endured two years of suffering and privation. I think he has earned repose now, and he had but one desire--to live among his family, in his own house, without anxiety."

  "The desire," said Richard, "of almost every man."

  "His desire will not be granted," I said, "if it should be proved he was a party to the rising."

  Richard glanced at me, then shrugged his shoulders.

  "That is something that the Parliament would find difficult to lay upon him," he said. "Rashleigh has been two years in London."

  For answer, I took the bill from my gown, and, spreading it on the floor, put the candlestick upon it. I read it aloud, as my brother-in-law had read it to me, that afternoon:

  " 'Anyone who has harbored at any time, or seeks to harbor in the future, the malignant known as Richard Grenvile, shall, upon discovery, be arrested for high treason, his lands sequestered finally and forever, and his family imprisoned.' "

  I waited a moment, and then I said: "They will come in the morning, Jonathan said, to search again."

  A blob of grease from the candle fell upon the paper, and the edges curled. Richard placed it on the flame, and the paper caught and burned, wisping to nothing in his hands, then fell and scattered.

  "You see?" said Richard to his son. "Life is like that. A flicker, and a spark, and then it is over. No trace remains."

  It seemed to me that Dick looked at his father as a dumb dog gazes at his master. Tell me, said his eyes, what you are asking me to do?

  "Ah, well," said Richard, with a sigh, "there's nothing for it but to run our necks into cold steel. A dreary finish. A scrap upon the road, some dozen men upon us, handcuffs and rope, and then the march through the streets of London, jeered at by the mob. Are you ready, Dick? Yours was the master hand that brought us to this pass. I trust you profit by it now."

  He rose to his feet and stretched his arms above his head. "At least," he said, "they keep a sharp axe in Whitehall. I have watched the executioner do justice before now. A little crabbed fellow he was, last time I saw him, but with biceps in his arms like cannonballs. He only takes a single stroke." He paused a moment, thoughtful. "But," he said slowly, "the blood makes a pretty mess upon the straw."

  I saw Dick grip his ankle with his hand, and I turned like a fury on the man I loved. "Will you be silent?" I said. "Hasn't he suffered enough these eighteen years?"

  Richard stared down at me, one eyebrow lifted.

  "What?" he said smiling. "Do you turn against me too?"

  For answer, I threw him the note I was clutching in my hand. It was smeared by now, and scarcely legible. "There is no need for your fox's head to lie upon the block," I said to him. "Read that, and change your tune."

  He bent low to the candle, and I saw his eye change in a strange manner as he read, from black malevolence to wonder.

  "I've bred a Grenvile after all," he answered softly.

  "The Frances leaves Fowey on the morning tide," I said. "She is bound for Flushing, and has room for passengers. The master can be trusted. The voyage will be swift."

  "And how," asked Richard, "do the passengers go aboard?"

  "A boat, in quest of lobsters and not foxes, will call at Pridmouth," I said lightly, "as the vessel sails from harbor. The passengers will be waiting for it. I suggest that they conceal themselves for the remainder of the night till dawn on the cowrie beach near to the Gribben hill, and when the boat creeps to its post, in the early morning light, a signal will bring it to the shore."

  "It would seem," said Richard, "that nothing could be more easy."

  "You agree, then, to this method of escape? Adieu to your fine heroics of surrender?" I think he had forgotten them already, for his eyes were traveling beyond my head to plans and schemes in which I played no part. "From Holland to France," he murmured, "and, once there, to see the Prince. A new plan of campaign better than this last. A landing, perchance in Ireland, and from Ireland to Scotland..." His eyes fell back upon the note screwed up in his hand. " 'My mother christened me Elizabeth,' " he read, " 'but I prefer to sign myself your daughter Bess.' "

  He whistled under his breath, and tossed the note to Dick. The boy read it, and handed it back in silence to his father.

  "Well?" said Richard. "Shall I like your sister?"

  "I think, sir," said Dick slowly, "you will like her very well."

  "It took courage, did it not," pursued his father, "to leave her home, find herself a ship, and be prepared to land alone in Holland without friends or fortune?"

  "Yes," I said, "it took courage, and something else besides."

  "What was that?"

  "Faith in the man she is proud to call her father. Confidence that he will not desert her, should she prove unworthy."

  They stared at one another, Richard and his son, brooding, watchful, as though between them both was some dark secret understanding that I, a woman, could not hope to share. Then Richard put the note into his pocket and turned, hesitating, to the entrance in the buttress. "Do we go," he said, "the same way by which we came?"

  "The house is guarded," I said. "It is your only chance."

  "And when the watchdogs come tomorrow," he said, "and seek to sniff our tracks, how will you deal with them?"

  "As Jonathan Rashleigh suggested," I replied, "dry timber in midsummer burns easily, and fast. I think the family of Rashleigh will not use their summerhouse again."

  "And the entrance here?"

  "The stone cannot be forced. Not from this side. See the rope there, and the hinge."

  We peered, all three of us, into the murky depths. And Dick, of a sudden, reached out to the rope and pulled upon it, and the hinge also. He gave three tugs, and then they broke, useless forever.

  "There," he said, smiling oddly. "No one will ever force the stone again, once you have closed it from this side."

  "One day," said Richard, "a Rashleigh will come and pull the buttress down. What shall we leave them for legacy?" His eyes wandered to the bones in the corner. "The skeleton of a rat," he said. And, with a smile, he threw it down the stair.

  "Go first, Dick," he said, "and I will follow you."

  Dick put his hand out to me, and I held it for a moment.

  "Be brave," I said. "The journey will be swift. Once safe in Holland you will make good friends."

  He did not answer. He gazed at me with his great dark eyes, then turned to the little stair.

  I was alone with Richard. We had had several partings, he and I. Each time I told myself it was the last. Each time we had found one another once again. "How long this time?" I said.

  "Two years," he said. "Perhaps eternity."

  He took my face in his hands and kissed me long.

  "When I come back," he said, "we'll build that house at Stowe. You shall sink your pride at last, and become a Grenvile."

  I smiled,
and shook my head.

  "Be happy with your daughter," I said to him.

  He paused at the entrance to the buttress.

  "I tell you one thing," he said. "Once out in Holland, I'll put pen to paper, and write the truth about the civil war. My God, I'll flay my fellow generals, and show them for the sods they are. Perhaps, when I have done so, the Prince of Wales will take the hint and make me at last supreme commander of his forces."

  "He is more likely," I said, "to degrade you to the ranks."

  He climbed through the entrance and knelt upon the stair, where Dick waited for him.

  "I'll do your destruction for you," he said. "Watch from your chamber in the eastern wing, and you will see the Rashleigh summerhouse make its last bow to Cornwall and the Grenviles also."

  "Beware the sentry," I said. "He stands below the causeway."

  "Do you love me still, Honor?"

  "For my sins, Richard."

  "Are they many?"

  "You know them all."

  And as he waited there, his hand upon the stone, I made my last request.

  "You know why Dick betrayed you to the enemy?"

  "I think so."

  "Not from resentment, not from revenge. But because he saw the blood on Gartred's cheek..."

  He stared at me thoughtfully, and I whispered: "Forgive him, for my sake, if not for your own."

  "I have forgiven him," he said slowly; "but the Grenviles are strangely fashioned. I think you will find that he cannot forgive himself." I saw them both, father and son, standing upon the stair with the little cell below, and then Richard pushed the stone flush against the buttress wall, and it was closed forever. I waited there beside it for a moment, and then I called for Matty. "It's all over," I said. "Finished now and done with."

  She came across the room and lifted me in her arms.

  "No one," I said to her, "will ever hide in the buttress cell again." I put my hand onto my cheek. It was wet. I did not know I had been crying. "Take me to my room," I said to Matty.

  I sat there, by the far window, looking out across the gardens. The moon was high now--not white as last night, but with a yellow rim about it. Clouds had gathered in the evening, and were banking curled and dark against the sky. The sentry had left the causeway steps and was leaning against the hatch door of the farm buildings opposite, watching the windows of the house. He did not see me sitting there, in the darkness, with my chin upon my hand.

  Hours long it seemed I waited there, staring to the east, with Matty crouching at my side, and at length I saw a little spurt of flame rise above the trees in thistle park. The wind was westerly, blowing the smoke away, and the sentry down below, leaning against the barn, could not see it from where he stood.

  Now, I said to myself, it will burn steadily till morning, and when daylight comes they will say poachers have lit a bonfire in the night that spread, catching the summerhouse alight, and someone from the estate here must go cap in hand, with apologies for carelessness, to Jonathan Rashleigh in his house at Fowey. Now, I said also, two figures wend their way across the cowrie beach and wait there, in the shelter of the cliff. They are safe, they are together. I can go to bed, and sleep, and so forget them. And yet I went on sitting there, beside my bedroom window, looking out upon the lawns, and I did not see the moon, nor the trees, nor the thin column of smoke rising in the air, but all the while Dick's eyes, looking up at me for the last time, as Richard closed the stone in the buttress wall.

  37

  At nine in the morning came a line of troopers riding through the park. They dismounted in the courtyard, and the officer in charge, a colonel from the staff of Sir Hardress Waller at Saltash, sent word up to me that I must dress and descend immediately, and be ready to accompany him to Fowey. I was dressed already, and when the servants carried me downstairs I saw the troopers he had brought prising the paneling in the long gallery. The watchdogs had arrived...

  "This house was sacked once already," I said to the officer, "and it has taken my brother-in-law four years to make what small repairs he could. Must this work begin again?"

  "I am sorry," said the officer, "but the Parliament can afford to take no chances with a man like Richard Grenvile."

  "You think to find him here?"

  "There are a score of houses in Cornwall where he might be hidden," he replied. "Menabilly is but one of them. This being so, I am compelled to search the house rather too thoroughly for the comfort of those who dwell beneath its roof. I am afraid that Menabilly will not be habitable for some little while... Therefore I must ask you to come with me to Fowey."

  I looked about me, at the place that had been my home now for two years. I had seen it sacked before. I had no wish to witness the sight again. "I am ready," I said to the officer.

  As I was placed in the litter, with Matty at my side, I heard the old sound I well remembered, of axes tearing the floorboards, of swords ripping the wood, and another jester, like his predecessor in '44, had already climbed up to the belfry and hung cross-legged from the beam, the rope between his hands, swinging the great bell from side to side. It tolled us from the gatehouse, tolled us from the outer court. This, I thought to myself in premonition, is my farewell to Menabilly. I shall not live here again.

  "We will go by the coast," said the officer, looking in the window of my litter. "The highway is choked with troops, bound for Helston and Penzance."

  "Do you need so many," I asked, "to quell but a little rising?"

  "The rising will be over in a day or so," he answered, "but the troops have come to stay. There will be no more insurrections in Cornwall, east or west, from this day forward."

  And as he spoke the Menabilly bell swung backwards, forwards, in a mournful knell, echoing his words.

  I looked up from the path beneath the causeway, and the summerhouse that had stood there yesterday, a little tower with its long windows, was now charred rubble, a heap of sticks and stones.

  "By whose orders," called the officer, "was that fire kindled?" I heard him take council of his men, and they climbed to the causeway to investigate the pile, while Matty and I waited in the litter. In a few moments the officer returned.

  "What building stood there?" he asked me. "I can make nothing of it from the mess. But the fire is recent, and smolders still."

  "A summerhouse," I said. "My sister, Mrs. Rashleigh, loved it well. We sat there often when she was home. This will vex her sorely. Colonel Bennett, when he came here yesterday, gave orders, I believe, for its destruction."

  "Colonel Bennett," said the officer, frowning, "had no authority without permission of the Sheriff, Sir Thomas Herle."

  I shrugged my shoulders. "He may have had permission. I cannot tell you. But he is a member of the County Committee, and therefore can do much as he pleases."

  "The County Committee takes too much upon itself," said the officer. "One day they will have trouble with us in the army." He mounted his horse in high ill temper, and shouted an order to his men. A civil war within a civil war. Did no faction ever keep the peace among themselves? Let the army and the Parliament quarrel as they pleased; it would help our cause in the end, in the long run... And as I turned and looked for the last time at the smoldering pile upon the causeway, and the tall trees in thistle park, I thought of the words that had been whispered two years ago, in '46; when the snow melts, when the thaw breaks, when the spring comes.

  We descended the steep path to Pridmouth. The tide was low, the Cannis Rock showed big and clear, and on the far horizon was the black smudge of a sail. The millstream gurgled out upon the stones, and ran sharply to the beach, and from the marsh at the farther end a swan rose suddenly, thrashing his way across the water, and, circling in the air a moment, winged his way out to the sea. We climbed the further hill, past Coombe Manor, where the Rashleigh cousins lived, and so down to my brother-in-law's town house on Fowey quay. The first thing I looked for was a ship at anchor in the Rashleigh roads, but none was there. The harbor water was still and gray, an
d no vessels but little fish-craft anchored at Polruan. The people on the quayside watched with curiosity as I was lifted from my litter and taken to the house. My brother-in-law was waiting for me in the parlor. The room was dark paneled, like the dining hall at Menabilly, the great windows looking out upon the quay. On the ledge stood the model of a ship--the same ship that his father had built and commissioned forty years before to sail with Drake against the Armada. She too was named the Frances.

  "I regret," said the officer, "that for a day or so, until the trouble in the west has quietened down, it will be necessary to keep a watch upon this house. I must ask you, sir, and this lady here, to stay within your doors."

  "I understand," said Jonathan. "I have been so long accustomed to surveillance that a few more days of it will not hurt me now."

  The officer withdrew, and I saw a sentry take up his position outside the window as his fellow had done the night before at Menabilly. "I have news of Robin," said my brother-in-law. "He is detained in Plymouth, but I think they can fasten little upon him. When this matter has blown over he will be released, on condition that he takes the oath of allegiance to the Parliament, as I was forced to do."

  "And then?" I asked.

  "Why, then he can become his own master, and settle down to peace and quietude. I have a little house in Tywardreath that would suit him well, and you too, Honor, if you should wish to share it with him. That is... if you have no other plan."

  "No," I said. "No, I have no other plan."

  He rose from his chair and walked slowly to the window, looking out upon the quay. An old man, white haired and bent, leaning heavily upon his stick. The sound of the gulls came to us as they wheeled and dived above the harbor.

  "The Frances sailed at five this morning," he said slowly.

  I did not answer.

  "The fishing lad who went to lift his pots pulled first into Pridmouth for his passenger. He found him waiting on the beach, as he expected. He looked tired and wan, the lad said, but otherwise little the worse for his ordeal."