“Damme, even if he’s but half a king,” Mr Killigrew said, “ there’s no one left to challenge him. And I believe he’ll see his best hope of prevailing is with our help.”
Ralegh drew moodily at his pipe. “The Estates meet in the Louvre this month. The Spanish Ambassador I think will be instructed to revive the idea of the Duc de Guise as King of France, with the Infanta as his consort. Such an idea would divide France more than ever, but with Spanish aid it could prevail … Henry has one counter to that, and one only.”
My uncle shrugged but did not speak.
Ralegh said: “ Henry could counter it by turning Catholic.”
“By God!” said my father; “he wouldn’t dare!”
“I had heard the rumour too,” Sir Henry said impatiently. “ He might gain much by so doing, but it would be such a vile betrayal of all that he and his people have been fighting for that I do not believe he would seriously consider it even if his conscience permitted him to do so. He would be discredited for ever. A commoner might do it and live. A king would no longer be considered fit to be a king.”
“Well, I do not think Henry is such a zealot that he will not weigh the issues carefully—nor should I blame him if he did.”
“You would not blame him?”
“I would not blame him for weighing up the gain and loss. No.”
“Even in an issue of religious conscience, cousin, for which blessed martyrs have burned at the stake?”
“I think we are apt to forget that all our grandfathers were Catholics. I do not believe they went to eternal damnation because of it. We all try to serve the same God.”
Ralegh did not seem put out by the shocked and angry glances round the table. I had heard before that he was capable of saying dangerous and outrageous things. My father, who admired and envied him, said it amused him to be outspoken. But these remarks were on the verge of blasphemy and on the verge of treason.
Talk had broken out at the table again, and Sir Walter, still in spate, was speaking of his wish to send other expeditions to the New World; but for me, and perhaps for all there, the alchemy had gone out of his words.
“If you read the Spanish documents of the last forty years you will find that they have more than once almost reached the hidden empire of the Incas but been driven back by hostile tribes, by disease, or by treachery among themselves. There can be no doubt that between the Amazon and the Orinoco lies the lake of Manoa, a lake conceivably as large as all Europe, and on the shores of the lake is the city of Manoa with its gold mines. This dorado, as the Spanish call it, is surrounded by mountains and peopled by intelligent and resourceful natives who, from evil experience, loathe Spain and the white man. Therein is England’s opportunity.”
“Guiana now, not Virginia,” said Sir Henry.
“Yes. And of equal import for the future. Look on this map again. Which are the three countries of the civilised world with long western seaboards and a seafaring tradition? … Spain, France and England. Of these only Spain has made use of her opportunities; and look at her strength, look at her wealth! In spite of all her setbacks she remains mistress of half Europe. And why? Not because of her own natural resources but because of this life blood of treasure which she draws from across the ocean. Look at the spoils of this single ship Madre de Dios, which Cecil and I and your brother William are still computing. Imagine what England could be if she drew such treasure regularly and as her right! All that opportunity we should now lose if we made peace with Spain.”
“My uncle Peter was of the same view,” muttered my father. “Rest his soul, he was an adventurous rascal, always fighting; and I’d have you know he proposed a voyage to the Grain Coast and the Ivory Coast ten years before Hawkins made it. It was not his fault he didn’t go, it was lack of the means to mount an expedition.”
“And such work of adventure should offer far more than prizes and spoil,” said Ralegh. “ The Spanish in their empires seek only gold and diamonds and spoil. It is a short view. I would set colonies of English down to live and breed and make their homes there and to live in amity with the savage and the Indian.”
Just then my grandmother turned and caught my eye again, and I knew I must go or suffer a beating. I took two backward steps towards the door. And then I found that Ralegh was looking at me. I was suddenly pinned there as if shot by an arrow.
“You go to join your playmates, boy?”
“No, sir,” I stammered. “ Leastwise not willingly. But I must—must go to bed.”
“Stay if you wish,” he said. “We are not talking secrets.”
So, very astonished, I stayed.
My grandmother looked at me once more, and I knew that sooner or later she would take it out of me for disobeying her.
But I had to wait until my fifteenth birthday before she paid me back.
Chapter Nine
On my fifteenth birthday my father apprenticed me as a clerk to his cousin, Mr Chudleigh Michell of Truro, who was a merchant and brother of the John Michell who had helped dispose of Captain Elliot’s haul.
“It is time you were striking out for yourself, boy,” he said staring at himself uneasily in his hand mirror. “ It will be of service to you, this experience; and who knows, you may make a niche for yourself there; he needs a handy boy to help him.”
I left Arwenack the following week. Little Odelia wept bitterly, and I was sad myself because it seemed the end of my childhood and the end of a phase of life. Chudleigh Michell was a thin sharp-nosed man with a pock-marked skin and rheumy eyes. His wife was deaf, though only 26, and the five children, the eldest barely seven years old, seemed to take advantage of her handicap by crying all the while. I had a garret under the eaves, and the house was so built that the wails of the babies rose up like the cries of lost lambs.
More than anything else in this changed life were the different noises and the different smells. At Arwenack one had grown accustomed to the smell of dogs and damp rushes and new bread and sour tallow and burning chestnut logs and sea breezes and salt air. In Truro the river smelt of mud and tar and rope, and the house of babies and urine, and the warehouse, which was really a part of the house; of woollen cloths and hides and wine. I heard less of the wind, and when it blew its voice was muted; and I heard much of running water, for a leat flowed under the house. The most unpleasing noise of all was of a founder in the house next door who cast candlesticks and copper chafing dishes, for after they had been cast he would turn them until they were smooth and bright, and the shrill scraping set one’s teeth on edge.
I had had the hope that to compensate for the change I might see something of Sue Farnaby, but my hours, which stretched from seven in the morning until nine at night with half an hour for dinner, left neither leisure nor energy to go far afield. Mostly my work was ledger work and copying in the office and handling the bales of cloth or the hides in the warehouse below. Chudleigh Michell exported coarse undyed woollen cloth and hides to Brittany and imported unsweetened wines in return. For a man of 35 who had begun from nothing he was doing well.
It was May before I had a day off—except for Sunday when church-going tied me close to St Mary’s—and I went at once to find the farm. First directions were quite wrong, for it was not by the river at all but in a fold of the hills behind St Clement’s Point. It was a poor place when I got there, muddy with recent rains, the track to it overgrown, the gates in need of repair. The woman who came to the door wiping her floury hands was lean enough and startlingly like Sue.
No, she was not Mrs Farnaby, she was Mrs Maris. No, the Farnabys no longer lived here: Mr Farnaby had died in March, and Mrs Farnaby had gone back to Tiverton to work for a cousin who was a lace-maker. No, Susanna had not gone with her; she had taken service at Tolverne, having been offered a place there as Elizabeth Arundell’s personal maid and companion.
I walked back to the town in some discomfort, for the name of Tolverne had come to have sinister meanings for me. It was a bad house, I thought, an unlucky, unhappy ho
use for Sue to be connected with. I remembered too what Belemus had said on the way home after the fight. “ Don’t you know that you have spent all afternoon enamouring with the little girl Thomas most fancies for himself?”
I saw nothing of my family and heard only from time to time of their doings; but I learned that my father had succeeded in selling Treworgan in spite of the claims of his creditors. It was the second manor he had had to sell within the year, and Chudleigh Michell was of the opinion that at least two more would have to go. I learned too of the great unpopularity of my Killigrew name. Over and over in the first half-year I saw the change in countenance that came over people when I told them. Almost always their first question was, ‘ From Arwenack?’ and if I answered yes, it was like confirming some mortal, affront.
The town of Truro, though it has grown in my lifetime, was then no more than six streets; but even those I hardly explored, being content to spend my few leisure minutes on the quay, which was built out on the tongue of land splitting the streams Allen and Kenwyn. It was early June before I wandered north of the town where one or two houses and shacks had begun to climb the dusty hill amidst the gorse bushes and the foxgloves and the litter of bluebells.
When I was clear of them I sat on a boulder and looked down on the roofs of the town from which a few lazy whorls of smoke curled upwards like a fire that is almost out. A woman with a dog was picking flowers among the stumps of trees to my right, and beyond her four men were cutting down another scrub oak.
One thing I greatly missed in my new life was the sense of being up with events. Ships were always putting in to the Fal with news which had not yet reached London—we were their first landfall—and the constant coming and going of people great and small with tidings from Court or from the Indies made Arwenack something of an exchange and a clearing house. Here in Truro I was cut off from everything but the gossip of the town.
I got up from the stone as the woman with the dog came towards me. It was Katherine Footmarker.
She had already seen me, so I could not turn away. “ Maugan Killigrew! I didn’t think to find you here!”
Perhaps it was the sun, but her sallow skin seemed to have flushed. She was wearing a cloak with the hood thrown back, and her hair was half down in a coil that disappeared under the cloak. Stumbling I explained.
“Well, so we are neighbours then, or more or less. I have a little place near the foot of the hill. Are you walking my way?”
It was hard to think of an excuse, so I turned and went with her. I felt again she had this spell over me, because sight of her had made my heart thump.
“After you played saviour to me I thought the mill might grow perilous with all your father’s strubbers roamin’ the countryside; so I came to Truro. Things would have gone hard with me here had I not been taken in by a friend, Mistress Larkin, who blows hot and cold in her friendship for me, and this, praise be, was one of the hot times. Alas, it was her last exercise in charity for in April she died, and I live in her property now, a small matter on sufferance—since it is not accorded a good sign that my friend should pass away so sudden—but at least I am not molested or have not been as yet. And there are enough brave folks in the district who will come and buy my simples.”
She asked about Arwenack and how Mrs Killigrew was; what my father had said when he came home. She asked why I had been apprenticed to a pinch-purse like Chudleigh Michell who must she thought have been pock-marked from birth as a prophecy of what he was to become. When we got to her house, which was a tiny cob cottage built for support between two trees, she said:
“Will you come in, Maugan?”
“I have to go back. I must be back by five.”
“Since we’re neighbours and strangers in this town, will you come and see me again some time?”
“… Mr Michell is strict about his hours.”
“I believe that …” She put her basket down. “These will cure warts, and, suitably mixed with other ingredients, will avert chill bladders, strangury and colic … D’you still think I am a witch, Maugan?”
I did not know where to look.
“My father was an apothecary,” she said. “I have cousins who are apothecaries still. But my father taught me more than he ever taught them. There are ways and wisdoms that can only be passed from man to woman and woman to man. He learned me these before he died. It is perhaps a small kind of magic; but I don’t think it is witchcraft. I don’t feel myself a witch. I fail utterly to fly or to change my shape. I have experimented to try to change Moses, here, into a toad, as I was accused of doing in Penryn, but again I failed. I don’t think you will come to harm associatin’ with me. I have never wantonly harmed anyone in my life, and I certainly would not harm you. If you are lonely ever or in need of help, will you come?”
“Yes.”
“After all,” she said, “I am in your debt. Never forget that.”
Perhaps I was more lonely than I knew, for I saw her again, once or twice by accident and then once or twice by design. Deep down I still did not know whose design it was, mine or hers—no more did I yet know whether I had released her at Arwenack of my own choice. But I found my visits a break from the monotony of book-keeping and letter copying. They helped to keep my wits alive.
She lent me books. The Most Pleasant History of Tom-a-Lincoln, the Red Rose Knight. The Noble Birth and Gallant Achievements of Robin Hood; in Twelve several Stories. These were books of a kind I had never seen in Arwenack, where all reading under Parson Merther was a drudgery. She lent me The Delightful History of Reynard the Fox and Reynardine his Son, every Chapter illustrated with a curious Device or Picture representing to the Eye all the material Passages. And she lent me The Compleat Book of Knowledge, compiled by Erra Pater, made English by W. Lilly, a heavy volume full of information on Astronomy, Medicine, Weather, History and Cooking.
With my twopence a week spending money I bought rushlights and read far into the night.
One day in her cottage I told her that the eldest Michell child had burnt her fingers on the stove and she said: “I’ll give you some salve to take back with you. It’s a simple diaculum and will take away the hurt. If you soothe the pain out of a wound it is halfway to healing.” She went to a shelf. “ Perhaps you’d like me to show you how I make it, then you can assure the Michells lest they think the ingredients unholy.”
“I have never told them I come here.”
“They’ll mislike it?”
“I don’t know.”
But I soon did know.
“Where?” said Mrs Michell cupping her ear. “Where did it come from? Who? Foot-what? Footmarker? … That woman! If she be a woman. No one be safe from her! Put that on my Emily’s fingers! Sooner I’d thrust ’em in the fire ’gain! Fire be where she did ought to be if Christian men and women knowed their duties! Toss ’n out of window, boy … Nay, nay, come to think on it, fire is best. Wait now while I stir ’n up, get a reg’lar blaaze. Now then, toss’n in.”
“There’s no harm to it,” I said. “I saw it mixed. It is all clean herbs, pounded and blent.”
“What say? What? Green? Clean? Clean! Naught can be clean that she’s touched! She’s supped wi’ the Devil, sure ’nough, and them as touches pitch … Throw it on the fire! Maugan, if I tell Mr Michell ’bout this …”
“You burn it if you want to,” I said.
“What? What’re ye mumbling for? Speak up. Here, if ye’re feared to do it I will!”
Mrs Michell picked up a pair of tongs and with them gingerly clasped the pot I had brought. She dropped it and it rolled under a chair, but with a cry of fright and rage she pursued it and caught it up again and at last dropped it into the fire. There it slowly turned black while the pot broke up and then suddenly flared into coloured flame.
“There!” she shouted in fear and triumph, waving the tongs in my face, while three of her babies cried piercingly. “There! What did I tell ee! Eh? What d’you say? Mr Michell shall ’ear of this!”
Chudleigh
Michell said cautiously, picking at a pimple on his cheek: “Not as we’ve proof positive against she, but tis dangerous work, Maugan, tampering wi’ such like. What I say is, them as is not against Satan is like to be for ’im. Witchcraft and such like is no call for ’alf measures, and Mrs Michell’s rightly afeared for the mites. Five little souls we got do to take chances, and I’ll thank you to keep away from such like. I’ve only had cause to beat you twice, Maugan, for lateness and such like; but this is devil’s work, and tis my duty not to spare the rod lest evil have got ’ee. Take off yer shirt.”
“Poor Maugan,” Mistress Footmarker said when I told her. “I am for even causin’ you trouble. So we’ll not meet again.”
“Oh, we’ll meet. But I fear for your books. I hide them under the bed, but sometimes he roams about late at night and he may surprise me.”
“I care nothing for books if they please you, but have a care for yourself. He has the cruel face of a weak man.”
“I must stay with him two years; then I shall be old enough to seek work in London.”
She said thoughtfully: “That may be best. That may well be for the best.”
I hesitated and then, because she had been much on my mind, spoke about Sue. Katherine Footmarker listened attentively while she stirred the fire, which was burning turf and only smouldering on that dark July day. Then I found I had to tell her about my quarrel with Thomas Arundell and my reasons for it.
She laughed harshly. “ So that was how you first came to me. But you’ll be much occupied, lad, if you try to kill every man who speaks the truth about your birth.”