The Grove of Eagles

  “Whom I helped to condemn,” said Sir Anthony.

  “All the more reason why you should not condemn yourself.”

  “All the more reason why I should, if that’s what you call condemnation.”

  Sir Francis gave a slight shrug, and glanced round the table. Is this, his glance said, a man incapable of ordering his own affairs?

  “Father,” Thomas said, “you’ve no right to imperil the inheritance of your children. We have our own lives to live. Look at the Tregians, the Beckets, the Tremaynes and all the rest—beggared and imprisoned, their estates seized and their prospects ruined. That’s well enough if they’re all of one mind. We are not.”

  “Nor are we all of yours, Thomas!” Elizabeth burst out shrilly.

  “Ah, well, you have been influenced, bewitched by all these priests—”

  “Silence!” said Lady Arundell suddenly. “I will not have my children talk in such a way! Francis … Thomas has presumed on an over-kindly upbringing to disgrace himself by speaking against his father. He exceeded his rights by sending for you. You are welcome, of course, but …”

  “I think Thomas has some right on his side,” said Sir Francis quietly. “I would disown a son who behaved as he has done, but I pray I should never give him such reason. Is it true, Anthony, that you have been disposing of lands and farms to give the money to the priests that pass this way?”

  That word had been spoken again—and this time not by an angry boy.

  “The money is my own to do with as I will.”

  “Some must be held in jointure with my sister. She brought you property worth £1,000 a year.”

  “It has not been touched. My mother, who was Margaret Chambond of Launcells, left each of her children personal property, and it is that which I have sold.”

  Elizabeth was opposite me. She was not a pretty girl but she had grown quickly to womanhood in the last year. She was wearing a severe frock of brown velvet with a doublet like a man’s but with much longer points. It was suddenly as if her bodice was too tight. She put her hand up to her throat, trying to loose the standing collar. She wrenched it open and pulled out the chain about her throat. On its end was a gold crucifix.

  She said in a loud broken voice: “Holy Mary, Blessed Virgin, Blessed Mother of Christ, pray for me!” and burst into tears. Then she pushed back her chair and ran from the room.

  Both Sir Anthony and Godfrey Brett crossed themselves at her words. You could hear her feet clattering, down the stone passage towards the other stairs. A servant came in bringing more claret wine. We all waited in silence until he had gone.

  As the door closed Thomas began to speak, but this time it was Sir Francis who waved him impatiently to silence.

  “My brother—for so you have been by marriage for twenty-eight years—my brother, your life is your own to do with as you will, and I have long held you in esteem. But there is a point at which it is the duty of every Englishman to take issue with you. It is especially my duty as a Deputy Lieutenant of the county. In harbouring Jesuit priests from Rheims and Douai you are guilty of a treachery against the realm. Byreceiving them, by sheltering them, by dispensing money to them, you are furthering the interests of Spain and making more possible the conquest of this country—with all that would follow. Whatever you may feel, I must arrest this man and deliver him in custody to the Sheriff.”

  Sir Anthony made some convulsive movement as if trying to stand up, but all he did was upset a goblet which rolled across the table spilling the dregs of red wine on the cloth.

  “So that’s it, eh? That’s why you come to call attended by no fewer than four personal servants. And do you intend to arrest me also?”

  “This man is your secretary, no more you say so yourself. Culpable fault need not attach to you. You were mistaken in the man, that’s all.”

  “And, having discovered my mistake, I am to denounce him? Oh, no, Francis. The spirit of Cuthbert Mayne, the first martyr in this holy war, will see that I don’t do that. I will go in chains with Brett, make no mistake. Even to the rack.”

  “You need denounce no one,” said Sir Francis, “only keep silent for the sake of your family.”

  With unsteady hands Lady Arundell picked up the overturned goblet. She did not look at her husband.

  “Sir,” said Godfrey Brett, “ I have a suggestion to make.”

  Everyone looked suddenly at him, at his narrow ascetic face, at his deep-set unyielding eyes. He too was now fingering a crucifix.

  “Well?”

  “I think you are reckoning without me. That would be a mistake.”

  “We are reckoning that you will soon have lost your power to harm, to corrupt, to subvert. That is the important thing.”

  “I have not lost my power to harm this household, though it is the last thing I would wish to do. Others have passed through Tolverne before me. One at least-—Humphry Petersen—was caught and put to the question. He gave away no secrets even to the end. It would be unwise to suppose that I would be so brave.”

  Sir Francis Godolphin pushed aside a candlestick so that he could see the other man more clearly. “ Explain yourself.”

  “I have a mission, Sir Francis. You have a mission. We meet, by misfortune, under the root of a common friend. That constrains us both. If I am caught here or hereabouts I shall necessarily implicate Tolverne and those in it. Sir Anthony, as you see, will not deny his part, so you cannot help but cause his family’s ruin.”

  “And your suggestion?”

  “My suggestion is that I leave tomorrow unimpeded by you. Twenty-four hours afterwards you come to seek me. By then I shall be well away from here; if I am caught there will be no need even to mention the name of Arundell.”

  The grease had spilled with the movement of the candlestick and was running down the brass base. Sir Francis turned to his brother-in-law.

  “You see, Anthony, how your secretary thinks first of his own skin.”

  “That is untrue,” said Godfrey Brett. “We all come prepared for martyrdom, but only as a final resort. It is our duty to do our utmost to avoid it—especially when it would involve others of the true faith. It’s a simple bargain I’m offering you.”

  “Bargain!” shouted Thomas. “ D’you think we should—”

  “Silence!” said Sir Francis. “… And how do we know that if you are caught later you will not betray your patron when put to the question?”

  “I cannot promise you that,” said Brett; “for we none of us know our own endurance. But I can promise you that I would rather die. Therefore that way you have much to gain. If I am taken here you are lost already.”

  “And if you evade us, as you clearly hope to, then another spy remains in England to spread blasphemy and treason and perhaps assassination!”

  Brett inclined his head. “ It is a risk. You must weigh the advantages of one course against another.”

  Sir Anthony said gently; “ Godfrey, I don’t like this talk. I’m not afraid of prison or shackles or disgrace. Our blessed Lord suffered more than we ever shall. It is an honour to follow in His footsteps. Let us be taken together.”

  Brett patted his hand. It was a gesture very out of place in a secretary. “We have not only ourselves to think of, sir. We have to consider our loved ones, our cause, the greater good. It is only considering the greater good that constrains me to make this bargain with my enemies.”

  Sir Francis poured himself a half glass of wine. It was a first sign of a lessening tension. “Are you an Oxford man?” he asked.

  Brett inclined his head. “Yes, sir.”

  “You argue like one. And seem to have given my brother a like disease.” Sir Francis carefully ignored Thomas and looked over his head at Lady Arundell. “I exceed my duty if I agree to this, Anne, I do indeed. No doubt there are hot-heads here who are for immediate action; but I think this proposition should be considered. It might well be considered until the morning.”

  Chapter Six

  I awoke thinking at first th
at I had dreamed the noise, that someone was slamming a door in my face. Then I heard voices, someone screaming for help.

  I was afoot at once, struggling into my slops, and had passed through Thomas’s room while he was still shaking the sleep out of his eyes.

  On the front landing was a light. The wide banisters of the stairs threw bars on the panelled walls from the single candle burning in the well of the hall. Elizabeth was down there, fully dressed, bending over a crumpled cloak. As I slithered down, bare feet slipping on the polished oak, I saw that beside her was the fallen figure of Sir Anthony.

  When she saw me she stopped calling and trying to raise him. “Maugan! He fell! I think he’s … Maugan, he fell from half way up. I—I was behind him but I could not catch him …”

  Sir Anthony was still breathing but in the flickering light his face was soap-grey and very old. As I tried to drag him into a better position others of the family came including servants, and presently he was lifted and carried back to his chamber. There he lay stertorous, a trickle of saliva damping the corner of his mouth, while talk and argument eddied over him.

  Elizabeth’s story was that she had been awakened by her father who had told her to dress and come downstairs, as he had a message for her to take. It was only when Thomas pointed out that Godfrey Brett was not roused and they went to his chamber and found the bed empty that she burst into tears and told the truth. Sir Anthony had not fallen on the way downstairs: he had fallen backwards as he was going up after seeing Godfrey on his best horse and away.

  “So!” shouted Thomas. “The rat’s gone! By morning he’ll be half across Cornwall! But if he’s taken Hilary she’s a distinctive mare and maybe we can trace him. Come, Uncle, what did I say? If we leave now we might even catch up with him before he leaves the woods!”

  “No,” said Sir Francis. “ Leave him go.”

  “But—”

  “Leave him go. The bargain that he made still stands. But I did not expect that he would run tonight. I thought his courage would have stuck till morning.”

  “It was not that way,” said Elizabeth, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “ It was my father who insisted he should go at once. It was against his own wishes that Godfrey Brett left.”

  As they discussed it I stepped back, feeling myself an intruder in this scene. I pictured Godfrey Brett spurring towards Truro, looking for the next family who would hide him. There were others, no doubt, and plenty.

  Old Henry, one of the ostlers, was brought in and stared helplessly at the sick man. He fingered the livid bruise at the side of Sir Anthony’s neck and said in a whining voice that he would draw off blood to give the Master some easement.

  Gertrude Arundell, Jonathan’s wife, came to stand beside me as he began. She too had gone thinner this summer; at sixteen she looked mature. Then I saw her glance towards the door and draw in a sharp breath; Godfrey Brett was standing beside Elizabeth.

  The only sound for some moments was the drip of blood into the bowl.

  Sir Francis straightened up. “ Well, sir, did your horse go lame?”

  “Yes,” said Brett, and came into the room. “Yes, sir, it was lamed by the sound of a fall as I was crossing the yard to the stables. So it never started. I have been waiting in Sir Anthony’s study until Miss Elizabeth brought me word. It seems that my old friend is mortal sick.”

  “I think he has had an apoplexy.”

  “Then he will need me.”

  “You came back at your own peril.”

  “We do all things, sir, at our own peril. It is man’s privilege and destiny.” He walked to the bed.

  By the morning Sir Anthony had come round, but he could not speak and lay listlessly, eyes dulled under the white brows; but now and then a gleam of intelligence showed, like someone coming to a window and peering through the shutter. Lady Arundell and Godfrey Brett never left him.

  Towards evening the sick man recovered enough to know what was being said to him and to nod emphatically when Brett asked if he should administer extreme unction. Only Lady Arundell stayed in the room while the anointing was performed; later when others went in it was possible to see a dampness round Sir Anthony’s eyelids. Shortly afterwards he relapsed into a state of coma. When you passed the door of his room you could hear the slow heavy snore of a dying man.

  He lasted through the night. I half expected Brett to make good his escape this time, now that all that could be done had been done, but he was still there when dawn broke.

  It was a warm heavy day. The trees had encroached on the house in the last two years; the gardens were neglected and flies hovered over rotted branches and damp ferns. Foxgloves and nettles and brambles fought for light and sun under the silent-trees. When one opened the window there was no fresh air, only a smell of dank vegetation and the buzzing of flies and bees. It had rained again in the night.

  About seven the family was called to the bedroom. Sir Anthony’s eyes were open and he had stopped snoring. Godfrey Brett stood by the bed holding a crucifix for him to see. Thomas stood by the window, his faint shadow darkening the floor.

  After a while the dying man moved his head an inch to take in the people about him. Brett was intoning in Latin. Sir Anthony raised a hand—and made a gesture which might have been the sign of the cross. Outside rooks cawed in the tall cypress trees. The hand came slowly to rest and the mouth slowly opened, the lips parting reluctantly as if stuck with glue; the head rolled.

  Thomas uttered a strange noise at the window. I do not know if it was grief, or if it was satisfaction at being one step nearer his inheritance.

  To arrest Godfrey Brett at once was now the obvious course, since Sir Anthony would no longer suffer from the disclosure. Thomas was all for seeing it done. Sir Francis hesitated.

  Thomas said they now had nothing to fear from an inquiry, his father had not been in his right mind when employing this man; no one could prove otherwise; no one else was to blame; Brett could hurt no one. Thomas further argued that there was now more danger in letting him go since, if he was later caught, he could accuse not Sir Anthony but Sir Francis Godolphin of abetting his entry into the kingdom. What high officer responsible to the Queen would dare to give such a man his freedom? Or suppose Brett got clear away, how would everyone feel then? Sir Francis rubbed his grey beard.

  I do not know if consideration for Brett’s decision to stay and be with Sir Anthony to the end had any bearing on Sir Francis’s doubt. Largely I think it was still consideration for the house of Tolverne. If an inquiry were ever held, the house and its occupants, even if cleared, would remain under a cloud. And Jonathan, now head of it, was not a man to bear, up stoutly under disgrace. There was a frailty in him, a lack of conviction, which would stand him in ill stead before a court of inquiry. Then there was Elizabeth, a convinced Catholic now and in a hysterical frame of mind. Even Lady Arundell, with her attachment for her late husband and in early bereavement, might not stand up well.

  Because there was no further excuse to stay, I left before a decision was come to. But I learned later that Sir Francis with typical discretion had found a middle way. He kept Brett under house arrest for four days until after the funeral, and in the meantime set afoot discreet inquiries in Truro. Two days after Sir Anthony was borne to his last resting place in Philleigh Church, where he still lies, a Breton vessel, the Violette, of 40 tons, bound from Truro to Dieppe with a cargo of uncoloured woollen cloth, took in sail at Tolverne Pool just long enough for a row boat, which had been loitering in her path, to put aboard one tall black-clad Catholic who temporarily was to be allowed to be neither missionary nor martyr. I understand that Brett took it calmly, as he took most things calmly in his dedicated life. It was no policy of the Counter-Reformation to sacrifice its sons without good cause.

  Mistress Alice Arundell now lived at Tregony, so it was scarcely out of my way to call first at the farm in the hills behind St Clement’s Point. It was raining hard and blowing, on the first of August, 1594. As I rode Copley up
the last ridge to the farm, his hooves were squelching in brown mud. The trees on the other side of the river near Malpas were hung with a widow’s veil of rain. I had passed field after field in which the corn was beaten flat; sheep huddled for protection under dripping and waving trees; cattle hung their heads; here and there men and women worked about the barns, sacks over shoulders and tied round legs; it rained as if it would never stop.

  At the first gate a dog barked savagely and Copley reared, but I made peace with the mongrel and we plodded together up the squelching track to the front door of the farm. I knocked and waited. My heart was thumping. Water dripped off my hat, off the thatch above the door, off Copley’s saddle, off the mongrel’s slimy muzzle.

  A woman came to the door wiping her floury hands. It was exactly what she had done last time I had called.

  “Mistress Maris? You remember me? I came to see you a year last May. I have called to see Sue. My name is Maugan Killigrew.”

  I forgot that the last time I had not told her that. But the name seemed to convey nothing to her.

  “Sue? She’s not here. She’s in Paul.”

  “In Paul? Near Penzance?”

  “Yes,”

  Mrs Maris was of a sudden involved in keeping the mongrel out of the house. It had tried to slip in unobserved but she saw it and blocked it first with her foot and then with her hand. There was a struggle, and then she grabbed the animal by the tail and turned it and thrust it out. It slunk off down the path, and Mrs Maris, breathing hard, straightened up to regard me again. She did not ask me in.

  “Why has she gone to Paul?” I asked.

  “Why not? That’s where she lives now. She’s wed. Did you not know?”

  So I saw the inside of the Maris farm after all. She was not unkind when she saw I was ill and took me in and gave me a cup of buttermilk.

  It was a small poor room with a low ceiling heavy-beamed so that one could barely stand upright, and on this dark day and with the small windows overgrown it was twilight at noon.