The Grove of Eagles

  Having been helping with the cutting up and salting of a carcase, I washed my hands and arms at the pump outside and went through the house to my room. On the stairs I met Katherine Footmarker.

  In the half dark I thought she was some illusion of the rain-dripping windows.

  “So, Maugan Killigrew! … Well, lad, you’re back. I’m glad. Truly glad.” She spoke as if I were the visitor here.

  “Yes. How is it—”

  “You’ve not been to see me since you came safe home.”

  “It is only three months. What brings you here?”

  She laughed gently. “Your stepmother thinks I’ve a skill or two that’s useful.”

  “Mrs Killigrew invites you?”

  “She sent for me first when your sister Odelia had the quinsies, but I would not come on account your father was here. So I sent a syrup which I’m told gave her ease. Then after, I came when Mrs Killigrew had an ’ ailment, and again to see little Peter. It surprises you?”

  I did not know what to say.

  “Peter’s sick again,” she said. “He has the autumn fever. But I tell Mrs Killigrew to save her fears for others. He shivers and quivers, in every wind, but he’s like to out-see you all.”

  It was on my tongue to tell her of the salve I had made for Mariana’s scald.

  “Does my father know you come?”

  She shrugged. “There’s servants here who rail at me comin’, and one or another may drop the word. It’s no concern of mine”

  “But you would not come when he’s here?”

  “I don’t like your father’s ways. I believe the Killigrews have no good destiny here, and he is sealin’ it. Each time I come it’s like a clenched fist over this house. It slopes, Maugan. The whole house slopes towards the pit!”

  She seemed herself a part of what she prophesied, a bird of ill-omen napping its wings in the dark.

  “Take care for yourself,” she said. “ I told you there was blood on your hands.”

  I stared down stupidly, thinking for a moment she meant from the carcase of the animal we had just slaughtered.

  “There’s blood on each hand,” she said, “and I’m none too sure Otho Kendall’s is marked on either. But it’s a warning. Follow not your father, lad. You’ve better things in you than to become one of his bullies. And as for women, the way for your happiness is not to pull down any maid within reach of your fingers, as your father did and I hear you’re doin’, but to live for one or two. Each bauble you seize and throw off tarnishes and debases what you can feel for the others. Love is like gold, it should be spent in sum and not frittered away.”

  That she was talking in such ignorance of the truth set all my anger alight. “I’ve a life to live, and how I spend it’s of concern only to me! I’m part Killigrew and I owe all to my father! If I can give him some service I shall do it. As for women … that’s my concern too, isn’t it?”

  She swung her scarlet stringed bag gently back and forth.

  “Well, I see there’s been a change in you, Maugan, and that in less than a year.”

  “Don’t come here again. If you’re against my father you’re against us all.”

  “That’s not true, boy. I’m not against your father. I’m ‘against’ no one. I see trouble comin’ to this house as rain comes with a cloud. That don’t mean I shout welcome to it. I speak warnin’. If you’ve no time or patience to heed it, more’s the pity.”

  “There’ll be less trouble with you out of it.”

  She put her hand on my arm; I tried to shake it off but it had a firm grip.

  “In Truro we were friends. Who’s slid poison in your veins?” She peered more closely. “Ah … I remember. You were sighin’ for that girl … How’s she done you ill?”

  I shook her hand off at last.

  She said: “I’ve many cures, but not for the one that ails you now. Time only can help. But remember that if one man robs you it don’t make all the world a thief. Nor one woman neither.”

  “Keep your advice.”

  I saw she was suddenly angry.

  “As for me staying away from Arwenack,” she said, “ I’ll see you damned ere I do that! So long as your stepmother calls me, I’ll come. I have a finger in this house, lad, and not you nor your father shall root it out. I give you warning of it!”

  She brushed past me. I almost laid hands on her, but something held me back, some old awe. I watched her till she was out of sight. Then I went on clumsily, noisily, up the stairs.

  I began to want Meg Levant. I wanted her not out of love, not at first wholly from desire, but out of seeming black-minded misery and frustration. Because of loyalty to Sue I’d rejected Mariana; because the alarm was raised I had been robbed of Sibylla. I had no hard thoughts for Dick Stable; everyone liked him; but I was in the mood to ignore the feelings of others. If he could not keep a pretty girl content for six months of marriage then he should not be surprised if another tried.

  With some cunning I changed my attitude to Meg. I began to use her with a respect which I saw she at once appreciated. I did not hurry; there was time. I contrived to meet her once by the castle steps when she was coming back from an errand there, so we walked home together. I was carrying a copy of The Noble Birth and Gallant Achievements of Robin Hood— it was Katherine Foomarker’s book which had never been returned—and on the way I suggested we sat on the stile and she could listen to the first of the twelve adventures. She sat very quiet all through the reading. A week later I did the same again; and when this was over suggested she should try to find an errand to come this way each Wednesday to listen to the rest. She looked at me out of her long hazel eyes, but did not say either yes or no.

  The next Wednesday she was not there, but I said nothing when we met in the house. I kept to my new civility and left things to simmer. The following Wednesday she was there, and, as it was raining we sheltered in the granite look-out which was at the narrowest part of the land. When the third chapter was finished she stretched as if coming out of a dream.

  “Laws, tis all very strange. Is it all true, d’ye think, all this trade about Friar Tuck and Maid Marion and the rest? Did they ever live?”

  “Surely they lived. Doesn’t it speak of King John?”

  “I wish I was like Maid Marion,” she said, pulling at a thread in her skirt. “I wish I was a man or could dress like a man …”

  “You did once.”

  “When?” she looked at me. “ Oh … that were in a play, in jest. Tedn the same ’tall.”

  “Meg,” I said, “what did you do with the stockings?”

  “Those? Oh, I still have ’em. But I wore them last Christmas and tored a hole in ’em. They’re mended, but I couldn’t get the right colour o’ wool.”

  “I never gave you a wedding gift. When next I’m in Truro I’ll buy you another pair.”

  For a few long seconds she looked through the rain towards the house. “Can’t you get a good view from here! Tis as good or betterer’n from your father’s window.”

  “Would you like that?”

  “I might like it but Dick might not.”

  “Dick would never know. He does not see all you wear.”

  She giggled slightly. “Aye, that’s true.”

  “Meg, I’ll buy you two pair, one red pair, one green—on a condition.”

  “What?”

  “That you let me put ’em on for you.”

  She went a sudden blushing scarlet. “Really, Maugan!” She stood up. “ What d’ye think I am—a common quean? Well … my life … tis too insulting of you. I thought you’d mended your ways—”

  “So I have.”

  “So you have not—”

  “I’ve mended my ways because I don’t joke with you, Meg. It’s dead serious.”

  “Then all the more shame!—”

  “D’you truly think so? But I’ve a great taking for you, Meg. I mean it not rudely but as a compliment.”

  She stared down at me, angry and flushed of face. Then,
as usual with Meg, she saw the comic side of it and burst out laughing.

  “Well, you’re some caution, boy. My blessed angels! Is this how you went on in Spain?”

  “No. For I saw no one there I liked so much as you.”

  “Then you learned it from that rig, Sibylla Kendall.”

  “No, I did not, I learned it from no one and have never asked it of no one else in my life.”

  “Oh!” She swung away, her hair shaking loose under its coif. “I’ll leave you here wi’ your lewd thoughts. I believe twas all a put-on to mock me.”

  “No mocking. Think it over, Meg.”

  “That I shall not,” she said, and left me.

  The next day it came on to blow from the south-west. There were those in the house who said the sea had been calling for three days. It blew a gale out of the south-west, piling the sea up in mountains on the rocks, scattering twigs and branches over our roofs and plucking thatches off the barns. Two fishing boats which should have come back to Penryn never came back, and a barque was blown on the rocks of Pennance Point and was lost with all hands. As soon as the news of this came a party of us went to see if we could help, but although the point was sheltered from the worst of the gale, there was little to be done. The bay was tossing and seeming with a tangle of rigging and spars, and all the sea rolled yellow with the cargo of corn. As the tide fell we picked up a dead sailor on the sand, then two lifting and falling in a pool stained red and still encroached on by the sea; then found one so wedged under a rock that no leverage would release him. A dozen spars, an old chest and a few lengths of sailcloth were worth salvaging, but it was uncomfortable work, for the wind was shifting north and the rain fell continuously and ever colder. When we reached home, soaked and tired and ready for a swig of brandy, we heard that another ship, an Irish ketch called Kinsale, had run for shelter into the Fal, both her masts spent and her captain lost. The mate, a man called Garvie, had already come up to Arwenack and was full of his woes and a good deal of usquebah. Temporary repairs, he said, would take ten days, and he might have to sell some of the cargo to pay for them. The ketch, he said, was the property of two brothers called Ferguson who lived in Dublin, but until he reached there he must act on his own authority.

  When he had gone grumbling off, mopping his flat face with a red kerchief, I said to Belemus: “ What did he say she carried?”

  “You heard. Unsweetened wine, with some Holland cloth and silks and perfume, from Bordeaux to Dublin. She is sailing under French letters of marque, which I find a little strange. I have a thought she may be doing a little privateering on the side.”

  “I have thought we might think so.”

  Belemus looked at me. “Were you in mind to interfere?”

  “Not with the wine.”

  Belemus always opened his mouth wide to laugh. “ I believe the Spaniards changed your soul while you were out there and sent you back with another man’s. The Maugan of other years is still languishing in some Friar’s prison in Madrid.” “He died,” I said, but did not specify when.

  That evening after supper we took Long Peter and Tom Bewse, the head falconer, and Dick Stable, and set out in the small Killigrew pinnace for Penryn. Even the river had choppy waves on it, but it took us only a few minutes to reach the shelter of Penryn Creek. There we soon picked out the Kinsale, a vessel of maybe 80 tons. She was in a sorry state, but so far as could be seen there was no one aboard her as she creaked gently at her ropes. Laughter and loud voices echoed along the quay from Piper’s Tavern, and no doubt Cox’s round the corner was busy too.

  A rat was nosing among the nets at the end of the pier. Lights from the cottages showed pools of water among the great uneven slabs of granite which made up the quay. We shipped our oars and rubbed up against the side of the Kinsale as gently as a cat making friends.

  Altogether we took out 16 bolts of Holland cloth, 19 bales of silk and twelve boxes of perfume. This was all the cargo we could get at without taking the ship apart. We had not the space or the time to unload the wine, and in any case the bulk was too great to handle unless we stole the ship as well.

  So in two hours we rowed slowly and heavily home.

  None of our booty, I decided, should go into the house. As it was unloaded from the pinnace the stuff was piled in the grass in front of the tower facing the harbour. There Long Peter and Tom Bewse had mules and horses assembled. The cloths, the silks, the scents were slung over the withers of the animals and by the early hours of the morning a train had left for Truro. Belemus went with it. I stayed behind. I did not know what the outcome would be, and I was curious to discover it.

  Chapter Three

  Three days later my grandmother sent for me.

  I seldom went or was invited into her chamber, which was the finest in the house because she had refused to vacate it in favour of her son when my grandfather died. Each time I went in I was impressed by the richness of the bed hangings, by the arras with the scenes of the Nativity and the Passion wrought upon it, by the Turkey carpet beside the bed. She once told me that these were things she had brought with her marriage portion, but so unblemished were they that I could hardly believe it. What gave credence to such a claim was my grandmother’s intense care of anything personal to herself. She used as expendable anything in the house except those things which were actually her own.

  When I went in this November day in 1594 I remember being impressed by something else for the first time: the close disagreeable smell of an old woman near to her term, and the noise of her breathing which sang its own tuneless swan-song.

  But there was no sign of any change in Lady Killigrew’s outlook on life. She knew all she wanted and wanted all she knew.

  “Maugan, I hear of another robbery in Penryn Creek.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Two or three nights gone it happened. A ketch had run in for succour.”

  “Do you know who robbed it?”

  “I think it better not to guess, ma’am.”

  Lady Killigrew coughed. “ Silk was stolen, they say, and cloth and perfume. Where is it now?”

  “What, ma’am?”

  “Do not fence with me, boy. What have you done with the stuff?”

  I glanced at the door. “It is all with—it is all in safe hands.”

  “Where?”

  “In Truro with John Michell.”

  Diamonds winked as she fumbled restlessly with the sheet, for she was never without her rings in bed. “What have you kept here?”

  “Nothing, ma’am.”

  “Nothing! How dare you! Was it good perfume? And silk too? I—”

  “Who told you, ma’am?”

  “God damn you, boy, think you I have no eyes or ears?” She paused to get her breath. “Who instructed you to convey it to Michell with such speed?”

  “No one, ma’am. It was a precaution. What is not in this house can never be connected with this house.”

  She stared at me with utter contempt. “ Think you Arwenack could be searched?”

  It came to me then that, just as my father clung to habits and attitudes now going out of date, my grandmother lived even more firmly in a world that was past. Mr Killigrew on his feckless course had intimations enough of danger; from time to time he lifted his head and looked uneasily about. But Lady Killigrew, perhaps because she was of a generation earlier, never questioned the grandeur and safety of her position and name. What she said was of course still true: Arwenack could not be searched. It never had been. But with open defiance of the law the risk would grow. To me the solution was a simple one. Defiance of the law could well continue but it must be more carefully contrived.

  I realised she was shouting at me. “You’d neither right nor leave to order this to be done! Who gave you leave?”

  “The mate of the Kinsale has already been here complaining,” I said sulkily. “There is commotion in Penryn. Nothing now could be moved. But there is no need: it was all gone before the alarm was raised.”

  “In future, Maugan, come to
me before you take decisions on yourself. My sister and I always have first pick of any cloths or jewellery that come in.”

  She began to cough again, and this time could not stop. Her long pale face crimsoned with the strain, the old veins bunched at temple and at neck; she sat up and shook convulsively. As the spasm went on she became less the tall lean fierce woman I had known all my life and instead was just an animal fighting for life and breath. Her eyes ran, her bottom lip stuck out quivering, her long broken teeth were parted in a snarl.

  I patted her on the back, I brought water for her to sip. It seemed that no human frame, especially an old one, could endure the strain, and I thought she would die.

  But at length the spasm began to subside, and finally nothing was left but the old tired wheezing of the lungs. She looked up at me with no more favour in her eye than before the attack began.

  She said: “ When—I die, boy—when I die, then you shall draw the shroud over me as you will. But so long as I occupy this bed, this room, this house, then direction as to the affairs of the house come from me—they do not originate in your mind. Understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She wiped her cheeks with a square of silk. “ I shall tell your father and ask him to punish you … But perhaps you do not care. You are young. Anything can be borne when you are young; nothing when you are old.”

  “May I go now, ma’am?”

  “Nothing when you are old, Maugan! D’you hear me?” She was shouting again.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But you do not understand! You don’t listen! Why should you even try? … People talk of the consolations of age … They do not exist.” Her fingers went slowly along the sheet, creasing it into a ridge, the nails leaving a line on the linen. “They do not exist. It is not just illness, infirmity, loss of husband and old friends, loneliness, the contempt of younger generations—it is not just these things.” She coughed again but this time checked it. “Age does not only take away the things one prizes, one by one; it takes away the sweet taste of life itself. Understand: the sweet taste. When you are young all sensations have savour, all the fruits are for plucking. In age one by one the fruits begin to lose relish. At first that does not matter; there are always new ones to try: but quickly, oh so quickly, the new ones pall and fade and turn pulpy like the others. The flowers droop as soon as picked. Are you listening?”