The Grove of Eagles

  “I don’t see it,” said my father.

  “Others see it.”

  My father took out his pocket mirror and began to turn up the ends of his moustache. “ Presently. In good time.”

  “Who is my mother, sir?” I asked.

  “You see,” said Lady Killigrew.

  “Your mother, boy, has gone to make one of the blest above. She did so at your birth. Who she was is neither here nor there. Be content that I am your father.”

  Lady Killigrew said: “Many a lad has fended for himself before he was Maugan’s age. You have a young multiplying family of your own, John. Saplings grow frail if they are overshadowed by taller trees.”

  Later that night I heard them talking about Ralegh. Henry Knyvett said he was over-proud and contemptuous sitting so silent over supper as if no one here were good enough to mix with him.

  “I am not so sure it was that,” said my father. “He was angry at having raised this expedition and commissioned its crews and part financed it, men to be deprived of the leadership and ordered to return to court so soon as he saw the expedition properly under way.”

  “When did he tell you that?” asked Lady Killigrew sharply.

  “Just as he was leaving. Frobisher is to follow and take over command in his stead. With Essex in some disgrace Walter is now supreme with the Queen, and she wants him home. But it is a tight-rope he walks with such a changeable woman.”

  “I would have his tight-rope if it were offered to me,” said Henry Knyvett, picking his teeth.

  My grandmother’s son by her first marriage was a ramshackle man of nearly fifty with a long nose and a receding profile. He walked as if there was water in his joints, and always wore a skull cap at meals to prevent his hair falling in his food. Things were never easy between him and Mr Killigrew.

  “Oh, you are all for Ralegh,” Mr Knyvett said, “ but we know he is the best hated man in London, and I could give more than several reasons why. He has pulled himself up from nothing by his own shoe-laces. He is a near-convicted atheist and a blasphemer. Now he lives richly in wine patents and cloth licences, domineers over the Queen as Captain of her Guard, and treats ordinary men as if they were dirt under his feet! D’you suppose he is disappointed to be deprived of a chance to fight the Spaniards? I do not. He gets all the Spanish adventures he wants in the Queen’s bedchamber.”

  “Envious tongues will always twist the courses of a man’s rise,” said my father. “He has done much for the tinners of this country and none could be more popular with them. As for him domineering the Queen, if you’d seen so much of her as I have you’d know better man to suppose any man is her master. She pulls the strings and others dance. Believe me.”

  All June was supreme, with no rain and gentle warm sea-breezes. It was the last fine summer for several years.

  Half a mile from our gates, and on the river bank near the town of Penryn, was the old Collegiate Church of St Thomas of Glasney. In my great-grandfather’s time, when England was Catholic, this had been the centre of church life for all the far west. The establishment had been large and wealthy, with a refectory, a chapter house, dormitories for the canons, a hospital, many outbuildings. Now, except for the church, it was in ruins. Of the college chapel, dedicated to Thomas à Becket, only the tower stood. When you walked through the cloisters you could see how roofs had been robbed of their lead, stones carried away to make farmers’ walls, windows broken, coloured glass stolen, doors prised off their hangings.

  Even many of the big paving stones had gone, and nettles and cow parsley and vipers bugloss grew rankly in their place.

  We children did not often go there: it was too near Penryn, and the Killigrews were not popular in Penryn. But on the rising ground above the ruins was a windmill which had been used by the monks for grinding corn. This had been taken over first by one and then another of the millers of Penryn; but it was known to bring bad luck, and the last man to use it had hanged himself from the great beam. Now it had been allowed to fall into ruin like the college buildings, and a witch lived there called Katherine Footmarker. She was a woman who had been driven out of Penryn for having turned a neighbour’s pet into a toad, but here in this ruin she had been allowed to live, partly because of men’s fear of her, partly because she was known to be able to cure cattle and sheep of the murrain, and the evil she did was suffered for the good.

  Although the Arwenack children were terrified of her, we were drawn sometimes towards the mill by the attraction of the forbidden and the dangerous, and twice we had seen her, a woman as tall and thin as my grandmother, walking with long strides through the bracken, once with a jackdaw on her shoulder, once followed by a black dog, which Belemus swore was no dog at all. We would have thrown stones at her if we had dared.

  I had in the last year grown fond, perhaps over-fond, of Meg Levant the serving maid. Sometimes around eleven in the morning I would sidle into one of the smaller kitchens where I knew I would find her helping to get our dinner. She would be cleaning the trenchers or scouring the knives—often I would steal a piece or two of marchpane to keep my stomach quiet. She was a jolly girl of 17, soft and pretty and auburn haired, and it was good to be in her company after the solemnities of Parson Merther. In the evenings too in the summer after prayers there was a half-hour before we had to be abed, and I would help her get the candles and the snuffers ready.

  One evening I said to her: “Who was my mother, Meg?”.

  She stared at me as if I had asked her the riddle of the Sphinx. “Your mother, Master Maugan? How should I know?”

  “You’re older than I am. You’ve been here for years. Someone must have whispered it to you.”

  “Why should they?”

  “Servants talk. What do the other servants say?”

  “Have a care for that candle: you know your grandmother won’t abide a crooked one … The servants say you was brought here as a mite a few months old. Your foster-nurse was old Sarah Amble who took the dropsy three years gone. You should’ve asked her while she was here to answer.”

  “D’you swear you do not know?”

  “If twas my way to swear, I’d swear, but since it isn’t I won’t. Now, out of my light, boy, or Rosewarne will be after us both.”

  I barred her passage. “Who would know, Meg?”

  She frowned and looked me over. “How you d’ grow. You’ll be more longer than me afore Christmas. Dare you not ask your father?”

  “I asked him but he wouldn’t say.”

  “Maybe tis a secret best kept.”

  “Not from me. Who else would know?”

  “I’ll think on it an’ tell you.”

  “Think now.”

  She tried to push me out of her way. I put my hands under her armpits. She squeaked petulantly. “ Don’t touch me that way! If someone catches you you’ll be for a thrashing.”

  “It would be worth it.”

  She looked at me sidelong and picked up a large bracket sconce which held five tall tallow candles for the kitchen. “Saucy. If you’re so curious and so brave, why not go and ask Katherine Footmarker?”

  I let her pass then. “ She would know? Really? You truly think so?”

  Meg looked back. “If she did not she would know who to ask.”

  At the end of the month my father’s younger brother Simon and his wife and two children came to spend a long summer holiday with us, as they usually did when there was plague in the capital. Simon was a lively man, hearty and noisy, and when he was on a visit he and my father would spend endless hours dicing together, or, when they could persuade Henry Knyvett to join them, Gleek. He and my other uncle, Thomas, were in some way attached to the court. Unlike my father’s uncles, William and Sir Henry, they seemed not to have any precise appointments, but they lived well and kept their creditors at arm’s length.

  Simon brought us news that Ralegh had secretly married one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour and in due time had confessed his error to the Queen. A week later he and his bride were
in the Tower—in separate cells, Uncle Simon explained with a roar of laughter; quite inconvenient for lovebirds. Simon did not like Sir Walter.

  With the arrival of two more children in the house, the pace of our learning slackened and we spent much time on the river and bathing from one of the sandy beaches of the bay. Life was pleasant and easy that warm August and early September. Talk of invasion had abated, and no enemy ship was reported all summer. Sometimes in our wanderings we would come within the sight of the old mill above Penryn, and I thought of what Meg Levant had said.

  In mid-September Mrs Simon Killigrew and her two children left for Somerset, but Uncle Simon still stayed on. A few days after his family left he rode out with my father on one of my father’s expeditions, and they took Belemus with them. The other children were to spend the afternoon by the swan pool, but I had a slight fever and had been leeched and told to stay in my bed. I knew no one would seek me until supper-time.

  I left the house by way of the bakery, the walled garden, and the stables, which lay between the main house and the approach. From there I followed the deep rutted track past our own windmill to a part of the palisade where a broken wall gave me a foot up and over.

  It was very little more than a mile to the mill over the fields and through the woods. At first I saw no one; but at Three Farthings House Paul Gwyther was ploughing a field and his son Oliver was following behind sowing the seed of winter wheat and rye. Behind Oliver were the two younger boys armed with slings and stones to keep the birds away. Oliver recognised me and waved a hand.

  The woods were thick around Glasney. I skirted the edge of them up the hill. The sails of the windmill were broken, but one of the arms rocked gently in the breeze. From behind a tree I stared across the brambles. I picked a blackberry and chewed it, got a seed in my teeth and felt for it with a forefinger. A dog barked once inside the mill.

  Silence fell then. In the clearing there were two grey granite millstones the size of dairy cheeses, and propped against them was a broken wheel. Thistles and docks grew among the grass, and with them shoots of barley and oats. A trampled path led to the door of the mill, which leaned on one hinge.

  “Who’s there?” said a voice. “Come forward if you have business. If not, leave us be.”

  Just inside the door and well within the sunshine a woman of thirty-odd, in a faded blue kirtle, was sitting cross-legged on the floor. On a stool beside her a rabbit sat eating some lettuce leaves, and there were two or three cats lying in the shafts of the sun.

  “Well, boy?”

  I tried to speak but some spittle of fright formed on my tongue and I could only swallow and stare.

  “What d’you want?” she said again.

  “I’m … I came to see Mistress Foot-Footmarker.”

  “You’re as near her as you’ll ever be.”

  I shifted from one foot to the other. A black dog was lying beside a wicker basket and a jackdaw was perched on a beam.

  “What’s your name, lad?” I told her. She got slowly to her feet, brushed the dust off her skirt, picked at a stain on it with her long forefinger. “ I thought I’d seen you before. I thought so. You’re from Arwenack. Of course. You’re for Arwenack. I thought so.”

  It was like being accused of something. “Yes.”

  “Ah … And what can I do for a Killigrew?”

  I watched the rabbit pick up a piece of lettuce and put it in his mouth. You could hear the crunching and could see his fat little cheeks swell up and down.

  “… Is he a pet rabbit?”

  “Not a pet, lad, because he’s free. He comes here when he is so minded.”

  I stood half in and half out of the door.

  She said: “Does your father know you’ve come?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You mean you’ve come to see me all on your own? Who suggested it?”

  “I—just thought I’d walk this way.”

  She blew out a breath and with her foot stirred a big grey cat which was asleep in the half shade. “Well, it’s a surprise to be so visited. It’s very strange. If there was to be any call from a Killigrew I’d have held a penny it had been your father with his armed band of ruffians to set the place afire over my head.”

  “Oh, no, he’d never do that.”

  “Would he not!” She scratched her bare leg above the knee where there was a tear in her skirt. “I’m between one and the other here, lad, as you should know. On the north side is Penryn and on the south side Arwenack, both wishing me ill, but each waitin’ and watchin’ for the other to stir first.” She smiled, showing strong white teeth in her long brown face. “Don’t you believe me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me what you’ve come for then.”

  I said: “ I want to know who my mother was.”

  The big black dog suddenly barked again and this disturbed the jackdaw, who fluttered, his wings and edged along the beam staring at me with a beady eye.

  “Hush, Moses!” the woman said, turning suddenly on the dog, and the dog got to its feet and slunk away into the darkness with its tail curving between its legs. “ Noisy animals I can’t abide!” she said. “Silence is where you learn things, not in noise.”

  She poured herself some milk and drank it, extended the mug to me. I shook my head.

  “How old are you, Maugan Killigrew?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “And base born? Fourteen. That’s 1578, isn’t it. Why do you suppose I can answer your question?”

  “I thought—you might—find out.”

  “Ah-hah, and when I find out you’ll run back to Arwenack saying Katherine Footmarker is a worser witch than ever you suspected and that she has a black dog that sings lewd hymns and five cats dressed in cassocks and surplices!”

  “No, no, I shall not! Really I shall not.”

  “So you say.” She put the mug down and came slowly forward into the light again. “1578 is a long time since. John Killigrew has been rovin’ over the countryside for long enough. How can you expect anyone to remember—except maybe your mother?—and perhaps even she’s forgot.”

  “She is dead! My father told me.”

  “Ah … well, then. So he remembers. And he won’t tell you? Maugan Killigrew, born in 1578. Well, well.”

  The rabbit had stopped eating and was watching her, “What’ll you give me to find out?”

  “I’ve two shillings here.”

  “I saw your father ride out this morning,” she said, “with his band of servants. What mischief is he up to now?”

  “He is not ‘up to mischief’. He rides out to hunt and hawk, that’s all.”

  “That’s what you believe, eh? Truly? Let me look at you.” She put a hand under my chin, but I shrank away. “ I believe you’re as innocent as you look … Give me a shilling.”

  I gave her one of the coins.

  “This is the half,” she said between her teeth as she bit at the silver. “Come again in three or four weeks. Time of the next full moon, maybe.”

  “But I may not be able to get here again! I thought you would—I thought you could …”

  I looked across the harbour. Two small cogs were luffing out of Penryn Creek, and another vessel had dropped anchor off Trefusis Point. She looked like one of the bigger fishing boats from Fowey or Looe.

  The woman said: “ If you think I am of the dark then you must come in the dark.”

  The rabbit hopped off his stool and moved out of the hut.

  “Here, let me look at your hand.” Before I could put them behind my back she had caught one and had turned it palm upward. “How hot you are. A touch of ague, maybe? … Well, leastwise you waste nothing needless on soap and water. Here, spit on them boy—not to clean them, but the way the spittle dries tells me as much as the lines themselves.”

  I did what she said. She was too close to me with her long black hair drooping over my hands. She smelt of damp hay.

  She said: “ You’re a Killigrew whether you like it or
not. There’s the eagle on you—stamped, see? No escape. You’ve an interesting hand, boy. There’s blood on it. There’s blood on both.”

  I tried to wriggle my hands free.

  “Don’t go yet. It’s different blood and all. Can you not see it? Here, here, by the two fingers and thumb of your left hand and a streak across the palm of the right.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Ah, that I can’t tell you. Time will tell you. You’re going to travel, lad. I see you back and forth to Arwenack all your life—in it but never of it. There’s wars—and women, though only one or two that mark deep. But always Cornwall and Arwenack, whether you like it or not, in your vitals. You’ll die here, I’m thinkin’, here or hereabouts—but not at Arwenack. You see, that’s the last time it shows; your life line goes on after that.”

  I took my hands away as soon as she gave a sign of releasing them. She laughed.

  “I think you’ll make a comely man, Maugan. The women will like you. Nor will the men despise you. It takes courage to seek out such a woman as I’m whispered to be.”

  I tried surreptitiously to wipe my hands down the back of my jerkin. “When must I come again?”

  “Today the moon is two days after the full. Come in a month or thereabouts; I may have somethin’ for you then, though it’s no promise.”

  “I’ll try to get away.”

  “You’ll get away. Most of the things you want to do you’ll do. I can see it in your face.”

  The gate that was the main entrance through the stockade to our land was on high ground which dominated the approaches to the house from the south. During daylight there was one or another manservant on duty there to see no unwanted person was admitted—beggars, tinkers, pedlars, they all got short shrift; as indeed did other more important personages if my father had reasons for not seeing them. At night the three boar hounds, Charon and Scylla and Charybdis roamed at large.

  But today I knew that by now a servant called Penrudduck would be at the gate and that he would let me in without telling on me, so I was making straight up the uphill path when I heard a horse whinny close behind. I ducked behind a gorse bush just as my father and Uncle Simon came over the brow of the hill.