The Grove of Eagles

  God’s virtue, can you guess the scene, Maugan? Can you imagine how it happened? Of course I grew angry and hard words were exchanged. But then Sir George said to this attorney: Produce the settlement for Mr Killigrew to see. And we pored over the parchment, Rosewarne and I, and we saw what in my misfortune I missed at Easton Neston when the contract was drawn. Since Rosewarne was not with me, he being always at my elbow in legal matters, I had permitted all unknowing this evil trickery, this matter of seven words, to be slipped in. On her husband’s attaining his 21st year.

  I have not the time to write all that flew between us, between Sir George and me. I fancy he had not been dealt with so blunt since his school days. But it availed nothing. He told me he had never had the intention of allowing his daughter’s dowry to be utilised for my debts, that he knew I should dominate over my own son to this end, and that she’d come to no harm for four years on the allowance of £200 a year which he would send her.

  Well, so as you see, any ransom I might have hoped to pay for your enlargement is in the clouds. I trust you’ll have the good fortune to be exchanged some time. There were many more Spanish taken than English so you may yet hope.

  For myself there is little hope indeed. I do not think I can prevail upon Jane to ask her father for substantial aid—for that is what he has done his evil utmost to avoid—and she is a hard little thing with a mind and a will like granite. Since her father left she has exerted her temper on several occasions, and, since I feel the only deliverance can come through her good will, she has been given way to. Her two creatures follow her everywhere—more bodyguards than servants. I only pray and believe that Sir George will be unwilling to allow the home of which his daughter will one day be mistress to be broken up or sold for lack of a few thousand pounds. But that does not protect me. He will see me in prison without a qualm and as good as told me so. That I am his daughter’s father-in-law and a man of ancient lineage and great personal distinction moves him not at all.

  Mrs Killigrew is in foal again, and is much distressed by the danger in which I now stand. Your grandmother, being frailer, more so; her night phlegms grow worse. Young Thomas fell out of a tree last month and broke his leg: we sent for Glapthorne. I hope he has put it to a good setting, for a young man with a limp is much hindered making his way in the world. We have lost more sheep with rot, and are likely to have less ground eared next spring than ever before. God help us.

  I send this letter by Captain Elliot, who says he’ll deliver it. I have my doubts of its reaching you, though I know he is as much in and out of Spanish ports as English. I pray that Almighty Christ will sustain you in your captivity and lead you to a happy outcome.

  Your affect, father, J. Killigrew.”

  During the next week I read that letter ten times daily. In the end I came to know it by heart, and even after all these years can repeat it word for word. It was a shaft from home, a lifeline to which I clung in this utter isolation. There might be no comfort in it but it was the connection that counted, a tangible recognition that I was still alive and in touch with the outside world. I felt I had almost spoken to my father—every phrase seemed to come from him, was like a breath of home. I saw it all and knew it all existed and was continuing to exist, and the knowledge steadied and kept me sane.

  All the same in January I gave up work on the cell grating. The stone was too hard to make any progress: I was defeated.

  For some time now I had regularly talked to myself; it seemed to provide a form of company and a means of ridding oneself of certain insupportable thoughts and fears. But now I began to grow short of breath in the night. Sometimes in spite of the cold I would wake in a sweat, not from fever but from a mind-induced panic. The walls seemed to be closing in so that the cell became a box no bigger than a stone coffin. I would leap up and shout myself hoarse and then beat on the door until my hands were bruised and sore. Then I would collapse on the bed seeking for breath.

  One night I could not stop and tore the straw out of the bunk and ripped into pieces the rough flannel covering. I screamed like an animal and knew I was going mad. I wept into bleeding hands and presently fainted or fell asleep asprawl with face pressed against the stone floor.

  This happened for six or seven nights. It went dark at this time about six o’clock in the evening and I knew I had at least twelve hours of blinding silent darkness before the next faintest glimmer of light. For half an hour then I would pray aloud: for strength, for patience, for deliverance; for Sue and my father and Mrs Killigrew and the Raleghs; and in so doing a sense of repose would come and some faint breath of hope. The war might soon be over; I was yet alive; I would sleep and tomorrow would be another day. But this feeling would not endure beyond the middle of the night when, with perhaps six hours’ sleep behind me, I would wake in a dreadful panic. I was blind and deaf and suffocating in a world of unutterable horror. The thick clay was in my mouth and choking me. I had been overlooked; the commandant had received no instructions; presently he too would lose interest and the jailors would no longer come down the narrow passage to the three cells and the door would never be opened again. I was alone and alone and alone for ever.

  Each day I pestered the guards; I demanded an interview with the governor; I must know what was intended. Even death on a grid-iron seemed less horrible than death from living burial.

  One day I found myself sitting on the floor after the midday meal and realised I had not been marking the passage of days. I had no memory as to how many had gone since last the wall was scratched, two or ten or twenty. It no longer mattered. Nothing any longer mattered. I had just the initiative to eat what was put before me. My guards perhaps were relieved when they were no longer pestered. I no longer talked to myself except sometimes in a muttered undertone. I no longer had any thoughts.

  Then I did the one thing which I had not thought of to secure a temporary release. I fell ill. A doctor was brought. He bled me and administered a clyster. Three days later I was moved to a cell with three other men and stayed there a week.

  A young man’s body will put up a fight even when he is himself past fighting. In a few days I could walk. On the Sunday, which could be distinguished because of the church bells, two guards came and led me along a narrow stone passage and into a room decorated with tapestries and tables and chairs. Two men were talking. One of them I had seen before, though I was too tired to put a name to the face: a young man with coppery red hair and fierce, intent eyes. The other was a stranger. The guards left.

  “Sit down, Killigrew,” said the younger man in halting English. “But you speak Spanish now, is it?”

  I sat down and stared at him.

  “You are Maugan Killigrew whom I met in Madrid? But yes, of course. You have changed. You are much older.”

  I was much older. The other man was wearing a suit of black velvet gone slightly green with the years. The sun was shining in the courtyard outside.

  “You wrote to Senorita Prada. She told her uncle and the message was passed on. This preserved you when you were recaptured in Portugal. But for that you would have been executed at once.”

  De Soto, that was the name.

  “My time has been occupied, otherwise I should have seen you before. Well, speak up! Have you lost your tongue?”

  I swallowed and looked at him. I ran my fingers through my beard and blinked again, feeling the light too strong.

  The other man said: “His confinement has been close, captain. After what happened at Lagos I had no choice.” He spoke with the gutteral accent of a southern Spaniard.

  De Soto said: “You seem to have stolen his wits. Well, Killigrew, I have little to say to you at this stage. Many decisions as to policy await His Majesty; others await lesser men. Until these are taken you will be preserved. I can offer you two choices—a return to the cell where you have spent the winter, or a less rigorous life of house confinement only. The last I can give you only on your oath not to escape. If you wish you may have twenty-four hours to decide.??
?

  Pedro Lopez de Soto, that was it, secretary to the highest admiral in Spain.

  I found myself being led out. I tried to struggle. “Not!”

  “No what?” asked De Soto.

  “I do not need the time. I will take the oath.”

  “Very well, you will be put in the house of Captain Caldes here as a garden servant—for the time. I can promise nothing more.”

  I moistened my lips.

  “You appreciate, Killigrew, that your escape from Lagos has still to come for reckoning, But the wicked murderers of Captain Buarcos and Lieutenant Claudio have been brought to justice and no more need be made of that.”

  “Brought to … But I—it was—”

  “Say nothing at this stage which will make your case worse. The corpses of the two English soldiers who committed the murder have been found on the Sierra Pelada, north of Huelva. Captain Buarcos’s sword was about the skeleton of one of them. Their guilt is established. There for the moment it should rest.”

  I stared at him. Three years later I was to come across Major George in London. He and Crocker had changed clothes with two peasants whom they had fought and killed for their mules, and, altering course, they had eventually made the Biscay coast and a fishing vessel home. But now I felt as if I had lost my two last friends.

  “There is one word of advice I would give you at this stage, young man—that is if you wish to take the best advantage of your time. Are you listening?”

  “Yes …”

  “Amend your religion,” said Captain de Soto. “Embrace the old religion of Christ. Without that no one may save you.”

  The trees were coming out. The long winter was over and with the suddenness of a woman throwing off a cloak, blossom burst in the garden. The cold winds lingered, and there was still snow on the low hills behind the town, but the sun seeped into my bones and warmed them and gave them new life. The dark purple sore in my side began to look less angry and the last stiffness went. I was 19 years old.

  I lived the life of a servant, but this was comfortable and mind-restoring after the solitary imprisonment of the winter. I wrote to my father again, and to Mariana to thank her—and finally a long letter to Sue.

  There were five servants in the house of Captain Caldes, two of them negroes, but they showed no hostility and very little curiosity. Perhaps they had learned better; but for me they were human company, and that was what was needed most. The only member of the household to show resentment and suspicion was Father Lorenzo, who was a Dominican, and he had in some way to be won over. I did not at first seriously think of taking De Soto’s advice, but it was good whatever the motive behind it. If Father Lorenzo were to make one complaint to the Inquisition, no protection from Madrid, however derived, was likely to save me.

  Time passed and his hostility did not change. I thought it all over with care. The heroics of openly defying a Roman Catholic monk no longer entered my head; the practical terrors of the dungeons of Seville had cured all that. So one day I decided to play for time.

  He was grudging and did not relax his suspicion, but after some sharp questioning and after hearing there had been some preliminary instruction in Madrid, he agreed to lend me books and to supervise my reading.

  This was far from uninteresting, indeed it was a stimulus for an atrophied brain; but I soon saw I walked upon a narrow edge, for the monk was not a man of intellect and he assumed all questions to be heretical unless they could be put down to ignorance. It would have been a much more stimulating discussion with Godfrey Brett.

  March and April came, with still no explanation of this treatment. De Soto had seemed to wish to clear me of the killing of Buarcos; this new detention on a favoured basis was nearer in manner to the time in Madrid. They seemed all to be waiting for instructions.

  Easter passed with the streets thronged and the bells pealing. The King, they said, had been ill but was recovered; in Spain all things waited on him. For a governor of a prison, Captain Caldes was a humane man, and mostly his visitors and friends were of a like mind. They all went in fear of the church. The activities of the Holy Office were like the visitation of the plague, something not to be spoken of above a whisper and then only to a trusted friend.

  I saw nothing of Seville outside the walls of the house, for the house adjoined the prison and was a part of it. Sometimes I would wake in the night with the stifling fear that I was back in that solitary cell. Then the breathing of the negro on the next pallet would be a salvation and a balm.

  In late April Father Lorenzo began to grow impatient. I had read the books and had run out of questions—or questions that could be safely asked. There seemed no way of delaying. One day he asked me when I was prepared to embrace the true church instituted by Christ.

  I promised to give him an answer the following week. This had become a cleft stick and one partly of my own making. As a heretic Englishman just released from prison and waiting decisions from Madrid, I might just have been tolerated in the household by being unobtrusive and easily overlooked. Now, however, having received instruction from a priest, I could not be overlooked by him. Either I became a Roman Catholic or I rejected his teaching. In the latter case he would inevitably report to the Inquisition.

  Well, was I prepared to die for my faith, as I had been in Madrid two years ago? Much had changed since then. I had heard the emancipating arguments at Sherborne.

  But what of those men who had spoken so brilliantly over the dinner table at Sherborne; Hariot, Northumberland and the rest; when it came to an absolute decision such as this, how would they choose? How would Ralegh himself choose, a man who for all his openness of mind was a convinced Protestant? Would he be willing to trim his sails and compromise when his soul was concerned? It did not seem likely. But what was the alternative for me?

  One morning I was planting out some clove-gilly-flowers when Captain Caldes came into the garden with a younger cousin of his, Enrico Caldes. They did not see me. Enrico Caldes, a handsome, open-featured man in his late twenties, was protesting vehemently against the Holy Office.

  “Let them lay a finger on you, John, let them but lay a finger on you, and all is lost. No one dare ask what has become of you, or write to you, or ask mercy on your behalf. To call and intercede would be to sign one’s own death order. As to the poor wretch—”

  “I know. I know it all—”

  “Yes, but you do not know that Felipe has been freed—”

  “Freed! Well, he is a lucky man!”

  “Listen. He was arrested as you know in the dark of the night. He tells me there was no accusation. Someone laid false information about him, he will never know who. So he lies in a loathsome dungeon for six weeks—six weeks—protesting his innocence, demanding to know what is his crime, asking for a fair and open hearing of his case—while outside all his property is seized and his family pauperised. Then at last when he has asked for the tenth time to be told the cause of his arrest he is taken out of his cell and brought before his judges …”

  “Three of them sit there. When he comes in they say nothing. They wait for him to speak, then when he does speak they ask him who he is—as if they don’t know his name, as if he is intruding on them. What is his business with them, they say. When he asks what offence he has committed to be so used, they tell him first to confess the faults he is aware of. When he says he knows no faults, they order him back to his cell. Knowing what that means—at best another six weeks in a dungeon—he stays there and offers to confess his sins. So in silence they sit and listen while he stumbles over a few irregularities which he has contrived to please them: he has lit candles on a Friday evening, he has changed his linen on the Sabbath—that sort of thing. It does not please them. Now for six hours he is examined before them, promised—mark you—promised pardon if he confesses. So he has confessed to his judges, knowing there is no other way, he has repented and recanted of crimes he has never committed!”

  “Well, it is the only way—you know that. Once you are acc
used … I imagine his penalties will not be light—”

  “Light! … On three Sunday festivals he is to be stripped and scourged from the city gate to San Clemente. He is to abjure the eating of flesh meat, eggs, cheese and wine for ever. He must take a vow of chastity, though only 33. He must hear Mass every day of his life. And on one day in every month for a year he must walk barefoot in penance from his house to his parish priest in San Clemente. This is what we have come to—”

  “Hush, man, keep your voice down. Lorenzo is out, but one does not know who—”

  “Ah, who may be his creature! Who may not! A child is encouraged to betray its father, a wife her husband; no one is safe …”

  “Well, that’s the way of it. I am no more happy about it than you.”

  “There is a new torture now, practised in Toledo. Have you heard, it is called Tormento di Toca. A thin cloth is thrown over the victim’s mouth and nostrils so that he is scarcely able to breathe, and then …”

  That night I lay awake for a long time. Did not Henry of Navarre turn Catholic to preserve and consolidate his kingdom; was I more at fault to try to preserve my life? What was my great-grandfather but a Catholic? Was he condemned to everlasting torment for that, when the new religion did not exist? So Ralegh had argued once at Arwenack.

  That week I said I was ready, and went with Father Lorenzo to the church of San Pedro and met two other priests who questioned me for four hours.

  First I had to say in Latin Our Father and the Creed and the Salve Regina. Then I was examined closely on matters of the new religion. What were my parents and how had I been brought up? How had I been told to regard the Roman Catholic faith? What had I first been taught of the Mass and what did I now believe? What of sacramental confession? What concerning the orders of friars and nuns such as I saw about me in Spain? What of the intercession of saints? What of Purgatory? What of the eating of meat on prohibited days? What of fasts and disciplines? What of the salvation of the soul? So it went on all through a shining spring morning. At noon a glass of water was brought and then all began again.