The King's General (12 page)

Whoever is there, I smiled grimly, is not aware that a cripple can be mobile, granted she has a resourceful brother with a talent for invention. I came abreast of the door and waited once again. The picture that Matty had hung over the crack was on a level with my eye. I blew my candle, trusting to fortune to blunder my way back to bed when my curiosity was satisfied. Then, very softly, holding my breath, I lifted the picture from the nail and, framing my face with my hands for cover, I peered with one eye into the slit. The chamber was in half darkness, lit by a single candle on a bare table. I could not see to right or left--the crack was not large enough--but the table was in direct line with my eye. A man was sitting at the table, his back turned to me. He was booted and spurred and wore a riding cloak about his shoulders. He had a pen in his hand and was writing on a long white slip of paper, consulting now and again another list propped up before him on the table. Here was flesh and blood indeed, and no ghost, and the intruder writing away as calmly as though he were a clerk on a copying stool. I watched him come to the end of the long slip of paper, and then he folded it and, going to the cabinet in the wall, opened the drawer with the same pulling sound I had heard before. The light was murky, as I have said, and with his back turned to me and his hat upon his head, I could make little of him except that his riding cloak was a dark crimson. He then moved out of my line of view, taking the candle, and softly walked to the far corner of the room. I heard nothing after that and no further footsteps, and while I waited, puzzled, with my eye still to the crack, I became aware suddenly that the draught of air was no longer blowing beneath the door. Yet I had heard no sound of a closing window. I bent down from my chair, testing the bottom of the door with my hand, but no current came. The intruder, therefore, had, by some action unperceived by me, cut off the draught, making his exit at the same time. He had left the chamber, as he had entered it, by some entrance other than the door that led into the corridor. I blundered back across my room in clumsy fashion, having first replaced the picture on its nail, and, knocking into a table on the way, woke that light sleeper Matty.

"Have you lost your senses," she scolded, "circling round your chamber in the pitch black?" And she lifted me like a child and dumped me in my bed.

"I had a nightmare," I lied, "and thought I heard footsteps. Is there anyone moving in the courtyard, Matty?"

She drew aside the curtain. "Not a soul," she grumbled, "not even a cat scratching on the cobbles. Everyone is asleep."

"You will think me mazed, I don't doubt," I answered, "but venture with your candle a moment into the passage and try the door of the locked apartment next to this."

"Mazed it is," she snapped. "This comes of looking into the mirror on a Friday night."

In a moment she was back again. "The door is locked like it always is," she said, "and, judging by the dust upon the latch, it has not been opened for months or more."

"No," I mused, "that is just what I supposed."

She stared at me and shook her head.

"I'd best brew you a hot cordial," she said.

"I do not want a hot cordial," I answered.

"There's nothing like it for putting a stop to bad dreams," she said. She tucked in my blankets and after grumbling a moment or two went back to her own room. But my mind was far too lively to find sleep for several hours. I kept trying to remember the formation of the house, seen from without, and what it was that struck me as peculiar the day before, when John had wheeled me in my chair towards the gatehouse. It was past four in the morning when the answer came to me. Menabilly was built foursquare around the courtyard, with clean straight lines and no protruding wings. But at the northwest corner of the house, jutting from the wall outside the fastened chamber, was a buttress, running tall and straight from the roof down to the cobbles.

Why in the name of heaven, when old John Rashleigh built his house in I600, did he build the northwest corner with a buttress? And had it some connection with the fact that the apartment behind it was designed for the special use of his idiot elder son?

Some lunatics were harmless; some were not. But even the worst, the truly animal, were given air and exercise at certain periods of the day and would hardly be paraded through the corridors of the house itself. I smiled to myself in the darkness, for I had guessed, after three restless hours of tossing on my back, how the intruder had crept into the apartment next to mine without using the locked door into the passage. He had come and he had gone, as poor Uncle John had doubtless done nearly half a century before, by a hidden stairway in the buttress.

But why he had come, and what was his business, I had yet to discover.

9

It turned to rain the next morning, and I was unable to take my usual airing in the grounds, but later in the day the fitful sun peeked through the low clouds and, wrapping my cloak about me, I announced to Matty my intention of going abroad.

John Rashleigh was out riding round the farms on the estate with the steward Langdon, whose house it was I had observed beyond the bowling green, thus I had not my faithful chair attendant. Joan came with me instead, and it was an easy enough matter to persuade her to wheel me first through the archway to the outer court, where I made pretence of looking up to admire my quarters in the gatehouse.

In reality I was observing the formation of the buttress, which ran, as I thought it did, the whole depth of the house on the northwest corner, immediately behind it being the barred chamber.

The width of the buttress was a little over four feet, so I judged, and, if hollow behind a false façade of stone, could easily contain a stair. There was, however, no outlet to the court; this was certain. I bade Joan wheel me to the base on pretence of touching the lichen, which already, after only some forty years, was forming on the stone, and I satisfied myself that the outside of the buttress, at any rate, was solid. If my supposition was correct, then there must be a stairway within the buttress leading underground, far beneath the foundations of the house, and a passage running some distance to an outlet in the grounds. Poor Uncle John... It was significant that there was no portrait of him in the gallery, alongside the rest of the family. If so much trouble was taken by his father that he should not be seen, he must have been an object of either fear or horror.

We left the outer court and, traversing the warren, came by the path outside the steward's lodge. The door was open to the parlour, and Mrs. Langdon, the steward's wife, was standing in the entrance, a comfortable homely woman, who on being introduced to me insisted that I take a glass of milk. While she was absent we glanced about the trim room, and Joan, laughing, pointed to a bunch of keys that hung on a nail beside the door.

"Old Langdon is like a jailer," she whispered. "As a rule he is never parted from that bunch but dangles them at his belt. John tells me he has a duplicate of each key belonging to my father-in-law."

"Has he been steward long?" I asked.

"Oh yes," said Joan. "He came here as a young man when the house was built.

There is no corner of Menabilly that he does not know."

I wager, then, I thought to myself, that he knows, too, the secret of the buttress, if there is a secret. Joan, with a curiosity much like mine, was examining the labels on the keys.

"'Summerhouse,'" she read, and with a mischievous smile at me she slipped it from the bunch and dangled it before my eyes. "You expressed a wish to peep into the tower on the causeway, did you not?" she teased.

At this moment Mrs. Langdon returned with the milk and, fearful of discovery, Joan, like a guilty child, reddened and concealed the key within her gown. We chatted for a few moments, I drinking my milk in haste, and Joan gazing with great innocence at the ceiling. Then we bade the good woman farewell and turned into the gardens, through the gate in the high wall.

"Now you have done for yourself," I said. "How in the world will you return the key?"

Joan was laughing under her breath.

"I'll give it to John," she said. "He must devise some tale or other to satisfy old Langdon. But seeing that we have the key, Honor, it were a pity not to make some use of it."

She was an accomplice after my own heart, and a true godchild.

"I make no promise," I murmured. "Wheel me along the causeway, and we will see which way the wind is blowing."

We crossed the gardens, passing the house as we did so and waving to Alice at the window of her apartment above the gallery. I caught sight, too, of Temperance Sawle peering like a witch from the side door, evidently in half a mind to risk the damp ground and join us.

"I am the best off in my chair," I called to her. "The walks are wringing wet, and clouds coming up again from the Gribbin."

She bolted like a rabbit withindoors again, and I saw her pass into the gallery, while Joan, smothering her laughter, propelled me through the gate on to the causeway.

It was only when mounted thus some ten feet from the ground that the fine view of the sea could be obtained, for down on a level the sloping ground masked all sight of it. Menabilly, though built on a hill, lay, therefore, in a saucer, and I commented on the fact to Joan as she wheeled me towards the towered summerhouse at the far end of the causeway.

"Yes," she said, "John has explained to me that the house was so built that no glimpse of it should be sighted from the sea. Old Mr. Rashleigh lived in great fear of pirates. But if the truth be told, he was not above piracy himself, and in the old days, when he was alive, there were bales of silk and bars of silver concealed somewhere within the house, stolen from the French and brought hither by his own ships, then landed down at Pridmouth yonder."

In which case, I thought privately, a passage known to no one but himself, and perhaps his steward, would prove of great advantage.

But we had reached the summerhouse, and Joan, glancing first over her shoulder to see that no one came, produced her key and turned it in the lock.

"I must tell you," she confessed, "that there is nothing great to see. I have been here once or twice with my father-in-law, and it is nought but a rather musty room, the shelves lined with books and papers, and a fine view from the windows."

She wheeled me through the door, and I glanced about me, half hoping in a most childish manner to find trace of piracy. But all was in order. The walls of the summerhouse were lined with books, save for the windows, which even as she had said, commanded the whole stretch of the bay to the Gribbin, and to the east showed the steep coast road that led to Fowey. Anyone, on horse or on foot, approaching Menabilly from the east, would be observed by a watcher at the window, likewise a vessel sailing close inshore. Old Mr. Rashleigh had shown great cunning as a builder.

The flagged floor was carpeted, save in one corner by my brother-in-law's writing table, where a strip of heavy matting served for his feet. It was like his particular character that the papers on his desk were neatly documented and filed in order. Joan left me in my chair to browse up at the books, while she herself kept watch out on the causeway. There was nothing much to tempt my interest. Books of law, dry as dust, books of accountancy, and many volumes docketed as County Affairs, no doubt filed when Jonathan was sheriff for the Duchy of Cornwall. On a lower shelf, near to the writing table, were volumes labelled My Town House and another, Menabilly, while close beside these he had Marriage Settlements and Wills. He was nothing if not methodical about his business. The volume marked Wills was nearest to me and surprisingly tempting to my hand .I looked over my shoulder and saw through the window that Joan, humming a tune, was busily engaged in picking posies for her children. I reached out my hand and took the volume. Page after page was covered in my brother-in-law's meticulously careful hand. I turned to the entries headed by the words, "My father, John Rashleigh, born I554. Died May 6th, I624," and folded close to this--perhaps it had slipped in by accident--was an account of a case brought to the Star Chamber in the year I6I6 by one Charles Bennett against the above John Rashleigh. This Charles Bennett I remembered was father to Robert Bennett, our neighbour at Looe, who had spread the poison rumour. The case, had I time to peruse it, would have made good reading, for it was of a highly scandalous nature; Charles Bennett accusing John Rashleigh of "leading a most incontinent course of life, lying with divers women, over forty-five in number, uttering blasphemies, etc., etc., and his wife dying through grief at his behaviour, she being a sober, virtuous woman." I was somewhat surprised after this, when glancing at the end, to find that John Rashleigh had been acquitted. What a lovely weapon, though, to hold over the head of my self-righteous brother-in-law when he made boast, as he sometimes did, about the high morals of his family. But I turned a page and came to the will I had been seeking. So John Rashleigh had not done too badly for his relatives. Nick Sawle had got fifty pounds (which I dare say Temperance had snatched from him), and the Sparkes had benefited to the same extent. The poor of Fowey had some twenty pounds bestowed upon them. It is really most iniquitous, I told myself, that I should be prying thus into matters that concern me not at all, but I read on. All lands in Cornwall, his house in Fowey, his house at Menabilly, and the residue of his estate to his second son, Jonathan, his executor. And then the codicil at the end: "Thirty pounds annuity out of Fowey to the use of my elder son John's maintenance, to be paid after the death of my second son Jonathan, who during his life will maintain him and allow him a chamber with meat, drink, and apparel." I caught a glimpse of Joan's shadow passing the window, and with a hurried guilty movement I shut the volume and put it back upon the shelf.

There was no doubt then about the disability of poor Uncle John.... I turned my chair from the desk, and as I did so the right wheel stuck against some obstruction on the ground beneath the heavy matting. I bent down from my chair to free the wheel, turning up the edge of the mat as I did so. I saw then that the obstruction was a ring in the flagstone, which, though flat to the ground and unnoticeable possibly to a foot treading upon it, had been enough to obstruct the smooth running of my chair.