The King's General (23 page)

Once a day we were allowed within the garden for some thirty minutes, and I would leave Matty in my room on an excuse and have Alice push my chair while her nurse walked with the children.

The poor gardens were laid waste already with the yew trees broken and the flower beds trampled, and up and down the muddied paths we went, stared at by the sentries at the gate and by the officers gathered at the long windows in the gallery. Their appraising hostile eyes burnt through our backs but must be endured for the sake of the fresh air we craved, and sometimes their laughter came to us and their voices hard and ugly, for they were mostly from London and the Eastern counties, except those staff officers of Lord Robartes, and I never could abide the London twang, made doubly alien now through enmity. Never once did we see Gartred when we took our exercise, though her two daughters, reserved and unfriendly, played in the far corner of the garden, watching us and the children with blank eyes.

They had neither of them inherited her beauty, but were brown-haired and heavy looking like their dead father, Antony Denys.

"I don't know what to make of it," said Alice in my ear. "She is supposed to be a prisoner like us, but she is not treated so .I have watched her from my window walk in the walled garden beneath the summerhouse, talking and smiling to Lord Robartes, and the servants say he dines with her most evenings."

"She only does what many other women do in wartime," I said, "and has turned the stress of the day to her advantage."

"You mean she is for the Parliament?" asked Alice.

"Neither for the Parliament nor for the King but for Gartred Denys," I answered.

"Do you not know the saying--to race with the hare and to run with the hounds? She will smile on Lord Robartes and sleep with him, too, if she has a mind, just as long as it suits her. He would let her leave tomorrow if she asked him."

"Why, then," said Alice, "does she not do so and return in safety to Orley Court?"

"That," I answered, "is what I would give a great deal to find out."

And as we paced up and down, up and down, before the staring hostile eyes of the London officers I thought of the footstep I had heard at midnight in the passage, the soft hand on the latch, and the rustle of a gown. Why should Gartred, while the house slept, find her way to my apartment in the northeast corner of the building and try my door unless she knew her way already; and, granting that she knew her way, what, then, was her motive?

It was ten days before I had my answer.

On Sunday, August the eleventh, came the first break in the weather. The sun shone watery in a mackerel sky and a bank of cloud gathered in the southwest. There had been much coming and going all the day, with fresh regiments of troopers riding to the park, bringing with them many carts of wounded who were carried to the farm buildings before the house. Their cries of distress were very real and terrible and gave to us, who were their enemies, a sick dread and apprehension. The shouting and calling of orders were persistent on that day, and the bugle never ceased from dawn to sundown.

For the first time we were given soup only for our dinner and a portion of stale bread, and this, we were told, would be the best we could hope for from henceforward.

No reason was given, but Matty, with her ears pricked, had hung about the kitchens with her tray under her arm and gleaned some gossip from the courtyard.

"There was a battle yesterday on Braddock Down," she said. "They've lost a lot of men." She spoke softly, for with our enemies about us we had grown to speak in whispers, our eyes upon the door.

I poured half my soup into Dick's bowl and watched him drink it greedily, running his tongue round the rim like a hungry dog.

"The King is only three miles from Lostwithiel," she said; "he and Price Maurice have joined forces and set up their headquarters at Boconnoc. Sir Richard has advanced with nigh a thousand men from Truro and is coming up on Bodmin from the west. 'Your fellows are trying to squeeze us dry,' said the trooper in the kitchen, 'like a bloody orange. But they won't do it.'"

"And what did you answer him?" I said to Matty.

She smiled grimly and cut Dick the largest slice of bread.

"I told him I'd pray for him when Sir Richard got him," she answered.

After eating I sat in my chair looking out across the park and watched the clouds gathering thick and fast. There were scarce a dozen bullocks left in the pen out of the fine herds that had been the week before and only a small flock of sheep. The rest had all been slaughtered. These remaining few would be gone within the next eight and forty hours. Not a stem of corn remained in the far meadows. The whole had been cut and ground and the ricks pulled. The grass in the park was now bare earth where the horses had grazed upon it. Not a tree stood in the orchard beyond the warren. If Matty's tale was true and the King and Richard to east and west of Lostwithiel, then the Earl of Essex and ten thousand men were pent up in a narrow strip of land some three miles long with no way of escape except the sea.

Ten thousand men with provisions getting low and only the bare land to live on, while three armies waited in their rear.

There was no laughter tonight from the courtyard, no shouting and no chatter; only a blazing fire as they heaped the cut trees and the kitchen benches upon it, the doors torn from the larder and the tables from the steward's room, and I could see their sullen faces lit by the leaping flames.

The sky darkened and slowly, silently, the rain began to fall. And as I listened to it, remembering Richard's words, I heard the rustle of a gown and a tap upon my door.

18

Dick was gone in a flash to his hiding place and Matty clearing his bowl and platter. I sat still in my chair with my back to the arras and bade them enter who knocked upon the door.

It was Gartred. She was wearing, if I remember right, a gown of emerald green, and there were emeralds round her throat and in her ears. She stood a moment within the doorway, a half-smile on her face.

"The good Matty," she said, "always so devoted. What ease of mind a faithful servant brings."

I saw Matty sniff and rattle the plates upon her tray while her lips tightened in ominous fashion.

"Am I disturbing you, Honor?" said Gartred, that same smile still on her face. "The hour is possibly inconvenient; you go early, no doubt, to bed?"

All meaning is in the inflexion of the voice, and when rendered on paper words seem harmless enough and plain. I give the remarks as Gartred phrased them, but the veiled contempt, the mockery, the suggestion that because I was crippled I must be tucked down and in the dark by half-past nine, these were in her voice and in her eyes as they swept over me.

"My going to bed depends upon my mood, as doubtless it does with you," I answered; "also, it depends upon my company."

"You must find the hours most horribly tedious," she said, "but then, no doubt, you are used to it by now. You have lived in custody so long that to be made prisoner is no new experience. I must confess I find it unamusing." She came closer in the room, looking about her, although I had given her no invitation.

"You have heard the news, I suppose?" she said.

"That the King is at Boconnoc and a skirmish was fought yesterday in which the rebels got the worst of it? Yes, I have heard that," I answered.

The last of the fruit picked before the rebels came was standing on a platter in the window. Gartred took a fig and began to eat it, still looking about her in the room.

Matty gave a snort of indignation which passed unnoticed and, taking her tray, went from the chamber with a glance at Gartred's back that would have slain her had it been Perceived.

"If this business continues long," said Gartred, "we none of us here will find it very pleasant. The men are already in an ugly mood. Defeat may turn them into brutes."

"Very probably," I said.

She threw away the skin of her fig and took another.

"Richard is at Lanhydrock," she said. "Word came today through a captured prisoner. It is rather ironic that we have the owner of Lanhydrock in possession here.

Richard will leave little of it for him by the time this campaign is settled, whichever way the battle goes. Jack Robartes is black as thunder."

"It is his own fault," I said, "for advising the Earl of Essex to come into Cornwall and run ten thousand men into a trap."

"So it is a trap," she said, "and my unscrupulous brother the baiter of it? I rather thought it must be."

I did not answer. I had said too much already, and Gartred was in quest of information. "Well, we shall see," she said, eating her fig with relish, "but if the process lasts much longer the rebels will turn cannibal. They have the country stripped already between here and Lostwithiel, and Fowey is without provisions. I shudder to think what J ack Robartes would do to Richard if he could get hold of him. "

"The reverse equally holds good," I told her.

She laughed and squeezed the last drop of juice into her mouth. "All men are idiots," she said, "and more especially in wartime. They lose all sense of values."

"It depends," I said, "upon the meaning of values."

"I value one thing only," she said, "my own security."

"In that case," I said, "you showed neglect of it when you travelled upon the road ten days ago."

She watched me under heavy lids and smiled.

"Your tongue hasn't blunted with the years," she said, "nor tribulation softened you. Tell me, do you still care for Richard?"

"That is my affair," I said.

"He is detested by his brother officers; I suppose you know that," she said, "and loathed equally in Cornwall as in Devon. In fact, the only creatures he can count as friends are sprigs of boys who daren't be rude to him. He has a little train of them nosing his shadow."

Oh God, I thought, you bloody woman, seizing upon the one insinuation in the world to make me mad. I watched her play with her rings.

"Poor Mary Howard," she said, "what she endured.... You were spared intolerable indignities, you know, Honor, by not being his wife. I suppose Richard has made great play lately of loving you the same, and no doubt he does, in his vicious fashion. Rather a rare new pastime, a woman who can't respond."

She yawned and strolled over to the window. "His treatment of Dick is really most distressing," she said. "The poor boy adored his mother, and now I understand Richard intends to rear him as a freak just to spite her. What did you think of him when he was here?"

"He was young and sensitive, like many other children," I said.

"It was a wonder to me he was ever born at all," said Gartred, "when I think of the revolting story Mary told me. However, I will spare your feelings, if you still put Richard on a pedestal. I am glad, for the lad's sake, that Jack Robartes did not find him here at Menabilly. He has sworn an oath to hang any relative of Richard's."

"Except yourself," I said.

"Ah, I don't count," she answered. "Mrs. Denys of Orley Court is not the same as Gartred Grenvile." Once more she looked up at the walls and then again into the courtyard. "This is the room, isn't it," she said, "where they used to keep the idiot? I can remember his mouthing down at Kit when we rode here five and twenty years ago."

"I have no idea," I said. "The subject is not discussed among the family."

"There was something odd about the formation of the house," she said carelessly.

"I cannot recollect exactly what it was. Some cupboard, I believe, where they used to shut him up when he grew violent, so Kit told me. Have you discovered it?"

"There are no cupboards here," I said, "except the cabinet over yonder."

"I am so sorry," she said, "that my coming here forced you to give your room to Joan Rashleigh. I could so easily have made do with this one, which one of the servants told me was never used until you took it over."

"It was much simpler," I said, "to place you and your daughters in a larger room, where you can entertain visitors to dinner."

"You always did like servants' gossip, did you not?" she answered. "The hobby of all old maids. It whips their appetite to imagine what goes on behind closed doors."

"I don't know," I said. "I hardly think my broth tastes any better for picturing you hip to hip with Lord Robartes."

She looked down at me, her gown in her hands, and I wondered who had the greater capacity for hatred, she or I.

"My being here," she said, "has at least spared you all, so far, from worse unpleasantness. I have known Jack Robartes for many years."

"Keep him busy, then," I said; "that's all we ask of you."

I was beginning to enjoy myself at last, and, realising it, she turned towards the door. "I cannot guarantee," she said, "that his good temper will continue. He was in a filthy mood tonight at dinner when he heard of Richard at Lanhydrock and has gone off now to a conference at Fowey with Essex and the chiefs of staff."

"I look to you, then," I said, "to have him mellow by the morning."

She stood with her hand on the door, her eyes sweeping the hangings on the wall.

"If they lose the campaign," she said, "they will lose their tempers too. A defeated soldier is a dangerous animal. Jack Robartes will give orders to sack Menabilly and destroy inside and without."

"Yes," I said, "we are all aware of that."

"Everything will be taken," she said, "clothes, jewels, furniture, food--and not much left of the inhabitants. He must be a curious man, your brother-in-law, Jonathan Rashleigh, to desert his home, knowing full well what must happen to it in the end."

I shrugged my shoulders. And then, as she left, she gave herself away.

"Does he still act as collector for the mint?" she said.

Then for the first time I smiled, for I had my answer to the problem of her presence.

"I cannot tell you," I said. "I have no idea. But if you wait long enough for the house to be ransacked you may come upon the plate you think he has concealed. Good night, Gartred."

She stared at me a moment and then went from the room. At last I knew her business, and had I been less preoccupied with my own problem of concealing Dick I might have guessed it sooner. Whoever won or lost the campaign in the West, it would not matter much to Gartred; she would see to it that she had a footing on the winning side. She could play the spy for both. Like Temperance Sawle, I was in a mood to quote the Scriptures and declaim, "Where the body lies, there will the eagles be gathered together." If there were pickings to be scavenged in the aftermath of battle, Gartred Denys would not stay at home in Orley Court. I remembered her grip upon the marriage settlement with Kit; I remembered that last feverish search for a lost trinket on the morning she left Lanrest, a widow; and I remembered, too, the rumours I had heard since she was widowed for the second time, how Orley Court was much burdened with debt and must be settled between her daughters when they came of age. Gartred had not yet found a third husband to her liking, but in the meantime she must live. The silver plate of Cornwall would be a prize indeed, could she lay hands on it.