The King's General (3 page)

I hung back, reluctant to be introduced, and suddenly she was beside me, her cool hand under my chin.

"So you are Honor?" she said.

The inflection in her voice suggested that I was small for my age, or ill-looking, or disappointing in some special way, and she passed on through to the big parlour, taking precedence of my mother with a confident smile, while the remainder of the family followed like fascinated moths. Percy, being a boy and goggle-eyed at beauty, went to her at once, and she put a sweetmeat in his mouth. She has them ready, I thought, to bribe us children as one bribes strange dogs.

"Would Honor like one too?" she said, and there was a note of mockery in her voice, as though she knew instinctively that this treating of me as a baby was what I hated most.

I could not take my eyes from her face. She reminded me of something, and suddenly I knew .I was a tiny child again at Radford, my uncle's home, and he was walking me through the glasshouses in the gardens. There was one flower, an orchid, that grew alone; it was the colour of pale ivory, with one little vein of crimson running through the petals. The scent filled the house, honeyed and sickly sweet. It was the loveliest flower I had ever seen. I stretched out my hand to stroke the soft velvet sheen, and swiftly my uncle pulled me by the shoulder. "Don't touch it, child. The stem is poisonous." I drew back, frightened. Sure enough, I could see the myriad hairs bristling, sharp and sticky, like a thousand swords.

Gartred was like that orchid. When she offered me the sweetmeat I turned away, shaking my head, and my father, who had never spoken to me harshly in his life, said sharply, "Honor, where are your manners?"

Gartred laughed and shrugged her shoulders. Everyone present turned reproving eyes upon me; even Robin frowned. My mother bade me go upstairs to my room.

That was how Gartred came to Lanrest....

The marriage lasted for three years, and it is not my purpose now to write about it.

So much has happened since to make the later life of Gartred the more vivid, and in the battles we have waged the early years loom dim now and unimportant. There was always war between us, that much is certain. She, young and confident and proud, and I a sullen child, peering at her from behind doors and screens, and both of us aware of a mutual hostility. They were more often at Radford and Stowe than at Lanrest, but when she came home I swear she cast a blight upon the place. I was still a child and I could not reason, but a child, like an animal, has an instinct that does not lie.

There were no children of the marriage. That was the first blow, and I know that was a disappointment to my parents because I heard them talk of it. My sister Cecilia came to us regularly for her lying-in, but there was never a rumour of Gartred. She rode and went hawking as we did; she did not keep to her room or complain of fatigue, which we had come to expect from Cecilia. Once my mother had the hardihood to say, "When I was first wed, Gartred, I neither rode nor hunted, for fear I should miscarry," and Gartred, trimming her nails with a tiny pair of scissors made of mother-of-pearl, looked up at her and said, "I have nothing within me to lose, madam, and for that you had better blame your son." Her voice was low and full of venom, and my mother stared at her for a moment, bewildered, then rose and left the room in distress. It was the first time the poison had touched her. I did not understand the talk between them, but I sensed that Gartred was bitter against my brother, for soon afterwards Kit came in and, going to Gartred, said to her in a tone loaded with reproach, "Have you accused me to my mother?"

They both looked at me, and I knew I had to leave the room. I went out into the garden and fed the pigeons, but the peace was gone from the place. From that moment all went ill with them and with us all. Kit's nature seemed to change. He wore a harassed air, wretchedly unlike himself, and a coolness grew up between him and my father, who had hitherto agreed so well.

Kit showed himself suddenly aggressive to my father and to us all, finding fault with the working of Lanrest and comparing it to Radford, and in contrast to this was his abject humility before Gartred, a humility that had nothing fine about it but made him despicable to my intolerant eyes.

The next year he stood for West Looe in Parliament and they went often to London, so we did not see them much, but when they came to Lanrest there seemed to be this continual strain about their presence, and once a heated quarrel between Kit and Robin, one night when my parents were from home. It was midsummer, very stifling and warm, and I, playing truant from my nursery, crept down to the garden in my nightgown. The household were abed. I remember flitting like a little ghost before the windows. The casement of the guest chamber was open wide, and I heard Kit's voice, louder than usual, lifted in argument. Some devil interest in me made me listen.

"It is always the same," he said, "wherever we go. You make a fool of me before all men, and now tonight before my very brother. I tell you I cannot endure it longer."

I heard Gartred laugh and I saw Kit's shadow reflected on the ceiling by the quivering candlelight. Their voices were low for a moment, then Kit spoke again for me to hear.

"You think I remark nothing," he said. "You think I have sunk so low that to keep you near me, and to be allowed to touch you sometimes, I will shut my eyes to everyone. Do you think it was pleasant for me at Stowe to see how you looked upon Antony Denys that night when I returned so suddenly from London? A man with grown children, and his wife scarce cold in her grave? Are you entirely without mercy for me?"

That terrible pleading note I so detested had crept back into his voice again, and I heard Gartred laugh once more. "And this evening," he said, "I saw you smiling here across the table at him, my own brother." I felt sick and rather frightened, but curiously excited, and my heart thumped within me as I heard a step beside me on the paving and, looking over my shoulder, I saw Robin standing beside me in the darkness.

"Go away," he whispered to me, "go away at once."

I pointed to the open window.

"It is Kit and Gartred," I said. "He is angry with her for smiling at you."

I heard Robin catch his breath and he turned as if to go, when suddenly Kit's voice cried out, loud and horrible, as though he, agrownman, were sobbing like a child. "If that happens I shall kill you. I swear to God I shall kill you." Then Robin, swift as an arrow, stooped to a stone and, taking it in his hand, he flung it against the casement, shivering the glass to fragments.

"Damn you for a coward, then," he shouted. "Come and kill me instead."

I looked up and saw Kit's face, white and tortured, and behind him Gartred with her hair loose on her shoulders. It was a picture to be imprinted always on my mind, those two there at the window, and Robin suddenly different from the brother I had always known and loved, breathing defiance and contempt. I felt ashamed for him, for Kit, for myself, but mostly I was filled with hatred for Gartred who had brought the storm to pass and remained untouched by it.

I turned and ran, with my fingers in my ears, and crept up to bed with never a word to anyone and drew the covers well over my head, fearing that by morning they would all three of them be discovered slain there in the grass. But what passed between them further I never knew. Day broke and all was as before, except that Robin rode away soon after breakfast and he did not return until after Kit and Gartred took their departure to Radford, some five days later. Whether anyone else in the family knew of the incident I never discovered. I was too scared to ask, and since Gartred had come amongst us we had all lost our old manner of sharing troubles and had each one of us grown more polite and secretive.

4

Next year, in '23, the smallpox swept through Cornwall like a scourge, and few families were spared. In Liskeard the people closed their doors and the shopkeepers put up their shutters and would do no trade, for fear of the infection.

In June my father was stricken, dying within a few days, and we had scarcely recovered from the blow before messages came to us from my uncle at Radford to say that Kit had been seized with the same dread disease, and there was no hope of his recovery.

Father and son thus died within a few weeks of each other, and Jo, the scholar, became the head of the family. We were all too unhappy with our double loss to think of Gartred, who had fled to Stowe at the first sign of infection and so escaped a similar fate, but when the two wills came to be read, both Kit's and my father's, we learnt that although Lanrest, with Radford later, passed to Jo, the rich pasture lands of Lametton and the Mill were to remain in Gartred's keeping for her lifetime.

She came down with her brother Bevil for the reading, and even Cecilia, the gentlest of my sisters, remarked afterwards with shocked surprise upon her composure, her icy confidence, and the niggardly manner with which she saw to the measuring of every acre down at Lametton. Bevil, married himself now and a near neighbour to us at Killigarth, did his utmost to smooth away the ill feeling that he sensed amongst us; and although I was still little more than a child, I remember feeling unhappy and embarrassed that he was put to so much awkwardness on our account. It was small wonder that he was loved by everyone, and I wondered to myself what opinion he held in his secret heart about his sister, or whether her beauty amazed him as it did every man.

When affairs were settled and they went away I think we all of us breathed relief that no actual breach had come to pass, causing a feud between the families, and that Lanrest belonged to Jo was a weight off my mother's mind, although she said nothing.

Robin remained from home during the whole period of the visit, and maybe no one but myself could guess the reason. The morning before she left some impulse prompted me to hesitate before her chamber, the door of which was open, and look at her within. She had claimed that the contents of the room belonged to Kit, and so to her, and the servants had been employed the day before in taking down the hangings and removing the pieces of furniture she most desired. At this last moment she was alone, turning out a little secrétaire that stood in one corner. Nor did she observe that I was watching her, and I saw the mask off her lovely face at last. The eyes were narrow, the lips protruding, and she wrenched at a little drawer with such force that the hinge came to pieces in her hands. There were some trinkets at the back of the drawer--none, I think, of great value--but she had remembered them. Suddenly she saw my face reflected in the mirror.

"If you leave to us the bare walls we shall be well content," I said as her eyes met mine.

My father would have whipped me for it had he been alive, and my brothers, too, but we were alone.

"You always played the spy, from the first," she said softly, but because I was no man she did not smile.

"I was born with eyes in my head," I said to her.

Slowly she put the jewels in a little pouch she wore hanging from her waist.

"Take comfort and be thankful, you are quit of me now," she said. "We are not likely to see each other again."

"I hope not," I told her.

Suddenly she laughed.

"It were a pity," she said, "that your brother did not have a little of your spirit."

"Which brother?" I asked.

She paused a moment, uncertain what I knew, and then, smiling, she tapped my cheek with her long slim finger.

"All of them," she said, and then she turned her back on me and called to her servant from the adjoining room.

Slowly I went downstairs, my mind on fire with questions, and, coming into the hallway, I saw Jo fingering the great map hanging on the wall. I did not talk to him but walked out past him into the garden.

She left Lanrest at noon, herself in a litter, and a great train of horses and servants from Stowe to carry her belongings. I watched them, from a hiding place in the trees, pass away up the road to Liskeard in a cloud of dust.

"That's over," I said to myself. "That's the last of them. We have done with the Grenviles."

But fate willed otherwise. my eighteenth birthday. A bright December day. My spirits soaring like a bird as, looking out across the dazzling sea from Radford, I watched His Majesty's fleet sail into Plymouth Sound.

It concerned me not that the expedition now returning had been a failure and that far away in France La Rochelle remained unconquered; these were matters for older people to discuss.

Here in Devon there was laughing and rejoicing and the young folk held high holiday. What a sight they were, some eighty ships or more, crowding together between Drake's Island and the Mount, the white sails bellying in the west wind, the coloured pennants streaming from the golden spars. As each vessel drew opposite the fort at Mount Batten she would be greeted with a salvo from the great guns and, dipping her colours in a return salute, let fly her anchor and bring up opposite the entrance to the Cattwater. The people gathered on the cliffs waved and shouted, and from the vessels themselves came a mighty cheer, while the drums beat and the bugles sounded, and the sides of the ships were seen to be thronged with soldiers pressing against the high bulwarks, clinging to the stout rigging. The sun shone upon their breastplates and their swords, which they waved to the crowds in greeting, and gathered on the poop would be the officers, flashes of crimson, blue, and Lincoln green, as they moved amongst the men.

Each ship carried on her mainmast the standard of the officer in command, and as the crowd recognised the colours and the arms of a Devon leader, or a Cornishman, another great shout would fill the air and be echoed back to us from the cheering fellows in the vessel. There was the two-headed eagle of the Godolphins, the running stag of the Trevannions from Carhayes, the six swallows of the numerous Arundell clan, and, perhaps loveliest of all, the crest of the Devon Champernownes, a sitting swan holding in her beak a horseshoe of gold.

The little ships, too, threaded their way amongst their larger sisters, a vivid flash of colour with their narrow decks black with troopers, and I recognised vessels I had seen last lying in Looe Harbour or in Fowey, now weather-stained and battered, but bearing triumphantly aloft the standards of the men who had built them, and manned them, and commissioned them for war--there was the wolf's head of our neighbour Trelawney, and the Cornish chough of the Menabilly Rashleighs.