I can recollect that supper as if it were yesterday. I lay on my bed with the pillows packed behind me, and Richard was seated on the end of it, with the low table in front of us both.
It might have been a day since we had parted, instead of fifteen years. When Matty came into the room bearing the platters, her mouth pursed and disapproving—for she had never understood how we came to lose one another, but imagined he had deserted me because of my crippled state—Richard burst out laughing on the instant, calling her “old go-between,” which had been his nickname for her in those distant days, and asked her how many hearts she had broken since he saw her last. She was for replying to him shortly, but it was no use. He would have none of it, and, taking the platters from her and putting them on the table, he soon had her reconciled—blushing from head to toe—while he poked fun at her broadening figure and the frizzed curl on her forehead. “There are some half-dozen troopers in the court,” he told her, “waiting to make your acquaintance. Go and prove to them that Cornish women are better than the frousts in Devon,” and she went off, closing the door behind her, guessing no doubt that for the first time in fifteen years I had no need of her services. He fell to eating right away, for he was always a good trencherman, and soon cleared all that had been put before us, while I—still weak with the shock of seeing him—toyed with the wishbone of a chicken. He started walking about the chamber before he had finished, a habit I remembered well, with a great bone in one hand and a pie in the other, talking all the while about the defenses at Plymouth, which his predecessor had allowed to become formidable instead of razing them to the ground on first setting siege to the place. “You’d hardly credit it, Honor,” he said, “but there’s that fat idiot Digby been sitting on his arse nine months before the walls of Plymouth, allowing the garrison to sortie as they please, fetch food and firewood and build up barricades, while he played cards with his junior officers. Thank God a bullet in his head will keep him to his bed a month or two, and allow me to conduct the siege instead.”
“And what do you propose to do?” I asked.
“My first two tasks were simple,” he replied, “and should have been done last October. I threw up a new earthwork at Mount Batten, and the guns I have placed there so damage the shipping which endeavors to pass through the Sound that the garrison are hard put to it for supplies. Secondly, I have cut off their waterpower, and the mills within the city can no longer grind flour for the inhabitants. Give me a month or two to play with, and I’ll have ’em starved.” He took a great bite out of his pie, and winked at me.
“And the blockade by land, is that effective now?” I questioned.
“It will be, when I’ve had time to organize it,” he answered. “The trouble is that I’ve arrived to find that most of the officers in my command are worse than useless—I’ve sacked more than half of them already. I have a good fellow in charge at Saltash, who sent the rebels flying back to Plymouth with several fleas in their ears when they tried a sortie a week or two back—a sharp engagement in which my nephew Jack—Bevil’s eldest boy, you remember him—did very well. Last week we sprang a little surprise on one of their outposts close to Maudlyn. We beat them out of their position there, and took a hundred prisoners. I rather think the gentlemen of Plymouth sleep not entirely easy in their beds.”
“Prisoners must be something of a problem,” I said. “It is hard enough to find forage in the country for your own men. You are obliged to feed them, I suppose?”
“Feed them be damned,” he answered. “I send the lot to Lydford Castle, where they are hanged without trial for high treason.” He threw his drumstick out of the window, and tore the other from the carcass.
“But, Richard,” I said, hesitating, “that is hardly justice, is it? I mean—they are only fighting for what they believe to be a better cause than ours?”
“I don’t give a fig for justice,” he replied. “The method is effective, and that’s the only thing that matters.”
“I am told the Parliament has put a price upon your head already,” I said. “I am told you are much feared and hated by the rebels.”
“What would you have them do, kiss my backside?” he asked. He smiled, and came and sat beside me on the bed.
“The war is too much with us; let us talk about ourselves,” he said. I had not wished for that, but hoped to keep him busy with his siege of Plymouth.
“Where are you living at the moment?” I parried. “In tents about the fields?”
“What would I be doing in a tent,” he mocked, “with the best houses in Devon at my disposal? Nay, my headquarters are at Buckland Abbey, which my grandfather sold to Francis Drake half a century ago, and I do not mind telling you that I live there very well. I have seized all the sheep and cattle upon the estate, and the tenants pay their rents to me, or else are hanged. They call me the Red Fox behind my back, and the women, I understand, use the name as a threat to their children when they misbehave, saying ‘Grenvile is coming. The Red Fox will have you.’ ”
He laughed, as if this was a fine jest, but I was watching the line of his jaw, which was heavier than before, and the curve of his mouth that narrowed at the corners.
“It was not thus,” I said softly, “that your brother Bevil’s reputation spread throughout the West.”
“No,” he said, “and I have not a wife like Bevil had, nor a home I love, nor a great brood of happy children.”
His voice was harsh suddenly, and strangely bitter. I turned my face away, and lay back on my pillows.
“Do you have your son with you at Buckland?” I asked quietly.
“My spawn?” he said. “Yes, he is somewhere about the place with his tutor.”
“What is he like?”
“Dick? Oh, he’s a little handful of a chap, with mournful eyes. I call him ‘whelp’ and make him sing to me at supper. But there’s no sign of Grenvile in him—he’s the spit of his goddamned mother.”
The boy we would have played with, and taught, and loved. I felt suddenly sad, and oddly depressed, that his father should dismiss him with this careless shrug of a shoulder.
“It went wrong with you then, Richard, from the beginning,” I said.
“It did,” he answered.
There was a long silence, for we had entered upon dangerous ground.
“Did you never try,” I asked, “to make some life of happiness?”
“Happiness was not in question,” he said. “That went with you, a factor you refused to recognize.”
“I am sorry,” I said.
“So am I,” he answered.
The shadows were creeping across the floor. Soon Matty would come to light the candles.
“When you refused to see me, that last time,” he said, “I knew that nothing mattered any more but bare existence. You have heard the story of my marriage, with much embellishment, no doubt, but the bones of it are true.”
“Had you no affection for her?”
“None whatever. I wanted her money, that was all.”
“Which you did not get.”
“Not then. I have it now. And her property, and her son—whom I fathered in a moment of black insensibility. The girl is with her mother up in London. I shall get her too one day, when she can be of use to me.”
“You are very altered, Richard, from the man I loved.”
“If I am so, you know the reason why.”
The sun had gone from the windows, the chamber seemed bleak and bare. Every bit of those fifteen years was now between us. Suddenly he reached out his hand to mine, and, taking it, held it against his lips. The touch I so well remembered was very hard to bear.
“Why in the name of God,” he said, rising to his feet, “were you and I marked down for such tragedy?”
“It is no use being angry,” I said. “I gave that up long ago. At first, yes, but not now. Not for many years. Lying on my back has taught me some discipline—but not the kind you engender in your troops.”
He came and stood beside my bed, looking down upon me.
“Has no one told you,” he said, “that you are more lovely now than you were then?”
I smiled, thinking of Matty and the mirror.
“I think you flatter me,” I answered, “or maybe I have more time now I lie idle, to play with paint and powder.”
No doubt he thought me cool and at my ease, and had no knowledge that his tone of voice ripped wide the dusty years and sent them scattering.
“There is no part of you,” he said, “that I do not now remember. You had a mole in the small of your back which gave you much distress. You thought it ugly—but I liked it well.”
“Is it not time,” I said, “that you went downstairs to join your officers? I heard one of them say you were to sleep this night at Grampound.”
“There was a bruise on your left thigh,” he said, “caused by that confounded branch that protruded halfway up the apple tree. I compared it to a dark-sized plum, and you were much offended.”
“I can hear the horses in the courtyard,” I said. “Your troopers are preparing for the journey. You will never reach your destination before morning.”
“You lie there,” he said, “so smug and so complacent on your bed, very certain of yourself now you are thirty-four. I tell you, Honor, I care not two straws for your civility.”
And he knelt then at my bed with his arms about me and the fifteen years went whistling down the wind.
“Are you still queasy when you eat roast swan?” he whispered.
He wiped away the silly childish tears that pricked my eyes, and laughed at me, and smoothed my hair.
“Beloved half-wit, with your goddamned pride,” he said, “do you understand now that you blighted both our lives?”
“I understood that at the time,” I told him.
“Why then, in the name of heaven, did you do it?”
“Had I not done so, you would soon have hated me, as you hated Mary Howard.”
“That is a lie, Honor.”
“Perhaps. What does it matter? There is no reason now to harp back on the past.”
“There I agree with you. The past is over. But we have the future with us. My marriage is annulled; you know that, I suppose. I am free to wed again.”
“Then do so, to another heiress.”
“I have no need of an heiress now, with all the estates in Devon to my plunder. I have become a gentleman of fortune to be looked upon with favor by the spinsters of the West.”
“There are many you might choose from, all agog for husbands.”
“In all probability. But I want one spinster only, and that yourself.”
I put my two hands on his shoulders and stared straight at him. The auburn hair, the hazel eyes, the little pulse that beat in his right temple. He was not the only one with recollections. I had my memories too, and could—had I the mind and lack of modesty—have reminded him of a patch of freckles that had been as much a matter for discussion as the mole upon my back.
“No, Richard.”
“Why?”
“Because I will not have you wedded to a cripple.”
“You will never change your mind?”
“Never.”
“And if I carry you by force to Buckland?”
“Do so, if you will, I can’t prevent you. But I shall still be a cripple.” I leaned back on my pillows, faint suddenly, and exhausted. It had not been a light thing to bear, this strain of seeing him, of beating down the years. Very gently he released me, and smoothed my blankets, and when I asked for a glass of water he gave me one in silence. It was nearly dark, and the clock in the belfry had struck eight a long while since. I could hear the jingling of harness from the courtyard, and the scraping sound of horses.
“I must ride to Grampound,” he said at length.
“Yes,” I said.
He stood for a moment looking down onto the court. The candles were lighted now throughout the house. The west windows of the gallery were open, sending a beam of light into my chamber. There was sound of music. Alice was playing her lute, and Peter singing.
Richard came once more and knelt beside my bed.
“I understand,” he said, “what you have tried so hard to tell me. There can never be, between us, what there was once. Is that it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I knew that all along, but it would make no difference,” he said.
“It would,” I said, “after a little while.”
Peter had a young voice, clear and gay, and his song was happy. I thought how Alice would be looking at him over her lute.
“I shall always love you,” said Richard, “and you will love me too. We cannot lose each other now, not since I have found you again. May I come and see you often, that we may be together?”
“Whenever you wish,” I answered.
There came a burst of clapping from the gallery, and the voices of the officers and the rest of the company asking for more. Alice struck up a lively jiggling air upon her lute—a soldier’s drinking song, much whistled at the moment by our men—and they one and all chimed in upon the chorus, with the troopers in the courtyard making echo to the song.
“Do you have as much pain now as when you were first hurt?” he said.
“Sometimes,” I answered, “when the air is damp. Matty calls me her weatherglass.”
“Can nothing be done for it?”
“She rubs my legs and my back with lotion that the doctors gave her. But it is of little use. You see, the bones were all smashed and twisted, and they cannot knit together.”
“Will you show me, Honor?”
“It is not a pretty sight, Richard.”
“I have seen worse in battle.”
I pulled aside my blanket and let him look upon the crumpled limbs that he had once known whole and clean. He was thus the only person in the world to see me so, except Matty and the doctors. I put my hands over my eyes, for I did not care to see his face.
“There is no need for that,” he said. “Whatever you suffer, you shall share with me, from this day forward.” He bent then, and kissed my ugly twisted legs, and after a moment covered me again with the blanket. “Will you promise,” he said, “never to send me from you again?”
“I promise,” I said.
“Farewell, then, sweetheart, and sleep sound this night.”
He stood for a moment, his figure carved clear against the beam of light from the windows opposite, and then turned and went away down the passage. Presently I heard them all come out into the courtyard and mount their horses; there was the sound of leave-taking and laughter, Richard’s voice high above the others telling John Rashleigh he would come again. Suddenly clipped and curt, he called an order to his men, and they went riding through the archway beneath the gatehouse where I lay, and I heard the sound of the hoofbeats echo across the park.