As the first gray chinks of light came through the casement I roused Dick, who lay sleeping with his head upon my shoulder like a baby, and when he had blinked a moment, and got his wits restored to him, I bade him light the candle and creep back again to the cell. The fear that gripped me was that lack of air had caused John to faint, and since he was by nature far from strong anything might have happened. Never, in all the fifteen years I had been crippled, had I so needed the use of my legs as now, but I was helpless. In a few moments Dick was back again, his little ghost’s face looking more pallid than ever in the gray morning light. “He is awake,” he said, “but very ill, I think. Shaking all over, and seeming not to know what has been happening. His head is burning hot, but his limbs are cold.”
At least he was alive, and a wave of thankfulness swept over me. But from Dick’s description I realized what had happened. The ague, that was his legacy from birth, had attacked John once again with its usual ferocity, and small wonder, after more than ten hours crouching beneath the buttress. I made up my mind swiftly. I bade Dick bring the chair beside my bed, and with his assistance I lowered myself into it. Then I went to the door communicating with the gatehouse chamber, and very gently called for Matty. Joan answered sleepily, and one of the children stirred.
“It is nothing,” I said, “it is only Matty that I want.”
In a moment or two she came from the little dressing room, her round plain face yawning beneath her nightcap, and would have chided me for rising had I not placed my finger on my lips. The urgency of the situation was such that my promise to my brother-in-law must finally be broken, though little of it held as it was. And without Matty it would be impossible to act. She came in, then, her eyes round with wonder when she saw Dick. “You love me, Matty, I believe,” I said to her. “Now I ask you to prove that love as never before. This boy’s safety and life is in our hands.” She nodded, saying nothing.
“Dick and Mr. John have been hiding since last evening,” I said. “There is a staircase and a little room built within the thickness of these walls. Mr. John is ill. I want you to go to him and bring him here. Dick will show you the way.”
He pulled aside the arras, and now for the first time I saw how the entrance was effected. A block of stone, about four feet square, worked on a hinge, moved by a lever and a rope, if pulled from beneath the narrow stair. This gave an opening just wide enough for a man to crawl through. When it was shut the stone was so closely fitting that it was impossible to find it from within the chamber, nor could it be pushed open, for the lever held it. The little stairway, set inside the buttress, twisted steeply to the cell below, which had height enough for a man to stand upright. More I could not see, craning from my chair, save for a dark heap, that must be John, lying on the lower step.
There was something weird and fearful in the scene, with the gray light of morning coming through the casement, and Matty, a fantastic figure in her nightclothes and cap, edging her way through the gap in the buttress. As she disappeared with Dick I heard the first high call of the bugle from the park, and I knew that for the rebel army the day had now begun. Soon the soldiers within the house would also be astir, and we had little time in hand. It was, I believe, some fifteen minutes before they were all three within the chamber, though it seemed an hour, and in those fifteen minutes the daylight had filled the room and the troopers were moving in the courtyard down below. John was quite conscious, thank God, and his mind lucid, but he was trembling all over and in a high fever, fit for nothing but his own bed and his wife’s care. We took rapid consultation, in which I held firmly to one thing, and that was that no further person, not even Joan his wife nor Mary his stepmother, should be told how he had come into the house, or that Dick was with us still.
John’s story, then, was to be that the fishing boat came in to one of the coves beneath the Gribben, where he put Dick aboard, and that on returning across the fields he had seen the arrival of the troopers, and hid until nightfall. But, his fever coming upon him, he decided to return, and therefore climbed in by the lead piping and the creeper that ran along the south front of the house outside his father’s window. For corroboration of this John must go at once to his father’s room, where his stepmother was sleeping, and waken her, and win her acceptance of the story. And this immediately, before the household were awake. It was like a nightmare to arrange, with Joan his wife in the adjoining chamber, through which he must pass to gain the southern portion of the house. For if he went by passage beneath the belfry he might risk encounter with the servants or the troopers. Matty went first, and since there was no question from Joan, or any movement from the children, we judged them to be sleeping, and poor John, his body on fire with fever, crept swiftly after her. I thought of the games of hide-and-seek I had played with my brothers and sisters at Lanrest as children, and how now that it was played in earnest there was no excitement but a sickening strain, which brought sweat to the forehead and a pain to the belly. When Matty returned, and reported John in safety in his father’s rooms, the first stage of the proceeding was completed. The next I had to break to Dick with great misgiving and an assumption of sternness and authority I was far from feeling. It was that he could remain with me, in my apartment, but must be prepared to stay, perhaps for long hours at a time, within the secret cell beneath the buttress, and have a palliasse there to sleep upon if need be, should there be visitors to my room.
He fell to crying at once, as I had expected, beseeching me not to let him stay alone in the dark cell. He would go mad, he said—he could not stand it, he would rather die.
I was well-nigh desperate, now that the house was beginning to stir, and the children to talk in the adjoining chamber.
“Very well, then,” I said. “Open the door, Matty. Call the troopers. Tell them that Richard Grenvile’s son is here and wishes to surrender himself to their mercy. They have sharp swords, and the pain will soon be over.” God forgive me that I could find it in my heart so to terrify the lad, but it was his only salvation.
The mention of the swords, bringing the thought of blood, sent the color draining from his face, as I knew it would, and he turned to me, his dark eyes desperate, and said, “Very well. I will do as you ask me.” It is those same dark eyes that haunt me still, and will always do so, to the day I die.
I bade Matty take the mattress from my bed, and the stool beside the window, and some blankets, and bundle them through the open gap onto the stair. “When it is safe for you to come, I will let you know,” I said. “But how can you,” said Dick, “when the gap is closed?” Here I was forced back again into the old dilemma of the night before. I could have wept with strain and weariness, and looked at Matty in despair. “If you do not quite close the gap,” she said, “but let it stay open three inches, Master Dick, with his ear put close to it, will hear your voice.”
We tried it, and although I was not happy with the plan it seemed the one solution. We found, too, that with a gap of two or three inches he could hear me strike with a stick upon the floor, once, twice, or thrice, which we arranged as signals. Thrice meant real danger, and then the stone must be pulled flush to the wall.
He had gone to his cell, with his mattress and his blankets and half a loaf that Matty had found for him, as the clock in the belfry struck six, and almost immediately little Jonathan from the adjoining room came pushing through the door, his toys under his arm, calling in loud tones for me to play with him. The day had started. When I look back now, to the intolerable strain and anguish of that time, I wonder how in God’s name I had the power to endure it. For I had to be on guard, not only against the rebels, but against my friends too, and those I loved. Mary, Alice, and Joan must all three remain in ignorance of what was happening, and their visits to my chamber, which should have been a comfort and a consolation in this time of strain, merely added to my anxiety.
What I would have done without Matty I do not know. It was she, acting sentinel as she had done in the past, who kept them from the door when Dick was with me, and, poor lad, I had to have him often, for the best part of the day. Luckily, my crippled state served as a good excuse, for it was known that often in the past I had “bad days,” and had to be alone, and this lie was now my only safeguard. John’s story had been accepted as full truth, and since he was quite obviously ill, and in high fever, he was allowed to remain in his father’s rooms with Joan to care for him and was not removed to closer custody under guard. Severe questioning from Lord Robartes could not shake John from his story, and, thank heaven, Robartes had too many other cares gathering fast upon his shoulders to worry any further about what had happened to Skellum Grenvile’s son.
I remember Matty saying to me on that first day, Friday, the second of August: “How long will they be here, Miss Honor? When will the Royalist army come to relieve us?”
And I, thinking of Richard down at Truro, and His Majesty already, so the rumor ran, entering Launceston, told her four days at the longest. But I was wrong. For four whole weeks the rebels were our masters.
It is nearly ten years since that August of ’44, but every day of that age-long month is printed firm upon my memory.
The first week was hot and stifling, with a glazed blue sky and not a cloud upon it, and in my nostrils now I can recapture the smell of horseflesh, and the stink of sweating soldiery, borne upwards to my open casement from the fetid court below.
Day in, day out, came the jingle of harness, the clattering of hoofs, the march of tramping feet, and the grinding sound of wagon wheels, and ever insistent, above the shouting of orders and the voices of the men, the bugle call, hammering its single note.
The children, Alice’s and Joan’s, unused to being within doors at high summer, hung fretful from the windows, adding to the babel, and Alice, who had the care of all of them while Joan nursed John in the greater quietude of the south front, would take them from room to room to distract them. Imprisonment made cronies of us all, and no sooner had Alice and the brood departed than the Sparke sisters, who hitherto had preferred checkers to my company, would come inquiring for me with some wild rumor to unfold, gleaned from the frightened servants, of how the house was to be burned down with all its inmates when Essex gave the order—but not till the women had been ravaged. I daresay I was the only woman in the house to be unmoved by such a threat, for God knows I could not be more bruised and broken than I was already. But for Deborah and Gillian it was another matter, and Deborah, whom I judged to be even safer from assault than I was myself, showed me with trembling hands the silver bodkin with which she would defend her honor. Their brother Will was become a sort of toady to the officers, thinking that by smiling and wishing them good morning he would win their favor and his safety, but as soon as their backs were turned he was whispering some slander about their persons, and repeating snatches of conversation he had overheard, bits and pieces that were no use to anyone. Once or twice Nick Sawle came tapping slowly to my room, leaning on his two sticks, a look of lost bewilderment and muddled resentment in his eye because the rebels had not been flung from Menabilly within four-and-twenty hours of their arrival, and I was forced to listen to his theories that His Majesty must be now at Launceston, now at Liskeard, now back again at Exeter—suppositions which brought our release no nearer. While he argued, his poor wife Temperance stared at him dully, in a kind of trance, her religious eloquence pent up at last from shock and fear so that she could do no more than clutch her prayer book without quoting from it.
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 had 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 burned through our backs, but must be endured for the sake of the fresh air we craved, and sometimes their laughter came to us. Their voices were hard and ugly, for they were mostly from London and the eastern counties, except the 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 turns 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 was 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 Prince 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 watching the clouds gathering thick and fast. There were scarce a dozen bullocks left in the pen, out of the fine herd there 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 were 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 nine 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 kitchen benches upon it, the doors torn from the larder and the tables from the stewards’ 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.