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 plain and harmless enough. 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, this was 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 Jack Robartes would do to Richard if he could get hold of him.”
“The reverse holds equally 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 traveled 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 his 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 curious 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 him 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 greatest 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, realizing 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 rumors I had heard since she was widowed for the second time, how Orley Court was much burdened with debt and must be settled among 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.
This, then, was her motive, with suspicion already centered on my room. She did not know the secret of the buttress, but memory had reminded her that there was, within the walls of Menabilly, some such hiding place. And with sharp guesswork, she had reached the conclusion that my brother-in-law would make a wartime use of it. That the hiding place might also conceal her nephew had, I was certain, never entered her head. Nor—and this was supposition on my part—was she working in partnership with Lord Robartes. She was playing her own game, and if the game was likely to be advanced by letting him make love to her, that was only by the way. It was far pleasanter to eat roast meat than watered broth; besides, she had a taste for burly men. But if she found she could not get what she wanted by playing a lone hand—then she would lay her cards upon the table and damn the consequences.
This, then, was what we had to fear, and no one in the house knew of it but myself. So Sunday, August the eleventh, came and went, and we woke next morning to another problematical week in which anything might happen, with the three Royalist armies squeezing the rebels tighter hour by hour, the strip of country left to them becoming daily more bare and devastated, and a steady, sweeping rain turning all the roads to mud.
Gone was the hot weather, the glazed sky, and the sun. No longer did the children hang from the windows, and listen to the bugles, and watch the troopers come and go. No more did we take our daily exercise before the windows of the gallery. A high, blustering wind broke across the park, and from my tightly shut casement I could see the closed, dripping tents, the horses tethered line upon line beneath the trees at the far end, their heads disconsolate, while the men stood about in huddled, melancholy groups, their fires dead as soon as kindled. Many of the wounded died in the farm buildings. Mary saw the burial parties go forth at dawn, a silent, gray procession in the early morning mist, and we heard they took them to the Long Mead, the valley beneath the woods at Pridmouth.
No more wounded came to the farm buildings, and we guessed from this that the heavy weather had put a stop to fighting. But we heard also that His Majesty’s Army now held the east bank of the Fowey River, from St. Veep down to the fortress at Polruan, which commanded the harbor entrance. The rebels in Fowey were thus cut off from their shipping in the Channel and could receive no supplies by sea, except from such small boats as could land at Pridmouth or Polkerris or on the sand flats at Tywardreath, which the heavy run from the southwest now made impossible. There was little laughter or chatter now from the messroom in the gallery, so Alice said, and the officers, with grim faces, clumped back and forth from the dining chamber, which Lord Robartes had taken for his own use, while every now and then his voice would be raised in irritation and anger, as a messenger would ride through the pouring rain bearing some counter-order from the Earl of Essex in Lostwithiel or some fresh item of disaster. Whether Gartred moved about the house or not I do not know. Alice said she thought she kept to her own chamber. I saw little of Joan, for poor John’s ague was still unabated, but Mary came from time to time to visit me, her face each day more drawn and agonized as she learned of further devastation to the estate. More than three hundred of the sheep had already been slaughtered, thirty fatted bullocks, and sixty store bullocks. All the draft oxen taken, and all the farm horses, some forty of them in number. A dozen or so hogs were left out of the eighty there had been, and these would all be gone before the week was out. The last year’s corn had vanished the first week of the rebel occupation, and now they had stripped the new, leaving no single blade to be harvested. There was nothing left, of course, of the farm wagons, or carts, or farming tools—these had all been taken. And the sheds where the winter fuel had been stored were as bare as the granaries. There was, in fact—so the servants in fear and trembling reported to Mary—scarcely anything remaining of the great estate that Jonathan Rashleigh had left in her keeping a fortnight since. The gardens spoiled, the orchards ruined, the timber felled, the livestock eaten. Whichever way the war in the west should go, my brother-in-law would be a bankrupt man.
And they had not yet started upon the house or the inhabitants. Our feeding was already a sore problem. At midday we all gathered to the main meal of the day. This was served to us in Alice’s apartment in the east wing, while John lay ill in his father’s chamber, and there some twenty of us herded side by side, the children clamoring and fretful, while we dipped stale bread in the mess of watery soup provided, helped sometimes by swollen beans and cabbage. The children had their milk, but no more than two cupfuls for the day, and already I noticed a staring look about them, their eyes overlarge in the pale faces, while their play had become listless, and they yawned often. Young Jonathan started his croup, bringing fresh anxiety to Joan, and Alice had to go below to the kitchen and beg for rhubarb sticks to broil for him—a favor which was only granted her because her gentle ways won sympathy from the trooper in charge. The old people suffered like the children, and complained fretfully with the same misunderstanding of what war brings. Nick Sawle would stare long at his empty bowl when he had finished and mutter “Disgraceful! Quite unpardonable!” into his beard, and look malevolently about him as though it were the fault of someone present, while Will Sparke with sly cunning would seat himself among the younger children and under pretense of making friends sneak crumbs from them when Alice and her nurse turned their backs. The women were less selfish, and Deborah, whom I had thought as great a freak in her own way as her brother was in his, showed great tenderness, on a sudden, for all those about her who seemed helpless, nor did her deep voice and incipient mustache discourage the smallest children.
It was solely with Matty’s aid that I was able to feed Dick at all. By some means, fair or foul, which I did not inquire into, she had made an ally of the second scullion, to whom she pulled a long story about her ailing, crippled mistress, with the result that further soup was smuggled to my chamber beneath Matty’s apron and no one the wiser for it. It was this same scullion who fed us with rumors, too—most of them disastrous to his own side—which made me wonder if a bribe would make him a deserter. At midweek we heard that Richard had seized Restormel Castle by Lostwithiel, and that Lord Goring, who commanded the King’s horse, held the bridge and the road below St. Blazey. Essex was now pinned up in our peninsula, some seven miles long and two broad, with ten thousand men to feed, and the guns from Polruan trained on Fowey Harbour. It could not last much longer. Either Essex and the rebels must be relieved by a further force marching to him from the east, or he must stand and make a fight of it. And we would sit, day after day, with cold hearts and empty bellies, staring out upon the sullen soldiery as they stood huddled in the rain outside their tents, while their leaders within the house held councils of despondency. Another Sunday came, and with it a whisper of alarm among the rebels that the country people were stealing forth at night and doing murder. Sentries were found strangled at their posts, men woke to find their comrades with cut throats, others would stagger to headquarters from the high road, their hands lopped from their wrists, their eyes blinded. The Cornish were rising.
On Tuesday, the twenty-seventh, there was no soup for our midday dinner, only half a dozen loaves among the twenty of us. On Wednesday one jugful of milk for the children, instead of three, and the milk much watered.
On Thursday Alice and Joan and Mary, and the two Sparke sisters and I, divided our bread among the children, and made for ourselves a brew of herb tea with scalding water. We were not hungry. Desire for food left us when we saw the children tear at the stale bread and cram it in their mouths, then turn and ask for more which we could not give to them. And all the while the southwest wind tore and blustered in the teeming sky, and the rebel bugle that had haunted us so long sounded across the park like a challenge of despair.