Rumors. Always rumors. Never anything of certainty. This was our portion during the winter of ’47–’48. So strict was the Parliamentary hold on news that nothing but the bare official statements were given to us down in Cornwall, and these had no value, being simply what Whitehall thought good for us to know.
So the whispers started, handed from one to the other, and when the whispers came to us fifth-hand we had to sift the welter of extravagance to find the seed of truth. The Royalists were arming. This was the firm base of all the allegations. Weapons were being smuggled into the country from France, and places of concealment were found for them. Gentlemen were meeting in one another’s houses. The laborers were conversing together in the field. A fellow at a street corner would beckon to another, for the purpose, it would seem, of discussing market prices; there would be a question, a swift answer, and then the two would separate, but information had been passed, and another link forged.
Outside the parish church of Tywardreath would stand a Parliamentary soldier, leaning on his musket, while the busybody agent, who had beneath his arm a fold of documents listing each member of the parish and his private affairs, gave him “Good morning”; and while he did so the old sexton, with his back turned, prepared a new grave, not for a corpse this time, but for weapons… They could have told a tale, those burial grounds of Cornwall. Cold steel beneath the green turf and the daisies, locked muskets in the dark family vaults. Let a fellow climb to repair his cottage roof against the rains of winter, and he will pause an instant and glance over his shoulder, and, thrusting his hand under the thatch, feel for the sharp edge of a sword. These would be Matty’s tales. Mary would come to me, with a letter from Jonathan in London. “Fighting is likely to start again at any moment,” would be his guarded word. “Discontent is rife, even here, against our masters. Many Londoners who fought in opposition to the King would swear loyalty to him now. I can say no more than this. Bid John have a care whom he meets and where he goes. Remember, I am bound to my oath. If we meddle in these matters he and I will answer for it with our lives.”
Mary would fold the letter anxiously and place it in her gown. “What does it mean?” she would say. “What matters does he refer to?” And to this there could be one answer only. The Royalists were rising.
Names that had not been spoken for two years were now whispered by cautious tongues. Trelawney… Trevanion… Arundell… Bassett… Grenvile… Yes, above all, Grenvile. He had been seen at Stowe, said one. Nay, that was false, it was not Stowe, but at his sister’s house near Bideford. The Isle of Wight, said another. The Red Fox was gone to Carisbrooke to take secret council of the King. He had not come to the West Country. He had been seen in Scotland. He had been spoken to in Ireland. Sir Richard Grenvile was returned. Sir Richard Grenvile was in Cornwall…
I made myself deaf to these tales. For once too often, in my life, I had had a bellyful of rumors. Yet it was strange no letter came any more from Italy, or from France…
John Rashleigh kept silent on these matters. His father had bidden him not to meddle, but to work, night and day, at the husbanding of the estate, so that the groaning debt to Parliament could be paid. But I could guess his thoughts. If there were in truth a rising, and the Prince landed, and Cornwall was freed once more, there would be no debt to pay. If the Trelawneys were a party to the plan, and the Trevanions also, and all those in the county who swore loyalty to the King in secret, then was it not something like cowardice, something like shame, for a Rashleigh to remain outside the company? Poor John. He was often restless and sharp tempered, those first weeks of spring, after plowing was done. And Joan was not with us to encourage him, for her twin boys, born the year before, were sickly, and she was with them, and the elder children, at Mothercombe in Devon. Then Jonathan fell ill up in London, and though he asked permission of the Parliament to return to Cornwall they would not grant it, so he sent for Mary, and she went to him. Alice was the next to leave. Peter wrote to her from France, desiring that she should take the children to Trethurfe, his home, which was—so he had heard—in sad state of repair, and would she go there, now spring was at hand, and see what could be done. She went, the first day of March, and it suddenly became strangely quiet at Menabilly. I had been used so long to children’s voices that now to be without them, and the sound of Alice’s voice calling to them, and the rustle of Mary’s gown, made me more solitary than usual, even a little sad. There was no one but John now for company, and I wondered what we should make of it together, he and I, through the long evenings.
“I have half a mind,” he said to me the third day we sat together, “to leave Menabilly in your care, and go to Mothercombe.”
“I’ll tell no tales of you if you do,” I said to him.
“I do not like to go against my father’s wishes,” he admitted, “but it’s over six months now since I have seen Joan and the children, and not a word comes to us here of what is passing in the country. Only that the war has broken out again. There is fighting in places as far apart as Wales and the eastern counties. I tell you, Honor, I am sick of inactivity. For very little I would take horse and ride to Wales.”
“No need to ride to Wales,” I said quietly, “when there is likely to be a rising in your own county.”
He glanced at the half-open door of the gallery. A queer, instinctive move, unnecessary when the few servants that we had could all be trusted. Yet since we had been ruled by Parliament this gesture would be force of habit. “Have you heard anything?” he said guardedly. “Some word of truth, I mean, not idle rumor?”
“Nothing,” I answered, “beyond what you hear yourself.”
“I thought perhaps Sir Richard…,” he began, but I shook my head.
“Since last year,” I said, “rumor has it that he has been hiding in the country. I’ve had no message.”
He sighed, and glanced once more towards the door.
“If only,” he said, “I could be certain what to do. If there should be a rising, and I took no part in it, how lacking in loyalty to the King I would seem, and what dishonor it would be to the name of Rashleigh.”
“If there should be a rising and it failed,” I said, “how damp your prison walls, how uneasy your head upon your shoulders.”
He smiled, for all his earnestness. “Trust a woman,” he said, “to damp a fellow’s ardor.”
“Trust a woman,” I replied, “to keep war out of her home.”
“Do you wish to sit down indefinitely, then, under the rule of Parliament?” he asked.
“Not so. But spit in their faces, before the time is ripe, and we shall find ourselves one and all under their feet forever.”
Once again he sighed, rumpling his hair and looking dubious.
“Get yourself permission,” I said, “and go to Mothercombe. It’s your wife you need, and not a rising. But I warn you, once you are in Devon you may not find it so easy to return.”
This warning had been repeated often during the past weeks. Those who had gone into Devon or to Somerset upon their lawful business, bearing a permit from the local Parliamentary officials, would find great delay upon the homeward journey, much scrutiny and questioning, and this would be followed by a search for documents or weapons, and possibly a night or more under arrest. We, the defeated, were not the only ones to hear the rumors…
The Sheriff of Cornwall at this time was a neighbor, Sir Thomas Herle of Prideaux, near St. Blazey, who, though firm for Parliament, was a just and fair man. He had done all he could to mitigate the heavy fine placed upon the Rashleigh estate, through respect for my brother-in-law, but Whitehall was too strong for his local powers. It was he now, in kindness, who granted John Rashleigh permission to visit his wife at Mothercombe in Devon, and so it happened, this fateful spring, that I was, of all our party, the only one remaining at Menabilly. A woman and a cripple—it was not likely that such a one could foster, all alone, a grim rebellion. The Rashleighs had taken the oath. Menabilly was now above suspicion. And though the garrison at Fowey and other harbors on the coast were strengthened, and more troops quartered in the towns and villages, our little neck of land seemed undisturbed. The sheep grazed on the Gribben hill. The cattle browsed in the beef park. The wheat was sown in Eighteen Acres. And smoke from a single fire—my own—rose from the Menabilly chimneys. Even the steward’s house was desolate, now old John Langdon had been gathered to his fathers, for with the crushing burden on the estate his place had not been filled. His keys, once so important and mysterious, were now in my keeping, and the summerhouse, so sacred to my brother-in-law, had become my routine shelter on a windy afternoon. I had no wish these days to pry into the Rashleigh papers. Most of the books were gone, stored in the house or packed and sent after him to London. The desk was bare and empty. Cobwebs hung from the walls. Green patches of mold showed upon the ceiling. But the torn matting on the floor still hid the flagstone with the iron ring… I saw a rat once creep from his corner and stare at me a moment with beady, unwinking eyes. A great black spider spun a web from a broken pane of glass in the east window, while ivy, spreading from the ground, thrust a tendril to the sill. A few years more, I thought, and Nature would take toll of it all. The stones of the summerhouse would crumble, the nettles force themselves through the floor, and no one would remember the flagstone with the ring upon it, or the flight of steps, and the earthy, moldering tunnel. Well, it had served its purpose. Those days would not return.
I looked out towards the sea, one day in March, and watched the shadows darken, for an instant, the pale ripple of the water beyond Pridmouth. The clock in the belfry struck four o’clock. Matty had gone to Fowey, and should be back by now. I heard a footstep on the path beneath the causeway, and called, thinking it was one of the farm laborers returning home, who could bear a message for me to the house. The footsteps ceased, but there came no word in answer.
I called again, and this time I heard a rustle in the undergrowth. My friend, the fox, perhaps, was out on his prowl. Then I saw a hand fasten to the sill and cling there for an instant, gripping for support. But the walls of the summerhouse were smooth, giving no foothold, and in a second the hand had slipped and was gone.
Someone was playing spy upon me… If one of the long-nosed Parliamentary agents who spent their days scaring the wits out of the simple country people wished to try the game on me, he would receive short measure.
“If anyone wishes to speak with Mr. Rashleigh, he is from home,” I called loudly. “There is no one but myself in charge at Menabilly. Mistress Honor Harris, at your service.”
I waited a moment, my eye still on the window, and then a shadow, falling suddenly upon my right shoulder, told me there was someone at the door. I whipped round, in an instant, my hands on the wheels of my chair, and saw the figure of a man, small and slight, clad in plain dark clothes like a London clerk, with a hat pulled low over his face. He stood watching me, his hand upon the lintel of the door.
“Who are you?” I said. “What do you want?” There was something in his manner which struck a chord… The way he hesitated, standing on one foot, then bit his thumbnail… I groped for the answer, my heart beating, when he whipped his hat from his close black curls, and I saw him smile, tremulous at first, uncertain, until he saw me smile and stretch my arms towards him.
“Dick…,” I whispered. He came and knelt by me at once, covering my hand with kisses.
I forgot the intervening years, and had in my arms a little frightened boy who gnawed a bone and swore he was a dog and I his mistress. And then, raising his head, I saw he was a boy no longer, but a young man, with hair upon his lip, and curls no longer riotous, but sleek and close. His voice was low and soft, a man’s voice.
“Four years,” I said. “Have you grown thus in four small years?”
“I shall be eighteen in two months’ time,” he answered, smiling. “Have you forgotten? You wrote the first year for my birthday, but never since.”
“Writing has not been possible, Dick, these past two years.”
I could not take my eyes from him, he was so grown, so altered. Yet that way of watching with dark eyes, wary and suspicious, was the same, and the trick of gnawing at his hand.
“Tell me quickly,” I said, “before they come to fetch me from the house, what you are doing here, and why.”
He looked at me doubtfully. “I am the first to come, then?” he asked. “My father is not here?”
My heart leaped, but whether in excitement or in fear I could not tell. In a flash of intuition, it seemed that I knew everything. The waiting of the past few months was over. It was all to begin afresh… It was to start again…
“No one is here,” I answered, “but yourself. Even the Rashleighs are from home.”
“Yes, we knew that,” he said. “That is why Menabilly has been chosen.”
“Chosen for what?” I asked.
He did not answer. He started his old trick of gnawing at his hand. “They will tell you,” he said, blinking his eyelids, “when they come.”
“Who are ‘they’?” I asked.
“My father, first,” he answered, with his eye upon the door, “and Peter Courtney another, and Ambrose Manaton of Trecarrel, and your own brother Robin, and, of course, my Aunt Gartred.”
Gartred… At this I felt like someone who has been ill overlong, or withdrawn from the world, leading another life. There had been rumors enough, God knows, in southeast Cornwall to stun the senses, but none so formidable as fell now upon my ears.
“I think it best,” I said slowly, “if you tell me what has happened since you came to England.”
He rose then from his knee, and, dusting the dirt from his clothes with a fastidious hand, swept a place upon the windowsill to sit. “We left Italy last autumn,” he said, “and came first of all to London. My father was disguised as a Dutch merchant, and I as his secretary. Since then we have traveled England, from south to north, outwardly as foreign men of business, secretly as agents for the Prince. At Christmas we crossed the Tamar into Cornwall, and went first of all to Stowe. My aunt is dead, you know, and no one was there but the steward, and my cousin Bunny, and the others. My father made himself known to the steward, and since then many secret meetings have been held throughout the county. From Stowe it is but a step to Bideford and Orley Court. There were found my aunt Gartred, who, having fallen out with her Parliamentary friends, was hot to join us, and your brother Robin also.”
Truly the world had passed me by at Menabilly. The Parliament had one grace to its credit, that the stoppage of news stopped gossip also.
“I did not know,” I said, “that my brother Robin lived at Bideford.”
Dick shrugged his shoulders. “He and my aunt are very thick,” he answered. “I understand your brother has made himself her bailiff. She owns land, does she not, that belonged to your eldest brother, who is dead?”
Yes, they could have met again that way. The ground upon which Lanrest had stood, the fields below the mill at Lometton. Why should I blame Robin, grown weary and idle in defeat?
“And so?” I asked.
“And so the plans matured, the clans gathered. They are all in it, you know, from east to west, the length and breadth of Cornwall. The Trelawneys, the Trevanions, the Bassetts, the Arundells. And now the time draws near. The muskets are being loaded and the swords sharpened. You will have a front seat at the slaughter.”
There was a strange note of bitterness in his soft voice, and I saw him clench his hands upon the sill.
“And you?” I asked. “Are you not excited at the prospect? Are you not happy to be one of them?”
He did not answer for a moment, and when he did I saw his eyes look large and black in his pale face, even as they had done as a boy four years before.
“I tell you one thing, Honor,” he said passionately. “I would give all I possess in the world, which is precious little, to be out of it.”
The force with which he spoke shocked me for an instant, but I took care that he should not guess it.
“Why so?” I asked. “Have you no faith that they will succeed?”
“Faith?” he said wearily. “I have no faith in anything. I begged him to let me stay in Italy, where I was content after my own fashion, but he would not let me. I found that I could paint, Honor. I wished to make painting my trade. I had friends, too, fellows of my age, for whom I felt affection. But no. Painting was womanish, a pastime fit for foreigners. My friends were womanish too, and would degrade me. If I wished to live, if I hoped to have a penny to my name, I must follow him, do his bidding, ape his ways, grow like my Grenvile cousins. God in heaven, how I have come to loathe the very name of Grenvile!”
Eighteen, but he had not changed. Eighteen, but he was still fourteen. This was the little boy who had sobbed his hatred of his father.
“And your mother?” I asked gently.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, I have seen her,” he said listlessly, “but it’s too late now to make amends. She cares nothing for me. She has other interests. Four years ago she would have loved me still. Not now. It’s too late. His fault. Always his fault.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “when—when this present business is concluded, you will be free. I will speak for you. I will ask that you may return to Italy, to your painting, to your friends.”
He picked at the fringe of his coat with his long slim hands—too long, I thought, too finely slim for a Grenvile.
“There will be fighting,” he said slowly, “men killing one another for no purpose, save to spill blood. Always to spill blood…”
It was growing dim in the summerhouse, and still I had heard no more about their plans. The fear that I read in his eyes found an echo in my heart, and the old strain and anxiety was with me once again. “When did you leave Bideford?” I asked.
“Two days ago,” he answered. “Those were my orders. We were to proceed separately, each by a different route. Lady Courtney has gone to Trethurfe, I presume?”
“She went at the beginning of the month.”
“So Peter intended. It was part of the ruse, you see, for emptying the house. Peter has been in Cornwall and among us since before Christmas.”
Another prey for Gartred? A second bailiff to attend on Orley Court? And Alice here, with wan cheeks, and chin upon her hand, at an open window… Richard did not choose his serviteurs for kindness.
“Mrs. Rashleigh was inveigled up to London for the same purpose,” said Dick. “The scheme has been cunningly planned, like all schemes of my father’s. And the last cast of all, to rid the house of John, was quite in keeping with his character.”
“John went of his own accord,” I answered, “to see his wife at Mothercombe in Devon.”
“Aye, but he had a message first,” said Dick, “a scrap of paper, passed to him in Fowey, saying that his wife was overfond of a neighbor, living in her father’s house. I know, because I saw my father pen the letter, laughing as he did so, with Aunt Gartred at his back.”
I was silent at that. God damn them both, I thought, for cruelty. And I knew Richard’s answer, even as I accused him in my thoughts: “Any means, to secure the end that I desire.”
Well, what was to come was no affair of mine. The house was empty. Let them make of it a place of assignation. I could not stop them. Let Menabilly become, in one brief hour, the headquarters of the Royalist rising. Whether they succeeded or failed was not my business. “Did your father,” I said, “send any word to me? Did he know that I was here?”
Dick stared at me blankly for a moment, as though I were in truth the half-wit I now believed myself to be.
“Why, yes, of course,” he said. “That is why he picked on Menabilly, rather than on Caerhayes. There was no woman at Caerhayes to give him comfort.”
“Does your father,” I said, “still need comfort after two long years in Italy?”
“It depends,” he answered, “what you intend by comfort. I never saw my father hold converse with Italian women. It might have made him better tempered, if he had.”
I saw Richard, in my mind’s eye, pen in hand, with a map of Cornwall spread on a table before him. And dotted upon the map were the houses by the coast that offered sanctuary. Trelawne… too deeply wooded. Penrice… not close enough to the sea. Caerhayes… yes, good landing ground for troops, but not a single Miss Trevanion. Menabilly… with a beach, and a hiding place, and an old love into the bargain, who had shared his life before and might be induced, even now, after long silence, to smile on him a moment after supper. And the pen would make a circle round the name of Menabilly. So I was become cynic in defeat. The rule of Parliament had taught me a lesson. But as I sat there watching Dick and thinking how little he resembled his father, I knew that all my anger was but a piece of bluff deceiving no one, not even my harder self, and that there was nothing I wanted in the world so much as to play hostess once more to Richard by candlelight, and to live again that life of strain and folly, anguish and enchantment.