At nine in the morning came a line of troopers riding through the park. They dismounted in the courtyard, and the officer in charge, a colonel from the staff of Sir Hardress Waller at Saltash, sent word up to me that I must dress and descend immediately, and be ready to accompany him to Fowey. I was dressed already, and when the servants carried me downstairs I saw the troopers he had brought prising the paneling in the long gallery. The watchdogs had arrived…
“This house was sacked once already,” I said to the officer, “and it has taken my brother-in-law four years to make what small repairs he could. Must this work begin again?”
“I am sorry,” said the officer, “but the Parliament can afford to take no chances with a man like Richard Grenvile.”
“You think to find him here?”
“There are a score of houses in Cornwall where he might be hidden,” he replied. “Menabilly is but one of them. This being so, I am compelled to search the house rather too thoroughly for the comfort of those who dwell beneath its roof. I am afraid that Menabilly will not be habitable for some little while… Therefore I must ask you to come with me to Fowey.”
I looked about me, at the place that had been my home now for two years. I had seen it sacked before. I had no wish to witness the sight again. “I am ready,” I said to the officer.
As I was placed in the litter, with Matty at my side, I heard the old sound I well remembered, of axes tearing the floorboards, of swords ripping the wood, and another jester, like his predecessor in ’44, had already climbed up to the belfry and hung cross-legged from the beam, the rope between his hands, swinging the great bell from side to side. It tolled us from the gatehouse, tolled us from the outer court. This, I thought to myself in premonition, is my farewell to Menabilly. I shall not live here again.
“We will go by the coast,” said the officer, looking in the window of my litter. “The highway is choked with troops, bound for Helston and Penzance.”
“Do you need so many,” I asked, “to quell but a little rising?”
“The rising will be over in a day or so,” he answered, “but the troops have come to stay. There will be no more insurrections in Cornwall, east or west, from this day forward.”
And as he spoke the Menabilly bell swung backwards, forwards, in a mournful knell, echoing his words.
I looked up from the path beneath the causeway, and the summerhouse that had stood there yesterday, a little tower with its long windows, was now charred rubble, a heap of sticks and stones.
“By whose orders,” called the officer, “was that fire kindled?” I heard him take council of his men, and they climbed to the causeway to investigate the pile, while Matty and I waited in the litter. In a few moments the officer returned.
“What building stood there?” he asked me. “I can make nothing of it from the mess. But the fire is recent, and smolders still.”
“A summerhouse,” I said. “My sister, Mrs. Rashleigh, loved it well. We sat there often when she was home. This will vex her sorely. Colonel Bennett, when he came here yesterday, gave orders, I believe, for its destruction.”
“Colonel Bennett,” said the officer, frowning, “had no authority without permission of the Sheriff, Sir Thomas Herle.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “He may have had permission. I cannot tell you. But he is a member of the County Committee, and therefore can do much as he pleases.”
“The County Committee takes too much upon itself,” said the officer. “One day they will have trouble with us in the army.” He mounted his horse in high ill temper, and shouted an order to his men. A civil war within a civil war. Did no faction ever keep the peace among themselves? Let the army and the Parliament quarrel as they pleased; it would help our cause in the end, in the long run… And as I turned and looked for the last time at the smoldering pile upon the causeway, and the tall trees in thistle park, I thought of the words that had been whispered two years ago, in ’46; when the snow melts, when the thaw breaks, when the spring comes.
We descended the steep path to Pridmouth. The tide was low, the Cannis Rock showed big and clear, and on the far horizon was the black smudge of a sail. The millstream gurgled out upon the stones, and ran sharply to the beach, and from the marsh at the farther end a swan rose suddenly, thrashing his way across the water, and, circling in the air a moment, winged his way out to the sea. We climbed the further hill, past Coombe Manor, where the Rashleigh cousins lived, and so down to my brother-in-law’s town house on Fowey quay. The first thing I looked for was a ship at anchor in the Rashleigh roads, but none was there. The harbor water was still and gray, and no vessels but little fish-craft anchored at Polruan. The people on the quayside watched with curiosity as I was lifted from my litter and taken to the house. My brother-in-law was waiting for me in the parlor. The room was dark paneled, like the dining hall at Menabilly, the great windows looking out upon the quay. On the ledge stood the model of a ship—the same ship that his father had built and commissioned forty years before to sail with Drake against the Armada. She too was named the Frances.
“I regret,” said the officer, “that for a day or so, until the trouble in the west has quietened down, it will be necessary to keep a watch upon this house. I must ask you, sir, and this lady here, to stay within your doors.”
“I understand,” said Jonathan. “I have been so long accustomed to surveillance that a few more days of it will not hurt me now.”
The officer withdrew, and I saw a sentry take up his position outside the window as his fellow had done the night before at Menabilly. “I have news of Robin,” said my brother-in-law. “He is detained in Plymouth, but I think they can fasten little upon him. When this matter has blown over he will be released, on condition that he takes the oath of allegiance to the Parliament, as I was forced to do.”
“And then?” I asked.
“Why, then he can become his own master, and settle down to peace and quietude. I have a little house in Tywardreath that would suit him well, and you too, Honor, if you should wish to share it with him. That is… if you have no other plan.”
“No,” I said. “No, I have no other plan.”
He rose from his chair and walked slowly to the window, looking out upon the quay. An old man, white haired and bent, leaning heavily upon his stick. The sound of the gulls came to us as they wheeled and dived above the harbor.
“The Frances sailed at five this morning,” he said slowly.
I did not answer.
“The fishing lad who went to lift his pots pulled first into Pridmouth for his passenger. He found him waiting on the beach, as he expected. He looked tired and wan, the lad said, but otherwise little the worse for his ordeal.”
“One passenger?” I said.
“Why, yes, there was but one,” said Jonathan, staring at me. “Is anything the matter? You looked wisht and strange.”
I went on listening to the gulls above the harbor, and now there were children’s voices also, laughing and crying, as they played upon the steps of the quay. “There is nothing the matter,” I said. “What else have you to tell me?”
He went to his desk in the far corner, and, opening a drawer, took out a length of rope, with a rusted hinge upon it.
“As the passenger was put aboard the vessel,” said my brother-in-law, “he gave the fisher lad this piece of rope, and bade him hand it, on his return, to Mr. Rashleigh. The lad brought it to me as I breakfasted just now. There was a piece of paper wrapped about it, with these words written on the face: ‘Tell Honor that the least of the Grenviles chose his own method of escape.’ ”
He handed me the little scrap of paper.
“What does it mean?” he asked. “Do you understand it?”
For a long while I did not answer. I sat there with the paper in my hands, and I saw once more the ashes of the summerhouse blocking for evermore the secret tunnel, and I saw too the silent cell, like a dark tomb, in the thick buttress wall.
“Yes, Jonathan,” I said, “I understand.”
He looked at me a moment, and then went to the table and put the rope and hinge back in the drawer.
“Well,” he said, “it’s over now, praise heaven. The danger and the strain. There is nothing more that we can do.”
“No,” I answered. “Nothing more that we can do.”
He fetched two glasses from the sideboard, and filled them with wine from the decanter. Then he handed one to me. “Drink this,” he said kindly, his hand upon my arm. “You have been through great anxiety.” He took his glass, and lifted it to the ship that had carried his father to the Armada.
“To the other Frances,” he said, “and to the King’s General in the West. May he find sanctuary and happiness in Holland.”
I drank the toast in silence, then put the glass back upon the table. “You have not finished it,” he said. “That spells ill luck to him whom we have toasted.”
I took the glass again, and this time I held it up against the light so that the wine shone clear and red.
“Did you ever hear,” I said, “those words that Bevil Grenvile wrote to Jonathan Trelawney?”
“What words were those?”
Once more we were assembled, four-and-twenty hours ago, in the long gallery at Menabilly. Richard at the window, Gartred on the couch, and Dick, in his dark corner, with his eyes upon his father. “ ‘And for mine own part,’ ” I quoted slowly, “ ‘I desire to acquire an honest name or an honorable grave. I never loved my life or ease so much as to shun such an occasion, which, if I should, I were unworthy of the profession I have held, or to succeed those ancestors of mine who have so many of them, in several ages, sacrificed their lives for their country.’ ”
I drank my wine then to the dregs, and gave the glass to Jonathan.
“Great words,” said my brother-in-law, “and the Grenviles were all great men. As long as the name endures, we shall be proud of them in Cornwall. But Bevil was the finest of them. He showed great courage at the last.”
“The least of them,” I said, “showed great courage also.”
“Which one was that?” he asked.
“Only a boy,” I said, “whose name will never now be written in the great book at Stowe, nor his grave be found in the little churchyard at Kilkhampton.”
“You are crying,” said Jonathan slowly. “This time has been hard and long for you. There is a bed prepared for you above. Let Matty take you to it. Come now, take heart. The worst is over. The best is yet to be. One day the King will come into his own again; one day your Richard will return.”
I looked up at the model of the ship upon the ledge, and across the masts to the blue harbor water. The fishing boats were making sail, and the gulls flew above them crying, white wings against the sky.
“One day,” I said, “when the snow melts, when the thaw breaks, when the spring comes.”