The Grove of Eagles

by Winston Graham

  “Maugan, it’s not nice to speak of it so, in broad daylight, in the sunshine, in the open air.”

  “Then it is ugly?”

  She pulled her hand away again. “ Oh, poh, you’re joking now. As if you’re s’ innocent as all that! I’m not the only girl you’ve kissed an’ fondled.”

  “I never said so. But love doesn’t end there.”

  “No, it does not.”

  “Well?”

  She put both hands up to push her hair away from her forehead. “Oh, it’s nothing special— nothing to get excited about. The best part is the kissing and fondling.”

  “Not everyone says that.”

  “There, I tell you, and straightway you contradict!”

  I said: “Meg, perhaps it is loving the right person. Like kissing the right person. For instance if I kiss you I take much pleasure of it. But if I kiss well … if I was to kiss Annora Job, who is a pretty girl, just as pretty as you, it would not pleasure me at all. Why not? I don’t know. But that’s the way it is. Now perhaps that is the way it is with love—”

  “Are you telling me I don’t love Dick?”

  “I’m not saying anything. I don’t know. Perhaps you don’t know. But might it not be part true? That you love him one way and perhaps not another?”

  “No, it is not! ’Ow dare ye say such things, Maugan! I only said … oh, tis no use talking! I’ll go.”

  As she got up I got up. As she turned to pad away on angry sandalled feet I caught her arm and pulled her round.

  “Meg.”

  “Leave me go!”

  I kissed her a few times, not well, for she struggled, but on the eyebrow, on the ear, on the lip. “Now you’re no better than they thieves!” she said breathlessly.

  “Stay awhile,” I pleaded. “ Please stay. No one’ll miss us for an hour.”

  She looked at me, again uncertain, but there was a glint of kindness in her eyes. “If you promise not to be lickerish.”

  “I promise.”

  We lay there lazily for ten minutes in the sun. I sucked a piece of grass and looked up at two choughs planing into the wind. The sun was gilding their black wings, transforming them. I wished it would gild ours.

  Meg went across and gathered a sheaf of bluebells, then came to sit beside me again.

  “A pity you ha’n’t your book, Maugan. Then you could read to me again.”

  “There’s nothing so good in books as there is in life.”

  “Such as love I suppose.”

  “Such as love, you rightly suppose.”

  “Which you, never ’aving ’ad it, d’ know all about.”

  “I’ll know if you’ll teach me.”

  “Hoh, some teaching you’d need.”

  “I’ll be a quick learner.”

  “Quick learner! I reckon in no time you’d be trying to give me lessons!”

  “Maybe we could both learn.”

  “Oh, Maugan, change the talk. It’s carnality—so to go on all the time.”

  “I don’t think so. I’m asking a favour of you, that’s all.”

  “A favour! My dear life!”

  “Well, wouldn’t it be?”

  She stared at me with compressed lips, breathing deep. But she could not keep up her exasperation and began to laugh. I leaned over and kissed her teeth.

  She stopped quick at that. “Maugan, please, what’re ye trying to do? I’m married. Do that mean naught? Have ye no thought for Dick? Have you no—”

  “Maybe I shall have thought for him—sometime—later. Not now. I’m sorry, but not now. I want you, Meg. I’m asking you. Truly, meekly, as a great favour.”

  She put her fingers on my mouth. “ Don’t speak so. Twouldn’t be fair. And”—she glanced round—“ you can’t mean here?”

  “Here. Safer than any dark corner of Arwenack. There’s no one in a mile, and no one ever comes here for no one knows of it, except Belemus and me, and he’s in Fowey visiting the Treffrys. Here in the warm wind where it’s light and clean … Prove to me love’s not ugly.”

  She stared at me and for the first time I could see temptation and indecision in her eyes. It almost staggered me, now that she was so near yielding, that I had got so far. I waited, not taking even a deep breath.

  The temptation faded. “ No, Maugan, what can I be even thinking of? No!”

  She began to get up and I caught her shoulders and pulled her down. She struggled and then was still. We lay there looking at each other, while the wind thrust through the trees and the may blossom drifted down. I began to smother her face with kisses, and then, with some instinct that at the last she would rebuff me in this open plaee, half pulled her, half caressed her into moving under the branches of an old elm where there was privacy and shade. The young bracken was crushed with our weight. At the last when I knew I had almost won there was a horrible fumbling with clothes which might even then have brought hesitation and self doubt back. She turned towards me and tried to speak but I said: “Sweet Meg, now I know Kilter lied. Oh Meg, let me love you. Sweet Meg, don’t deny me now.”

  And she did not. In later years I was to learn that a woman’s attitude to love is only an extension of her attitude to life; and Meg was never one in ordinary dealings to measure or grudge a gift.

  When my father came home next day he was in a black mood that found fault with everything and everyone. I was at a loss to account for it.

  Now he took me really to task for having laid hands on the Irish vessel. It seemed that she belonged to Sir Denison Ferguson, who had been raising Cain to have a commission appointed to investigate the robbery, and it was only by strenuous efforts that he, Mr Killigrew, had blocked the appointment. He had done this by accepting the task of opening up an inquiry himself, jointly with Mr Hannibal Vyvyan, to discover the culprits. This was going to be a delicate matter and a tedious one, for there were people in Penryn, he had heard, who were prepared to stand up and swear that the raid was the work of his bastard son. They had no proof, of course, but the accusation would look bad. Care must be taken so to arrange the inquiry that the trouble-makers should not be. called. A report must be in the hands of the Privy Council by July, or they would send Sir Ferdinando Gorges from Plymouth to complete the inquiry. Gorges, being a creature of Essex, must not be allowed to come.

  However, the full and real cause of his angry mood emerged later, when he told me that Sir George Fermor had postponed the wedding. Sir George, he said, had come to the conclusion that John and Jane were yet too young for marriage—let them wait another six months. He would reconsider the matter in August when Jane was 16.

  “There is some deep device behind the postponement that I like not. It was all arranged for next month, and I went up there expressly to discuss the details. This was a thunder-stroke.”

  “D’you think it is the money, sir? It’s a vast amount to find, and all in gold.”

  “I think not. I made the carefullest inquiries before ever proposing the match. He is very wealthy.”

  “D’you think it may be that he has heard we are in debt?”

  “I told him as much—but not of course the extent. No one knows the extent, for my debtors are well scattered and unknown to each other. That is what preserves me at all! … Anyway, it will add acutely to our problems through the summer … Perhaps by August the Spaniards will have landed, and then we shall have no debts, nor no life neither!”

  Loving a woman is not an act in isolation. No fences of the mind or body screen its effects from everyday life. Meg and I lived in the same house, ate in the same room, could meet by accident three or four times daily. Yet while we were often near each other there was little chance of true conversation and no privacy for anything more. May brought in the rain and no further meetings were possible in the whitethorn glade.

  For ten days she kept me in ignorance of her true feelings. With greater experience perhaps I would have known, but I did not then. For ten days she kept out of arm’s reach. Then one evening I was sitting reading by the
fire in the big drawing-room chamber. My grandmother and Mrs Killigrew were there, the latter working a sampler, Lady Killigrew poring over a letter which had come by the wool stapler that evening. Supper had been done an hour and dusk was falling. Someone came into the room with a branch of candles, and I knew it was Meg. Without looking up I heard her move to put the candles on the side table where they usually stood and then for a few seconds she did not move to go out. I glanced at the mirror on the wall and saw she was looking at me. I turned my head and she quickly lowered hers and went out.

  That old room at the end of the north wing where we had dressed up for the junketings of three Christmases ago. In the old days servants had slept there, under the eaves where a man could not stand. But now because we were the fewer to house the room was empty. I wandered up and looked it over. I remembered it vividly with Sue standing in front of the looking-glass, tucking in a strand of hair. She had just taken the burnt cork off her face and one smear had remained under her ear. I had wiped it away. Now the room was empty except for some old sacks and a sea chest. Green timber had been used up here when the house was built, and the door was warped. The window, having been shut with difficulty in 1590, had never been open since. One of the beams had got beetle. It all smelt of sacking and cobwebs and dust. But it was an empty room.

  There was special danger in all this—if my grandmother ever learned of it we should both be turned out of the house without hesitation—and at first Meg would have nothing of the idea. Indeed she was so hostile that if it had not been for that betraying look I would have thought it hopeless to press her. Then suddenly she gave way. Embarrassment, shyness, hostility, desire, they were all there in her eyes as she nodded and said maybe, in the hour after supper, in the long hour of twilight, in the hour of dusk. I was to go first. She would perhaps be able to slip away. But, mind, I wasn’t to wait—at least, not long.

  I went up. I said I was going out and instead turned up the stairs. The maids were washing dishes, scouring pans; I tried to walk quietly but tension made me clumsy; I seemed to have four feet and hobnailed boots. I reached the room out of breath and lay there on the floor gazing out at a fleece of cloud moving over the grey slit of the sky. I lay there, my heart thumping, my body alive, my mind full of concupiscence. So she came, and instead of young bracken and the wind and the high sun, I laid her on the sacking, and her small body was the warmer and the softer and the more vivid for the contrast with the dust and the dirt.

  I do not know even to this day how much I was truly loving Meg and how much the memory of Sue. At least, although there was still much bitterness in my heart towards Sue and in a sense towards all women, none of it escaped upon Meg. Perhaps I too, like Meg, was a romantic, and this emotion transmuted what might have been a shabby coupling with a maidservant. Surely inner experience is all. The gold and the dross exist together in the same ground; it depends which you find.

  In those days I knew myself to be changed, and wondered that others did not remark it. I looked at all women with new eyes. Confidence and imagination had grown overnight. I was stabilised, more content. I was not happy but so much less unhappy than before that it passed muster. And some of the wildness had gone.

  All this time Dick Stable had been making a slow mend and when one day he asked for his harp we knew him to be truly in recovery.

  Then Belemus came home and at once perceived what others had not. “ Well, what’s to do with you? You look wideawake. Have you been conquesting over some woman?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I’d lay a curse you know well. Is it Meg Levant you’ve spurred? I’ve thought for some time—”

  “You’ve thought! With what? There’s nothing in your head but dried blood and crow droppings. Just because—”

  “But soft. He who denies most roundly accuses himself. What if you have been tampering with some wench? Is it a matter for anger between friends? If you will tell me nothing well and good; I shall know in quick time. You admit you can keep nothing from me. Come, I tell you all my adventures. To share ’ em makes ’em live again.”

  “I’m sorry, Belemus, you’re mistaken this time.”

  He looked at me cynically, pulling at his beard. “I thought you’d changed, I thought you’d left your other soul in Madrid. But now and then it pokes out as if begrudging your better self free play. How does it profit man to take things serious? You were like death after Sue Farnaby had married elsewhere. I tell you, there is only one philosophy in love: to kiss and fly. Take your pick this morning—and tomorrow start over again. It’s the one solution, boy. Love is fun. Don’t tie it up in all manner of tedious ribbons labelled faithfulness and truth and honour. You’ll weigh it down and sink it. And what’s true of love is just as true of life. Spit in its eye before it spits in yours. It’s spring for us, witless, and we must make the most of it. It lasts no time. We’ll be gouty and palsied soon enough!”

  “You’re preaching to the converted,” I said. “I’ve no time to waste, no more than you.”

  Chapter Five

  That day a Spanish shallop appeared in daylight cruising along the shore of Falmouth Bay. She carried lug sails on both masts and in spite of her ungainly build had a turn of speed. From what we could see her full complement must have been more than forty, perhaps half of them soldiers. She came close in but when our demi culverin fired twice at about 600 yards, which was near the limit for accuracy, she turned sharp about and made away. Carminow cursed his own precipitancy then, for if one of the 9 lb. shot had struck her it might have disabled her.

  Instead we had to stand and watch the Spaniard chase and overhaul a fishing vessel which had come inshore unsuspecting. Foster said he thought the smack was from St Keverne. She was boarded and her crew of six taken off. Then the shallop shook out her sails again and moved away with the empty smack in tow.

  My father, who had come hastily from the house, said that with the Spaniards so close Sir Francis Godolphin should be warned, so Belemus and I left for Godolphin. It was a twelve mile ride, and to reach it we passed over high and desolate moorland from which it was possible to see the distant prospect of Mount’s Bay glittering like a dish in the slanting sun. Over there, I thought, across the other side, just beyond Penzance, is the church of Paul on the hill and there lives a girl called Susanna Reskymer.

  Godolphin was a mansion built around a square courtyard with gardens surrounding it on three sides. On the fourth side and shadowing it from the late sun was the hill on which some 300 tin miners were employed and from which the family derived its wealth and stability; and I wished that the Killigrews could have had some similar source so that, irrespective of personal extravagance and royal favour, there would be a steady replenishment of resources to pay off old debts and to guarantee new ones.

  Sir Francis greeted us graciously enough and we spent the night there. He had the news, which we had not heard, that the new master of Tolverne, Jonathan Arundell, was sick and was more often confined to his bed than managing his estate. When Belemus was not there Sir Francis said he thought Jonathan was still suffering from the effects of the crisis at the time of his father’s death; Jonathan was a sensitive man, and humiliation and melancholy of that time had bit deep. I thought of Thomas’s prophecies, and asked about him.

  “Grows fat and ever more vocal. When a younger son is so strident it is good for all that he should leave home early.”

  “Does he propose to do that, sir?”

  “Not as yet. I advise his mother, but she seems set on an early marriage for him to Bridget Mohun. Marriage may tame him.”

  I got up to go but he said: “Stay a while, Maugan. Talking of taming …”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “This Belemus is a wild spark, and I hear rumour that you are outvying him.”

  “… Sometimes we ride together.”

  Sir Francis pulled his beard. “Your father lives the life he does perhaps of necessity now. He is in a tide race and must swim with it. But
it is a pity if his sons should become so committed.”

  “Is not a son committed to sustain his father?”

  “Not in activities outside the law.”

  “The law is hard to come by in these parts, sir. Sometimes one has to assert one’s rights.”

  “It is the distinction between right and wrong that I draw your attention to, Maugan. Have a care for it, for a happy life and the hangman’s noose are closer together than some realise.” When I did not speak he went on: “ But this is a bad time for differences.

  With the Spanish so close all men of goodwill should draw together. If they do not they will be lost.”

  “You think there will be an invasion this summer?”

  “What will stop them? Only perhaps the fear of Drake and Hawkins. The command of the narrow seas is no longer ours. You who have been in Spain must feel the same. Were they not preparing even last year?”

  With June there were several false alarms round our coast, and during the month at least four fishing vessels disappeared. Then a great to-do was caused by the return of the crew of the St Keverne smack which had been taken in Falmouth Bay. One man, a gunner, had not been released, but the others were sent back in their own boat. They were examined before Godolphin and Sir Anthony Rowse with other deputy-lieutenants present.

  It seemed that the Spaniards had captured them only to press them for news of Drake’s fleet now almost ready to sail from Plymouth. They had told what they could but knew nothing fortunately of Drake’s objective. (Few did. ) So they had been set free again, and themselves brought back valuable information, namely that there were 11 Spanish galleys and 20 ships of war in Blavet alone.

  In late June two Lizard fishermen came in with reports that there was 60 sails just off the Manacles. They swore the exact position and approximate number, but whether it was true or not the fleet disappeared into the summer mists.

  One night I plucked up courage to ask my father whether anyone had yet called at Arwenack for his answer to the message I had brought.