The King's General

by Daphne Du Maurier

  "Why did you move, Honor dear?" she said. "There was no need." And like Matty she gazed about the room in curiosity. "It is very plain and bare," she added; "nothing valuable at all. I am much relieved, for those brutes would have got it. Come back in your own chamber, Honor, if you can bear with the babies."

  "No," I said. "I am well enough."

  "You look so tired and drawn," she said, "but I dare swear I do the same. I feel I have aged ten years these last two hours. What will they do to us?"

  "Nothing," I said, "if we keep to our rooms."

  "If only John would return," she said, tears rising to her eyes. "Supposing he has had some skirmish on the road, and has been hurt? I cannot understand what can have become of him."

  The children began to whimper, hearing the anxiety in her voice, and then Matty, who loved children, came and coaxed the baby, and proceeded to undress her for her cot, while little Jonathan, with a small boy's sharp nervous way, began to plague us all with questions: Why did they come to their Aunt Honor's room? And who were all the soldiers? And how long would they stay?

  The hours wore on with horrid dragging tedium, and the sun began to sink behind the trees at the far end of the park, while the air was thick with smoke from the fires lit by the troopers.

  All the time there was tramping below, and orders called, and the pacing to and fro of horses, with the insistent bugle sometimes far distant in the park, echoed by a fellow bugle, and sometimes directly beneath the windows. The children were restless, turning continually in their cots and calling for either Matty or their mother, and when Joan was not hushing them she was gazing from my window, reporting fresh actions of destruction, her cheeks aflame with indignation. "They have rounded up all the cattle from the beef park and the beacon fields, and driven them into the park here, with a pen about them," she said, "and they are dividing up the steers now into another pen." Suddenly she gave a little cry of dismay. "They have slaughtered three of them," she said. "The men are quartering them already by the fires. Now they are driving the sheep." We could hear the anxious baaing of the ewes to the sturdy lambs, and the lowing of the cattle. I thought of the five hundred men encamped there in the park, and the many hundreds more between us and Lostwithiel, and how they and their horses must be fed, but I said nothing. Joan shut the window, for the smoke from the campfires blew thick about the room and the noise of the men shouting and calling orders made a vile and sickening clamor. The sun set in a dull crimson sky, and the shadows lengthened.

  About half past eight Matty brought us a small portion of a pie upon one plate, with a carafe of water. Her lips were grimly set.

  "This for the two of you," she said. "Mrs. Rashleigh and Lady Courtney fare no better. Lady Courtney is making a little broth for the children's breakfast, in case they give us no eggs."

  Joan ate my piece of pie as well as hers, for I had no appetite. I could think of one thing only, and that was that it was now nearly five hours since her husband and Richard's son had lain hidden in the buttress. Matty brought candles, and presently Alice and Mary came to say good night, poor Mary looking suddenly like an old woman from anxiety and shock, with great shadows under her eyes.

  "They're axing the trees in the orchard," she said. "I saw them myself, sawing the branches, and stripping the young fruit that has scarce formed. I sent down a message to Lord Robartes, but he returned no answer. The servants have been told by the soldiers that tomorrow they are going to cut the corn, strip all the barley from Eighteen Acres, and the wheat from the Great Meadow. And it wants three weeks to harvest."

  The tears began to course down her cheeks, and she turned to Joan.

  "Why does John not come?" she said in useless reproach. "Why is he not here to stand up for his father's home?"

  "If John was here he could do nothing," I said swiftly before Joan could lash back in anger. "Don't you understand, Mary, that this is war? This is what has been happening all over England, and we in Cornwall are having our first taste of it."

  Even as I spoke there came a great burst of laughter from the courtyard, and a tongue of flame shot up to the windows. The troopers were roasting an ox in the clearing above the warren, and because they were too idle to search for firewood they had broken down the doors from the dairy and the bakery, and were piling them upon the fire.

  "There must have been thirty officers or more at dinner in the gallery," said Alice quietly. "We saw them from our windows afterwards walk up and down the terrace before the house. One or two were Cornish--I remember meeting them before the war--but most of them were strangers."

  "They say the Earl of Essex is in Fowey," said Joan, "and has set up his headquarters at Place. Whether it is true or not I do not know."

  "The Treffrys will not suffer," said Mary bitterly. "They have too many relatives fighting for the rebels. You won't find Bridget has her stores pillaged, and her larders ransacked."

  "Come to bed, Mother," said Alice gently. "Honor is right--it does no good to worry. We have been spared so happily until now. If my father and Peter are safe somewhere, with the King's army, nothing else can matter."

  They went to their own apartments, and Joan to the children next door, while Matty--all oblivious of my own hidden fears--helped me undress for bed.

  "There's one discovery I've made this night, anyway," she said grimly, as she brushed my hair.

  "What is that, Matty?"

  "Mrs. Denys hasn't lost her taste for gentlemen."

  I said nothing, waiting for what would follow.

  "You and the others, and Mrs. Sawle, and Mistress Sparke, had pie for your supper," she said, "but there was roast beef and burgundy taken up to Mrs. Denys, and places set for two upon the tray. Her children were put together in the dressing room, and had a chicken between them."

  I realized that Matty's partiality for eavesdropping and her nose for gossip might stand us in good stead in the immediate future.

  "And who was the fortunate who dined with Mrs. Denys?" I asked.

  "Lord Robartes himself," said Matty with sour triumph.

  My first suspicion became a certainty. It was not mere chance that had so strangely brought Gartred to Menabilly after five-and-twenty years. She was here for a purpose.

  "Lord Robartes is not an ill-looking man," I said. "I might invite him to share cold pie with me another evening."

  Matty snorted, and lifted me to bed. "I'd like to see Sir Richard's face if you did," she snapped.

  "Sir Richard would not mind," I answered. "Not if there was something to be gained from it."

  I feigned a lightness I was far from feeling, and when she had blown the candles and was gone I lay back in my bed with my nerves tense and strained. The flames outside my window died away, and slowly the shouting and the laughter ceased, and the tramping of feet, and the movement of the horses, and the calling bugles. I heard the clock in the belfry strike ten, then eleven, and then midnight. The people within the house were still and silent, and so was the alien enemy. At a quarter after midnight a dog howled in the far distance, and as though it were a signal I felt suddenly upon my cheek a current of cold chill air. I sat up in bed and waited. The draft continued, blowing straight from the torn arras on the wall. "John," I whispered, and "John," I whispered again. I heard a movement from behind the arras, like a scratching mouse. Slowly, stealthily, I saw the hand come from behind the arras, lifting it aside, and a figure step out, dropping on all fours and creeping to my bed. "It is I, Honor," I said, and the cold, froggy hand touched me, icy cold, and the hands clutched me and the dark figure climbed onto my bed, and lay trembling beside me.

  It was Dick, the clothes still dank and chill upon him, and he began to weep, long and silently, from exhaustion and from fear.

  I held him close, warming him as best I could, and when he was still I whispered, "Where is John?"

  "In the little room," he said, "below the steps. We sat there, waiting, hour after hour, and you did not come. I wanted to turn back, but Mr. Rashleigh would not l
et me." He began to sob again, and I drew the covers over his head.

  "He has fainted, down there on the steps," he said. "He's lying there now, his head between his hands. I got hold of the long rope that hangs there, above the steps, and pulled at it, and the hinged stone gave way, and I came up into this room. I did not care--I could not stay there longer, Honor. It's black as pitch, and closer than a grave." He was still trembling, his head buried in my shoulder. I went on lying there, wondering what to do, whether to summon Joan and thus betray the secret to another, or wait until Dick was calmer and then send him back there with a candle to John's aid. And as I waited, my heart thumping, my ears strained to all sounds, I heard from without the tiptoe of a footstep in the passage, the noise of the latch of the door gently lifted and then let fall again as the door was seen to be fastened, and a moment's pause; then the footsteps tiptoeing gently away once more, and the soft, departing rustle of a gown. Someone had crept to the chamber in the stillness of the night, and that someone was a woman.

  I went on lying there with my arms wrapped close about the sleeping boy and the clock in the belfry struck one, then two, then three...

  17

  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?"