The King's General

by Daphne Du Maurier

  And I, thinking of Richard down at Truro, and His Majesty already, so the rumor ran, entering Launceston, told her four days at the longest. But I was wrong. For four whole weeks the rebels were our masters.

  It is nearly ten years since that August of '44, but every day of that age-long month is printed firm upon my memory.

  The first week was hot and stifling, with a glazed blue sky and not a cloud upon it, and in my nostrils now I can recapture the smell of horseflesh, and the stink of sweating soldiery, borne upwards to my open casement from the fetid court below.

  Day in, day out, came the jingle of harness, the clattering of hoofs, the march of tramping feet, and the grinding sound of wagon wheels, and ever insistent, above the shouting of orders and the voices of the men, the bugle call, hammering its single note.

  The children, Alice's and Joan's, unused to being within doors at high summer, hung fretful from the windows, adding to the babel, and Alice, who had the care of all of them while Joan nursed John in the greater quietude of the south front, would take them from room to room to distract them. Imprisonment made cronies of us all, and no sooner had Alice and the brood departed than the Sparke sisters, who hitherto had preferred checkers to my company, would come inquiring for me with some wild rumor to unfold, gleaned from the frightened servants, of how the house was to be burned down with all its inmates when Essex gave the order--but not till the women had been ravaged. I daresay I was the only woman in the house to be unmoved by such a threat, for God knows I could not be more bruised and broken than I was already. But for Deborah and Gillian it was another matter, and Deborah, whom I judged to be even safer from assault than I was myself, showed me with trembling hands the silver bodkin with which she would defend her honor. Their brother Will was become a sort of toady to the officers, thinking that by smiling and wishing them good morning he would win their favor and his safety, but as soon as their backs were turned he was whispering some slander about their persons, and repeating snatches of conversation he had overheard, bits and pieces that were no use to anyone. Once or twice Nick Sawle came tapping slowly to my room, leaning on his two sticks, a look of lost bewilderment and muddled resentment in his eye because the rebels had not been flung from Menabilly within four-and-twenty hours of their arrival, and I was forced to listen to his theories that His Majesty must be now at Launceston, now at Liskeard, now back again at Exeter--suppositions which brought our release no nearer. While he argued, his poor wife Temperance stared at him dully, in a kind of trance, her religious eloquence pent up at last from shock and fear so that she could do no more than clutch her prayer book without quoting from it.

  Once a day we were allowed within the garden, for some thirty minutes, and I would leave Matty in my room on an excuse and had Alice push my chair, while her nurse walked with the children. The poor gardens were laid waste already, with the yew trees broken and the flower beds trampled, and up and down the muddied paths we went, stared at by the sentries at the gate and by the officers gathered at the long windows in the gallery. Their appraising, hostile eyes burned through our backs, but must be endured for the sake of the fresh air we craved, and sometimes their laughter came to us. Their voices were hard and ugly, for they were mostly from London and the eastern counties, except the staff officers of Lord Robartes--and I never could abide the London twang, made doubly alien now through enmity. Never once did we see Gartred when we took our exercise, though her two daughters, reserved and unfriendly, played in the far corner of the garden, watching us and the children with blank eyes. They had neither of them inherited her beauty, but were brown haired and heavy looking, like their dead father, Antony Denys.

  "I don't know what to make of it," said Alice, in my ear. "She is supposed to be a prisoner like us, but she is not treated so. I have watched her, from my window, walk in the walled garden beneath the summerhouse, talking and smiling to Lord Robartes, and the servants say he dines with her most evenings."

  "She only does what many other women do in wartime," I said, "and turns the stress of the day to her advantage."

  "You mean she is for the Parliament?" asked Alice.

  "Neither for the Parliament, nor for the King, but for Gartred Denys," I answered. "Do you not know the saying--to race with the hare and to run with the hounds? She will smile on Lord Robartes, and sleep with him too if she has a mind, just as long as it suits her. He would let her leave tomorrow, if she asked him."

  "Why, then," said Alice, "does she not do so, and return in safety to Orley Court?"

  "That," I answered "is what I would give a great deal to find out." And as we paced up and down, up and down, before the staring, hostile eyes of the London officers, I thought of the footstep I had heard at midnight in the passage, the soft hand on the latch, and the rustle of a gown. Why should Gartred, while the house slept, find her way to my apartment in the northeast corner of the building and try my door, unless she knew her way already. And granting that she knew her way, what then was her motive?

  It was ten days before I had my answer.

  On Sunday, August the eleventh, came the first break in the weather. The sun shone watery in a mackerel sky, and a bank of cloud gathered in the southwest. There had been much coming and going all the day, with fresh regiments of troopers riding to the park, bringing with them many carts of wounded, who were carried to the farm buildings before the house. Their cries of distress were very real and terrible, and gave to us, who were their enemies, a sick dread and apprehension. The shouting and calling of orders was persistent on that day, and the bugle never ceased from dawn to sundown.

  For the first time we were given soup only for our dinner, and a portion of stale bread, and this, we were told, would be the best we could hope for from henceforward. No reason was given, but Matty, with her ears pricked, had hung about the kitchens with her tray under her arm, and gleaned some gossip from the courtyard.

  "There was a battle yesterday on Braddock Down," she said. "They've lost a lot of men." She spoke softly, for with our enemies about us we had grown to speak in whispers, our eyes upon the door.

  I poured half my soup into Dick's bowl, and watched him drink it greedily, running his tongue round the rim like a hungry dog. "The King is only three miles from Lostwithiel," she said. "He and Prince Maurice have joined forces, and set up their headquarters at Boconnoc. Sir Richard has advanced, with nigh a thousand men from Truro, and is coming up on Bodmin from the west. 'Your fellows are trying to squeeze us dry,' said the trooper in the kitchen, 'like a bloody orange. But they won't do it.' "

  "And what did you answer him?" I said to Matty.

  She smiled grimly, and cut Dick the largest slice of bread.

  "I told him I'd pray for him, when Sir Richard got him," she answered.

  After eating, I sat in my chair looking out across the park and watching the clouds gathering thick and fast. There were scarce a dozen bullocks left in the pen, out of the fine herd there had been the week before, and only a small flock of sheep. The rest had all been slaughtered. These remaining few would be gone within the next eight-and-forty hours. Not a stem of corn remained in the far meadows. The whole had been cut and ground, and the ricks pulled. The grass in the park was now bare earth where the horses had grazed upon it. Not a tree stood in the orchard beyond the warren. If Matty's tale was true, and the King and Richard were to east and west of Lostwithiel, then the Earl of Essex and ten thousand men were pent up in a narrow strip of land some nine miles long, with no way of escape except the sea.

  Ten thousand men, with provisions getting low, and only the bare land to live on, while three armies waited in their rear.

  There was no laughter tonight from the courtyard, no shouting, and no chatter; only a blazing fire as they heaped the cut trees and kitchen benches upon it, the doors torn from the larder and the tables from the stewards' room, and I could see their sullen faces lit by the leaping flames.

  The sky darkened, and slowly, silently, the rain began to fall. And as I listened
to it, remembering Richard's words, I heard the rustle of a gown and a tap upon my door.

  18

  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 hers
elf 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.