The King's General

by Daphne Du Maurier

  I had fresh in my mind a picture of the rebel regiment who had taken Menabilly. Although they had worn a formidable air upon first sight, with their close helmets and uniform jerkins, they had soon lost their sheen, and as the weeks wore on they became dirty looking and rough, and with the threat of defeat had one and all reverted to a London mob in panic.

  Richard's men had another stamp upon them, and, though they were drawn mostly from the farms and moors of Cornwall and of Devon, rustic in speech and origin, they had become knit, in the few months of his command, into a professional body of soldiers, quick of thought and swift of limb, with an admiration for their leader that showed at once in the upward tilt of their heads as he addressed them and the flash of pride in their eyes. A strange review. I in my chair, a hooded cloak about my shoulders, and Richard walking by my side; the campfires burning, the white frost gleaming on the clipped turf, the drums beating their tattoo as we approached each different company.

  The horse were drawn up on the further field, and we watched them being groomed and watered for the night, fine sleek animals--many of them seized from rebel estates, as I was fully aware--and they stamped on the hard ground, the harness jingling, their breath rising in the cold air like the smoke from the fires.

  The sun was setting, fiery red, beyond the Tamar into Cornwall, and as it sank beyond the hills it threw a last dull sullen glow upon the forts of Plymouth to the south of us.

  We could see the tiny figures of the rebel sentries, like black dots, upon the outer defenses, and I wondered how many of the Grenvile men about me would make themselves a sacrifice to the spitting thunder of the rebel guns. Lastly, as evening fell, we visited the forward posts, and here there was no more cleaning of equipment, no grooming of horses, but men stripped bare for battle, silent, motionless, and we talked in whispers, for we were scarce two hundred yards from the enemy defenses.

  The silence was grim, uncanny. The assault force seemed dim figures in the gathering darkness, for they had blackened their faces to make themselves less visible, and I could make out nothing of them but white eyes, gleaming, and the show of teeth when they smiled.

  Their breastplates were discarded for a night attack, and in their hands they carried pikes, steely sharp. I felt the edge of one of them and shuddered.

  At the last post we visited the men were not so prompt to challenge us as hitherto, and I heard Richard administer a sharp reproof to the young officer in charge. The colonel of the regiment of foot, in command of the post, came forth to excuse himself, and I saw that it was my old suitor of the past, Jo's brother-in-law, Edward Champernowne. He bowed to me, somewhat stiffly, and then turning to Richard, I heard him stammer several attempts at explanation, and the two withdrew to a little distance. On his return Richard was silent, and we straightway turned back towards my wagon and the escort, and I knew that the review was finished.

  "You must return alone to Radford," he said. "I will send the escort with you. There will be no danger."

  "And the coming battle?" I asked. "Are you confident, and pleased?"

  He paused a moment before replying. "Yes," he answered, "yes, I am hopeful. The plan is sound, and there is nothing wanting in the men. If only my seconds were more dependable." He jerked his head toward the post from which we had just lately come. "Your old lover, Edward Champernowne," he said. "I sometimes think he would do better to command a squad of ducks. He has a flickering reason when his long nose is glued upon a map, ten miles from the enemy, but give him a piece of work to do upon the field a hundred yards away, and he is lost."

  "Can you not replace him with some other?" I questioned.

  "Not at this juncture," he said. "I have to risk him now."

  He kissed my hand and smiled, and it was not until he had turned his back on me and vanished that I remembered I had never asked him whether the reason for his not returning with me to Radford was because he proposed to lead the assault in person.

  I jogged back in the wagon to my brother's house, my spirits sinking. Shortly before daybreak, next morning, the attack began. The first we heard of it at Radford was the echo of the guns across the Cattwater--whether from within the garrison or from the outer defenses, we could not tell--but by midday we had the news that three of the Works had been seized and held by the Royalist troops, and the most formidable of the forts, the Maudlyn, stormed by the commanding General in person. The guns were turned, and the men of Plymouth felt for the first time their own fire fall upon the walls of the city. I could see nothing from my window but a pall of smoke hanging like a curtain in the sky, and now and again, the wind being northerly, I thought I heard the sound of distant shouting from the besieged within the garrison.

  At three o'clock, with barely three hours of daylight left, the news was not so good. The rebels had counterattacked, and two of the forts had been recaptured. The fate of Plymouth now depended upon the rebels gaining back the ground they had lost and driving the Royalists from their foothold all along the line, and most especially from the Maudlyn works. I watched the setting sun, as I had done the day before, and I thought of all those, both rebel men and Royalist, whose lives had been held forfeit within these past four-and-twenty hours. We dined in the hall at half past five, with my brother Jo seated at the head of his table, as was his custom, and Phillipa at his right hand and his little motherless son, young John, upon his left. We ate in silence, none of us having much heart for conversation, while the battle only a few miles away hung thus in the balance. We were nearly finished when my brother Percy, who had ridden down to Plymouth to get news, came bursting in upon us.

  "The rebels have gained the day," he said grimly, "and driven off Grenvile with the loss of three hundred men. They stormed the fort on all sides, and finally recaptured it, barely an hour ago. It seems that Grenvile's covering troops, who should have come to his support and turned the scale to success, failed to reach him. A tremendous blunder on the part of someone."

  "No doubt the fault of the General himself," said Jo drily, "in having too much confidence."

  "They say, down in Plymstock, that the officer responsible has been shot by Grenvile for contravention of orders," said Percy, "and is lying now in his tent with a bullet through his head. Who it is they could not tell me, but we shall hear anon."

  I could think of nothing but those three hundred men who were lying now upon their faces under the stars, and I was filled with a great war-sickness, a loathing for guns and pikes and blood and battle cries. The brave fellows who had smiled at me the night before, so strong, so young and confident, were now carrion for the seagulls who swooped and dived in Plymouth Sound, and it was Richard, my Richard, who had led them to their death. I could not blame him. He had only, by attacking, done his duty. He was a soldier...

  As I turned away to call a servant for my chair, a young secretary, employed by my elder brother on the Devon Commission, came into the room, much agitated, with a request to speak to him.

  "What is the matter?" said Jo tersely. "There is no one but my family present."

  "Colonel Champernowne lies at Egg Buckland, mortally wounded," said the secretary. "He was not hurt in battle, but pistoled by the General himself on returning to headquarters."

  There was a moment of great silence. Jo rose slowly from his chair, very white and tense, and I saw him turn round and look at me, as did my brother Percy. In a moment of perception I knew what they were thinking. Jo's brother-in-law, Edward Champernowne, had been my suitor seventeen years before, and they both saw, in this sudden terrible dispute after the heat of battle, no military cause, but some private jealous wrangle, the settling of a feud.

  "This," said my elder brother slowly, "is the beginning of the end for Richard Grenvile."

  His words fell upon my ear cold as steel, and, calling softly to the servant, I bade him take me to my room.

  The next day I left for Mothercombe, to my sister Cecilia, for to remain under my brother's roof one moment longer would have been impossible. The vendetta
had begun.

  My eldest brother, with the vast family of Champernowne behind him, and supported by the leading families in the county of Devon, most of them members of the Commission, pressed for the removal of Sir Richard Grenvile from his position as Sheriff and commander of the King's forces in the West. Richard retaliated by turning my brother out of Radford and using the house and estate as a jumping ground for a fresh assault upon Plymouth.

  Snowed-up in Mothercombe with the Pollexefens, I knew little of what was happening, and Cecilia, with consummate tact and delicacy, avoided the subject. I myself had had no word from Richard since the night I had bidden him good-bye before the battle, and now that he was engaged in a struggle with foe and former friends as well, I thought it best to keep silent. He knew my whereabouts, for I had sent word of it, and should he want me he would come to me.

  The thaw burst at the end of March, and we had the first tidings of the outside world for many weeks.

  The peace moves between King and Parliament had come to nothing, for the Treaty of Uxbridge had failed, and the war, it seemed, was to be carried on more ruthlessly than ever.

  The Parliament, we heard, was forming a New Model Army, likely to sweep all before it, in the opinion of the judges, while His Majesty had sent forth an edict to his enemies saying that unless the rebels repented, their end must be damnation, ruin, and infamy. The young Prince of Wales, it seemed, was now to bear the title of supreme commander of all the forces in the West, and was gone to Bristol, but since he was a lad of only fifteen years or so, the real authority would be vested in his Advisory Council, at the head of whom was Hyde, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  I remember John Pollexefen shaking his head as he heard the news. "There will be nothing but wrangles now between the Prince's Council and the generals," he said. "Each will countermand the orders of the other. Lawyers and soldiers never agree. And while they wrangle the King's cause will suffer. I do not like it."

  I thought of Richard and how he had once vouchsafed the same opinion. "What is happening at Plymouth?" asked my sister. "Stalemate," said her husband. "A token force of less than a thousand men left to blockade the garrison, and Grenvile with the remainder gone to join Goring in Somerset and lay siege to Taunton. The spring campaign has started."

  Soon a year would have come and gone since I had left Lanrest for Menabilly. The snow melted down in the Devon valley where Cecilia had her home, and the crocus and daffodil appeared. I made no plans. I sat and waited. Someone brought a rumor that there was great disaffection in the High Command, and that Grenvile, Goring, and Berkeley were all at loggerheads.

  March turned to April. The golden gorse was in full bloom. And on Easter Day a horseman came riding down the valley, wearing the Grenvile badge. He asked at once for Mistress Harris, and, saluting gravely, handed me a letter.

  "What is it?" I asked before I broke the seal. "Has something happened?" My throat felt dry and strange, and my hands trembled. "The General has been gravely wounded," replied the soldier, "in a battle before Wellington House at Taunton. They fear for his life." I tore open the letter, and read Richard's shaky scrawl.

  "Dear Heart," he said, "this is the very devil. I am like to lose my leg, if not my life, with a great gaping hole in my thigh, below the groin. I know now what you suffer. Come teach me patience. I love you."

  I folded the letter, and, turning to the messenger, asked him where the General lay.

  "They were bringing him from Taunton down to Exeter when I left," he answered. "His Majesty had dispatched his own chirurgeon to attend upon Sir Richard. He was very weak, and bade me ride without delay to bring you this."

  I looked at Cecilia, who was standing by the window. "Would you summon Matty to pack my clothes," I said, "and ask John if he would arrange for a litter, and for horses? I am going to Exeter."

  23

  We took the southern route to Exeter, and at every halt upon the journey I thought to hear the news of Richard's death.

  Totnes, Newton Abbot, Ashburton, each delay seemed longer than the last, and when at length after six days I reached the capital of Devon, and saw the great cathedral rising high above the city and the river, it seemed to me I had been weeks upon the road.

  Richard still lived. This was my first inquiry, and the only thing that mattered. He was lodging at the hostelry in the cathedral square, where I immediately repaired. He had taken the whole building for his personal use, and had a sentry before the door.

  When I gave my name a young officer immediately appeared from within, and something ruddy about his coloring, and familiar in his bearing, made me pause a moment before addressing him correctly. Then his courteous smile gave me the clue.

  "You are Jack Grenvile, Bevil's boy," I said, and he reminded me of how he had come once with his father to Lanrest in the days before the war. I remembered too how I had washed him as a baby on that memorable visit to Stowe in '28, but this I did not tell him.

  "My uncle will be most heartily glad to see you," he said as I was lifted from my litter. "He has talked of little else since writing to you. He has sent at least ten women flying from his side since coming here, swearing they were rough and did not know their business, nor how to dress his wound. Matty shall do it, he said, while Honor talks to me." I saw Matty color up with pleasure at these words, and assume at once an air of authority before the corporal who shouldered our trunks.

  "And how is he?" I asked, as I was set down within the great inn parlor, which had been, judging by the long table in the center, turned into a messroom for the General's staff.

  "Better these last three days than hitherto," replied his nephew, "but at first we thought to lose him. Directly he was wounded I applied to the Prince of Wales to wait on him, and I attended him here from Taunton. Now he declares he will not send me back. Nor have I any wish to go."

  "Your uncle," I said, "likes to have a Grenvile by his side."

  "I know one thing," said the young man. "He finds fellows of my age better company than his contemporaries, which I take as a great compliment." At this moment Richard's servant came down the stairs saying the General wished to see Mistress Harris upon the instant. I went first to my room, where Matty washed me and changed my gown, and then, with Jack Grenvile to escort me, I went along the corridor, in my wheeled chair, to Richard's room.

  It looked out upon the cobbled square, and as we entered the great bell from the cathedral chimed four o'clock.

  "God confound that blasted bell," said a familiar voice, sounding stronger than I had dared to hope, from the dark-curtained bed in the far corner. "A dozen times I have asked the Mayor of this damned city to have it silenced, and nothing has been done. Harry, for God's sake make a note of it."

  "Sir," answered hurriedly a tall youth at the foot of the bed, scribbling a word upon his tablets.

  "And move these pillows, can't you? Not that way, you clumsy lout; behind my head, thus. Where the devil is Jack? Jack is the only lad who knows how I like them placed."

  "Here I am, Uncle," said his nephew, "but you will not need me now. I have brought you someone with gentler hands than I."

  He pushed my chair towards the bed, smiling, and I saw Richard's hand reach out to pull back the curtains.

  "Ah!" he said, sighing deeply. "You have come at last." He was deathly white. And his eyes had grown larger, perhaps in contrast to the pallor of his face. His auburn locks were clipped short, giving him a strangely youthful look. For the first time I noticed in him a resemblance to Dick. I took his hand and held it.

  "I did not wait," I said, "once I had read your letter."

  He turned to the two lads standing at the foot of the bed, his nephew and the one he had named Harry.

  "Get out, both of you," he said, "and if that damned chirurgeon shows his face, tell him to go to the devil."

  "Sir," they replied, clicking their heels, and I could swear that as they left the room young Jack Grenvile winked an eye at his companion.

  Richard lifted my
hand to his lips, and then cradled it beside his cheek. "This is a good jest," he said, "on the part of the Almighty. You and I both smitten in the thigh."

  "Does it pain you much?" I asked.

  "Pain me? My God, splinters from a cannonball, striking below the groin, burn something fiercer than a woman's kiss. Of course it pains me."

  "Who has seen the wound?"

  "Every chirurgeon in the army, and each one makes more mess of it than his fellow."

  I called for Matty, who was waiting outside the door, and she came in at once with a basin of warm water and bandages and towels.

  "Good day to you, mutton-face," said Richard. "How many corporals have you bedded with en route?"

  "No time to bed with anyone," snapped Matty, "carried at the rate we were, with Miss Honor delaying only to sleep a few snatched hours every night. Now we've come here to be insulted."

  "I'll not insult you, unless you tie my bandages too tight."

  "Come, then," she said. "Let's see what they have done to you."

  She unfolded the bandages with expert fingers, and exposed the wound. It was deep, in truth, the splinters having penetrated the bone and lodged there. With every probe of her fingers he winced and groaned, calling her every name under the sun, which did not worry her.

  "It's clean, that's one thing," she said. "I fully expected to find it gangrenous. But you'll have some of those splinters to the end of your days, unless you let them take your leg off."

  "They'll not do that," he answered. "I'd rather keep the splinters and bear the pain."

  "It will give you an excuse, at any rate, for your bad temper," she replied. She washed the wound, and dressed it once again, and all the while he held my hand as Dick might do. Then she finished, and he thumbed his finger to his nose as she left the room.

  "Over three months," he said, "since I have seen you. Are the Pollexefens as unpleasant as the rest of your family?"

  "My family were not unpleasant till you made them so."

  "They disliked me from the first. Now they pursue their dislike across the county. You know the Commissioners of Devon are in Exeter at this moment, with a list of complaints a mile long to launch at me?"