Grove of Eagles

CHAPTER ONE

I was born on the 25th February, 1578. Later in the year my father married Dorothy Monck, an heiress, of Potheridge in Devon, and by her had fourteen children nine sons and five daughters of whom only four died in infancy.

I did not know my mother. I was brought up in my father’s house, as his son, and bore his name of Killigrew, and was christened Maugan.

We came from St Erme, near Truro in the county of Cornwall where one Ralph Killigrew about 1240 was granted permission by Henry III to bear arms. Ralph’s great-great- grandson was called Simon, and this Simon in 1385 married Joan, of Arwenack, which is at the mouth of the River Fal, and the family moved there and was enriched. Five generations later when the eighth Henry, at war with the French, thought to build a castle commanding the mouth of the River Fal, he chose as his site an old ruined fort on Killigrew land hard by Arwenack House; and the John Killigrew then living my great-grandfather was created first captain of the castle and knighted the same year.

This John Killigrew was a man then in middle life, stout and a little pock-marked; his portrait, which we had until it was burned, shows him to have the round face of the Killigrews, with the prominent eyes and cleft chin and fair hair that come to some of the men. He had married a rich woman, Elizabeth Trewinnard, and had gained much from the dissolution of the monasteries; so that his lands and properties extended from the River Fal to the Helford Passage, and he held the tithes of sixteen parishes and had an incoming of above œ6,000 a year. No doubt it seemed to him that the house he lived in under the shadow of the castle was unworthy of his new wealth and status, for he decided to pull the old house down and to build in its place the biggest house in Cornwall.

So the new Arwenack in which I was born was built. It was not finished until 1567, and my great-grandfather lived only to see the last stone in place before he fell from his horse and died.

He was not a popular man, and there were not lacking people to whisper that this was an omen that overweening pride should bring no good in its wake. True the new Arwenack was seldom a happy house in my lifetime but equally one can seek for a practical cause and see it in the simple fact that my great-grandfather overreached himself. Our family, for all its ancient lineage and good estate, lacked the solidity of great possessions such as could maintain without strain the extravagant way of life he set for it. From his time, therefore, there was a hint of the feverish and the insolvent in our lives. Each generation tried to re-establish itself each generation failed in greater measure than the last. My grandfather and my father were much at court, spending heavily to gain royal favour and office. When they received office they could no longer afford to be scrupulous in their use of it.

But of all this I knew nothing when I was young.

The Pal river, which is navigable as far as Tregony, broadens three miles from the sea and forms a great natural anchorage one of the finest in the world. A mile inland from the mouth a narrow tongue of land splits its west bank, and the creek thus formed runs another mile or more off the main river to the town of Penryn, which IS the main port of the river.

But at the very mouth of the river there juts out, again on its west side, a promontory of land shaped like the head of a guinea-fowl. Imagine that in the head there is an eye: this is the Pendennis Castle of which my great-grandfather, my grandfather and my father were captains; and like an eye it commands all ways of approach. Just below the neck of the guinea-fawl is the house of Arwenack, and all the huge body of the bird was Killigrew land.

So Arwenack House, facing south, looks on the blue smile of the river mouth. But behind the house, behind a narrow hump of land, is the sea again, all the width of Falmouth Bay and the Channel.

I never knew if the house was built to any design. It was like a little town containing within its palisades all that was needed for life and sustenance. When I was born, there were upwards of fifty people living there. Additional to the evergrowing family and near relatives there were thirty-five servants and retainers and a halfdozen hangers-on, people with some claim on my father’s generosity or forbearance who lived and fed with us.

The buildings of the house enclosed a quadrangle on three sides, the fourth facing the harbour being open except for a castellated tower with low walls flanking it and a big gate under the tower. By this gate the house was approached by anyone landing from the sea, and over the gate, supported by cantilevers, was the Killigrew coat of arms, an eagle with two heads and spread wings. At the north corner of the house was another tower pierced with loop-holes for bows or muskets, and tall enough to command the landward approaches. On all sides the house was protected by stockades and earthworks, for, situated as it was in so exposed and isolated a position, not even the castle nearby could give it complete immunity from invasion by sea.

My own bedroom which I shared with my halfbrother John, who was by eighteen months the younger was in the left wing of the house and looked over towards the harbour. It was eight feet broad by eleven feet long and it had a tall narrow window at one end with the bed beside the door at the other, and a second door leading into the bedrooms beyond. When the south-easterly gales blew, the wind would whistle into the room however tightly latched the window and suck its way out with such vehemence that our straw mat would float and quiver as if a snake were under it. The room was plainly but comfortably furnished, for besides the bedstead we had two stools, a window cushion of needlework, canvas to cover the window at night, a box of shelves, and on the wall an old map of the French Brittany coast drawn by Baptista Boazio.

All my childhood memories are of a dark room looking out on a bright scene, because the window for all its tallness seemed not so much to admit light as to stress the brightness without. The first memory ever I had was of John my halfbrother being fed by his wet-nurse he was breast fed until he was three and myself tiring of the entertainment and trotting to the window and looking out of the darkness of the room and seeing a great blueness of still water like a blue dish, with a ship whose chocolate sails were just crumpling as she came to anchor, and behind that the green wooded hills of the east bank of the river.

All my early memories are of water, of sea and river and rain and wind and sky. Either I was looking down on it or was abroad on it with some older member of the family, or I was down at the lake where we bred our swans or I was climbing among the rocks below the castle while the waves showered me with spray. Before I was old enough to reason I came to love the sea, to know it as an element as natural as earth. As soon as I was old enough to reason I came to fear it not as an element but for what it could bring.

For always we lived under the threat of Spain. There had been no peace as long as I could remember, and we never knew when the enemy galleons might appear off our coast. When the first Armada came and passed us by I was ten; and I remember on the 30th July of that year, which was a Saturday, standing with my father and John and my great-uncle Peter and my uncle Thomas on the highest turret of the castle and scanning the uncertain horizon.

We got a sight of the ships in the late afternoon as the wind freshened and the haze over the sea cleared. The great fleet, of which we could see only a part, looked elevated above the sea like castles, like our Pendennis Castle, built on the horizon, the sun glinting on them and gilding them. As dusk fell Walter Powell of Penryn put in and told us that he had passed close by and that he had counted many more than a hundred ships and that they all had their flags and pennants streaming and that the bands on board were playing martial music. My great-uncle Peter, though by then above sixty years of age, had already put to sea in a coaster to follow the enemy up channel.

But even after the first danger was past, and even after the great rejoicings when it became known that the Armada was sunk and dispersed, we knew well that this was not the end of the war for us.

Nor was it only Spaniards that the sea brought. We suffered no menace from English pirates; but in the Channel there were other ships of foreign marque, from Turkey and Algiers and Tunis. When I was five John Michell of Truro lost two ships in the river, six miles up river from the mouth, boarded and seized; and the coast towns of St Ives and Penzance and Market Jew were seldom free from risk of raid and fire and abduction. Before I was born, before we were at war with Spain, French ships one day, being pursued by Spanish ships of war, took refuge in the River Fall The Spaniards sailed past our castle, following the French ships in, which them selves retreated farther and farther up the river in a battle last ing three hours. At length the French ships were driven aground at Malpas near Truro, and then Sir John Arundell, our kinsman from Trerice, sent messages to the Spanish Admiral to try to stop the fighting; but the Spaniards refused and bombarded the French for another two hours before being forced to withdraw by the falling tide.

All this my grandmother told me, for it had happened when she came to Arwenack as a young widow to marry my grandfather.

This was before my grandmother took against me.

I have many memories of youth. But over all there is the first memory, of being within four walls like in a dark cell, pressed down, and looking out on a world of vivid brightness, of being held down in darkness like a prisoner and wanting to get out, of a sense of confinement and constriction. And there is the second memory, the longer memory, of there being no peace in the world, of fear and danger outside and a limited safety within.

We were always in those days at the mercy of rumour, of the false alarm, the whisper behind the hand, of a change of atmosphere, of a growing tension without cause, of suspicion of treachery and betrayal. A calf would die for no reason, or the horses would be restless in their stables, or a cloud would form at sunset red-tipped and shaped like the Judgment Seat. Or Meg Levant, one of the serving maids, would come in with a story she had had of Harold Tregwin of Gluvias, who had heard that a Papist priest had been found in a secret cupboard in the house of the Roscarrocks at Pentire and they were all arrested.

When I was four I was put to study with horn-book and primer under Parson Merther, the chaplain of the house, and the following year my brother John joined me. Every year, almost, another came: Thomas, then Odelia, then Henry. Then there were no more for a while because Grace died at 3 months. With our group often was my cousin Paul Knyvett, a sulky boy older than I by a year, and another more distant cousin Belemus Roscarrock who was a year older still but very lazy and mutinous.

By the time I was eleven I had been introduced to Lily’s Grammar and Record’s Arithmetic and the Colloquies of Erasmus, and had got by heart some Ovid and Juvenal. I had learned the first twenty propositions of Euclid and knew something of history and the stars.

Each morning the whole house would rise at sun-up for prayers, then we children would have to read a chapter of the Bible aloud before we broke our fast: we would have meal — bread with porridge and sometimes a slice of cold mutton or a piece of Holland cheese. Parson Merther would watch over us, fussy as an old woman, his long yellow fingers picking at his doublet, his small, sword-point eyes ever on the move to find cause for reproof in our manners or our dress. John was caught blowing on his porridge to cool it, Odelia had forgotten to wipe her nose, Paul had left off his garters, we an bent too close over our food.

This was a special care of Parson Merther’s: even at lessons we were made to work with head upright lest humours should fall into the forehead and cause injury to the eyes.

After dinner at noon we would have three hours of the afternoon free, when we could practice fencing with rapier or sword, or go hawking with one of the grooms, or take a boat and play on the river, or sit telling each other frightening stories in the dark aromatic shed in the herb garden where the herbs were dried. Or we would play with the dogs or help feed the horses or even ride a nag if Thomas Rosewarne, the steward, was in a good mood. Or we would climb the elm trees or play in the thick wood going down to the swan pool.

But we had to be in and dressed and properly clean to be at board for supper at six. Having supped we had an hour with Parson Merther again and would have to repeat some paragraphs out of Cicero’s Epistles or some other good author we had studied in the morning; and if we got them wrong we were beaten before going to bed.

I remember especially my fourteenth birthday. My father’s sixth legitimate child, Walter, had been ill for three weeks of a quartan ague and had had many fits. My father’s wife, Dorothy, was great again but there was to be a banquet that evening. Two ships were in the Bay, and there were to be a dozen guests at table. So the day had flown, with hurryings and scurryings of servants and preparations of food.

With my stepmother so industrious in child-bearing, my grandmother often held the reins of the household or perhaps, being how she was, she would have retained them in any case. When there were guests she always took charge, and I think although my grandfather had been dead seven years she had never really given way either to her son or her daughter-in-law. Certainly she was the only person in the house who did not stir uneasily at my father’s footstep.

I had spent the afternoon with Belemus Roscarrock. We had played with a tennis ball on the archery lawn until driven off.

Then we had tried stalking the crows which milled around the newly turned earth of the turnip field. When we tired of this, having killed only one, we mooched back in the fading light to the house and stood a few moments looking at the two vessels, both shallops, which lay close in to the shelter of the land.

“Neptune and Dolphin,” said Belemus scratching his black hair. “It’s more than six months since they were here before.”

“I don’t remember ‘em,” I said.

“No, they were over at Helford. Did not show their faces here. The Crane was on the prowl. We’d best be going on. Old Ink-horn will be chewing on his gums with rage.”

Although I did not always get on with Belemus, I found his company challenging and a stimulus. A heavy boy, already at 16 a full man’s size, with black eyes set deep in his face like cave dwellings overhung by rock, he talked cynically out of a wide full mouth. He seemed to have so much more knowledge of affairs than I had.

“You at least,” I said, “should hardly fear Ink-horn, for although you’ll not work you are his favourite.”

“Ah, and do you know why I am his favourite? It’s because I don’t fear him, see?”

He turned to go in, but I stared a few minutes longer at the two low dark ships, their masts swaying slowly with the swell. Behind them, on the other side of the river’s mouth, there was a light in St Mawes Castle, built at the same time and for the same purpose as Pendennis but indifferently sited. I had often wondered why Parson Merther treated Belemus with greater respect than the rest of us. Was I being incited to rebellion so that my cousin could sit back and be entertained by the result?

The evening was cold, and I remember the sense of warmth I felt as I came into the quadrangle under the tower and through the central gate and saw the lights of the house beginning to glimmer. In the south corner the lights were brightest where my grandmother’s room was and where she would now be dressing. As I moved to go in a girl came hurrying across the grass, taking a short cut from one wing to the other; it was something the maids did not dare to do in the daylight. I drew back intending to jump out and frighten her but she had already seen me, and instead of darting away she came towards me.

“Walter is mortal sick, Master Maugan. He has just been taken with another tedious fit. Go quietly if you enter his room.”

I said: “Meg, Meg, thin as a peg,” but only from habit, and really thinking of what she had told me. Last night there had been comings and goings all the dark hours through our bedroom. I had never been ill in my life and the idea of illness interested me. We had been taken in to see Grace last year, and I had kissed her chubby dead little face and had found it soft and cold and smelling.

When I got in I rubbed my hands and face hurriedly and dressed before Parson Merther could come in and provoke that trial of strength that Belemus was inciting me to; but in fact Ink-horn was busy next door and saw me not at all that evening.

The banqueting hall held not above its normal fifty persons that night, for some ten of our servants who usually supped at the same time were needed extra in the kitchen and to wait at table. The hall took up most of the middle part of the house and was served by kitchens behind and separate from the rest of the house. A handsome room in the summer, it grew very damp in winter; the plaster walls would run with moisture and a chill spread over it that no arras could keep out. Tonight a big fire had been lighted early, and since there was little wind it was cosy enough.

The top table was full, and six of the lesser guests had been put on the end of our smaller table which was at the side of the hall. The trestle table and benches for the servants ran crosswise at the bottom. The beech-wood fire made dancing reflections on the oriel window opposite, and the fatten candlesticks held twenty-four candles of fine wax, not the stinking tallow of ordinary evenings.

New rushes had been strewn on the floor and most of the dogs had been banished. My father had a weakness for dogs and would seldom bring himself to order one destroyed, so they bred and multiplied into all sizes and shapes of mongrel. There was seldom a time without puppies and seldom a time except when guests were expected when there were not pools on the floor and sometimes even on the chairs. Most rooms in the house had a smell of dog about them, but in the hall it was always strongest.

A child accepts its environment unthinking, unseeing for many years. Then comes a day when the mind unlinks itself and stands apart for the first time, looking around with a new eye. For the first time that night I wondered at the strange variety and quality of the guests who sat at my father’s table.

One day it would be our cousins the Arundells or the Godolphins, or the Bassets, distinguished and wealthier than ourselves; another it would be the captain of a naval pinnace sent to watch the coasts for pirates, together with Hannibal Vyvyan across from St Mawes Castle to complain about his ordnance. Then there were banquets given to people in small authority about the county, and all this did not take into account the occasional visits of the really great. Seldom a week passed without entertaining of some sort. But the strangest of all were these noisy feasts given to the captains and crews of the ships which quietly from time to time dropped anchor in our bay.

Captain Elliot of Dolphin was a man of sickly complexion, dark-bearded, raw-boned and thin. He had a nose which whistled when he breathed through it, and he spoke scarcely ever above a voice used for confidences. All his orders afloat, one felt, must go through his mate, William Love, who came from Weymouth, a red-faced jolly man with strange greedy eyes. They were both dressed for the banquet, but the others with them were all sixes and sevens, most in illfitting clothes which might have been made for someone else, rough spoken, long-haired and unshaven, coarse of manner. Captain Burley from Neptune was a big pale-haired shabby man who looked a rogue.

That my grandmother should choose to sit between him and Elliot I found hard to understand. For my grandmother was a great lady.

Others at this banquet were my father’s unmarried sister, Mary Killigrew, and Henry Knyvett and Bethia Wolverstone. My grandmother was the daughter of Philip Wolverstone of Suffolk, and Mistress Wolverstone was her sister, a gaunt ailing woman well on in years. Henry Knyvett was my grandmother’s son by her first marriage. This Henry Knyvett lived with his wife and four children at one of my father’s manor houses, Rosemerryn, but he more often than not ate at Arwenack, for he did not agree with his wife, and his second son Paul lived with us all the time.

In the corner by the stairs three men played tunes, but as supper went on their music rose and fell like a raft in rough weather, half submerged in the sea of voices.

My father was always at his best when entertaining, and in those days he was a handsome man, still in his early forties, a trifle short of stature but fresh complexioned, with a fine full head of blond hair, expressionless, rather prominent blue eyes, and a light-brown moustache, silky and pampered above a firm but cleft chin. He drank and gambled and wenched much of his time away in a feckless care-free fashion, though his temper was unstable and his determination could be great if his own welfare was concerned.

On this noisy, fire-flickering, greasy company came suddenly Parson Merther, blinking at the noise and light, sidling round against the walls of the room like a cockroach until he came behind my father’s chair, whence he ventured forward and whispered some words in my father’s ear. It so happened that the players had come to the end of their piece, and talk too hesitated as guests and servants stared.

“What is it, John?” Lady Killigrew, my grandmother said. “News of Walter?”

“Yes. Wat is dead.” He turned unemotionally to the others. “It is my son. At the tender age of 5. My chaplain will say a prayer or two.”

Everyone stumbled to their feet while Parson Merther muttered a long prayer. He was about to start another but my father grunted and cut him short. After we had all settled in our chairs Captain Elliot asked some whispered question but my father said:

“No, God’s eyes. It will give him no aid to break up now. His mother is with him. He died a Christian. What more is there to it?”

Yet there was more to it, for talk in the room would not get going again. My father sounded callous but I was not sure he was as callous as he seemed. He kept wiping his moustaches with a stained napkin, and he ate no more but blinked stonily across the room over the rim of his glass.

In another silence I heard Captain Burley say to my grandmother: “We need the stuff bad, your ladyship. It is not to be found in every port, and we’ll pay well; you know that.”

“With what?” said Lady Killigrew, but I never heard the reply, for a servant went by with a clatter of dishes.

“With what?” whispered Belemus. “With frog’s kidneys and chicken’s eyes and the soft parts of a tortured dog. That’s all he has to pay with, for his mother is a witch.”

Ink-horn was leaving the hall again, and I realised thankfully that tonight we were to be left undisturbed instead of hurried away to bed.

“Six fits of a quartan ague,” my father said sulkily. “Many would have recovered from it. But Walter was of too fine a stock. The fine are taken up to God and the coarse are left here for the Devil’s work.”

“I think it was more than the ague,” said Lady Killigrew. “Like as not he was liver-grown. I lost two of your sisters that way and the second I suffered to be opened. The liver was rust-coloured and swollen, no pretty sight.”

My father thrust his platter violently away from him, but did not reply. No one wished to be the object of his attention now. In the uncomfortable silence Lady Killigrew motioned a footman and sent him with a message to the players to strike up another tune.

“You were saying, Captain Elliot?”

“I was saying, your ladyship? Oh, yes, I was saying that there is no ship of war in the Irish Sea, or but rarely, and there are valuable cargoes afloat every day. I wonder Mr Killigrew does not petition for one.”

Lady Killigrew adjusted a pin. “It is not in Mr Killigrew’s commission to command the Irish Sea, Captain Elliot. He is hard set because of the parsimony of the Privy Council to defend one castle and a strip of coast, and to keep down pirates.”

“Such parsimony,” said Burley, “I can hardly conceive’ll run to the lengths of depriving so important a post of common ordnance.”

“Indeed it does, Captain Burley,” said my grandmother. “You’d be surprised at the constant efforts Mr Killigrew makes, by letter and by personal appeal, for sufficiency of small armaments of all sorts. He does not get them. Even today, with the Spanish threat in no way abated, we are pared to the bone. Mr Killigrew receives 12d. a day as captain, which is the same sum as is paid to the master mason at Boscastle Pier. We have our deputy Captain Foster here; a Master Gunner Carminow there; two other gunners, and the musters of Budock to call on in need. To supply them we have not above twenty calivers, four barrels of powder and three culverin mounted. Mr Killigrew has spent a fortune out of his own pocket, as he has told you.”

“Your ladyship has my deepest sympathy,” said Captain Elliot. “It is a bitter reflection that those who serve our country most are the most often beggared by it.”

“There are some as find their labours not unrewarding,” said Captain Burley, swilling back another draught and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. Everything this man said he said with a sneer.

Soon afterwards the chief guests left the room, and servants began to clear away, picking their way among overturned chairs and spilt wine and a halfdozen sleeping sailors. In one corner three men were gambling and seemed likely to come to blows, among them an evil faced sailor called Aristotle Totle. Candles “uttered and dripped on the tables. The beech-wood had burned dead, and grey ash was scattered in the hearth The musicians had given up the struggle, and Dick Stable, who was the harpist, was feeding scraps to my father’s spaniels.

“See,” said Belemus, nudging my elbow, “the captains have gone off for their private talks. You were asking me why these men came here. Now if you could listen you would know.”

“Well, I cannot, so I never shall.”

“Ah, that depends, doesn’t it.”

“On what?”

We left the great hall and walked slowly along the panelled passage to the south wing. We passed the door of the drawingroom chamber where our guests were likely to be. Light came from two cracks in the door. After we were past Belemus said in a low voice: “There you are, witless, you can see in.”

“But someone might come.”

“If you’re interested I’ll watch for you.”

I hesitated, breathing in sensations of doubt and conspiracy, then I went to the door. The top crack was about a foot below eye level. The wood had shrunk and split, and one could see through. I heard my grandmother’s harsh cough.

Captain Burley was talking. “… if to that we add five pounds of Levant silk dyed Watchet blue, and two cases of figs, that’s more’n the value of two paltry barrels of powder.”

“I cannot strip my poor defences any barer. If the Spaniards come …”

“Oh, if the Spaniards come, Mr Killigrew …” This was Captain Elliot, whispering, not quite audible. “Ten barrels of powder would not suffice. If they come … Armada double the size of the last … Come with whips specially made for the naked backs of Englishwomen … but no attempt in the coming summer.”

“What information?‘9

“Private but authentic, your ladyship. Dolphin travels widely … Blavet last month, the Groyne in December … You could dispense with your last demi-culverin and suffer no hurt.”

One of the dogs, Christian, stirred and growled in his sleep. I could just see my father’s head as it rested on his hand, his fair moustache drooping over it. Somewhere behind him there was the clink and bubble of wine in a goblet.

“Make us a better proposition. One that we can entertain.”

“Well, Lady Killigrew, you know what it would entail as well as I do “

“Nay,” my father cut in, “I do not know that I am in the mood for it tonight. My child lies upstairs, but just gone from us…”

Elliot whispered his sympathy.

“My position,” said my father, “is one of vast responsibility with scant, paltry, minimal resources. Every month I embase myself writing to Cecil … England’s safety, England’s very survival~may depend on the quality of her few real commanders in the southwest. Grenville agreed with me God rest his soul. Ralegh agrees and has promised …”

Something passed then that I could not catch, but Captain Burley must have made a remark which was instantly resented. My father broke into one of his sudden angers which were always nearer the surface than one suspected.

“… I’m not a lackey to be gibed atl We’ve served four monarchs in our time at the castle and lost half an inheritance in the process! To be so accused in my own home …”

“Well, your honour, it’s commonly so spoken, and that Lady Killigrew herself was involved and that two of her servants was hanged for it “

A goblet of wine rolled on the floor. “If that is the sort of calumny to which I am to be subjected “

“Begging your ladyship’s pardon,” came William Love’s voice. “Richard Burley meant no offense, I’ll wager. If so “

“Let it be discussed as you will. I’ll no longer be a party to it.”

Conversation passed back and forth, cooling and calming and smoothing over. All the same I should have taken warning. I did not, until a shadow moved across the crack of the door. Then too late I stumbled back as someone opened it for my grandmother, and I stared into her cold grey eyes.

There had been little to see through the crack, but now all the room was there beyond her shoulder: the brace of candlesticks, flames bobbing, the heavy, pale-haired figure of Burley sneering angrily in the leather studded armchair, Love standing behind it; Elliot fingering the gold ring in his ear; my father pouring wine, face Hushed, his quilted yellow doublet open and awry.

Yet all the time T was staring into my grandmother’s eyes. One of the dogs had come after her, its tail wagging unsteadily. She pushed it away with her foot and without speaking to me swept on.

CHAPTER TWO

Elliot and Love and Burley and their friends stayed feasting all the following day, but they left at nine in the evening and caught the midnight tide. The day of Walter’s funeral they were gone and the waters of the river-mouth were so still and glassy that no ships might ever have been there to break the reflections of tree and hill and distant fort. To my surprise my grandmother never spoke to me about her discovery of me that night.

Spring came, and we children worked reluctantly through the long bright mornings longing for the afternoon hours of freedom and adventure. Usually we stayed within the palisades, but sometimes we ventured abroad in the keeping of a groom called Rose who not seldom risked a thrashing for allowing us to wander farther than we should. We had a tiny boat with a single sail and a pair of oars; in it we sometimes sailed wed up the river.

Both river banks, except for enclaves where houses or villages stood, were covered with thick dark woods, cut through here and there with miry tracks. Squirrels, badgers, foxes and hares abounded, and sometimes underfoot the viper would lift his head. Venturing into this wild country was explicitly forbidden us by Parson Merther, but sometimes we penetrated a few hundred yards. Many strange stories were told of these woods, that they were old, old as the birth of the world, and that they had an influence on all people born or living in them. Strange sects flourished there; witches lived in the far reaches of some of the narrower creeks. These smaller creeks filled up with glimmering oily water at high tide but twice daily sank away to silent yellow mud on which the only sound was the cry and flutter of birds. Many an unsuspecting child, we were told, had strayed up them never to return. Some of the bigger birds were like children, lost children crying, and who was to say they were not?

In the summer we proved the age and magic of the woods by diving and swimming under the water just at the edge of our enclosed land by the entrance to Penryn Creek. There you could see the trees that had grown there before ever the river was. Clusters of tree stumps still existed three fathoms under water, hazel and oak and beech and fir, and at low tide you could see the flag iris and the ferns.

On the promontory of land dividing Penryn Creek from the Fal River proper lived the Trefusis family, of Trefusis, but we seldom visited or spoke. I did not then know any reason why and as a matter of course took my father’s part, but the two families had quarrelled over the generations, and it was well known John Trefusis did not at all approve of Killigrew highhandedness. My father used to say that with the mouth of the Fal held between the pincers of Pendennis and St Mawes Castles, Trefusis Point felt the nip every time the pincers closed.

Farther up the Fal on the left bank, near the ferry across the river, was Tolverne in which lived cousins of ours, a branch of the Arundell family. Jonathan, the elder boy, was in his twenties, but Thomas and Elizabeth were of our age. Sir Anthony Arundell of Tolverne, the father, had become an eccentric of late, living a recluse’s life, often not rising from his bed until five in the afternoon, sometimes not retiring until daybreak. My father said the woods had got him.

One day in early May we children were invited to spend the day there, so we sailed up the river in the company of Rose and another servant. Tolverne was a much smaller house than ours, but it was convenient of scope and less sprawling and would have been pleasant had it not been so dark and close. In front of the main windows was a shallow lawn, but surrounding that were the trees, crowding close, with a path cut through them to the river. Many of the trees near the house were conifers and even in the winter kept the light away. To me, brought up on the airy promontory of Arwenack, the house was always secretive and strange.

We found there today besides the three young Arundells, Gertrude and Hoblyn Carew, the children of Richard Carew of Antony near Plymouth, Gertrude being in her middle teens and Hoblyn two years younger; and also Sue Farnaby from Treworgan near Truro, a slim girl of about fourteen with a piquant tilted face and black hair; and Jack Arundell of Trerice, who at 15 had been head of the ArundeU Trerices ever since his father died when he was an infant.

Jonathan Arundell of Tolverne, though 25, seemed to find as much pleasure in the afternoon as any of us, especially when it put him in the company of Gertrude Carew. Soon we began a game called ‘Who’s From Home?’ which ranged over the widest area of the garden and grounds, and to my slight alarm I found myself paired with Sue Farnaby. I had never been alone with a girl of my own age in quite this way before for the essence of the game was that it should be stealthy and secretive, and that led to whispering close to ears and giggling and an air of conspiracy which put you on a familiar footing right off.

Sue had the advantage of having played this game at Tolverne before, so she knew all the best hiding places and all the paths through the woods. Soon we had lost the others and were on a narrow path by the river from which we could see our own little boat with Rose sitting fishing from it, a rowboat crossing at the ferry and a troy of thirty or forty tons struggling down the river against the breeze.

“It’s best to sit here for a while,” she said. “The others will seek each other by the house. After we have given them time to scatter we can creep back and be first home.”

She settled on an outcrop of rock and smoothed the thin scarf tied over her ears. “My father is a farmer and merchant. We do not own Treworgan, we rent it from your father. My mother knew your mother in Devon.”

“My mother?” I said, and then realised she meant Mrs Killigrew.

“Yes. They grew up near each other.”

“That is my stepmother. My own mother is dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry … My mother almost died when I was born; that’s why I’m an only child.”

“Are you lonely at home?”

The turned and gave me a wide glinting beautiful smile. “No … I have so many friends.”

The smile made her a new one for life. She shaded her eyes with her hand. “Do you know Sir Anthony Arundell? Isn’t that him coming across the ferry?”

There were two men in the boat. “The front one in the crimson cloak? Yes, you cannot mistake his white hair.”

Sue Farnaby said: “I have been friendly with Elizabeth Arundell for years. I come here often, and sometimes she comes to us, though our house is humble to hers. Why were you called Maugan? Is it Welsh?”

I laughed. “I don’t think so. Not this way of spelling it. There was a St Maugan, wasn’t there, who founded a church near Padstow? I have never thought about it. Why were you called Susan?”

“Susanne,” she said, “after my grandmother.”

I laughed again. There was nothing in the conversation, but at the time it seemed light and witty and suddenly joyous. we chatted on until she got up and gave me a hand. “We should be going: they’ll have tired of waiting by now.”

Giggling together, we began to creep back by another path towards the house. I wished I could wander through these woods all afternoon linked to this slim, pale, black-haired creature who led me on by one hand, while the other gathered her skirts together at the front so that they should not be caught by brambles. When she laughed her teeth gleamed like sudden sunshine; her skin was strangely fine; her eyes had twenty expressions from the darkest gravity to gray-green laughter. For me at that moment she was all mystery and enchantment: she was the first woman.

We found ourselves within sight of the house; and there ahead of us crouching behind a bush was Belemus with little Odelia Killigrew who had drawn him as her partner. I had no wish to speak to them, but Sue Farnaby said we must, so in three minutes we had ‘captured’ them and were concerting together how we might get back to our winning point on the other side of the house without being seen.

Sue said-we could go through the house: there was an arched door ahead of us in a stone wall and beyond it steps to another narrower door which was open. We found ourselves in a dark room which had a strange look about it, there being ornaments and small pictures and a smell of burnt herbs. Before we could go on Sir Anthony came in followed by the man who had been with him in the rowing boat.

Sue said: “I beg your pardon, sir; we were playing a game and had lost our way.”

Sir Anthony had a flat plump face which my father said had once been handsome. The flesh was no longer healthy; it was as if some subtle corrosion of stress had touched it. He waved a dismissive hand, but the man with him said:

“These are your children, sir?”

He was a stout man, his stoutness being in all ways different from Sir Anthony’s, as a taut strong rope is different from a frayed slack one.

“No … Friends of my children. This is Susanna Farnaby of Treworgan. This is Maugan and Odelia Killigrew, and Belemus Roscarrock, who also lives at Arwenack.”

“Roscarrock,” said the man. “That is a famous Catholic name.”

“My father is a Catholic,” said Belemus.

We were about to move off when Lady Arundell came in. Sir Anthony said: “Oh, Anne, this is Mr Humphry Petersen, I don’t think you will have met him before. Though you’ll have heard our cousins speak of him.”

“You come from Chideock?” Lady Arundell said coldly.

“Not directly, my lady, though I know it. I have been abroad for some months.”

“You have news of war, then?”

“Nothing that makes good hearing. The English have suffered a heavy defeat in Brittany.”

“Ah?” said Sir Anthony. “I hadn’t heard it.”

“Well, sir, it’s serious enough to prejudice English hopes in France for a long time. We laid siege to Craon 1,000 English, some 600 Germans and some loyal French troops under the Prince of Dombe and the Prince of Condy. A large force of Spanish and League forces launched a surprise attack and cut us to pieces. The loyal French suffered much less but fled and found refuge in neighbouring towns, but we had no place of refuge, sir, and were hardly an army at all by dawn of the next day.”

Lady Arundell said: “Susanne, in the orchard under the vine bower you will find my lawn cap. Fetch it for me, will you?”

“Of course, ma’am.”

“Did I hear say you were a Killigrew, boy?” Mr Petersen said to me as I was going past him.

“Yes, sir.”

“The Killigrews of Arwenack, hard by the mouth of the Pal,” said Sir Anthony Arundell. “John Killigrew has a numerous brood.”

“Yes, I know of him well. He governs Pendennis Castle. And are you the eldest boy?”

“Yes, sir, leastwise …”

“Leastwise? “

“Maugan is a pack-saddle boy,” said Sir Anthony, peering at me as if I were not there. “John is his eldest, who’s twelve or so; you’ll see him in the garden. Thomas is a year younger, and Odelia, here, a year younger still.”

Just then Jack Arundell of Trerice and Thomas Arundell came in to see what had become of us, so we went off with them and rejoined the others. We lay for a time in the grass talking and laughing and planning what we should play next.

Suddenly Odelia dropped a little stone into her lap and said: “What is recusancy? I have not heard of it before.”

“Recusancy?” said Thomas. “Who used the word?”

“It was your visitor, Thomas, I did not mean it had been spoken out here. Is it some wrong word?”

“There is nothing wrong with the word,” said Jack Arundell of Trerice brusquely. “It is what it stands for that’s dislikable. Recusancy is being a Catholic and refusing to change, refusing to come to church, refusing to be a Protestant of the English Church.”

“Are you a recusancy, Belemus?” Odelia asked.

“Recusant,” said Belemus, sucking a piece of grass. “My father is.”

“Mean to say he would fight for the Spaniards?” Hoblyn Carew asked.

“Of course,” said Belemus. “I’m a Spaniard in disguise. Did you not know?”

Sarcasm was too much for some of the younger ones and they wriggled uncomfortably.

“They say there are spies and traitors everywhere,” said Hoblyn. “They say that if the Spaniards landed there would be traitors in every town. And they say another Armada is coming.”

You could hear the east wind stirring the top of the trees. Odelia picked up two stones and threw them into the air, trying to pick up the one in her lap before catching the two as they came down.

“And what,” she said, “is a pack-saddle boy?”

Two of the older ones laughed, and I thought Sue Farnaby was one of them. Belemus said “When you are born the midwife puts you on a horse, and if you take a toss you are known as ‘t

Thomas interrupted: “Being a pack-saddle boy means you are a bastard.”

Thomas was the second of the Tolverne children; nine or ten years younger than his brother, but still older and bigger than 1. The other two were gentle and rather frail and without guile, but he was a thruster, with tight curled hair, a white bland face like his father’s but without the sensitivity, a pampered body.

I said: “You are quite a know-all, aren’t you?”

“Well, it’s the truth. It may taste poor, but then the truth often does. It’s a pill that has to be swallowed.”

“Other things too may have to be swallowed. Like this mud, for instance.”

“It means,” he said, “that your mother like as not was a light woman and that, for certain, you have no name. You bear the name of Killigrew for a kindness only. I doubt if you was ever baptised.”

He got up as I went for him, but I had the strength of anger. I put him down twice and broke two of his front teeth. Odelia and Elizabeth were screaming and soon the elders rushed out and there was much to do, with no one taking my side except Sue Farnaby and Jack Arundell of Trerice, and the elders were too angry to listen to either of them.

The party did not last long after that. Making the most of a need to catch the falling tide, we left in a subdued silence. I thought I would never be invited there again and probably would never see Susanna Farnaby again or be permitted to roam through the woods with her, with the sun shining and the trees budding and the river birds crying and a light breeze rustling the grasses. I felt as if I had destroyed some part of my youth.

In spite of the ebbing tide the head breeze was so fresh as we came out into Carrick Road that Rose and the other servant had to lower the sail and take to the oars. I only spoke once and that was to Belemus as we neared our landing jetty.

“I don’t understand it. Would you not have fought him if he had said as much to you? Then why did he say it? What had I done to offend him?”

Belemus smiled his cavernous old-man’s smile.

“Witless, don’t you know you had spent all the afternoon enamouring with the little girl he most fancies for himself?”

Rose was the bearer of an angry note written by Lady Arundell to my father complaining that I had attacked her son as if I were out of Bedlam and had done his looks permanent harm and perhaps his very health; she trusted I should be suitably dealt with.

I was. My father was out, but my grandmother ordered me to be well thrashed, not by Parson Merther, who had no muscle, but by Carminow the gunner, who knew how to draw blood. And then I was confined to my room for three days on bread and water.

The pain and the hunger were things quite light beside the sense of humiliation. Something budding for the first time in my heart had been burned away. I went over the scenes of the afternoon a hundred times, and all the pleasure of the first hours was poisoned by the disgrace of the last.

On the second day of the confinement came a new and unexpected frustration: we woke that morning, which was a Thursday, to find ten ships of war anchored in the roads.

The fleet was under the personal command of Walter Ralegh, with Sir John Burrough as second-in-command, and was being sent out to attack the Isthmus of Panama and to try to capture the treasure ships of the Plate. That night my father was to banquet Ralegh and Burrough and a picked company of officers and gentlemen. They were sailing on the morrow.

All I could see from my window was the passing to and fro of small boats ferrying people aboard and ashore. I paced up and down most of the time, biting the skin round my fingers, and when Rose brought me bread and water at five I kicked it over and ground the bread into the floorboards. When John and the others came to bed at eight he said the guests were still at table, so I pulled a shirt on and a pair of slops and went to see.

I stole across to a bedroom which was my uncle Simon Killigrew’s when he was home and stared out across the river mouth. It was a moonless night but starlit, and I could see the lights of the vessels and pick out their shapes. I wished I was going with them, to glory or to death. If I had no name I must make one.

I took a devious way towards the great hall, avoiding contact with the servants. I had seen Sir Walter Ralegh twice before and could guess which was Sir John Burrough; but I could not make out the others, though I knew one was a Grenville and another a Crosse and a third called Thynne, all west-country men.

Supper was near its end, and for this meal no servants had dined but only the twenty guests and their hosts. Ralegh seemed to take little part in the conversation, his face sombre and as if his mind were elsewhere. I was surprised that he looked so sour and preoccupied, with this splendid new venture just opening for him. Sir John Burrow looked a kinder, more tolerant man, and I wondered if I could run after him when he left tonight and ask to be taken. I thought of Grenville last year who had fought the whole Spanish fleet for fifteen hours alone, withstanding eight hundred rounds of shot before being overwhelmed. Ralegh was his cousin.

I wondered what it must be like to be the Queen’s favourite, perhaps the most powerful man in all England; and now leading a fleet against the enemy. I wished fervently that I might grow up. I felt that all opportunity was passing while I was still too young to play any part.

The following evening when they had all gone I went down into the big parlour to see my father and to receive from him what final admonition he deemed necessary before the incident was closed. To my surprise he seemed now to think lightly of it all.

“The Arundells were always touchy as to their looks not that they ever had none anyway. But you’ll have a grief of a life if you fight everyone who calls you bastard, my boy.”

“No, father, it was not so much that; it was what he said “

“Never forget that there have been others such as yourself who have left their mark. William the Conqueror was one, and people tumble over their own heels to claim him as their ancestor.”

I watched my grandmother, who was adding some accounts. It was due to her, though I did not realise it until years later, that there was little risk of my having to seek for my mother among the servants. It was a rule she had enforced with an iron hand even in her husband’s time. What her menfolk did outside the house was very much their own affair but they did not, in peril almost of their lives, embroil themselves with the servants.

“Remember one word,” my father said, yawning and stretching his legs across a footstool. “Success. If you are a good success in your life people will forgive you far worse things than a little matter of your mother’s wedding. You may do murder, you may betray your country, you may savage women, you may steal from orphans, you may have pillaged and perjured and burned only let the outcome be success and the world will fawn on you.”

“Yes, father.’,

“But don’t consume your substance in your country’s service, or you’ll be brought near to beggary. To hold office in our age is to hold your purse over a hungry mouth that takes all and gives nothing in return. Even your great-uncles Henry and William who are as close to the Queen as a pair of father confessors in and out of her bedchamber, running secret errands for her even your uncles admit themselves to be deeper in debt with each year that passes. At least, one has a knighthood for it, which is more than I, though I am head of the family and my father was knighted and his father before him, and they living in less troublous times than this. By rights I should have had it ten years ago.”

“Leave the boy be, John,” said my grandmother, coughing harshly. “Leave him to learn his own lessons.”

My father drank deep from his mug. “We all learn, but some of us leave it a trifle late. If I had the last twenty years over again I should do one thing or the other: till my own soil and never budge from it and become a wealthy vegetable, like the Boscawens over across the river; or live all my life at court and reap the benefits the way Ralegh has done. Half and half gives you the sour edge of both worlds . ..”

“The best way to teach the boy,” said Lady Killigrew, “is not by book or precept but by sending him into the world to taste it for himself. The confines of Arwenack are too restrictive for him.”

“I don’t see it,” said my father.

“Others see it.”

My father took out his pocket mirror and began to turn up the ends of his moustache. “Presently. In good time.”

“Who is my mother, sir?” I asked.

“You see,” said Lady Killigrew.

“Your mother, boy, has gone to make one of the blest above. She did so at your birth. Who she was is neither here nor there. Be content that I am your father.”

Lady Killigrew said: “Many a lad has fended for himself before he was Maugan’s age. You have a young multiplying family of your own, John. Saplings grow frail if they are overshadowed by taller trees.”

Later that night I heard them talking about Ralegh. Henry Knyvett said he was over-proud and contemptuous sitting so silent over supper as if no one here were good enough to mix with him.

“I am not so sure it was that,” said my father. “He was angry at having raised this expedition and commissioned its crews and part financed it, then to be deprived of the leadership and ordered to return to court so soon as he saw the expedition properly under way.”

“When did he tell you that?” asked Lady Killigrew sharply.

“Just as he was leaving. Frobisher is to follow and take over command in his stead. With Essex in some disgrace Walter is now supreme with the Queen, and she wants him home. But it is a tightrope he walks with such a changeable woman.”

“I would have his tightrope if it were offered to me,” said Henry Knyvett, picking his teeth.

My grandmother’s son by her first marriage was a ramshackle man of nearly fifty with a long nose and a receding profile. He walked as if there was water in his joints, and always wore a skull cap at meals to prevent his hair falling in his food. Things were never easy between him and Mr Killigrew

“Oh, you are all for Ralegh,” Mr Knyvett said, “but we know he is the best hated man in London, and I could give more than several reasons why. He has pulled himself up from nothing by his own shoe-laces. He is a near-convicted atheist and a blasphemer. Now he lives richly in wine patents and cloth licences, domineers over the Queen as Captain of her Guard, and treats ordinary men as if they were dirt under his feet! D’you suppose he is disappointed to be deprived of a chance to fight the Spaniards? I do not. He gets all the Spanish adventures he wants in the Queen’s bedchamber.”

“Envious tongues will always twist the courses of a man’s rise,” said my father. “He has done much for the tinners of this country and none could be more popular with them. As for him domineering the Queen, if you’d seen so much of her as I have you’d know better than to suppose any man is her master. She pulls the strings and others dance. Believe me.”

All June was supreme, with no rain and gentle warm sea-breezes. It was the last fine summer for several years.

Half a mile from our gates, and on the river bank near the town of Penryn, was the old Collegiate Church of St Thomas of Glasney. In my great-grandfather’s time, when England was Catholic, this had been the centre of church life for all the far west. The establishment had been large and wealthy, with a refectory, a chapter house, dormitories for the canons, a hospital, many outbuildings. Now, except for the church, it was in ruins. Of the college chapel, dedicated to Thomas a Becket, only the tower stood. When you walked through the cloisters you could see how roofs had been robbed of their lead, stones carried away to make farmers’ walls, windows broken, coloured glass stolen, doors prised off their hangings.

Even many of the big paving stones had gone, and nettles and cow parsley and vipers bugloss grew rankly in their place.

We children did not often go there: it was too near Penryn, and the Killigrews were not popular in Penryn. But on the rising ground above the ruins was a windmill which had been used by the monks for grinding corn. This had been taken over first by one and then another of the millers of Penryn; but it was known to bring bad luck, and the last man to use it had hanged himself from the great beam. Now it had been allowed to fall into ruin like the college buildings, and a witch lived there called Katherine Footmarker. She was a woman who had been driven out of Penryn for having turned a neighbour’s pet into a toad, but here in this ruin she had been allowed to live, partly because of men’s fear of her, partly because she was known to be able to cure cattle and sheep of the murrain, and the evil she did was suffered for the good.

Although the Arwenack children were terrified of her, we were drawn sometimes towards the mill by the attraction of the forbidden and the dangerous, and twice we had seen her, a woman as tall and thin as my grandmother, walking with long strides through the bracken, once with a jackdaw on her shoulder, once followed by a black dog, which Belemus swore was no dog at all. We would have thrown stones at her if we had dared.

I had in the last year grown fond, perhaps over-fond, of Meg Levant the serving maid. Sometimes around eleven in the morning I would sidle into one of the smaller kitchens where I knew I would find her helping to get our dinner. She would be cleaning the trenchers or scouring the knives often I would steal a piece or two of marchpane to keep my stomach quiet. She was a jolly girl of 17, soft and pretty and auburn haired, and it was good to be in her company after the solemnuties of Parson Merther. In the evenings too in the summer after prayers there was a half-hour before we had to be abed, and I would help her get the candles and the snuffers ready.

One evening I said to her “Who was my mother, Meg?”

She stared at me as if I had asked her the riddle of the Sphinx. “Your mother, Master Maugan? How should I know? “

“You’re older than I am. You’ve been here for years. Someone must have whispered it to you.”

“Why should they?”

“Servants talk. What do the other servants say?”

“Have a care for that candle: you know your grandmother won’t abide a crooked one … The servants say you was brought here as a mite a few months old. Your foster-nurse was old Sarah Amble who took the dropsy three years gone. You should’ve asked her while she was here to answer.”

“D’you swear you do not know?”

“If twas my way to swear, I’d swear, but since it isn’t I won’t. Now, out of my light, boy, or Rosewarne will be after us both.”

I barred her passage. “Who would know, Meg?”

She frowned and looked me over. “How you d’ grow. You’ll be more longer than me afore Christmas. Dare you not ask your father?”

“I asked him but he wouldn’t say.”

“Maybe tis a secret best kept.”

“Not from me. Who else would know?”

“I’ll think on it an’ tell you.”

“Think now.”

She tried to push me out of her way. I put my hands under her armpits. She squeaked petulantly. “Don’t touch me that way! If someone catches you you’ll be for a thrashing.”

“It would be worth it.”

She looked at me sidelong and picked up a large bracket sconce which held five tall tallow candles for the kitchen. “Saucy. If you’re so curious and so brave, why not go and ask Katherine Footmarker?”

I let her pass then. “She would know? Really? You truly think so?”

Meg looked back. “If she did not she would know who to ask.”

At the end of the month my father’s younger brother Simon and his wife and two children came to spend a long summer holiday with us, as they usually did when there was plague in the capital. Simon was a lively man, hearty and noisy, and when he was on a visit he and my father would spend endless hours dicing together, or, when they could persuade Henry Knyvett to join them, Gleek. He and my other uncle, Thomas, were in some way attached to the court. Unlike my father’s uncles, William and Sir Henry, they seemed not to have any precise appointments, but they lived well and kept their creditors at arm’s length.

Simon brought us news that Ralegh had secretly married one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour and in due time had confessed his error to the Queen. A week later he and his bride were in the Tower in separate cells, Uncle Simon explained with a roar of laughter; quite inconvenient for lovebirds. Simon did not like Sir Walter.

With the arrival of two more children in the house, the pace of our learning slackened and we spent much time on the river and bathing from one of the sandy beaches of the bay. Life was pleasant and easy that warm August and early September. Talk of invasion had abated, and no enemy ship was reported all summer. Sometimes in our wanderings we would come within the sight of the old mill above Penryn, and I thought of what Meg Levant had said.

In mid-September Mrs Simon Killigrew and her two children left for Somerset, but Uncle Simon still stayed on. A few days after his family left he rode out with my father on one of my father’s expeditions, and they took Belemus with them. The other children were to spend the afternoon by the swan pool, but I had a slight fever and had been leeched and told to stay in my bed. I knew no one would seek me until supper-time.

I left the house by way of the bakery, the walled garden, and the stables, which lay between the main house and the approach. From there I followed the deep rutted track past our own windmill to a part of the palisade where a broken wall gave me a foot up and over.

It was very little more than a mile to the mill over the fields and through the woods. At first I saw no one; but at Three Farthings House Paul Gwyther was ploughing a field and his son Oliver was following behind sowing the seed of winter wheat and rye. Behind Oliver were the two younger boys armed with slings and stones to keep the birds away. Oliver recognised me and waved a hand.

The woods were thick around Glasney. I skirted the edge of them up the hill. The sails of the windmill were broken, but one of the arms rocked gently in the breeze. From behind a tree I stared across the brambles. I picked a blackberry and chewed it, got a seed in my teeth and felt for it with a forefinger. A dog barked once inside the mill.

Silence fell then. In the clearing there were two grey granite millstones the size of dairy cheeses, and propped against them was a broken wheel. Thistles and docks grew among the grass, and with them shoots of barley and oats. A trampled path led to the door of the mill, which leaned on one hinge.

“Who’s there?” said a voice. “Come forward if you have business. If not, leave us be.”

Just inside the door and well within the sunshine a woman of thirty-odd, in a faded blue kirtle, was sitting cross-legged on the floor. On a stool beside her a rabbit sat eating some lettuce leaves, and there were two or three cats lying the shafts of the sun.

“Well, boy?”

I tried to speak but some spittle of fright formed on my tongue and I could only swallow and stare.

“What d’you want?” she said again.

“I’m … I came to see Mistress Foot-Footmarker.”

“You’re as near her as you’ll ever be.”

I shifted from one foot to the other. A black dog was lying beside a wicker basket and a jackdaw was perched on a beam.

“What’s your name, lad?” I told her. She got slowly to her feet, brushed the dust off her skirt, picked at a stain on it with her long forefinger. “I thought I’d seen you before. I thought so. You’re from Arwenack. Of course. You’re for Arwenack. I thought so.”

It was like being accused of something. “Yes.”

“Ah … And what can I do for a Kilfigrew?”

I watched the rabbit pick up a piece of lettuce and put it in his mouth. You could hear the crunching and could see his fat little cheeks swell up and down.

“… Is he a pet rabbit?”

“Not a pet, lad, because he’s free. He comes here when he is so minded.”

I stood half in and half out of the door.

She said: “Does your father know you’ve come?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You mean you’ve come to see me all on your own? Who suggested it?”

“I just thought I’d walk this way.”

She blew out a breath and with her foot stirred a big grey cat which was asleep in the half shade. “Well, it’s a surprise to be so visited. It’s very strange. If there was to be any call from a Kilfigrew I’d have held a penny it had been your father with his armed band of ruffians to set the place afire over my head.”

“Oh, no, he’d never do that.”

“Would he not! ” She scratched her bare leg above the knee where there was a tear in her skirt. “I’m between one and the other here, lad, as you should know. On the north side IS Penryn and on the south side Arwenack, both wishing me ill, but each waitin’ and watchin’ for the other to stir first.” She smiled, showing strong white teeth in her long brown face. “Don’t you believe me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me what you’ve come for then.”

I said: “I want to know who my mother was.”

The big black dog suddenly barked again and this disturbed the jackdaw, who fluttered his wings and edged along the beam staring at me with a beady eye.

“Hush, Moses!” the woman said, turning suddenly on the dog, and the dog got to its feet and slunk away into the darkness with its tail curving between its legs. “Noisy animals I can’t abide ~ ” she said. “Silence is where you learn things, not in noise.”

She poured herself some milk and drank it, extended the mug to me. I shook my head.

“How old are you, Maugan Killigrew?”

“Fourteen.”

“And base born? Fourteen. That’s 1578, isn’t it. Why do you suppose I can answer your question?”

“I thought you might find out.”

“Ah-hah, and when I find out you’ll run back to Arwenack saying Katherine Footmarker is a worser witch than ever you suspected and that she has a black dog that sings lewd hymns and five cats dressed in cassocks and surplices I”

“No, no, I shall not! Really I shall not.”

“So you say.” She put the mug down and came slowly forward into the light again. “1578 is a long time since. John Killigrew has been rovin’ over the countryside for long enough. How can you expect anyone to remember except maybe your mother? and perhaps even she’s forgot.”

“She is dead! My father told me.”

“Ah … well, then. So he remembers. And he won’t tell you? Maugan Killigrew, born in 1578. Well, well.”

The rabbit had stopped eating and was watching her.

“What’ll you give me to find out?”

“I’ve two shillings here.”

“I saw your father ride out this morning,” she said, “with his band of servants. What mischief is he up to now?’)

“He is not ‘up to mischief’. He rides out to hunt and hawk, that’s all.”

“That’s what you believe, eh? Truly? Let me look at you.” She put a hand under my chin, but I shrank away. “I believe you’re as innocent as you look … Give me a shilling.”

I gave her one of the coins.

“This is the half,” she said between her teeth as she bit at the silver. “Come again in three or four weeks. Time of the next full moon, maybe.”

“But I may not be able to get here againl I thought you would I thought you could …”

I looked across the harbour. Two small cogs were luffing out of Penryn Creek, and another vessel had dropped anchor off Trefusis Point. She looked like one of the bigger fishing boats from Fowey or Looe.

The woman said: “If you think I am of the dark then you must come in the dark.”

The rabbit hopped off his stool and moved out of the hut.

“Here, let me look at your hand.” Before I could put them behind my back she had caught one and had turned it palm upward. “How hot you are. A touch of ague, maybe? … Well, leastwise you waste nothing needless on soap and water. Here, spit on them boy not to clean them, but the way the spittle dries tells me as much as the lines themselves.”

I did what she said. She was too close to me with her long black hair drooping over my hands. She smelt of damp hay.

She said: “You’re a Killigrew whether you like it or not. There’s the eagle on you stamped, see? No escape. You’ve an interesting hand, boy. There’s blood on it. There’s blood on both.”

I tried to wriggle my hands free.

“Don’t go yet. It’s different blood and all. Can you not see it? Here, here, by the two fingers and thumb of your left hand and a streak across the palm of the right.”

“What does it mean?”

“Ah, that I can’t ten you. Time will tell you. You’re going to travel, lad. I see you back and forth to Arwenack an your life in it but never of it. There’s wars and women, though only one or two that mark deep. But always Cornwall and Arwenack, whether you like it or not, in your vitals. You’ll die here, I’m thinkin’, here or hereabouts but not at Arwenack. You see, that’s the last time it shows; your life line goes on after that.”

I took my hands away as soon as she gave a sign of releasing them. She laughed.

“I think you’ll make a comely man, Maugan. The women win like you. Nor will the men despise you. It takes courage to seek out such a woman as I’m whispered to be.”

I tried surreptitiously to wipe my hands down the back of my jerkin. “When must I come again?”

“Today the moon is two days after the full. Come in a month or thereabouts; I may have somethin’ for you then, though it’s no promise.”

“I’ll try to get away.”

“You’ll get away. Most of the things you want to do you’ll do. I can see it in your face.”

The gate that was the main entrance through the stockade to our land was on high ground which dominated the approaches to the house from the south. During daylight there was one or another manservant on duty there to see no unwanted person was admitted beggars, tinkers, pedlars, they an got short shrift; as indeed did other more important personages if my father had reasons for not seeing them. At night the three boar hounds, Charon and Scylla and Charybdis roamed at large.

But today I knew that by now a servant caned Penrudduck would be at the gate and that he would let me in without telling on me, so I was making straight up the uphill path when I heard a horse whinny close behind. I ducked behind a gorse bush just as my father and Uncle Simon came over the brow of the hill.

With them were eight of our servants and Belemus and Rosewarne our steward. Their horses were sweating, and all looked as if they had ridden hard. But they could not have been hawking for none of the falconers was there, no hooded hawks on wrist, no game tied lifeless over saddles. It was true that four spaniels followed tongues lolling sideways, but these were my father’s favourite dogs that went with him everywhere.

I watched my father’s face when he went past. The easy contours had temporarily gone; he looked self-wiHed and preoccupied. Rosewarne carried a book, and a bag was slung over his saddle.

As I came up to the great gate Penruddock was just shooting the last bolt home. He raised his grey eyebrows. “Was you with your father, Master Maugan?”

When I slid in there was the usual noise and confusion attending my father’s return. Dogs barking, servants scurrying, a man to pull off his boots, another to bring a dry linen shirt, and a third to give account of work that had been on hand during the afternoon. But today a new voice could be heard.

It was another cousin and neighbour of ours, Digby Bonython, son of John Bonython of Carclew, a small estate seven miles distant. Digby was on his way home from Exeter. He was a quiet spoken man of twenty-five or six, so it was unusual to hear his voice raised.

“It was Ralegh’s ship that made the capture. His second squadron under Borough has taken a Portuguese carrack on its way to San Lucar, and they brought her in to Dartmouth early last week. Nothing is more unbelievable than the scenes since she have been brought in. It was half market and half riot. Pearls, diamonds, vessels of China “

“How was she taken?”

“Only after a desperate battle. But this carrackl In Dartmouth she towers over the town. Seven decks she has, five times the tonnage of her captor; thirty-two guns, upwards of seven hundred men aboard. They say every trader for miles around has converged on the port. And over a thousand buyers and merchants from London! One has to fight one’s way along the streets and fight is the word. I wished I’d been there two days before. Cecil has been sent down himself, but you could not stop it then “

“What name did you call her?”

“Madre de Dies and she has all the riches of the Mother of God. Cinnamon, spices, cloth of gold, twisted silks, Turkey carpets, musk and ambergris, jewels of all shape and size. I saw a sailor selling fine porcelain at a shilling a piece “

“Is it still going on?”

“No, it has stopped or I should not have come away when I did. Ralegh stopped it.”

“Ralegh? But he is in the Tower.”

“So he was, but when it was found no one could control the men, he was released and sent post to Dartmouth in company with a gaoler called Blount who is to watch over his return. I was there when he came and you would not believe with what pleasure and joy he was greeted. In the end he took control, and from then on, aided by Cecil’s men and others order and discipline was brought.”

Henry Knyvett shuffled across and pulled the lattice window to and resumed his seat, brushed some dog hairs off his dusty black coat, crossed his knock knees. Everyone watched him but no one spoke.

Dorothy Killigrew, my stepmother, who had baby Peter on her knee and was eating her favouritesugar-coated caraway seeds, said in her mild voice: “You will lie with us tonight, Digby?“

“Thank you, no, cousin, I’m bound home and am two days late. I must hurry on if you can favour me and my man with a couple of nags. I would have come post but was short of money. Seven of the Plymouth fishing fleet were just leaving for the Newfoundland banks, and two were putting in here on their way west, so I thought to cheapen my journey and at the same time bring you the latest news.”

“You must sup with us, then. It would be a cold ride on an empty belly.”

She got up, handing Peter to a nurse, and went out dropping her kerchief as she left. She was scarcely two months from her eighth confinement. My grandmother watched her

“And you came away from such a feast empty handed?” said my father, puckering his brows. The bitter mood in which he had returned from his ride had not lifted; the world was persecuting him. “Why, in God’s name? If there were pickings …”

“Well, not quite empty handed, cousin, as I’ll show you.”

Digby fumbled in his pouch and took out a necklace. It was of pearls, three fold, interspersed with gold buttons, each button being set with a diamond. My father took it and one of the spaniels, Mayflower, thinking it was something to eat, nosed up but Mr Killigrew shoved him impatiently away.

‘And what did you pay for that?”

“Ten pounds. It cannot be worth less than a hundred.”

There was no sound then except for the spaniels scratching.

Lady Killigrew passed the necklace to her sister, Mistress Wolverstone. “And what else?”

“All I had money for. No, no more jewels. But I have a parcel at the door of fine taffetas and some unwrought china silk that will delight them at home. I wished I’d had a fortune to spend. Much of it had been already snapped up, but you could still find sailors who were uncomfortable with their loads and willing to lighten them at a cheap rate.”

So then he was persuaded to have the package brought in and unrolled on the table, and we gathered round staring and exclaiming. Presently he gave a small piece of silk to my stepmother but none of the family was very gracious, except Dorothy on receiving the gift. I could see they were all picturing the scene Digby had spoken of and eating out their hearts because they had heard nothing until too late, though it had happened less than ninety miles distant.

After supper, Digby went off together with his servant and one of our men whom my father, pressed by Dorothy, grudgingly lent him for extra safety, since the way they must travel though short was hazardous in the bends of the river beyond Penryn. At the gate where they mounted my father said:

“D’you know if Raleghis to remain free?”

“He says he is the Queen’s captive, and Mr Blount’s presence would seem to confirm it. But I would not put it beyond him to use his enlargement in such a way that it will continue.”

“Neither would I. What has he done? Sometimes it is a touchy business having a woman on the throne.”

“He changed his allegiance from one Elizabeth to another,” said Digby. “That was his crime. And unless we know how inward he was with the first we can’t estimate the degree of the offense.””

Someone laughed. My grandmother, who had come to the door with us, was staring across the harbour. The wind, which was rising and chill, blew her ochre silk gown about her tall thin figure. She coughed harshly.

“That was the vessel you came in?” She pointed towards Trefusis Point.

“No, that is the other, the Buckfast. The captain of the Totrzes who brought me had a commission in Penryn which he discharged at once and left by the same tide, following the others while the wind was fair. I have my own thoughts about Buckf ass.”

My father laid a hand on the saddle. “Which are, cousin?”

“Which are that some of Ralegh’s fleet put into Plymouth and that they all had had their pickings of Madre de Dios while she was at sea. Not all the rich booty was confined to Dartmouth. So my supposition is that the captain of the Buckfast most probably has by barter laid hold of some of the spoils for himself, and not wanting to face the hazards of a long voyage to Newfoundland with fragile things in his hold, he chooses to dispose of them where prices are still unaffected by the glut of riches, before he leaves England.”

“You think that, do you, Digby?”

“Yes, I think that. Otherwise his delaying here would be unaccountable … Well, I must be off. Good-bye.”

Mr Killigrew relaxed his grip. “My loving thoughts to your father and mother.”

We waved until the three were out of sight, which was soon, for the night was lowering and the moon not yet up. When I turned, my grandmother’s eyes were on the river again. My father followed her gaze.

Parson Merther had come to usher us inside, but the last I saw of Lady Killigrew and my father they had not moved; their two figures were black against the cloudy evening sky. Below them the water was slightly greyer than the land, and a yellow light glimmered on board the Buckfast as she swung at anchor near Trefusis Point.

We had eaten salted beef for supper and I was very thirsty and felt a small matter sick. So about midnight I crept out of bed and went down to the kitchen where the pump was. The house should have been in darkness, but a light came from the great hall. The door was ajar, and four figures sat around the empty fireplace: my father, my grandmother, uncle Simon and uncle Henry Knyvett. They were talking in low tones but I caught the word ‘Buckfast’.

Then I heard Henry Knyvett say in an irritable and therefore louder voice: “Sometimes, mother, you talk in knots. Untie this one.”

Lady Killigrew coughed. “John’s middle course would give us the worst of both worlds “

“But in this case “

“I know. And I say you must do nothing, John. How do you know, when all is said, that there is so much as a roll of calico aboard? It is only Digby Bonython’s thought.”

My father said: “There are all manners of dangers in such a project. Whereas if I go aboard in the Queen’s name none can question my right. The other way “

“I understand Mother now,” said Simon. “Be taken sick, brother. Call Merther to your bedside. Then later we can have our way.”

The scrape of a chair made me quick to move this time. I slid away in haste and stole back to bed my thirst unsatisfied.

CHAPTER THREE

I slept poorly. A dozen times in the course of the night I slid out of bed~uietly so as not to disturb John who was a light sleeper and stood at the long window peering out. Arwenack was such a dispersed house that one part of it could be quite in ignorance of what was going on in another; but I did hear voices now and then, and once something in the back courtyard fell with a clatter.

By leaning out of this window and craning my neck I could just see Trefusis Point and the thin black masts of the Buckfast on the moon-silvered water.

As the moon sank behind the rising ground at the back of the house, the colour of the water in the harbour became bluer and colder with the first streaks of dawn, and I fell into a heavy sleep from which I was wakened by the footboy, Stevens, shaking my shoulder. I must have slept only for two or three hours in all, and I felt heavy and unprepared for another day. In the morning lessons I dropped off over Euclid and received a stinging rap across the shoulders from Ink-horn. Then I had to construe from Horace and stumbled many times and at last dried up.

Parson Merther said: “Out here. boy.”

His beatings were so common that a day never passed without one or another bending over his stool, and little eight-year-old Odelia suffered with the rest. It was his custom to give the older boys five or six strokes, but this morning when he had dealt me four I straightened up and turned.

He paused with his cane half raised, his little sword-point eyes red with the effort. “I did not tell you to rise, boy.”

“No, sir, but I think it’s enough.”

Parson Merther said: “Such brains as you have been given, boy, which are few, you may use on learning more of the Latin tongue, not on instructing me. Bend down, or I will double your punishment.”

“I have had my punishment, sir,” I said, and moved back towards my seat. Before I could get to it he grasped me by the arm and hit me across the face with his cane. I snatched the cane out of his hand and threw it across the room. He would have struck me again with his fist, but I caught his wrist and turned it away.

“I have had my punishment,” I said again, and turned and went back to my seat. This time he did not try to stop me, but walked across to where I had flung his cane, picked it up and went back to his desk.

“Continue the chapter, John.”

In a close-bound community such as ours, news from outside the palisades could come early or late according to the merest chance. Rumour was always rife, but news as such hung on the chance caller or, more often, some messenger we might need to send out who would bring back what he had heard.

Today no one left the estate. Our head falconer, Bewse, had a cut over his eye, but when I asked him how he came by it he grunted and said it was none of my business.

Neither Uncle Simon nor Uncle Henry Knyvett was in to dinner, and Mr Killigrew was still in the mood when all the world, instead of being of no consequence, had become his enemy. In the afternoon it began to rain, and a curtain of wet mist shivered across the bay. The house itself seemed to drowse off to sleep in the clammy damp. When the mist lifted a little before supper I saw that the Buckfast was still there, swinging gently at anchor. As I watched, a ship’s boat cast off and three or four men in her were rowed ashore at the point.

At supper both Uncle Simon and Mr Knyvett came in. Uncle Simon was walking with a limp, and during supper Henry Knyvett grew very drunk.

As we were going upstairs Belemus said: “And how does the little rebel feel?”

I shrugged. “Well enough.”

“Ah, you see how easy it is, once the first step is taken.”

“What first step did you take, Belemus?”

“Oh, much the same as yours, Maugan, except that I did not advertise it so publicly.”

As I undressed and got into bed I peered out again, but the mist had returned and suffered me not to take a full view of the harbour.

On the following morning before we broke our fast Stevens came in and said: “Master Maugan, your father wants you in his chamber.”

Few were summoned to the small room in which Mr Killigrew kept his private papers and to which he often retired, occasionally to work but more often for peace and quiet or to dice against himself when there was no one in the house to play with. Today he was sitting behind his ironclamped desk, and four spaniels were sprawled like a discarded fur coat at his feet. I stood just inside the door and listened to the scratch of his pen and a spaniel sighing.

He was wearing the tarnished buff jerkin and the broad greasy shoulder belt which was his usual workaday attire; but his hair was always well washed and combed and his moustache pomaded and unstained.

He finished the letter and put the quill back in the pewter inkstand. “Damned ink,” he said, and dusted the paper and leaned back in his worn leather chair to look at me. His eyes were almost empty of expression, as they so often were. He could smile charmingly and his eyes would stay cold; he could shout with anger and his eyes would stay cold; it took something from his good looks.

“You are growing big for your boots, boy.”

I stared at the pistolets on the walls.

“Answer me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You would do well to remember that but for me you might have no boots. On that I’ll say no more … But you’re yet 14, Maugan, and at that age you do as you’re told by your elders, whether it’s by me or by a little horneywink like Merther. See?”

“Yes, sir.”

His eyes strayed to a pack of cards lying on the desk, then reluctantly came back to the matter in hand.

“If you don’t know how you must learn how. But you’ve had beatings enough, so today you’ll spend in the kennels chained along with the hounds. They know how to come to heel when you tell ‘em. Neither food nor drink till cockshut, unless you fancy their food. When we’ve supped I’ll think whether to keep you there the night. Follow?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But use your hands on Merther again and I’ll have all the skin off your back. That or you’ll be turned out of the house.”

He got up and pulled the bell rope by the window. All the spaniels woke and tumbled over each other. “I’ve a taking for you, Maugan. You’re my eldest, so far as I know, and though there’s other base ones about, you’re the only one aside from my own family that I’ve cared for. Maybe that’s because I cared more for your mother … But don’t over-try my patience. A child or a spank more or less: what’s that in a large household?”

I was cold and hungry. The hounds did not seem at all to mind my being among them. It rained until three, but I would not crawl inside the kennels so I got wet. When the rain cleared a thick high fog came down again so that even the chimneys of the house could scarcely be seen.

No one came near me and no one dared speak. On the rising ground behind the cobbled yard four men were sawing and stacking logs for the winter. Each year trees were cut down from the wood just to the west of the castle and the thin weakly growths thinned out. The better pieces were kept long to make planks for repairing the upper rooms of the north wing, for here during the building they had run out of good timber and green wood had been used. Coming across my view from time to time were three girls carrying apples from the orchard to be wiped and stored. Between me and them was a great pool of liquid manure lying where it had drained out of the stables and the cow-houses.

In the late afternoon I heard a quiet hiss and swung on my chain to see Meg Levant who had sidled round the edge of the yard keeping within the shelter of the bakery until she was near. She had a bowl of hot soup. I glanced quickly about, as did she, at the windows of the house and at the four men sawing wood. Then the bowl and the soup changed hands and she squatted down in the shelter of the wall almost invisible against the brown stone, while I gobbled up the soup.

It went down into my vitals like thick warm wine. As soon as I had finished I handed it back and she snatched it and subsided again.

“Someone will remember that in heaven,” I whispered.

“So long as no one d’ discover it here on earth.”

“Go then before they do.”

“I can hardly be seen ‘ere. Do you want for aught else?”

“No, I shall live now to torment you again.”

“I was afraid so.” She took out an apple and began to eat it.

“Meg.”

“Yes?”

“Jael Job brought me here. When it is dark jog his memory or I may be forgot for the night.”

She promised. I was glad of her being somewhere by for a few minutes.

“What should you be doing now, Meg?”

“Peeling rushes for the candle wicks.”

“Have a care you’re not put in with me for disobedience.”

“I shouldn’t mind; twould be a welcome rest.”

The three maids carrying the apples clattered across the yard. When they were gone I said: “What news is there today?”

“News?”

“I’ve been here since early morning. Is my father in or out?”

“In. They be all in … There was trouble in the river the night afore last.”

“What sort of trouble?”

I had to listen to the crunch of her teeth on the apple while she chewed it and swallowed.

“Harold Tregwin came over from Glovias. You know what a gossip he be. Thursday night off Trefusis Point a fishing troy was boarded and robbed, and one of the crew falls overboard in the commotion and is drowned. Yester eve his body floats up by St Thomas’s Bridge.”

I let out a slow breath. “Why should anyone wish to rob a poor fishing troy?”

“That’s what Harold d’ say. By his account the captain have put in a complaint to the justices o’ the county and asked that the murderers be traced. Twas quite a tale he told, but you d’ know Harold, how he love to make a plaguey long history of it. Here, can you catch? I’d best be going.”

On the next day, which was Sunday, we all walked as was customary to Budock Church, my father and mother leading the way followed by the other members of the family, then the children, with our servants in a long crocodile behind. Mr Garrock, the vicar, by mischance chose as the text of his sermon St Mark, Chapter 3, Verse 27: “No man can enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his house.”

My father slept through most of it, but I knew I dared not because we should be examined on the content of the sermon by Parson Merther that evening and whipped if we could not give a fair outline, and I was in no position to court further trouble.

When the sermon was over my father yawned and said in a loud voice to Uncle Simon: “Let us not tarry for the prayers,” and so elbowed his way out.

Perhaps he had not slept so soundly after all, for over dinner he was downright in his criticism of the state of the clergy. Will Garrock, he said, was an ignorant unlettered scoundrel better suited to keep a taproom than a church. Hawken of Philleigh, he knew for a fact, spent all his days and nights dicing and wenching; it was said that the parson at St Issey had been burnt in the hand for felony; and Arscott of Cubert was a drunkard and kept a whore and six bastards. It was time there was a clean sweep in the church of pluralists, felons and ignorant rogues.

I do not know how or in what way it came to be understood in the house that our part in the affray of Thursday night was not an innocent one; but it crept up like cold in the bones. Perhaps it is not possible for five or six men, some of them with wives, to go out after dark and to come back unquestioned.

On the Tuesday Sir Francis Godolphin called.

Sir Francis, who lived near Helston, was Vice Warden of the Stannaries and lately Sheriff of Cornwall. His first wife Margaret had been a Killigrew and my father’s aunt. Sir Francis was nearing sixty at this time, a gray-bearded man, short of stature and quiet of manner, temperate and sober; he and Ralegh between them, so it was said, had done much to improve the lot of the tinners in the country, and through it Sir Francis had become rich.

With him tonight was our neighbour, Mr John Trefusis, a sharp-voiced man with a skin as brown as snuff. My father was up at the Castle when they came, so Mrs Killigrew, in a fluster and with babies and needlework to be rid of, had to greet them in the withdrawing-room, and I and young John and Odelia were permitted to stay on unnoticed. By the time my father came in, close followed by Lady Killigrew, our guests were sipping white Rhenish wine and eating sweet almond biscuits.

Since Mr Killigrew and Mr Trefusis did not at all esteem each other there was a stiffness about their greeting which left an awkward silence when they sat down. To fill it Mrs Killigrew began to ask about Sir Francis’s eldest son who was fighting in Ireland; but the exchange of polite talk was brief before Sir Francis with less than his usual smoothness said:

“You will have heard, John, of the boarding and robbery of the Bllckfast last Thursday night?”

“Who has not? They have trumpeted it abroad sufficient for all to hear.”

“And should they not,” said Mr Trefusis sharply, “when they are robbed of sixty pounds in gold and when one of their number is hit on the head and dropped overboard? Should they not complain? You cannot be unmindful of your responsibility.”

“1?” My father crossed his legs and squinted down at a stain on his stocking. “I suppose you mean because it happened in my waters? Well, I regret it, but I do not see what I can do beyond taking depositions if they wish to make them.”

“They have already made depositions, John,” Sir Francis said. “Yesterday, before they left.”

“They have? Then they made them improperly. They should have come to me.”

“They preferred otherwise.”

“One has not always the good fortune to be able to please oneself. In any event I should have thought the captain on very shaky ground for complaint if it’s true what is rumoured, that the money was stolen from this Portuguese carrack which has been brought in and which is the Queen’s prize.”

“According to the captain,” said Sir Francis, “they brought goods here which they had purchased in fair trade at the quay at Plymouth. They spent the afternoon and evening of Thursday visiting Mr Trefusis, Mr Thomas Enys, and divers traders of Penryn, to whom they sold most of these goods and received payment in money and in bills. At about four of the clock on Friday morning seven armed men boarded and took possession of Buckfast, and in the struggle one of the crew Ezekiel Penwethers, was struck on the head and fell overboard to his death. The ship was searched from prow to poop and everything of value taken, including of course the gold.”

My father had not listened patiently to this. He had closed his eyes and sighed and opened them to look again at the stain. “So I’ve heard, Francis. So I’ve been told. For my own part I doubt very much if the captain’s story will bear a close quizzing. But if it is true I am sorry he has suffered this misfortune though not overly surprised. Vagrants and thieves roam the countryside committing all manner of outrages, and they are on the increase. Who is to check them?”

“If the captain’s story were true I’m sure you would not be overly surprised,” stuttered Mr Trefusis, “since one of the robbers was seen to be wearing Killigrew livery under his cloak! “

Into the stretched silence came a sudden burst of shrill weeping; little Odelia had slipped from her chair, and she rushed to her mother for comfort. By the time Mrs Killigrew had carried her from the room the flush had faded from my father’s face.

“The spleenful thoughts of my neighbour never surprise me. But I trust that you, Francis, don’t cradle such suspicions? “

“Well, I should be glad to have “

“A reassurance? Are you saying that I did it? Do you think if I had committed this robbery I should have been such a fool as to take men aboard dressed in my own livery? But in fact on Thursday night last I was ill.”

“Ill? “

“A seizure in the stomach. I had to rouse my chaplain, and I think he can reassure you that I was not out of my bed that night.”

Mr Trefusis grunted his doubts. “Then if it was not you in person … This has “

It was a mischance that at that moment Simon Killigrew should enter the room. He looked curiously from one to another of the tautened faces. “Welcome, Uncle. And you too, Trefusis. Is this private business?”

“Oh,” said Trefusis, “I did not know you were beret That might well explain it all! “

“Explain what?” asked Simon.

“They’re all the same, the Killigrews,” said our neighbour. “They all have morals as accommodating as a Greyfriar’s sleeve.”

“You came to this house uninvited, Trefusis,” said my father. “If you don’t leave under your own sail you are likely to be helped to go.”

“A moment, John,” Sir Francis said quietly. “You may put Mr Trefusis out; but these depositions have been taken and will presently find their way to the appropriate quarters. Whether they are true or not, I’m afraid they will have to be sifted. Therefore “

“Then sift them, Francis ~ But I thought I had enough jealous ill-wishers in the county without supposing one of my own kinsmen to be among them. What is your interest in this? With all your broad acres and prospering tin-works, what can you covet of mine?”

‘Y covet nothing of yours, as you should know. This accusation is no doubt false, but it shows the reputation you bear.”

“My reputation, by God! “

“Yes t If you think because I speak you words of warning I am your ill-wisher, then you misread me. But it comes to a pretty pass when mariners shun the river you command and only put in here under extremity of storm and stress, when armed retainers rule the countryside instead of the Queen’s law. Things cannot go on like this. I speak as your kinsman and your friend! Good night.”

On the Thursday after this Uncle Simon said he must leave on the morrow for Greenwich where the court then was. My father said he had been thinking it over and had decided he would ride with him; then my grandmother decided to go too. This caused harsh words. My father said Lady Killigrew was not strong enough to sit a horse with them for ten days. She answered that if she tired she would hire a coach. My father said that in their present beggared state they could not afford it; best if she waited and took a passage by sea. My grandmother said she was an indifferent sailor and the autumn gales were due; she wanted to go now; she was sick and tired of a country bumpkin’s existence; if he wished to go chasing Lady Betty again she would not stand in his way; all she wanted was to see for herself what they were wearing in London and in Westminster; she wanted to meet all her relatives and friends; besides, she had a little money now.

When Friday morning came Lady Killigrew was ready at sun-up with the others, her two bags packed, her little black mare saddled, and no one dared say no.

The house was very different without them. Rosewarne the steward did his best, but he was given such scant authority when the two ruling Killigrews were at home that he did not have the way of it when they were gone. Then my stepmother took to her bed with an attack of jaundice, and just at this time Henry Knyvett chose to pay one of his rare visits to his wife at Rosemerryn, so the ordering of the servants fell upon Bethia Wolverstone, my grandmother’s unmarried sister, and upon Mary Killigrew, my father’s unmarried sister. But Mistress Wolverstone spent much of her day reading and praying and my aunt Mary lived only for her hawks and her falcons, so discipline relaxed, meals were late and work went forward at half-speed. Even when Mr Knyvett came back there was no improvement, for he went into one of his drunken spells.

All this slackness was aided by the great storms which blew up as October came in. There were ever more excuses for not going out, for postponing work in the yards and on the roofs of the barns. It had been a good year for apples, and the cider presses were much in use. Catching Henry Knyvett’s complaint, servants were found drunk about the house, and one was thrashed for trying to force a kitchen maid. One day the Webster came and bargained for our surplus wool but I do not think my grandmother would have let it go at so low a price.

One evening, having been helping with some hides, I went up to say good night to Mrs Killigrew later than her own children, and she told me to sit and talk with her for a while; then she read me a chapter from the Bible.

There was no malice toward me in her such as I found now in my grandmother; indeed Mrs Killigrew was too gentle and too absent~thoughted to feel malice for anyone. She spent much time in reading and meditation. The books beside her bed were Latimer’s Sermons and A Treatise on the Resurrection of the Dead. Yet she did fine wrought-stitch work, was skilled in gardening and in preserving fruit, and if one of the servants was ill or hurt she would tend on them herself. I thought my eldest halfbrother John would grow up to be like her.

When she paused to take a sip of water I could hear the rats scattering behind the wainscot and the bang of a loose shutter in the wind. I stared curiously at the wire hoop of a farthingale with a pair of silk stockings hung over it, at a purple taffeta nightgown behind the door. I thought: what if my mother had been here instead; would she have been content always to take second place? Mrs Killigrew said: “Tell me, Maugan, are you happy here?” When I looked up startled, she added: “Of late you have been in trouble more often than out of it.”

“Perhaps it is a Killigrew shortcoming.”

She lifted her head. “You’re growing old before your time, Maugan.”

“Do you want me to go away?”

“Away? “

“To leave Arwenack.”

She smiled. “No. You are good company for my own children. They would miss you greatly. We all should.”

“It’s a big family now.”

She closed the Bible, though she had not finished the chapter. “I too come of a large family, Maugan, with many sisters. My father ruined himself in providing dowries for us all, so lack of money is no new problem to me. There are many greater misfortunes.”

I said: “I wish I knew who my mother was.”

“I wish I could tell you.”

“Does Father ever speak of her?”

“No, Maugan, never. Or not to me. Perhaps it is not surprising that he does not speak of her to me.”

There was something on the bed on which Mrs Killigrew had been working when I came into the room: a piece of fine purple cloth enriched with gold and silver lace. There was a short length of pleated silk cord dangling from it over the side of the table.

“Have you often been to London, ma’am?”

“Once only.” She put a coriander seed in her mouth and chewed slowly. “To Whitehall, when your father’s uncle, Sir Henry Killigrew, presented me to the Queen.”

“ls my great-uncle high in favour still? How comes it that he stays constantly in the Queen’s favour when others go so much by ups and downs?”

“I think the Queen has two kinds of servants, those who are her favourites … and those whom she trusts. Those whom she trusts are those to whom she gives her most laborious and responsible positions of state; their lives and careers are not so subject to change if they serve her well. Your great-uncle Henry has served her well for thirty-five years, and your great-uncle William for scarcely ten less.”

The wind leaned and pushed against the house, and the loose shutter slammed in the next room.

“And,” she added, “your great-uncle Henry married well. His new wife is French and I do not know her; but his first wife’s sister is married to Lord Burghley and is the mother of Robert Cecil, whom everybody supposed Lord Burghley is bringing on to succeed him as Chief Secretary. And a second sister, Lady Bacon, is the mother of Anthony and Francis Bacon, both young men of gifts, I’m told.”

I got up to go. “I’ll tie that shutter. Do you lack anythung for the night?”

“Your aunt Mary will be in soon, thank you.”

I fingered the material on the bed. “What is this, a new canopy for the cradle?”

She seemed to hesitate. “It’s a Spanish cloak belonging to your father. I’m repairing it.”

“The material is fine. I don’t remember him wearing it.”

I picked up a string of corals that had been dropped by one of the babies and put it on the carved chest beside the bed.

“Good night, madam. I hope you sleep well.” I hissed her cheek which smelt of some herbal tincture.

“Maugan,” she said as I got to the door. “Do not mention this cloak. Mr Killigrew would be angry.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The evening of the full moon was the second Thursday in October, and my father and uncle and grandmother had been gone three weeks. It had been a windy day, but as night fell the wind fell and left only the high white clouds moving across the sky like afterthoughts. By the time ten o’clock had come and the house was asleep, the moon was riding high and the harbour water was greying and whitening with the passage of every cloud.

Almost as soon as I was out of the house Charon found me and growled his suspicion, but he soon stopped to eat the pieces of meat I brought. But away from the house it was not the hounds that had to be feared. I could appease them and shake them off but could never lose the shadow that followed at my feet or dodge the giant imprints of the trees that cut across the drive with silhouette images of witches and skeletons, of blood feasts, of human sacrifices and of damned souls.

Once over the palisade I ran for some way along the rutted muddy lane, before breaking through a tangle of bramble and bracken to the more open land beyond. From here the river mouth lay like a forked quicksilver tongue thrust into the dark flesh of the land.

Near the mill a stop for breath. There was a light. I went on through the brambles and then more slowly across the open ground. The door could not properly close because of its lost hinge, and the light inside was cut off briefly as a figure moved across it.

The light came from a small open lamp like an early Christian lamp with oil in the shell and a wick burning from the lip. There was a brazier near the centre of the room with a pot simmering on it.

“So you have come, lad.”

The lamp though dim spread a more uniform light over the room than the bright sun had done. On a shelf against one wall was a pile of books, and on the millstones behind the 53

brazier were rows of bottles and jars and tins. The roof of the floor above had given way in one place and the wooden steps led to a hole which had been nailed across with old sacks to keep out the draught.

“I came … have you …”

She shut the door. “It’s a fine full moon but a small matter withdrawn. Sit down … Let’s see, what is your name? Maugan? “

I sat on the edge of the stool where the rabbit had been last time. She said: “Are you not afraid of comin’ here?”

I nodded.

“Well, courage is no bad thing and deserves a reward. I’ll try to help you.”

I held out the other shilling but she shook her head. “Wait a little. In time we’ll see.” She took a spoon and stirred the pot. The glow lit up her long cautious sun-browned face. I realised it could once have been pretty.

“Do you know, I have lost my rabbit,” she said. “He was killed by a stoat.”

“Oh … I’m sorry.”

“Have you ever seen a stoat dance before he kill?”

“No.”

“Animal nature is not kind, but kills only for food. Human kind kill for the pleasure or from a strange evil notion called principle. Was your mother’s name Maugan?”

I stared at her. “Why?”

“There’s an M in this pot. It would not be unnatural that you were given her name.”

“Oh …”

She looked up at me. “Have you ever seen a glow-worm in the day time?”

“No.”

“One day if you will come again I’ll show you what they’re dike. Like a little beetle. The female have more light than the male. When she be bearin’ her eggs, she is lit up by them from within, like little embers from the fire. Do you know you can read by the light of three or four glow-worms?”

“No.l’

She stared into the pot again. “You must learn of nature, Maugan. It will help you to find content such as no mixing in the company of men can … I think you were born by a river, lad.”

“This river?” I said.

“Bigger than this. Wider and deeper.”

“Where? “

“I have not seen all the rivers of England. Bristol, maybe. Plymouth. London. I see love there and hate and greed and disease. But neither poverty nor riches. It’s likely your mother was of good stock. You’ve no call to be ashamed of it, if that were ever in your mind.”

I said nothing in reply.

“They were not of a kind, your father and mother. I can see that. But it’s not always just money or greed …”

“How how did she die?”

“Of the plague, I’d lay a guess. There’s sickness and death all around. It is a wonder you survive. I see no relatives left. I see only your father riding with you up a narrow lane …”

There was a long silence. She seemed to have come to the end.

“Greed, did you say?” I ventured at last.

“Yes, greed. But ask me not what part it played … It could be that your father was greedy, graspin’ and pluckin’ at the flowers that were not his.”

She stood up and folded her hands on her elbows. The light flung her shadow across the room like the shadow of a great cat. “D’you know, lad, what this bowl contains in which I have been reading your past?”

“N-no.”

“My food for tomorrow …”

I did not answer.

“Rabbit bones for stew. If you don’t believe me, here, take this spoon and taste it.”

“No! “

“Afraid it’s some ungodly brew? It matters not what you look in if you have the gift of sight. I could have told as much by gazing in a cabbage heart, no more by using the skull of Paracelsus.”

She went over to the bottles ranged on the millstones. “D’you know who Paracelsus was, Maugan?”

“No.”

“They stuff your head with Greek and Latin and Logic and never tell you how to cure a sore place or heal a cut finger. Here, come here, beside me.”

I got up slowly from my chair and while she was not looking I glanced into the bubbling pot. I thought I saw a face in it and moved back.

“Betony,” she said. “Saffron for measles, saxifrage for the stone, neat’s foot for chilblains, comfrey and liquorice for bronchitis, marjoram and aniseed for megrim… they make a pretty list. Few here come to me for ailments of their own; they are too Frighted.. They only come four at a time for protection when their cattle or sheep be sick. See what courage you have, Maugan, treading where fools dare not tread.”

“You spoke of hate too,” I whispered.

“Love and hate, I spoke of. There is always love and hate between every man and woman. You will learn that it is so. And when the love is hot and stolen it’s the more passionate for that. And when betrayal follows, hate flourishes like tares in a cornfield. In a manner you are fortunate, Maugan Killigrew.”

“How? “

“You spring from passion, and so must be more alive than those who come of duty, routine appetites or the boredom of long livin’ together. In the fullness of time it may be you will come to love and hate, just as your father and mother did.”

The moon had moved some way across the sky before she would let me go. In the end she took my shilling. She talked much more before I left, and each time I made a move she began some new subject. But she told me no more of my mother.

I came away with a sensation of discomfort and distaste and with little feeling of relief at an ordeal over. While she had talked to me I had felt both drawn to her and repelled. I felt she had tried to put a spell on me and that she had in some measure succeeded. Soon or late I should go back, drawn by this attraction-repulsion as to the edge of a cliff.

The night had clouded as it grew old and the way home was no more friendly than the way out. I had left a short stout length of rope looped over the palisade and marked it with a broken tree, but as I got near I heard voices, low and gruff, and then the shuffle of feet.

They were coming on the track by which I had come, a group of figures in the uncertain moonlight tramping up the hill. Six men. The first wore a grey hat with upturned brim and had a bandaged hand; another was a negro. They were all ill” dressed, two almost in rags. They might have been any band of robbers that roamed the wide commons of England, but they walked too confident, their gait was purposeful.

When they had passed I rose and moved slowly from bush to bush in their wake. They stopped at the closed gate of Arwenack and rattled it and tried to force it open. It was only then in the brilliance of the moon that I recognised the man in the grey hat as Captain Elliot.

They had dropped anchor, they said, in Helford Haven but two hours ago. Dolphin only was here. Ne prune had been sailing with them but they had been separated by storm. Dolphin had been badly damaged and was in need of repair and refit. Also Mr Love, the mate, was ill.

“Rouse your father, boy.”

“He’s from home. Also my grandmother.”

“Who’s in charge, then? Your mother?”

“My mother is not well. My uncle, Mr Knyvett he’s here.”

“Go summon him then. Can you brave the dogs?”

“Yes. But it is long after midnight. Mr Knyvett will be abed.”

“Tell him who’s here and that we’ve urgent business with him. In the end we shall persuade him it has been worth a disturbed night.”

So my return was not at all as I had expected. I went over the palisade, pacified Charon, found my way in through the sleeping house and woke Uncle Knyvett. He was far too heavy in the head and confused to care how I knew of the callers. He grumpily pulled on his nightshirt and breeches and over them put his shabby black velvet dressing-gown. Then he stumbled in his ramshackle way across to the other wing, kicked Long Peter and another servant into some sort of wakefulness and instructed them to call in the hounds and open the gate.

As soon as he saw Captain Elliot Henry Knyvett began to complain, but he was cut short.

“It’s no time for the amenities, Mr Knyvett. We’ve had a pretty brush off the Carmarthen coast. Then we ran into heavy weather off the Land’s End and near foundered. Captain Burley was beaten back towards St Ives and may be drowned by now with all that barren coast on his lee.”

They walked away from me then, but I could still hear portions of their talk.

“… four barques, there were, on passage from Bristol to Pembroke … We’d been beating about for some days, but that morning the wind was coming fair from the south. Burley sighted them first and gave chase. We was in the wind of them and cut them off. We summoned them to surrender but the first two gave fight …”

The sailors had come into the great hall and had dropped their bags beside the fireplace in which a great log dully smouldered in a desert of white ash.

“… I got this in boarding. My master gunner is a leg short, and two others hurt … Love? Nay, Love came through unscathed but fell sick after. After being at sea three months we all need a thorough rummage and are not unentitled to it, I’d say …”

The man with the gun was the pock-marked sailor who had been so quarrelsome in February, Aristotle Totle.

“… then when will he be home? But no doubt you can undertake the necessary measures … Silks and velvets mainly, with a substantial loadage of wine … we could not transfer the cargo in mid-ocean …”

“Maugan, to bed now.”

“Yes, Uncle Knyvett.”

“This stuff you have here, this is some of it?” - “A sample. Just a sample …”

I moved towards the door. The negro was feeling the Pavia tapestry that hung to the left of the fire.

“… There’s little to be done tonight, Elliot. Do you wish to lie here?”

“You must send word to Truro. Also we have need of vegetables, fruit, fresh water. And an apothecary. Some of my men are sick too. These things are why I didn’t tarry until the morning.”

“Maugan. It is time for you to got “

“Yes, Mr Knyvett.”

I went, shutting the door after me, climbing the stairs, suddenly feeling weary and alone.

Dolphin lay in Helford Haven five miles away. This was a small river running into a sizeable broad estuary with safe land-locked mooring for vessels up to 300 tons and densely wooded banks. Beside the Dolphin was another vessel of about the same size but not so lean a trim. I saw them both on the third day when I slipped away with Belemus and we climbed across the headlands to look for ourselves.

But by then there could have been nothing more peaceful than the sight we saw. It was far more peaceful than Arwenack where more than a dozen seamen sat at table each day and made free with our food and the comforts and cordialities of the house.

Others came to the house too. John Penrose, a cousin of ours from Kethicke, John Michell from Truro and John Maderne. They came and talked in private, together and separately, they ate and drank and got drunk with the sailors and then left again. On the fourth day William Love arrived, much thinner for his illness, and sat in a chair in the great hall and watched our servant girls with strange and cloudy eyes.

Some of the other sailors were less content to watch, and a few of the servant girls were not backward in secret meetings in the hay lofts. They blossomed in new silks and velvets, and two babies were born the next July. But the visitors roamed further than the unpromised, and thunder more than once grew up around a wife or a sweetheart. A long-haired sailor, Justinian Kilter, was in trouble all the time. Meg Levant had been seen of late with Dick Stable, the tall delicate boy who played the harp, but one day Kilter turned his attentions to her and Stable would not be put aside and he was sent sprawling across the yard and fell and cut his head on a mounting stone. Later that evening I heard a scuffling in the passage and found Meg struggling in Kilter’s arms. I took a breath and ran at him full tilt. The charge knocked them off balance, and in the confusion Meg wrenched herself free and bolted into the next room.

“Oh, ask pardon! ” I said. “I didn’t see you,” and was about to go on when Kilter seized my arm.

“Pup,” he said, “you collide over-easy for my liking. See this fist?”

“Yes.”

“Have a care it don’t collide with your nose or it might spoil your chances in a more permanent way than you have just spoilt mine.” He laughed. “There’s too many meddlesome folk in this house.”

But all did not treat it so light nor did many carry their drink as amiably. There was more drink than I had ever seen before, the visitors having brought two casks of wine into the yard where any might sup who chose. The yard smelt like a taproom, and the house little better.

Annora Job, the 17-year-old daughter of Jael and Jane, was pretty and tall with long golden hair and thought much of herself. Jael Job, as senior retainer, on conversational terms with his master and much in his confidence, was a step or two above most of the servants and had not looked with pleasure on any of the young men who had so far come forward, so she was still unpromised. She was not herself above a side glance here and there, but she had none for Aristotle Totle, who on the fifth evening got up late from the supper board, leaving a number of his fellows in a drunken stupor at the winespilled table and carefully climbed the stairs to where he knew Annora would be. When she came past he tried to persuade her and then to take her by force. Her father was the first to reach her, and finding her still shrieking and with her clothes in disarray, he gave Totle a great blow and threw him downstairs.

Totle picked himself up with blood spurting over his face and went roaring up the stairs again, to be met by Jael Job coming down. They locked, and fell together, and burst open the door into the banqueting hall. Neither Mr Knyvett nor Captain Elliot was there, and the others in the room, seamen and servants alike, stood back while the two men reeled across the room, upsetting stools and trestle tables and fire irons and chairs. The negro, tipped off his chair, suddenly leaped cursing at Job from behind, but Carminow, the master gunner, snatched up a candlestick and, spilling lighted candles about the table, hit the negro across the head with it.

In the semi-dark women screamed and men shouted and trampled and swore. Dogs too took sides, snarling and fighting among the scuffing feet. The seamen, outnumbered by two to one, would in the end have been badly used by the Killigrew men whose tempers had smouldered for days; but in time Parson Merther, who had scuttled out at the first blow brought in Mr Knyvett and Captain Elliot.

Captain Elliot fired his pistol over the heads of the fighting men, and in a while some order was let in; men were picked up, a fire of burning tallow and rushes was stamped out in a corner, new lights were brought and dogs kicked out of doors to cool. The negro came round quickly, but a falconer called Corbett was badly hurt by a blow he had taken late in the fight, and he lay in a stupor for several days and was never quite clear in his head again until he died in ‘95.

It might have been that such an explosion would have cleared the air, but it did no such thing; the seamen thought themselves set on unjustly and quietly whetted their long knives and waited. It was clear that Elliot must get them away as quick as possible, so there were long hours of hasty bar-ga~ning behind closed doors. It was not until one of the seamen who had been ill quietly died that we woke to realise there 60

were other perils in their visit besides drunkenness and rape. His body was carried down to our landing stage and taken out to sea by four of his fellows and put overboard. An hour later the last bargains were struck and Elliot and Love left. Elliot carried two heavy bags which clinked. Then the others began to go, bearing their belongings with them. One sailor looked unlikely ever to make the five mile trek to Helford.

Last to leave were Aristotle Totle and Justinian Kilter. Mr Knyvett had gone in, but Carminow and Rosewarne were there to see them away.

“Well, we’d best be off now,” Totle said. “But we’ll be back eh, Tinny?”

“Like as not,” said Kilter.

“Like as not in my own barque next time,” said Totle. “Or I should be if right was right. We poor lacks never get our deserts.”

“Who knows,” said Carminow.

“Aye, just so, who knows. Maybe next time we’ll be along of the Spanish, and come blow you out of your little ‘ole.”

“I’ll wait for the day,” said Carminow.

Totle showed his broken teeth. “Then we’ll really get among your women, gales. Eh, Tinny?”

“Already have,” said Kilter, shouldering his bundle with a quiet grin.

A gale is an impotent bull, and the two insults, I could see, were all but more than even the quiet tempered Rosewarne could stand.

In silence the two sailors were watched until they had tramped down the leaf-covered path towards the gate. Then Carminow cleared his throat noisily and spat.

“Good rid to they. They only just left in time.”

“Maybe they didn’t leave in time,” said Rosewarne.

CHAPTER FIVE

For several days life went on as usual. Letters arrived from Nonesuch, where the Court had moved, telling of my father’s life there but vaguely worded and avoiding mention of a date of return. I heard Henry Knyvett mutter that if ‘John’s doxy’ was amiable we should not see him until his money ran dry. Then about a week after Dolphin sailed Mrs Killigrew’s per61

sonal maid, a girl called Ida, complained she had a headache and could not sleep. The next day a dairy maid and Dick Stable the harpist were taken with a high fever, and the day after two more went down. Attacks of quartan ague were common enough, and the outbreak might have been a seasonal one, but on the Sunday I heard two of the older women whisper together. One of them, Maud Vance, who was the midwife for the house, told the other that an hour ago she had gone to the room where Ida was ill and found her in a stupor, and had stripped the shift off her and found a rash of purple spots on her belly and legs. It did not take long then for word to spread that the sailors had left their disease behind.

What name it had no one knew, or how to treat it. We put the sick people in one big room and closed the windows and nailed black sailcloth over the windows so that there was no difference in the room between night and day. We had the walls washed in vinegar, and smouldered herbs in pewter dishes held over the candle flames. My stepmother, though still frail from her last illness and great with child, insisted on directing the care of the sick.

At the end of the first week the dairy maid died, and soon afterwards a saddler. By now there were twelve sick, but so far it was all among the servants. There was great divergence in the degree of the illness. Ida was still out of her senses, but Dick Stable was up again and helping to wait on the others. Some broke out in a rash. Some were troubled with shivering and fever for a day or two and then mended. One man died in wild delirium; two or three lay for days having lost their senses but with eyes wide open as if awake. Maud Vance muttered about ‘the putrid fever’ while Henry Knyvett even mentioned the dreaded word ‘plague’. But Mary Killigrew, my aunt, who was so shaken by the illness about her that she quite forgot her hawks, said it was not either. She had been through the London plague of ‘63, when twenty thousand had died, and this complaint bore no resemblance; she ought to know. To her it was, she said, more like the spotted death; those noisy drunken pirates; no good ever came of giving evil loose men house room. It would not surprise her at all if this were a judgment.

At the end of October twenty-one people in the household were sick with the disease, including Thomas Rosewarne, our steward, and three had died. Twelve were mending. Then, at last, one of the children took it. It was Paul Knyvett, my cousin, who was near sixteen. Then Maud Vance took it. Then Mrs Killigrew.

Maud Vance had it very bad and lingered for days between life and death, Mrs Killigrew had it just as light, though it pulled her down and caused her to look more frail than ever. Paul Knyvett had fearful pains in the head and could not pass water. His tongue was covered with sores, and on the second of November in great pain he died.

So another long walk, this time in showers of hail, and this time behind a coffin of polished pine made by Timothy Carpenter, the house handyman and furniture maker, who had to use up wood for it he had been saving for new cupboards in the still-room. Death I had always conceived of as something which could happen to other people, not to me; but Paul’s dying so suddenly, while I still had his metal pencil case, and while we had been carrying on a make-believe feud, came too close home.

In the middle of November, when many were at last recovering and there had been but two new cases in the last six days my stepmother was brought to bed of her ninth child. As Aunt Mary said, it was an inconvenient season. Mr Knyvett, since the death of his son, was never out of a drunken stupor he wanted to return to Rosemerryn but his wife would not have him for fear of the infection, barring the windows and doors against him; Maud Vance our midwife was still too weak to walk; and with Rosewarne in the same condition the last discipline had fallen out of the house.

Belemus told me about Mrs Killigrew, whispering it behind his hand when we were supposed to be listening to Elizabeth reciting a passage from Cicero. Mrs Killigrew had been taken with the first pains during the afternoon and Jane Job and Kate Penruddock were with her. “Trembling in their shoes, I’ll lay a crown, and not knowing what to do next.”

“And would you?” I asked.

“When I grow up I shall be a surgeon. It’s a useful trade. And the first belly I shall open will be yours.”

“They’ve families of their own,” I said after a minute.

“Who? “

“Mrs Job, Mrs Penrudduck.”

“Oh, yes, that’s true. I’ve no doubt we shall soon have another little cousin. Ink-horn will come around and tell us in the morning as if he’d done it all himself.”

But in. the morning Parson Merther had nothing to say. Outside it was blowing a half gale and the wide river mouth frothed with white. The house, as usual when the weather turned wild, was full of draughts and creaking windows. As we went along the passage to break our fast we could hear Mrs Killigrew moaning, and Odelia burst into tears and wanted to run in to her.

After lessons and just before dinner I wandered into the kitchen. Instead of preparing dinner they were baking bread, which should have been done early in the morning.

The great bread oven into which the huge faggots of wood had been put hours ago was just open, and the ashes were being raked over before the loaves were thrust in. I hung about not speaking, not getting in anyone’s way. The heat from the oven quickly spread all about the kitchen, and it was a relief when the last batch went in and the oven door could be shut. Sarah Keast, who was making the bread because Simon Cook was ill, went across and thrust her bare feet into old felt slippers and took a long drink of buttermilk.

“Rose back yet?” she asked of Stevens, who came in carrying a cauldron for the soup.

“Aye. Ten minutes gone. Pendavey won’t come.”

“Why not?”

“Afraid of the fever, he say.”

“What an’ him a leech. Shame on ‘im. What then?”

“Rose went all around Penryn. Clapthorne he d’ ask next. Clapthorne say he’ve no skill wi’ Iyings in. He say to send to Truro.”

“They’m all scared. That’s what’s trouble wi’ they. Mrstll have to manage as best she may.”

Another woman in the kitchen said: “Reckon she’ll be as well witout any of ‘em. I was twenty hours wi’ my third. They leeched me twice, but twas no help. Twas the rowan berries Sam hanged over the bed that give me the strength to bring the child forth.”

“But Jane d’ say tis all the wrong way round. If the child be the wrong way round there’s no ‘elp for it. I tell ‘ee tis they men coming ‘ere, as Mistress Mary d’ say. Tis they coming as put the evil eye on we. Four dead already, and gracious knows where it will stop. Two more afore nightfall, like as not!”

“Well, if tis so, I shouldn’t wish to be in Jane’s shoes. If Mrs and child was to die, God knows what Master would say; fault or no fault, it isn’t in him to take it kindly.”

“Reckon he should be ‘ere to look after his own, stead of whoring after others. Like as not none of this would’ve happened else.”

They stopped and one of them glanced warningly at me. I went out into the larder which was lined with flour barrels and salting tins and earthenware preserving jars and deep wooden tubs of meal. No one was there so I made my way back by another route into the house. Then I saw Meg, but she was carrying a posses of colewort up for Mrs Killigrew and would not stop except to shake a scared head at me. Upstairs I heard Mrs Killigrew screaming.

I did not like the sound. Dinner was late and we were nearly forgot. I wandered into my father’s private study. Mr Knyvett had used it of late. It smelt cold and stale, and it had not been cleaned for days; a dozen glasses were littered about the room, some still stained with the remnants of wine. The rain was beating on the lattice window like a birchen broom.

On the desk was an open book in which Mr Knyvett had been writing. I did not think he had touched it since the day when Bewse, the head falconer, had come to him with the news that Paul was dead.

I looked at the writing.

“21st Oct rec. John Michell sale of 200 yds fine velvet cloth at 18/- per yd. œ180. Paid Capt Elliot one fifth = œ36. Paid J. Michell one fifth = œ36. Divers other payments = œ18. Nett œ90.

“29th Oct rec. T. Roscarrock 80 yds purple silk cloth at œ2. 10. 0 per yd. = œ200. Pd. J. Roscarrock one fifth = œ40. Divers other payments = œ12. Aside for Captain Elliot one fifth = œ40. Nett œ108.”

I shut the book. I did not know who else was in and out of this room; in any event few could read; but it seemed a matter best kept private.

On the desk was a smaller book bound in black leather, and I opened it where a straw was stuck in to mark the place. Entries this time in my father’s hand.

“Paid John Harris, Lamrest, œ15. Owe him œ235. Owe John Heale œ1000, Mr Challenor œ250, Hugh Jones œ550. Paid Mr Coswarth and his uncle œ50. Owe Wm Gilbert of London, haberdasher, œ26. Mr Siprian of London, farrier, œ100. Paid Mrs Arscott œ15. Owe Her Majesty by the report of Mr Reynolds of the exchequer, œ1,700. Borrowed of Mr Stanes œ200, owe him now œ1400. Owe Anthony Honey, œ150.”

There was a long list of smaller entries, some of them household items of expenditure, some debts, some rents received.

I wandered through the dark passage into the hall, where the servants were now laying the cloths for dinner. Parson Merther was passing down it with his thin ferret face a-tremble.

I said: “How is Mrs Killigrew, sir? Is the baby born yet?”

He gave me a distraught glance in which he scarcely seemed to recognise me and said: “Musculorum convulsio cum sopore.”

I turned and looked after his hurrying form. For the second time since he had gone I wished Mr Killigrew home.

At dinner that day Rosewarne reappeared. He looked thin and still sweaty as if the ague had not yet left him. Mistress Wolverstone had also come down; I heard Aunt Mary say in an undertone to Miss Wolverstone:

“She will not live long unless something be done. The child’s head has descended but these convulsions will kill them both. She is quite out of her mind between the fits, and nothing we can do brings her aidance. I think tis more a spell than a disease. We have rubbed her face with my topaz and given her saxifrage root and motherwort. What John will say when he returns I know not.”

“There is a young woman lives near Penryn,” said Mistress Wolverstone, pulling up her fur collar against the draught. “Has she been asked?”

“None of them will come. They have no fancy for our household while the fever is among us.”

“I am of the opinion Maud should get up, even if it is only to sit in a chair and give her counsel.”

“Have you seen Maud? She can as yet no more put foot to floor than fly.”

I had to go then to my seat because Parson Merther was about to say grace. But after the meal I pretended not to see his beckoning hand and slid away towards where my aunt and my great-aunt and Mr Knyvett and Rosewarne and Jael Job were standing talking together. I knew what they were talking about, whom they were talking about, and I had to hear.

“… I’ve heard tell she is very skilful with medicines and herbs, and if it’s a spell been put on my sister, then this woman is as like as anyone to know the cure. If she would come.”

“Oh, Katherine Footmarker is afeared of nothing.”

“Well might she be afeared of nothing,” said Rosewarne, “seein’ Who she serves. To bring her in the ‘ouse would call down worse misfortune than we now suffer.”

“There’s some as do good as well as harm,” Mistress Wolverstone said, folding her gouty hands. “I was once cured of the stone by a girl witch in Suffolk. It was magic the way she did it. Did Rose ask this woman?”

Mr Knyvett took the toothpick from his mouth. “You may be assured if Rose was sent he went no nearer than to throw a stone. Rose would take fright at the first flap of a black cloak.”

“Twould be true of any of we, sir,” Rosewarne said doggedly. “There’s bad tales of Katherine Footmarker. They say she dance naked in the full moon and if once she touch a youth he be lost for ever.”

“I’ll go for her,” said Jael Job. “If so be as you’ve the mind to send for her. I’m not afeared. I’ll go and ask her if she’ll come.”

Everyone looked at him. Perhaps it was in their minds that he was ready to go because as yet his wife bore the weight of responsibility for what happened in the upstairs chamber, and he would rid her of it. John Killigrew’s return hung over them all.

“I think she should be asked,” said Aunt Mary. “It is the least we can do, and what worse can a witch bring than what those men brought? Foulness and liquor, lechery and gluttony, poison and pestilence. A child dies every time they come to this house. Take someone with you, Job, if you want company.”

“I think, ma’am, Rose would come if I done the talking. Maybe if I go straight away she can be here and gone again afore nightfall.”

Katherine Footmarker came.

I saw her from a window striding up the long approach, a black caul over her hair against the rain. She carried a cloth bag drawn together at the top by a red string. Behind her, at a distance, followed Job and Rose. When she came into the house she must have been watched from all points by eyes as curious and as frightened as mine. All work came to a stop.

What happened I learned later. It seemed that my poor stepmother was still having fits, and the child was as yet unborn. In the fits Mrs Killigrew was becoming violent, and between them she lay like one dead except now and then for a long shuddering sigh. Katherine Footmarker looked over the sick woman thoroughly and in silence. Then she opened her bag and sent Mrs Job for a cauldron of hot water. All this while Mrs Killigrew lay quiet, but at this stage she began to shake with her next convulsion. Footmarker thereupon caused a crystal of salt or nitre or some other unknown element to be inserted in the sick woman’s rectum, and at the same time rags were soaked in the water, a strange yellow flower powdered over them, and wrapped around, and the steaming hot bandage put about her head.

Kate Penruddock said that when this was applied a strange draught came into the room and caused all the candle flames to flutter and darken. At the same moment Mrs Killigrew gave a piercing scream and her struggles began to subside. Afterwards there were strong faecal evacuations before the birth pangs began again. For an hour this continued, then Footmarker sent for a needle and with this pierced the jugular vein, drawing off a little poisoned blood. At about four o’clock Mrs Killigrew came to her senses and asked for a drink of wine. This Katherine Footmarker refused her, but instead she mixed her a posses in which were dissolved some fennel and poppy seed and terrible things out of two bottles that Mrs Penruddock could not bring herself to describe. At five o’clock Mrs Killigrew was delivered of a strong male child, perfect in every part.

A little later, just as darkness was falling, the child went into convulsions of its own and died. They said it wore such an expression on its face as if it was a damned soul.

Much against our wishes we had been herded in by Parson Merther to wash ourselves and tidy for supper, so I knew nothing for a time except that Katherine Footmarker had triumphed. I was full of a strange exaltation as if I had been a party to the magic. After all my fears, this proved that the woman I had been to was good and not evil. I had done no wrong by going to her. I was delighted for Mrs Killigrew that she was through her ordeal. Perhaps if Katherine Footmarker had been summoned earlier she might even have been able to save Paul Knyvett’s life and those others who had died from the fever.

We trooped into the hall a half hour later than the appointed time of six, knowing the meal would not be ready yet; fifteen or so of the servants were standing about in groups whispering, and Mr Knyvett was already seated at the top table waving his toothpick and talking to Rosewarne who was standing behind him.

Belemus had slipped away on the walk downstairs and he rejoined us now and moved into place beside me.

“The child’s dead,” he said.

Then I had a strange and terrible feeling in my vitals as if the fever had struck.

“How? When?”

“Of fits. Of the foulest most fiendish fits ever you saw. They say that as it died its body contorted and changed into the shape of a black dog.”

“… How could that be?”

He looked at me with his craggy face twisted wryly. “I don’t know how it could be, cousin. I only know that that is how it is being spoken about the house. It may be as Rosewarne and others swear that the Footmarker woman is as she is because she’s kissed the naked buttocks of the devil bent over the altar at black mass. Anyway, if she can grow wings and fly, now is the time for her to do it.”

“How long is it since she left?”

“She hasn’t left. She was leaving when the change took place. She was stopped. They was to have taken her and locked her in one of the dungeons of the castle, but Foster would not have her said it would ill-wish him in any fight with the Spanish so she is in the cellar under the Gate Tower. It was the farthest away they could put her overnight for safety.”

We all stood. “Oh, Lord Jesus Christ,” began Parson Merther, “almighty and most merciful Saviour, we the most sinful, the most errant of Thy creatures, do humbly beseech Thee…”

When all were seated I said: “Why overnight? What will they do with her?”

Belemus shrugged. “That will depend on your father, no doubt. He’s not likely to be kindly disposed.”

“But when is he back? Perhaps not for “

“Tomorrow. I thought you knew, witless. John Michell has had word that he lay last night with George Grenville at Penheale and should be home by this time tomorrow.”

Supper was customarily noisy but the hall was quiet that night, more so than at the height of the fever. Miss Mary Killigrew did not appear at all and Mr Knyvett was drunk. Afterwards, while Parson Merther waited impatiently for me to follow the others, I spoke to Mistress Wolverstone.

“What?” she said. “What? Well, your stepmother is asleep now. She breathes peaceably; pray God when she wakes she will be in her right mind and not overlooked. What? Well, I know not what evil came from her, but evil came from somewhere, did it not? She is best shut up, poor creature. All such creatures are best shut up, lest they do more harm than good.”

“Come, Maugan,” Parson Merther said. “The knowledge of good and evil comes late to some people. You are such a one. With prayer and due humility towards your elders of which, alas, I see few signs as yet you may come to a full understanding. You must thank God that you are not alone to judge for yourself.”

For an hour I sat with the other children translating Virgil’s Georg~cs. When at last I got into bed beside John I lay for a long time with my head propped up so that through the undrawn bed curtains I could see the narrow oblong of the window, greyer than the rest of the room. It was still raining and blowing hard, but from the southwest, so that in this room you could only hear the rumble of the wind in the distance as it leaned on the house over the shoulder of the hill.

Presently John, whom I had thought asleep, said: “Do you think Mama will die?”

“Not now,” I said.

“Do you think the witch will be burnt?”

“I don’t know.”

“I heard Ink-horn say he knows of tests so that you can tell if she has sold herself to the Devil. What sort of tests?”

“If you stick pins in her and she does not bleed,- I said; “if you throw her in the river and she floats; if you tie her thumbs and her toes crosswise and she sheds no tears; if you shave her head …”

“But is that not like torture?”

“If she’s a witch it will drive out Satan from her and make her confess .. .”

“And what if she confesses?”

“I suppose they will hang her.” -

“What do you hope they will do to her?”

“It’s for them to decide.”

Soon after that we must both have fallen asleep, but I did not sleep long and wakened in utter terror, the way one can from a dream, with the belief that I was in a coffin and the lid was coming down. I sat up in bed and could see no light and breathe no air. The feel of the bed curtains only convinced me it was a shroud. I crawled to the foot of the bed and nearly fell out, then groped towards the window. It was not until I heard the familiar sound of water gurgling off the roof and saw a single light of a fishing boat that it came to me I was in my own room, looking from my own window and that John still slept undisturbed in the darkness.

It took minutes standing there by the window while the dream fell slowly away like slime dripping off after crawling out of a bog. It took more minutes standing there before I began to pull on my breeches and hose and jerkin and a pair of shoes …

The passage outside was no lighter than the bedroom; from the opposite room came Parson Merther’s snores. In the great hall a few gaunt shadows lurked, fathered by a flickering log; dogs stirred and grumbled. I picked up the poker that lay on the andiron in the hearth.

I had to stand on a chair to unfasten the iron bolt, and when the door came open a gust of damp air wafted in from outside. I did not shut the door again but left it swinging, and I could hear the stirring of the rushes on the floor as the wind moved over them.

It was lighter out here, and the warm night cloyed. There was only one light to be seen in the whole house, where Kate Penruddock sat up with Mrs Killigrew.

The door leading to the cellar of the Gate Tower was in the right hand wall and was not locked. I went down the ten steps and came to the cellar door and knocked. There was at once a stirring inside.

“Who is it?”

“… Maugan Killigrew.”

“Ah, Maugan, I looked for you today when I came. Were you hiding from me?”, I looked at the door. Last year a man had been put there, a beggar, who was not worth a place in the castle, and the same stout padlock had been used then as now.

“Or did you suggest they should send for me in the first place? “

“No! “

“Ah, well, it is good to have a friend. Have you water? I’m thirsty.”

I slid the end of the poker through the padlock and began to pull.

I heard her laugh. “It’s hard to be an apothecary if you be a woman. And it is hard to do good by savin’ one life because then you are rough treated because you did not save two.”

The poker slipped and I slipped with it, so that the metal clanged.

“You trying to release me? Well, that’s a kindly act, and I exempt you from all the curses I’ve been mutterin’ these past hours. Ignorance is a sorry thing, my dear.”

I was sweating so that my hands could hardly grip, as if I was still part of a nightmare. I felt I wasn’t doing this just because I wanted to but because she was making me. She had awakened me in my room and brought me here.

Although I was so thin I was always very strong, even in those days, and I could feel the poker beginning to bend. I stopped and then noticed that while the padlock was not giving, the staples let into the wall were. Another heave and the staples gave way and the door swung free.

She came out. Her face was an unnatural white in the darkness.

“You’re a true friend, Maugan Killigrew.” . “I had to come.”

“That’s how it should be.”

I could not tell whether her vivid smile was loving or wolfish.

I said: “You must not go home across the fields. The hounds would be on you.”

“I have no fear of dogs.”

“They would raise the house. It’s safer to go through this gate if we can get it unbarred.”

“And then?”

“This leads direct to the jetty. Behind the jetty on the stones you’ll find a small boat. You can row round the point and beach it down the river below our land.”

“How far is it round the point? I could swim.”

I thought of witches who never sank. “Take the boat. There will be a strong outgoing current.”

“You’ll not come with me to bring the boat back?”

“It will be found in the morning. I have left all the doors open behind me.”

“Come here, Maugan. You’re not afraid of me?”

I did not answer, but when she moved closer I could not step away. She kissed me on the mouth.

“If that’s a witch’s kiss, then you’re accursed, no doubt. If it is a woman’s, then you’ll come to no harm because of it. Time will show.”

CHAPTER SIX

“Well ” said my father, “she was left to go by someone in the house there’s no doubt of that. She could not have forced the lock from the outside and bent a poker in so doing, and then left by sea, bolting the gates after her.”

“Anything is possible,” said Parson Merther, “if you have Satan on your side.”

“Oh, stuff and nonsense, man … I do not believe every woman who bows twice to the moon has all the power of evil at her beck. I doubt if this Katherine what’s-her-name is likely to know any magic beyond mixing a brew or two.”

“Your son died under her hand, sir, and you saw his face.”

“Mrs Killigrew thinks she did no ill, but rather good in delivering her when no one else could.”

“Mrs Killigrew, sir, if I may make so bold, has so generous and Christian a nature that she seeks only the good in the darkest deed.” -

“Well, since you mentor us, or should do, in the faith yourself, perhaps you should pick a leaf from her book.”

Parson Merther blew his nose and lapsed into offended silence.

Mr Killigrew said: “It has been an ill time for you all while I have been away: Paul dead and Clara and Basset and Wilson too; and now this. But you can’t visit all the blame on this woman who came in only yesterday. I’d say, leave her be but for one thing. I don’t relish a traitor in my house. Whether it was right to detain this woman overnight or no, it was done. That being so, the justice of the case was left to me. Follow? Properly to me. Someone who will let a prisoner out can on another day creep down to let the enemy inl “

“Send some men for the woman,” said Henry Knyvett. “She cannot have gone far. Bring her in and we can question her.”

“I’ll think it over,” said my father coddling his moustache. “I’ve much on my mind today. She’ll be at the mill, never fear; women like that don’t run far. No, I’ll ride over myself tomorrow or the next day and question her there.”

“Suppose she will not say?”

“She’ll say.”

For the next week I lived in an agony of fear lest Mr Killigrew should put his threat into practice; but for a week he did not leave the grounds. He was in one of his feckless, indolent, agreeable moods. Always when he came back after some venery with a woman he would show a more lively affection for his wife and children though I did not perceive the connection until I was older.

Also, perhaps almost to his own surprise, his other affairs had prospered. Money had come into Arwenack through the visit of Elliot; and while in London he had received some private assurance that there would be a blockage in the inquiries into the boarded fishing vessel.

In spite of his extravagances on Lady Betty he was in funds. Uncle Sir Henry had lent him money, and the son of a wealthy draper called Henry Lok had taken over a substantial number of his bonds. This to Mr Killigrew was almost the same as being given money; the problems of repayment were too far ahead to trouble his mind. He was loud in the praises of both men, and Sir Henry and his lady were to spend Christmas at Arwenack. It was to be a great occasion.

Mrs Killigrew had no setbacks after her ordeal and in two weeks was about again. The fever dragged on until mid-December with one or two new cases and several slow convalescents, but no one else died.

One day at the beginning of December my father rode out with his men, but it was only collecting rents, or so Belemus who rode with him told me. I asked Belemus, trying to be casual, wether they had stopped to collect a rent from Katherine Footmarker, but he only grinned and said no. Then followed a week of good weather when Mr Killigrew was out hawking and hunting every day. He would be away by eight and back at dusk, so the house hardly saw him and the daylight hours were each day a long lull of sunny quietness between the shouts and clatter and bustle of morning and the clamour of late afternoon. I knew at such a time Katherine Footmarker was safe unless she got right in his tracks.

On the 15th December, which was a Friday, he said he was riding on business to Trerice to see Mrs Gertrude Arundell, and said would I ride with him. Though I had several times been to Fowey and once to Penzance by sea, this was the farthest I had been on land. My father had a younger sister called Katherine, who after being a widow for three years had just married Sir Henry Billingsley of Totnes. My father and Katherine quarrelled incessantly; they never wrote unless they were disputing over something, and this visit to Trerice was over property held in coparcenary, as it is called, with Aunt Katherine, in which Mrs Arundell had an interest. That is the way of the Cornish gentry: by threads of property, marriage and inheritance they are for ever intertwined.

We left with five servants riding with us, crossed near the old mill, which to my relief showed no life, dropped into Penryn and then skirted the wooded valleys up which the creeks of the river run. We forded one narrow neck of the river and crossed Carnon Bridge which is the limit to which the Carnon stream is navigable at low water. Farther up you could see the tinners working, and the stream under the bridge was a muddy yellow. My father told me the river was silting up and that there was now no more than four fathoms at low water at Daniel Point. It was on account, he said, of all the trees being cut down and the soil washing away into the valleys.

We passed through Truro and up the steep hill at the other side, with the horses falling to a slow walk, bits and stirrups clinking, hooves slipping in the mud; my father said we were first calling at Treworgan, for he had business there.

“Do you mean where the Farnabys live?”

“Yes.” He looked across at me suspiciously. “Do you know them?”

“I met their daughter, Susanna Farnaby, at Tolverne in May.”

“Ah. I follow.” His horse shook its muzzle and snorted; the air from its nostrils rose like steam in the crisp sunshine. “Well, they were there but are there no longer.”

“Where have they gone?”

“Gone? How should I know? To live with some sister of hers better circumstanced, I believe. He was a shiftless fellow from whom I could get no rent.”

“Do you mean he was they were turned out?”

“He’d put me off long enough with this or that excuse. A man’s a fool who thinks to pay the same rent today as fifteen years back. Prices have flown up everywhere. When you were born you could buy a dozen yards of cloth for œ4, now you cannot buy the half of that. Wheat was œ1 a quarter, now it’s œ3. You could get an ox for œ5; now it’s œ12. It is his own fault; he can sell his produce higher. Why, the farmers are the lucky ones! It’s sloth has put him out.”

We were nearly there before I said: “He was ill, I think. Sue mentioned it when I met her in May.”

“Who? Oh, the Farnabys, you’re still chewing the cud over them. Yes, he’s been ill; everyone’s ill sometime. It did not excuse me from my obligations when I had an ulcer on my leg. The world’s no place for lent-lilies, boy.”

It was a pleasant house with mullioned windows. At the gate, to my surprise, one of our own servants met us, and there were two more at the door. My father dismounted and went in. I stared about, fancying that in spite of what I had heard Sue might come running from one of the outbuildings. I suddenly noticed that there was no front door; then I saw it propped against the wall of the house.

Penruddock was one of those who had ridden with us and I said to him: “What has happened to the front door?”

“Twas took off last week, Master Maugan.”

“But why?”

He rubbed his thumb through his beard. “Mr Killigrew ordered it. Mrs Farnaby was not for moving; ye see, she says Mr Farnaby is too ill to be moved. Mr Killigrew had been over once afore but the rent was not paid, so we was ordered to take all the doors off, and Mr Killigrew puts an hour-glass on a pole and says if they’re not out by the time the sand is run we’re to go in and put ‘em out.”

There were two white doves cooing in a cote.

“Have our servants been left here since you came last?”

“Aye. The house and furniture has been seized in non-payment and will all be sold. If we’d have left it unguarded news would have got around, and other debtors would’ve stepped in and claimed a share.”

I walked slowly into the house. My father was in what must have been the big parlour. With him was a clerkly man with a book.

“Tis all down, Mr Killigrew,” he was saying, giving a little bow now and then as he spoke. “One Turkey carpet, œ3, Two window cushions, lOs., Two looking glasses, œ1 3s 4d., Nine pieces of hangings, which rightly belong in the diningchamber, œ3 lOs., Twenty-nine pewter dishes, twelve saucers and a candlestick, œ2 Ids. ad. Tis all down in the greatest detail.”

My father grunted. “Nevertheless kindly walk with me through the house. I want to have a fair idea of the total value.”

“The total value, Mr Killigrew, the total value …” They disappeared through the farther door, the little clerk trotting behind Mr Killigrew like an eager puppy.

I went back into the hall. Behind the door was a cloak and a hat with a feather. Had they not even been allowed time to take their personal things? I thought of slender, pretty Sue as I had seen her last laughing among the trees at Tolverne.

I went upstairs and opened one or two of the doors. In the second room there was a faint perfume: I think it is sandalwood, for to this day if that scent comes to my nostrils I am back in that empty house walking hesitantly into Sue’s chamber.

I never for a moment doubted that it was hers. The long narrow bed with the taffeta curtains, the floor covering of a once bright yellow, now much faded and worn. The canvas sheets were still on the bed. On a table beside the window was a sugar box, a cup of mother of pearl, a candle snuffer. By the table was a pair of worn slippers of blue velvet. A looking glass lay face downwards on a chair, as if dropped in haste.

I picked up the slippers and thrust them inside my jerkin and ran out of the house.

We were expected at Trerice, and Jack Arundell came out to meet us, with his mother, younger brother and sisters not far behind. I liked Jack as much as any boy I knew, and little realised what the years would bring. He was staunch, opinionated, frank, and had a great belly-laugh which his new-found deep voice made the more startling. His father had died when he was four and he had been under the wardship of Sir Richard Grenville until Sir Richard was killed.

Trerice was a new house, enlarged and rebuilt by Jack’s father, and was handsome and ornately gabled though not so large as ours. Mrs Arundell was good looking and, being a second wife, much younger than her late husband; and I was a little startled to see my father suddenly begin paying court to her. No doubt it was all done expertly and with breeding, but to me, being so young, it seemed maladroit and was greatly embarrassing. He invited them to spend Christmas with us, and Mrs Arundell, blushing, thanked him and said she

would try to make the necessary arrangements. “Do not try, Gertrude, just make ‘em and come.” “Well, John, I have four stepdaughters to consider, two of them yet unmarried, aside from my own family.” “Bring them all. We shall be very jolly this Christmas, so the more the merrier.”

I slept in the same bed with Jack, in a square dark room black panelled to the ceiling, and we talked long after the lights were snuffed. Jack said he knew where the Farnabys would be, her sister’s husband was called Maris and owned a farm on the high ground behind the river.

Jack had just returned from Exeter College, Oxford, and next year after he had matriculated was to read law at Lincoln’s Inn. He told me of his life at Oxford, the Ids. 8d. a year he paid for his chamber, of dicing at the inns, of long talking late into the night and arguing all the problems of the universe with like minds, of disguising himself in a workman’s smock to go and see the plays in St Mary’s Church, of the cold after Cornwall and the load of wood he had ordered for when he returned on the 8th of January, of the logic he read, of the laws against beards and long hair, of the lectures on rhetoric and theology.

After a while he fell silent, and then said: “What do you think of the Arundells of Tolverne, Maugan?”

“I have not been since my the dispute I had with Thomas. Why? “

“I esteem Jonathan myself. But like you I am not very inclinable to Thomas who is something of a cot-queen and will rule them all before long. Did you know Jonathan is to wed Gertrude Carew next month?”

“No. She’s very young.”

“It will be a good match. Even his father favours it.”

“Why ‘even his father’?”

“Because Sir Anthony, I believe, is getting addled in his age and does not know his own mind two days together. Have you any hankering after the old faith, Maugan?”

“The old faith?” I said, astonished. “No. I am a Protestant, as we all are.”

“As we all should be. Catholic is another way of spelling Traitor these days. How many of them are in the pay of Spain no one knows. But we Arundells are a mixed bag. Our cousins _,,

“Oh, the Arundells of Lanherne, I know.”

“My grandfather happily believed otherwise, and we are as staunchly Protestant as the Killigrews. So are the Tolverne Arundells, one would say.”

“Have you reason to suppose …”

‘pro you remember the man we met there called Petersen?”

XYes. I had forgot you saw him, too.”

“Do you think he looked like a priest?”

“No. At least: I never thought of it. What are you suggesting? “

“These priests are still coming in from France, with their intent to overthrow the Queen, or to organise sedition until the Spanish land. What more suitable entry than Tolverne hidden in its quiet creek in the woods?”

“It would be suitable but that the Tolverne Arundells are as loyal as we are!”

“Perhaps I imagine things. Perhaps I am over-sensitive about someone who bears the same name as myself. But it but the change is not so hard as you may imagine. There were some lectures at Oxford … a man named Curry … it calls many of one’s beliefs in question. I can understand a man like Sir Anthony, a thought eccentric at any time, perhaps driving himself so hard that at the last he finds he has worn out his new beliefs and is left only with the old. Like someone with a wooden board trying to rub away a stone …”

A rat squeaked in the wainscot; after a moment it went hobbling away. We became drowsy and warm. I remember thinking before I dropped off of the difference in our positions; I without name or lands or independence, a base son of a great family much in debt; and he already master of this fine house and estate, rich and unencumbered, sure so far as one could be sure of a life of activity and distinction.

Two or three days after we got home I was alone with Mrs Killigrew and said to her:

“Did you say you knew the Farnabys, madam?”

“I knew Mrs Farnaby in Devonshire when she was a girl. Her father was my father’s steward.”

“Have you heard they are in distress?”

She had not. I told her what I knew and she bent over her lace.

“Your father does not always tell me of the day to day happenings on the estate … I wish I had money to send them, or gifts, but alas …”

I swallowed something and said: “You might perhaps invite the daughter, Susanna Farnaby, to spend Christmas here, ma’am.”

She looked so surprised that I went redder than before. “I might, Maugan. Do you want her to come?”

“I don’t think she would. I mean I don’t think she would come here after the way they were turned out of their farm.”

“It was harsh, you think.”

“I don’t know what they were owing, what had gone before, but …”

“Your father, too, Maugan, is beset with problems of money. There is now a temporary easement, for which God be thanked, but I see no such happy issue as a permanency. So he may seem harsh in his own straitness. I will invite the girl if you like. I can write to her mother. She could come with Gertrude Carew.”

“Perhaps Father would not want it, even if they were willing.”

“I don’t think he is in the mood to cavil at an extra guest or two. Indeed, among so many, he is hardly likely to know she is here.”

I caught her gaze. In another I might have thought there was mild irony in it; but it was not in Mrs Killigrew’s nature to be disillusioned; religion and meditation were her steady comforters.

“Thank you, ma’am. I don’t think she will come.”

“We shall see.”

One day in that week I was able to slip away on my own and go to the ruined mill above Penryn. It was empty. Katherine Footmarker had left and taken all her belongings with her. Only a jackdaw fluttered in the darkness as I pushed open the door. I called once or twice, every moment more glad that I should not have to see her again. The bottles and packets had gone, the wooden mug, the brazier, the iron pot. Only the burnt circle on the floor and the litter of fallen ash, a broken stool … I went out again into the open air, dragging the door to after me.

It was only on the way home that I found my relief vaguely tinged with disappointment.

The first of our guests to arrive were Sir Henry and Lady Killigrew on the 20th, and they brought my grandmother home with them. I do not remember that I had ever seen Sir Henry before. He was, I suppose, about sixty-five or six, but he looked younger, a dapper man, not tall few Killigrews are but he had been handsome before a faded greyness had stolen over cheek and beard. He had a cold careful assessing eye like a judge or an attorney, beautiful hands much beringed, was spare of figure and dressed like a dandy. Lady Killigrew, his second wife, was half his age, dark eyed, pale skinned and beautiful, but there was something hard about her

she had a strong accent and lapsed with relief into French when she spoke to her husband or to my grandmother.

Sir Henry had four daughters by his first wife, all now married to knights, and one more daughter by his second. But this year at last to his great joy the second Lady Killigrew had given him a son and heir.

He seemed then to me to be immensely old, for in his late teens he had ridden to London with his father and been introduced into the court of the late King Henry. He remembered the news coming into Cornwall of the execution of Catherine Howard and of Henry’s remarriage to “the discreet widow” as he called Katherine Parr; he had been 23 during the great uprising in Cornwall against the new Prayer Book led and encouraged by Humphrey, John and Thomas Arundell I felt a prick of discomfort at these names. When he was 26 he had been placed by his father in the service of the Duke of Northumberland and had become M.P. for Launceston in young King Edward’s last parliament. When Edward died he had on instructions from the Duke ridden to Launceston and there had Lady Jane Grey proclaimed Queen. After the plan failed and the Duke was beheaded, my uncle had had to flee the country.

“Walter Ralegh put a barque at my disposal,” he said. “Not this Walter but his father; it was his own barque, he was a merchant, you know, and traded with the French ports. The loan she was called, after his first wife she had but the evening before put in and was scarce unloaded but Wat knew I had no time to spare. There were men looking for us. Not just the Queen’s men but others who owed us personal revenges: if we were caught it was to be a Roman harvest. We put out in the dark before the moon rose; with me was Andrew Tremayne, John Courtenay, Peter Carew; we none of us saw England again until Mary died ...

“I was seasick that night,” he added, “and all through the days that came. Like brother Peter, I was never a sailor.”

“It does not follow,” said Mrs Killigrew. “Sir Walter is often sick, they tell me.”

“I doubt if Sir Walter is ever as comfortable at sea as he pretends to be. Oh, he has great gifts, I know, including a gift of the gab, but he’s a soldier first and foremost.”

“Is he still confined within the Towers”

“No, he and his Elizabeth were released last week just before we left, but he’s still banished from Court, and no easement of that. It will irk him, I know, for he frets to be at the centre of things.”

“He should do as Essex does and keep his wife quietly in the country where no one notices her,” said my father. “In due time the Queen will forget.”

“I think it is a greater offence on Walter’s part,” said Sir Henry. “Her Majesty, I know, showed a greater choler; she spoke harshly to me of his deceit and ingratitude. I believe she thought a man who stayed unwed until he was forty should stay faithful to her for life. Also I think it is her feeling that my Lord of Essex is a nobleman of the most distinguished blood and as such owes less to her favour. Walter, as a commoner, owes all.”

Sir Henry had himself seen service in the field as a young man, and had been with the English army under Poynings which landed at Havre in 1562 to support the Huguenots. He had been wounded in the battle of Rouen and taken prisoner, and he would have been put to death on the orders of the second Duc de Guise but for the intervention of one of the Montmorencys. Twentyfive years later he had been sent under Leicester to the relief of the Netherlands and had witnessed the brilliant crazy charge at Zutphen which had brought Sir Philip Sidney to his death.

I noticed when he was talking to us he would speak freely of things long past, but if talk moved to the present his face would close up and he would turn the conversation. Only on the evening of the 23rd, when many of our other guests were due on the morrow, did I hear him talk much of things of the present and then it was to my father and stepmother when he thought there was no one else within earshot.

They had supped less fully than usual; my father said he had stomach pains, so Sir Henry said he would keep him company at a smaller meal, and they had eaten a shoulder of veal well larded and the loins of a hare dressed with a special black sauce. Afterwards they drank malmsey and ate roasted pears, while my stepmother picked at her favourite sweetmeats.

My father had been telling him that Sir Walter Ralegh had taken a great fancy to Sir Richard Grenville’s younger son, John.

Sir Henry said: “No doubt then he’ll be sending the boy off on one of those wild-cat adventures to Roanoke or some other point in North America, and staying behind himself, writing exhortations from afar. After all it was Ralegh who should have gone in the Revenge in the first place, not Grenville at all.”

“You are imputing him with cowardice?”

“Oh, Walter’s no coward! I should be a fool to call him anything but violently brave when the occasion prompts. But by chance or design of late the occasion has not prompted.”

“And Essex?” said my father, stretching his legs indolently over his favourite footstool. “What of him?”

Sir Henry sipped his wine. “We see Essex’s influence as more dangerous than ever Walter’s was. And nowadays he has better brains to guide him ...”

“There was talk in London that he might be appointed to the Privy Council.”

“Oh, I would not be surprised at that any day. Last week at Nonesuch the Queen and he were happy and flirtatious together; then one or other says the wrong thing; a great quarrel arises and Essex stalks off in a passion. When I left the Queen was agitated, touchy, would fly into anger at the least thing. When Essex returns, as maybe he will have done ore now, she will rant and curse at him like a fish-wife, but then will come the reconciliation, and just after the reconciliation is the time when she grants him new distinction.”

Sir Henry looked across the big room to where his beautiful wife was sitting before the fire plucking at her lute.

“The Queen gave orders that Christmas was to be spent at Whitehall: the whole Court has been half packed and in a fret to be gone. Three times they have called the carrier in charge of the wagons to move the royal furniture and ward-robes, and three times she haye changed her mind. It will depend on Essex what sort of Christmas the Court will enjoy.”

“You spoke of the earl having good brains to guide him,” Mrs Killigrew said.

“Well, yes, I mean advisers, and the wisest of them are my two nephews, Anthony and Francis. Indeed, if he took more heed of their counsel, I think we should have more to fear.”

“We called at Gorhambury on the way down,” said Lady Jael Killigrew. “That mother of theirs!”

“There are many whispers about Francis’s morals,” said Sir Henry with a wry expression. “But Lady Bacon does not whisper, she roars. We were scarce in the house and the door shut on the servants when she burst out, ‘Fornicators and adulterers and perverts shall bring the wrath of God upon ‘eml Francis has no shamel Keeping that bloody Percy as coach companion and bed companion I And those wanton Welsh boys besides. Hell fire will fall upon him, mark my words

“And much more, so very much more,” added his wife. She plucked a note from the lute. “All day the old woman talks me a sermon on the corruptions of the court. As if I do not know ~ “

My father scratched a flea bite on his hand. “You’d have thought the Bacons would have stuck to their own instead of going in with Essex.”

“I have lived too long to believe that relationship or loyalty have any weight in the modern world,” Sir Henry said. “Brother is against brother, friend against friend. It is little for the son of a slain man to become the ardent supporter of the murderer, for husbands and wives to bear witness that will see the other to the block. There are only two motives which reign undisputed, advancement and survival.”

“You’re a thought cynical tonight,” my father said. “And I’ve no doubt you’re right … The Queen looked well, but she grows no younger. Whatever comes now, she is the last of the Tudor line.”

There was a short silence.

“And what follows? James of Scotland? Arabella Stewart? Philip of Spain?”

Sir Henry’s face took on its closed-up look. “The Queen is only 59. Who knows what changes a few years may bring?”

“I wish it would bring peace with Spain,” my father said. “You’d think that even Philip would see the war’s not paying either of us to continue.”

“There are always feelers out,” said Sir Henry, still cautious. “The peace party in both countries is growing.”

“Is it true that another Armada is building?” Dorothy Killigrew asked.

“Our spies say so.”

“Even more reason why we should come to a just agreement before it sets sail,” said my father. “The last one missed success by a narrower margin than is trumpeted abroad.”

A log rolled from the fire, and I moved quickly to push it back, then shrank back into the corner lest I should be noticed and sent away. The new flames cast a flickering light on Lady Jael’s white hands.

‘Yt’s always a mystery to me,” my father was saying, “how the Spanish soldiers have such superiority on land while we hold it at sea. Think you it was all Parma’s doing?”

“I am not so sure either will hold good that much longer,” said Sir Henry, “since each nation is learning, from the other.

“It is discipline, technique, leadership that tells. Often we’ve showed ourselves superior in courage but the organising has been inferior. But we’ve learned and are still learning.”

A servant Rose it was came in with a pottle of canary sack, which my stepmother preferred to the heavier wine the others were drinking. Sir Henry got up and knocked out his pipe and refilled it. I watched him fascinated; no one in our family yet smoked.

Lady Jael laughed. “What do you do with your life here, Dor’thy? At other times than feasts and festivals. Are you not so so quiet? So on a desert island?”

“I have my books,” said Mrs Killigrew. “And many tasks pleasant tasks in this house. There is no town near by, but this is a town, this house, the people who live here, within the palisades. It is just the same but in a smaller, more closer way, for everyone is known to us and we are known to everyone.”

“Well, I think it would not suit me for a long time, though I grant you it has more of the rest and the beauty than Lothbury, eh? Soon I should sigh for noises and laughter in the streets.”

My father grunted. “Ralegh said last time he was here why did we not build a town in the arm of the river. There’s ample space for docks and warehousing. I’ve thought of it myself since. It would give me pleasure if it cut the throat of Penryn.”

“On fine Sundays now,” said Lady Jael, “it is quite the height of the fashion after service at St Paul’s to climb up upon the roof and stroll for the air and the view.”

“Men do not build towns,” said Sir Henry, “towns grow where there is need for them. If Penryn were not there there might be reason for one to come into being at the mouth of the river. Not otherwise, I should have thought.”

“Yet I’m not sure,” said my father. “There is a Dartmouth, there is a Plymouth, there is an Exmouth … Why not a Falmouth? It would be profitable for us as a family, but I fancy it would need a greater outlay of money than I could ever gather. I will sound William sometime. He has the Queen’s ear.”

“You will get no help from William,” said Sir Henry, with that affectionate asperity with which he spoke of his brother. “William is knee deep in debt, though prospering withal. The Queen might lend an ear but she will certainly lend nothing else unless she sees hope of profit. Her funds at present are stretched to fortify her coasts, not to build new towns for the Spaniards to sack.”

My father drained his cup. “Our best hope is peace. And in the meantime … well Christmas is upon us! Sing us a song, Jael. It is the Eve tomorrow.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Many times since 1592 I have celebrated Christ’s birthday in happiness, in sorrow, and under the stark severity of the narrowest puritans, but this was the only one of its kind. My father shrugged off such minor problems as his evergrowing debts: money had come in and he spent it. Perhaps he remennbered the days of his own youth when life had been easy for the head of the house; perhaps he only remembered his early Christmasses with a child’s memory and tried to recapture something that had never been.

Lady Killigrew, my grandmother, had not been well while she was away, and spent much of Christmas in her room; this freed my father and perhaps all of us from some restraint.

On Christmas Eve Mrs Gertrude Arundell and Jack Arundell arrived from Trerice. Then came Digby Bonython and his sister Alice from Cardew, and a few minutes after them Hugh and Grace Boscawen from Tregothnan. Hugh was two months younger than I, but Grace was 24 and unmarried.

After dinner two of our cousins arrived from Fowey, Tresithney and Abel Treffry. Tresithney was 21 and Abel was 15. We waited then and that was all until dark. At six, when we were sitting down to supper Mr and Mrs Richard Carew came with their daughter Gertrude and her husband to be, young Jonathan Arundell of Tolverne. Sir Anthony and Lady Arundell had not come, nor Thomas, so it looked as if we were but part forgiven for my attack on him. I did not mind because in the party that arrived was Sue Farnaby …

I think, along with the sinking sensation of pleasure at seeing her again, came the realisation that her family really was of inferior status to ours, or they could not have been brought so soon to overlook the deadly act of eviction.

From St Thomas’s until Christmas Eve the children and a halfdozen servants had been decorating the great hall and the principal chambers. Holly and ivy had been brought in from the woods near the river and the apple trees stripped of their mistletoe. The window sills were boweredwith bay leaves, and rosettes made of dyed rags were strung across the hall. Belemus, given his way for once, painted some of the window panes crimson and ochre and vivid green, so that in the day coloured light fell in, and in the night coloured light shone out. Oranges and lemons were tied together in bunches and some crimson cloth found to hang upon the walls hiding the duller arras.

To make room for our visitors we children were turned out of our bedrooms and slept five in a room on straw at the back of the house. At table we were crowded closer together than ever before, for none of the parties came with less than two servants to accompany them.

Christmas Eve there was a fine supper, and the Yule log was dragged in and laid across the hearth. It was expected that it would burn for four days. After supper we sang madrigals and carols; then at midnight the Lord of Misrule came in in a gaudy yellow robe followed by twelve attendants in all the colours they could find. Dick Stable, because he was a lively comic lad, and because he had a sense of how far he might go without setting my father on him, had been chosen for the part, and he was crowned by my stepmother amid much cheering and laughter. Henceforward he was to command the merry-making and to keep his throne for twelve days.

On Christmas Day nearly the whole household went across the fields in procession to communicate at Budock, and after a great dinner at which there was pigeon-pie and a boar’s head and mince-meat and plum-porridge and saddles of mutton, the afternoon was spent in a torpor. In the evening presents were given all round, and we danced until ten o’clock. Apart from little things for my own family, I had only two present to give, for I had scant money or for that matter scant opportunity of spending it. But I had had Rose buy me in Truro a pair of stockings of fine wool dyed scarlet, and from one of the sailors I had bought a little cap made of delicate bone lace from Antwerp.

Having bought them, I spent an agony of time deciding which to give to Meg and which to Sue. Because the stockings had cost more I esteemed them more, but I was not sure whether Sue would regard stockings as a proper present from me. I could not make her out at all: she looked so shy and pale and hostile.

So I gave the stockings to Meg. I did this before supper when she was trimming the candles, and she took the stockings from me and let them slowly unroll out of her hands.

“For me? … Dear life, boy … Where did ee get ‘em? Bought ‘em? For me? Proper ladies’ they are. Well, my blessed parliament! Thank you, Master Maugan. I’ll never bear to wear ‘em. But I’ll put ‘em on. Truly. Not that you can ever see ‘em.” She giggled. “Well maybe once, so long as Dick don’t catch us.” She took two dancing steps up to me and put her arms, stockings and all, round me and kissed me on the lips. It was the first time she’d kissed me on the lips. There was much more taste and it was more exciting.

Suddenly she drew away. “Do anyone know about this?”

“No.”

“Then nary a one tell, will ee, Maugan? Tis better that way, boy.” -

“I won’t tell,” I said.

“My dear life, ladies’ stockings. You’re a real gentleman, Maugan. When you d’grow up there’ll be no holding of you. And thank you.”

I went away feeling as if I had done something I should not have done. Yet I was not ashamed for it.

I carried the little cap for Sue in my pocket all through supper and through the dance after, but was shy of giving it to her in front of others. Meg’s attitude had added to my shyness and reserve. But when the dancing broke up there was a lot of talk and movement and no one attended to what others were doing, so I edged over.

“Sue, I bought you this, I thought it would perhaps pleasure you, it was the only thing I could think of, and ...”

She was flushing from dancing, and the many conflicting and coloured lights in the room gave new expression to her face. I remember how white her eyelids were as she took the lace cap and looked down at it.

“It’s very … kind of you, Maugan. This lace is … fine.” She turned it over and her fingers suddenly trembled. “But should you not buy me a gown too? A pomander ball, a muff, a mirror? It’s the least a Killigrew should give a Farnaby, now that my father’s bankrupted and may go to prison.”

“It was not my doing.”

“Do you know we were given but an hour? We were allowed to take nothing but the clothes we were in, and one small valise besides among the three of us. Do you know that your father had raised the rent fourfold since we went there? Do you know my father wrote six letters asking for time and promising to pay? And it was all just two weeks before Christmas, a time of peace and goodwill toward men and among neighbours. See all this: all the luxury, the table, the wines, the jewellery; we don’t begrudge it to others if we could have had an understanding of our own straits.”

She looked up, and her eyes were full of tears.

I said: “Oh, Sue, Sue. I know … I know it all, but it was done before I heard. But if I had known I couldn’t have stopped it … Why did you come?”

“Because my aunt thought it best. I was one less for her to feed.”

The next day, which was St Stephen’s Day, most of the men went hawking, and it was good to have them out of the way. The rest of us, after longer prayers than usual which were to suffice the day and a quick breakfast of brawn and mustard and malmsey, set about preparing the hall for the mummers’ play in the evening.

The nature of the play was such that, although we all knew who was taking part in it, each player should be so disguised that the watchers could not easily name him, and work had been in hand for two weeks making new and remaking. old masks. Some looked like unicorns, some like bears; others wore deer’s hides and antlers, and a few with no other disguise must black their faces. Dick Stable was to be St George and old Penruddock the Devil.

I do not know if many guessed the identity of the boy who played the young companion to St George. He wore a white skintight mask, a black cap, a green jerkin, tight grey breeches with garters just above the knee and brilliant scarlet stockings. Meg was not only showing them to me, she was showing them to all the house. I was afraid for her because she risked a beating. I kept looking at her legs as if they were something beautiful but forbidden that I would never see again.

The play would have been a greater success if so much double beer had not been drunk before it. Twice it had to be halted because the stage was giving way from over-many persons on it. When there was a fight to the death between St George and Satan, Satan forgot that he was mumming and encouraged by the shouts of his followers laid St George over on his back with a Cornish wrestler’s throw and looked up with a drunken grin of triumph beneath his loosened mask. St George’s boy tried to drag him off, and a fight broke out. In a moment eight or ten figures were wrestling and punching; but there were some sober enough to stop them before it became more than a matter for passing laughter among the distinguished audience.

When the dancing came, mummers mingled with audience, and although at the beginning there was a pavane and a coranto, no one was in a mood for courtly airs, and soon the players struck up for a country dance. Lady Jael Killigrew was closely attended by Digby Bonython, and she seemed not at all to mind. She had shocked us by coming down to supper in a gown of tissue of gold lined with velvet, so low-cut that her breasts were scarcely covered. Her eyebrows were plucked and her eyelids fresh treated with kohl, and she wore perfumed lavender gloves. My stepmother did not dance as yet after her illness, and my father constantly led out Mrs Gertrude Arundell, Jack of Trerice’s mother.

Mr Killigrew was in his liveliest, most arrogant mood, and insisted that everyone should dance a new dance he had brought from court called a lavolta, whose chief step was a high leap in the air. What with demonstrating and then dancing it, his face became flushed, his thick blond hair fell over his face, sweat glistened round his nostrils and in the cleft of his moustache. It was strange to see him so animated yet with so little animation in his prominent eyes.

Sue Farnaby had avoided me all day. In the play she had been one of the signs of the Zodiac, and she still wore her parchment mask and two wooden fishes on her shoulders. There was a jig, and I went suddenly across and caught her by the hand and we were into the dance before she could stop. For a while she seemed to be making little effort, but after a few minutes she brightened her step. I saw Jonathan Arundell of Tolverne watching us.

“I have been wanting to speak to you all day,” I said.

She looked up at me quickly but did not speak.

“After last night,” I said, “it was almost more than I could do to ask you for a dance.”

She giggled slightly.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was on account of me that you were asked here and I realise now it was wrong of me to ask. I hope some day some day to be able to put things right between your family and mine. I can only do my best.”

She seemed to be thinking of this as we went round again but when the dance came to an end and we paused breathless before another began and still she did not speak, I said:

“Sue …”

She patted my arm. “Maugan, dear, it was naughty of me to deceive you but I am Gertrude Carew.”

I went very red. “All evening I thought … Which is Sue, then? “

“She says I was not to tell anyone.”

“Did you change your costume on purpose to deceive folks? “

“Sue wanted it. I don’t know why.”

Jonathan Arundell had come up. “Gertrude, is that mask not irksome on you now, dear? I shouldn’t think jigging in it so comfortable.”

She laughed. “Nor is it comfortable to Maugan, Jonathan.” She pulled off the mask and showed dishevelled hair and a shiny happy face. “I must withdraw and cool myself.”

“Do you know which is Sue Farnaby?” I asked when she had moved away.

“I think she left the room a half hour gone,” Jonathan said. “She was the black girl in the turban. I think she went to take the colour off her face.”

I walked slowly down the passage leading to the north wing. The wind outside was not strong tonight, but every now and then it would raise its voice like a lost dog and howl round the big straggling house. I thought of this building teeming with life and colour and music and little human beings, and all about us were the great empty spaces of sea and river and sky and wood and star. In the grim castle at the end of the promontory two men remained on guard through the night as a precaution against surprise; but in the dark of the night it was impossible for that watch to be sure. The safest protection and the surest watch dog was the wind and the treacherous unquiet sea, for ever ready to pounce on men and drive them on the Manacles of Dodman Point. They said there was the wreck of an Armada ship to be seen on the north coast not far from the Arundell house at Trerice. Wrecks from that Armada still littered the sea-coast below Dover, so passengers to and from France did not pass unreminded.

There was a light burning in one of the rooms upstairs, and from it Annora Job came out, her fair hair in long plaits down the front of her bodice. She glanced at me with slant eyes and went on down the passage. As I reached the other end I heard a door close again and saw that someone else, a man, had come out of the same room. It looked like Tresithney Treffry, my cousin from Fowey.

At the end of the passage were two rooms given over to the mummers where we could dress; they were no more than attics under the eaves. One had been set aside for the men and one for the women. The men’s room was empty except for piles of clothes; in the women’s room was Sue Farnaby. By the light of the single candle she was combing her hair before the square piece of mirror propped against a wooded box. She turned round when she heard me.

She was still wearing the borrowed frock but she had washed the burnt cork off her face and hands.

I said: “I was confused tonight. I thought you were Gertrude and Gertrude you.”

“She has just told me. Don’t you know I am an inch taller?” “I thought it was the shoes.”

“And she is two inches more round the waist.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That we differ or that you made the mistake?”

“That I made the mistake.”

She put the comb down but did not look at me again. “I think I was wrong to speak to you as I did last night, Maugan.”

“Oh, no, it was well deserved. I’m ashamed for my family.” “Gertrude says it was you who got me invited here.”

“Well … Yes.”

“It was kindly meant.”

“I wanted to see you again. So perhaps it was selfish.”

“I don’t think that selfish. I’ve enjoyed it here.”

“You can stay another seven or eight days yet.”

“I’ll have to go when Gertrude goes. I think it will be before January.”

“What will you do then?”

“I don’t know. Something will come. Do not spoil your Christmas with our worries.”

“Won’t you come back to the dance?”

“I wanted to take the black off my face. Already it has made this lace dirty.”

“You still have a mark on your ear.”

“Where?” She turned. “Where? I can’t see it.”

“No, not there. It’s very little.”

She picked up the cloth towel. “You take it off for me, will you, Maugan?”

I stood beside her; I was two or three inches the taller and I lifted away a piece of her black hair and rubbed the towel gingerly round the rim of her ear. I rested my hand on her shoulder and it was like touching something magic. I felt sick with pleasure. Her breath was on my cheek. I wanted life and time to stop.

I laughed loudly and stepped away. “There, all’s welll” I swallowed and dropped the towel and turned away.

“Thank you, Maugan. Let’s go down.”

She took my hand and we went slowly along the first passage and turned into the second. Here we surprised Stevens the footboy who was kissing one of Carminow’s daughters. They broke off and fled when we came round the corner.

I said: “Not all are dancing.”

“It’s a merry house. I hope the Carews will stay over into January.”

“When is Gertrude marrying Jonathan Arundell?”

“In May. She’ll be 15 then.”

“So shall I be. I’m 15 in February. And you?”

She said: “I was 15 last month. Soon we shall all be old.”

“I can’t bear the thought of your being old.”

Her hand tightened on mine. “I wish I were a man. I could go out into the world and make my fortune or at the least try to make it I could help my father and mother in some bigger way. A woman is such a useless thing!“

“No!“

She said: “I have known for years that nearly all my friends are different circumstanced from me. It was by accident perhaps that I made such friends. My mother knew yours and she knew also the Bonythons and the Arundells. So it happened that I sometimes often~ame to be invited where my father and mother were not, because I was of a suitable age for their children, because my manners were not amiss, because I have been taught well. But all the time there was this difference which now my father’s bankruptcy or your father’s ruthless ways has pointed. I’m not of their world, Maugan, and I never shall be.”

“Do you think I am?”

“Well … I don’t suppose in your case it will make so much difference. Although you your mother is unknown, your father is the biggest man in all these parts. He’ll be able to establish you in some way; or you will be of value to him here, While he lives you cannot want, And if he dies you will remain a Killigrew, with relatives in the highest places in the land …”

As we got to the great hall Belemus came out with a jangle, for he was wearing the cap and bells of a jester.

“Ah-ha! ” he said on seeing us. “There’s more than one skirmish going on about the house this night. My, your tongue must be black, Maugan.”

“What do you mean?”

He peered at Sue and laughed and went bounding along the passage.

I said: “I’m sorry for my cousin. Becoming a jester has shaken his wits.”

She stopped and looked up at me with that sober elfin stare. Then she opened the door into the hall. At once all the light and heat and noise rushed out like a furnace flame. They were dancing a round dance, and my father and his guests were in figures of eight at one end of the floor, while the mummers and servants were at the other. Job and Carminow and Foster were gulping beer out of the barrel by the further door; my mother was talking to Parson Merther who had come to call the younger children to bed; in a corner beyond the fire” place Henry Knyvett and Lady Jael and Digby Bonython were at dice together. One of the candelabra had slipped askew and the candles were smelling rank and dripping grease: it was the game in that particular figure of eight so to manoeuvre that your partner was hit by the grease and you were not. Three dogs had slipped in through an unguarded door and were quarrelling over the bones of the swans which had been thrown on the floor.

Sue, who had released my hand when Belemus came out, took it again.

“D’you wish to join in?” I shouted.

“No, let’s stay here and watch.”

I was happy just then, feeling her fingers in mine. I was content that she was my friend again and not at all concerned that Belemus’s conclusions were wrong or to think how much happier I might have been if they had been right.

Mr Killigrew sat up all that night dicing with a succession of his guests. They one by one took themselves off to bed until at dawn he was left only with Lady Jael and Digby Bonython. He was in pocket on the night, and so was happy about it, but as a consequence few stirred until well into the afternoon of the following day, which was St John’s. At dusk John and Sinobia’~nys arrived. He was three weeks younger than I but she was just 21. They matched with the Boscawens, except that Sinobia was pretty and featherheaded while Grace Boscawen was plain and intelligent. In the evening there was another procession, headed by the Lord of Misrule and tonight he was followed by a hobby horse, who was Rose the groom, and after him came Maid Marion, our kennel man, Long Peter, the tallest man in the house, dressed in woman’s clothes. It was the night for practical jokes. Someone sawed the back legs of Penrudduck’s stool and melted the ends of two candles on to the stumps, so that when he sat down, he collapsed backwards into the fireplace. Little Odelia Killigrew was terrified of spiders, and her brothers John and Thomas captured three hairy ones out of a loft and released them on her platter just as she was about to eat. Six of the servants were served with small beer which turned out to be cow urine.

Nor were the guests exempt. Jack Arundell was given a meat pie which contained a live mouse. This ran along the table and caused upset wine cups and shrieks of laughter. Digby Bonython’s chair was smeared with wet paint. Henry Knyvett contrived to set off a firework under the table between Lady Jael and himself, but Lady Jael was too concerned for the sparks on her skirt to join in the loud laughter.

The next night, which was Holy Innocents’ night, we danced ‘Kiss in the Ring’,‘The Spanish Lady’,‘Lumps of Pudding’ and ‘Up Tails All’. Most of these were kissing dances, and I kissed Sue five times. But each time she turned her cheek and it was not as exciting as that moment in the dressing-room holding her shoulder. Meg Levant with one kiss had spoiled me for cheek kissing for ever.

My father had been shamelessly pursuing Mrs Gertrude Arundell of Trerice all the week, so that the least of us could not miss his intentions; I pitied my stepmother who had little choice but to sit through it all. Jack was boiling, and I could see that he would take his mother away as soon as ever he could. Another affray, subtler and more suspicious, was that between Digby Bonython and Lady Jael, who was far from being so correct as Mrs Arundell. I did not know until near the end of the holiday whether my great uncle Sir Henry was aware of what was going on, but in the middle of the first week in January, Belemus came to me in delight and told of a great quarrel which had taken place that morning.

The Carews and Jonathan Arundell of Tolverne and Sue rarnaby left on the last day of December. The day before they left a dozen of us went over the neck of land dividing the house from the promontory of Pendennis and climbed the hill to the castle. It was a clear bright day with a north-westerly breeze flicking a few white waves beyond the shelter of the bay.

Carminow let us in and we climbed the narrow spiral steps to the topmost turret. In later years I have seen some of the big residential castles of England, and realise that compared with them Pendennis might be more properly called a fort. We admired the guns in the ramparts, walked round the walls, chatting and laughing together. Some wanted to see the dungeons under the keep, but Sue said she had no taste for cells and she would like to climb down the rocks to the edge of the water. I said I would go with her.

It was a scramble, but when we got down we were in the sun and quite sheltered from the wind. For a while we sat there watching a barque from Amsterdam furling her sails as she came slowly into the harbour. Neither of us spoke, but as the warmth seeped into us Sue unfastened the tie of her cloak. She knew she was leaving on the morrow.

After a long silence she said: “I have a feeling it will be the last time I ever come here to Arwenack, I mean. It has been a wonderful week, Maugan, in spite of what went before.”

I said: “Write to me, will you, when you have time? I want to hear from you.”

She nodded. “But I’m not very smart with a pen.”

“I’ll come and see you. After all you’re only at the head of the river. It will be quite easy to take a boat and go up with the tide.”

But I think we both knew it wouldn’t be so easy, neither writing nor meeting, and we both knew that, even if we contrived both, it would not be the same as the week just gone. My heart felt like lead. I desperately wanted to say something important to her or to get some declaration from her before it was too late; but my tongue would not frame the sentences. What I felt was not something you could blurt out in a few words, but I had not the wit or the experience to frame them in a way that I imagined would be acceptable to her; the alternative was silence.

There is no ache like the ache of youth. I knew Arwenack would never be so empty for me again as it was going to be tomorrow.

She said gaily: “Would you like to be a sailor, Maugan?”

“I think so. I’d like to go west and fight the Spaniards.”

“My father says voyages of purchase or reprisal swallow up more sailors than they breed.”

“Has your father been to sea?”

“Yes, he went twice with Captain Amidas to the Canaries.”

I stared bleakly out at the horizon on which were two vessels hull down. “And did he like it?”

“Not so much that he was not willing to leave it afterwards to others. He says that some come home with wooden legs and some with none, leaving body and all behind, and that those who return learn little but to eat tallow and drink stinking water from the ship’s pump,”

“Some gain honour and a great name.”

She also was staring over the water. I think neither of us was attending seriously to what the other said.

“I wish that I were older.”

“It will come, Maugan.”

“Perhaps not soon enough.”

Both the ships on the horizon were now closer in.

“We must go,” Sue said. “Dinner will be on the table. The rich man’s guests must curtsey and say ‘Thank you, God be with you,’ and your serving men will be ready with the wines and the meats and we shall all be called to say grace.”

She got up to leave but I did not move.

“Maugan.” She held out her hand.

I took it and got up; she smiled at me. I bent and kissed her cheek, which she turned to me. I moved my head quickly and kissed her lips. It was a poor kiss, a child’s kiss with a man’s meaning in it, one stolen rather than given.

She smiled past me. Her lips trembled and she said: “I had wild dreams last night that the Spanish were here. I dreamed of snakes and angels. D’you know what that means?”

“No.”

“It’s an omen of some sort. Maugan, I’m afraid. Afraid for the future. Will you take this and keep it for remembrance?”

She unclasped a small gilt bracelet from her wrist.

“I’ll keep it, Sue. Here, will you take this stone, it’s all I have? “

“I’ll keep it always.”

We began to climb slowly back out of that warm corner of the world, up towards the castle.

Young John, my eldest halfbrother, who was now 13, was climbing down the rocks towards us followed by Thomas and Odelia.

“Did you see that?” he called as he came within hearing. “She’s Frances of Fowey being chased by a Spanish galley, Carminow says. From Blavet, Carminow says.”

We swung round. The second ship had turned away, and from here one could not tell her identity.

“Carminow says she’s been lurking off here all week; two barques, he says, was chased by her yesterday and were forced to hazard themselves almost on the cliffs to be free.”

Thomas and Odelia were chattering beside him, but Sue and I gazed out at the sea with not a word to say.

“Carminow says if she had come another half mile he would have fired on her. I wish she had, don’t you? The guns have not been fired since April last when they stayed a suspicious Frenchman. D’you remember, we were reading from the Georgics and Ink-horn would not let us go to the window and see! “

“Part of your dream,” I said to Sue in an undertone.

“Yes,” she said. “Part of my dream.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

For me that was the last of Christmas, though I played my part to the fag-end. By the first days of January our party was winnowed away. All the Arundells had gone, and Digby and Alice Bonython Digby with a flea in his ear, having trespassed, not without a welcome, on Sir Henry Killigrew’s preserves.

Perhaps now looking back T am more aware than I was at the time of some feverishness in my father’s festive mood. It emerged more than ever as the first days of January came in, for he tried to hold each parting guest a while longer. As Twelfth Night drew near preparations were set afoot for a special evening to bring our Christmas to its close. If the weather favoured, there was to be a bonfire out of doors with some fireworks my father had bought in London cheap after one of the court festivities had been rained off. The Lord of Misrule was to be dethroned, with lots of horse-play, and an effigy of him was to be burned on the bonfire.

But the project seemed ill-wished from the first. It was as if the enclosed, blinkered, private festive days were too near their end and the cold sharp edges of winter and reality were already pushing their way into our lives. In the morning three boys Devon came into the harbour to join the Frances of Fowey, and later two barques, one from Bremen and one from Dieppe, made a cluster in the crook of the bay which demanded my father’s urgent attention. He was busy till dinner time. In the afternoon Thomas Rosewarne returned from Truro with news of difficulties over the disposal of Treworgan, the Farnaby House, which someone was now trying to seize by execution of a bailiff’s order on a debt owed by my father. In the evening Sir Walter Ralegh arrived.

We were just ready to sit down to supper, the cloths laid, the cold dishes on the table, when Stevens and Penruddock came quickly up to Mr Killigrew, both sweating with the need to tell urgent news. Mr Killigrew had no time to move or issue orders before our visitor came into the room on clanking feet, followed by his personal servant, while two other servants camp no farther than the door.

“I disturb you,” he said. “Why, Sir Henry, and my lady. Mistress Killigrew, your servant.” He lifted his eyes briefly to the decorations. “I had forgot it was still Christmas, Mr Killigrew, pray excuse me.”

After the silence all was commotion. However much Sir Walter, drawing off his gloves and warming his hands before the fire, might protest that he wished in no way to disturb us, his presence was like a tiger shark thrust into a pool of minnows. Although he was not above six feet in height, the old illusion was again created that he was taller than anyone else in the room.

It was not just his reputation, nor was it his voice which was thin and rather high with West country over-tones. Nor was it any charm of manner for he smiled seldom and his manners barely hid an impatience to be done with the courtesies of the evening.

It seemed he had been at a Stannary Court at Helston and had been charged by the Privy Council to report on the fortifications of Pendennis on his way home. This he proposed to do in the first light of morning, having lain here, so that he might also visit St Mawes later in the morning and be at Fowey by this hour tomorrow. As my father said after his departure, Sir Walter, in his offices of Lord Lieutenant of the county, Lord Warden of the Stannaries and member of Parliament for St Michael, did nothing but good for the county in his appointments, but his visits to it were always in haste and he always seemed glad to be gone.

My grandmother, on hearing of his arrival, hastened down to be of the party, and no one dared proceed with the jokes that had been planned. Later it was heard that the bonfire and the fireworks had been cancelled because Sir Walter thought they might start a false alarm of a Spanish invasion.

Sir Walter ate sparingly and drank less. He talked much in fluent French to Lady Jael who alone bloomed under his conversation. But in a few minutes my father excused himself to his other guests and he and Ralegh and Sir Henry went off together, followed by my grandmother, who refused to be left out, and Henry Knyvett, spavin-shanked and skull-capped, carrying his wine cup.

For an hour games were played but everything had gone out of the night, and I wandered moodily off. At the withdrawing chamber door I heard voices, and Carminow came out.

“Where’s Wilky?” Stephen Wilky was my father’s personal servant.

“I don’t know, but I think he is in the hall.”

“Mr Killigrew has been pulling the bell and no one has answered it. Tell Wilky to bring the map of Europe from Mr Killigrew’s private chamber.”

I nodded and ran off down the passage, but after a moment’s hesitation fetched the map myself.

They were grouped round the long oak table at the end of the room, Ralegh at the head of it. “… if you are aware, Sir Henry,” he was saying, “whom you are suggesting we make peace with, for in this you cannot negotiate with Spain, but only with the man who speaks for Spam.”

“Difficult, I’m aware, but not impossible “

“I would have thought more and more impossible. Philip is a fanatic on the verge of mania. Look at his ancestry. His parents were first cousins, both grandchildren of Ferdinand and Isabella. He carries in him hereditary taints. His grandmother, Juana the Mad, lived three parts of her life in a melancholy torpor. His father, for all his gross appetites and power of mind and body, became in middle life a prey to moods of religious exaltation and black despair. Philip might make a peace, but it would only be on terms that a fanatic would approve.”

“Burghley is not unaware of the hazards,” Sir Henry said. “But throughout his life, in spite of all, Philip has striven for peace with England. He cannot be unaware of the great need for a respite in Europe, for time to let religious passions cool “

Ralegh interrupted impatiently: “Do not forget his own claim to our throne. Plantagenet blood and a direct descent from John of Gaunt, son of Edward III. He was married to Mary Tudor and has already virtually been King of England for a short time. And Mary Stuart by her last will disinherited her son in favour of Philip. He still dreams of inheriting England when Elizabeth dies, or of conquering England before. As he grows older and our queen still lives, his mind will turn more than ever to conquest.”

My father saw me. “Oh, you’ve the map, boy.”

“Were all else in favour,” Ralegh went on, “this is no moment to make peace. Had our forward policy been favoured after the Armada was beat back, Spain would have been brought to her knees. We should have been dictating peace, not feebly negotiating it through secret channels. It is too late for peace, Sir Henry. Four years ago Spain was in dire distress, her fleets scattered and destroyed, her coasts open to the massive counter-stroke which we could have mounted the next year. But instead we did all by quarter measures, by petty invasions and timid retreats. Now we are no longer in the strong position we were.”

My father began to unroll the map along the table; the others held it down with their hands but as yet paid little attention to it; Sir Walter was not now to be stopped.

“The Spanish are a noble and a clever race. If one thing was made plain to them by our defeat of their Armada it was that our ships, our training, our gunnery were better than theirs. Since then they have been building feverishly and every one of their new ships is built on English lines or putting to use the lessons of their first Armada. In some cases even the designers and builders have been English. Twelve great galleons, called after the apostles, have been built in Biscayan ports, another nine laid down in Portugal. There are at least another twenty nearing completion, with many flyboats, galleys and pinnaces to escort them. Look what happened in ‘91, when Howard and his fleet was nearly caught off the Azores. That was new tactics, not old. And the only one to stand and fight, by the living God, was my friend and dear Kinsman, Richard Grenville! It was two of the ‘apostles’ that in the end destroyed him. No … the defeat of the Armada did not signal the end of the Spanish navy, gentlemen, it marked its beginning! “

My father made love to his moustache. “All that may be better reason to come to peaceful agreement with Spain rather than a bitter fight to the death.”

“And I tell you, they’ll not make peace now on any terms acceptable to us. Not under Philip, not under the new leaders of the fleet. If you and the Cecils believe otherwise you are living in a fool’s paradise!”

In the hostile pause which followed Lady Killigrew turned her head and saw me. “Go, Maugan, this is no place for you. You intrude.”

“If you please, ma’am …”

Ralegh looked across at me. “Who is this boy?”

“My son. My base son, Maugan.”

He seemed in an instant to forget me and stared down, frowning at the map.

“Look,” he said. “The Spanish now hold Blavet on the Brittany coast. Troops can be massed there and brought over at will, not in helpless barges to be shot at or rammed by the Dutch. We have sent a new army to Brittany this autumn, but in November the Spaniards landed upwards of 2,000 fresh troops; they outnumber us three to one. Of course King Henry has promised to join us, but he will not; he is not ready and without him Norris is too weak to hold the field, certainly too weak to attack … Now look up here. Because the Dutch are enfeebled Denmark rules. Foreign ships must strike their topsails to Danish men-of-war as a token of her su-premacy. She possesses all the rich Norwegian fisheries and can close the Baltic to us at will. At present there is a minor on the throne. Protectorates are dangerous as we know too well. We suspect and I believe that Denmark has signed a secret treaty with Spain … Then consider the position in Ireland ...”

So he went on, dealing in turn with each country as its position and policy affected our struggle with Spain. I noticed that the hands with which he pointed to places on the map were long and slender, the hands of an artist rather than a soldier.

“Henry of France has undertaken to make no separate peace with Spain,” my uncle said. “Verbally, in a direct promise to me. And by treaty last June. He can gain nothing by breaking it.”

“Henry walks on a wire,” said Ralegh. “He fights his own Catholic Leaguers everywhere, the Spanish in Brittany or in Flanders, the Savoyards in Provence. In Normandy rival parliaments sit at Caen and Rouen. North of the Loire the Duc de Mercoeur is his bitter enemy. Picardy is for the Catholic League. Burgundy is a stronghold for the Duc de Moyenne. Champagne is governed by young Guise. Even in Navarre and his ancestral lands he is not unchallenged. And he distrusts the English whom he asks for help. You cannot expect any undertaking given in such plight to last beyond its usefulness.”

“Damme, even if he’s but half a king,” Mr Killigrew said, “there’s no one left to challenge him. And I believe he’ll see his best hope of prevailing is with our help.”

Ralegh drew moodily at his pipe. “The Estates meet in the Louvre this month. The Spanish Ambassador I think will be instructed to revive the idea of the Duc de Guise as King of France, with the Infanta as his consort. Such an idea would divide France more than ever, but with Spanish aid it could prevail … Henry has one counter to that, and one only.”

My uncle shrugged but did not speak.

Ralegh said: “Henry could counter it by turning Catholic.”

“By Godl” said my father; “he wouldn’t darer”

“I had heard the rumour too,” Sir Henry said impatiently. “He might gain much by so doing, but it would be such a vile betrayal of all that he and his people have been fighting for that I do not believe he would seriously consider it even if his conscience permitted him to do so. He would be discredited for ever. A commoner might do it and live. A king would no longer be considered fit to be a king.”

“Well, I do not think Henry is such a zealot that he will not weigh the issues carefully nor should I blame him if he did.”

“You would not blame him?”

“I would not blame him for weighing up the gain and loss. No.”

“Even in an issue of religious conscience, cousin, for which blessed martyrs have burned at the stake?”

“I think we are apt to forget that all our grandfathers were Catholics. I do not believe they went to eternal damnation because of it. We all try to serve the same God.”

Ralegh did not seem put out by the shocked and angry glances round the table. I had heard before that he was capable of saying dangerous and outrageous things. My father, who admired and envied him, said it amused him to be outspoken. But these remarks were on the verge of blasphemy and on the verge of Reason.

Talk had broken out at the table again, and Sir Walter, still in spate, was speaking of his wish to send other expeditions to the New World; but for me, and perhaps for all there, the alchemy had gone out of his words.

“If you read the Spanish documents of the last forty years you will find that they have more than once almost reached the hidden empire of the Incas but been driven back by hostile tribes, by disease, or by treachery among themselves. There can be no doubt that between the Amazon and the Orinoco lies the lake of Manoa, a lake conceivably as large as all Europe, and on the shores of the lake is the city of Manoa with its gold mines. This dorado, as the Spanish call it, is surrounded by mountains and peopled by intelligent and resourceful natives who, from evil experience, loathe Spain and the white man. Therein is England’s opportunity.”

“Guiana now, not Virginia,” said Sir Henry.

“Yes. And of equal import for the future. Look on this map again. Which are the three countries of the civilised world with long western seaboards and a seafaring tradition? … Spain, France and England. Of these only Spain has made use of her opportunities; and look at her strength, look at her wealth! In spite of all her setbacks she remains mistress of half Europe. And why? Not because of her own natural resources but because of this life blood of treasure which she draws from across the ocean. Look at the spoils of this single ship Madre de Dios. which Cecil and I and your brother William are still computing. Imagine what England could be if she drew such treasure regularly and as her right! All that opportunity we should now lose if we made peace with Spain.”

“My uncle Peter was of the same view,” muttered my father. “Rest his soul, he was an adventurous rascal, always fighting; and I’d have you know he proposed a voyage to the Grain Coast and the Ivory Coast ten years before Hawkins made it. It was not his fault he didn’t go, it was lack of the means to mount an expedition.”

“And such work of adventure should offer far more than prizes and spoil,” said Ralegh. “The Spanish in their empires seek only gold and diamonds and spoil. It is a short view. I would set colonies of English down to live and breed and make their homes there and to live in amity with the savage and the Indian.”

Just then my grandmother turned and caught my eye again, and I knew I must go or suffer a beating. I took two backward steps towards the door. And then I found that Ralegh was looking at me. I was suddenly pinned there as if shot by an arrow.

“You go to join your playmates, boy?”

“No, sir,” I stammered. “Leastwise not willingly. But I must must go to bed.”

“Stay if you wish,” he said. “We are not talking secrets.”

So, very astonished, I stayed. ‘

My grandmother looked at me once more, and I knew that sooner or later she would take it out of me for disobeying her.

But I had to wait until my fifteenth birthday before she paid me back.

CHAPTER NINE

On my fifteen birthday my father apprenticed me as a clerk to his cousin, Mr Chudleigh Michell of Truro, who was a merchant and brother of the John Michell who had helped dispose of Captain Elliot’s haul.

‘fit is time you were striking out for yourself, boy,” he said staring at himself uneasily in his hand mirror. “It will be of service to you, this experience; and who knows, you may make a niche for yourself there; he needs a handy boy to help him.”

I left Arwenack the following week. Little Odelia wept bitterly, and I was sad myself because it seemed the end of my childhood and the end of a phase of life. Chudleigh Michell was a thin sharp-nosed man with a pock-marked skin and rheumy eyes. His wife was deaf, though only 26, and the five children, the eldest barely seven years old, seemed to take advantage of her handicap by crying all the while. I had a garret under the eaves, and the house was so built that the wails of the babies rose up like the cries of lost lambs.

More than anything else in this changed life were the different noises and the different smells. At Arwenack one had grown accustomed to the smell of dogs and damp rushes and new bread and sour tallow and burning chestnut logs and sea breezes and salt air. In Truro the river smelt of mud and tar and rope, and the house of babies and urine, and the warehouse, which was really a part of the house, of woollen cloths and hides and wine. I heard less of the wind, and when it blew its voice was muted; and I heard much of running water, for a feat flowed under the house. The most unpleasing noise of all was of a founder in the house next door who cast candlesticks and copper chafing dishes, for after they had been cast he would turn them until they were smooth and bright, and the shrill scraping set one’s teeth on edge.

I had had the hope that to compensate for the change I might see something of Sue Farnaby, but my hours, which stretched from seven in the morning until nine at night with half an hour for dinner, left neither leisure nor energy to go far afield. Mostly my work was ledger work and copying in the office and handling the bales of cloth or the hides in the warehouse below. Chudleigh Michell exported coarse undyed woollen cloth and hides to Brittany and imported unsweetened wines in return. For a man of 35 who had begun from nothing he was doing well.

It was May before I had a day off except for Sunday when church-going tied me close to St Mary’s and I went at once to find the farm. First directions were quite wrong, for it was not by the river at all but in a fold of the hills behind St Clement’s Point. It was a poor place when I got there, muddy with recent rains, the track to it overgrown, the gates in need of repair. The woman who came to the door wiping her floury hands was lean enough and startlingly like Sue.

No, she was not Mrs Farnaby, she was Mrs Maris. No, the Farnabys no longer lived here: Mr Farnaby had died in March, and Mrs Farnaby had gone back to Tiverton to work for a cousin who was a lace-maker. No, Susanna had not gone with her; she had taken service at Tolverne, having been offered a place there as Elizabeth Arundell’s personal maid and companion.

I walked back to the town in some discomfort, for the name of Tolverne had come to have sinister meanings for me. It was a bad house, I thought, an unlucky, unhappy house for Sue to be connected with. I remembered too what Belemus had said on the way home after the fight. “Don’t you know that you have spent all afternoon enamouring with the little girl Thomas most fancies for himself?”

I saw nothing of my family and heard only from time to time of their doings; but I learned that my father had succeeded in selling Treworgan in spite of the claims of his creditors. It was the second manor he had had to sell within the year, and Chudleigh Michell was of the opinion that at least two more would have to go. I learned too of the great unpopularity of the Killigrew name. Over and over in the first half-year I saw the change in countenance that came over people when I told them. Almost always their first question was, ‘From Arwenack?’ and if \1 answered yes, it was like confirming some mortal affront.

The town of Truro, though it has grown in my lifetime, was then no more than six streets; but even those I hardly explored, being content to spend my few leisure minutes on the quay, which was built out on the tongue of land splitting the streams Allen and Kenwyn. It was early June before I wandered north of the town where one or two houses and shacks had begun to climb the dusty hill amidst the gorse bushes and the foxgloves and the litter of bluebells.

When I was clear of them I sat on a boulder and looked down on the roofs of the town from which a few lazy whorls of smoke curled upwards like a fire that is almost out. A woman with a dog was picking flowers among the stumps of trees to my right, and beyond her four men were cutting down another scrub oak.

One thing I greatly missed in my new life was the sense of being up with events. Ships were always putting in to the Fat with news which had not yet reached London we were their first landfall and the constant coming and going of people great and small with tidings from Court or from the Indies made Arwenack something of an exchange and a clearing house. Here in Truro I was cut off from everything but the gossip of the town.

I got up from the stone as the woman with the dog came towards me. It was Katherine Footmarker.

She had already seen me, so I could not turn away. “Maugan Killigrew! I didn’t think to find you here!”

Perhaps it was the sun, but her sallow skin seemed to have flushed. She was wearing a cloak with the hood thrown back, and her hair was half down in a coil that disappeared under the cloak. Stumbling I explained.

“Well, so we are neighbours then, or more or less. I have a little place near the foot of the hill. Are you walking my way?”

It was hard to think of en’ excuse, so I turned and went with her. I felt again she had this spell over me, because sight of her had made my heart thump.

“After you played saviour to me I thought the mill might grow perilous with all your father’s strubbers roamin’ the countryside; so I came to Truro. Things would have gone hard with me here had I not been taken in by a friend, Mistress Larkin, who blows hot and cold in her friendship for me, and this, praise be, was one of the hot times. Alas, it was her last exercise in charity for in April she died, and I live in her property now, a small matter on sufferance since it is not accorded a good sign that my friend should pass away so 107

sudden but at least I am not molested or have not been as yet. And there are enough brave folks in the district who will come and buy my simples.”

She asked about Arwenack and how Mrs Killigrew was; what my father had said when he came home. She asked why I had been apprenticed to a pinch-purse like Chudleigh Michell who must she thought have been pock-marked from birth as a prophecy of what he was to become. When we got to her house, which was a tiny cob cottage built for support between two trees, she said:

“Will you come in, Maugan?”

“I have to go back. I must be back by five.”

“Since we’re neighbours and strangers in this town, will you come and see me again some time?”

“… Mr Michell is strict about his hours.”

“I believe that …” She put her basket down. “These will cure warts, and, suitably mixed with other ingredients, will avert chill bladders, strangury and colic … D’you still think I am a witch, Maugan?”

I did not know where to look.

“My father was an apothecary,” she said. “I have cousins who are apothecaries still. But my father taught me more than he ever taught them. There are ways and wisdoms that can only be passed from man to woman and woman to man. He learned me these before he died. It is perhaps a small kind of magic; but I don’t think it is witchcraft. I don’t feel myself a witch. I fail utterly to fly or to change my shape. I have experimented to try to change Moses, here, into a toad, as I was accused of doing in Penryn, but again I failed. I don’t think you will come to harm associatin’ with me. I have never wantonly harmed anyone in my life, and I certainly would not harm you. If you are lonely ever or in need of help, will you come?”

“Yes.”

“After all,” she said, “I am in your debt. Never forget that.”

Perhaps I was more lonely than I knew, for I saw her again, once or twice by accident and then once or twice by design. Deep down I still did not know whose design-it was, mine or hers no more did I yet know whether I had released her at Arwenack of my own choice. But I found my visits a break from the monotony of book-keeping and letter copying. They helped to keep my wits alive.

She lent me books. The Most Pleasant History of Tom-a—Lincoln, the Red Rose Knight. The Noble Birth and Gallant Achievements of Robin Hood; in Twelve several Stories. These were books of a kind I had never seen in Arwenack, where all reading under Parson Merther was a drudgery. She lent me The Delightful History of Reynard the Fox and Rey-nardine his Son, every Chapter illustrated with a curious Device or Picture representing to the Eye all the material Passages. And she lent me The Compleat Book of Knowledge, compiled by Erra Pater, made English by W. Lilly, a heavy volume full of information on Astronomy, Medicine, Weather, History and Cooking.

With my twopence a week spending money I bought rushlights and read far into the night.

One day in her cottage I told her that the eldest Michell child had burnt her fingers on the stove and she said: “I’ll give you some salve to take back with you. It’s a simple diaculum and will take away the hurt. If you soothe the pain out of a wound it is halfway to healing.” She went to a shelf. “Perhaps you’d like me to show you how I make it, then you can assure the Michells lest they think the ingredients unholy.”

“I have never told them I come here.”

“They’ll mislike it?”

“I don’t know.”

But I soon did know.

“Where?” said Mrs Michell cupping her ear. “Where did it come from? Who? Foot-what? Footmarker? … That woman! If she be a woman. No one be safe from her! Put that on my Emily’s fingers! Sooner I’d thrust ‘em in the fire ‘gain! Fire be where she did ought to be if Christian men and women knowed their duties! Toss ‘n out of window, boy … Nay, nay, come to think on it, fire is best. Wait now while I stir ‘n up, get a reg’lar blanze. Now then, toss’n in.”

“There’s no harm to it,” I said. “I saw it mixed. It is all clean herbs, pounded and blent.”

“What say? What? Green? Clean? Clean! Naught can be clean that she’s touched! She’s supped wi’ the Devil, sure ‘rough, and them as touches pitch … Throw it on the fire Maugan, if I tell Mr Michell ‘bout this …”

“You burn it if you want to,” I said.

“What? Whattre ye mumbling for? Speak up. Here, if ye’re feared to do it I will! “

Mrs Michell picked up a pair of tongs and with them gingerly clasped the pot I had brought. She dropped it and it rolled under a chair, but with a cry of fright and rage she 109

pursued it and caught it up again and at last dropped it into the fire. There it slowly turned black while the pot broke up and then suddenly flared into coloured flame.

“There!” she shouted in fear and triumph, waving the tongs in my face, while three of her babies cried piercingly. “There! What did I tell eel Eh? What d’you say? Mr Michell shall ‘ear of this!”

Chudleigh Michell said cautiously, picking at a pimple on his cheek: “Not as we’ve proof positive against she, but tis dangerous work, Maugan, tampering wi’ such like. What I say is, them as is not against Satan is like to be for ‘im. Witchcraft and such like is no call for ‘elf measures, and Mrs Michell’s rightly afeared for the mites. Five little souls we got in our charge, Maugan, and a sixth conceived lately. It don’t do to take chances, and I’ll thank you to keep away from such like. I’ve only had cause to beat you twice, Maugan, for lateness and such like; but this is devil’s work, and tis my duty not to spare the rod lest evil have got into ‘ee. Take off yer shirt.”

“Poor Maugan,” Mistress Footmarker said when I told her. “I am for ever causin’ you trouble. So we’ll not meet again.”

“Oh, we’ll meet. But I fear for your books. I hide them under the bed, but sometimes he roams about late at night and he may surprise me.”

“I care nothing for the books if they please you, but have a care for yourself. He has the cruel face of a weak man.”

“I must stay with him two years; then I shall be old enough to seek work in London.”

She said thoughtfully: “That may be best. That may well be for the best.”

I hesitated and then, because she had been much on my mind, spoke about Sue. Katherine Footmarker listened atten-tively while she stirred the fire, which was burning turf and only smouldering on that dank July day. Then I found I had to tell her about my quarrel with Thomas Arundell and my reasons for it.

She laughed harshly. “So that was how you first came to me. But you’ll be much occupied, lad, if you try to kill every man who speaks the truth about your birth.”

“So my father said.”

“Did he? Well, for once he was speakin’ wisdom.”

“It was not what Thomas said of my birth, but what he said of my mother … Do you know my grandmother?”

“Lady Killigrew? Not but by reports. By reports, well.”

“I think it was through her I was sent here. She does not like me.”

The woman picked up a piece of the turf with the fire tongs and turned it over. “If there be a witch in Kerrier…”

“You’ll not get your fire to draw that way,” I said. “Turning turf over only encourages the smoke.”

She put the tongs down and straightened her back. “I don’t know where the bad comes from in the Killigrews. They have wit and charm, most of ‘em, and courage and a forthcomin’ manner, and sometimes great good looks. But there’s a wild and wasteful streak, like a crack in a good wall and there’s a hint of slipperiness and of the weathercock about them too. D’you know what some folk say about the Killigrew coat of arms?”

“No.”

“That it’s a two-headed eagle so that they can always look which way suits them best …”

All through the wet summer and autumn I visited her when I could. She was the one person I could talk to. The other apprentices of the town had fought shy of me as soon as they knew my name, and one or two attempts at a sort of persecution had not prospered for them, so they had learned to leave me alone. It was a bad year for everyone; the hay was ruined by storms and the harvest late and blackened by rain. Prices mounted, and midsummer wheat was 8s. a bushel. By the autumn it was unsafe to venture far out of the town because of the bands of desperate men who roamed the moors terrorising travellers and stealing sheep. The constables were afraid to proceed against them for they were so greatly outnumbered.

Confirmation came to the town that Henry IV, of Navarre and now France, had changed his religion and turned Catholic, as they had talked of at Arwenack. It meant, said my father when at last he came to see me, a new weighing of the struggle in Europe. Henry swore he would be true to his treaties, and the first effects of his apostasy had been to unite his people rather than divide them further; but he was not yet master of Paris; when he felt himself secure who knew which way he would jump?

Mr Killigrew said I was growing into a great beanstalk and I looked too sapless and scrawny; it was high time I came to Arwenack for a week or so; I had another half-sister, Elizabeth, born last week and no fuss at all, not like last year when they called in that woman from the mill.

There was to be nothing special about Christmas this year.

My father said it was time some of our guests invited us back. I asked him if he had seen or heard of the Arundells of Tolverne. He said he had seen some of them at Antony,the Carews’ place, in May, where he and Mrs Killigrew had gone for the wedding of Jonathan Arundell to Gertrude Carew, but the old man by which my father meant Sir Anthony was as queer as a jay-pie. He had refused to leave his home even to be present at the marriage ceremony, it was said that Lady Arundell had difficulty in getting him out of the house at all. “It’s the trees,” my father said. “They’ve been there too long, before ever the country was Christian. If I had that house I’d cut ‘em all down.”

When he left he slipped me two shillings and kissed me on the forehead. We were not a demonstrative family, and I did not remember when last he had done such a thing.

A week or so after his visit I went as far as Powder Street with a message for Mr John Michell and saw a crowd come up the narrow way going towards High Cross. In the middle of it was a stout man shackled and walking between two guards. There were three others with him, the rest were all sightseers following behind or others who pressed in to watch the procession pass.

“Who is it?” I asked of a notary’s apprentice.

“Don’t really know. They d’say he be a Romanish priest caught red-‘anded down to St Ives. He be going to be examined afore the Bishop of Exeter who’s up to parsonage house. I ‘ear tell he was caught wi’ a mass book an’ a cross ‘pan him. Tha’s all I d’ know.”

The stout man was Humphry Petersen whom I had seen rowing across the river with Sir Anthony ArundeH.

I was to travel home by wagon to Penryn and from there walk. Mr Michell personally saw me aboard with my pack, and said I must be back not later than 1st January. As the two-wheeled wagon began to move, he stood with his cap over one ear, picking at a spot on his chin, his narrow eyes following me suspiciously as if he thought I might jump off as soon as we rounded the first corner.

Indeed I got off, but not for three miles more until we had taken the long slow pull up from St Kea. Then when we stopped to give the five horses a breather I told the wagoner I was going no farther with him.

The track through the woods was miry with an the recent rains; crows and jackdaws were zigzagging over the bare treetops; in my path were trees bright with holly berries and young oaks with brown withered leaves and rusty fronds of bracken and here and there Aaron’s Beard powdering the branches. There was much rustling and stirring in the undergrowth, but I saw no man all the way to the ferry, and when I got there, glad to break at last from the overhanging wood, I had to knock four times at the cottage door to rouse the illfavoured ferryman.

There was welcome at Tolverne. Even Thomas’s smile, though grudging, parted his lips sufficient to show the stumps of the broken teeth. Sue Farnaby went scarlet and then white. The now Gertrude Arundell had not changed at all with marriage and was the same laughing bouncing girl.

- I must of course stay the night. To put me on until supper

they brought cold game pie and some powdered beef spread with Dijon mustard, and this was so appetising after the food in Truro that I ate it wolfishly. By the time it was finished, the rest of the family had drifted out of the dining-hall all except Sue Farnaby and young Elizabeth; and Elizabeth, in spite of hints from Sue, stayed on and on chattering.

Sue was not so pretty as I remembered her; she had dressed her hair in some different new way, and she had gone even thinner. But it didn’t matter, that was the strange thing, it didn’t matter at all.

Suddenly, forgetting Elizabeth, I said: “Sue, you are happy here? “

“Oh, yes, of course.” I knew then that she was not.

“I went to the farm behind Malpas where your aunt lives. She told me you were at Tolverne.”

“I came when my father died.”

“She told me. That was in May. But I haven’t been able to visit you before. I have so little time free that it has not been possible.”

Elizabeth had stopped prattling and was listening, looking from one to the other. She said: “Sue is very hapw here, except that Thomas is tiresome from time to time. I tell her to take no heed of him.”

There was an awkward pause.

“I take no heed,” Sue said lightly. “And I have you, my sweet, to guard over me.”

“He has been better since I told Jonathan. But Jonathan should put his foot down firm. After all he is well, he is almost master of Tolverne.”

We sat down twelve to supper that night at the main table: there were several relatives I did not remember having met before and as soon forgot. Sir Anthony did not come in until the meal was half finished, and then he appeared at the door in his dressing-gown, with a servant at his back carrying a candelabrum. I did not think he had changed much in looks but his presence cast long shadows of silence over the table, which had not been lively by Arwenack standards when he came in.

When the meal broke up, Thomas was with me; I wanted to shake him off and seek out Sue; but he said: “Come in here a minute,” and led me into another chamber where there was a spinning wheel and other evidence of women’s occupation.

“My dear cousin Jack has sent you?”

“Jack? “

“Jack Arundell of Trerice. I imagine he is employing you to spy on us.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He stared at me with his angry little eyes, which gleamed red in the light of the single candle. Slowly his expression calmed. “Oh, no matter then.”

“But it does matter. What are you talking of?”

“Nothing. Forget I spoke.”

“I can’t do that.”

He stared out of the window a moment and then flicked the curtain across. “My father, as you will have seen, is becoming of unstable mind.”

“Oh, no. Eccentric maybe …”

“If he is not incapable of looking after his affairs this year he will be so next. It is a rotting of the vital matter which is going on all the time. It is not to be wondered at.”

“What makes you say that?”

“We are a doomed family. Some of us at least. It is an evil seed in our inheritance. My grandfather’s two eldest brothers, Alexander and Richard, both became idiots and incapable of managing their affairs while still in their twenties. That was how my grandfather inherited. My father has been lucky: he is near fifty. So it will go on, I fancy.”

“Perhaps you take too gloomy a view.”

“Perhaps. But the disease has taken a religious turn in my father as it did in my uncle Thomas who went on a pilgrimage to Rome thirteen years ago and has never returned. That’s all. That’s why it’s more important.”

“Your father is deeply troubled over religion; many are, and it doesn’t mean they’re insane because of it. I think your father is swaying towards the old religion again.”

“Swaying! He would have us all swaying on the gibbet in Launceston gaol if he were not restrained … That’s why I thought you were a party to Jack of Trerice’s scheme to spy on him and have him attainted. You seem a likely type for Jack to employ.”

Thomas stood with his hands on his hips ready to fight, fair hair curling about his face. Already he was running to fat, and his chin was so smooth he could hardly have begun to shave. But he was no weakling.

I said: “I cannot for the second time abuse your hospitality.”

“What? Oh, I see; that way. You rushed at me unawares that time. Well, why did you come, then? To see Sue?”

“Why do you suppose Jack has any scheme to spy on you?”

Outside an owl was screeching. There was no moon tonight and I knew it would be very black among the trees.

“And if anything happens to my father,” he said, “look at Jonathan. Another such. Weakly and insecure; he’ll as like as not run on the rocks himself in one way or another … And then there’s me. Well, I tell you, I hate this house, for it’s dank and lush and ungodly. If it comes to me, I shall drop it through my fingers and move away. I’m not like th’ others, thank God. I take after my mother who’s solid Godolphin stock. If I have my way we’ll make an end of the Arundells here I “

“You’re not likely to have your way,” I said.

“All right, bastard, tell me why.”

But this time I would not be provoked. “Your brother is well enough and young. He’s just married and will have a family. They’ll inherit here, not you.”

The boy laughed harshly. “Jonathan … I wonder … That’s another unhealthful symptom of our family. My grandfather had three brothers and a sister: none of ‘em married. My father has two brothers and a sister: none of ‘em married. Well, you can work that out as you fancy. But I can tell you, whatever was wrong with them, it’s skipped met”

As he finished speaking his mother came in, and with her were Gertrude and Sue. Talk was general until just as she was leaving Sue was able to get a word alone with me. She whispered: “Meet me in the herb shed at eleven. Move quiet, for Elizabeth sleeps light.”

It was dark but not cold in the herb shed, and aromatic of thyme and rosemary and marjoram. I lost count of time waiting. There was one faint light I could see through the door and it helped to break the blackness. At last I heard her light footstep. I hissed faintly to show her I was there and she crept over to me. I made room for her beside me on a low bench and for a moment or two she was quite silent. There was a sweet sick delight in the moment for me: all the thrill of meeting shadowed by the realization that it might be the last meeting for months and that we were, by our lack of age and position and money, as far apart as ever.

Then she made some slight movement, and I realised she was shivering.

“Are you cold?”

She shook her head. I put my arm round her and felt her quivering against me.

She said: “Hold me, Maugan.”

I held her and felt an exaltation steal over me. It was like being a father and a lover and a prince all in one. I was strengthened and uplifted by her weakness until I could have sung.

“Sweet,” I said. “Sweet Sue. Sweet Sure, Beet love. Sweet darling. Sue, Sue, Sue.” It we:, a solve song to me as beautiful as the Song of SolQ=opl, I kissed her and found she was crying.

“Oh, my ‘~e,” I said. “Don’t cry. Don’t cry.” I half knelt beside her, trying to comfort her.

In a few minutes she said: “Sorry. I’m sorry. But it was seeing you again after so long. I was afraid you would g-go and I should have no word with you.”

“That wouldn’t have happened because I came only to see you.”

“You did? But I wondered, I never heard, I did not even know you had been to Aunt Kate’s, I thought you’d forgotten me. Why didn’t you write, Maugan?”

“Each week I thought I should be able to come, and each week could not. I thought there would be no welcome for me here, and therefore …” I tailed off, too dazed with her to be coherent. “Why are you so unhappy? There is Elizabeth and Gertrude …”

“Oh, I’m not unhappy. I know I’m lucky to be here; but it is the thought that my own home is broken up and win never return, and being away from my own people altogether, nothing of my own … And then it was seeing you. I’m sorry, Maugan. I’ll not embarrass you again.”

“And Thomas?” I said.

“Well, yes, he can be tiresome. But it’s nothing. Elizabeth should not have mentioned it.”

“Isn’t that really why you are uncomfortable here? … Sue, answer me.”

“Oh, what does it matter? I have other things. Let’s not spoil this moment.”

I took her hand and she stood up beside me. Her hand moved up to my shoulder. I drew her to me and kissed her, for the first time not like a boy but a man. She kissed me back, leaning against me. At that moment I could have conquered the world. I kissed her tenderly, fiercely, comfortingly, experimentally. It went to my head like a drug.

She began to speak against my shoulder. ‘ He has been three times to my room. Of course I have only allowed him the barest liberties under threat of screaming for help. But it is so degrading, I never know what to say, what to do …”

“Have you told Lady Arundell?”

“No, I dare not. If she knows he is seriously interested in me she’ll find some excuse to be rid of me. She has different plans for her favourite son.”

“But could you not go elsewhere?”

“My mother says she can earn barely enough to support herself and urges me to stay. The girls are kind; Jonathan is good; it’s something I can put up with.”

“Does he what does he say to you?” Already I was beginning one of the familiar self-tortures of love.

“Oh, he speaks kind enough, but his eyes give him away. And what is most degrading, I know that his mother need have no fear: Thomas would never marry a girl without money; he only sees me as someone he would like to take his pleasure of.”

“Sue … we’re both soon we shall be both sixteen. While I am home I’ll talk to my father. I’ll tell him I want to go to London, not to be apprenticed but to find work at once that will enable me to live somehow. Then when I get to London I have relatives at Court. It must be possible to find some occupation for you too, so that we can be not too far apart. I’ll talk to him. I promise I’ll persuade him to let me try ~ “

I began to kiss her again. I could not believe that this was not a unique thing happening to me, that it could ever have happened before in just this way since the world began. I am not a complete fool; but the sweetness of first love is overtoppling to mind and sense. Whatever it was I had gained, it was priceless, beyond earthly valuation, to be cherished, venerated, tasted and drunk of. Above all, it must not be lost. No exertion, no risk, no enterprise was too great.

I said: “Even at sixteen there is nothing to stop our running away together.”

“Except that all the laws of the country are against us. We cannot even be betrothed without the consent of your father and my mother. I think … Maugan, I would want to run away with you but I should be afraid.”

“Sue, Sue we must not be defeated.”

“Your father will surely help us.”

“I think he may help me to go to London. But I think if I mention you he’ll be angry and call it a moon-calf passion.”

The joy was suddenly gone and reality had its cold finger on

us.

She said: “Go first to Arwenack, see what you can persuade your father to do for us. If he will help in some way, go to London and I’ll wait. I can manage here. If it becomes impossible I will leave and go to my mother … But if your father will not help you, if you think it is a time to be desperate, then we will be.”

“You’ll run away with me?”

“… Yes.”

Before we separated I had promised her that if I could extract a promise from my father that I need not go back to Chudleigh Michell I would come up the river and tell her; if he would not help then I would call in on my way back to Truro, since it would be easier to return to Truro and concert our desperate plans from there.

I saw Sir Anthony in the morning. He was still in his dressing-gown and smelt slightly of incense, but he seemed very far from the incapable person his son Thomas adjudged him. “Give my obliged duty to your father, boy. I have not seen him for twelve months or more. We are neighbours and relatives but I do not stir from here and he does not call, so we might be hemispheres away.”

“Yes, sir.”

“At one time there was much traffic between the houses. Your grandfather was my guardian. Did you know that?”

“No, sir.”

“My own father died when I was 21 much as Jack of Trerice’s leaving me with two brothers younger than myself. I was named ward of John Killigrew. Then my mother remarried almost at once to Dick Trevanion of Caerhays. She continued to live here with her new husband and spawned an eightsome of little Trevanions who’ve all swum away with the passage of years. All swum away. A grasping lot, the Trevanions, a wild and grasping lot, without reverence for the things that are God’s. And the Mohuns, their cousins too.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Yes, indeed. My lady would betroth Thomas with one of the Mohuns, but I say no good will come to them in the end. There is but one Church and but one Vicar of Christ. The heresy and blasphemy rampant in England today can never prosper, Maugan. It can never prosper.”

I did not speak.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “I pray you will be given grace to see your duty as Christ’s will.”

“I pray so, sir.”

“In this critical time Cornwall, unpopulous and poorly endowed though it is, must play a leading part, for we are thrust out like a lance into the western seas. All that is done here is of greater moment than in any other part of this island. So we must search our souls: you, Maugan, a young boy; I, an ageing man; John Killigrew, your father, who keeps guard over the greatest harbour in the west.”

“Yes sir.”

“I think one day soon I will break my habit and call on him. We used to play together as boys. I have sinned greatly in the past, Maugan, but it was from mistaken convictions, never from greed.”

Lady Arundell came to the door. “Come, my dear, you will take cold standing there. The servants are waiting for you at the steps, Maugan.”

CHAPTER TEN

I said nothing to Mr Killigrew for the first few days. My grandmother seemed always to be about; and also he was in a temper, which boded ill for any requests I had to make. It might not have been the same house from last Christmas. The servants were preparing some mild junketings, but we had no guests, few decorations, no plans for dancing or plays. Meg told me eight servants had been discharged last June, and although at first they had hung on grateful for the charities of the more fortunate ones and feeding when possible from the leavings after each meal, they had gradually drifted away: three to the granite quarries of Penryn, two to service with the Boscawens, one to work at the Godolphin tin mines, two she thought to join the bands who roamed the moors. Everyone, Meg said, was in fear of the least misadventure, for it was common knowledge that Lady Killigrew wanted to be rid of more.

I noticed that the armed retainers were no fewer in number.

Belemus Roscarrock was away with his mother, but I saw how my halfbrothers and sisters had grown. John, though still the same sober, earnest, un-Killigrew-like lad, had shot up three inches, and Odelia was turning very pretty. She put her soft arms round my neck and smothered my face with kisses. Meg Levant also kissed me, though in private, and I noticed guiltily that my passion for Sue did not prevent me from enjoying it.

1 had only ten days all told, and three of them passed in a flash. I gradually realised that if I had any ally in this house at all, anyone with any influence on my father, who might be prepared to listen with sympathy to my troubles and aims, it was my stepmother.

St John’s day was clammy and foggy but not with the harsh damp I was later to know in other parts of England it blotted out the harbour at dawn, dusk fell an hour early, and a low dread wind sighed over the house. In the afternoon, glad to be near the sea again, I walked along the cliffs to Helford River and back through Rosemerryn, sometimes losing my way but never far off direction because I had known all the land since childhood. If I was to ask Mrs Killigrew’s help, I must carefully rehearse what had to be said. I must put my problem to her in the most appealing way, asking her first only for advice. Instinctively I was reaching towards that axiom of human affairs that if you seek out another for advice you often get help as well.

On my way back to our main gate I met Harold Tregwin of Gluvias. Tregwin owned a small boat, but it was too illfound to venture far to sea, and sometimes he seemed to do as much trade in gossip as in fish.

Today he had a tale that while out trawling last night for mackerel off Shag Rock, which was near St Anthony’s Point, he had nearly collided with an unknown vessel close in upon the rocks and under oar. He had exchanged shouts with her and an English voice had answered, but he was certain he had seen men in armour aboard.

I repeated this story to my father when I got in, but he took little notice; he said if he paid attention to every story that reached him of Tunisian pirates and Spanish galleons he would have been at arms every day.

I had hoped to see Mrs Killigrew before supper but she was busy with her second youngest who was ill. In after years I often thought it strange that Peter, who was delicate as a child and constantly demanding of attention, should prove so strong and resilient in later life that he stood the hazards of his manhood and of the torn and combative world in which he grew up better than any of his brothers and sisters. His deceptive stamina, his ability to bend without breaking, to trim his sails and ride out every contrary hurricane, drew something perhaps from a childhood in which he learned early to husband his strength and to give ground like a fencer.

We sat down about thirty-five that night. Because I was no longer a child I did not sit with the others at the side table, but had been given a place at the top table not far from my father.

They began to speak of Ralegh. His first child had just been born, a boy, to be called Walter after him. There were rejoicings and there was to be a great christening at Sherborne. Sir Walter they said, had not been well, had been taking the waters at Bath. He’d been active throughout the year, in Parliament, making speeches, sitting on committees, putting fresh projects before the Privy Council for setting up another colony in Virginia; but he was still not permitted to appear at Court, to see the Queen or to take up his old position as Captain of the Guard.

There was a story too that Sir John Borrough had been active again, landing on the island of Margarita, and that the Spanish governor had been killed in battle

The boom of the explosion was muffled by the rocks and the situation of the house, but there could be no doubt of its nature. In a minute my father was on his feet shouting orders, and the great hall was in confusion, men rushing off to gain their weapons, women calling to each other, children crying, dogs barking.

For the first time then I missed Belemus is companion. I knew what he would have d`SOeiipped out quietly to see what was toward, no doubt with me as his companion. I proceeded to do just that, but perhaps because of being on my own I ran into disaster.

After the first haste and confusion things quieted down quickly. Carminow was already at the castle, but Foster was in the hall, and he went off at once with four of the senior retainers bearing calivers and pistols. Since the explosion could mean several things, an attack on the almost unfortified house being as likely as an attack on the fortified castle, my father wisely did not order more of his men out of Arwenack but instead posted watchers in the two towers. The women and children he said should stay in the hall, and those not already there should assemble there, with Jael Job and his four remaining best men in charge. My father then picked out Penruddock and Carpenter and two other servants who normally never bore arms, and furnished them with pikes. A similar number of men he gave to Henry Knyvett, and told the two parties to move off in the direction from which the explosion had come.

This was as far as organisation had gone before I slipped from the hall. I raced up to my bedroom to get a sheath knife and was down again and out well ahead of the search parties.

There was a moon somewhere making opalescence of the fog. The first thing when clear of the house was the smell of gunpowder. As soon as the explosion occurred I had thought of Harold Tregwin’s story, but now it occurred to me that it might be that someone had accidentally discharged one of the great culverin in the castle or still more likely have dropped a spark into a keg of powder.

I ran quickly through the trees and bushes towards the head; the fog seemed more like smoke drifting from a fire, but at the edge of the rocks below the castle it was as if I had come past the smoke-laden area, for the fog blew chill and clean.

I looked up towards the castle. The two lights were what one would expect on any night. The sea was blanketed and impenetrable. This was much where I had come with Sue that day twelve months ago only we had climbed farther down.

There was another explosion directly under the castle wall where it ran back towards Arwenack. I was too late to see the flash, but as the sky flickered I turned and the noise struck me. Figures moved between me and the darkness where the light had been.

Someone fired a musket, but this quickly died and there was silence. A man began to shout. The sound of oars.

I was still some 20 feet above the water but turned to climb up again because the sound was so close; they must have been coming in right beneath me. I took a sharp step up, and two figures on the rock above converged in the mist. I grabbed at my knife, but a man caught my arm and twisted it round. Something glinted like a shield or a breastplate, and then my head seemed to split open with a blow that reached down to my chin.

I woke in a ship’s hold, seasick and with a vile headache. A rope ladder was swinging like a pendulum and bilge water was slapping backwards and forwards with the rolling of the ship.

After a while a man came down and left me a bowl of bread and milk, but I was too sick to eat it, and the rats had it instead. I must eventually have slept, for I woke to find a dark foreign man bending over me and fingering the bump on my head. He nodded at me but said nothing and climbed the rope ladder and disappeared.

I was wondering whether to make the effort to try the ladder myself when the hatchway opened and another man came down. He was big and fair-haired with a lean fox face. He was Captain Richard Burley of Neptune, who had feasted at our house in company with Captain Elliot and Mr Love on my fourteenth birthday.