The Grove of Eagles

by Winston Graham

  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 Farnaby 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 bill 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 ride.”

  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 half-brother, 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 I 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 hoys from 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 bailiffs 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 came 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 Spain.”

  “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 fly-boats, 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 outn
umber 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 supremacy. 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.”