The Grove of Eagles

by Winston Graham

  “Aye,” she said, “ it was last Wednesday. A week since today, so perhaps it’s not surprising that everyone does not yet know. The betrothal was very short. She was wed at St Clement, down the valley from here. You take the turning by the old stables that Richard Robartes has just now bought and follow the trees down the hill. Her uncle, my man, stood for her, since her mother has but recently herself wed again and could not travel. I loaned her my own gown that I’d had since better days. The silk was turned yellow a small degree, but it fitted her, and it became her well. Mrs Glubb who’s quick with her fingers, made her cap and gloves. It was all done very handsome as you’ve a right to suppose.”

  There were signs of a faded gentility about the room: goblets on an oak dresser, a cupboard cloth of Venice work, brass pans well scoured and polished, two brazil armchairs.

  “I saw how it was directly he came to call. And I saw it was a chance for her. She was always a bright child, quick as silver, sharp as a needle, and lively company, and she’ll make a good wife. When she came home from Tolverne she was listless and lacking spirit; but when he called all that was changed. I saw how it was going to be, and how fortunate she was.”

  I sipped the buttermilk but could hardly get my throat to swallow.

  “Oh, it is a good match for her. Mind, he’s not so young as he was, but there’s money and land and connections. He’s not one of these shiftless paupers who eke out their living as best they may. And he’s a godly man, not a drunkard or a dicer, as many are. As I said to her: you’re alone in the world now your mother’s wed again, and you’ve no dowry nor no hope of one. Here’s the chance of a fine house—though I’ve not seen it—and a horse to ride; and he says he keeps five servants—he never came but with one beside him; and a fine old name like Reskymer. Mind, no one ever pressed her. When my man thought she was over-long in answering he said, does she know what she’s about keeping him waiting like this? There’s many a maid would leap at the chance. But I said, go to, it is part of a woman’s way to hesitate; it does not do to be too eager, lest you be taken for granted ever after. A matter of a few days’ patience. And sure enough it was.”

  A heavy patch of damp on two of the low beams, the room smelt of mildew and rot; afterwards that smell would recall to me the darkness in my soul.

  “I believe he’s a Reskymer of Merthen, a cousin of the main family, that is. There’s always been Reskymers in the church. He says he met Susanna at the Arundells two years back when she was fourteen. He was then a widower by some ten years but he had no thought for Sue, thinking her then a child. Since then he has seen her three times; but the last of these, chancing to call at Tolverne in May, he was much struck by her beauty and called there again last month only to find her gone. So he pursued her here, and so it fell out. If you have a thought to see them they live in the rectory at Paul near Penzance, which I’m told is a handsome house quite worthy of his position and name.”

  I could not sit here for ever. If I could get out into the rain again, mount the pony, just the effort and the buffeting of the wind …

  “Thank you, ma’am. If you write to Susanna, give her my respectful regard.”

  Copley welcomed me with a snort and a shake of his bridle. The mongrel dog was sniffing at a piece of bone on the edge of a muddy pool of water. A man was in sight coming over the fields driving a pair of oxen before him. The rain blew in fresh clouds over the dripping trees. Nothing in the landscape had changed. Only I had changed. And I had changed for ever.

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter One

  There is no proportion in memory. Months of happiness or misery can suffer an ellipsis which no effort may fill; yet moments or single days linger in the mind from a choice that seems not one’s own and have an endurance beyond their worth. So it is in my recollection of the next twelve months. Selection is as difficult as sequence because one’s memory has already acted.

  I know there has never in my life been a time of greater misery and resentment. A young man of finer fibre might have permitted himself to feel only sorrow, but I have never been one to take adversity well. One always feels most for the first illusion lost; but this was more than illusion; it was the linch-pin of my faith in life. Belief in Sue Farnaby and our love for each other had become for me in a few short months the constant around which everything else revolved. That destroyed, there was no centre for any loving kindness to attach to. I was lost, groping in the dark of my own nature, clumsy with pain, and liable to break anything with which I came in contact.

  The attitude of many people at Arwenack changed towards me during that year, and this can only have been reflecting the change that was in me. I quarrelled violently with Belemus when he returned, and we fought it out in the wood behind the house. I was uncouth and unpleasant to my half-brothers and sisters. If my grandmother had been about there is no doubt I should have been sent away again to Truro, but the damp weather did not suit her and she spent most of each day in her chamber coughing.

  Yet I fared altogether better with my father. I was inches taller than he now and tireless, filling out a little but still very thin. He set me to work about the house or in the fields or to ride with him on one of his dubious outings, and my new mood only made him smile derisively. He never asked about the change or why all the world had suddenly become my enemy; Dorothy Killigrew of course did, but I returned her evasive answers and presently she gave up.

  Perhaps my mood found a responding chord in Mr Killigrew; I know he forbade any inquisition when Belemus and I came to the table with our features puffed and scarred. I have since thought—though I did not perceive it then—that my father was a man who was himself lost and without beliefs in a world that seemed to him full of enemies. He had grown up in an age when lawlessness was near to a patriotic duty, when armed retainers were the accepted instrument of privilege, when one lived by force at home and by bribery at Court. But time had caught him up and passed him by. He was in a bog of his own and my grandfather’s devising, and casual efforts to struggle free only sent him the deeper. To thwart his enemies he went to shifts that created more enemies. Godolphin was a greater power in the land, but Godolphin never rode abroad followed by a half score of armed men of his own. Nor did Sir Reginald Mohun nor did a Grenville nor a Basset nor a Boscawen. Their only armed forces were the musters they garnered for the defence of England.

  Times were changing. My father’s way of life stood out in a dangerous prominence. And he was not prepared to change it. Creditors were pressing, but his need of Mistress Margaret Jolly pressed harder. His debts demanded close personal attention, but it would not always be such good hawking weather. A number of his fields were fallow for lack of farm help, but he saved with having fewer servants to feed and so could spend more on the occasional feast.

  I began to know all he did. The expulsion of the Farnabys was not an isolated act. When he rode abroad to collect his rents there was no nonsense tolerated, and I was the witness of three scenes in which tenants were turned out without ceremony and without mercy. Twice I was in brushes with bailiffs who sought to put a distraint on property. I learned to carry pistols and to practise the use of them. Sometimes Belemus came with us and then we would ride together immediately behind my father.

  Belemus’s father was still in prison and his lands under seizure by the crown, so that he too was a young man without proper restraint. After our fight we became closer friends and took part in ventures of our own.

  At the end of that summer Belemus fell in love with a girl called Sibylla who was the daughter of Otho Kendall, a burgher of Penryn. In the town Killigrews were never popular, but Belemus and I took to frequenting Cox’s Tavern which was hard by the harbour and next to the Kendall house. This way he could sometimes catch a glimpse of Sibylla as she came and went, and presently he found a wall which he could climb on, from which he could carry on a whispered conversation with her out of her bedroom window.

  It was all fraught with a good deal of hazard. The local quarr
yworkers and townsfolk knew who we were and resented our being there. Otho Kendall was a fiery man, and his father Sebastian Kendall was an old sailor, be-ringed and one-eyed, whose reputation for violence had not lapsed with age.

  Sibylla was a slender black-eyed girl, more beautiful perhaps than pretty, and she wore her hair under its cap in long black braids. But there was nothing demure about her eyes when she raised them, and Belemus was afire with passion.

  It must have been one afternoon in early September when, sitting in the tavern, we saw the girl leave her home alone and walk up the hill carrying a basket. She had gone no more than a dozen yards before we followed her. The sun was shining after a morning of heavy rain, the tide was out, and the town drowsed in the warmth as if deserted. But once or twice I thought there were faces quietly withdrawn from windows as we passed.

  They were bell-ringing in St Gluvias church across the narrow creek: they had been at it all afternoon, practising or just for the sport.

  We followed Sibylla until at the first thicket out of the town she stopped to pick the blackberries which glistened still with the drops of rain on them. Belemus gave me a nudge to stay where I was and went over to speak to her.

  At eighteen Belemus had grown into a powerful and personable young man. His buff leather jerkin with its brass buttons showed the breadth of his chest. He had grown a short black beard and a tiny wisp of moustache which he kept carefully trimmed and which softened the wide flat angles of his mouth and cheeks. He walked with the swagger of a man who hardly knows his own strength. He gave the girl a great bow, his long hair as he uncovered blowing in the breeze. She turned her head away and continued to pick blackberries. I could not hear what they said for they spoke in low tones, but every now and then she would break into a shrill excited laugh. The church was a few hundred yards away across the muddy creek and up the hill, and the bells clashed and clanged ever more violently as if themselves agitated by some compulsion of excitement.

  Belemus was trying to persuade Sibylla to take a walk with him as far as the hill above the town. It seemed an innocent invitation, but she knew that the paths through the hazel and nut trees were narrow and winding and one might easily stray. Others had done it before, and the bold and the brazen walked up there of a summer evening hand in hand. All the same, something in her manner suggested that sooner or later she would yield; it might not be today, but a persistent courtship would have its reward.

  The bells at last stopped with a final clang, and in the echoing sunny silence the only sound was the crying of the gulls as they fought and flapped about refuse which had been thrown in the mud for the next tide to carry away. I glanced back and saw two figures coming up the narrow cobbled street. One was limping and had a black patch over his eye.

  Belemus scowled at me as I came up. “ What’s amiss? Leave us be.”

  “There’s others who’ll not.”

  “Who’s that, man?”

  “Miss Sibylla’s father and grandfather will walk with you right away. They’re equipped for climbing, for they carry sticks.”

  The colour fell out of the girl’s flushed cheeks. “God save us, go away, Belemus! Hide yourself, you and your friend. Go, go quick, leave me to my berries!” She turned sharply and began to clutch at the fruit; ripe and unripe went into her basket together.

  “It would take more than a couple of such to flight me,” said Belemus, pulling at his beard. “A damned old miser and a limping one-eyed lobster-catcher. Why—”

  “Come, man, you’ll only make it worse for the girl. Come away while there’s time.”

  I pulled at him, but by now the two men were near enough to see us. As we moved farther up the hill putting distance; between us and Sibylla, the roar of Otho Kendall came after us.

  “Hi! You! Killigrew trash, I’d have a word wi’ ye!”

  Belemus stopped and fingered the short knife in his belt. “If I were a Killigrew I should feel some choler at that.”

  I said: “ You are included.”

  We waited until the two old men had come up with the girl. We were then some twenty yards away. The sun, already watery for the morrow, glinted on the three gold rings on old Sebastian Kendall’s gouty fingers, on the ear-rings trembling: under his grey wig. He had been hard put to it to keep up with his son.

  “Killigrew dung!” shouted Otho Kendall, and spat. “Keep off of my dattur!”

  “We were not on her, old man,” said Belemus.

  “Filthy whorers! Keep out of Penryn. Go back to your own midden over th’ hill. Come nigh us again and we’ll tear yer tripes out.”

  “Old man,” said Belemus, “old man, when I choose to come to your scabby little town, I shall come and not you nor any of your smutty fellows shall stop me.”

  At this moment Sibylla unwisely made some movement, and her father swung round and hit her on the side of the head. She collapsed in a sudden wailing heap, bonnet going one way, basket the other.

  “Bravo,” said Belemus, “ strike your women! It’s common, I know, among offal such as you!”

  Old Sebastian could restrain himself no longer and came up the hill his great stick swinging and murder in his eye. Otho at once followed. We should have had our skulls laid open before ever we could get near them, so we turned and went up the hill.

  And there stopped. The eight bell-ringers had come out of the church and while we were exchanging insults with the Kendalls had surrounded us. Except for two who carried sticks they were not armed, but four or five were grabbing up stones.

  “Hold ’em, boys!” shouted Otho. “ We’ll give ’em a rare cooting this time!”

  A stone struck me on the shoulder. Behind us the two old men would be on us within a count of five. Together we rushed uphill towards the two men who chiefly barred the way home. Another stone struck me on the back of the head, and a great shower sprayed over Belemus. Faced by us both charging them with drawn knives the two men backed away. One swung at Belemus’s shin with a stick as we went past. He stumbled but I grabbed his arm and we were through.

  But though we ran we did not out-distance them. It was close on two miles to the palisades, and each time when we thought we were clear they would catch us again with another shower of stones.

  When we got to the gate of Arwenack and the shouts and yells of our pursuers had at last died away, I was bruised in a dozen places and bleeding at the back of the neck. As Belemus leaned against the gate gulping for breath he bared his teeth and said:

  “They think to drive us away, the rogues.”

  “And so they have.”

  “But not for long, dear Maugan, not for long.”

  “Well,” I said, “ I do not fancy your love affair will prosper, but let me know what you have in mind.”

  That night we went back with a half-dozen armed servants. We walked along the little cobbled main street. Cottagers at their doors watched us resentfully, and mothers called their children in, but no one blocked the way. We went into Cox’s tavern and stayed drinking for an hour. Then Belemus went out and hammered on the door of the Kendalls’ house. The windows were shuttered and no one came. Belemus thought to break down the door but I counselled that this would not endear him to Sibylla, however she might be suffering at the hands of her parents. So we came away.

  Thus the affair simmered for two or three weeks. Then we began to revisit the tavern, though not without rapiers in our belts. Sometimes Belemus would get a word with the girl, but she was close guarded. Then came another day when, leaving as darkness fell, we were stoned again.

  Belemus said: “These rats need a lesson.”

  We went back that night and broke open the door of the church. I climbed up in the belfry and cut the four bell ropes so that but one strand of each remained. Some of the ringers would likely fall on their scuts at the next practice.

  We splashed lime-wash on the walls, carried out the pews and chairs and dropped them in the mud of the river. We rounded up a flock of sheep, drove them into the church and shut the do
or on them. Then we dug a pit outside the door and went home.

  A scandal there was, but none could bring the fault home to a Killigrew. We continued to go into Penryn twice a week. Sometimes Belemus would get a word with Sibylla but most often not. Then one day we met her by chance on St Thomas’s Bridge and it all fell into place. He came home exultant but at first would not satisfy my curiosity. Two days later he took a private chamber at Cox’s tavern and spent the night there. Then I knew ‘it’ had happened but not how. The next time we went together he showed me the window of the chamber he had hired. It looked directly into Sibylla’s window. There was a high wall between the two buildings, but if you were already on a level with it it could be used as a stepping stone between.

  So for three weeks he took the room at Cox’s Tavern, selling two of his rings to pay for it. His absences did not go unremarked at Arwenack, but he was eighteen and thought able to look out for himself.

  Then one day he was not back to help with the reaping, and since it was the first fine day of the week my father was angry. I went up to my chamber about noon and found Belemus lying on the bed.

  He said: “Ah, well, Maugan, I had a little trouble,” and moved. The bed was soaked with blood.

  On his way home he had been set on by two men in the wood above the town. He had a knife wound in his ribs and a purple cut on his head. He did not know either man—had barely seen them—but he had been left, perhaps for dead, and had not come round until the sun was high. Then he had crawled down towards Three Farthings House, and Paul Gwyther had brought him home in his cart.

  He was weak from loss of blood and the knife had gone deep, but he had not bled from his mouth, and I thought he was not wounded to death.

  There was a rough and ready treatment followed at Arwenack for injuries of all sorts, but I thought of what Katherine Footmarker had told me and used first a strong solution of salt and water, at which he complained greatly; then I put on a plaster and hoped for the best.