The Grove of Eagles

by Winston Graham

  “You were delayed, Maugan? I expected you last week.”

  “Yes. There was some, delay …”

  “You have seen Lord Henry Howard?”

  “Yes. It is all arranged.”

  “I—with waiting so long and nothing to do I have been looking at rooms in London. There’s a very pleasant apartment in Great Carter Lane by St Paul’s Churchyard. It’s more costly than I had thought of, but everything in London is so. It would be in the heart of things but perhaps noisy. Could we see it together?”

  “Yes … we can do that.”

  “I have had the banns called two weeks in St Pancras in the Fields. Next Sunday will be the third. Did I do right?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve the certificate from Mr Garrock? You had the banns called at Budock?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re very quiet. Is anything amiss?”

  “No, nothing at all.”

  “Let us sit down and talk of the arrangements, then. I shall be married from here. Amelia’s cousin Robert will give me away. Do you think your brothers would escort me to the church?”

  “I think they would.”

  “Maugan, it was you who made it a condition that the wedding should be in early February. I hope I don’t hasten it unduly or seem unwomanly to you in my arrangements?”

  “No. No, not at all.”

  So we talked on for a half-hour. Gradually as this proceeded, our conversation melted the ice which for three weeks had been round my heart. I began to make plans with a new interest. Whatever else, I thought, she will be my wife. God in heaven, what more do I demand?

  She was talking on, making more light conversation than I had ever known her do before. “ Did you come by the Fields? Yes, then you’d cross Battle Bridge. It’s where Boadicea fought the Romans … The conduit runs for 2,000 yards to Snow Hill. All these fields abound in springs … Maugan, I think you’re not listening.”

  “Oh, yes I am, I assure you. Sue …” It had to come.

  “Yes?”

  “All that time you were married to Philip Reskymer—I mean before we met at the landing of the Spanish at Mousehole—it was nearly a year after I came home; did you never hear that I was alive?”

  She looked at me with slightly narrowed eyes. “What makes you ask that now?”

  “Well, I’ve often thought—when we met that day outside the burning church, you looked as if you’d seen a ghost. Yet we only lived—what?—thirty miles apart. Did you hear nothing of my return at all?”

  There was a grinding grumbling of cart wheels in the lane outside. “My dear, it was not necessary that I should still think you dead to act as if I’d seen a ghost. It was the first time we’d met. How do you suppose I felt? I’m not made of stone.”

  “Then when did you first know I was alive?”

  “What’s wrong, Maugan? Why is this important to you now?”

  I looked down into the crevasse I had approached and sheered away from it. “Sometimes one wonders these things. You did not write.”

  “You did not write to me. And I felt that by my marriage I’d forfeited any claim on your love.”

  “It doesn’t—happen that way.”

  “I’m glad. I hope you are.”

  “Yes …”

  Silence fell between us. The man outside was calling to his horses.

  She said: “I heard first from my aunt. When I went to call on her about two months after my marriage she told me you’d come to see me.”

  “Oh … I thought you might have heard earlier than that. D’you remember Dick Stable?”

  “No?”

  “He was Lord of Misrule during the twelve days of Christmas.”

  “Oh, yes. A tall thin boy with a big nose.”

  “Yes. He said he met you in Truro one day and told you about my return. He said that was soon after I got back.”

  “It couldn’t have been. I wasn’t in Truro for several months after my marriage.” She leant and stirred the charcoal dying in the grate. “But what is the point of this? You haven’t told me. Is it of any value to go over any of that sad time? Aren’t we alive and well and in love? What else is of importance?”

  “It has some importance, Sue. Do you remember meeting Dick?”

  She frowned into the fire. “Yes … But it was later—after Christmas. March, I think. Yes, it would be March. I went with Philip to call on the Robartes; we spent a night there. I bought some gloves one morning and Dick— what is it?—Stable was passing with another man. He recognised me and I stopped and spoke. He told me you were safely home. Perhaps I may have seemed startled to him, but—every mention of your name at that time was like a knell in my ears. I couldn’t bear to hear you spoken of, to think what I had done.” She looked up through fringed lashes. “ Does that please you? Are you satisfied now, or have I to sit in the pillory and be stoned?”

  “No, my love. No one will throw stones.” As she straightened up I put my arms under her arms and kissed her. These were the lips.

  March was the month when Dick had been dangerously ill with the wound in the head after being set on in Penryn.

  One of them was wrong. Which, perhaps, I should never know.

  Chapter Eleven

  During the next two weeks I saw her only twice. Something kept me away, and she did not press. We saw and took the apartment in Great Carter Lane. It was a good district and the rooms were well appointed. They were better than I would ever have expected, but she would not say what they cost; she said the twelve months’ lease must be regarded as a wedding present.

  I went a dozen times to Henry Howard’s, and the work seemed without special portent. The letters I wrote in Spanish dealt with matters of commerce which seemed quite innocent. If they were in a code I could not detect it.

  I wondered if Lord Henry in one sentence had not summed up the whole reason of my distaste for him. He said he had taken a fancy to employ me because he detected in me qualities he found in himself. Underneath ordinary reason—which vehemently rejected any similarity—the likenesses might be there. Not fortunately in any ambivalence towards sex on my part, but in the old ductile qualities of the Killigrews. The two-headed eagle again.

  I had had contact with Spain; I had had contact with Catholicism; and neither had left me as single-minded as before. Nor had the compromises left me unchanged. Nor would the one I was going to make in respect of Sue.

  I went about town with Thomas. We sat and drank in the taverns and ale houses, sampling the ales, the Gascoigne wines, the Malmsey, the sack, and eating the soft saffron cakes sweetened with raisins. Sometimes, for the first time in my life, I got drunk and Thomas had to help me home. We went to the menagerie near the Tower and saw the lions and the tiger, the lynx, the porcupine, the eagle. We visited the bear pits and saw the great brown bears baited, four dogs to a bear and the dogs often getting the worst of it. We saw a half-dozen men hanged at Bridewell, one for rape, one for murder, one for stealing a hat valued 2s. They were sat each one in turn in a cart with a rope round their necks and the cart driven away, then their friends pulled on their twitching legs to help them die the quicker.

  So time passed and our wedding day drew near. It was to be February 9th.

  We were to be married at noon. I was up at dawn, and for once Thomas was in his element. He liked dressing in fine clothes, he loved music and he loved ceremonial when he was not the centre of the ceremony. In these weeks in London we had accorded better than ever at home where he had been over-shadowed by John and Belemus, and I was touched when after breaking our fast he gave me a bunch of rosemary tied with yellow ribbons which I was to wear through the ceremony. Rosemary, representing the manly qualities, was a customary gift, but I had not thought of it.

  Since I came to London I had had a wedding ring made, an enamelled hoop with small diamonds surrounding the Killigrew double-headed eagle. Sir Henry had lent me the money for these necessary expenses, but he could not be at the wedding because he was attending o
n the Queen who was that morning moving to Greenwich. Lady Jael was to come, also my uncle Simon who, to my surprise, seemed sufficiently interested to wish me well, and his son Stephen was to be my bridegroom man.

  I went to take my leave of Sir Henry about eight. He smiled on seeing me and said:

  “Well, Maugan, this is a happy day for you—and a fine one. All is in order?”

  “All is in order, thanks to you, sir.”

  “I wish I could remember your bride. You say we met some years ago?”

  “Yes. But now, living where we shall be living …”

  “Of course … And how is your work for Lord Henry? Well enough?”

  “Well enough.”

  “It could be a good attachment, Lord Henry himself being attached to the Earl of Essex, and Essex riding high. Since he was made Earl Marshal of England six weeks ago my lord of Essex is back in the best of spirits.” My great-uncle frowned. “ I wish I knew …”

  “Knew what, sir?”

  “The mind of the Queen. Lord Essex is now almost in a position to dominate her. Slowly she has given ground—slowly he has won it. Often in such cases the brilliant young man seems to hold complete sway over the ageing woman … And yet, no one, no man or woman on earth has ever dominated the Queen since she came to the throne forty years ago. She has such inborn greatness that if he is not careful he’ll ride himself to ruin … In that case have a care you’re not involved in the fall.”

  “Lord Henry is also very close with Sir Robert Cecil these days. He has written a letter to him every day this week.”

  Sir Henry tied the points of his doublet. “On what, may I ask?”

  “I think sir, if I am employed by him I must keep his counsel.”

  “Yes … yes, that’s true. I should not have asked you.”

  “Much is to do with Scotland. I can only tell you that.”

  “Affairs in Scotland?”

  “Affairs in Scotland. Nothing of apparent consequence.”

  “What is or is not of consequence depends on the writer and the reader, Maugan. With the Queen in her sixties we all walk a rope drawn across a chasm. She is much racked with rheumatism and with headaches. Any day anything may happen.”

  “I pray it will not.”

  “All men pray it will not.”

  Sir Henry straightened his paned velvet hose over his thin shanks. “But it’s not for you to be concerned with that now, Maugan. This is your wedding day … I remember well when your father—it only seems yesterday—came first to Court as young and as eager as you. His father, my elder brother, brought him up, and we all thought him a handsome young man. Our Queen was then in her thirties, and some hoped he would catch her eye and be advanced, as Leicester and Ralegh and Essex have been. But it did not happen. Perhaps he lacked the stature …”

  I said: “ Did you ever know my mother?”

  “What?” Sir Henry scratched his beard. “ What? Your mother? Well, yes, I did.”

  I stared at him. The question had been put casually, without any expectation of this answer.

  He said: “I think I was the only one who met her in our family. Your father—as happens with handsome and well bred young men new to Court life—had a number of interesting affairs. None of them was serious, and your grandfather and grandmother, having regard to their great debts, were making inquiries to see what suitable heiress he might be betrothed to. Then he met your mother, and, it seemed, fell in love with her. She was a Londoner of no distinction of family but some personal charm, and I believe your father even contemplated marriage. However, this was forbidden—particularly by your grandmother, whom you will still know as a woman of forceful character—and the attachment was broken off. I really believe,” Sir Henry finished dryly, “that it is the only time in his life your father was in love with somebody other than himself.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Maugan, the same as yours. You were given her surname as your first name. The plague was rampant soon after you were born—it had lingered on as it sometimes does from the previous year—and all the Maugan family fell ill with it. Much against the wishes of his parents your father went down to the Thames side where they lived and took you away. He hired a wet nurse and bore you down to Cornwall. Lady Killigrew was vastly annoyed, for this was just at the time when a betrothal party had been arranged at Arwenack for the Moncks, whose daughter your father married later that year.” Sir Henry smiled as he tucked a handkerchief into his pocket. “ During the celebrations attending the betrothal you were kept in the kitchen and passed off as the son of Sarah Amble who was then caring for you! But I believe that Dorothy Monck, after her marriage, never took exception to your presence; indeed, you could hardly have had a more affectionate stepmother.”

  “I could not. What was my mother like?”

  “To look at? Tall, a trifle big boned for a woman. Blue eyed, dark haired. You take after her somewhat. I met her only once but was impressed by her appearance.”

  “Do you know where she is buried?”

  “No, I have no idea. She did not die then, and I suppose might still be alive—she would scarcely be forty yet.”

  “She didn’t die? But—”

  “She recovered from the fever but her father died. He was a herbalist called William Maugan who lived near Hermitage Stairs. Katherine Maugan carried on his business for some years, and become well known for her cures; then she got into trouble with one of the guilds and left London.”

  Sir Henry picked up his stick. “I did hear she went into the West Country; but that was years ago. Women who ply that trade sometimes arouse suspicion of witchcraft and the like; I trust she came to some peaceful haven, for she was a worthy woman.”

  It was a good day for February, with a north-west breeze and the white clouds high in a sky of starched blue. I went by horse, and Lady Jael and Uncle Simon and Philip Killigrew followed in her coach. We left London by Ludgate and crossed the Fleet Bridge, with its pikes set into the stone and its stone lanthoras ready to be lit for travellers on winter evenings. The fields were just losing their morning frost. Sheep were pasturing in groups. Two windmills were clack-clacking beside a stream. My wedding day.

  The worthy son of a worthy woman.

  Sue was wearing a gown of russet, I remember that well, though I do not recall a great deal of the ceremony. I think I must have been at the church first, because I remember standing at the church door and seeing her come in from the lych gate, with Thomas on her right hand and Henry on her left, and a cousin by marriage, Dorothy Reskymer, as a bridesmaid, following with Mr Robert Reskymer, who was to give her away. Sue was wearing her hair braided, not down over her shoulders as she would have if she had not been married before. Round her head she wore a circlet of gold, and the gown was of finest home-spun silk. On the gown were stitched the usual favours, of milk white, flame colour, blue and red. Gold colours were never used because they signified avarice. Had she worn these at her first marriage? Flesh colours were also eschewed for they signified lasciviousness. I should have worn that instead of rosemary. She looked as desirable to me as the scarlet woman.

  More people than I had expected. Some bystanders, but some friends. The effeminate Claude from Lord Henry Howard’s, a half-dozen tavern friends of Thomas’s, Mistress Amelia Reskymer, a cousin Killigrew who had come with young Henry, our faithful steward, Thomas Rosewarne.

  Sue smiled at me, and I do not think I returned the smile. In spirit another woman was beside us, holding my hand, peering into my face.

  The parson standing at the door said some words, and in some words I had learned I responded. He led the way into the church. A hand was in mine, gloved, fine boned, the hand of a lady. It held to mine with a discreet pressure and then we separated again. There was music in the church. We walked up it, she in advance with my two brothers and Dorothy Reskymer. I followed with Philip Killigrew. ‘Saffron for measles; marjoram and aniseed; comfrey and liquorice …’

  We were kneeling then at the al
tar, the slim, frail, dark-haired scheming girl who was in process of becoming my wife. I turned my head and looked at her. I seemed to see quite clearly—and quite cynically—her cool fine-boned body lying naked beside me in the bed at Trewoofe. I saw her pale drowned face with the lank black hair lying on the pillow like seaweed. I saw the tiny beads of sweat on her lips, felt her lashes moving on my cheek. All that was going to come again.

  “Love and hate. There is always love and hate between every man and woman. You will learn that it is so.”

  “I require and charge you that if either of you do know of any impediment why you may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, that you confess it. For be you well assured that so many as be coupled together otherwise than God’s word doth allow, are not joined of God, neither is their matrimony lawful.”

  The church smelt of mildew and dust, but sometimes a waft of scent would carry from the girl beside me. The sun was falling through a stained-glass window behind the parson, and the light, a vivid red and blue, stained the marble floor and the edge of his vestment. I had carried Victor Hardwicke bleeding down such steps. ‘Take care for yourself,’ she had said once, meeting me on the stairs. ‘I told you there was blood on your hands.’

  “Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou obey him and serve him, love, honour and keep him in sickness and in health? And forsaking all other keep thee only to him so long as you both shall live?”

  “I will.”

  Sue, I saw, was standing now. What had once been said to me about—

  “Get up,” whispered Philip Killigrew behind me. I stood up, feeling my hands and knees stiff and aching, as if emotion, knowing no other exit, had turned to poison and run through my body. “The ring,” he said.

  I fumbled and found the ring and almost dropped it. She had taken off her gloves. The hand I took was warm and calm and feminine and thin and beautiful.