“What trouble?”
“Ralegh was here a brief tempest and then gone again but these men, these soldiers have all but taken control of the castle and the fortifications. Decisions are made without consultation of Mr Killigrew; placement of the troops, plans for defence, victualling, arming, powder; we might be in occupied territory. Your father has accepted all this, it seems, without protest. Unlike him. A few years ago he’d have fought a pitched battle sooner than be turned out of his proper office.”
We walked to the edge of the lawn which was ankle deep in wet and tufted grass, and peered across at the black bulk of the castle.
“His debts are no easier!”
“Ha! Look around you.”
“And Jane? “
“Jane, dear Maugan, is the wonder of the age.”
“How so?”
“If your father had combed the highways of England he could not have found a more unsuitable mate for sober John. A she-wolf! She might be Lady Killigrew’s daughter by Captain Elliot!”
“Where is her dowry? My father wrote me something.”
“I doubt if we’ll ever see it here. But she seems to have some source of funds beyond this mere œ200 a year. She is having a boat built in Penryn Penryn of all places and plans to go into business, as she calls it, as a trader around the coasts: this at 181”
“Maybe she’ll have a family soon and that will tone her down.”
“There’s no issue yet, and they’ve been married a year. For her part it cannot be for want of trying.”
“What d’you mean?”
“She had not been in the house three months before she invited me to a couplement with her. It’s a small matter hard on a man, and no augury for the future.”
I hesitated but had to have it out. “You refused?”
“Against the grain. She’s no Hebe, but would, I fancy, be entertaining. However, I have my reservations, as I told her, and one is against coupling with my cousin’s bride before even the shine is off the wedding ring.”
We paced along in silence. I said: “Susan Reskymer?”
“I heard her husband was sick.”
“He was sick before I left.”
“Some old men hang on ignobly.”
Stars were winking in a cloudless night sky. They were a purer light than the yellow stars winking on the shoulder of the castle hill.
He said: “I leave here next month.”
“Oh? Why? What are you doing?”
He shrugged. “For two years now I have worked on the farm here and acted as esquire to your father. Now through my uncle the one who is not in prison I have a commission under Norris. I think maybe I was cut out to be a soldier of fortune.”
“You spoke of Elliot,” I said.
“Oh, Dolphin’s been in and out, the last time eight or nine days ago. They had been illused by the storm. There were the usual secret conferences and mutterings behind closed doors. As soon as news came that the Spaniards might be landing he left. Not that I blame him. It would not be a happy position to be caught between two fires.”
I could not get over a sense of unreality that my home and everything around it should have changed so little. During those desperate sixteen months, while I had seen and done and suffered so much, life had gone on here almost unaltered. Always downhill, yet day by day the same routine. Cows had been milked, sheep sheared, fields tilled, apples pressed, in the unchanging pattern of existence. I and my family had lived in different worlds. It seemed almost as if for them time had not passed. All my nerves had been strung up to a tautness which now would not relax. Egoism in me demanded some greater change in them.
While I was away Meg Stable had had a baby boy, and this or some change had softened her towards me; she seemed no longer to bear resentment for our affair. This was the happiest circumstance of my homecoming; it rejoiced me to be able to talk to her again.
Mr Killigrew did not appear the following day and let it be known that he was unwell. In the afternoon he sent for me to his bed chamber. I found him up, sitting before a hissing log fire in a bed-gown which had once been emerald green but was now so faded that it looked as if it had been dipped in sea water. He had a bad cold in the head. All the servants were coughing with an autumn chill that had gone around.
“You haven’t yet been to see your grandmother, Maugan. She has complained of it to me.”
“I’m sorry. I was busy this morning and expected to see her at dinner.”
He was in one of his persecution moods, when he was friendless and alone, and even inanimate things combined to do him ill. The wood on the fire, by being green, would not burn to warm him. His favourite slippers had split only yesterday.
The jug at his elbow contained, he said, an old remedy, feverfew boiled with wine, but I thought the wine predominated. The room was close and horrid.
“Well, boy, it’s good to have you back; but you had my letter, so you know all that has gone amiss with us here since you left. A deeper abyss than ever, the Fermors playing their dastardly trick over the dowry, now even my office usurped by these military. It’s no pretty picture to come home to! “
“Did Sir Walter order these men to take command of the castle? “
“No one commands the castle except myself; but they control the forces to defend it! There’s the rub. For years I have petitioned for money and men, they have not come. Now in an emergency men are flung in, powder and shot lavishly provided, but control of the levies passes to an army commander. It’s grossly unfair.”
“You will, of course, complain to the Privy Council.”
He coughed and snuffled and wiped his moustache on a baby’s sock. “So I will, so I certainly will. But I’m not a fit man. The anxiety, the tension of this time; you have no idea what I have been through for a week or more before these soldiers came, struggling to gather the musters together, preparing to defend the castle with my own few servants and two trained gunners, constantly back and forth between castle and house, writing despatches, expecting my wife and children any day to be dragged out and raped and murdered. It has been a period of great strain, and no thanks for any of it, no thanks; no one cares what I have been through. I’m not at all well; I have been on and off the night-nobby constantly since yesterday. It’s very lowering.”
“I saw Captain Elliot,” I said.
My father glanced at me for only the second time since I came into the room.
“When he delivered my letter to you?”
“Since then.”
“Ah, I shall have less to do with him in the future. He’s very much of a turncoat, and as such must be kept at a distance.”
“He seemed to me something of a go-between,” I said.
Silence fell in the room.
Mr Killigrew picked at the frayed sleeve of his bed-gown.
I said: “I saw Elliot at Cadiz and at El Ferrol. Then later still I saw him off the Scillies little more than two weeks ago.”