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.”