“Does he propose to do that, sir?”
“Not as yet. I advise his mother, but she seems set on an early marriage for him to Bridget Mohun. Marriage may tame him.”
I got up to go but he said: “Stay a while, Maugan. Tanking of taming...”
“Yes, sir?”
“This Belemus is a wild spark, and I hear rumour that you are outvying him.”
“… Sometimes we ride together.”
Sir Francis pulled his beard. “Your father lives the life he does perhaps of necessity now. He is in a tide race and must swim with it. But it is a pity if his sons should become so committed.”
“Is not a son committed to sustain his father?”
“Not in activities outside the law.”
“The law is hard to come by in these parts, sir. Sometimes one has to assert one’s rights.”
“It is the distinction between right and wrong that I draw your attention to, Maugan. Have a care for it, for a happy life and the hangman’s noose are closer together than some realise.” When I did not speak he went on: “But this is a bad time for differences. With the Spanish so close all men of goodwill should draw together. If they do not they will be lost.”
“You think there will be an invasion this summer?”
“What will stop them? Only perhaps the fear of Drake and Hawkins. The command of the narrow seas is no longer ours. You who have been in Spain must feel the same. Were they not preparing even last year?”
With June there were several false alarms round our coast, and during the month at least four fishing vessels disappeared. Then a great to-do was caused by the return of the crew of the St Keverne smack which had been taken in Falmouth Bay. One man, a gunner, had not been released, but the others were sent back in their own boat. They were examined before Godolphin and Sir Anthony Rowse with other deputy-lieutenants present.
It seemed that the Spaniards had captured them only to press them for news of Drake’s fleet now almost ready to sail from Plymouth. They had told what they could but knew nothing fortunately of Drake’s objective. (Few did.) So they had been set free again, and themselves brought back valuable information, namely that there were 11 Spanish galleys and 20 ships of war in Blavet alone.
In late June two Lizard fishermen came in with reports that there was 60 sails just off the Manacles. They swore the exact position and approximate number, but whether it was true or not the fleet disappeared into the summer mists.
One night I plucked up courage to ask my father whether anyone had yet called at Arwenack for his answer to the message I had brought.
He looked at me out of swimmy, prominent eyes and said: “Well, what do you think, boy?”
“I think you’d have told me. But if they bothered to release me with the message they surely must sooner or later send for your reply.”
“Well, when they do their messenger will receive an answer as plain as the nose on his face.”
“D’you not think, then, that that shows the Spanish mean no invasion this summer?”
“Oh, I’d reason nothing from it. Maybe they thought they’d try you out with this message to see if you’d deign to carry it. Maybe they had no thought except to mock us.”
I knew this had been an offer made in deadly earnest, and I thought from an expression on my father’s face, as he bent to pick up a puppy, that he too was not deceived either. Sooner or later someone would come.
Sometimes in the night, especially during those long fair nights of late June, I would lie awake and think of the elderly, scholarly, grey faced fanatic in the Escorial, with his tiny junta of powerful, clever, dedicated men around him; and I would think of the milling crowds in Madrid, and especially of the crowd gathered for the auto de ye; and I would think of the warships lying at anchor in Lisbon waiting for the word to sail.
All through June and early July I was making love to Meg. Meetings were difficult, sometimes hurried, and the more difficult as the nights grew lighter and as Dick recovered his health and spirits. One night, the last of June, we were able to meet out of doors at nearly midnight in the woods behind the house. It was not dark, it was never dark those nights, with a pale blue reflected light over the northern horizon blending into an ultramarine sky in which the stars were never bright. We lay and made love in the long dew-damp grass, and afterwards walked across to the headland looking over towards France. I had never tried to fathom her feelings for Dick, but I knew that, whatever it had been at the beginning, now she was in love with me. We talked little. When we met there was the need for each other which grew no less with indulgence. I do not think we either of us thought much of the future. She was the stableman’s wife; that could not be altered. I was in love with her because she was pretty and kind, because she was my first woman, because I needed love, because at that age there is no other way to be. Perhaps she wanted it like this always; but if I wanted it as a permanence it was lime that I wanted to stand still; a perpetual summer when I was 17; when everything is new and crisp and soft and brilliant; when the boy’s eye and the poet’s eye have the same vision. If time moved on, then that created other vistas. Soon or late, I was prepared to move with it.
On the way home that night, climbing the palisade, she fell and turned her ankle; so I picked her up and carried her the rest of the way.
“How strong y’are, Maugan,” she whispered, and I enjoyed my own strength and the feel of her firm thighs, and her warm arms round my neck. We got in somehow limping and conspiratori~al and giggling in the dark. When I tip-toed to my room John woke but he did not ask where I’d been; and I lay for a long time beside him in a delicious, healthy, uplifted lassitude of muscle and mind until as dawn crept in sleep came with it.
In early July my father, burying his differences in the emergency, went over to Godolphin and there conferred with Sir Francis, together with Bernard Grenville, Sir Richard’s eldest son, and Jack Arundell of Trerice, Sir Anthony Rowse, Hannibal Vyvyan and others. As a result Sir Francis addressed a letter to Lord Essex asking for more men to be sent into the West Country. “I still rest of the same mind,” he wrote, “that a stronger garrison be needed for all these parts, for the gathering of the Spaniards seems as a cloud that is like to fall shortly in some part of her Majesty’s dominions.”
In the middle of the following week, before any reply could be got, galleys appeared off the north coast of the country, near St Eval. They came in close on that forbidding coast in the calm clear weather, making their soundings as they edged nearer the black and emerald rocks, but they had been seen and watched from early morning, and by the time they were within reach of shore Bernard Grenville and Jack Arundell had mustered a group of ill-assorted and ill-armed men to oppose the landing, if landing had been in the Spaniards’ minds. So the galleys sheered off.
Thereafter no more alarms. The weather broke and the emergency passed. Haymaking began, and all set to get the meadows cut before the gusty dust-raising wind turned to rain. When the hay had all been cut and been left to dry and turned with pitchforks from day to day and then gathered and finally built into ricks, there was a night of carousing and celebration. Most of the men and boys, including all the Killigrew boys old enough to work, had been out all day and every day, having had food brought to them to save returning to the house; so now all was noise and laughter, with jokes and lewd banter and traditional songs. The girls were put into two carts and dragged by the half-drunken men round and round the yards, while Dick Stable preceded them on an ass, plucking unsteadily on his harp and singing:
“With Hal-an-tow! Rum below!
For we are up as soon as any day,