Grove of Eagles

WINSTON GRAHAM THE GROVE OF EAGLES

FONTANA BOOKS

First published by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 1963

First issued in Fontana Books 1970

Second Impression October 1971

Third Impression April 1973

Copyright ~1963 by Winston Graham

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE ...................    7

BOOK TWO .................. 124

BOOK THREE ................ 187

BOOK FOUR .................. 281

BOOK FIVE ................... 438

POSTSCRIPT FOR PURISTS .. 536

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER ONE

I was born on the 25th February, 1578. Later in the year my father married Dorothy Monck, an heiress, of Potheridge in Devon, and by her had fourteen children nine sons and five daughters of whom only four died in infancy.

I did not know my mother. I was brought up in my father’s house, as his son, and bore his name of Killigrew, and was christened Maugan.

We came from St Erme, near Truro in the county of Cornwall where one Ralph Killigrew about 1240 was granted permission by Henry III to bear arms. Ralph’s great-great- grandson was called Simon, and this Simon in 1385 married Joan, of Arwenack, which is at the mouth of the River Fal, and the family moved there and was enriched. Five generations later when the eighth Henry, at war with the French, thought to build a castle commanding the mouth of the River Fal, he chose as his site an old ruined fort on Killigrew land hard by Arwenack House; and the John Killigrew then living my great-grandfather was created first captain of the castle and knighted the same year.

This John Killigrew was a man then in middle life, stout and a little pock-marked; his portrait, which we had until it was burned, shows him to have the round face of the Killigrews, with the prominent eyes and cleft chin and fair hair that come to some of the men. He had married a rich woman, Elizabeth Trewinnard, and had gained much from the dissolution of the monasteries; so that his lands and properties extended from the River Fal to the Helford Passage, and he held the tithes of sixteen parishes and had an incoming of above œ6,000 a year. No doubt it seemed to him that the house he lived in under the shadow of the castle was unworthy of his new wealth and status, for he decided to pull the old house down and to build in its place the biggest house in Cornwall.

So the new Arwenack in which I was born was built. It was not finished until 1567, and my great-grandfather lived only to see the last stone in place before he fell from his horse and died.

He was not a popular man, and there were not lacking people to whisper that this was an omen that overweening pride should bring no good in its wake. True the new Arwenack was seldom a happy house in my lifetime but equally one can seek for a practical cause and see it in the simple fact that my great-grandfather overreached himself. Our family, for all its ancient lineage and good estate, lacked the solidity of great possessions such as could maintain without strain the extravagant way of life he set for it. From his time, therefore, there was a hint of the feverish and the insolvent in our lives. Each generation tried to re-establish itself each generation failed in greater measure than the last. My grandfather and my father were much at court, spending heavily to gain royal favour and office. When they received office they could no longer afford to be scrupulous in their use of it.

But of all this I knew nothing when I was young.

The Pal river, which is navigable as far as Tregony, broadens three miles from the sea and forms a great natural anchorage one of the finest in the world. A mile inland from the mouth a narrow tongue of land splits its west bank, and the creek thus formed runs another mile or more off the main river to the town of Penryn, which IS the main port of the river.

But at the very mouth of the river there juts out, again on its west side, a promontory of land shaped like the head of a guinea-fowl. Imagine that in the head there is an eye: this is the Pendennis Castle of which my great-grandfather, my grandfather and my father were captains; and like an eye it commands all ways of approach. Just below the neck of the guinea-fawl is the house of Arwenack, and all the huge body of the bird was Killigrew land.

So Arwenack House, facing south, looks on the blue smile of the river mouth. But behind the house, behind a narrow hump of land, is the sea again, all the width of Falmouth Bay and the Channel.

I never knew if the house was built to any design. It was like a little town containing within its palisades all that was needed for life and sustenance. When I was born, there were upwards of fifty people living there. Additional to the evergrowing family and near relatives there were thirty-five servants and retainers and a halfdozen hangers-on, people with some claim on my father’s generosity or forbearance who lived and fed with us.

The buildings of the house enclosed a quadrangle on three sides, the fourth facing the harbour being open except for a castellated tower with low walls flanking it and a big gate under the tower. By this gate the house was approached by anyone landing from the sea, and over the gate, supported by cantilevers, was the Killigrew coat of arms, an eagle with two heads and spread wings. At the north corner of the house was another tower pierced with loop-holes for bows or muskets, and tall enough to command the landward approaches. On all sides the house was protected by stockades and earthworks, for, situated as it was in so exposed and isolated a position, not even the castle nearby could give it complete immunity from invasion by sea.

My own bedroom which I shared with my halfbrother John, who was by eighteen months the younger was in the left wing of the house and looked over towards the harbour. It was eight feet broad by eleven feet long and it had a tall narrow window at one end with the bed beside the door at the other, and a second door leading into the bedrooms beyond. When the south-easterly gales blew, the wind would whistle into the room however tightly latched the window and suck its way out with such vehemence that our straw mat would float and quiver as if a snake were under it. The room was plainly but comfortably furnished, for besides the bedstead we had two stools, a window cushion of needlework, canvas to cover the window at night, a box of shelves, and on the wall an old map of the French Brittany coast drawn by Baptista Boazio.

All my childhood memories are of a dark room looking out on a bright scene, because the window for all its tallness seemed not so much to admit light as to stress the brightness without. The first memory ever I had was of John my halfbrother being fed by his wet-nurse he was breast fed until he was three and myself tiring of the entertainment and trotting to the window and looking out of the darkness of the room and seeing a great blueness of still water like a blue dish, with a ship whose chocolate sails were just crumpling as she came to anchor, and behind that the green wooded hills of the east bank of the river.

All my early memories are of water, of sea and river and rain and wind and sky. Either I was looking down on it or was abroad on it with some older member of the family, or I was down at the lake where we bred our swans or I was climbing among the rocks below the castle while the waves showered me with spray. Before I was old enough to reason I came to love the sea, to know it as an element as natural as earth. As soon as I was old enough to reason I came to fear it not as an element but for what it could bring.

For always we lived under the threat of Spain. There had been no peace as long as I could remember, and we never knew when the enemy galleons might appear off our coast. When the first Armada came and passed us by I was ten; and I remember on the 30th July of that year, which was a Saturday, standing with my father and John and my great-uncle Peter and my uncle Thomas on the highest turret of the castle and scanning the uncertain horizon.