Now reports began to come in of wrecks on the north Devon coast, and three Spanish ureas in great distress put into the Bristol ports for shelter and their crews were imprisoned. A large Spanish flyboat, leaking and part dismasted by the storm, appeared off Dodman Point with a crew of eighty, of which half were veteran troops. Here it was attacked and captured by a Plymouth vessel and brought back in triumph.
On the last day of October I borrowed a horse and servant and rode to Arwenack. By starting early I arrived before dark. I did not know what to expect; I had no idea. Presumably the Spanish had not yet landed; but MrWilliam Treffry and his family had no detailed news, and I could not press for it except in the vaguest terms. Until I saw my father under arrest and led out, I must affect to know nothing of treason or betrayal.
There were a few soldiers about in Truro, but as I rode through Penryn it seemed as if nothing here had changed. No sense of emergency seemed to exist. The place looked exactly the same as when Belemus had been courting Sibylla Kendall and we had been pursued out of the town.
It was a sunny day, but bright only with that autumnal brightness which seems to have no warmth or happiness in it. After the storm the month was going out peaceably, like some old man who has wrought havoc in his manhood and now in age assumes an amiability quite out of character. Only the oaks retained their leaves, the rest of the trees had been stripped by the wild and vicious winds.
As we neared the palisades I felt it was not so long after all since I had been home; the flying visit before the Cadiz em pedition, the visit to Sue; those for the moment seemed to have all the objective reality I could apprehend; the fierce and bloody sixteen months in between existed only in my mind as a barely accepted dream staining the memory with the colours of nightmare. I was not aware this time of any overwhelming emotional sensation such as I had felt when stumbling over the wet grass and through the bracken towards home in 1594. I was younger then. Or perhaps it was that circumstances made it no longer possible to see home as something unequivocal, clear-cut, safe, a symbol of what was to be desired. My bedroom with its narrow walls and long bright window would no longer offer me protection from the dangers and complexities of the world. Wherever I went now, until the day I died, I carried those dangers and complexities within me.
Simon Cook was on the gate. His presence was a reassurance that neither of the worst eventualities could yet have happened. He was astonished, delighted, wished to come with me to the house, but I said no, we’d go on alone.
It was not until we were almost at the house that I saw the tents. They were spread all around the foot of the hill leading to the castle. It was a light in one of them in the growing dusk that first caught the eye. Figures moved about them. They were soldiers.
I came to the house as supper was about to begin.
My father was there, my stepmother, many half brothers and sisters, Belemus, Henry Knyvett, Mistress Wolverstone, Aunt Mary Killigrew, Rosewarne, two officers I did not know. The children greeted me wildly, with great affection and relief. They were full of the danger they were in but excited by it rather than frightened; they clamoured to know how I had come home. My father got up smiling and knuckling his moustache and saying By God, I had changed, I looked 30 if a day, what I must have been through, and now by God’s providence restored to the family, this was a night to celebrate. By what chance of war and shipwreck … Captain Alexander and Lieutenant Guildford, this was his eldest son base son but greatly esteemed by all home from Spain, shipwrecked, did you say, Maugan? aboard the Spanish fleet off our coasts. Come, we must all be happy tonight, eh, Dorothy? Eh, Henry? Wilkey, fetch a bottle of the best canary; we must break it out.
Never had he been so pleased to see me; I should have been warmed and heartened. But if I had changed, he had changed more. He must have been the heavier by 15 lbs. and this had spread him without adding solidity or strength. His skin was blotched and flabby; there were sacks under his eyes, and the lack of feeling in them had spread to the whole of his face. He had always drunk much but seldom before had stumbled over his words.
The two officers were studiously correct but little more. They had arrived only two days ago in charge of 500 levies thrown into Pendennis by Ralegh. The men were soldiers disembarked from the English fleet, musters from the inland towns, some regular levies and a few sailors to make the number.
It seemed that my arrival was an embarrassment to my father, so his welcome was the warmer to deceive others. It was an embarrassment to have anybody arrive from Spain, even an escaped prisoner.
The two officers did not personally question me through the meal but they attended carefully to what was said. So for my part I weighed each word before it was uttered, and found this not so difficult as once would have been the case. The habit of deceit grows.
The great hall had grown shabbier in sixteen months. Two window panes were broken and were boarded waiting proper repair. The rushes on the floor could hardly have been changed in two weeks. The fire had been badly built and was smoking; a thin fog of grey smoke hung around the beams. The candles “uttered and stank; the rabbit pie was half cold and the beef tough and over-salt. Servants looked slovenly and dispirited.
At last I was able to divert attention by saying: “And … grandmother? “
“Oh, she’s with us still,” said Mr Killigrew. “Tenacious as ever; though much of the time gasping like a landed fish. She keeps her room these days.”
“And John? With his new wife?”
“They’re on a visit to her father. They’ve been gone a month, so I’m hoping to have word of them before long.”
Captain Alexander and Lieutenant Guildford correctly and formally excused themselves from a game of dice and went off to the castle. I thought my father would want to speak to me alone, but he tramped off to his private chamber and was not seen again. Mrs Killigrew now had another daughter, christened Dorothy after herself. A baker’s dozen of children had only cost her her figure and her teeth; but in the last twelve months something had taken a new toll.
After supper Belemus made a gesture to me and I was able to detach myself from the children and join him on the ragged lawn before the house.
“So … the bad penny. And never more welcome than now. I had thought you were done for. But what a change hollow cheeks, burning eyes: did they put you to the torture?”
“No … But a Spanish prison is no place for lent-lilies.”
He looked at me keenly. “There is much that has been going on here that I don’t follow, and your coming seems a part of it. I know you too well, Maugan. All you say smacks of evasion. What have you been up to?”
“Nothing that I was not compelled to.”
“Ah. That tells a lot. And “
“And what has been going on here that you can’t follow?”
He bent and eased the buckle of his shoe. “Ah, there again, evasion. You see the house, poverty-stricken, you see your father, bloated and hag-ridden; there has fallen on us all a conspiracy of whispers. Things are decided without reason and acted on without notice. This crisis, for instance. Ever since the beginning of September your father has been like a fox when the hounds are out. I do not know if he had some presentiment of it, but one might well think so. As you know he could always pour the wine down his throat; but this month he has not been sober … In September he was at great pains to send John and Jane off to Northampton, though they had no seeming wish to go. One would have thought, I say, of some presentiment; but if so he has made no attempt to prepare against attack. Carminow had not enough powder to ward away one determined assault. At the worst moment Foster was sent off to Launceston Castle to negotiate the purchase of a demi-cannon; as if we had the money to buy it. I think he will be in trouble for it.”