“I think we are apt to forget that all our grandfathers were Catholics. I do not believe they went to eternal damnation because of it. We all try to serve the same God.”
Ralegh did not seem put out by the shocked and angry glances round the table. I had heard before that he was capable of saying dangerous and outrageous things. My father, who admired and envied him, said it amused him to be outspoken. But these remarks were on the verge of blasphemy and on the verge of Reason.
Talk had broken out at the table again, and Sir Walter, still in spate, was speaking of his wish to send other expeditions to the New World; but for me, and perhaps for all there, the alchemy had gone out of his words.
“If you read the Spanish documents of the last forty years you will find that they have more than once almost reached the hidden empire of the Incas but been driven back by hostile tribes, by disease, or by treachery among themselves. There can be no doubt that between the Amazon and the Orinoco lies the lake of Manoa, a lake conceivably as large as all Europe, and on the shores of the lake is the city of Manoa with its gold mines. This dorado, as the Spanish call it, is surrounded by mountains and peopled by intelligent and resourceful natives who, from evil experience, loathe Spain and the white man. Therein is England’s opportunity.”
“Guiana now, not Virginia,” said Sir Henry.
“Yes. And of equal import for the future. Look on this map again. Which are the three countries of the civilised world with long western seaboards and a seafaring tradition? … Spain, France and England. Of these only Spain has made use of her opportunities; and look at her strength, look at her wealth! In spite of all her setbacks she remains mistress of half Europe. And why? Not because of her own natural resources but because of this life blood of treasure which she draws from across the ocean. Look at the spoils of this single ship Madre de Dios. which Cecil and I and your brother William are still computing. Imagine what England could be if she drew such treasure regularly and as her right! All that opportunity we should now lose if we made peace with Spain.”
“My uncle Peter was of the same view,” muttered my father. “Rest his soul, he was an adventurous rascal, always fighting; and I’d have you know he proposed a voyage to the Grain Coast and the Ivory Coast ten years before Hawkins made it. It was not his fault he didn’t go, it was lack of the means to mount an expedition.”
“And such work of adventure should offer far more than prizes and spoil,” said Ralegh. “The Spanish in their empires seek only gold and diamonds and spoil. It is a short view. I would set colonies of English down to live and breed and make their homes there and to live in amity with the savage and the Indian.”
Just then my grandmother turned and caught my eye again, and I knew I must go or suffer a beating. I took two backward steps towards the door. And then I found that Ralegh was looking at me. I was suddenly pinned there as if shot by an arrow.
“You go to join your playmates, boy?”
“No, sir,” I stammered. “Leastwise not willingly. But I must must go to bed.”
“Stay if you wish,” he said. “We are not talking secrets.”
So, very astonished, I stayed. ‘
My grandmother looked at me once more, and I knew that sooner or later she would take it out of me for disobeying her.
But I had to wait until my fifteenth birthday before she paid me back.
CHAPTER NINE
On my fifteen birthday my father apprenticed me as a clerk to his cousin, Mr Chudleigh Michell of Truro, who was a merchant and brother of the John Michell who had helped dispose of Captain Elliot’s haul.
‘fit is time you were striking out for yourself, boy,” he said staring at himself uneasily in his hand mirror. “It will be of service to you, this experience; and who knows, you may make a niche for yourself there; he needs a handy boy to help him.”
I left Arwenack the following week. Little Odelia wept bitterly, and I was sad myself because it seemed the end of my childhood and the end of a phase of life. Chudleigh Michell was a thin sharp-nosed man with a pock-marked skin and rheumy eyes. His wife was deaf, though only 26, and the five children, the eldest barely seven years old, seemed to take advantage of her handicap by crying all the while. I had a garret under the eaves, and the house was so built that the wails of the babies rose up like the cries of lost lambs.
More than anything else in this changed life were the different noises and the different smells. At Arwenack one had grown accustomed to the smell of dogs and damp rushes and new bread and sour tallow and burning chestnut logs and sea breezes and salt air. In Truro the river smelt of mud and tar and rope, and the house of babies and urine, and the warehouse, which was really a part of the house, of woollen cloths and hides and wine. I heard less of the wind, and when it blew its voice was muted; and I heard much of running water, for a feat flowed under the house. The most unpleasing noise of all was of a founder in the house next door who cast candlesticks and copper chafing dishes, for after they had been cast he would turn them until they were smooth and bright, and the shrill scraping set one’s teeth on edge.
I had had the hope that to compensate for the change I might see something of Sue Farnaby, but my hours, which stretched from seven in the morning until nine at night with half an hour for dinner, left neither leisure nor energy to go far afield. Mostly my work was ledger work and copying in the office and handling the bales of cloth or the hides in the warehouse below. Chudleigh Michell exported coarse undyed woollen cloth and hides to Brittany and imported unsweetened wines in return. For a man of 35 who had begun from nothing he was doing well.
It was May before I had a day off except for Sunday when church-going tied me close to St Mary’s and I went at once to find the farm. First directions were quite wrong, for it was not by the river at all but in a fold of the hills behind St Clement’s Point. It was a poor place when I got there, muddy with recent rains, the track to it overgrown, the gates in need of repair. The woman who came to the door wiping her floury hands was lean enough and startlingly like Sue.
No, she was not Mrs Farnaby, she was Mrs Maris. No, the Farnabys no longer lived here: Mr Farnaby had died in March, and Mrs Farnaby had gone back to Tiverton to work for a cousin who was a lace-maker. No, Susanna had not gone with her; she had taken service at Tolverne, having been offered a place there as Elizabeth Arundell’s personal maid and companion.
I walked back to the town in some discomfort, for the name of Tolverne had come to have sinister meanings for me. It was a bad house, I thought, an unlucky, unhappy house for Sue to be connected with. I remembered too what Belemus had said on the way home after the fight. “Don’t you know that you have spent all afternoon enamouring with the little girl Thomas most fancies for himself?”
I saw nothing of my family and heard only from time to time of their doings; but I learned that my father had succeeded in selling Treworgan in spite of the claims of his creditors. It was the second manor he had had to sell within the year, and Chudleigh Michell was of the opinion that at least two more would have to go. I learned too of the great unpopularity of the Killigrew name. Over and over in the first half-year I saw the change in countenance that came over people when I told them. Almost always their first question was, ‘From Arwenack?’ and if \1 answered yes, it was like confirming some mortal affront.
The town of Truro, though it has grown in my lifetime, was then no more than six streets; but even those I hardly explored, being content to spend my few leisure minutes on the quay, which was built out on the tongue of land splitting the streams Allen and Kenwyn. It was early June before I wandered north of the town where one or two houses and shacks had begun to climb the dusty hill amidst the gorse bushes and the foxgloves and the litter of bluebells.