“Poor Maugan,” Mistress Footmarker said when I told her. “I am for ever causin’ you trouble. So we’ll not meet again.”
“Oh, we’ll meet. But I fear for your books. I hide them under the bed, but sometimes he roams about late at night and he may surprise me.”
“I care nothing for the books if they please you, but have a care for yourself. He has the cruel face of a weak man.”
“I must stay with him two years; then I shall be old enough to seek work in London.”
She said thoughtfully: “That may be best. That may well be for the best.”
I hesitated and then, because she had been much on my mind, spoke about Sue. Katherine Footmarker listened atten-tively while she stirred the fire, which was burning turf and only smouldering on that dank July day. Then I found I had to tell her about my quarrel with Thomas Arundell and my reasons for it.
She laughed harshly. “So that was how you first came to me. But you’ll be much occupied, lad, if you try to kill every man who speaks the truth about your birth.”
“So my father said.”
“Did he? Well, for once he was speakin’ wisdom.”
“It was not what Thomas said of my birth, but what he said of my mother … Do you know my grandmother?”
“Lady Killigrew? Not but by reports. By reports, well.”
“I think it was through her I was sent here. She does not like me.”
The woman picked up a piece of the turf with the fire tongs and turned it over. “If there be a witch in Kerrier…”
“You’ll not get your fire to draw that way,” I said. “Turning turf over only encourages the smoke.”
She put the tongs down and straightened her back. “I don’t know where the bad comes from in the Killigrews. They have wit and charm, most of ‘em, and courage and a forthcomin’ manner, and sometimes great good looks. But there’s a wild and wasteful streak, like a crack in a good wall and there’s a hint of slipperiness and of the weathercock about them too. D’you know what some folk say about the Killigrew coat of arms?”
“No.”
“That it’s a two-headed eagle so that they can always look which way suits them best …”
All through the wet summer and autumn I visited her when I could. She was the one person I could talk to. The other apprentices of the town had fought shy of me as soon as they knew my name, and one or two attempts at a sort of persecution had not prospered for them, so they had learned to leave me alone. It was a bad year for everyone; the hay was ruined by storms and the harvest late and blackened by rain. Prices mounted, and midsummer wheat was 8s. a bushel. By the autumn it was unsafe to venture far out of the town because of the bands of desperate men who roamed the moors terrorising travellers and stealing sheep. The constables were afraid to proceed against them for they were so greatly outnumbered.
Confirmation came to the town that Henry IV, of Navarre and now France, had changed his religion and turned Catholic, as they had talked of at Arwenack. It meant, said my father when at last he came to see me, a new weighing of the struggle in Europe. Henry swore he would be true to his treaties, and the first effects of his apostasy had been to unite his people rather than divide them further; but he was not yet master of Paris; when he felt himself secure who knew which way he would jump?
Mr Killigrew said I was growing into a great beanstalk and I looked too sapless and scrawny; it was high time I came to Arwenack for a week or so; I had another half-sister, Elizabeth, born last week and no fuss at all, not like last year when they called in that woman from the mill.
There was to be nothing special about Christmas this year.
My father said it was time some of our guests invited us back. I asked him if he had seen or heard of the Arundells of Tolverne. He said he had seen some of them at Antony,the Carews’ place, in May, where he and Mrs Killigrew had gone for the wedding of Jonathan Arundell to Gertrude Carew, but the old man by which my father meant Sir Anthony was as queer as a jay-pie. He had refused to leave his home even to be present at the marriage ceremony, it was said that Lady Arundell had difficulty in getting him out of the house at all. “It’s the trees,” my father said. “They’ve been there too long, before ever the country was Christian. If I had that house I’d cut ‘em all down.”
When he left he slipped me two shillings and kissed me on the forehead. We were not a demonstrative family, and I did not remember when last he had done such a thing.
A week or so after his visit I went as far as Powder Street with a message for Mr John Michell and saw a crowd come up the narrow way going towards High Cross. In the middle of it was a stout man shackled and walking between two guards. There were three others with him, the rest were all sightseers following behind or others who pressed in to watch the procession pass.
“Who is it?” I asked of a notary’s apprentice.
“Don’t really know. They d’say he be a Romanish priest caught red-‘anded down to St Ives. He be going to be examined afore the Bishop of Exeter who’s up to parsonage house. I ‘ear tell he was caught wi’ a mass book an’ a cross ‘pan him. Tha’s all I d’ know.”
The stout man was Humphry Petersen whom I had seen rowing across the river with Sir Anthony ArundeH.
I was to travel home by wagon to Penryn and from there walk. Mr Michell personally saw me aboard with my pack, and said I must be back not later than 1st January. As the two-wheeled wagon began to move, he stood with his cap over one ear, picking at a spot on his chin, his narrow eyes following me suspiciously as if he thought I might jump off as soon as we rounded the first corner.
Indeed I got off, but not for three miles more until we had taken the long slow pull up from St Kea. Then when we stopped to give the five horses a breather I told the wagoner I was going no farther with him.
The track through the woods was miry with an the recent rains; crows and jackdaws were zigzagging over the bare treetops; in my path were trees bright with holly berries and young oaks with brown withered leaves and rusty fronds of bracken and here and there Aaron’s Beard powdering the branches. There was much rustling and stirring in the undergrowth, but I saw no man all the way to the ferry, and when I got there, glad to break at last from the overhanging wood, I had to knock four times at the cottage door to rouse the illfavoured ferryman.
There was welcome at Tolverne. Even Thomas’s smile, though grudging, parted his lips sufficient to show the stumps of the broken teeth. Sue Farnaby went scarlet and then white. The now Gertrude Arundell had not changed at all with marriage and was the same laughing bouncing girl.
- I must of course stay the night. To put me on until supper
they brought cold game pie and some powdered beef spread with Dijon mustard, and this was so appetising after the food in Truro that I ate it wolfishly. By the time it was finished, the rest of the family had drifted out of the dining-hall all except Sue Farnaby and young Elizabeth; and Elizabeth, in spite of hints from Sue, stayed on and on chattering.
Sue was not so pretty as I remembered her; she had dressed her hair in some different new way, and she had gone even thinner. But it didn’t matter, that was the strange thing, it didn’t matter at all.
Suddenly, forgetting Elizabeth, I said: “Sue, you are happy here? “
“Oh, yes, of course.” I knew then that she was not.
“I went to the farm behind Malpas where your aunt lives. She told me you were at Tolverne.”
“I came when my father died.”
“She told me. That was in May. But I haven’t been able to visit you before. I have so little time free that it has not been possible.”
Elizabeth had stopped prattling and was listening, looking from one to the other. She said: “Sue is very hapw here, except that Thomas is tiresome from time to time. I tell her to take no heed of him.”