“Tomorrow then we will see if a way can be found.”
“What are you asking me to swear, sehor?”
“To secrecy in the message you carry.”
“To my father?”
“Yes, it must be learned by heart and must go to him only and must never be spoken of again.”
Sleep for less than an hour. The pageant of the day, with its ponderous, tedious progression to the blind automatic spectacle of the end, was of the stuff of nightmare. Mingling with all this were sudden wakings, full of panic hopes and fears, and long minutes when everything was clear with the feverish clarity of illness.
About eleven that morning Mariana limped down the steps to the patio.
“So, Maugan, I hear you are to leave us?”
“There is no certainty of it yet.”
“Perhaps you will be returning to your girl, and you can say to her, ‘Ay de mi, those Spanish women, how I despised them ~ ‘ “
“If I say anything to anyone in England it will be that Spanish women have courage and beauty … and one, among them that I knew, more than any of the others.”
She looked surprised. “Sweet Jesu, you are becoming a courtier. Perhaps it is after all true that you have uncles close to the Queen.”
All that day I waited, but it was not until six in the evening that the summons came. Rodez arrhed to say we were to attend at the palace at once.
There was no ceremony to being admitted, no waiting, no ante-chambers crowded with favour-seekers. We entered the palace by the side door through which the pages came and went, crossed the width of the building by musty passages most of them below ground, here and there coming out level with little green courtyards.
I was led into a chapel with savage stained glass in its Gothic windows. At the back of the chapel was a writing table, and seated at the table were three men: a priest I had never seen before he had been chosen because he spoke English; Senor Prada; and Don Juan de Idiaquez, whom I had seen once before and whom I knew to be, after the King, the most important member of the Junta de Noche. Rodez withdrew and left me with the three men. The light from one of the windows threw a bloody streak across the table and across the well-kept hands of Idiaquez.
“You will sit here, Maugan Killigrew,” said Andres Prada. “Father Vasco will read to you the message you are to learn by heart. When you have learned it he will take your oath, then you will be free to go.”
CHAPTER FOUR
It was July before I saw Cornwall. I travelled back to Lisbon in the company of two couriers and there waited four weeks. A provision ship carrying supplies for the army in Brittany at length gave me passage, but three days out we were struck with a great storm which after a week drove us back, a battered leaking wreck, into Coruna at the Groyne. More weeks passed in repairs and we did not reach Blavet until early June. Then began the most contrary wait of all, with only 200 miles of sea between myself and home. Great gales blew across the Bay with rain and biting winds. Enormous waves dashed against the mole and damp powdery-balls of spume tottered through the narrow streets. I had been given some money but this ran low, and I worked in a shipyard for three weeks unloading planks.
In the end a man I knew brought me home in the sort of secrecy in which he always seemed to move and have his life, a secrecy of which his thin whispering nasal voice seemed an essential part. Captain Elliot said:
“I’ll run you as far as Helford, put you ashore there
Dolph~n’s bound for Plymouth but twill be no great way off course. I’m never above doing a favour for an old friend, and your father has long been a well-wisher of mine.”
“Taken by Burley, was you?” shouted William Love, laughing heartily. “He’s turned his hand to many things, has Richard Burley, but child snatching is a new one and not, you’d ha’ thought, so richly profitable. One day he’ll find his neck in a loop o’ rope, and then he’ll dance to someone else’s measure.”
“Seen him?” said Captain Elliot. “No, young man, we have not seen Captain Burley since just before that time we visited you. You remember that time when we came on you late and you roused the house, and we stayed with you four or five days.”
“Aye,” said William Love, “and there was some fever in the house among the servants that more’n one of our hearty lads took. I wished we’d never come.”
“But that “
“What,” whispered Captain Elliot, “what was the name of the one that died of it? We buried him off Gyllyngvase. Mark Jarvis, that was it … Nay, I have not seen Captain Burley since we parted off the Land’s End the day before we made Helford. And then I had no time to bid him good day for I was afraid any minute to feel the Runnelstones under my keel. His prize foundered, you say? I thought we all should have. How long ago is all that, William?”
“thigh on two year. September or October ‘92. The boy’s grown since then. He’s already taller ‘n his father.”
“Ye’ve grown since I seen ye last,” said Justinian Kilter, “but I mind you well. You was ever interfering twixt me and that girl, what’s her name, Meg something. But last time we called you wasn’t there to thrust in your oar so I made free with her to my heart’s content.”
“Dick Stable would see you did not.”
“Ah, that’s his name, that skim-milk of a man. I never can mind whether he be Dick Harp the stable boy or Dick Stable th’ harpist. Poh, he could not protect a lent lily from a bumble bee. Meg had her fill o’ me last time I was there. I should not wonder if I’ve fathered a brat on her.”
“Muscle?” said Aristotle Totle. “Why ye’ve no muscle yet, you should be ashamed at 16; why at your age I could lift two grown men. ‘Ere, feel my arms no, not there, ‘ore. There’s stren’th for ‘ee. I’ve killed twenty men in my time wi’ my bare ‘ends. Twenty or twenty-one, I lose the count.”
“How is her Ladyship your grandmother?” asked Captain Elliot. “I’ll be bound she’ll be glad to see you back. You’re a lucky young man, Maugan Killigrew, being sent home like this. Many will say, how did he accomplish it? What special service did he render to receive such special favour? Like as not, you’ll be asked that, and then what will you say?”
“The truth. That it was because of an exchange.”
“Ah, but what exchange? they’ll say. Did we release some Spaniard? Did we?”
“I think so.”
“I’ll hold a penny Richard Burley plays some eor.hr,uir.g part in this,” shouted William Love. “He’s a deep fish and contrives much to his own profit. We must seek him out.”
“No,” said Captain Elliot. “Burley now has truck with the Spaniards, and that is treasonable work. Eh, young man? Who sups with the devil … Let us have no thought for Burley and his evil ways.”
We sighted the Lizard about four-thirty on a wet and gusty Sunday afternoon. After the towering Sierras the dark coastline looked low and unimposing, but a lump rose in my throat and for a half-hour it would not be swallowed down. Though the sea had little vicious heads on it and the wind was shifting and backing treacherously Dolphin reefed her sails and made scarcely any headway towards the shelter of the land.
“We’ll slip in as the day wanes,” said Captain Elliot. “Twould not do to rouse an alarm, for there’s been much nervousness all summer on account of a Spanish attack.”
I could not wait to get off this ship, and there was more than homesickness to it. For one reason or another they were all lying to me. Whatever element of truth escaped them was by accident and not design. They even contradicted each other. Totle boasted of impossible prowess; Kilter spoke so of Meg to goad me; Elliot untruthfully disowned Burley; Love, perhaps most dangerously of all, twisted his own memory.