Perhaps my mood found a responding chord in Mr Killigrew; I know he forbade any inquisition when Belemus and I came to the table with our features puffed and scarred. I have since thought though I did not perceive it then that my father was a man who was himself lost and without beliefs in a world that seemed to him full of enemies. He had grown up in an age when lawlessness was near to a patriotic duty, when armed retainers were the accepted instrument of
privilege, when one lived by force at home and by bribery at Court. But time had caught him up and passed him by. He was in a bog of his own and my grandfather’s devising, and casual efforts to struggle free only sent him the deeper. To thwart his enemies he went to shifts that created more enemies. Godolphin was a greater power in the land, but Godolphin never rode abroad followed by a half score of armed men of his own. Nor did Sir Reginald Mohun nor did a Grenville nor a Basset nor a Boscawen. Their only armed forces were the musters they gathered for the defence of England.
Times were changing. My father’s way of life stood out in a dangerous prominence. And he was not prepared to change it. Creditors were pressing, but his need of Mistress Margaret Jolly pressed harder. His debts demanded close personal attention, but it would not always be such good hawking weather. A number of his fields were fallow for lack of farm help, but he saved with having fewer servants to feed and so could spend more on the occasional feast.
I began to know all he did. The expulsion of the Farnabys was not an isolated act. When he rode abroad to collect his rents there was no nonsense tolerated, and I was the witness of three scenes in which tenants were turned out without ceremony and without mercy. Twice I was in brushes with bailiffs who sought to put a distraint on property. I learned to carry pistols and to practice the use of them. Sometimes Belemus came with us and then we would ride together immediately behind my father.
Belemus’s father was still in prison and his lands under seizure by the crown, so that he too was a young man without proper restraint. After our fight we became closer friends and took part in ventures of our own.
At the end of that summer Belemus fell in love with a girl called Sibylla who was the daughter of Otho Kendall, a burgher of Penryn. In the town Killigrews were never popular, but Belemus and I took to frequenting Cox’s Tavern which was hard by the harbour and next to the Kendall house. This way he could sometimes catch a glimpse of Sibylla as she came and went, and presently he found a wall which he could climb on, from which he could carry on a whispered conversation with her out of her bedroom window.
It was all fraught with a good deal of hazard. The local quarryworkers and townsfolk knew who we were and resented our being there. Otho Kendall was a fiery man, and his father Sebastian Kendall was an old sailor, beringed and one-eyed, whose reputation for violence had not lapsed with age.
Sibylla was a slender black-eyed girl, more beautiful perhaps than pretty, and she wore her hair under its cap in long black braids. But there was nothing demure about her eyes when she raised them, and Belemus was afire with passion.
It must have been one afternoon in early September when, sitting in the tavern, we saw the girl leave her home alone and walk up the hill carrying a basket. She had gone no more than a dozen yards before we followed her. The sun was shining after a morning of heavy rain, the tide was out, and the town drowsed in the warmth as if deserted. But once or twice I thought there were faces quietly withdrawn from windows as we passed.
They were bell-ringing in St Gluvias church across the narrow creek: they had been at it all afternoon, practicing or just for the sport.
We followed Sibylla until at the first thicket out of the town she stopped to pick the blackberries which glistened still with the drops of rain on them. Belemus gave me a nudge to stay where I was and went over to speak to her.
At eighteen Belemus had grown into a powerful and personable young man. His buff leather jerkin with its brass buttons showed the breadth of his chest. He had grown a short black beard and a tiny wisp of moustache which he kept carefully trimmed and which softened the wide flat angles of his mouth and cheeks. He walked with the swagger of a man who hardly knows his own strength. He gave the girl a great bow, his long hair as he uncovered blowing in the breeze. She turned her head away and continued to pick blackberries. I could not hear what they said for they spoke in low tones, but every now and then she would break into a shrill excited laugh. The church was a few hundred yards away across the muddy creek and up the hill, and the bells clashed and clanged ever more violently as if themselves agitated by some compulsion of excitement.
Belemus was trying to persuade Sibylla to take a walk with him as far as the hill above the town. It seemed an innocent invitation, but she knew that the paths through the hazel and nut trees were narrow and winding and one might easily stray. Others had done it before, and the bold and the brazen walked up there of a summer evening hand in hand. All the same, something in her manner suggested that sooner or later she would yield; it might not be today, but a persistent courtship would have its reward.
The bells at last stopped with a final clang, and in the echoing sunny silence the only sound was the crying of the gulls as they fought and flapped about refuse which had been thrown in the mud for the next tide to carry away. I glanced back and saw two figures coming up the narrow cobbled street. One was limping and had a black patch over his eye.
Belemus scowled at me as I came up. “What’s amiss? Leave us be.”
“There’s others who’ll not.”
“Who’s that, man?”
“Miss Sibylla’s father and grandfather will walk with you right away. They’re equipped for climbing, for they carry sticks.”
The colour fell out of the girl’s flushed cheeks. “God save us, go away, Belemus! Hide yourself, you and your friend. Go, go quick, leave me to my berries!” She turned sharply and began to clutch at the fruit; ripe and unripe went into her basket together.
“It would take more than a couple of such to flight me,” said Belemus, pulling at his beard. “A damned old miser and a limping one-eyed lobster-catcher. Why “
“Come, man, you’ll only make it worse for the girl. Come away while there’s time.”
I pulled at him, but by now the two men were near enough to see us. As we moved farther up the hill putting distance between us and Sibylla, the roar of Otho Kendall came after us.
“Hi! You! Killigrew trash, I’d have a word wi’ ye!”
Belemus stopped and fingered the short knife in his belt. “If I were a Killigrew I should feel some choler at that.”
I said: “You are included.”
We waited until the two old men had come up with the girl. We were then some twenty yards away. The sun, already watery for the morrow, glinted on the three gold rings on old Sebastian Kendall’s gouty fingers, on the earrings trembling under his grey wig. He had been hard put to it to keep up with his son.
“Killigrew dung!” shouted Otho Kendall, and spat. “Keep off of my dattur! “
“We were not on her, old man,” said Belemus.
“Filthy whorers! Keep out of Penryn. Go back to your own midden over th’ hill. Come nigh us again and we’ll tear yer tripes out.”
“Old man,” said Belemus, “old man, when I choose to come to your scabby little town, I shall come and not you nor any of your smutty fellows shall stop me.”
At this moment Sibylla unwisely made some movement, and her father swung round and hit her on the side of the head. She collapsed in a sudden wailing heap, bonnet going one way, basket the other.
“Bravo,” said Belemus, “strike your womenl It’s common, I know, among offal such as you!”