“Well, you’re some caution, boy. My blessed angels! Is this how you went on in Spain?”
“No. For I saw no one there I liked so much as you.”
“Then you learned it from that rig, Sibylla Kendall.”
“No, I did not, I learned it from no one and have never asked it of no one else in my life.”
“Oh!” She swung away, her hair shaking loose under its coil. “I’ll leave you here wi’ your lewd thoughts. I believe twas all a put-on to mock me.”
“No mocking. Think it over, Meg.”
“That I shall not,” she said, and left me.
The next day it came on to blow from the southwest. There were those in the house who said the sea had been calling for three days. It blew a gale out of the southwest, piling the sea up in mountains on the rocks, scattering twigs and branches over our roofs and plucking thatches off the barns. Two fishing boats which should have come back to Penryn never came back, and a barque was blown on the rocks of Pennance Point and was lost with all hands. As soon as the news of this came a party of us went to see if we could help, but although the point was sheltered from the worst of the gale, there was little to be done. The bay was tossing and seething with a tangle of rigging and spars, and all the sea rolled yellow with the cargo of corn. As the tide fell we picked up a dead sailor on the sand, then two lifting and falling in a pool stained red and still encroached on by the sea; then found one so wedged under a rock that no leverage would release him. A dozen spars, an old chest and a few lengths of sailcloth were worth salvaging, but it was uncomfortable work, for the wind was shifting north and the rain fell continuously and ever colder. When we reached home, soaked and tired and ready for a swig of brandy, we heard that another ship, an Irish ketch called Kinsale, had run for shelter into the Fal, both her masts spent and her captain lost. The mate, a man called Garvie, had already come up to Arwenack and was full of his woes and a good deal of usquebah. Temporary repairs, he said, would take ten days, and he might have to sell some of the cargo to pay for them. The ketch, he said, was the property of two brothers called Ferguson who lived in Dublin, but until he reached there he must act on his own authority.
When he had gone grumbling off, mopping his flat face with a red kerchief, I said to Belemus: “What did he say she carried?”
“You heard. Unsweetened wine, with some Holland cloth and silks and perfume, from Bordeaux to Dublin. She is sailing under French letters of marque, which I find a little strange. I have a thought she may be doing a little privateering on the side.”
“I have thought we might think so.”
Belemus looked at me. “Were you in mind to interfere?”
“Not with the wine.”
Belemus always opened his mouth wide to laugh. “I believe the Spaniards changed your soul while you were out there and sent you back with another man’s. The Maugan of other years is still languishing in some Friar’s prison in Madrid.”
“He died,” I said, but did not specify when.
That evening after supper we took Long Peter and Tom Bewse, the head falconer, and Dick Stable, and set out in the small Killigrew pinnace for Penryn. Even the river had choppy waves on it, but it took us only a few minutes to reach the shelter of Penryn Creek. There we soon picked out the Kinsale, a vessel of maybe 80 tons. She was in a sorry state, but so far as could be seen there was no one aboard her as she creaked gently at her ropes. Laughter and loud voices echoed along the quay from Piper’s Tavern, and no doubt Cox’s round the corner was busy too.
A rat was nosing among the nets at the end of the pier. Lights from the cottages showed pools of water among the great uneven slabs of granite which made up the quay. We shipped our oars and rubbed up against the side of the Kinsale as gently as a cat making friends.
Altogether we took out 16 bolts of Holland cloth, 19 bales of silk and twelve boxes of perfume. This was all the cargo we could get at without taking the ship apart. We had not the space or the time to unload the wine, and in any case the bulk was too great to handle unless we stole the ship as well.
So in two hours we rowed slowly and heavily home.
None of our booty, I decided, should go into the house. As it was unloaded from the pinnace the stuff was piled in the grass in front of the tower facing the harbour. There Long Peter and Tom Bewse had mules and horses assembled. The cloths, the silks, the scents were slung over the withers of the animals and by the early hours of the morning a train had left for Truro. Belemus went with it. I stayed behind. I did not know what the outcome would be, and I was curious to discover it.
CHAPTER THREE
Three days later my grandmother sent for me.
I seldom went or was invited into her chamber, which was the finest in the house because she had refused to vacate it in favour of her son when my grandfather died. Each time I went in I was impressed by the richness of the bed hangings, by the arras with the scenes of the Nativity and the Passion wrought upon it, by the Turkey carpet beside the bed. She once told me that these were things she had brought with her marriage portion, but so unblemished were they that I could hardly believe it. What gave credence to such a claim was my grandmother’s intense care of anything personal to herself. She used as expendable anything in the house except those things which were actually her own.
When I went in this November day in 1594 I remember being impressed by something else for the first time: the close disagreeable smell of an old woman near to her term, and the noise of her breathing which sang its own tuneless swan-song.
But there was no sign of any change in Lady Killigrew’s outlook on life. She knew all she wanted and wanted all she knew.
“Maugan, I hear of another robbery in Penryn Creek.”
“Yes, ma’am. Two or three nights gone it happened. A ketch had run in for succour.”
“Do you know who robbed it?” 207
“I think it better not to guess, ma’am.”
Lady Killigrew coughed. “Silk was stolen, they say, and cloth and perfume. Where is it now?”
“What, ma’am?”
“Do not fence with me, boy. What have you done with the stuff? “
I glanced at the door. “It is all with it is all in safe hands.”
“Where? “
“In Truro with John Michell.”
Diamonds winked as she fumbled restlessly with the sheet, for she was never without her rings in bed. “What have you kept here?”
“Nothing, ma’am.”
“Nothing! How dare you! Was it good perfume? And silk too? I “
“Who told you, ma’am?”
“God damn you, boy, think you I have no eyes or ears?” She paused to get her breath. “Who instructed you to convey it to Michell with such speed?”
“No one, ma’am. It was a precaution. What is not in this house can never be connected with this house.”
She stared at me with utter contempt. “Think you Arwenack could be searched?”
It came to me then that, just as my father clung to habits and attitudes now going out of date, my grandmother lived even more firmly in a world that was past. Mr Killigrew on his feckless course had intimations enough of danger; from time to time he lifted his head and looked uneasily about. But Lady Killigrew, perhaps because she was of a generation earlier, never questioned the grandeur and safety of her position and name. What she said was of course still true: Arwenack could not be searched. It never had been. But with open defiance of the law the risk would grow. To me the solution was a simple one. Defiance of the law could well continue but it must be more carefully contrived.