All I could see from my window was the passing to and fro of small boats ferrying people aboard and ashore. I paced up and down most of the time, biting the skin round my fingers, and when Rose brought me bread and water at five I kicked it over and ground the bread into the floorboards. When John and the others came to bed at eight he said the guests were still at table, so I pulled a shirt on and a pair of slops and went to see.
I stole across to a bedroom which was my uncle Simon Killigrew’s when he was home and stared out across the river mouth. It was a moonless night but starlit, and I could see the lights of the vessels and pick out their shapes. I wished I was going with them, to glory or to death. If I had no name I must make one.
I took a devious way towards the great hall, avoiding contact with the servants. I had seen Sir Walter Ralegh twice before and could guess which was Sir John Burrough; but I could not make out the others, though I knew one was a Grenville and another a Crosse and a third called Thynne, all west-country men.
Supper was near its end, and for this meal no servants had dined but only the twenty guests and their hosts. Ralegh seemed to take little part in the conversation, his face sombre and as if his mind were elsewhere. I was surprised that he looked so sour and preoccupied, with this splendid new venture just opening for him. Sir John Burrow looked a kinder, more tolerant man, and I wondered if I could run after him when he left tonight and ask to be taken. I thought of Grenville last year who had fought the whole Spanish fleet for fifteen hours alone, withstanding eight hundred rounds of shot before being overwhelmed. Ralegh was his cousin.
I wondered what it must be like to be the Queen’s favourite, perhaps the most powerful man in all England; and now leading a fleet against the enemy. I wished fervently that I might grow up. I felt that all opportunity was passing while I was still too young to play any part.
The following evening when they had all gone I went down into the big parlour to see my father and to receive from him what final admonition he deemed necessary before the incident was closed. To my surprise he seemed now to think lightly of it all.
“The Arundells were always touchy as to their looks not that they ever had none anyway. But you’ll have a grief of a life if you fight everyone who calls you bastard, my boy.”
“No, father, it was not so much that; it was what he said “
“Never forget that there have been others such as yourself who have left their mark. William the Conqueror was one, and people tumble over their own heels to claim him as their ancestor.”
I watched my grandmother, who was adding some accounts. It was due to her, though I did not realise it until years later, that there was little risk of my having to seek for my mother among the servants. It was a rule she had enforced with an iron hand even in her husband’s time. What her menfolk did outside the house was very much their own affair but they did not, in peril almost of their lives, embroil themselves with the servants.
“Remember one word,” my father said, yawning and stretching his legs across a footstool. “Success. If you are a good success in your life people will forgive you far worse things than a little matter of your mother’s wedding. You may do murder, you may betray your country, you may savage women, you may steal from orphans, you may have pillaged and perjured and burned only let the outcome be success and the world will fawn on you.”
“Yes, father.’,
“But don’t consume your substance in your country’s service, or you’ll be brought near to beggary. To hold office in our age is to hold your purse over a hungry mouth that takes all and gives nothing in return. Even your great-uncles Henry and William who are as close to the Queen as a pair of father confessors in and out of her bedchamber, running secret errands for her even your uncles admit themselves to be deeper in debt with each year that passes. At least, one has a knighthood for it, which is more than I, though I am head of the family and my father was knighted and his father before him, and they living in less troublous times than this. By rights I should have had it ten years ago.”
“Leave the boy be, John,” said my grandmother, coughing harshly. “Leave him to learn his own lessons.”
My father drank deep from his mug. “We all learn, but some of us leave it a trifle late. If I had the last twenty years over again I should do one thing or the other: till my own soil and never budge from it and become a wealthy vegetable, like the Boscawens over across the river; or live all my life at court and reap the benefits the way Ralegh has done. Half and half gives you the sour edge of both worlds . ..”
“The best way to teach the boy,” said Lady Killigrew, “is not by book or precept but by sending him into the world to taste it for himself. The confines of Arwenack are too restrictive for him.”
“I don’t see it,” said my father.
“Others see it.”
My father took out his pocket mirror and began to turn up the ends of his moustache. “Presently. In good time.”
“Who is my mother, sir?” I asked.
“You see,” said Lady Killigrew.
“Your mother, boy, has gone to make one of the blest above. She did so at your birth. Who she was is neither here nor there. Be content that I am your father.”
Lady Killigrew said: “Many a lad has fended for himself before he was Maugan’s age. You have a young multiplying family of your own, John. Saplings grow frail if they are overshadowed by taller trees.”
Later that night I heard them talking about Ralegh. Henry Knyvett said he was over-proud and contemptuous sitting so silent over supper as if no one here were good enough to mix with him.
“I am not so sure it was that,” said my father. “He was angry at having raised this expedition and commissioned its crews and part financed it, then to be deprived of the leadership and ordered to return to court so soon as he saw the expedition properly under way.”
“When did he tell you that?” asked Lady Killigrew sharply.
“Just as he was leaving. Frobisher is to follow and take over command in his stead. With Essex in some disgrace Walter is now supreme with the Queen, and she wants him home. But it is a tightrope he walks with such a changeable woman.”
“I would have his tightrope if it were offered to me,” said Henry Knyvett, picking his teeth.
My grandmother’s son by her first marriage was a ramshackle man of nearly fifty with a long nose and a receding profile. He walked as if there was water in his joints, and always wore a skull cap at meals to prevent his hair falling in his food. Things were never easy between him and Mr Killigrew
“Oh, you are all for Ralegh,” Mr Knyvett said, “but we know he is the best hated man in London, and I could give more than several reasons why. He has pulled himself up from nothing by his own shoe-laces. He is a near-convicted atheist and a blasphemer. Now he lives richly in wine patents and cloth licences, domineers over the Queen as Captain of her Guard, and treats ordinary men as if they were dirt under his feet! D’you suppose he is disappointed to be deprived of a chance to fight the Spaniards? I do not. He gets all the Spanish adventures he wants in the Queen’s bedchamber.”
“Envious tongues will always twist the courses of a man’s rise,” said my father. “He has done much for the tinners of this country and none could be more popular with them. As for him domineering the Queen, if you’d seen so much of her as I have you’d know better than to suppose any man is her master. She pulls the strings and others dance. Believe me.”