All June was supreme, with no rain and gentle warm sea-breezes. It was the last fine summer for several years.
Half a mile from our gates, and on the river bank near the town of Penryn, was the old Collegiate Church of St Thomas of Glasney. In my great-grandfather’s time, when England was Catholic, this had been the centre of church life for all the far west. The establishment had been large and wealthy, with a refectory, a chapter house, dormitories for the canons, a hospital, many outbuildings. Now, except for the church, it was in ruins. Of the college chapel, dedicated to Thomas a Becket, only the tower stood. When you walked through the cloisters you could see how roofs had been robbed of their lead, stones carried away to make farmers’ walls, windows broken, coloured glass stolen, doors prised off their hangings.
Even many of the big paving stones had gone, and nettles and cow parsley and vipers bugloss grew rankly in their place.
We children did not often go there: it was too near Penryn, and the Killigrews were not popular in Penryn. But on the rising ground above the ruins was a windmill which had been used by the monks for grinding corn. This had been taken over first by one and then another of the millers of Penryn; but it was known to bring bad luck, and the last man to use it had hanged himself from the great beam. Now it had been allowed to fall into ruin like the college buildings, and a witch lived there called Katherine Footmarker. She was a woman who had been driven out of Penryn for having turned a neighbour’s pet into a toad, but here in this ruin she had been allowed to live, partly because of men’s fear of her, partly because she was known to be able to cure cattle and sheep of the murrain, and the evil she did was suffered for the good.
Although the Arwenack children were terrified of her, we were drawn sometimes towards the mill by the attraction of the forbidden and the dangerous, and twice we had seen her, a woman as tall and thin as my grandmother, walking with long strides through the bracken, once with a jackdaw on her shoulder, once followed by a black dog, which Belemus swore was no dog at all. We would have thrown stones at her if we had dared.
I had in the last year grown fond, perhaps over-fond, of Meg Levant the serving maid. Sometimes around eleven in the morning I would sidle into one of the smaller kitchens where I knew I would find her helping to get our dinner. She would be cleaning the trenchers or scouring the knives often I would steal a piece or two of marchpane to keep my stomach quiet. She was a jolly girl of 17, soft and pretty and auburn haired, and it was good to be in her company after the solemnuties of Parson Merther. In the evenings too in the summer after prayers there was a half-hour before we had to be abed, and I would help her get the candles and the snuffers ready.
One evening I said to her “Who was my mother, Meg?”
She stared at me as if I had asked her the riddle of the Sphinx. “Your mother, Master Maugan? How should I know? “
“You’re older than I am. You’ve been here for years. Someone must have whispered it to you.”
“Why should they?”
“Servants talk. What do the other servants say?”
“Have a care for that candle: you know your grandmother won’t abide a crooked one … The servants say you was brought here as a mite a few months old. Your foster-nurse was old Sarah Amble who took the dropsy three years gone. You should’ve asked her while she was here to answer.”
“D’you swear you do not know?”
“If twas my way to swear, I’d swear, but since it isn’t I won’t. Now, out of my light, boy, or Rosewarne will be after us both.”
I barred her passage. “Who would know, Meg?”
She frowned and looked me over. “How you d’ grow. You’ll be more longer than me afore Christmas. Dare you not ask your father?”
“I asked him but he wouldn’t say.”
“Maybe tis a secret best kept.”
“Not from me. Who else would know?”
“I’ll think on it an’ tell you.”
“Think now.”
She tried to push me out of her way. I put my hands under her armpits. She squeaked petulantly. “Don’t touch me that way! If someone catches you you’ll be for a thrashing.”
“It would be worth it.”
She looked at me sidelong and picked up a large bracket sconce which held five tall tallow candles for the kitchen. “Saucy. If you’re so curious and so brave, why not go and ask Katherine Footmarker?”
I let her pass then. “She would know? Really? You truly think so?”
Meg looked back. “If she did not she would know who to ask.”
At the end of the month my father’s younger brother Simon and his wife and two children came to spend a long summer holiday with us, as they usually did when there was plague in the capital. Simon was a lively man, hearty and noisy, and when he was on a visit he and my father would spend endless hours dicing together, or, when they could persuade Henry Knyvett to join them, Gleek. He and my other uncle, Thomas, were in some way attached to the court. Unlike my father’s uncles, William and Sir Henry, they seemed not to have any precise appointments, but they lived well and kept their creditors at arm’s length.
Simon brought us news that Ralegh had secretly married one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour and in due time had confessed his error to the Queen. A week later he and his bride were in the Tower in separate cells, Uncle Simon explained with a roar of laughter; quite inconvenient for lovebirds. Simon did not like Sir Walter.
With the arrival of two more children in the house, the pace of our learning slackened and we spent much time on the river and bathing from one of the sandy beaches of the bay. Life was pleasant and easy that warm August and early September. Talk of invasion had abated, and no enemy ship was reported all summer. Sometimes in our wanderings we would come within the sight of the old mill above Penryn, and I thought of what Meg Levant had said.
In mid-September Mrs Simon Killigrew and her two children left for Somerset, but Uncle Simon still stayed on. A few days after his family left he rode out with my father on one of my father’s expeditions, and they took Belemus with them. The other children were to spend the afternoon by the swan pool, but I had a slight fever and had been leeched and told to stay in my bed. I knew no one would seek me until supper-time.
I left the house by way of the bakery, the walled garden, and the stables, which lay between the main house and the approach. From there I followed the deep rutted track past our own windmill to a part of the palisade where a broken wall gave me a foot up and over.
It was very little more than a mile to the mill over the fields and through the woods. At first I saw no one; but at Three Farthings House Paul Gwyther was ploughing a field and his son Oliver was following behind sowing the seed of winter wheat and rye. Behind Oliver were the two younger boys armed with slings and stones to keep the birds away. Oliver recognised me and waved a hand.
The woods were thick around Glasney. I skirted the edge of them up the hill. The sails of the windmill were broken, but one of the arms rocked gently in the breeze. From behind a tree I stared across the brambles. I picked a blackberry and chewed it, got a seed in my teeth and felt for it with a forefinger. A dog barked once inside the mill.
Silence fell then. In the clearing there were two grey granite millstones the size of dairy cheeses, and propped against them was a broken wheel. Thistles and docks grew among the grass, and with them shoots of barley and oats. A trampled path led to the door of the mill, which leaned on one hinge.
“Who’s there?” said a voice. “Come forward if you have business. If not, leave us be.”
Just inside the door and well within the sunshine a woman of thirty-odd, in a faded blue kirtle, was sitting cross-legged on the floor. On a stool beside her a rabbit sat eating some lettuce leaves, and there were two or three cats lying the shafts of the sun.