The Grove of Eagles by Winston Graham
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Contents
Winston Graham
BOOK ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
BOOK TWO
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
BOOK THREE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
BOOK FOUR
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
BOOK FIVE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
POSTSCRIPT FOR PURISTS
Winston Graham
The Grove of Eagles
Winston Mawdsley Graham OBE was an English novelist, best known for the series of historical novels about the Poldarks. Graham was born in Manchester in 1908, but moved to Perranporth, Cornwall when he was seventeen. His first novel, The House with the Stained Glass Windows was published in 1933. His first ‘Poldark’ novel, Ross Poldark, was published in 1945, and was followed by eleven further titles, the last of which, Bella Poldark, came out in 2002. The novels were set in Cornwall, especially in and around Perranporth, where Graham spent much of his life, and were made into a BBC television series in the 1970s. It was so successful that vicars moved or cancelled church services rather than try to hold them when Poldark was showing.
Aside from the Poldark series, Graham’s most successful work was Marnie, a thriller which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1964. Hitchcock had originally hoped that Grace Kelly would return to films to play the lead and she had agreed in principle, but the plan failed when the principality of Monaco realised that the heroine was a thief and sexually repressed. The leads were eventually taken by Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery. Five of Graham’s other books were filmed, including The Walking Stick, Night Without Stars and Take My Life. Graham wrote a history of the Spanish Armadas and an historical novel, The Grove of Eagles, based in that period. He was also an accomplished writer of suspense novels. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Private Man, was published by Macmillan in 2003. He had completed work on it just weeks before he died. Graham was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1983 was honoured with the OBE.
BOOK ONE
Chapter One
I was born on the 25th February, 1578. Later in the year my father married Dorothy Monck, an heiress, of Potheridge in Devon, and by her had fourteen children—nine sons and five daughters—of whom only four died in infancy.
I did not know my mother. I was brought up in my father’s house, as his son, and bore his name of Killigrew, and was christened Maugan.
We came from St Erme, near Truro in the county of Cornwall where one Ralph Killigrew about 1240 was granted permission, by Henry III to bear arms. Ralph’s great-great-grandson was called Simon, and this Simon in 1385 married Joan, of Arwenack, which is at the mouth of the River Fal, and the family moved there and was enriched. Five generations later when the eighth Henry, at war with the French, thought to build a castle commanding the mouth of the River Fal, he chose as his site an old ruined fort on Killigrew land hard by Arwenack House; and the John Killigrew then living—my great-grandfather—was created first captain of the castle and knighted the same year.
This John Killigrew was a man then in middle life, stout and a little pock-marked; his portrait, which we had until it was burned, shows him to have the round face of the Killigrews, with the prominent eyes and cleft chin and fair hair that come to some of the men. He had married a rich woman, Elizabeth Trewinnard, and had gained much from the dissolution of the monasteries; so that his lands and properties extended from the River Fal to the Helford Passage, and he held the tithes of sixteen parishes and had an incoming of above £6,000 a year. No doubt it seemed to him that the house he lived in under the shadow of the castle was unworthy of his new wealth and status, for he decided to pull the old house down and to build in its place the biggest house in Cornwall.
So the new Arwenack in which I was born was built. It was not finished until 1567, and my great-grandfather lived only to see the last stone in place before he fell from his horse and died.
He was not a popular man, and there were not lacking people to whisper that this was an omen that overweening pride should bring no good in its wake. True the new Arwenack was seldom a happy house in my lifetime; but equally one can seek for a practical cause and see it in the simple fact that my great-grandfather overreached himself. Our family, for all its ancient lineage and good estate, lacked the solidity of great possessions such as could maintain without strain the extravagant way of life he set for it. From his time, therefore, there was a hint of the feverish and the insolvent in our lives. Each generation tried to re-establish itself; each generation failed in greater measure than the last. My grandfather and my father were much at court, spending heavily to gain royal favour and office. When they received office they could no longer afford to be scrupulous in their use of it.
But of all this I knew nothing when I was young.
The Fal river, which is navigable as far as Tregony, broadens three miles from the sea and forms a great natural anchorage, one of the finest in the world. A mile inland from the mouth a narrow tongue of land splits its west bank, and the creek thus formed runs another mile or more off the main river to the town of Penryn, which is the main port of the river.
But at the very mouth of the river there juts out, again on its west side, a promontory of land shaped like the head of a guinea-fowl. Imagine that in the head there is an eye: this is the Pendennis Castle of which my great-grandfather, my grandfather and my father were captains; and like an eye it commands all ways of approach. Just below the neck of the guinea-fowl is the house of Arwenack, and all the huge body of the bird was Killigrew land.
So Arwenack House, facing south, looks on the blue smile of the river mouth. But behind the house, behind a narrow hump of land, is the sea again, all the width of Falmouth Bay and the Channel.
I never knew if the house was built to any design. It was like a little town containing within its palisades all that was needed for life and sustenance. When I was born, there were upwards of fifty people living there. Additional to the evergrowing family and n
The buildings of the house enclosed a quadrangle on three sides, the fourth facing the harbour being open except for a castellated tower with low walls flanking it and a big gate under the tower. By this gate the house was approached by anyone landing from the sea, and over the gate, supported by cantilevers, was the Killigrew coat of arms, an eagle with two heads and spread wings. At the north corner of the house was another tower pierced with loop-holes for bows or muskets, and tall enough to command the landward approaches. On all sides the house was protected by stockades and earthworks, for, situated as it was in so exposed and isolated a position, not even the castle nearby could give it complete immunity from invasion by sea.
My own bedroom—which I shared with my half-brother John, who was by eighteen months the younger—was in the left wing of the house and looked over towards the harbour. It was eight feet broad by eleven feet long and it had a tall narrow window at one end with the bed beside the door at the other, and a second door leading into the bedrooms beyond. When the south-easterly gales blew, the wind would whistle into the room however tightly latched the window and suck its way out with such vehemence that our straw that would float and quiver as if a snake were under it. The room was plainly but comfortably furnished, for besides the bedstead we had two stools, a window cushion of needlework, canvas to cover the window at night, a box of shelves, and on the wall an old map of the French Brittany coast drawn by Baptista Boazio.
All my childhood memories are of a dark room looking out on a bright scene, because the window for all its tallness seemed not so much to admit light as to stress the brightness without. The first memory ever I had was of John my half-brother being fed by his wet-nurse—he was breast fed until he was three—and myself tiring of the entertainment and trotting to the window and looking out of the darkness of the room and seeing a great blueness of still water like a blue dish, with a ship whose chocolate sails were just crumpling as she came to anchor, and behind that the green wooded, hills of the east bank of the river.
All my early memories are of water, of sea and river and rain and wind and sky. Either I was looking down on it or was abroad on it with some older member of the family, or I was down at the lake where we bred our swans or I was climbing among the rocks below the castle while the waves showered me with spray. Before I was old enough to reason I came to love the sea, to know it as an element as natural as earth. As soon as I was old enough to reason I came to fear it—not as an element but for what it could bring.
For always we lived under the threat of Spain. There had been no peace as long as I could remember, and we never knew when the enemy galleons might appear off our coast. When the first Armada came and passed us by I was ten; and I remember on the 30th July of that year, which was a Saturday, standing with my father and John and my great-uncle Peter and my uncle Thomas on the highest turret of the castle and scanning the uncertain horizon.
We got a sight of the ships in the late afternoon as the wind freshened and the haze over the sea cleared. The great fleet, of which we could see only a part, looked elevated above the sea like castles, like our Pendenis Castle, built on the horizon, the sun glinting on them and gilding them. As dusk fell Walter Powell of Penryn put in and told us that he had passed close by and that he had counted many more than a hundred ships and that they all had their flags and pennants streaming and that the bands on board were playing martial music. My great-uncle Peter, though by then above sixty years of age, had already put to sea in a coaster to follow the enemy up channel.
But even after the first danger was past, and even after the great rejoicings when it became known that the Armada was sunk and dispersed, we knew well that this was not the end of the war for us
Nor was it only Spaniards that the sea brought. We suffered no menace from English pirates; but in the Channel there were other ships of foreign marque, from Turkey and Algiers and Turns. When I was five John Michell of Truro lost two ships in the river, six miles up river from the mouth, boarded and. seized; and the coast towns of St Ives and Penzance and Market Jew were seldom free from risk of raid and fire and abduction. Before I was born, before we were at war with Spain, French ships one day, being pursued by Spanish ships of war, took refuge in the River Fal. The Spaniards sailed past our castle, following the French ships in, which themselves retreated, farther and farther up the river in a battle lasting three hours. At length the French ships were driven aground at Malpas near Truro, and then Sir John Arundell, our kinsman from Trerice, sent messages to the Spanish Admiral to try to stop the fighting; but the Spaniards refused and bombarded the French for another two hours before being forced to withdraw by the falling tide.
All this my grandmother told me, for it had happened when she came to Arwenack as a young widow to marry my grandfather.
This was before my grandmother took against me.
I have many memories of youth. But over all there is the first memory, of being within four walls like in a dark cell, pressed down, and looking out on a world of vivid brightness, of being held down in darkness like a prisoner and wanting to get out, of a sense of confinement and constriction. And there is the second memory, the longer memory, of there being no peace in the world, of fear and danger outside and a limited safety within.
We were always in those days at the mercy of rumour, of the false alarm, the whisper behind the hand, of a change of atmosphere, of a growing tension without cause, of suspicion of treachery and betrayal. A calf would die for no reason, or the horses would be restless in their stables, or a cloud would form at sunset red-tipped and shaped like the Judgment Seat. Or Meg Levant, one of the serving maids, would come in with a story she had had of Harold Tregwin of Gluvias, who had heard that a Papist priest had been found in a secret cupboard in the house of the Roscarrocks at Pentire and they were all arrested.
When I was four I was put to study with horn-book and primer under Parson Merther, the chaplain of the house, and the following year my brother John joined me. Every year, almost, another came: Thomas, then Odelia, then Henry. Then there were no more for a while because Grace died at 3 months. With our group often was my cousin Paul Knyvett, a sulky boy older than I by a year, and another more distant cousin Belemus Roscarrock who was a year older still but very lazy and mutinous.
By the time I was eleven I had been introduced to Lily’s Grammar and Record’s Arithmetic and the Colloquies of Erasmus, and had got by heart some Ovid and Juvenai. I had learned the first twenty propositions of Euclid and knew something of history and the stars.
Each morning the whole house would rise at sun-up for prayers, then we children would have to read a chapter of the Bible aloud before we broke our fast: we would have meal bread with porridge and sometimes a slice of cold mutton or a piece of Holland cheese. Parson Merther would watch over us, fussy as an old woman, his long yellow fingers picking at his doublet, his small, sword-point eyes ever on the move to find cause for reproof in our manners or our dress. John was caught blowing on his porridge to cool it, Odelia had forgotten to wipe her nose, Paul had left off his garters, we all bent too close over our food.
This was a special care of Parson Merther’s: even at lessons we were made to work with head upright lest humours should fall into the forehead and cause injury to the eyes.
After dinner at noon we would have three hours of the afternoon free, when we could practise fencing with rapier or sword, or go hawking with one of the grooms, or take a boat and play on the river, or sit telling each other frightening stories in the dark aromatic shed in the herb garden where the herbs were dried. Or we would play with the dogs or help feed the horses or even ride a nag if Thomas Rosewarae, the steward, was in a good mood. Or we would climb the elm trees or play in the thick wood going down to the swan pool.
But we had to be in and dressed and properly clean to be at board f
I remember especially my fourteenth birthday. My father’s sixth legitimate child, Walter, had been ill for three weeks of a quartan ague and had had many fits. My father’s wife, Dorothy, was great again but there was to be a banquet that evening. Two ships were in the Bay, and there were to be a dozen guests at table. So the day had flown, with hurryings and scurryings of servants and preparations of food.
With my stepmother so industrious in child-bearing, my grandmother often held the reins of the household—or perhaps, being how she was, she would have retained them in any case. When there were guests she always took charge, and I think although my grandfather had been dead seven years she had never really given way either to her son or her daughter-in-law. Certainly she was the only person in the house who did not stir uneasily at my father’s footstep.
I had spent the afternoon with Belemus Roscarrock. We had played with a tennis ball on the archery lawn until driven off.
Then we had tried stalking the crows which milled around the newly turned earth of the turnip field. When we tired of this, having killed only one, we mooched back in the fading light to the house and stood a few moments looking at the two vessels, both shallops, which lay close in to the shelter of the land.
“Neptune and Dolphin,” said Belemus scratching his black hair. “It’s more than six months since they were here before.”
“I don’t remember ’em,” I said.
“No, they were over at Helford. Did not show their faces here. The Crane was on the prowl. We’d best be going on. Old Ink-horn will be chewing on his gums with rage.”
Although I did not always get on with Belemus, I found his company challenging and a stimulus. A heavy boy, already at 16 a full man’s size, with black eyes set deep in his face like cave dwellings overhung by rock, he talked cynically out of a wide full mouth. He seemed to have so much more knowledge of affairs than I had.