King's General, The by Maurier Daphne Du

Author:Maurier, Daphne Du [Maurier, Daphne Du]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classics, Fiction, Historical, Novel, Romance
ISBN: 9781405518895
Google: FKk0AgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18869969
Publisher: Little, Brown & Co.
Published: 1946-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

20

The rebel army capitulated to the King in the early hours of Sunday morning. There was no escape by sea for the hundreds of men herded on the beaches. Only one fishing boat put forth from Fowey bound for Plymouth, in the dim light before dawn, and she carried in her cabin the Lord General the Earl of Essex, and his adviser, Lord Robartes. So much we learned later, and we learned too that Matty’s scullion had proved faithful to his promise and borne his message to Sir Jacob Astley at Bodinnick on the Friday evening. But by the time word had reached His Majesty, the outposts upon the road were warned and the Parliament horse had successfully broken through the Royalist lines, and made good their escape to Saltash. So, by a lag in time, over two thousand rebel horse got clean away to fight another day, a serious mishap which was glossed over by our forces in the heat and excitement of the big surrender, and I think the only one of our commanders to go nearly hopping mad at the escape was Richard Grenvile.

It was, I think, most typical of his character that when he sent a regiment of his foot to come to our succor on that Sunday morning, bringing us food from their own wagons, he did not come himself, but forwarded me this brief message, stopping not to consider whether I lived or died, or whether his son was with me still: “You will soon learn,” he wrote, “that my plan has only partially succeeded. The horse have got away, all owing to that besotted idiot Goring lying in a stupor at his headquarters, and permitting—you will scarcely credit it—the rebels to slip through his lines without as much as a musket shot at their backsides. May God preserve us from our own commanders. I go now in haste to Saltash in pursuit, but have little hope of overtaking the sods, if Goring, with his cavalry, has already failed.”

First a soldier, last a lover, my Richard had no time to waste over a starving household and a crippled woman who had let a whole house be laid waste about her for the sake of the son he did not love. So it was not the father after all who carried the fainting lad into my chamber once again, and laid him down, but poor sick John Rashleigh, who crawling for the second time into the tunnel beneath the summerhouse, found Dick unconscious in the buttress cell, tugged at the rope, and so opened the hinged stone into the room.

This was about nine o’clock on the Saturday night, after the house had been abandoned by the rebels, and we were all too weak to do much more than smile at the Royalist foot when they beat their drums under our gaping windows on the Sunday morning.

The first necessity was milk for the children and bread for ourselves, and later in the day, when we had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.