The King's General by Daphne DuMaurier

Author:Daphne DuMaurier [DuMaurier, Daphne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, General, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9780316252959
Google: ha4lAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18869969
Publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc.
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 learnt later, and we learnt, too, that Matty’s scullion had indeed 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 and the outposts upon the road were warned, the Parliament horse had successfully broken through the royalist lines and made good their escape to Saltash. So, by a lag in time, more than two thousand rebel horse got clean away to fight another day, which serious mishap 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 succour 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. He wrote: You will soon learn 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 so 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 we 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 to 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 and, finding 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 little more than smile at them when the royalist foot 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

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