Read The King's General for Free Online

scarce knowing what I was doing, and found myself, not in the great entrance as I had hoped, but in the cold air upon the battlements, looking out on to Plymouth Sound, while away below me, in the cobbled square, the townsfolk danced and sang. My odious companion was with me still, and he stood now, with his hand upon his sword, looking down upon me with that same mocking smile on his face.
    "So you are the little maid my sister so much detested," he said.
    "What the devil do you mean?" I asked.
    "I would have spanked you for it had I been her," he said. Something in the clip of his voice and the droop of his eye struck a chord in my memory.
    "Who are you?" I said to him.
    "Sir Richard Grenvile," he replied, "a colonel in His Majesty's Army, and knighted some little while ago for extreme gallantry in the field."
    He hummed a little, playing with his sash.
    "It is a pity," I said, "that your manners do not match your courage."
    "And that your deportment," he said, "does not equal your looks."
    This reference to my height--always a sore point, for I had not grown an inch since I was thirteen--stung me to fresh fury. I let fly a string of oaths that Jo and Robin, under the greatest provocation, might have loosed upon the stablemen, though certainly not in my presence, and which I had only learnt through my inveterate habit of eavesdropping; but if I hoped to make Richard Grenvile blanch I was wasting my breath. He waited until I had finished, his head cocked as though he were a tutor hearing me repeat a lesson, and then he shook his head.
    "There is a certain coarseness about the English tongue that does not do for the occasion," he said. "Spanish is more graceful and far more satisfying to the temper.
    Listen to this." And he began to swear in Spanish, loosing upon me a stream of lovely-sounding oaths that would certainly have won admiration had they come from Jo or Robin.
    As I listened I looked again for that resemblance to Gartred, but it was gone. He was like his brother Bevil, but with more dash, and certainly more swagger, and I felt he cared not a tinker's curse for anyone's opinion but his own.
    "You must admit," he said, breaking off suddenly, "that I have you beaten." His smile, no longer sardonic but disarming, had me beaten, too, and I felt my anger die within me. "Come and look at the fleet," he said, "A ship at anchor is a lovely thing."
    We went to the battlements and stared out across the Sound. It was a still, clear night and the moon had risen. The ships were motionless upon the water, and they stood out in the moonlight carved and clear. The men were singing; the sound of their voices was borne to us across the water, distinct from the rough jollity of the crowds in the street below.
    "Were your losses very great at La Rochelle?" I asked him.
    "No more than I expected in an expedition that was bound to be abortive," he answered, shrugging his shoulders. "Those ships yonder are filled with wounded men who won't recover. It would be more humane to throw them overboard." I looked at him in doubt, wondering if this was a further instalment of his peculiar sense of humour. "The only fellows who distinguished themselves were those in the regiment I have the honour to command," he continued, "but as no other officer but myself insists on discipline, it was small wonder that the attack proved a failure."
    His self-assurance was as astounding to me as his former rudeness.
    "Do you talk thus to your superiors?" I asked him.
    "If you mean superior to me in matters military, such a man does not exist," he answered, "but superiors in rank, why, yes, invariably. That is why, although I am not yet twenty-nine, I am already the most detested officer in His Majesty's Army."
    He looked down at me, smiling, and once again I was at a loss for words.
    I thought of my sister Bridget and how he had trodden upon her dress at Kit's wedding, and I wondered if there was anyone in the world who liked him. "And the Duke of Buckingham?" I