Penmarric (17 page)

I at least wasn’t sorry. My husband was by no means repulsive and I was fond of him, but after a long hard day the last thing I wanted was to postpone the luxury of rest.

But it was not all drudgery. On Sundays I was able to escape from my work when we attended church, and on Sunday evenings I would practice my reading by studying the newspaper which I always bought when I went to market at Penzance on Thursdays. My husband was proud of the fact that I could read and write, and indeed I think he would have had no reservations about the wisdom of his second marriage at all if only he had been on better terms with his sons.

He and his first wife had had five children in all, but three had died in infancy and only the oldest and the youngest had survived. Joss was eleven years younger than Jared, so I did not expect them to be as close to each other as brothers can be, but Joss’s older brother was so much a hero to him that he always took Jared’s side in any family arguments. And Jared, of course, never forgave his father for marrying me.

Within six months he married the daughter of a Madron farmer, and my husband, relieved to end the uneasy atmosphere beneath his roof, ceded his son the tenant farm up the valley which Jared’s mother had had as a dower when she married. The house was a mere stone cottage and the land was hilly and difficult to farm, but Jared was willing to accept any place which afforded him a measure of independence. He wasted no time in moving to the cottage and afterward took care to avoid his father as much as possible.

Joss soon followed his example and went to live with him. Unlike Jared, who had always been John Henry’s favorite, Joss had never been on good terms with his father and I had found him a surly, difficult boy who had been hostile to me from the start. I was hardly sorry to see him go, but I felt guilty that my marriage had divided the family so deeply, and although my husband never reproached me I knew he reproached himself for not realizing that Jared’s interest in me was more than a passing fancy, and for not foreseeing the rift that had developed in consequence between himself and his sons.

The fourth year of my marriage passed, and by this time I had grown accustomed to the life of a farmer’s wife. I looked forward to the Corpus Christi Fair in Penzance and Feast Monday in St. Just and Harvest Festival in Zillan—I did not even mind preparing the feast at the farm to celebrate the end of the potato-lifting. I came to know all the villagers, from the farm laborers to the miners, the blacksmith to the carter, and although I never knew them well (for I was always regarded as a stranger) I also came to know their wives and families.

Even my surroundings now seemed less strange and more pleasing to my eyes. I loved the sweep of the hillside as it rose to the ruins of Chûn Castle, the square tower of Zillan church across the moors, the stone engine house of Ding Dong mine atop the hills to the east. And best of all I loved. Roslyn Farm, the mellow bricks, the spacious rooms, the solidity of the dark, heavy furniture. I loved each uneven flagstone of the dairy, even the latticed windows of the parlor which were so tiresome to clean. In the summer I would open those windows and the scent of the wild roses would float into the house on the soft warm breeze from the moors and the bees would buzz around the honeysuckle. I loved it all; I was at peace. After years of struggle I at last had a home of my own, and the home was doubly precious to me since I had had to fight so long for what I wanted.

I felt no lack in my life. I was vaguely sorry that my marriage was not a romantic one, but would have considered myself a fool to have expected romance under the circumstances. I remember that occasionally I did wonder what it would have been like to have a child, but my childlessness did not upset me. I had never been as maternal as most women, and now the house was my child and it was the house on which I lavished my affection. So long as I had the house, I thought to myself, I would be safe, free from anxiety, blessedly secure.

So I thought my life pleasant enough as the time passed and the seasons came and went. Why not? I had never been more fortunate. It was not until I was thirty years old that I first realized life was merely passing me by, but then it was not until I was thirty years old that I first saw Laurence Castallack.

I met him in the evening when the light was golden and the air was still and there was a great peace on the ruined walls of Chûn. It was March, a mild March when the spring flowers were already in bloom and the air was warm with the promise of summer ahead. We have mild winters in Cornwall; early springs are the rule, not the exception, and it was in the spring when I first saw Laurence, the spring of 1890.

It was a beautiful day.

After supper that evening Jared had called unexpectedly on his father, and because my head always began to ache when I saw Jared I slipped out of the house for a breath of fresh air. Why I decided to walk up the hillside behind the farmhouse I have no idea, but within minutes I was within sight of the top of the ridge and approaching the ruins of Chûn Castle.

The castle is not really a castle at all, merely a double circle of stone walls which have stood on top of the ridge since time out of mind, but the views from the walls are spectacular and I was not altogether surprised when I saw someone else was already there admiring the landscape. But then I saw not only that he was a stranger but that he was also a stranger of quality—and this did surprise me, for the ridge was remote and few of the visitors who came to Cornwall cared enough about a heap of stones to make the journey to the castle.

All we said to each other was “good evening,” but I was to think of him for hours afterward. He had a sad face. His eyes were blue, unexpectedly gentle. What else is there to say? I have no power to describe him any more; descriptions are for people detached enough to observe, and apart from those first few seconds I was never a detached observer of Laurence Castallack.

I saw him several times after that at church on Sundays, and once I even came face to face with him in Penzance on market day. And each time I saw him something happened which I had previously thought happened only in the novels that Miss Charlotte St. Enedoc had lent me long ago at Menherion Castle. I felt weak. My heart hammered in my lungs and there was a quick sinking sensation in my stomach. Even my knees began to tremble.

Of course I soon found out who he was. Since strangers of quality were almost unknown in Zillan he quickly became a subject of interest among the villagers as soon as he began to attend matins at Zillan church every Sunday. He was, I was told, the owner of the large farm at Morvah where old Ned Sparnon had lived until his death recently; Mr. Castallack had inherited the farm from his mother, who had been a Waymark of Zennor. More than twenty years before he had married into the notorious Penmar family, but he and his wife, so gossip whispered, were divorced.

“But he can’t be connected with the Penmars!” I protested to my most fertile source of gossip, Ethel and Millie Turner, who arrived daily at the farm to help me in the house. “The Waymarks, the Carnforths or the St. Enedocs—but not the Penmars!”

“Ah,” chorused Ethel and Millie triumphantly, seizing the chance to voice one of their favorite observations. “There’s bad blood in that family, that we all know.”

And we all did. The Penmars were a wild family of jumped-up adventurers who lived in an enormous mansion called Penmarric on the far side of St. Just. The first Penmar had won the estate in the earlier part of the century by cheating the future King George the Fourth with a pair of loaded dice. Of his three sons, all of whom had been notoriously profligate, the youngest, Mr. Mark Penmar, had made a fortune by swindling in India before he had inherited the estate, and it was his daughter, Miss Maud, who had married Mr. Castallack. Miss Maud now lived in London, and Mr. Castallack lived with his two sons at the family home far away at Gweek. He was only spending the summer at Morvah, the Turner girls informed me—and as soon as I knew that I lived in dread that he would go away.

But he stayed.

Soon I knew not how to contain myself. I burned for him. I thought of him constantly. Yet there was nothing I dared do. Jared had of late been trying to drive a wedge between me and my husband by hinting that I flirted with Farmer Polmarth, a young unmarried neighbor of ours, and although I had convinced John Henry of my innocence I was too conscious that my past was yet again trying to repeat itself to feel confident that my husband trusted me absolutely. Soon all my old fears and dreads and my appalling sense of insecurity began to grip me again. If my husband were to suspect that I had succumbed to this wild infatuation with Mr. Castallack …

I felt quite faint at the thought.

I knew my husband had made a will in which he had left the house, together with a small income for its upkeep, to me for life, but I knew too that his own advancing years and the continuing rift with his sons had made him regret his marriage to a young wife; his suspicion and disillusionment had made him increasingly disagreeable as the months passed. I was well aware that if I gave him the slightest provocation he would remake his will to leave everything to Jared, who at present was to have only the reversion of the house together with a large part of the land and the tenant farm.

Blood always did run thicker than water under circumstances that were adverse. I began to feel as if I were walking on a razor’s edge where one false step could send me toppling over the brink into the abyss of poverty below.

Yet by the time May came I was still trapped in the tangled meshes of my madness, still imprisoned by my determination not to lose everything I had by betraying any symptom of my lunacy. It was a Thursday when the disaster finally overtook me. For once I had stayed at home instead of going to market; having nursed my husband through a serious fever not long before, I was too tired to feel as well as I should have been. Annie had walked to Zennor to see her kin and Griselda had accompanied my husband to Penzance, so I was alone in the house.

I was just sitting in my room and reflecting in an agony of bitterness that I would soon be reaching my thirty-first birthday and still wasting whatever youth I yet possessed, when far away downstairs I heard the back door close.

“Who’s that?” I called sharply at once.

But there was no reply.

In a sudden fever of excitement I raced downstairs, but when I flung open the kitchen door my hopes ended as abruptly as they had begun.

“So there you are, Janna,” said Jared, amused. “I thought you might be at home.”

The shock of seeing him combined with the violence of my disappointment made me tremble with rage.

“How dare you sneak in like that and frighten me so!” I stormed. “I’ve a good mind to tell your father—”

“—that you’re sweet on Mr. Castallack of Morvah?”

The words struck me as hard as a blow. I had thought myself painstakingly careful in concealing my emotions. It had not occurred to me that a woman in love can betray herself in a thousand small but eloquent ways.

Jared laughed. “I’ll bargain with you, Janna,” he said confidently, amused how angry I was. “Fair’s fair. Father’s left you the house for life, hasn’t he? Then promise me you’ll give me the house when he dies if I give you a hundred pounds. I know I’ll have that much coming to me. Promise me that and I’ll see Father hears nothing of Mr. Castallack. If you won’t promise … then I’ll tell him what’s going on and I’ll see you get neither house nor coin.”

“I’ll see you penniless first!” I cried, my fury reviving. “You just try and make your word carry more weight with him than mine! He believed me when you made those accusations about Farmer Polmarth and he’ll still believe me this time! You just try and make trouble and see where it gets you! You just try!”

There was a stillness, a second of hesitation. We stood close together, scarcely two feet apart, I looking him straight in the eyes, he looking at me with equal defiance. Suddenly an indefinable change came upon his expression; his dark eyes lost their hardness and the sullen line of his mouth softened.

“Well, you’ve plenty of spirit,” he said. “I’ll say that for you.”

I stepped aside very quickly but not quickly enough. He moved faster than I did, and before I knew what was happening he had pulled me toward him with a jerk of the wrist and closed my lips with his own.

The room seemed to swim, tilt, blur. I was rigid with revulsion, paralyzed with panic. I felt his huge hands, their backs matted with black hair, slide over my hips and move swiftly upward to my bosom, and all the while his tongue like some monstrous instrument of torture explored my mouth. I felt as if I were suffocating. The moistness of his lips mingled unpleasantly with my sense of taste, but as he pressed me against the wall I could not even twist my face from his.

Suddenly it was over. Jared’s presence was withdrawn; I was left faint and gasping against the wall, but even as I opened my mouth to scream my vision cleared and I saw my husband watching us from the doorway.

The next day he rode to Penzance. He would not say why he went. He had not spoken one word to me since his early return from the market, and even though his silence had reduced me to tears he had stubbornly refused to talk to me.

Four hours later, just as he left the offices of his lawyers after signing a new will, he collapsed with a heart attack and died before he could be taken to hospital.

I would like to write that everyone was very kind to me, but they were not. I knew then who my friends were and who merely pretended to be my friends because I was the wife of one of the more well-to-do farmers in the parish. The rector Mr. Barnwell was as considerate and kind as I had expected him to be; he was the best kind of clergyman, wise, understanding and unprejudiced. My two daily housemaids Ethel and Millie Turner were also kind enough to stay with me for some hours after the funeral when I did not want to be alone, but I suspected they joined in the gossip about me once my back was turned.

Gossip was rife. The very air seemed thick with it.

“Have you heard?” someone said on Market Jew Street in Penzance as I went to see my husband’s lawyers. “John Henry Roslyn … That’s what happens when an old man marries a fast young woman … four years and he’s dead! She’s a sly one, I’ll be bound. Fancy John Henry Roslyn, married all those years to that nice respectable woman, and then suddenly wedding a barmaid young enough to be his daughter … and we all know what being a barmaid means in a town like St. Ives, don’t we?”