Penmarric (20 page)

“What an incredibly ugly clock,” said Mark, slipping off his jacket. “I suppose it was your husband’s.”

We said nothing else. We undressed, he very quickly, I with great precision as if every movement was of vital importance, and then at last when there was nothing else left to be done, we went to bed.

I expected nothing.

I did not love him. I had lost the man I loved and was full of grief. I was resentful but too wrapped up in my misery, too desolated by life’s unfairness to feel either violently angry or violently humiliated. I felt nothing. I entered the episode so passively that I had already resolved to forget it the moment it was over, and one does not expect anything from an association begun in that frame of mind.

I did not want to expect anything. That would have betrayed Laurence, and it was Laurence that I loved.

So I went to Mark wanting nothing and expecting nothing, and suddenly it was all changed, just as it is in those nightmares when a familiar landscape becomes alien, and I found I did not know myself. I looked into those narrow black eyes, and it was as if I had never known myself, as if my own self were imprisoned in a stranger’s body over which I had no control. And when he touched me, unhooking the fastenings of my bodice and burying his face in my hair as I let it fall past my shoulders, it was as if no man had ever touched me before and I forgot Laurence—yes, I forgot him—forgot him as if he had never existed, because never in all my moments with Laurence had I imagined it was possible to experience what I experienced then with his son.

It was indescribable. No words ever invented could even begin to describe it.

When I awoke at last it was late afternoon and beyond the window the moors were already bathed in the golden October light. I lay where I was, not even wanting to move, my limbs warm and relaxed between the sheets, my eyelids heavy with drowsiness, my whole body satiated and at peace. The house was very quiet. All I could hear was the even breathing of the man beside me, but I did not look at him because I did not want to acknowledge to myself what had happened. I closed my eyes and let that slumbrous languor seep through me with its delicious drowsiness, and tried to pretend that it was Laurence beside me and that I had only to open my eyes to see the face I had loved so much, but suddenly his face, was gone. I could not remember it, and all I could see were slanting eyes and that hard masculine mouth.

I sat up.

Mark did not stir. I looked at him. He seemed young and childish, his hair black against the white pillow, his lashes motionless against his flushed cheeks. I went on looking at him, but presently when I could look at him no longer I slipped out of bed and began to dress.

He still did not stir. I went on dressing, praying for tears or for some other release from the pain of shock, but I did not cry. I finished dressing, picked up the bolsters from the floor, twisted my hair into place; When I had finished I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were tearless. I thought I would look tired, but I did not. I looked young.

Twenty-five, perhaps. Or possibly twenty-six. I thought: I’m young—young! But I could not understand it; it was too hard to comprehend, but as I left the room and went downstairs I felt as light and free as air.

Griselda came out into the hall to meet me. I saw her look at Mark’s hat on the table, but she said nothing and I said nothing to her. I went outside. The sun was warm; a breeze caressed the moors, and suddenly I was stumbling up the hillside until before me in the heather rose the ruined walls of Chûn.

I began to cry then, the tears welling soundlessly in my eyes and burning my cheeks. I went, into the inner circle as if I could recall the ghost of the man I had first seen there seven months before, but there were no ghosts, only bitter memories of a romance between an ill-assorted couple, a farmer’s widow aflame with the desire to make up for a wasted youth and a middle-aged scholar unable to tolerate a seventeenth consecutive year of celibacy. We had each been a convenience for the other; I saw that now. The only difference between us was that I had deluded myself by thinking I was passionately in love, while Laurence had recognized from the beginning that we were two strangers who, seeking an escape from loneliness, had stumbled upon an affection which manifested itself in diffident expressions of love three times a week during a long, empty rural summer.

That was all. It was a simple enough truth perhaps, but I might have gone to my grave without realizing it if I had not been confronted by a much more unwelcome truth during my enforced encounter with Mark Castallack.

As I began to cry again I tried to hate Mark for destroying the illusions I had lived with and loved for so long, but I could not. The instant I thought of Mark I began to wish myself back behind that locked door with him, and one cannot hate a man to whom one would give oneself again and again without a second’s hesitation.

After a long while I turned once more, left the castle and moved slowly downhill to the farm.

Griselda was nibbling bread and cheese in the kitchen. Again neither of us spoke. Moving into the hall, I saw Mark’s hat still on the chest, and in a fit of restlessness I returned to the kitchens and cut myself a large slice of cold pie from the plate in the larder. I found I was ravenously hungry and after the pie I ate an apple and some lemon curd tart. At last I was beginning to feel that I had assuaged my hunger when I heard Mark’s footsteps far away on the stairs.

I went at once to the hall.

When I saw him then it was as if I saw him for the first time. He looked older, poised, completely self-possessed, and his slanting eyes were shadowed with knowledge in a way I found curiously exciting. When he saw me he smiled. I could not understand then how I had ever thought him plain. I was in the middle of thinking what a striking face he had when he smoothed back a lock of hair with his hand and the sight of those short strong fingers reminded me at once of our hours together behind that locked door.

The color rose to my face; I felt my heart beating very fast.

“Will you stay and dine here?” I said evenly. “There’s plenty of food if you’re hungry.”

“Thank you, but dinner will be waiting for me at Morvah, and I should be on my way.” He paused and for some reason glanced at the closed parlor door. “However, I confess I’m thirsty. Perhaps some cider …”

“I’ll fetch it for you.”

When I returned with a full pitcher and a glass I found he was still in the hall, but the parlor door was now ajar. I wondered what he had wanted in there.

He drank the cider very quickly and set down the glass on the chest nearby. “May I call on you after dinner tomorrow evening?”

“Very well … but will you not come earlier and dine with me?”

“No,” he said, “but I’ll stay to breakfast.” He smiled again. There was an expression in his eyes which I had seen and despised in other men but which in him seemed unbearably exciting. We stood facing each other two feet apart, and the spark between us was so strong that I felt if we touched each other it would flare as vividly as sheet lightning on a dark night. “Until tomorrow, then,” he said after a pause. “Good day to you, Mrs. Roslyn.”

“Good day, Mr. Castallack,” I said wryly and held the door open for him as he stepped out into the porch.

When he was out of sight I closed the door and leaned against the panels. My knees were trembling again; physical exhaustion struck me with the force of a hammer. Picking up the jug of cider, I poured myself a measure into the glass he had used and carried it unsteadily into the parlor.

I was on the threshold when I saw the table. I nearly dropped the, glass. Cider slopped over the rim, splashed my dress and stained the carpet. Then as my cheeks began to burn I set my glass down on the table; slowly so that it would not spill again and picked up one by one the five gold sovereigns he had taken such care to leave behind.

Mark spent every night of that week at the farm. While he was gone I found myself incapable of doing anything except the most mundane chores such as dusting the furniture or feeding the hens, and in the end it was left to Griselda and Annie to do most of the work; on the grounds of economy I had not employed Ethel and Millie Turner since my husband’s death. I did go once to market with Griselda but could not concentrate on my business and made a sadly inefficient muddle of my transactions. I lived for the evenings, but although I asked Mark more than once to dine with me at the farm he always refused.

His refusals made me angry and curiously humiliated.

“Am I not worthy to dine with you?” I demanded at last. “It’s insulting to come here night after night and do nothing except—”

“Except?” He laughed, much amused by my confusion, and drawled, “Well, you must admit it’s a very sizable exception!”

His levity annoyed me intensely. “But why should you refuse to dine with me?” I demanded. “I think I’m at least entitled to a reason!”

“You’re not entitled to anything, my dear,” he said politely. “I’m not answerable to you. I can do exactly as I please.”

“Very well,” I said, furiously angry, “be as independent as you please! I suppose you’re still young enough to mistake a show of arrogance for an expression of mature behavior. As far as I’m concerned it couldn’t matter less.”

He laughed again. “I love to see you angry!” was his only comment, and then his hand was sliding across the parlor table and enclosing my own so that I felt the now familiar thrill of weakness shiver through my body, and his voice, the deep beautiful voice that attracted me so much, was telling me to be patient because in the end I would have everything I wanted. “When we dine together for the first time it’s going to be a great occasion,” he said, “not a mundane meal in this little Cornish farmhouse where you dined with your husband and received … other people. If you would only trust me …”

But I did not trust him. I had no faith in his grand promises, and his obvious dislike of the farm I loved so much rankled with me and made me feel resentful toward him. Young men, I knew, often made grandiose promises about the future with no intention of keeping them and I thought he was only pacifying me, smoothing over my resentment until I was once more a pliable convenience to be visited whenever he chose.

My distrust deepened when he departed the next day for the Castallack family home at Gweek. He had certain business affairs to attend to, he told me casually, and would be away from Morvah for a few days.

Two weeks passed and there was no sign of him. By this time each day seemed as long as a week. Finally to my horror I heard in the village that young Mr. Castallack had moved from Gweek to London and his housekeeper at Morvah did not know when he would be returning.

“But surely he must return eventually to Morvah!” I protested desperately to Griselda. “Laurence left him the house there—he wouldn’t live at Gweek because Nigel gets Gweekellis Manor under the will and, besides, he and Mark are estranged. They quarreled violently when Nigel returned from abroad to find the funeral had been held without him and that Laurence had been buried at Zillan instead of at the church they attended near Gweek. And Mark wouldn’t stay with his mother in London, because he doesn’t get along with her, so in that case he must return to Deveral Farm at Morvah because he has nowhere else to go.”

Griselda said she wasn’t going  to waste her precious time mooning over Mark Castallack and asking herself what he’d be doing next. Furthermore it was about time I pulled myself together, forgot about young Mr. Mark and gave serious thought to the question of remarriage. Those gold coins wouldn’t last long, and then where would we be? If I was sensible I’d sell the farm to Mr. Jared, marry young Mr. Polmarth of Polmarth Farm, who had always regarded me with such favor, and escape all this constant worrying about where the next penny was coming from.

“Thomas Polmarth?” I said with distaste, “That uncouth, plain-looking yokel? No, thank you!”

“Don’t ’ee be so high and mighty!” shrilled Griselda, losing her temper. “Just because thee’s been a-courted by two gentlemen yurr head be turned and thee’s all airs and graces! Thee’d best pull yurrself up, my girl, and put some sense in yurr poor addled mind. Gentlemen ain’t be going a-marrying the likes of thee, so don’t ’ee think they will. Gentlemen marry ladies, not fishermen’s daughters. And don’t ’ee forgets where ’ee comes from and what ’ee truly art! If ’ee thinks Mr. Mark’s coming back here and marrying ’ee one day—”

“I think no such thing!” I said angrily, and it was true. Mark had indeed mentioned marriage to me once before Laurence had died, but he had been distraught at the time and I had not taken him seriously. Besides, at that time he was the last person I wanted to marry. Now I knew I felt differently, but despite my change of feelings I had not lost my common sense. “Mark was interested in me for one reason and one reason only,” I said sharply to Griselda, “and that reason had nothing whatsoever to do with matrimony.”

Griselda began to growl something about sin and damnation.

“Very well!” I cried, much exasperated. “So my behavior with him was sinful and wrong! But why should I not indulge in a pleasurable love affair for once? I’ve always been unlucky in love—I spent all my twenties in unfortunate circumstances—aren’t I entitled now to a little pleasure with a man who attracts me? Surely God is not so cruel as to deny me the right to a little happiness after so much pain and misery! All I’ve ever wanted in life was security and love and if I can’t have the one I think I might at least try and have the other!”

Griselda said what did it matter now anyway since it was clear as daylight Mark had taken when he wanted from me and moved on to someone else.

But she was wrong.

He came back two weeks later, just as I had given up all hope of ever seeing him again and was in my despair composing a cold note to remind him of his offer to grant me a loan. He walked into my house as if he owned it; strolled with the most insolent nonchalance into the parlor where I was writing my letter and greeted me as if it had been only yesterday since I had last seen him.