Penmarric (30 page)

Needless to say, local gossip was of the opinion that she married because she had to, but as winter passed into spring and she retained her figure the gossiping tongues were silenced. It seemed that after all she had married for love, that in Joss, with his rebelliousness and coarse vulgarity, she had found what she wanted at last after her years of searching among the brilliant ballrooms of London.

“Well, good luck to her,” said Mark, shrugging the incident away as I continued to marvel at the match. “I hope she’s happy.”

He was too busy to spend much time dwelling on Clarissa’s
mésalliance.

The thesis of his on King John had been published by an Oxford journal and later reprinted by a London publication of note. He was beginning to make a name for himself in academic circles, and in the spring of 1896 he went away again to study a series of documents called the Pipe Rolls, which I understood to encompass the household accounts of medieval royalty. I did not go with him on that occasion, but when toward the end of the year he invited me to accompany him to Oxford for a month or two while he did some more research, I accepted willingly enough. I knew better than to refuse, but I found Oxford a cold, formal place with forbidding old buildings and an air of such advanced scholasticism that I felt at once pitifully aware of my lack of education.

 
“Never mind, Mrs. Castallack,” said one of the professors to me with a smile after I had made some appalling historical
faux pas.
“Lovely ladies were never intended by God to pursue the quest for knowledge!”

But I felt sure Mark was embarrassed by my all too obvious ignorance.

However, the weeks away from Penmarric brought us closer together than we had been for some months, and when we returned home I felt my effort in making the journey had not been wasted. Early in 1897 when I told him I was again expecting a baby we were both pleased, and in August, two years and two months after Philip’s arrival, I gave birth to another son in the Tower Room of Penmarric.

This time it was Mark’s turn to choose the name. The baby was christened Hugh, not a name that appealed to me, but the infant made no protest and slept tranquilly through the service. He was small, much finer-boned than Philip, but Philip had always been unusually large. At the reception following the christening, Marcus made himself ill by drinking a glass of champagne when no one was looking. Mariana refused to sit down for fear of creasing her dress and Philip pulled off his sister’s straw hat and jumped on it.

“You horrid, horrid boy!” cried Mariana, who was a very feminine child and loved all her clothes but especially her hats. “I hate you!” And she boxed Philip’s ears so resoundingly that he sat down and cried until the room was deafened.

“Mariana, how naughty!” I said, much irritated by this fuss and fearing the guests would think my children very ill-behaved. I stooped and gathered Philip to me. “There, there, precious … hush, Mama’s here.”

He looked at me mistily with great tear-filled blue eyes. My heart ached with love for him.

“Now, now!” said Nanny’s voice sternly from close at hand. “What’s all this to-do? Who stamped on this hat?”

“
He
did!” wailed Mariana. “I hate him!”

“Oh, do be quiet, Mariana,” I said crossly. “You quite make my head ache. The hat’s by no means ruined.” I turned to Nanny. “I think the children are getting tired and overexcited.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Nanny agreed, “I’ll take him away and put him to bed.” And to my exasperation she scooped up Philip and carried him away to the nursery.

Time passed. Hugh, although small, was evidently strong and healthy. He too was fair like Philip and had inherited my blue eyes and my features, but I often wondered whom he truly resembled. As he developed more personality he seemed to have a little of everything, a little of Marcus’ winning charm, a little of Philip’s striking looks, a little of Mariana’s irritating fastidiousness. He seemed intelligent without being unusually precocious. Presently as he began to walk he showed himself tough enough to survive copious nursery fights with Philip, and ultimately I suspected he had a belligerent streak in his nature.

But Nanny thought otherwise. “It’s Master Philip, ma’am,” she told me bluntly when I raised the matter with her. “It’s he who’s the trouble-maker in the nursery.”

I privately thought she was prejudiced against Philip. To make up to him for any slights he might or might not have received at her hands, I was especially loving toward him whenever I visited the nursery.

When Hugh was a year old some news reached our ears about the Roslyns of Morvah. Clarissa had given birth to a girl after more than two years of marriage and, so the local gossips reported with malicious satisfaction, had had a difficult time, so difficult that the doctor had told her it was unlikely she would have any more children. I could not fathom how the gossips knew such delicate details and suspected much of the news was pure invention, but it was true that the child was born and that it was a girl. They called her Rebecca after Joss’s mother, my predecessor at Roslyn Farm. Joss and Clarissa were still beyond the pale as far as society was concerned and seldom even made the effort to go to church or chapel, but once a month Clarissa would go on her own to Zillan rectory to see her niece Alice and have tea with the Barnwells. Alice was less than two years older than Marcus. I had half a mind to invite her to Penmarric when we engaged a governess for the children, for Mariana was always complaining she hated little boys and had no little girls to play with.

It was the fashion for children just then. All Mark’s contemporaries seemed to be busy perpetuating their illustrious family names. I remember thinking that it would be pleasant for my own children later on when they needed friends of their own age, but that made the shadow cross my mind again, the dread of the passing years, and I would become morbid and depressed.

When Hugh was sixteen months old I said to Mark, “I would so love another baby.”

He had no objection but he laughed and said, “You’re not tired of children yet? With three noisy sons and one very vociferous daughter?”

When I answered, I was expressing the thought most dominant in my mind. “Next year I shall be forty,” I said, “and once one is forty childbirth becomes more difficult and hazardous. I only have a few months left now.”

“You speak of forty as if it’s the end of the world!” he said, amused. “I’m sure it can’t be as bad as all that!”

He was twenty-nine.

My second daughter was born in December at the very end of the nineteenth century. I would not allow her to be called Janna, so we called her instead by my true name, Jeanne, and she was christened directly after Christmas. Three days later the old year was gone, and although the Astronomer Royal said that the end of the nineteenth century should officially be recognized as the thirty-first of December 1900, we took little notice of this in distant Cornwall and welcomed the new century at the end of 1899. The twentieth century! I remember we were all very gay, a little overawed by the prospect of entering a new era, but excited too as if the best was yet to come and the promised land lay ahead for every one of us. We celebrated New Year’s Eve that year in the most splendid manner imaginable and never once guessed as we heard the church bells chime across the moors at midnight that they were ringing the death bell for big houses like Penmarric and for a way of life that supported us all.

It was the time of the Boer War and the newspapers were full of England’s struggles in South Africa against the farmers of Dutch descent. Since it was a highly controversial issue not only between Tories and Liberals but also between Liberals and other Liberals, the war soon became a leading topic of conversation whenever the subject of politics could be suitably introduced into a social gathering. A wave of patriotism which swept the country led to a wave of enlistment; young men joined regiments and left their homes to risk their lives in that faraway foreign land.

“You wouldn’t enlist, would you?” I said to Mark in a moment of fright after Russell St. Enedoc had left St. Ives for London before being sent overseas to the war. “You’re not anxious to fight, are you, darling?”

But I need not have worried. Mark, as was usual where politics were concerned, held unorthodox views which the majority of his class did not share. “Certainly not!” he said sharply. “I wouldn’t dream of enlisting. To begin with I think all war is utterly monstrous and quite inexcusable unless one’s own family and land are being threatened. Secondly, I disapprove of the British Empire when its foreign policy dissolves in jingoism, and finally I’m not at all sure the Boers haven’t a right to determine their affairs as they wish without outside interference. I’m not in favor of their unfortunate attitude to the black people, but a show of force by the mightiest nation on earth isn’t going to do anything except convince them that their attitudes are worth holding on to. Soon they’ll be martyrs and world opinion will think the British Empire nothing but a big bully too fond of waving the big stick. No, my dear, I’ve better things to do than join in a war of which I most strongly disapprove! Nobody is more of a patriot than I am, but I’ve very little confidence in politicians and even less confidence in wars. When I look back over past history and think how much misery and suffering they caused to so many people and usually for a net result of absolutely nothing, I can only think how remarkable it is that the human race never learns from past experience.”

So he did not enlist. However, his brother Nigel did not share his views and presently set off for South Africa. I had not met Nigel, since he and Mark had remained estranged since their father’s death, and soon I heard that we were destined never to meet. He was killed in action in 1900 and, being unmarried, left his money and his property to his mother.

“Good heavens!” said Maud Penmar with her typical lack of any emotion resembling sentiment. “What shall I do with the wretched house?
I
don’t want it! Do you? Have it if you want it, by all means, and the money too. I want no part of any Castallack inheritance.”

She came down to visit us after receiving the news of Nigel’s death but although I was prepared to sympathize with her in her bereavement she hardly seemed to need my sympathy. “He was a nice boy,” she said plainly, “but foolish. Mark was right not to enlist. What’s the point of going six thousand miles to fight a bunch of rustic foreigners? Let the colonials settle their own disputes! After all, what did they go to the colonies for in the first place? To weep on the bosom of the mother country as soon as they have a tiff with some other white men who cannot even speak English? I don’t know what the Empire’s coming to these days and I told Nigel so, but all Nigel said was that moral issues were at stake and that it was his moral as well as his patriotic duty to go to war. Well, of course I am entirely in favor of patriotism and moral duties, but it does all seem very sad to think I shall not see Nigel again just because the present-day colonial is markedly lacking in the spirit which built the Empire.”

“I’m sure,” I said cautiously, “that you’ll miss him very much.”

“Yes, doubtless I shall,” she agreed moodily. “I did not know him as well as I know Mark, but he was a nice boy. Kind, very kind … .I was fond of him. But when I left Gweek he was hardly two years old and I didn’t see him again until he was grown up. Now Mark was different. I saw Mark continually throughout his childhood.”

“Three times in twelve years,” said Mark.

“Yes, but …” They began to wrangle again, spoiling for a fight as always, and the subject of Nigel’s premature death was temporarily forgotten.

“I suppose I ought to retain Gweekellis Manor,” said Mark later without enthusiasm. “There have been Castallacks at Gweek for hundreds of years. No doubt I ought to keep the estate in the family.” He worried over the problem for some time, but finally in 1901, just before the Queen’s death, he managed to lease the house and estate for a term of fifty years to a retired Indian Army colonel and thus ridded himself of the place while still keeping the title deeds.

He had formed the habit of going away three times a year to London or Oxford to do research and I had at last grown to accept the fact that I saw less and less of him. His latest project was a study of changing social conditions in the twelfth century, and he already had publishers anxious to produce the book as soon as the manuscript was ready. He was well known at Oxford now; he had even been offered an academic post, but he had no wish to become involved with lecturing and other faculty activities and was content to continue his work as a writer. But the academic world attracted him; I could see how much he looked forward to his visits to Oxford and could judge from his letters how stimulating he found the atmosphere there. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the tenor of his habits changed; he visited Oxford more often, stayed longer, wrote fewer letters. Presently he rented rooms there. “Well, why not?” he said blandly. “I’m tired of staying in the same old hotel and I like a place of my own where I can entertain my friends.”

“Yes, of course,” I said stiffly. “I understand.”

But I did not. Depression enveloped me. I was forty-one, then forty-two. My hair was no longer the same rich color but paler, dimmed with an increasing number of white hairs which I could no longer hide. But my figure remained good and my skin belied my years unless the light was unexpectedly harsh. I told myself I was still attractive, still beautiful, still desirable, but as the months passed and Mark spent more time away from home it became useless to try to deceive myself any more.

He no longer wanted me. It was almost as if he had outgrown me, just as he had outgrown Cornwall. The phase of his life when he had enjoyed playing the gentleman of leisure running a country estate was finished, and now he was back once more where he belonged, in the libraries of Oxford, in the drawing rooms of the upper classes, in the society of the most brilliant intellectuals of his day. He belonged in a world where there was no place for me among people to whom I would seem provincial, narrow and—worst of all—uneducated.