Penmarric (47 page)

“You’re not seriously considering seeking out some common prostitute!”

“No,” said Hugh, “just toying with the idea.”

“Honestly, Hugh!”

“Well, why not? Everyone else goes to bed with women, so why shouldn’t I? Id go and see that barmaid Tilly at Zillan, but Marcus goes to her and I don’t want her telling Marcus when he comes home from the Continent that I’ve been taking his place during his absence. He’s quite silly enough to let the news slip out to Papa, although why Papa should object I don’t know since he spent seven years at Allengate going to bed with … sorry, old chap! I didn’t mean to say that, I just wasn’t thinking. No offense meant… . Actually the girl I’d really like to go to bed with is right here at Penmarric. You know Hannah the tweeny? I must say, I rather fancy her. Have you noticed her mouth? She has very full lips. I think it might be fun to kiss her. And she’s got the most marvelous bosom… Hey, where are you going? What’s the matter?”

But I shook my head blindly without replying. I felt sickened by his conversation and wanted to be alone.

“Wait!” He followed me and caught my arm. I’m sorry—look, let’s forget about girls for a while—I was only joking half the time anyway! Let’s go for a walk along the cliffs—it’s a fine afternoon and it seems a pity to waste it indoors.”

I tried to get rid of him, but when he refused to take no for an answer we went outside together and strolled along the cliff path past the deserted engine houses of the Sennen Garth and King Walloe mines. Soon St. Just was on our right while the sea lay to our left. Passing Cape Cornwall, we skirted the mighty workings of the Levant mine and walked on along the scarred cliffs to Botallack before turning inland to Carn Kenidjack and wandering up onto the moors. Finally after several minutes of stiff climbing we sank down in the heather to rest. I lay on my back, my hands behind my head, and tried to think of Hugh’s postcards and his obsession with the ’tween maid’s anatomy, but presently Hugh propped himself up on his elbow and disturbed me.

“There’s a girl coming,” he said, his eyes narrowed against the bright light. “A girl on horseback.”

“Semi-classical?” I inquired with suitable sarcasm.

He did not answer. I went on looking up at the sky and displaying a pointed lack of interest.

“How odd,” said Hugh. “I don’t recognize her. Yet she must be someone of consequence if she’s riding her own horse. Perhaps she’s a friend of Peter Waymark’s sisters and spending a holiday at Gurnards Grange. But why is she out riding alone?”

Curiosity conquered me. I levered myself into a sitting position.

The girl was close to us now but it was difficult to tell if she had noticed our existence. Certainly if she had she gave no indication of it. She was young, younger than us, and she had long straight black hair which she wore brushed back from her face. A small hat, perched on top of her head, kept her hair in place and prevented it from blowing across her eyes. Her riding habit was elegant but old-fashioned, as if it had been handed down to her from someone else.

“She’s very pretty,” said Hugh.

I thought she was too. We watched her approach and at last she looked at us and tilted her chin up haughtily in rejection.

We both rose to our feet as if we were puppets governed by the same strings.

“Good afternoon!” called Hugh.

She stared at him. Her eyes were dark and proud. “Good afternoon,” she said with a faint air of disdain and prepared to ride past us.

“It’s a beautiful afternoon too!” persisted Hugh with a reckless determination I could not help but admire. “Beautiful weather for a holiday!”

The girl raised her slim, dark eyebrows; a faint smile curled the corners of her wide mouth.

“I live here,” she said coolly and spurred her horse to the gallop.

We watched her race away from us across the moors toward Morvah.

“Who is she?” Hugh was saying. “Who is she? Who
is
she?”

“How should I know? You’re the native of this part of the world, not I!”

“But damn it, who
can
she be! Unless …” He stopped.

“Yes?”

“She might be a Roslyn.”

“Of course,” I said at once. “That must be it. She must be the daughter of Alice’s Aunt Clarissa. That would explain why she had such a ladylike appearance.”

“Good God!” said Hugh. He was still staring after her. “Little Rebecca Roslyn! Last time I saw her she was six years old, wearing a pinafore and talking with a Cornish accent!” He could not get over it. He kept referring to the incident all the way back to Penmarric. Finally he said in disgust, “But I can’t even call at her house to invite her to come riding with me! That bastard Joss Roslyn would chase me off his land with a pitchfork.”

“If she has such an unpleasant father,” I said, trying to console him, “maybe she’s not particularly nice either.”

“What does being nice have to do with it?” said Hugh, very fractiously, I thought, and retired without even so much as an apology to the solitude of his room.

I was to see Rebecca Roslyn again before the year was out but meanwhile I was soon preoccupied with her cousin Alice Penmar once again. At Penmarric Jan-Yves had hounded the housekeeper into giving notice, and when discussing this item of news with Alice during a visit to the rectory I was suddenly smitten with the brilliant idea that Alice might like to be the new housekeeper. She had often mentioned the fact that if she did not keep house for her grandfather she would be obliged to earn her living by keeping house for someone else, and Mr. Barnwell had once privately regretted to me that Alice met so few people at Zillan rectory and wished matters could be otherwise. Much excited, I decided that my idea would suit everyone to perfection and I became determined to pursue it.

“William,” I said with unintended overtones of
David Copperfield,
“tell Papa that Alice is willing.”

“Very well,” said William agreeably, “but why don’t you tell him yourself? You were at the rectory when the subject was discussed and I wasn’t.” In my enthusiasm I had already mentioned my idea to Alice, who, after protesting that she could not leave her grandfather even if she were offered such a post, had allowed the rector to convince her that he had no wish to confine her to Zillan rectory for the rest of her life.

“No, you tell Papa, William” I said. “You’re the bailiff and he’ll listen to you on business matters.”

For I was shy about Alice. I did not want anyone to know how much I liked the idea of her coming to Penmarric to keep house for us all, and I did not want anyone to know how pleasant I thought it would be to discuss current events with her after dinner in the evenings and perhaps walk in the grounds with her after lunch whenever she had a few minutes to spare.

Papa first of all said Alice was too young to be considered for such an important post, but when he invited Alice to lunch to discuss the matter he soon changed his mind. Afterward he said, sounding surprised, “She seemed a capable, self-assured girl. I liked her. We agreed that she should accept the position on a six months’ trial basis—that at least will take us until after Mariana’s wedding. Then if either of us find the arrangement unsatisfactory we can terminate it without any hard feelings on either side.” And to Jan-Yves he added, “If you once play on Alice the kind of practical jokes you played on Mrs. Hollingdale you’ll get a good caning—is that understood? I’ve had enough of your pranks at the servants’ expense and my patience is exhausted.”

“Pooh!” said the child rudely, but Papa let the rudeness pass. In spite of his threats he always seemed curiously reluctant to discipline Jan-Yves.

I went back to school for the summer term soon after that, and for twelve weeks I heard about family affairs only through the letters I received from Papa and William. Mariana had paid a fleeting visit to Penmarric to discuss the wedding arrangements, and much to her fury Papa had said that since Jeanne and Elizabeth were to be bridesmaids it was only fair that Jan-Yves should be granted his burning wish to be a page.

“Papa bends over backward to be nice to the little beggar,” wrote William, “but I don’t believe it makes any difference whatsoever to Jan-Yves’s ingrained dislike of him. Incidentally—and this’ll surprise you!—Jan-Yves is now meeting his mother once a week and saying good morning to her. This came about because Alice likes to attend matins at her grandfather’s church and now that I’ve got the hang of the new car I drive her over to Zillan each week. Naturally Jan-Yves couldn’t bear to be left out of an expedition that included a motorcar—” And you, I thought dryly “—so he comes with us, but only on condition that he greets his mother afterward. Papa is very firm about that. I find I don’t mind seeing Mrs. Castallack at all—of course we always keep our distance from each other—and if she minds seeing me that’s her concern, not mine. But she can’t mind so very much or she’d go to evensong.”

But later he wrote: “Mrs. C’s causing trouble again. On Nick’s behalf Mariana asked me to be an usher at the Great Wedding, which I must say I found very flattering, and everyone thought this was a fine idea—except Philip and Mrs. C. Philip wrote to Papa and said they wouldn’t be at the wedding if I was to be an usher, and furthermore that if we were to be staying at the townhouse he’d take his mother to stay at a hotel. So I expect I shall have to step down. Rather a shame, isn’t it? When you think how Mama provided a home for the Castallacks for seven years you’d think Mrs. C. could put up with us for a day or two, but evidently she doesn’t see the situation in that light.”

I was incensed by this news and wrote back demanding to know what Papa had said in reply to Philip’s letter, but William was vague. Papa had postponed making a decision on the subject and was at present involved in quarreling with Marcus.

“Marcus went broke in Monte Carlo,” William wrote shortly after his twenty-first birthday in May, (God knows what he was doing there out of season! He was supposed to be somewhere else) and wired Papa for money. Papa was furious, since this was the third time Marcus has got into this sort of scrape, and wired him to come home. Marcus wired back to say he’d borrowed the money, and had no intention of coming home early as he was having such a marvelous time. Papa was livid. I’ve seldom seen him so angry. He immediately sent another wire saying Marcus was to come home pretty damned quickly if he still wanted to go up to Oxford in the autumn and Marcus sent a wire saying he couldn’t see why Papa was making so much fuss. Papa then wired: ‘Kindly cease wasting borrowed money on expensive telegrams stop Your behavior is insolent, impertinent and totally irresponsible stop Be at Penmarric by Friday or else I shall be in Monte Carlo promptly to bring your Grand Tour to a conclusion decidedly lacking in grandeur stop MSC.’ I know the telegram word for word because I had to go to Penzance to send it! Poor old Marcus. Anyway, he came home fuming on Friday and he and Papa had the most almighty row. Marcus actually vomited afterward.

Poor chap, he does so hate scenes and unpleasantness. It turned out he’d fallen violently in love with a French cabaret dancer in Monte Carlo and had been sending her two dozen red roses every day, wining and dining her in the most expensive restaurants and assuming optimistically that his money would last forever …”

When I returned to Penmarric for the summer holidays I fully expected to find a strained atmosphere existing in the house, but Marcus had evidently made his peace with Papa and Papa himself seemed to have forgotten the quarrel. However, I noticed that Marcus spent more time visiting his mother. He went over there with the girls for Saturday lunch as usual, but he had fallen into the habit of dining at the farm during the middle of the week and calling whenever he happened to be in the neighborhood.

I saw Mrs. Castallack at matins on the first Sunday after my return. I did not see her enter the church since William and Alice had formed the habit of arriving early and taking a front pew, but I turned around during the first hymn and glimpsed Philip’s golden head at the back of the building. When I glanced around again I saw his mother beside him. She wore black and looked almost young from a distance. I did not dare stare at her too long for fear our glances would meet, so I spent the rest of the service looking steadfastly ahead of me toward the altar.

But throughout the service I remained uncomfortably aware of her presence.

“Do you like your mother any better yet?” I asked Jan- Yves after he had said his weekly “Good morning” to Mrs. Castallack and had rejoined us as we all wandered over to the rectory for lunch.

“No,” said Jan-Yves. He scowled. “Why does she bother with me? She never did until Papa started to. I wish they’d both go away and leave me alone. I wish my old nanny would come back instead of them. She really did like me and it wasn’t just a pretend-like either because if it was just a pretend-like she wouldn’t have saved me from the wastepaper basket when I was a baby.”

“You and your wastepaper basket!” I said, laughing at him, and he stuck out his tongue at me as he skipped ahead to join William.

After lunch the rector and I played chess outside in the garden, Alice wandered down to the far border to cut some flowers for the drawing room, and William took Jan-Yves for an afternoon walk on the moors. Some time passed. I was just wondering if Alice would finish arranging the flowers soon and come to join us when there was an interruption. The side gate opened by the back door, light footsteps crossed the yard outside the scullery, and the next moment I looked up and saw a girl moving over the lawn toward us, an empty basket swinging from her hand.

It was the girl Hugh and I had seen riding on the moors in the spring, the girl we had assumed to be Alice’s cousin, Rebecca Roslyn.

She looked different, younger. Her hair was tightly plaited instead of being allowed to trail wild and free down her back, and her gingham dress was severely cut to give her a childish look. It was also too small for her. I noticed uncomfortably that she was beginning to look like a woman, and to my furious embarrassment I remembered Hugh’s postcards and felt my cheeks begin to burn with a long slow blush.