Penmarric (55 page)

I shook my head, admiring his knowledge, wishing I could speak of mines with such authority. “No, sir,” I said respectfully.

I shall always remember what he said then. It’s the clearest memory of my childhood. “The water would come in from King Walloe,” he said, just as a Baptist preacher might have thundered, ‘Fire and brimstone will rain down from heaven.’ As I looked duly impressed he added, “The mine next door to Sennen Garth is flooded to the adits. That means that when you’re at, say, the hundred-fathom level in Sennen Garth you have an enormous amount of water—thousands of gallons—standing over you in King Walloe next door. Think of it as if you were standing beside a mighty water tank with sides as thin as paper. One prick in those thin walls and the water would rush through and the whole face of the tank would collapse. The western reaches of Sennen Garth are dangerous as all hell let loose. You keep away from that mine.”

But nothing could keep me away from Sennen Garth. I was more careful, certainly. I left notes hidden in my room in case I had an accident, took a ball of string with me so that I would not lose my way in the labyrinth, but I went on exploring the mine. I was just beginning to think I knew the old workings like the back of my hand when my parents separated, I was sent to Allengate, and for seven years I did not see any mines, least of all the mines of the Cornish Tin Coast.

That was how I came to know Sennen Garth. That was how it came to be my mine, my cause, my life’s work, because once I’d taken possession all I wanted was to make it live again as Levant lived and to restore it to its position among the greatest mines in Cornwall. Almost all the best memories of my childhood were linked with that mine.

But the very best memory had nothing to do with the mine at all.

I remember going home.

On my sixteenth birthday I quarreled with my father and took the night train to Cornwall. The next morning in Penzance I left my luggage at the station until I could collect it later, hired a horse from the nearby inn and rode out of town.

The moors rose before me in the sunlight like a mirage of the promised land.

It was all so beautiful, you see, each particle of heather, each swaying frond of bracken, each wildflower by the wayside. I saw the ruined engine houses of the deserted mines of Zillan parish, the square tower of Zillan church, the gray huddles of scattered farms, and once I stooped from my horse to touch the stone walls which bordered the road as if I couldn’t believe my return wasn’t a dream. But it was real enough. I rode on, too drunk with joy to hurry, and the black tors were jagged against that flawless sky and the air was cool and fresh upon my face.

Zillan village lay to the east of me; the farm, Roslyn Farm, where my mother had lived since the separation, lay to the west. I left the road, turned up the lane, and still I couldn’t bring myself to hurry. The land was so beautiful, so foreign yet so familiar. My heart ached with love for it. I thought of all those long dreary years at Allengate which now lay behind me forever, and tears pricked my eyes because I was free at last and I was home.

I saw the house.

And someone saw me coming. The front door opened and I saw her standing in the shadows of the porch.

I hurried then as I had never hurried in my life before. I slid off the horse and started to run. I ran and ran, my feet stumbling on the wet earth, and as I ran she ran too, and the scent of wild roses floated toward me on the soft wind from the moors.

It was three years later when Jared Roslyn rode up to the back door of the farmhouse with the scheme that was to bring my mine back to life, but during those three years I had tried every means I knew to persuade my father to open Sennen Garth again. First of all I tried writing to some groups of well-known mining speculators or “adventurers” as they were called in the old days, to urge them to approach my father and ask him to grant them a sett, but although I had some friendly replies none of them showed enough interest to begin negotiations. My father’s gesture of closing the mine in the Nineties after seeking advice from the famous mining experts of Dolcoath was still remembered, and although my father’s opinion of Sennen Garth might have been questioned in mining circles, no one questioned the opinion of the experts. No one seemed willing to believe me when I stressed that the mine had been closed for practical reasons unrelated to the remaining wealth beneath the ground, and that to judge from the old maps and books I had inherited from my grandmother there was plenty of tin still left if anyone cared to invest some money in bringing it to the surface. Everyone merely assumed that too much money would be needed for such an investment and that the returns might not be half so rewarding as I myself felt they would be.

After that I approached my father in person. By then Rose Parrish had died. Allengate Manor had been sold and the entire family—including my bastard half-brothers—had returned to my old home Penmarric in St. Just a stone’s throw from my mother’s farm in Zillan. Presently my oldest sister Mariana decided to marry some overbred boor with a title, and when we all gathered at the townhouse in London for her wedding I seized the opportunity to speak to my father about the mine. I thought I presented my case very convincingly, but I got nowhere at all with him. The truth was that he was in an exceedingly bad mood, and when I saw his mind was closed against anything I proposed my mood became as bad as his, so we ended up shouting at each other in our usual fashion. I had no idea why he should have been so bad-tempered, but I discovered later from my mother that he had asked her to return to Penmarric—for
my
sake! Of course that was his way of saying he did not like me living at the farm. I practiced farming in my spare time when I wasn’t riding over to Levant or Botallack to learn as much as I could about mining, and the thought of any son of his cleaning out a pigsty was no doubt horrifying to him. Fortunately my mother refused to be bullied back to the place where she had been so unhappy, and retorted that she and I were both more than content to remain at Zillan. However, I doubt my father was serious about this proposed reconciliation, for he had admitted willingly enough to my mother that he had no intention of removing William and Adrian from the house even if she did come back, and I fail to see how he could have expected her to live in the same house as his bastards.

After the failure of my attempt to reason with my father I tried to force his hand by resorting to blackmail, but even that was a fiasco. It was my brother Hugh who invented the scheme, but my brother Marcus was as quick as I was to back him up. Marcus had the quaint idea that as he was the eldest legitimate son and the heir to Penmarric my father should finance his revels at Oxford with an inexhaustible supply of blank checks. Hugh wasn’t nearly such a fool as Marcus. Though in many ways my direct opposite—he had no regard at all for the truth and nothing would have induced him to soil his hands with manual labor—he was such good company that I found myself forgiving him his more irritating qualities. And he was clever. It was he who suspected that the current housekeeper at Penmarric, Alice Penmar, was my father’s new mistress and that my father might do much to avoid a scandal, and it was he too who thought of forcing Adrian to provide us with the proof we needed for a showdown. It seemed a first-class scheme at the time, but in the end it came to nothing. Adrian, playing the role of noble martyr with his usual sickening piety, refused to yield under pressure and when we were obliged to confront my father prematurely without evidence, my father made short work of demolishing our hopes. Marcus was reproved for “continual immaturity,” Hugh was labeled “a capricious child with a talent for mischief” (Hugh, who had dreamed up the entire scheme!) and I was informed that I was obviously still suffering from my “small boy’s infatuation with the mine.”

That finished it.

I started to yell at him and soon he was yelling at me. I accused him of unjustly favoring Adrian, and he said yes, he damned well did favor Adrian because Adrian was the one son who behaved as a son should behave toward his father. I told him that was a load of horses’ excrement and that he favored Adrian because he had preferred Adrian’s mother to mine. I was so angry that I made the mistake of referring to Rose Parrish as “that whore.” My father at once went white with rage and shouted that my mother was the whore and that he had once paid her five pounds to go to bed with him. I called him a bloody liar. Marcus then said he was sorry but he felt sick and would we please excuse him, and Hugh somehow managed to melt away into the hall before I was even aware that he had left the room. Without any form of moral support I knew there was nothing else for me to do but retreat ignominiously in their wake, so I spat on the floor and walked out with as much dignity as I could muster after such a disastrous defeat.

But even then I wasn’t allowed to leave Penmarric at once. Alice Penmar cornered me, confessed she had been eavesdropping and swore she wasn’t my father’s mistress because she would much rather be mine. Considering she had spent her childhood calling me a “rude foul-mouthed little pest,” I suppose the situation was not without its humorous side, but unfortunately I wasn’t in the mood to be amused and merely suggested to her in the crudest of Anglo-Saxon terms that she should go and have intercourse with herself instead.

I admit I behaved badly to her, but since she’d been brought up in a rectory I don’t suppose she understood half of what I was saying anyway. When I made the effort to apologize to her the following Sunday after church she told me with perfect composure that she realized we had both been unusually upset at the time and that as far as she was concerned the incident was closed and I was to think no more of it.

I followed her advice with relief.

As if to divert my attention from the memory of those scenes at Penmarric, the war broke out a week later. I thought at first that this was the last straw, the final slice of ill-luck I needed to end all my hopes for reopening the mine, but I was wrong. I had just made up my mind fiercely that no one would make me enlist no matter how many white feathers might be handed to me and that no one, not even the King himself, could ever drag me away from Cornwall again, when I had a visitor. One cloudy morning at the end of 1914 I heard horse’s hoofs ring out in the yard of my mother’s farm, and on going to the window I saw to my amazement that my visitor was none other than that pillar of the working-class community, Mr. Jared Roslyn of Morvah.

I knew Jared Roslyn just as he knew me, but we had never spoken to each other. He was the elder of my mother’s two stepsons by her first marriage, and both he and his brother Joss had been her enemies for nearly thirty years. My father was as unpopular with them as my mother was, so I had not expected either brother to show any sign of friendliness toward me, and when Jared Roslyn came riding up to the farm on that mild December morning I instantly assumed he came on some hostile mission. My first reaction—caused by my guilt—was that he had come to tell me to enlist at once as every other young man had done and to fight for my country against the Germans; I had long been afraid that someone would drop hints to me on the subject, and although I was popular in the parish I had begun to think that people were looking at me askance. I fully expected to receive a letter any day from my father asking me why I had not followed the example of Marcus and Adrian, both of whom had enlisted at once, but in fact I received no such inquiry from Penmarric. My mother took my part, of course, and declared my work on the farm was of vital importance, but there were older men, too old to fight, who could have managed the farm in my absence. Even William, whose position as bailiff was as important as my role at the farm, had volunteered for the army, and the only reason he was still at Penmarric was because he had been declared medically unfit for military service; a bout of diphtheria suffered in childhood had left him with high blood pressure and the suspicion of a weak heart. As soon as I saw Jared Roslyn I concluded he had come to remind me of my patriotic duty.

Having given free rein to my guilty conscience, I then became more rational. Jared was a lay preacher in the Wesleyan chapel and a leading man in his community, but it was hardly likely that he would dare hand me a white feather and roundly harangue me for cowardice.

Finally I had to admit to myself I was baffled and went out into the yard to meet him.

He was a big man, as tall as I was, and Cornish-dark with a black beard. He must have been over fifty but he had few gray hairs and still carried himself like a young man. Considering we had never spoken to each other, I knew a fair amount about him; he had an anemic-looking wife who was obviously terrified of him, eight buxom daughters, and one pale undersized boy in whom he was clearly disappointed. The boy was a couple of years older than my youngest brother Jan-Yves and had just surprised everyone by winning a scholarship to the nearest grammar school. Of the eight daughters, all of whom had the most preposterously Puritan names, three were now safely married to local men, four were at home under the stern supervision of the paterfamilias, and one, Charity, had become a fallen woman and was publicly disowned by her family; she had been in service at Gurnards Grange, the Waymarks’ home at Zennor, and, according to Hugh, who always managed to hear the gossip, had been dismissed for fornication in the pantry. Not in the least daunted by this just reward for her sins, she had found employment as a barmaid in St. Just and for over a year had maintained the honor of being the best whore from Land’s End to St. Ives. However, the urge to settle down had overtaken her and presently she had left her lodgings at the pub, where she still continued to work at the bar, and moved to a little villa facing the sea on the outskirts of the town. It was common knowledge that everything in the cottage, from the lace curtains in the bedrooms to the geraniums in the window boxes, had been provided for her by my half brother William Parrish, who also exercised his discretion as my father’s bailiff and allowed her to live there rent free.