Authors: Rachel Hore
***
April 1914
‘Is it true, girl, what they’re saying? It’s no good lying to me.’ Shocked into immobility, Pearl finally dragged her gaze from Mrs Carey’s half-dressed hair to meet her furious eyes in the dressing-table mirror.
‘Yes,’ she said hoarsely, making to continue to brush the woman’s hair.
‘Yes,
Mrs Carey
.’ The mistress did not wait for Pearl to correct herself, but half-rose and snatched the hairbrush from her. Her voice rose sharply. ‘And you blame my nephew for it, I gather?’
‘No, I didn’t say that, mam, Mrs Carey!’ Pearl cried out. How on earth had the mistress known that, and where in this deepest trouble had she, Pearl, summoned the strength to protect him?
‘It is him though, isn’t it? Don’t think I don’t know. I have my sources, you know.’
Cecily. She thought of the spying girl. It could only be Cecily who had told her mother, who had searched her possessions and stolen her mermaid.
‘You wretch. You, with your big eyes and your airs above your station. We’ve all been wrong about you. Well, they say it’s the quiet ones you have to watch, don’t they?
Don’t they?
’ She stood, hands on hips, a picture of rage, but slightly ridiculous with her hair on one side in pins and the other tumbling around her shoulders.
‘He . . . he said we could go away together.’ Pearl’s howl was heart-wrenching.
‘Go away together? What a simply ridiculous idea.’ The woman threw the hairbrush onto the rug. ‘Where would you have gone away
to
, I ask you? And who would pay for it all? He couldn’t have expected a penny from us and I can’t think of anyone else who would help him after cutting himself off from family and friends in such a low, despicable manner.’
Pearl felt the spit of ‘despicable’ on her cheek and flinched.
‘How far on is it?’ her mistress snapped. ‘This . . . baby.’
‘Might be three months now. My courses—’
‘Spare me the details. Three months. I suppose you’ve tried . . . yes, well.’
‘I have, mam, yes.’ Pearl stared at the floor. ‘It wasn’t any good.’
The anger seemed to go out of Mrs Carey suddenly, and a shrewd, calculating look came over her face instead. She sat back on her chair again and gestured to Pearl to continue with her hair.
‘Well, I suppose we’ve time to think about it.’ Pearl’s hand froze halfway, reaching down for the thrown hairbrush. ‘You’ll have to go, of course.’
Pearl’s eyes filled with sudden tears. ‘Yes, mam,’ she whispered. Then said, ‘I’ve nowhere to go. Nowhere.’
‘Well, you should have thought about that earlier,’ Mrs Carey said viciously. Then, seeing the shock and distress in the maid’s eyes, added more gently, ‘I’ll have to find out what happens in these cases. The important thing is that nobody outside these walls learns a thing.’
‘Charles? Master Charles?’ The stable door was padlocked but Pearl hammered on it anyway. It was useless. Where was he? She had tried his bedroom, hurried round all the rooms downstairs.
A shadow fell across the garden. She looked up, shivering in the sudden coolness, to see a veil of dark cloud cover the sun.
The garden – she must try the garden. She turned and began to run down the path past the house, her heart banging in her chest, her head reeling. She tried the summerhouse first. It was deserted but for a book of poems by Robert Kernow forgotten, dusty, on a chair. She picked it up and flicked the pages, remembering Charles reading her the purple descriptions of the Cornish landscape and the passionate repressed spirit of the people.
Throwing down the book, with such force it bounced onto the floor, she ran outside. With her skirt bunched up to dodge the rose thorns that reached out to snag her, she slipped through the gap into the laurel maze. The seat was empty, and her panic grew. Down to the ravine she ran, then back up the path past the fountain, her breath rasping in her throat, the sky darkening like black ash now overhead. Thunder rumbled.
She halted, looking round madly. No one in the Vegetable Garden. Thunder crashed suddenly and she jumped fair out of her skin. A silence, then every bird in the garden started as one, calling warning.
‘Charles,’ she called. ‘Master Charles!’ And fled under the arch into the Flower Garden, searching the greenhouses then going to stand in the corner where he had posed for her painting, the painting she had now hidden deep in the cupboard in her attic.
A footstep on gravel and she whirled round. ‘Charles,’ she breathed, but it wasn’t Charles, it was John Boase. He carried a shovel, which he leaned carefully against a wall before coming over to her, taking off his hat and standing before her.
His look was of deep pity.
‘He’s gone, miss,’ he said gently. Then, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Gone?’ What did the man mean?
‘In the trap to Penzance. Zachary’s orders is to put him on the London train.’
The London train? Why? She couldn’t ask Boase – no, she couldn’t.
Boase cleared his expression on his face awkwardly, then said in a hoarse voice, ‘They’ve sent him away, Miss Pearl.’
‘No,’ sobbed Pearl. ‘He wouldn’t have gone without . . .’
She stopped. He wouldn’t have left without saying goodbye, surely? But he had. Shock hit her like a dash of freezing water. Then a clamour of voices started up in her head, and black childhood nightmare images of shrieking bats swooped before her. When they finally receded, she stood in a choking fog of desolation, desertion and despair.
Through the madness came a gentle voice. ‘I can help you, Pearl, if you’ll let me.’
‘Help me? Of course you can’t help me. You don’t know . . . How can anyone help me?’
And she pushed at him, darted away under the arch as the rain started to fall in great soft drops, the air soon a torrent of tears running down her hair, her face, her body. Gasping in panic, she grabbed her skirts and made for the gate, out into the road – which way? Down to the sea.
Slipping and sobbing, she stumbled alongside the stream, the lichen-daubed branches of trees catching at her hair, and shadowed its rushed and noisy course down the valley to the home that called it, that was calling her. The wide open arms of the ocean.
A shout. She looked behind her. John Boase was running after her. She darted past the jetty and up to the right, through the narrow gap in the rock onto the cliff path. Soaked by rain and spray, gasping with cold, she scrambled up the zig-zag path, her heart bursting in her chest. Up and up, slithering on wet stones, scratched by gorse, she clambered higher and higher until she reached the cairn where the painters sat, though no one was there today, then further along the cliff edge to where the sea boiled and hurled itself over vicious black rock below. There she teetered for a moment as the universe held its breath.
‘Pearl.’ Boase’s voice carried over the wind, but he stayed up by the cairn, not daring to come on in case she gave in like many a hunted creature and jumped.
So there she waited on the edge, looking out over the water, the storm washing away all her thoughts until she was just an empty husk, exhausted.
Charles had gone. They had sent him away. He had gone without saying goodbye, probably leaving no message. He wouldn’t have had time. But he hadn’t fought for her, she knew that in her heart of hearts.
And once more she was alone again, and soon she would be homeless.
She gazed down at the boiling water beneath, knowing how a toss of a white-crested wave could dash her fragile body against the cliff face, crack her skull like a nut. It would be so easy.
Alone.
But no, she wasn’t alone, was she? She touched her belly, still as slim and tight as ever, hiding a life within, another heartbeat.
It wasn’t much of a hope, having this baby. Maybe it would be taken from her, and grow up abandoned as she effectively had been, too. But she and it would have to make the best of it somehow.
Where there’s life there’s hope
, her stepmother’s voice rang in her mind.
And when she turned at last to go back, it was to see John Boase waiting for her, watching out for her, as she realised he had done ever since he had first set eyes on her, standing under the Davy statue in Penzance on market -day, all her worldly possessions in a shabby bag at her feet.
‘And so he married her,’ said John Boase’s grandson, ninety years later. ‘Married her, and when the baby was born, took her little boy – my father – to be his own. They lived in the Gardener’s Cottage until she died. And if my grandfather is to be believed, they were very happy for the short time God gave them together. He was a good man, kind and gentle.’
A romantic story, thought Mel. Very heartwarming. But was it really like that? Didn’t Pearl still love Charles? Wasn’t she heartbroken when he left? This was John Boase’s side of the story, not Pearl’s. But perhaps it wasn’t possible to learn Pearl’s.
She didn’t feel she could say this to the moist-eyed old man who had recently lost his wife and sought comfort in the past, those mythical golden days of youth when happy ever afters seemed possible. Instead she said, ‘I’m surprised Mrs Carey let them live in the Gardener’s Cottage. Why didn’t she turn them out to avoid Pearl’s secret getting out?’
‘Maybe she didn’t want to lose a fine Head Gardener. Especially once the war started and so many downed tools to go and fight. And maybe no one else knew the secret. If it was all under the carpet, maybe she wasn’t bothered.’
‘A pragmatic lady. So what happened to Charles?’
But here Boase shrugged. ‘Called up after the Somme. Went missing sometime in 1917, but Dad said he thought he survived after all. Don’t know what happened to him after that.’
‘I suppose it’s possible to find out,’ Mel said doubtfully.
‘Don’t think I ever cared that much, frankly,’ said Boase, flexing arthritic fingers stiffly on the arm of his chair. ‘Dad always said John Boase was his father, didn’t want to hear about Charles Carey. There’s a lot more to family feeling than a bunch of DNA, you know. Seems like Carey gave up any right he had.’
‘That’s true,’ said Mel, thinking of her own father who had abandoned them.
As she pondered these things, lying next to Patrick in the darkness, finally she drifted into a deep sleep.
The phone rang the next morning during an otherwise silent breakfast. Irina, looking pale and distant, sat sipping black coffee. Mel sliced large chunks of soft white bread and Patrick spooned boiled eggs, which Lana loved, into eggcups.
‘Can you pick it up?’ he asked Mel, who did.
‘Mel? It’s Matt,’ came the voice down the line. ‘Listen, I’m worried about Mum. I told you she was tired last night? Well she didn’t sleep. She’s very breathless and her chest hurts. I’ve made her stay in bed, but she’s pretty distressed.’
‘Have you called the doctor?’
‘Just now, yes. And he said . . . well, there’s an ambulance on its way. And of course I’ll have to go with her to the hospital.’
‘Oh Matt, that’s awful. Poor Carrie. But that leaves you . . .’
‘I know. I’m on my own here apart from Ella and George.’ Ella was a shy middle-aged woman who came to chambermaid every morning. Whilst utterly dependable in her unchanging routine, she would not be happy answering the phone or dealing with a customer complaint. George, a cheerful stocky pensioner whose jobs were portering and maintenance, would know little about the administration of a hotel.
‘What’s the matter, Mel?’ Irina broke in.
‘Just a minute, Matt.’ She cocked the handset away from her ear. ‘Carrie’s ill – she’s going to hospital. Matt’s a bit desperate for help at the hotel.’
Weariness and concern fought for position on Irina’s face. After a moment she sighed heavily. ‘Give me the phone, please.’
‘Irina . . .’
‘No, they are my friends and I want to help.’ She held out her hand for the receiver.
‘Hello, Matt,’ she said. ‘It is Irina here. No, no, I am all right. Tell Carrie not to worry, I am coming now.’
There must have been protest at the other end of the line because Irina repeated firmly, ‘No, no, I will come. You haven’t seen Greg again, have you?’ Her shoulders relaxed at Matt’s response. ‘Well.’ She looked at Lana and then beseechingly at Mel and Patrick. ‘Lana might have to come with me.’
Mel, impressed by Irina’s resolution, readily picked up the hint. ‘Don’t worry.’ She smiled at Lana. ‘Patrick’s giving me a lift into Penzance this morning to do a few errands. Would you like to come, Lana? We could go shopping and maybe have lunch out.’
Lana slipped the last spoonful of her eggs into her mouth and nodded, her sulky expression suddenly gone. ‘Please, Mum?’
‘Of course, angel . . . Matt, I’ll come right away,’ Irina told him. ‘And . . . give Carrie my love, poor lady, if the ambulance comes before I get there.’ She replaced the handset in its cradle and took a large gulp of her cooling coffee, a picture of strength and purpose. Mel watched her in some surprise; her behaviour was such a contrast to that of the previous evening.
‘A woman of many parts,’ said Patrick, eyebrows raised, as he closed the front door when she left.
‘I think it will help her to have something useful to do,’ replied Mel, ‘rather than sit around worrying. And Carrie and Matt do need her. She likes being needed.’
‘Let’s look at the elephant I bought you. He’s so cute, isn’t he?’
Mel and Lana had walked up and down the streets in Penzance, browsing in the shops and – Lana’s choice – had sat down to eat an early lunch in a Cornish pasty shop.
Lana pulled a paper bag out of the plastic carrier hooked over her chair, unfolded the top and carefully withdrew a carved wooden elephant with a blue and gold howdah in which perched a tiny Indian boy. She had spent ages choosing the present, going from ethnic craft emporium to gaudy gift shop, fingering plastic ‘shark’s tooth’ necklaces and enamel flower brooches before settling on this.
They had hardly spoken about anything unrelated to their shopping, but now that Mel was facing the child across the table, it was difficult to avoid conversation of some sort. She longed to ask Lana what she felt about everything – her father, her music – but was too nervous of destroying their easy companionship. The girl would tell her what she wanted in her own way, in her own time.