Fled: A Novel

by Meg Keneally

  ‘Do you think he is genuine?’ she asked. ‘Everyone knows each other in Penmor, and each other’s business.’

  ‘It is odd, then, that you have not heard of him, even if he lived in a neighbouring town. I think, my dear, we had best keep our guards up while we hear what he has to say.’

  ‘But if he’s a fraud, what could he want?’

  ‘Who knows. Payment, perhaps, to carry messages to his supposed contacts in Penmor. We shall find that out, too. I have a nose for such things. I wanted to prepare you, though. You must not show him too much encouragement. And if it turns out that he is indeed an imposter, you must try not to be too disappointed.’

  The man was ushered in by a frowning Mrs Titchfield, and Richard offered him a seat at the parlour table with the barest minimum of flourish that courtesy required. ‘Mr Nance,’ he said. ‘May I present Mrs Gwyn. Jenny Trelawney, as she was.’

  Nance looked to be between Jenny and Richard in age, perhaps forty or so. Clean, plainly dressed, with the callused hands of most of the men Jenny knew. He smiled at her with what seemed to be genuine warmth. Jenny, though, had seen much that appeared to be genuine and wasn’t. It will take more than a smile, she thought, I promise you that.

  She inclined her head as she had seen Mrs Titchfield do. ‘Mr Nance,’ she said.

  ‘Mrs Gwyn! What a pleasure. I have read about you, as has most of London. It was a joy to find out you had survived and were back with us.’

  ‘Thank you. As you say, though, most of London has read about me. I am sure you understand, I would very much like to hear of Penmor, including details with which most of London is not familiar.’

  Nance frowned for a moment, and Jenny resolved to apologise to him later if he was indeed what he claimed to be.

  ‘I’ve seen you before, you know,’ he said. ‘At church, sitting near your neighbours.’

  ‘Oh. Howard and his son John?’

  ‘John? No, Stephen. I didn’t know there was a John.’

  And there wasn’t. Jenny caught Richard’s eye, nodding slightly.

  ‘Young Stephen,’ said Nance, ‘he isn’t the lad he used to be. Married. Lost a babe to the fever.’

  The disease Jenny had fled from. It had straddled the world. In failing to take her, had it taken one of her family instead?

  ‘There . . . there was a fever,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Winter of 1790.’

  ‘And how many . . .?’

  Nance suddenly seemed to realise what she was asking. ‘No one dear to you, as far as I know. Your mother, she is well. Mrs Tippett now. Grieved for you, for a long time.’

  ‘And my sister?’

  ‘Dolly is in service here, in London, as it happens,’ he said. ‘It was she, actually, who set me the task of finding you!’

  ‘And she has been in the same city, this whole time?’

  ‘Not just in the same city – less than a mile away!’

  ‘Why, though, did she send you? I mean no disrespect, but why did she not come herself?’

  ‘Well, two things,’ said Nance. ‘First of all, she knew it would take a bit of asking around. She is a little shy like that, is Dolly.’

  Jenny nodded. ‘And the other reason?’

  ‘She was not sure, you see, if you would welcome her,’ Nance said.

  ‘She was not sure . . .’

  Jenny shook her head, to clear it. The knowledge that she and her sister had probably walked the same paths within hours of each other. That they might have passed each other without recognition. It was almost too much for her to bear.

  ‘I can assure you, Mr Nance, I would welcome Dolly very much indeed,’ she said, and did not realise until she saw droplets darkening her napkin that she was crying.

  CHAPTER 37

  After agreeing to arrange a meeting between Jenny and Dolly, Nance came back that afternoon with news. Dolly had each Sunday free from her position as a cook. Sunday was the next day.

  ‘She wants to see you, not your dresses,’ Richard said. He now unashamedly walked into her room at will. ‘Mrs Titchfield has seen worse, poor woman,’ he’d assured Jenny when she objected on the grounds of propriety.

  On this visit, Richard was greeted by a bed covered with every day gown he had bought her.

  ‘She will have decided about me, though,’ said Jenny. ‘It has been seven years. She will have decided on a picture of me, and there has been more than enough time for it to replace any soft memories she might have. I need to supplant it. One of these dresses will help me. I just need to decide which one.’

  ‘You’re expecting her to disapprove of you?’

  ‘Why would she not, Richard? A thief, a convict, the rumoured mistress of a known philanderer – oh don’t frown, you know what people say, and I suspect you enjoy it.’

  ‘As long as the gossip doesn’t board a coach and visit Scotland,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a little late to be concerned about that. Didn’t you come back from a trip to Paris once with a French noblewoman?’

  He smiled. ‘Ah yes. Well. I do take your point. And you must take mine. Whatever her view of you – and I do doubt it is as negative as you fear – it’s unlikely to be swayed one way or the other by what you are wearing.’

  ‘But should I dress richly, or plainly? Should I look like a penitent?’

  ‘Dress as yourself Jenny. You are what you are. The woman who sailed over those uncountable leagues did not manage it by worrying about clothes.’

  In the end she chose the blue muslin she used for walks in the gardens with Mrs Titchfield.

  Richard wasn’t there to distract her – he had gone with Nance to fetch Dolly and bring her to the cottage. Jenny had never learned the significance of the filigree metal hands on the clock face in the parlour; she had always measured time in tides and shoals. Now, though, she couldn’t stop glancing at it each time she reached the end of a transit around the room.

  Turning away from the clock for what must have been the twentieth time, Jenny found Mrs Titchfield standing a foot away. The woman reached out and took Jenny’s shoulders in a disconcertingly strong grip, turned her around and propelled her towards a chair at the polished table, which had been set with tea things and little cakes. When they got there, Mrs Titchfield pressed down firmly until Jenny found herself sitting.

  ‘You simply must calm down, Mrs Gwyn,’ Mrs Titchfield said. ‘What will she think if she walks in and finds you pacing like a caged animal?’

  ‘I was a caged animal.’

  ‘Well, precisely! Why remind her?’

  They heard the door opening, and Richard’s rumbling voice say, ‘Right this way, my dear.’

  And then Dolly was in the doorway, dressed in grey wool, her hair far neater than Jenny had ever seen it and scraped back under a servant’s cap, but otherwise unchanged, suspended for the course of Jenny’s absence.

  Jenny stood slowly, opened her mouth, closed it.

  Dolly stared at her, her eyes shining. Took a step. Did not take a second one. She stood there for precious seconds, attaching them onto the tally of Jenny’s absence.

  Then, very suddenly, Dolly started to cry, great gulping sobs that pulled Jenny to her with a speed she hadn’t thought herself capable of. Jenny was taller, and she drew her sister’s head down onto her shoulder and stroked her immaculate hair, while tears and mucus darkened the shoulder of her dress. She heard, dimly, Mrs Titchfield withdrawing to the kitchen, and Richard ushering Mr Nance towards the street.

  After a while, Jenny kissed Dolly’s forehead, turned her around – as Mrs Titchfield had turned Jenny earlier – and led her towards the table. ‘You should eat something, Dolly. You look too thin.’

  ‘But you!’ said Dolly, and her voice was still as soft as it had been in Penmor. ‘You nearly starved! Starved, drowned – nearly eaten by natives, if what the papers say is true!’

  ‘Not the last, no. But I very much hope that God has tired of trying to find ways to kill me.’

  Dolly let o
ut a laugh at the same time that she was inhaling for another cry, the result a most unladylike snort. ‘At least he’s paying you some attention,’ she said. ‘We . . . we thought you were dead, or so lost to us that you might as well be.’

  Jenny reached out and touched Dolly’s cheek. It was smooth, pale. Her own face, she was constantly told by the mirror in her room, had been roughened by a fiercer sun than a London cook could imagine.

  ‘Dolly,’ she said, and her throat convulsed at the need to speak the next words. ‘You had a niece. A nephew.’

  Dolly looked as though she would start crying again, and Jenny was dimly aware of moisture on her own cheeks, of the sudden heaving of her chest.

  ‘Yes, I know. The papers said that, too. Were they wonderful?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jenny. ‘More than wonderful. And brave.’

  ‘That awful man. Who would be cruel enough to put them in a hold like that? I read he is going to be court-martialled.’

  ‘You read it yourself?’

  ‘Yes. My mistress taught me to read so I could use her old cook’s recipes. And I remember the first time I read about you. That you had come back. That we were on the same piece of land, that there was no ocean between our two pairs of feet.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jenny, barely able to talk now. ‘For everything. The going away. The way I came back. For the way you found out about it.’

  Dolly was smiling, shaking her head. ‘But it was wonderful! And I was able to write to Mother, to tell her! She would have had the reverend read it to her, of course. He wrote back for her – the letter arrived so quickly, he must’ve done it on the same day he read it to her.’

  ‘She must . . . must hate me. Or be ashamed, at least. Perhaps it would have been better if I had stayed dead, at least in her mind. I couldn’t have caused any more trouble, then.’

  Dolly shook her head so vigorously that strands of hair came loose from her servant’s cap. ‘Ma sent me a message to give to you, when I found you. She can’t read, can’t write. But she had the reverend write it on a piece of paper, so she could copy it onto another. She wanted it to come from her hand.’

  Dolly reached into her pocket, then handed Jenny a slip of paper.

  Jenny opened it, saw jagged, crooked letters spelling out two words that she was no more capable of deciphering than her mother was. ‘Dolly, I . . . I’m sorry, I can’t read either.’

  ‘I will teach you, if you like. But I don’t think I shall wait for you to learn these words. Shall I read them for you?’

  Jenny forced herself to nod. Truthfully, she was terrified of the meaning that those marks on the page might convey, fearful they were an admonition, a rejection.

  But Dolly was smiling as she took the paper and laid it flat on the table, pointing to the first word. ‘This here, you see, says “come”.’ She moved her finger to the second word. ‘And this one, Jenny, says “home”.’

  Richard must have been listening at the door. He returned that evening with the news he had booked a passage for her: one that would take her down the river and around the coast of Cornwall. One that would end at the dock in Penmor Harbour.

  ‘I am sorry, I won’t be able to come,’ he said. ‘Perhaps, though, you might consider dining with me tonight?’

  Mrs Titchfield served them herself, squeezing Jenny’s shoulder as she put the last course of summer berries down in front of them, then filling Richard’s sherry glass. The old woman cleared her throat. ‘I do suddenly feel rather tired,’ she said. ‘I do hope you’ll forgive me, your lordship, if I take to my bed now.’

  Richard beamed at her, nodded, and told her to take all the rest that she needed.

  He was far more urgent that night than usual, losing the gentleness that came from fear of hurting a much smaller creature.

  ‘You do not expect to see me again, do you?’ Jenny said later, as he came back to the bed, having placed the invading cat on the sill and closed the window.

  He was silent for a moment, then said, ‘You are welcome here, at any time.’

  ‘That is not what I asked, Richard.’

  ‘Look, you’re a creature of the sea. You’re not at home in London. The crush of so many people must be disconcerting, even to somebody who’s been jammed up against so many others in the hold of a ship.’ He lay down next to her, propped himself up on one elbow and ran a hand across her cheek. ‘I am a town mouse, Jenny. Always will be.’ He rolled over onto his back. ‘I will, though, make sure you are taken care of. There will be a monthly stipend.’

  ‘And what if I don’t want that? What if I don’t need it?’

  ‘Take it, Jenny, with my love. You know better than I do that money can cushion against horrors.’

  ‘So you have finished with me?’

  ‘No, my dear, but I rather think you have finished with me.’

  And when the sloop sailed out at the mouth of the Thames, when the first foamy wave slapped it for its temerity to stick its nose into the ocean, she knew he was right.

  This was her first time on the ocean since the Gorgon. She stared at the walls of a pleasant cabin, finding no meaning or comfort in them, or in the language of the seabirds and the insistence of the waves. But the tilt of the boat felt natural, comfortable, far more so than a stilted walk through the park with Mrs Titchfield; Jenny’s legs instinctively bent and stretched to compensate for the boat’s movement. She felt sorry for those others on board who couldn’t read the intentions of a wave and position themselves to meet it.

  She would, too, have felt sorry for the passengers, women and men, who responded to the ocean’s heaving by splattering the rails with their stomach contents. She didn’t have the time for sympathy, though, when she was doing the same.

  She had never been sick on a boat – except once, on the journey to Australia. Then, the sea had not been the cause.

  The sea calmed, and Jenny saw the squat towers that sprang like warts from the arms of Penmor Harbour. The ship cut through the water to the dock where only one passenger would disembark before the rest travelled on to Plymouth, a place she did not wish to visit.

  She hid in the shadows towards the back of the deck and watched the dock approaching, and the woman on it. A woman who was more thickset than she had been, and better dressed, too, in plain fabric that was faded but undecorated by oil or fish innards. Her eyes were not vacant, sitting uselessly in a head that never turned; they were raking the bay, then the deck of the ship. Their brows knitted together when they found no sign of an answering gaze.

  This wasn’t the face of a woman who would turn at the sight of Jenny, who would glance back up the hill, who would say she was no daughter anymore.

  Jenny stepped out of the shadows, and those flickering eyes found her and began to spout tears.

  She’d had visions of walking, straight-backed, down the gangplank to the dock, of greeting her mother with the best possible manners. Of showing her that her daughter had finally learned how to leave a dress unstained for more than a day.

  She had never, though, walked sedately off a boat, and her legs seemed to know that, because now they were carrying her at a run to the dock, and her hands were pressing down on it so she could push herself up as her father had taught her to, ending up on her backside at her mother’s feet, with her dress collecting splinters and stains along the way, scissoring into a sitting position and pressing her body against her mother’s now comfortable curves, as Constance’s hand came around the back of her head, with fingers threading through her hair, pushing until Jenny’s cheek was on her mother’s shoulder, and the grip at the back of her head told her she would never be released again.

  EPILOGUE

  Somewhere in the English Channel, off Penmor, Cornwall, 1845

  ‘This might have to be the last time, Will. I feel the waves more than I used to.’

  Her grandson frowned as he struggled to keep the boat’s nose turned into the waves. ‘I have never heard you worry about it before. Shall I go in?’

>   ‘Perhaps. Are the wind dragons stirring?’ Will Gwyn shielded his eyes, staring at the clouds that jostled for position on the horizon. ‘Maybe. Yes, we’ll turn back. And then straight home with you.’

  ‘Not a bit of it!’ Mrs Gwyn said. ‘They’ll be expecting a story. I’d face any danger before a gang of disappointed children.’

  ‘No one ever believed her wilder stories – they enjoyed listening to them, though.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ said Maisie Lowe, a pert madam who enjoyed holding court at the side of the church after service, ‘that the less she goes to sea, the wilder the stories get? Bloodthirsty natives, sea dragons –’

  ‘But it keeps the children entertained,’ said Sarah Parkey.

  ‘Not mine, I assure you,’ said Maisie. ‘I don’t let them anywhere near her. You’ve seen her, you must’ve. With her own grandchildren lashed to the bench of a boat before they could walk.’

  ‘Keeps them safe, I suppose, while they learn the business,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Fish are not a business!’ said Maisie, looking more petulant than any child lashed to a bench. She didn’t mention that she had grown up eating the fish Mrs Gwyn’s fleet brought in, or that her husband rented their cottage, one of a row owned by the old woman.

  Mrs Gwyn didn’t get out on the ocean as much as she used to. But she still tried to go out once a week on one of the fifteen fishing boats she owned. Preferably piloted by her grandson, who had learned to sail almost before he could walk, and who was now in command of the Gwyn fishing fleet.

  Her expeditions had become even less frequent since she had convinced Richard to move back to Penmor. She had showed her son off at church on his return from London, where his life had clearly been comfortable enough to earn him something of a paunch.

  Mrs Gwyn, they said, could read the wind like a book, even though words on a page were still a mystery to her. Will had the same talent, honed by his grandmother during frequent childhood trips on summer oceans. Perhaps that was why, when his mother fell to a fever, he had stayed with his grandmother rather than moving to London with his father.