Penmarric

by Susan Howatch

  “But he can’t be connected with the Penmars!” I protested to my most fertile source of gossip, Ethel and Millie Turner, who arrived daily at the farm to help me in the house. “The Waymarks, the Carnforths or the St. Enedocs—but not the Penmars!”

  “Ah,” chorused Ethel and Millie triumphantly, seizing the chance to voice one of their favorite observations. “There’s bad blood in that family, that we all know.”

  And we all did. The Penmars were a wild family of jumped-up adventurers who lived in an enormous mansion called Penmarric on the far side of St. Just. The first Penmar had won the estate in the earlier part of the century by cheating the future King George the Fourth with a pair of loaded dice. Of his three sons, all of whom had been notoriously profligate, the youngest, Mr. Mark Penmar, had made a fortune by swindling in India before he had inherited the estate, and it was his daughter, Miss Maud, who had married Mr. Castallack. Miss Maud now lived in London, and Mr. Castallack lived with his two sons at the family home far away at Gweek. He was only spending the summer at Morvah, the Turner girls informed me—and as soon as I knew that I lived in dread that he would go away.

  But he stayed.

  Soon I knew not how to contain myself. I burned for him. I thought of him constantly. Yet there was nothing I dared do. Jared had of late been trying to drive a wedge between me and my husband by hinting that I flirted with Farmer Polmarth, a young unmarried neighbor of ours, and although I had convinced John Henry of my innocence I was too conscious that my past was yet again trying to repeat itself to feel confident that my husband trusted me absolutely. Soon all my old fears and dreads and my appalling sense of insecurity began to grip me again. If my husband were to suspect that I had succumbed to this wild infatuation with Mr. Castallack …

  I felt quite faint at the thought.

  I knew my husband had made a will in which he had left the house, together with a small income for its upkeep, to me for life, but I knew too that his own advancing years and the continuing rift with his sons had made him regret his marriage to a young wife; his suspicion and disillusionment had made him increasingly disagreeable as the months passed. I was well aware that if I gave him the slightest provocation he would remake his will to leave everything to Jared, who at present was to have only the reversion of the house together with a large part of the land and the tenant farm.

  Blood always did run thicker than water under circumstances that were adverse. I began to feel as if I were walking on a razor’s edge where one false step could send me toppling over the brink into the abyss of poverty below.

  Yet by the time May came I was still trapped in the tangled meshes of my madness, still imprisoned by my determination not to lose everything I had by betraying any symptom of my lunacy. It was a Thursday when the disaster finally overtook me. For once I had stayed at home instead of going to market; having nursed my husband through a serious fever not long before, I was too tired to feel as well as I should have been. Annie had walked to Zennor to see her kin and Griselda had accompanied my husband to Penzance, so I was alone in the house.

  I was just sitting in my room and reflecting in an agony of bitterness that I would soon be reaching my thirty-first birthday and still wasting whatever youth I yet possessed, when far away downstairs I heard the back door close.

  “Who’s that?” I called sharply at once.

  But there was no reply.

  In a sudden fever of excitement I raced downstairs, but when I flung open the kitchen door my hopes ended as abruptly as they had begun.

  “So there you are, Janna,” said Jared, amused. “I thought you might be at home.”

  The shock of seeing him combined with the violence of my disappointment made me tremble with rage.

  “How dare you sneak in like that and frighten me so!” I stormed. “I’ve a good mind to tell your father—”

  “—that you’re sweet on Mr. Castallack of Morvah?”

  The words struck me as hard as a blow. I had thought myself painstakingly careful in concealing my emotions. It had not occurred to me that a woman in love can betray herself in a thousand small but eloquent ways.

  Jared laughed. “I’ll bargain with you, Janna,” he said confidently, amused how angry I was. “Fair’s fair. Father’s left you the house for life, hasn’t he? Then promise me you’ll give me the house when he dies if I give you a hundred pounds. I know I’ll have that much coming to me. Promise me that and I’ll see Father hears nothing of Mr. Castallack. If you won’t promise … then I’ll tell him what’s going on and I’ll see you get neither house nor coin.”

  “I’ll see you penniless first!” I cried, my fury reviving. “You just try and make your word carry more weight with him than mine! He believed me when you made those accusations about Farmer Polmarth and he’ll still believe me this time! You just try and make trouble and see where it gets you! You just try!”

  There was a stillness, a second of hesitation. We stood close together, scarcely two feet apart, I looking him straight in the eyes, he looking at me with equal defiance. Suddenly an indefinable change came upon his expression; his dark eyes lost their hardness and the sullen line of his mouth softened.

  “Well, you’ve plenty of spirit,” he said. “I’ll say that for you.”

  I stepped aside very quickly but not quickly enough. He moved faster than I did, and before I knew what was happening he had pulled me toward him with a jerk of the wrist and closed my lips with his own.

  The room seemed to swim, tilt, blur. I was rigid with revulsion, paralyzed with panic. I felt his huge hands, their backs matted with black hair, slide over my hips and move swiftly upward to my bosom, and all the while his tongue like some monstrous instrument of torture explored my mouth. I felt as if I were suffocating. The moistness of his lips mingled unpleasantly with my sense of taste, but as he pressed me against the wall I could not even twist my face from his.

  Suddenly it was over. Jared’s presence was withdrawn; I was left faint and gasping against the wall, but even as I opened my mouth to scream my vision cleared and I saw my husband watching us from the doorway.

  The next day he rode to Penzance. He would not say why he went. He had not spoken one word to me since his early return from the market, and even though his silence had reduced me to tears he had stubbornly refused to talk to me.

  Four hours later, just as he left the offices of his lawyers after signing a new will, he collapsed with a heart attack and died before he could be taken to hospital.

  7

  I would like to write that everyone was very kind to me, but they were not. I knew then who my friends were and who merely pretended to be my friends because I was the wife of one of the more well-to-do farmers in the parish. The rector Mr. Barnwell was as considerate and kind as I had expected him to be; he was the best kind of clergyman, wise, understanding and unprejudiced. My two daily housemaids Ethel and Millie Turner were also kind enough to stay with me for some hours after the funeral when I did not want to be alone, but I suspected they joined in the gossip about me once my back was turned.

  Gossip was rife. The very air seemed thick with it.

  “Have you heard?” someone said on Market Jew Street in Penzance as I went to see my husband’s lawyers. “John Henry Roslyn … That’s what happens when an old man marries a fast young woman … four years and he’s dead! She’s a sly one, I’ll be bound. Fancy John Henry Roslyn, married all those years to that nice respectable woman, and then suddenly wedding a barmaid young enough to be his daughter … and we all know what being a barmaid means in a town like St. Ives, don’t we?”

  Even my husband’s lawyers seemed to regard me with a prurient interest. My husband’s new will was in the care of Mr. Trebarvah, the senior partner of Holmes, Holmes, Trebarvah and Holmes, the largest firm of solicitors in Penzance, and with Mr. Trebarvah when I saw him that morning was his assistant, a young man called Mr. Vincent. After Jared and Joss had arrived the will was read, and Mr. Trebarvah, translating the legal terms for
us, explained what my husband had done before his death.

  Jared had been cut out of the will; his little son Abel, who was two years old, inherited the money, the stock, the land and the tenant farm, although Jared, as co-trustee with Mr. Trebarvah, was allowed to administer this inheritance for the child till he came of age. Joss received his father’s gold watch and twenty-five pounds. As for me, I was left with the house—and without a penny to support myself or maintain the house, yard and garden which had been devised to me not for life but in fee simple. The result, as I quickly saw, was that I would be forced to sell my inheritance while Jared, acting on behalf of his son, would be forced to buy if he wanted to recover his family home. My husband had kept his promise and left the house to me, but in such a way that it would be impossible for me to live there.

  “So be it, Janna,” said Jared, struggling to contain his rage. “We’ve both of us been punished. Name your price, and if it’s a fair one I’ll see you get your money. Mr. Trebarvah here can draw up the deed and see it’s all done in a proper legal fashion, and afterward when the money’s yours you can go and buy yourself a little cottage in St. Ives.”

  As soon as he uttered the words “St. Ives” I knew I could not and would not leave the farm. The farm was my home—the only true home I had ever had. It represented peace and security, a refuge from all those years of toil and hardship which had followed my dismissal from Menherion Castle. The house was mine and I loved it and no one, least of all Jared, was ever going to take it away from me.

  “I won’t sell,” I said.

  There followed a bitter and heated quarrel during which Mr. Trebarvah tried in vain to act as mediator and young Mr. Vincent looked both distressed and embarrassed.

  “But you’ve got no money!” shouted Jared. “And if you want to make ends meet you’ll have to replace the stock that’s been left to me!”

  “I’ve money saved,” I said, But it was a lie.

  “Even if you can replace the hens and cows you couldn’t make ends meet!”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “Yes, you’ll see well enough!” cried Joss. “We’ll drive you out!”

  “Really, young man,” said Mr. Trebarvah, much scandalized by this threat. “That’s no way to talk to a lady.”

  “She’s no lady!” said Joss, trembling with hatred. “Ask anyone in St. Ives!”

  And he stalked out of the room.

  Jared and I left soon afterward. In the street outside he tried to bargain with me again, but I would not listen and ran all the way back to the inn yard where Cullis, one of the farm laborers, was waiting with the ponytrap. Within the hour I was back at the farm, shutting myself in the little sitting room behind the parlor where I kept my household accounts, and trying in despair to decide how I could ever get the money I needed.

  I did not dare go to the Jews; I was too afraid that I would be unable to pay their rates of interest and would lose the roof over my head. I could approach a bank, but I thought the financiers there would look down on a mere farmer’s widow when the rest of their clients were gentry or wealthy merchants.

  It was then at last that I acknowledged the thought which had been at the back of my mind all the time and allowed myself to think of Laurence Castallack.

  I knew he would help me just as surely as I knew no one else would. It did briefly occur to me that to sit down and write a begging letter to a gentleman with whom one was barely on speaking terms must break all recognized conventions of etiquette, but I dismissed the thought as irrelevant. Etiquette did not matter because he would understand.

  So taking enormous care with my grammar and spelling, I wrote, asking him if he would call at the farm to advise me on a matter which I wished to discuss with a gentleman of quality and education, yet when the letter had been posted my courage ebbed and my confidence in him faded. Afterward all I could think with dread was: He will not come.

  But he did come: He came when the rain had died away in the east and the May sunshine shimmered in a cloudless blue sky and the wildflowers blazed from the banks of the lane. He came in the afternoon in the long hours before supper, at the time when I was ironing, when my hair was untidy, when my black dress was drab beneath my shabby apron. And when I opened the door and saw him there he smiled and took off his hat, just as he always did, and there was nothing more to be said between us because we already knew all there was to say.

  8

  I had waited over thirty years without really knowing what I was waiting for, but at last the moment came and the thirty years were as nothing because time ceased to matter any more. It did not matter that I was no longer young. I was a woman; I was loved; I loved in return, and during our love the spring blazed into summer, a long, lingering, languid summer, and the whole world seemed reborn in my eyes so that each moment was doubly meaningful to me.

  He would come in the afternoons, not every afternoon, only twice or perhaps three times a week, and he would stay for two or three hours. It seems curious now and even painful to look back and see that out of the one hundred and sixty-eight hours of each week I did not spend more than nine hours in his company, but to me then the nine hours seemed a great wealth of happiness. I had never before been nine hours a week in the company of someone I loved; at first I was merely grateful that such hours could exist, but gradually I became restless and my yearning for him grew until the nine hours were a mere drop in the vast ocean of time and it seemed that all my days were spent longing for his arrival and dreading his departure. I wanted him every afternoon, not merely on two or three. I began to long for him in the mornings and evenings, not simply in the afternoons. And most of all I longed for him at night when I was alone in bed and the house was dark and still.

  But I was afraid of seeming too eager, too immodest. He was shy, fastidious in his emotions, and I did not wish to alarm him by any frank declaration of feeling. So I schooled myself to be as restrained as he was, and forced myself never to complain when he took his leave, never to ask when he would be back, never to burst out saying how much I would miss him when I was alone. The years had taught me immense self-control, but even my self-control was no match for my emotions that summer. I endured it until July, and then one Wednesday when he was taking his leave of me I broke down and wept.

  “I can’t bear you going away,” I sobbed. “I can’t bear it … I love you so much … I want to be with you all the time …” All the things that a woman should not say to a man. All the emotions a clever woman should not express aloud to her lover. And I said them all. “Can you not come every day? I can’t bear all these terrible partings and all the hours and hours till I see you again!”

  “Janna dearest …” He was confused and upset. Despite the fact that he was a sensitive man he had had no idea of my feelings before that moment. “If I’d known you felt so strongly or minded so much—”

  “I mind every hour I don’t spend with you!” I was so distressed, so utterly devoid of self-control that I cried out, “Could we not be married? I would be a good wife to you—I would learn how to be a lady, to speak without any accent—I wouldn’t be an embarrassment to you—”

  I stopped. There was a terrible silence. But even before I could begin to feel appalled by what I had done he said in a low, unhappy voice, “But I cannot marry you. I would have told you from the beginning but I assumed you already knew. I’m not divorced. In the eyes of the law—not to mention the eyes of the church—I’m still a married man.”

  I looked past him. On the mantelshelf was a clock which he himself had given me, its hands pointing to half past four. It was a small attractive wooden clock with Roman numerals painted in black on the white dial. Ever afterward I remembered looking at that stolid comforting little clock keeping time with its stolid comforting little hands.

  “Forgive me … If I had known your thoughts had turned to marriage …” And he began to explain that his wife had given him no cause for divorce, that divorce was impossible on the grounds of desertion
alone, but I barely heard him. After a long while I managed to say, “Please, Laurence, think no more of it. I must apologize for behaving so very foolishly. You must be thinking I’ve quite taken leave of my senses.”

  If only he could have accepted my apology and responded with some light remark—then I could have maintained the shreds of self-possession I had summoned from the battered remnants of my pride and all would have been well. But instead he said, “Janna my dear … Janna darling …” And the compassion in his voice made me break down again and weep until my body shook with sobs.

  I clung to him and he kissed me. From there it was but three paces to the bed, but after all was finished between us I was conscious as I always was of not having had enough of him, and the whole corrosive series of emotions began to wrack me all over again.

  It was exactly as if nothing had happened, exactly as if nothing had changed.

  9

  It was two days later that I first saw Mark.

  Laurence had naturally spoken to me of both his sons, and because I loved him so much I had been filled with a curiosity to see them so that I could glimpse their likeness to him in their features and mannerisms. When I had asked him if they resembled him closely he had talked at some length of Nigel, the younger boy, before adding that Mark shared his intellectual tastes. Despite the fact that he then went to great trouble to explain to me how anxious he was not to praise Mark too much for fear I would think him too boastful a father, it occurred to me as time passed that Nigel, not Mark, was the favorite son. This, I decided, was probably because Mark, although a dedicated scholar, was quiet and dull while Nigel, although less gifted intellectually, had more natural charm and grace of manner.