Penmarric

by Susan Howatch

  4

  As soon as I had promised to marry him I was overcome with panic. Mark began to talk blithely of a wedding in London, a honeymoon on the Continent and renovations to Deveral Farm so that we could live there in comfort until he inherited Penmarric—and the more he talked the more frightened I became. At length when he paused for breath I managed to say in a small voice, “But, Mark, could we not be married in Penzance? Or Truro or Launceston or some other large Cornish town?”

  “Penzance!” he exclaimed, much amused. “What an extraordinary idea! No, it would be much more practical to be married in London. My cousin left me his townhouse in Park Lane, so we can stay there until we’re ready to go abroad. You can have the opportunity to order some good clothes, look around the shops, buy whatever you wish—”

  “But, Mark,” I said, and I could hear my voice tremble, “I’ve never been away from Cornwall before. Penzance is the largest town I’ve ever seen. I—I would not know how to behave in London. I would make mistakes—it’s so many years since I lived at Menherion Castle that I can’t remember all the details of etiquette. All your friends would look down at me—your mother …” I nearly fainted with fright at the thought of Mark’s mother. Words failed me.

  “My darling,” said Mark in his gentlest, kindest voice, “simply be yourself and I shall be more than proud to present you in any drawing room in London. If you’re good enough for me you’re good enough for everyone else as far as I’m concerned.”

  “But my voice—I don’t speak as a lady should—”

  “Your accent’s so pretty! I love to hear you speak!”

  “But I’m not educated! I know nothing—”

  “You can read and write and that’s all that matters. Too much education makes a woman unfeminine.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Listen,” he said, kissing me, “you’ll enjoy London—we can have a box at the theater, dine at some good restaurants, see all the famous sights—”

  “But I shall have to meet your mother.”

  “Yes, it’ll be tedious for you, I agree, but—”

  “Tedious!” I felt faint again.

  “She won’t dare to make any unpleasant observations to you while I’m there. Besides, she’s no longer living at the house in Park Lane. She’s bought herself a house near Berkeley Square, so we need only see her once while we’re in London … There’s no one else you need meet—one or two Oxonian friends of mine, perhaps, but that’s all. You won’t be meeting Nigel. He and I are still not on speaking terms.”

  The word “London” was still reverberating so loudly in my ears that I did not at first listen to his next words. It came as a shock when I heard him say rapidly: “…and while we’re on the subject of my family I wish to make one point perfectly clear. I never want to discuss my father with you. Is that understood? I never want to hear you speak of him or refer to him in your conversation. He’s dead. He’s gone from your life and he’s gone from mine, and that’s all there is to say. I shall never speak of him myself and if I hear you speaking of him I shall be very angry. Is that clear?”

  I was so startled by his vehemence and the rough edge to his voice that I merely said meekly, “Yes, Mark.”

  “Good.” He rose to his feet and I rose too so that in a second we were face to face and he was taking me in his arms. We kissed. I had forgotten how weak and dizzy his embrace made me feel. I could hardly stand …

  “Oh Mark, Mark …” We could not even separate from each other for long enough to go upstairs to my room. I remember lying on the sofa and then, when the sofa became too cramped for us, on the rug by the hearth.

  Later, much later, when we were ourselves again and I was twisting my hair back into place before the looking-glass, he asked me if I had a gown I could wear that evening in Penzance.

  ‘This evening?” I said stupidly. “Penzance?”

  “At the Metropole Hotel,” he said. “I was hoping that tonight at last we could dine together for the first time.”

  5

  I said to Griselda, “He wants to marry me.” Griselda snorted.

  “He does, Griselda. At Christmas. In London.”

  She gaped at me. “Lunnon?”

  “He’s going to marry me, Griselda. And I want to marry him. He’s not, as shallow as I thought he was. He keeps his promises—he means what he says, so I can trust him, Griselda, can’t you see? I can trust him and feel secure.”

  “And the house? The house thee’s so crazed for? What’s to happen to the house?”

  “I’ll lease it to Jared. Mark and I will live at Morvah, and he says he’ll make a little cottage for you, Griselda, a little home all your own! Oh, Griselda, I do love him! I’m not marrying him just because he’s rich and well-to-do! If you knew how I felt—if you could understand—”

  “Bewitched thee art. Bewitched and crazed. There’s that boy, no more ’n one-and-twenty—”

  “Oh do be quiet, you silly old woman! Really, you make me so angry sometimes I feel quite put out. Quick, get out the ironing board and let me press that pale-green gown Miss Charlotte gave me all those years ago. I think if I lace up my corset a little tighter I can still make the gown meet around the waist.”

  The news of my good fortune exploded in Zillan as furiously as fire in a tinderbox. At first my natural reaction was to feel exultant, but gradually my exultation faded and a bitter anger took its place.

  “Maybe you’d have married me, Janna,” said Jared, “if I’d been six inches shorter and a whole heap uglier and a rich gentleman instead of a yeoman farmer.”

  “Mrs. Roslyn,” said my friend the rector with a tactfulness that could not wholly conceal his concern, “would it perhaps not be more prudent to wait until the spring? I realize that you and Mark both feel there’s no point in waiting since you both know your minds so clearly, but I fear your haste will give rise to the most unfortunate gossip …”

  “Gossip,” said Griselda, “gossip, gossip, gossip. They thinks I’m deaf and don’t understand, but I understands right enough. Fast, they says thee art, fast and scheming. And someone’s been talking of thee and Mr. Laurence—Jared, maybe? Or that evil-tongued Joss … Well, says they, well, if she can’t get the father, they says, she gets the son. She gets what she can, they says, and her husband not yet one year in his grave. And there’s Mr. Mark, they says, an innocent boy, they says, no more ’n one-and-twenty, and clay, says they, clay in the hands of a powerful ambitious older woman. Terrible gossip there be all through Zillan parish and all through Morvah, Zennor and St. Just, and even as far as Penzance, Madron and Marazion—”

  “Stop it, Griselda!” I cried. I felt close to tears with horror and resentment. “Stop it!” In a passionate wave of anger I exclaimed, “I’ll be glad to leave here and go to London! I’m sick of all their vicious tongues! I’ll be glad to leave Zillan parish and never speak to anyone in Zillan again!”

  I left Roslyn Farm with Mark less than a week later.

  THREE

  She immediately married Henry.

  —The Saxon and Norman Kings,

  CHRISTOPHER BROOKE

  Henry and Eleanor were quietly married at Poitiers without any pomp and almost surreptitiously…

  —Henry II,

  JOHN T.APPLEBY

  I SHALL NEVER FORGET the horrified amazement that assailed me when I first saw the house in Park Lane which Mark’s cousin Robert Yorke had recently devised to him by will. I was already stupefied by the long, train journey from Penzance—I had never been in a train before—and stunned by the enormity of the vast, dirty, crowded, jumbled, confused city, in which I found myself late at night on that December evening, but when I saw the townhouse I was so numb with shock that I forgot even the fearful excitement of the journey and of my first sight of the London lights stretching away on all sides to infinity. I had fancied “Park Lane” to be a pleasant little street in some modest neighborhood not unlike the superior residential areas of Penzance and the house to be a simple
dwelling a little smaller than Roslyn Farm but with one or two more servants. Yet to my horror I found myself in one of the grandest streets in London with the magnificence of Hyde Park on the one hand and the splendor of mighty mansions on the other. Speech instantly deserted me. I was so unnerved I could hardly bring myself to descend from the hansom cab.”

  A footman came out to meet us. And another. A butler hovered in the hall. There was even a third footman behind him. And the hall! A massive chandelier hung from an ornate ceiling. A beautiful staircase curved elegantly to the floor above. I stared blankly around me. The servants were bowing, the butler was murmuring courtesies. I think I smiled in acknowledgment. I cannot remember. All I do recall is that I thought at once with fright of the patched underwear in my valise, and I began to beseech Mark in a whisper to let me unpack the luggage myself. I had bought one or two items in Penzance before the journey but at his suggestion, had left the essential purchases until reaching London. “But I must do the unpacking!” I urged wretchedly. “My clothes—”

  “No.” That was all he said. Merely: “No.”

  “But, Mark—”

  “My dear, it simply isn’t done. Do as I say.” It was as if he were the one who had the ten years more experience of the world and I were the one scarce out of my teens. So overwhelmed was I by his manner and authority that I did not dare question him further.

  Upstairs I found I had been allotted a vast bedchamber with a grandiose modern bed, resplendent furniture and somber paintings on the walls. The carpet was so thick that I could hardly walk upon it. Presently I was informed by the expressionless maid who was unpacking my belongings that there was even a bathroom nearby, and, seizing the chance to escape before she could discover my patched underwear, I hurried down the corridor in search of it. The bath was of white porcelain on little gilt legs and there was a basin with taps. I turned the tap. Water came out. I turned it off again. The water stopped. Becoming bolder, I investigated the room next door and discovered it was, as I had suspected, a water closet, the bowl very fancifully decorated with a royal-blue design on a white background. There had been a water closet at Menherion Castle, but none of the servants had ever been allowed to use it, and besides, the castle plumbing had never been reliable—at least not back in the Seventies when I had lived there. Perhaps matters were so improved now that all the gentry had beautiful bathrooms and perfectly functioning water closets. Or perhaps they were simply more advanced in London than they were in far-off provincial Cornwall.

  For a moment I was so absorbed with the novelty of my surroundings that I quite forgot to feel nervous.

  That night after an informal supper we went to bed early. We slept in separate rooms, of course, to preserve the proprieties, but he slipped into my bed before dawn and stayed until it was light, so I was not alone the entire night. In fact the proprieties were hardly observed anyway since we were both unmarried and both sleeping under the same roof with the whole house to ourselves, but as we were to be married so soon and as we did not intend to mingle with society before our wedding, I supposed it did not matter that we paid such scant respect to the conventions.

  The next morning for the first time in my life I had breakfast in bed, and afterward my maid offered to draw my bath for me. Oh, the wonder of that long hot bath! By the time I had finished it was almost eleven o’clock. Eleven, I thought, eleven! I remembered my days as a farmer’s wife, the milking and the churning, the cooking and baking and cleaning, the ceaseless routine of morning activity. Yet here it was, eleven o’clock, and all I had done was have breakfast, lie in bed and take a bath!

  I began at last to enjoy myself.

  That day the dressmaker came, and, being a competent woman, she advised me at once on the wardrobe I required and made various suggestions about patterns and materials. It was an enthralling morning. After a late luncheon we took a drive in the park before visiting Bond Street and Oxford Street and viewing the amazing variety of shops. The next few days passed very quickly; Mark was making the arrangements for the wedding and I was busy trying on the new gowns which were beginning to arrive from the dressmaker’s. I was just starting to adjust to my surroundings and to attain a small measure of self-confidence when Mark announced that the time had come to call on his mother.

  Panic overwhelmed me again. I was literally shaking with fright. In vain Mark assured me that I looked so beautiful in my new clothes that he would have taken me to Buckingham Palace without a qualm. In vain he told me that his mother was only a middle-aged woman, very vain, incredibly arrogant and more than a little pathetic in her loneliness. In vain he reassured me that she was not the devil incarnate. All I could remember was that she was the haughty, domineering “Miss Maud Penmar” of Ethel and Millie Turner’s gossipy reminiscences of the local gentry and the quarrelsome, discontented wife who had made Laurence so unhappy during the years they had spent together at Gweek.

  “Oh, by the way,” said Mark casually, “don’t forget to address my mother as Mrs. Penmar. She never uses the name Castallack.”

  “Mrs. Penmar. Yes. I’ll remember.” I wracked my brains to think of an excuse I could use for avoiding that dreadful meeting, but there was no escape and at length we departed for the house in Charles Street.

  “Oh, Mark!” I whispered in an agony of nervousness after an imperious butler had regarded us with a baleful eye and shown us into the morning room. “Could we not go away—leave before she comes? You could say I was suddenly taken ill, that I felt faint—”

  “And have her instantly imagine you’re pregnant and that I’m marrying you because I must? Certainly not!”

  I was just about to give way to my panic and declare I did not care what motives for marriage she attributed to us when the door opened and a tall, handsome woman swept haughtily into the room and paused without the least embarrassment to survey me through a lorgnette. She had iron-gray hair, the black Penmar eyes which I now felt I knew so well, a tight, ill-tempered mouth and a strong masculine jaw. Rings flashed on her fingers. Her dress, of a grand shade of purple, was strangely becoming to her. As she let the lorgnette fall and came forward again toward me I saw she moved with the air of the privileged classes, the air of coming and going exactly where she pleased whenever she wished, the air of arrogance which had attracted yet irritated me when I had first met Mark.

  “Well,” she said disagreeably to her son. “This is a fine how-d’ye-do, I must say. At least she has good looks. I suppose one must try and look on the more fortunate aspects of the situation.”

  “Mama,” said Mark in a voice of steel, “if you cannot receive us with the necessary minimum of courtesy, then pray do not bother to receive us at all. I don’t have to have your consent to my marriage—”

  “Very lucky for you, isn’t it?”

  “—and I certainly don’t intend to go down on my knees and beg for your blessing!”

  “I should think not indeed! I detest groveling. Very well, if you ring the bell and stop striding up and down like a bad actor playing Hamlet I’ll ask Tipstock to bring in some sherry. Sit down, Mrs. Roslyn,” she added, not bothering to look at me, and proceeded to lower herself into a formidable high-backed chair from which she could act the part of an inquisitor.

  There followed a grueling quarter of an hour during which my prospective mother-in-law inquired ruthlessly into my antecedents. Mark had urged me beforehand to hide nothing and speak as boldly as if I were as proud of being a fisherman’s daughter as she was of being a Penmar, but that was easier said than done. However, I spoke up as best I could, telling her that my parents had died young, obliging me to go into service at an early age, and I somehow contrived to make it appear that I had worked at Menherion Castle until I had married my first husband; I also stressed that the Roslyns were not tenants but yeomen farmers who owned their own land.

  “Hm,” said Maud Penmar and took a large mouthful of sherry. She drank without any pretense of daintiness. “Well, that’s all very respectable, I suppose. I
s Janna your real name?”

  “No, I was christened Jeanne after my father, whose name was Jean-Yves. But the Cornish cannot pronounce French names.”

  “He was French?”

  “From Brittany, yes. There was a colony of Breton sailors in St. Ives.”

  “Do you speak French?”

  “I’ve forgotten it all. It’s so long since my father died.”

  “A pity. It would have helped if you spoke French.” She set down her glass and turned to Mark. “When do you intend to be married?”

  “Next week. I expect to have the special license any day now and I’ve made arrangements to be married in the Savoy Chapel—”

  “Am I invited to the wedding?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of putting you in such an embarrassing position!”

  “How tactful!” Their expressions became bitter as they stared at each other. Her mouth set itself in a hard narrow line. “Well,” she said, not looking at either of us and pouring herself a third glass of sherry from the decanter, “I don’t approve of your future wife—how could I?—but at least matters could be infinitely worse. There’s no reason why Mrs. Roslyn should not acquire a certain air of gentility, and God knows there aren’t many working-class women one could say that much for. She’s clever and good-looking and if she makes an effort she could even be presentable. I wish you both well and hope you will always call upon me whenever you’re in London.”

  The interview was over. Within minutes I was sinking down exhausted against the upholstery of the carriage and savoring the enormity of my relief that my ordeal should at last be behind me.

  “Of course,” said Mark abruptly, “she was most embarrassingly rude. I apologize for her. However, that’s an ordeal we don’t have to repeat. You need not visit her again—I’ve no intention of taking you back there to be insulted.”

  Relief made me charitable. “I don’t think she meant to be insulting, Mark. She was merely a little outspoken, and I expect her outspokenness sprang from disappointment. She must have hoped you would make a good match.”