Penmarric

by Susan Howatch

  My mother looked at my father. My father looked at Rebecca.

  “Do your parents know about this yet?” he said not unpleasantly. “Does your father approve?”

  The girl blushed, still starry-eyed. “I haven’t told my parents yet, Mr. Castallack.”

  “Then isn’t this rather … premature? I presume you intend to ask Mr. Roslyn’s permission, Hugh, for his daughter’s hand.”

  “Come, Papa,” said Hugh, happy as a lark and just about as unconcerned, “you know what Joss Roslyn would say if I did! Rebecca’s twenty-one in August, so we’ll get married as soon as possible after that. We all know Roslyn won’t approve of the marriage, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t get married as soon as Rebecca no longer needs his legal consent.”

  “I see,” said my father in his politest voice. “Very interesting. Well, the station platform at Penzance is hardly the place to discuss such important family matters. I suggest you lunch with us at Penmarric, Miss Roslyn, and we can discuss the situation in more detail later.”

  “I’ve already asked her to lunch,” said Hugh gaily, “and she says she’ll come. Will there be room in the car, Papa, or shall Rebecca and I hire transport of our own?”

  “There’ll be room for you both in the car,” said my father shortly. He turned to my mother. “Janna, if you would care to travel with us in the car, Jeanne can go in the ponytrap with Philip. It would be more comfortable for you and I’m sure you want to talk to Hugh.”

  We sorted ourselves out and presently Jeanne and I set off in the ponytrap as the car roared away from the station ahead of us.

  “Well!” I said. “That’s set the cat among the pigeons! I wonder what line Father will take. It’s obvious he And Mama will be opposed to the marriage.”

  “The course of true love never did run smooth,” murmured Jeanne, who was incurably romantic at heart. “She’s pretty, isn’t she? I can see why Hugh likes her. Oh, I don’t care if it is unsuitable! It’s lovely to think of them writing to each other for nearly four years, each faithful to the other …”

  Knowing Hugh’s sexual inclinations, I doubted if he were capable of maintaining a strict celibacy for four years, but naturally I couldn’t say this to Jeanne. She was already taking the dewy-eyed feminine view of the situation and planning what she should wear at the wedding. I wondered what would happen at Penmarric.

  In fact what happened was predictable enough. For once my parents were in complete agreement with each other; neither of them wanted a grandchild who had Joss Roslyn’s blood in his veins. After lunch my father said to them in his politest voice that while he and my mother bore Rebecca no ill-feeling whatsoever they really felt they couldn’t accept the engagement until Hugh had obtained Roslyn’s consent.

  “Well, of course we’ll get married anyway,” said Hugh nonchalantly in private to me later. “After Rebecca’s twenty-one who the hell cares what our parents think? Besides, I don’t see how Papa can disapprove of the marriage for long—he married when he was younger than I am to a woman of a lower class than himself.”

  “And took how that ended!”

  “Yes, but that’s no good reason for assuming my marriage will automatically end in the same way!”

  “True … It’s a pity she is who she is. I don’t think they would be half as opposed to the idea if she was anyone but Joss Roslyn’s daughter.”

  “But God damn it, that’s not her fault! Poor girl, she’s terrified of him. I can’t wait to get her out of that house. She’s had a miserable existence there, and now her mother’s ill things are ten times worse than they were already.”

  “What’s the matter with her mother?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m afraid it might be serious because she refuses to discuss it with Rebecca.”

  There was a pause. After a moment I said curiously, “You weren’t faithful to Rebecca in France, of course.”

  “I didn’t fall in love with anyone else. She’s the one I love.”

  “But you—”

  “Oh God, of course I made use of the camp women! What the devil have they got to do with it? Could you conceivably exist for over three years without having a woman of any description?”

  I was silent. I had never understood Hugh’s compulsion to go to bed with a woman whenever he had the opportunity. It was true I had sometimes considered having a brief affair in an attempt to discover why such a pastime should be so irresistible to him, but I had never met a woman who had attracted me enough to override my wariness of all the risks that were involved. I had no wish for rumors of any bad behavior of mine to reach my mother’s ears. I don’t say she wouldn’t have understood if I had had my fling with the village girls, but she had suffered enough from my father’s fornications, and I didn’t intend her to suffer from mine.

  In an effort to change the subject I said abruptly to Hugh, “What are you going to live on when you get married? You’ll need a job-—Papa won’t give you anything while he’s in a hostile mood, and it’s no good expecting a penny from Joss Roslyn.”

  “Oh …” Hugh yawned as if this were a very minor detail, “I’ll get some job which pays the maximum of money for the minimum of effort. I’ll think of something.” He smiled at me lazily with his innocent blue eyes. “I’ve always been rather good at making money.”

  I smiled too, but if I had known where his future source of income was to come from I wouldn’t have smiled at all. Unknown to us both, our friendship was already sailing blithely toward the waiting rocks to wreck itself beyond repair.

  5

  They married six weeks later after running away to London immediately after Rebecca’s twenty-first birthday. Somehow they managed to keep their engagement a secret from Joss Roslyn, but Rebecca had told her mother, who had encouraged the affair as vigorously as she could whenever her husband’s back was turned. But the vigor she possessed was too weak to give them more than token support; she died a month before Rebecca’s birthday and was buried according to her wishes—and contrary to her husband’s—at St. Just by the Penmar family tomb.

  What Joss Roslyn thought of his daughter’s elopement so soon after his wife’s funeral can well be imagined. He shut himself up in his farmhouse for a week, spoke to nobody and allowed his anger to simmer in silence. When he left the house again he rode to St. Ives—“To see his lawyer there,” said my mother’s servant, Ethel Turner, who always knew everything, “to cut Miss Rebecca out of his will, as like as not. Joss Roslyn got a powerful lot of money when he upped and married Miss Clarissa Penmar, that we all know and he won’t be a-wanting Miss Rebecca to get the money now.”

  My parents were at first as furious as Roslyn, but Hugh had enough charm and cunning to wind anyone around his little finger if he tried hard enough, and he soon softened my mother’s heart with two treacly letters in which he laid on the sentiment with a shovel while begging his darling mama’s forgiveness. I wasn’t in the least surprised when she finally relented far enough to have them to stay at the farm when they returned to Cornwall from London and even gave them the tenant farm up the valley as a wedding present; this was a cottage which had belonged to Jared Roslyn, but my mother had bought him out when she had returned to the farm to live and it had been empty for some years. I supposed I ought to offer some sort of a wedding present, so I offered to pay to have plumbing installed, the walls painted and the chimney swept.

  “Oh, that would be kind!” exclaimed Rebecca with shining eyes. “Thank you so much.” She turned to her husband. “We’ll have a home of our own after all, Hugh!”

  “Yes,” said Hugh, who had always turned up his nose at agricultural dwellings. “That’ll be nice.”

  The next day he rode over to Penmarric to try to make his peace with my father.

  On the whole he had more success than I had anticipated. My father refused to pay him an allowance in future or offer him any financial help, but he said he would like to see Rebecca again and asked Hugh to bring her to Penmarric to dinner at the end of the
week. When they arrived he gave them a dinner service and a canteen of silver and said he hoped they would have a happy married life together; he was too clever to give them a check in lieu of a gift, and even as it was Rebecca had a struggle to prevent Hugh pawning the silver. However, they were now on speaking terms with my father and were accepted at Penmarric, so Hugh felt he had made a step in the right direction. He was confident he would soon be able to persuade my father to renew the monthly allowance, and I had a suspicion my father would in the end capitulate, finance the marriage and forgive them.

  Unfortunately Joss Roslyn was not prepared to follow my father’s example. He stormed over to the farm on the Sunday after their return from London and told Rebecca in front of us all that he never wanted to see her again and that as far as he was concerned she could go to the devil along with her mother.

  We all rose to speak. Hugh was scarlet with fury, my mother pink with indignation, and I’ve no idea what color I was. But Rebecca silenced us all. Up till that moment she had always been so quiet and polite that my mother had privately called her colorless, but now at last we saw the real Rebecca and it soon became clear that the word “colorless” no longer did her justice.

  We gaped at her.

  “Don’t you dare speak of my mother like that!” Her words rang out across the farm kitchen, and her quiet over-refined little voice was suddenly harsh and wild and full of Cornish. “My mother was a true lady and why she married you I’ll never know since you never had a good word to say for her morning, noon or night. Once you’d got your filthy hands on her money you never had a moment’s time for her! I know! She told me! You only married her so that you could set yourself up in a big house with a lot of land and try and make yourself out to be a landowning gentleman. You—a gentleman! My God! You weren’t even fit to shine my mother’s shoes, let alone share the house she lived in!”

  “You be quiet!” shouted Roslyn. “I loved your mother! She married me because she thought she didn’t want to be a lady any more, but when she found herself a farmer’s wife she didn’t like it any better than she liked being a lady at Penmarric! She was a bad wife to me, always grumbling and complaining and never having the house straight or the cooking right and the milk always going sour in the dairy—”

  “—because you wouldn’t pay for more servants! You—with all the money she gave you when you married her! You wanted her to be a household drudge like Uncle Jared’s wife with a baby every year and—”

  “You shut your cursed mouth about a baby every year and go down on your knees to thank God you were born at all! She didn’t want any babies! She wouldn’t even give me a son! All I got was one miserable daughter and after that she says she’s never going to have no more children again-—”

  “—because she didn’t want to bring any more daughters into the world and have to listen to you moaning because they weren’t boys! She knew the kind of man you were! How do you think I felt, not knowing why you never seemed to show any spark of affection for me? I thought I was ugly, afflicted with some terrible defect. Do you imagine I didn’t want to get out of your horrible house? I only stayed there for Mother’s sake and once she was in her grave I was thankful to leave it. You can keep your ill-gotten money and your grand farmhouse and your prosperous lands! I don’t want any of them. I’ve had enough of you—more than enough—and if you don’t want to see me or speak to me again, that’s the best news I could ever wish to hear.”

  We all began to speak at once, Hugh threatening him with violence, I shouting at him to get off my land, my mother telling him he should be ashamed of treating his own flesh and blood so unkindly. He listened to no one. Instead he spat on the floor, told us he hoped we’d be damned for all eternity and stalked out into the yard to his horse.

  Rebecca burst into tears.

  While Hugh and my mother fussed around her I went out to the yard after Roslyn, but he was already riding off over the moors to Morvah; all I could do was stand and watch him till he disappeared from sight.

  After this incident Hugh and Rebecca stayed two weeks longer under my mother’s roof and then coaxed my father to let them stay at Penmarric while their cottage was being made habitable. I was relieved to see them go. I was tired of returning from the mine each night and being obliged to waste the evening talking to Hugh. I had nothing to say to Rebecca, and the atmosphere emanating from the pair began to be wearisome. I was bored with all their intimate smiles and meaningful looks and exasperated when I was kept awake at night. My mother had lent them her bedroom, which was the only room in the house with a double bed, and as I had the room next door all the louder accompaniments of sexual intercourse were audible to me. I couldn’t have cared less how often Hugh wanted to make love to his wife, but I didn’t see why I should have to lose sleep on account of his extended honeymoon.

  To my surprise my mother was also relieved when they moved from the farm to Penmarric.

  “I was becoming irritated with Rebecca,” she confessed. “We nearly quarreled at least twice. You know, I don’t believe she’s half as meek and mild as she would like us to think she is. The more I see of her the more willful and opinionated she becomes. If Hugh’s not firm with her from the beginning he’s going to find her quite a handful later on.”

  “Personally,” I said, “I think she’s the one who’s going to find her partner a handful. How on earth is he going to find the money to support them? He shows no inclination at all to earn a living and do an honest day’s work.”

  But I misjudged him. The next morning I was sitting at my office desk in my hut near the count house and trying to sift through a mountain of paperwork which the purser, Walter Hubert, had said wasn’t truly “within his province.” It wasn’t within mine either, but Walter was overworked and I’d refused his request for a clerk in order to economize, so I had no alternative but to attempt the work myself. I was just wondering gloomily if I would be able to get below ground before the bell rang for the change of shifts when there was a knock on the door of my hut.

  “Come in!” I yelled, hoping it was Walter coming to tell me the work was within his province after all.

  The door opened. A shadow fell across my untidy desk. I looked up.

  “Good God!” I said, amazed. “What are you doing here?”

  “Offering my services,” said Hugh, casually debonair in his best country tweeds. “You wouldn’t like a hand with the accounts, I suppose? I can promise you I’m exceedingly clever with money. I was wondering if you’d like to take me on as your assistant purser, chief clerk and general factotum.”

  FOUR

  Geoffrey* was married to Constance, the heiress of Brittany, and assumed the title of duke of that rugged corner of France … Eleanor had disliked her Breton daughter-in-law from the beginning.

  —The Conquering Family,

  THOMAS COSTAIN

  The trouble with Geoffrey was that his honey-tongued eloquence was merely a top dressing on a scoundrelly hypocrisy. Roger of Howden can hardly mention his name without an epithet of abuse, and thought him the real trouble-maker among the brothers.

  —King John,

  W. L. WARREN

  “TRY ME,” SAID HUGH. “I could learn what has to be learned. I’m not a fool.”

  It was an attractive proposition. As soon as I had recovered from my astonishment I began to consider his offer seriously. To my reluctance I had been more and more involved with the business side of the mine since Walter Hubert had become too busy to cope with all the paperwork single-handed, but the more involved I became the more I realized that I hated to work in my office and grudged every second I was kept from the mine. But if I had Hugh to help Walter run the office, deal with the freight company, haggle with the middle men, supervise the payroll, cope with the insurance schemes and hack a path for the mine through the jungle of administration it was possible I could spend most of the working week down the mine with the tin. It would be more than pleasant to have Hugh take my place in dealing with the more
boring aspects of management, and since Walter was no longer young Hugh could be trained to take over from him completely when he retired.

  “I wouldn’t want much to start with,” said Hugh modestly. “Just enough to keep body and soul together.”

  “How much do you have in mind?”

  “How much are you prepared to spare?”

  We looked at each other. I looked right into his innocent blue eyes and I knew. He was just out for what he could get. He would never understand that every penny of profit had to be plowed back into the mine to stoke it up into the best and safest mine in all Cornwall. As soon as Walter’s back was turned he would prey upon the profits, altering a figure here, a figure there, a figure somewhere else, and while he lived off the fat of the land my mine would be slowly choked to death in an economic noose.

  I wondered what to say. I couldn’t tell him I didn’t trust him and suspected he was a dishonest adventurer out to line his own pocket as lavishly as he could. Nor could I admit that I thought he might outwit me even though I watched him like a hawk. I couldn’t say, “You’re much too crooked and much too clever and I don’t want to have anything to do with you.” On the other hand I didn’t want to lie about it either. As the silence lengthened I wondered why this situation had not arisen before; I had realized long ago that Hugh was untrustworthy. However, since I had never had to put him in a position of trust, the more unpleasant aspects of his personality had never bothered me. Our interests had not conflicted before, but now that they did I found myself placed in a situation which was not only damned difficult but damned embarrassing as well.

  “Look, Hugh,” I said carefully at last, “I can’t really afford to put another man on the payroll at the moment.” That was true anyway. “The mine badly needs new equipment,” I said, warming to my theme, “and although Father has put capital into the mine in the past he’s always vowed not to put in a penny more, so we’re entirely dependent on the mine’s profits. We haven’t even been able to pay a dividend yet because we still need every penny we can make. I’m sorry.”