Polsinney Harbour: A heartwarming family saga set in Victorian era Cornwall

by Mary E. Pearce

  Maggie sat perfectly still. Whatever she might have expected, it was certainly not this, and she was struck dumb. But Gus was in no hurry for her to answer. There were still a number of things he wanted to make clear to her and he was glad to have the chance of doing it in his own way.

  ‘Don’t make any mistake about it. This is a business proposition and nothing else. I’m a sick man and I’m soon for the grave. All I want from you is that you should keep house for me and bring some comfort into the place. I shouldn’t want to come to your bed ‒ much good it’d do me if I did! ‒ and you and me would have separate rooms. I thought I’d better make that plain so as not to give the wrong idea and frighten you off before I’ve begun.’

  Gus paused and took a deep breath. Talking always taxed his strength.

  ‘Of course, I could just ask you to come as my paid housekeeper and still leave my property to you,’ he said. ‘But it would be better if we married cos that’d make everything right and tight. Oh, I know folk’ll talk just the same! They’ll wink and nod among themselves and say they know what’s behind it all … But marriage, even of this sort, is legal and binding in every way and people have great respect for it. You’d have my name and so would your child and when you came into the property there’d be no room for argument about the rights and wrongs of it. No one could interfere with you. No one could ever take it away.’

  Once again there was a pause. The clock on the wall could be heard ticking and rain could be heard on the window-panes. Maggie sat, straight-backed, her hands folded in her lap. Her grey eyes were full of thought and Gus could see uncertainty in them.

  ‘I don’t expect you to answer at once. You’ll need time to brood on it. And if I read your face aright, you’ve got a few questions you want to ask.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maggie said. ‘One question at least. Why should you want to do this for me?’

  ‘It’s not just for you. It’s for both of us. I’ve got two or three years at the most and Dr Sam Carveth has said that my end will not be an easy one. At present I can still use my legs but it costs me something, I can tell you, to get myself across this room. In a year or so I shall be worse. Helpless. Dependent on you. That won’t make me an easy man to live with day in, day out, and I reckon by the time you’ve seen me through, you’ll have earnt what you’re getting in return. You need to consider that side of it. You’ll have your child to think about and you may decide it’s too much to take on.’

  ‘Can’t the doctor do anything for you?’

  ‘No. Nothing. He’ve said so straight. Any more questions you want to ask?’

  ‘Yes. I’m wondering about your nephew, Brice, and your sister-in-law, Mrs Tallack. Won’t they, being family, expect you to leave your property to them?’

  Gus gave a cynical laugh.

  ‘You’re right about my sister-in-law. What she expects would fill a book. But don’t worry your head about that. My brother Henry, years ago, sold his share of the business to me and put his money into a copper mine over to Goonwelter. It was Rachel who made him do that. She thought it’d make him a rich man. But instead he lost every penny he had. So whatever hopes Rachel has about getting her hands on my property, she’ve got no rights in the matter at all, and if you accept my proposition, one of the things that’ll please me most is giving her a smack in the eye.’

  Gus broke off and took a rest. He was breathing heavily.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded, after a while. ‘Does that shock you, Maggie Care?’

  ‘No. Not in the least.’

  ‘Rachel’s had me dead and buried a dozen times in the past two years so what do I owe her? ‒ Not a groat! As for boy Brice, well, a few disappointments here and there won’t do him a ha’porth of harm. He’s a young man, fit and strong, and he can make his own way in the world. But you’re a girl and you’re all alone, so surely you won’t refuse my help just because of some foolish qualm over putting my nephew’s nose out of joint?’

  ‘No,’ Maggie said. She shook her head. ‘I have my baby to think of and that’s more important to me than anything else in the world. But ‒’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It still seems strange that you should want to do this for me, someone you’ve never met before, a stranger you know nothing about.’

  ‘Damme, why should it seem so strange? It seems simple enough to me.’

  Gus sought to brush the matter aside, but Maggie looked at him in such a way that his gaze faltered before hers and he sat for some time in complete silence, frowning at the oil-lamp on the stove.

  ‘There is another reason of sorts and I may as well make a clean breast of it. It’s an old story, out of the past, and I’ve kept it to myself till now.’

  Gus shifted in his chair. Somehow the lamp was bothering him and he leant forward to turn down the flame. Then he slumped back again.

  ‘I started life as a fisherman. That was when I was twelve years old. When I was twenty my father died and left me the money to buy my own boat. In winter I used to go up to Bigbury Bay for the herring fishing and one winter there I met a girl. We became lovers, her and me, and we planned to get married just as soon as we could get her father’s consent. He was one of the Plymouth Brethren. Too sanctimonious by half for me. Anyway, at the end of the season, I came home to Polsinney for the long-lining, and I didn’t go back again till June. By then Ellen had gone. I’d got her into trouble, you see, and her father had turned her out of the house.’

  Gus stared at the lamp on the hob. His story was bringing old wounds to life and he still felt some of the rage he had felt as a young man of twenty-two.

  ‘Nobody knew where she’d gone. She’d slipped away without a word. But I’d only missed her by four days and I thought I should find her in no time at all. I spent three weeks tramping the roads, asking at turnpikes, villages, towns … But by the time I got news of her it was too late and she was dead. It seems she’d set out to walk down into Cornwall to find me here in Polsinney but on the way she’d caught a chill and been taken into the workhouse infirmary at Dunsett. It turned to pneumonia and she died. She was buried as a pauper in the churchyard at Bayle.’

  Gus looked up and met Maggie’s gaze.

  ‘I was too late to help Ellen and do what I ought to have done for her but I can help you and your child instead. It’s the one last useful job I can do before I have to hand over the helm and when I meet up with Ellen again, to give an account of myself to her, I know she’ll say I’ve done the right thing.’

  ‘How old was she?’

  ‘She was eighteen. It happened thirty years ago. But no one in Polsinney knows the tale and I would prefer to keep it that way.’

  ‘I shan’t tell anyone,’ Maggie said.

  Gus gave a nod. He was satisfied.

  ‘There’s something about you, somehow, that makes me feel I can trust you,’ he said. ‘Do you think you can trust me the same?’

  Before Maggie could answer, however, he stopped her with a brusque command.

  ‘Don’t answer that! I’m asking too soon. You need time to go besting about to find out something of what I’m like. You’ll be told some rare tales, I daresay, and when you’ve heard them you can make up your mind.’

  ‘I don’t need to go besting about. I’ve been in Polsinney long enough to know what people say about you.’

  ‘Hah! Is that so? And what do they say?’

  ‘For one thing, they say you’re fond of the rum bottle.’

  ‘Damme! And what if I am? Would they grudge a dying man the one bit of comfort left to him? What else do the beggars say about me?’

  ‘They say you don’t suffer fools gladly.’

  ‘Nobody does, except he be a fool himself, and even then he’s a lot more shrewd with other folk’s foolishness than he is with his own. What else do they say?’

  ‘They say you’ve got a quick temper and that once you’ve got an idea in your head you can be peggy as a mule.’

  ‘Is that the whole reckoning?’ Gus asked.

/>   ‘Yes,’ Maggie said, ‘I think it is, and it seems to me, if that’s the worst, I haven’t got a lot to worry about.’

  ‘Does that mean you’re willing to consider my proposition?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Maggie now rose to her feet and took her wet cape from the back of the chair. She drew it round her and tied the cord.

  ‘I’ll come in the morning, before work, and let you have my answer,’ she said. ‘That’ll be just before eight.’

  ‘That’s not very long to be thinking all round a step that will settle the whole of your future life.’

  ‘It’s as long as I shall need,’ Maggie said.

  At the back of her mind she already felt sure that she would accept his proposal of marriage and the conditions that went with it. Astonishing though the proposal was, her mind had quickly adapted to it, and she had soon begun to feel that everything that had happened to her since her arrival in Polsinney had been bringing her slowly to this point. She had been in Gus Tallack’s company for less than an hour but somehow, during that time, because of what had passed between them, a conviction had grown and taken root that their lives were already linked by fate.

  But certainly she needed to think; to look coolly and critically at all the possible implications; to weigh the problems against the advantages, especially with regard to her child, and to try, with what honesty she could command, to sort out the rights and wrongs involved in accepting a dying man’s proposal.

  On reaching the door she paused and looked back, and what she saw was an old man, aged prematurely by disease, his big body, once powerful, now misshapen and made slack by the slow wasting of his muscles and nerves. But there was a look of strength even now in the set of the head on the powerful neck and as he turned his bearded face towards her, she saw how fiercely the flame of life still burnt in him, glowing in the broad, thick-fleshed cheeks and lighting up the dark brown eyes with a kind of angry energy.

  ‘Well, does it give you pause,’ he said, ‘to see what a wreck of a man I am?’

  ‘I was thinking, if we do marry, I shall want to speak to that doctor of yours, to see what can be done for you.’

  ‘I’ve already told you, there’s nothing to be done. That’s how I come to be sitting here, offering to make you wife and widow all in the space of two or three years.’

  ‘Yes, well, we shall see,’ Maggie said.

  When she had gone, Gus sat for a while without moving, staring fixedly into space. The clock on the wall struck nine. He looked at it and gave a scowl.

  ‘Get a move on, will you?’ he said.

  During the night the rain stopped and by seven o’clock the next morning Polsinney was steaming dry in a sun that shone, burning hot, from a cloudless sky. Gus had wheeled himself out to the yard and sat watching the drifters unloading their catches onto the quay on the opposite side of the harbour. He had brought his breakfast out with him: two thick slices of bread and a hunk of cold fat bacon; but after two or three bites it lay untouched on the plate in his lap.

  Just before eight Maggie came. Gus had set a stool for her, and she sat down on it, facing him. She came to the point without delay.

  ‘I’ve thought it over and the answer is yes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. Quite sure.’

  ‘You won’t change your mind later on and leave me looking a damned fool?’

  ‘No. I promise you faithfully.’

  Gus took a long, deep, quivering breath. His face was flushed with satisfaction. He looked as though he would burst with it. But there were lingering doubts.

  ‘I’m not a saint. You know that. And sickness doesn’t bring out the best in a man who’s only flesh and blood. Have you thought what it’ll mean, seeing me through to my end? Have you any idea what you’re taking on?’

  Maggie tried to answer him honestly.

  ‘I can’t see into the future, Mr Tallack, but I promise I shall do my best to fulfil my side of the bargain and so long as you’re good to me and my child ‒’

  ‘You will be my wife,’ Gus said, ‘and your child will be like my own child, and the day we are married I shall make my will leaving my property to you, so that it’s all as watertight as anything on this earth can be.’ After further thought he said: ‘In some ways we know a lot about each other. In other ways we know nothing at all. It may be I’m doing a bad thing, persuading a young girl like you to marry a sick old man like me, but I mean only good to you and your child, and this much I swear by Almighty God.’

  Maggie nodded but made no reply. She trusted him absolutely.

  ‘Are you church or chapel?’ he asked.

  ‘Church,’ she said.

  ‘Then as soon as Isaac Kiddy comes, I’ll send him up to fetch the parson, to see about calling the banns. There’s no sense in wasting time. Are you agreeable to that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So be it. I’ll see to it.’

  ‘I must go now. I’ll be late for work.’

  ‘There are things we shall need to discuss. You’d better come and see me again tonight.’

  ‘Yes. All right. I’ll be here at eight.’

  When she had gone out of the yard Gus, in a sudden surge of feeling, took his breakfast from the plate in his lap and hurled it piece by piece to the gulls who swooped instantly, screaming and flapping, to snatch it up in mid air.

  At half-past-eight Isaac Kiddy arrived and immediately Gus sent him out again.

  ‘I want you to go to the parsonage and ask the parson to step down here. I want to see him straight away.’

  ‘What do ee want with the parson, you?’

  ‘You can tell him I’ve got a job for him.’

  Even before the first banns had been read in church, news had spread throughout Polsinney that Gus was to marry Maggie Care. Hall’s cellar was agog with it. The women and girls could not leave it alone. And just as their hands were ceaselessly busy laying out the pilchards and spreading the salt, so their tongues were equally busy with this latest piece of news.

  ‘You must’ve known a thing or two when you came to Polsinney, Maggie Care. You’ll be sitting some pretty when the old man dies and leaves you his bit of property even if tes all tumblen down.’

  ‘If I’d known old Gus was looking out for a wife, I should have made up to him myself. But tedn no good talken like that. I should have had to get into trouble before I stood a chance, I suppose.’

  ‘Aw, just listen to Deborah Larch! If she haven’t got herself in trouble it can’t be for want of running the risk!’

  ‘Maybe Kate Cledra can give her some hints.’

  ‘If at first you don’t conceive ‒’

  ‘The church’ll be full on Sunday, you. Even the chapel folk’ll be there to hear Gus Tallack’s banns shouted out.’

  ‘Any just cause or ’pediment, en?’

  ‘Only a little one, that’s all.’

  ‘Dear of’n, too, tedn hardly his fault.’

  ‘Maggie’ll have to make the most of this cheeld. She won’t get another from old Gus.’

  The noisy gossip went on and on and Maggie let it flow over her. The women and girls, for the most part, were friendly and sympathetic to her, now that her story was fully known, for their own menfolk were fishermen and the tragedy that had befallen her was one that touched them very close. Rough their jokes might be, but they were meant in good fellowship, and Maggie knew it. As for the rest, the spiteful few, she was completely indifferent to them. Their barbed remarks left her untouched. She found she was able to shut them out.

  The only thing that mattered to her was the child she carried in her womb and she thought about it constantly. All her life’s hopes were wrapped up in this child and to safeguard its future she had agreed to marry a man almost three times her age. An ailing man, close to death. A man she knew almost nothing about. Yet none of this seemed strange to her. Instead it seemed like providence. Gus Tallack might be a stranger to her, but he had appeared in her hour of need, and he had h
er trust and her gratitude. People would say, and it would be true, that she was marrying him for his money; but a bargain had been struck between them and so long as she kept her side of it there need not be any feelings of guilt; and when his property came to her she would keep it and hold it, for her child’s sake, whatever the world might think of her.

  All these things so filled her mind that the babble of gossip in the fish-cellar made no impression on her at all. She felt perfectly safe and secure, now that her baby’s future was settled, and she followed her own trend of thoughts.

  ‘One thing I should dearly love to see,’ said Martha Cledra, at her side, ‘and that’s Rachel Tallack’s face when she hears you’re going to marry old Gus.’

  Chapter Four

  Rachel’s anger was bitter indeed and Brice had to bear the brunt of it.

  ‘It was a bad day for us when that girl came to the district!’ she said. ‘She’s brought nothing but trouble, right from the start, and to think I took her into my house! If only I had had the sense to send her packing as she deserved! But no, I took Christian pity on her, and this is how I’ve been repaid!’

  ‘It surely wasn’t Christian pity that made you turn her out of the house, and perhaps if you hadn’t done that, none of this would ever have happened.’

  ‘So that’s the way it’s to be, is it? I am to take the blame for it all?’

  ‘It’s too late now to talk about blame. All we can do is face the facts. The girl was in trouble and Uncle Gus felt sorry for her. This is his way of helping her.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it!’ Rachel scoffed. ‘He’s doing it to spite you and me!’

  ‘Why should he want to do that?’

  ‘Because it’s the kind of man he is! He’s always disliked me, merely because I speak my mind, and now it seems he’s spiteful enough to take his feelings out on you!’

  ‘You needn’t worry on my account. The property is nothing to me. And my uncle has a perfect right to do whatever he likes with it.’

  ‘Don’t speak to me about his rights! You are his brother’s only son and what he is doing is cheating you. That business of his may be run down but if only you had the running of it, and got good men to work for you, who knows what would have come of it? Why, you could have been as big a man as John Lanyon or Mark Hall, if only you’d got your proper rights!’