The Loving Cup

by Winston Graham

  He knew which was Cuby’s bedroom; it had been lit until half an hour ago – so also had Clemency’s; now they were dark; the family was at supper. It was very much a gamble as to when he went in, but he knew they were not a family who kept late hours, nor one that had the traditional big meal before retiring. A roast duck or two, canary wine, a dish of apple tart and cream, cheese. It could not last more than an hour. After that Mrs Bettesworth usually went quickly to bed; the two girls might play a game of draughts or chess. John Trevanion would doze or read the latest racing news over his port. Most of the servants, except those engaged in serving the meal, would be in their own quarters. There was likely to be little activity upstairs.

  He peered at his watch to check the time, pocketed it, patted the two horses, stepped lightly towards the house.

  Caerhays Castle was built with a flat roof behind its handsome castellations. He had been up there once with the girls, until John Trevanion came after them calling them down for fear they might damage the delicate roofing. Jeremy groped around for the longest ladder, gradually reared it against the wall of the house. It would reach Cuby’s bedroom window easily, but that was not what he wanted. It went up well beyond, but he could not see whether it actually reached to the turreted stonework. He blamed himself for not risking this much while the moon was up. Well, it was too late now, and only trial and error would answer the question.

  He put the ladder as close to the castle wall as he could, to give it its greatest length, and wedged it by building a pile of bricks around the base. Then he began to climb.

  It was a shaky ladder, and the thought crossed his mind that it had been lying here so long some of the rungs might have become rotten; all the same he went up it with few of the vapours his mother had suffered climbing another ladder not so long ago.

  It did not quite reach, but the distance was only a matter of a couple of feet, and he could grasp the stonework with both hands. He sprang from the top rung, got his hands well gripped about the stone, tensed his arms and put a leg over. As he did this his other leg slipped and he pulled himself to safety and peered down, observing that though the ladder had not fallen it was now askew. A descent that way would not be desirable.

  He listened. Only an owl broke the stillness, screeching in the wood hollows in the mild winter night. He tiptoed across the roof, careful to kick nothing, came to the trapdoor, grasped the handle and lifted. It came up. No one expected burglars from above.

  He went down into the loft room. The greatest danger when he entered the house proper were Trixie and Truff, Trevanion’s two spaniels. The servants might be sleepy and wanting to go to bed, but let those dogs hear one unfamiliar footstep or smell one unfamiliar smell and they would raise Cain.

  It was darker in the house, so the risk of kicking something over was far greater. But time was on his side, he could afford to proceed at a snail’s pace, feeling each inch with finger tips before he moved. Patience was all.

  It took him several minutes to reach the door. He supposed it could have been locked but it was not. It opened with a damnable groan. Now it was slightly less dark: the crack let in the faintest of lights which by comparison was welcome; some candle on the stairs, no doubt, left to light the Trevanions to bed.

  Another six inches of groaning; the gap was wide enough and he slipped through. One of his buttons caught on the door edge and made an unwelcome clack. He shut the door, which did not complain at being moved back into place.

  Although he had had no reason to memorize the plan of the house, he knew with certainty that to get to Cuby’s bedroom you simply went along this corridor, turned left and her room was on the right.

  Floorboards in a new house should not creak, but some of these already did. By stepping close to the wall he avoided most of them. He had reached the end of the corridor when he heard quick footsteps coming towards him. He shrank back against the wall: there was nowhere to hide.

  A woman’s voice said in an undertone: ‘Well, tis all very fine fur you, James, but maybe I don’t see it that way ’tall, see?’

  ‘Ar,’ said a man. ‘I reckon I can get ee to see it my way in next to no time.’

  The girl giggled. ‘Leave me be, you great oaf!’

  A maid came up carrying a candle: the light spilled everywhere. A footman Jeremy had not seen before followed her. At the very entrance to the corridor in which Jeremy tried to shrink, they turned right towards the other bedrooms. They should have seen him but they had no eyes except for each other. Jeremy retreated to the door of the loft room, almost panicked into retreating into it, but decided to brazen it out. There were, as far as he knew, no bedrooms in use in this corridor; in all probability the maid had gone into Mrs Bettesworth’s room or Cuby’s room, for some ordinary purpose such as to make up the fire, and would be unlikely to come up here.

  Unless they sought privacy . . .

  He waited and counted. By the time he reached a hundred the voices were audible again. They were coming this way. Then they turned and went down the stairs. A door closed and the voices ceased.

  So he could not yet altogether rule out the staff.

  He proceeded inch by inch to the end of the corridor. The faint light did indeed come from a lantern in the hall. He turned sharp left and made for the bedrooms that he knew. And there he stopped, for his memory had played him false. There were three doors, well spaced out. He knew it was not the last, but he had no idea which of the other two to choose. The third, he felt certain, was Clemency’s. But did not Mrs Bettesworth occupy the largest room, which was in between?

  He chose the first door. It opened easily but almost before he got in he stumbled over something: a slipper or a book. He clung to the door, waiting for someone to discover him. Nothing happened. He bent and picked up what he had stumbled over: it was a shoe. And it was not Cuby’s.

  He backed out. There were voices downstairs again, and he thought it was Major Trevanion. Light was spreading up from an open door.

  He tried the second door, and he had hardly entered before he knew the room was Cuby’s. The scent she used; a gown lying on the bed, indistinguishable as to colour but unmistakable as to wearer. Caution slipping, he made his way by finger tip from bed to wardrobe to dressing table to – yes, to alcove. He had remembered that aright. And there was a curtain across it.

  He stumbled in, tramping on another pair of shoes, a fallen frock hanger. The curtain rattled on its rings and then was still.

  He was still. All he had to do now was to wait.

  Chapter Nine

  Yesterday, Cuby and Clemency had been out all day with the Tregony Hunt. After early fog, when the going had been wet and almost blind, they had drawn a fox near Creed and had had a fine run for over an hour before losing him in one of the upper reaches of the Fal. Nobody seemed to mind, and, the weather turning sunny, they had gone on to find another fox, and had killed about three in the afternoon. It had been a glorious day in the open air and both girls had come home tired and muddy and glowing with content.

  Today they had been occupied with other things, small things, house and parochial things, which in their way were the perfect foil to yesterday’s excitements. They had walked with John’s little boys on Porthluney Beach, and Cuby had returned home to write letters, one to her brother, one to her aunt. At dinner they had entertained the Rev. C. T. Kempe, rector of the parish of St Michael Caerhays, with which were joined the parishes of St Dennis and St Stephen-in-Brannel. Mr Kempe, a second cousin, was a cheerful outgoing man who seemed so certain of his future in the afterlife that he neglected his dress and his circumstances in this. After dinner they had strolled back to the rectory with him to look in again at his great pig, Alexander, which he was convinced was the largest in the world. It measured, he claimed, nine feet from snout to tail-tip, stood four feet high and weighed over 600 lbs. It had already won him prizes, but it was now become so fat it could not get to its feet unaided. Then they walked on together, sick visiting with Mr Kempe in the scattere
d cottages.

  Returning at six they had found horses at the door and that their friends Captain and Mrs Octavius Temple from Carvossa had called in on their way home from staying with Lady Whitworth near Mevagissey. So it was a pleasant and jolly tea time, and seven o’clock before they left.

  A happy, comfortable day. A happy, comfortable way of life, country-house life at its best, unexpectedly made more easy for the time being by the surprisingly good sale of Trevanion’s last remaining unencumbered farm near Grampound. Like Restronguet, sold earlier, this had belonged to the family since Bosworth Field, and it was the property Trevanion had intended to retreat to and live in under the terms of the marriage settlement, if that had come to pass. The proceeds of the sale would not last for ever, but just in time it had taken the most pressing creditors off their backs. Sufficient unto the day . . .

  After Valentine’s defection Cuby had accepted the fact that she would not marry now – at least for some considerable time. There was no suitable man, young or otherwise, on the horizon. About a month ago her brother had brought up the name of a rich lawyer from Torbay who had recently lost his wife and might be lacking in companionship; but Cuby had not encouraged the idea that he should be invited to spend a week at Caerhays. John had not pressed. He was very fond of his younger sister and liked to have her at home. The arrangement with Warleggan was about as much as he could stomach. He had been driven into it; but now that it had fallen through he did not feel he could harry her into some new match purely for the money that match would bring. The disappointment at Valentine’s defection was at first profound: disappointment and panic, for he knew how his creditors would pounce; but the sale of the farm had removed the axe from his neck. So, making a virtue of necessity, he had expressed his own relief that he would now never be related by marriage to Smelter George.

  Cuby lived from day to day and enjoyed each one as it passed. Tomorrow there would be hunting again . . .

  Sometimes she thought she would perhaps never marry now. She had never of course loved Valentine, and she knew she had been wrong – flirtatious and silly – to encourage Jeremy as much as she had. For she knew she had never really loved him either. In a perverse way she had enjoyed his attentions, been flattered by his ardour. Conceit had been at the bottom of it, she realized with self-critical contempt, not really attraction. She blamed herself and was glad that it was over.

  She looked after John’s two little sons, worked samplers with her mother or with Clemency, superintended plantings in the gardens, watching the new shrubs growing up under the protection of the tall trees, the brilliant cold sea between the low black rocks, the gentle sloping of green and russet cliff. She had taken up the piano again. She had children here, John’s children; why did she ever need any of her own?

  She sometimes thought she would never come to care for anyone in the way that men expected her to care. Particularly in the way Jeremy had expected her to care. He had seemed to demand so much, of which she had never at any time been capable. Was she cold? Frigid, even, as they called it nowadays. Perhaps. The fact that she was attractive to men did not necessarily make them attractive to her. Her affections were of the stabler and staider kind. Love of family, love of comfort, love of home. She wanted no more.

  Her brother was in very good spirits at supper. Offering Mr Kempe snuff at dinner – a habit he never personally indulged in – John had flipped open the top of the silver snuff-box and found it entirely empty, except for eight guineas which he had put there in October and completely forgotten. It had set him in a good temper for the rest of the day.

  This evening he began to discuss London, and his younger brother Augustus’s letters, and the temptations open to a young man of good name but no property. He spoke of these temptations with disapproval, but with a hint of envy in his voice, Cuby thought, as if he would once again like to be subject to them himself. All the games of chance they played at Crockford’s for high stakes: Jeu d’Enfer, Faro, Blind Hookey, Vingt-et-un, and, of course, whist. He had personally been there when a man called Leary played whist without a break from Monday night to Wednesday morning, and then only broke off because he had to go to a funeral. It was on that occasion that the Duke of Wexford had lost £20,000.

  How difficult it was to get into the Argyle Rooms: some said you were easier in Debrett’s than past those gilded doors! How the courtesans flaunted themselves; it was known that the most exclusive of them paid £200 a season for a front box at Covent Garden, as a shop-window for their own allurements.

  Dinner at the Thatched House in St James’s Street, he remarked wistfully, smacking his lips, where Mr Willis presided in an apron stitched with gold thread! Then down to the St James’s Coffee House; as an ex-Dragoon Guardsman he was welcomed; the little Coffee House had become almost a private club for the Guards; trouble was you could not keep all the undesirables out; sometimes the fashionable bullies would force their way in; then there were fights.

  His mother said reprovingly: ‘Those days are well past, John. And I am sure Augustus will not consider such dissipations appropriate to his small salary. Indeed he knows well that we cannot ever help him even with the smallest debt.’

  ‘I remember “Soapy” Wargrave,’ said John, taking a gulp of port. ‘My senior officer at the time. Very rich man who impoverished himself at the tables. Almost broke! Then he had a great run of luck – won a fraction of his losses back. He was beginning to learn his lesson by this time, so he went immediately out and spent all his winnings on presents: jewellery and wearing apparel for his mistresses, so that, he said, “those rascals in the salon stand no chance of winning it back again!”’

  ‘I’m afraid that is not a very moral story, John,’ said Clemency, smiling.

  ‘Fraid he was not a very moral man. When we were stationed at Windsor he took up with one of the ladies in waiting to the Queen, Lady Eleanor Blair – quite a passionate affair, I believe; but when we returned to the Portman Street barracks it cooled off – at least on his side. She was very angry, very tight about it, I gather, sent him a letter demanding the return of the lock of hair she had given him. D’you know what Wargrave did – terrible thing, I think. He sent his orderly up to Windsor with a packet containing more than a dozen locks of hair of all colours – fair, dark, auburn – and invited her to pick out her own!’

  Both the girls laughed. John helped himself to more port. A thin disapproving smile crossed Mrs Bettesworth’s lips.

  She said: ‘From such elegancies as those, John, it will no doubt seem quite demeaning of me to mention mere domestic details, but I will do so before Carter returns. He must have new livery soon. As Harrison must, and Coad and the rest. The men’s coats are becoming quite threadbare.’

  ‘Let ’em make do,’ said John. ‘At least they are paid now, which is an improvement on recent times. Get Mrs Saunders to put two maids to repairing the coats.’

  ‘Coad’s does not even fit him,’ said Cuby.

  ‘Well, he is a bigger man than Trethewy. And of course younger. He is the one most likely to split the seams!’

  ‘We cannot get new coats for him without getting them for the others.’

  ‘I am not sure that I like Coad,’ said Clemency. ‘He is a little intrusive.’

  ‘He’ll settle down,’ said John, stretching his legs. ‘Not been trained properly, that’s all. What can you expect, getting a man from the Hicks.’

  Supper ended. John Trevanion retired to his study to smoke a cigar. Mrs Bettesworth took up her needlework, but after a few minutes set it down again and said:

  ‘Dear me, I do get so sleepy these days. I wake so early, that is the trouble. I wake before dawn and lie watching the day break. There is nothing I can do at that time except wait for the house to wake. But because of that – as a consequence – I am sleepy in the evening before it is proper time.’

  Clemency exchanged a private smile with Cuby: they heard this speech almost every night. Whether it was true or not they could not say, but it d
id not convince the more with repetition.

  After they had kissed their mother good night Clemency suggested a game of chess; but with the prospect of an early rise for the hunt tomorrow Cuby demurred. They played one game of backgammon, and then Clemency decided to stay down and read for a while, so Cuby kissed her and went in to put her lips to John’s brow as he sat in a wreath of idle smoke turning over a news sheet devoted to racing.

  So then to bed. She lit a candle at the lantern in the hall and went up with it, shielding the flame from draughts with her cupped hand. Past her mother’s room and into her own. She began to light the six other candles.

  She agreed with Clemency about Coad. He had come only in November, with a good reference from the Hicks of Truro, but instead of settling down in the right way, as John predicted he would, he seemed to her to be settling down in the wrong way, so that, as he became more familiar with his surroundings, he became more familiar with the people in those surroundings; or tried to. She knew that the older maids did not like him, and thought that one or two of the younger maids found him too pushing for their own good. Particularly Ellen Smith, who was a nice girl but could not resist the sight of a man. So long as it merely remained at the state of ogling and giggles no one would come to any harm. But how long would it remain so innocent? Not long, if Coad had his way.

  As she lit the sixth candle the curtain rail rattled and a soldier stepped out.

  She screamed, loud and clear.

  ‘Ssh!’ he said.

  She put her knuckles to her mouth when she saw who the soldier was.

  ‘Jeremy!’

  ‘Ssh!’ he said again.

  They stared at each other.

  She was wearing an old but attractive frock of indigo velvet, with muslin sleeves at the upper arm and tighter transparent muslin to the wrists.

  ‘Jeremy!’ she whispered again.

  ‘I have come to see you,’ he said. ‘I have come to take you away.’