A Cornish Girl

by Gloria Cook

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Gloria Cook

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Extract from A Home for Alice

  Copyright

  About the Book

  In the Cornish mining village of Meryen, a secret never stays a secret for very long …

  No one knows this more than Tara Nankervis. Beautiful yet pained, she is forced to share a devastating secret with her much older and destructive husband Joshua.

  Out of options, she plans to leave once and for all, taking her daughter Rosa Grace with her. But will she have the courage to leave everything behind, or is home truly where the heart is?

  About the Author

  Gloria Cook is the author of well-loved Cornish novels, including the Pengarron and Harvey family and Meryen sagas. She is Cornish born and bred, and lives in Truro.

  Also by Gloria Cook:

  The Carpenter’s Daughter

  One

  Two figures were hunched over the stone fireplace in the little rough dwelling on the downs. An odd pairing, as always they were quiet, keeping to their own thoughts. Sarah Kivell, just twenty-one, had been a widow for the last four years, and for most of that time she had lodged with an elderly spinster, Tabbie Sawle, the herbwife of the village. If not for Tabbie, Sarah would be homeless. It was of no concern to her that Sarah had lived with the much older Titus Kivell, the criminal head of a once disorderly clan, before their disastrous marriage. She knew all about Sarah, but she never offered information about her past and Sarah asked her no questions.

  It suited Sarah to live in relative isolation. They could only be reached from Meryen by a series of narrow tracks hacked through straggly banks of gorse, bramble and scrubby willow, off a slightly wider thoroughfare that the villagers called Tabbie’s Lane. A lane it wasn’t, its length being no more than a thousand yards and wouldn’t accommodate even a small dog cart. The abode – it could hardly be termed a house – was built against a formation of high granite, which made up the back wall and incorporated the fireplace, set in a low shelf of rock. Against the wall, hunks and thereafter fist-sized stones made up the tapering chimney piece. The carefully chosen slabs and boulders of the other three walls made the place like a fortress. The roof, of timber and sheets of corrugated iron, slanted gently down from the back wall and was waterproofed by pitch. The door was formed from spliced young tree trunks, and barred inside with metal of an arm’s breadth threaded through huge iron staples. The floor was stamped earth but covered from end to end by layers of rush mats and a once fine piece of carpet. The two square apertures that served as windows had metal gratings and were covered against the cold by wooden shutters. In all, it was a dark and airless place; to many it would seem claustrophobic, but it was furnished with the gathered curiosities of Tabbie’s lifetime and was not without embellishment and comfort, and here, among the dark-blue and claret drapes and cushions, the velvets and damasks that sparkled with gold thread, all booty from shipwrecks, Sarah was pleased to be shut off from the world she wanted no part of.

  It was rare to be disturbed in Tabbie’s Shack, and usually only then by some desperate soul seeking, as a last resort, advantage of the old woman’s remedies or fortune-telling abilities. Tabbie was considered by the uncharitable to be a witch. The superstitious feared she could read minds, look into souls and successfully ill-wish anyone she took against. Another reason for the solitude was that Tabbie was an alarming sight. It was known she had been strong in her youth – it was she who had single-handedly built her home and brought its trappings home on a hand barrow – but her height was now bent with age and her joints contorted by arthritis. Her wrinkled flesh, sallow from decades of peat and furze smoke, appeared desiccated, and flakes of skin were always scattered about her shoulders. Her shoulders had fashioned themselves into a hump and her head flopped down to her hollow chest. Her darting eyes, however, remained sharp and clear and her hearing had not waned; it was rumoured fearfully that she could hear a whisper from any distance. No one could recall exactly when she had set up her home, supposedly having done so with the help of demons, and her age was speculated as being between eighty and over a century. Always in black, with her bonnet ribbons flapping loose, Tabbie was not unlike some monstrous rook chewing on two fat dangling worms. A gruesome-looking companion, but she was a woman whose heart was big enough to take in a ‘fallen woman’. Sarah was shunned by most, and the few who had taken pity on her at her husband’s death were disappointed over her refusal to denounce Titus Kivell despite his evil deeds.

  Sarah accepted the contempt, it did not hurt her. Titus’s brutality and the terrible things he had done to her, and the fact he had tried to murder his grown-up son, had robbed her of all need to fit in. She had been left without hope. She existed, that was all, and cared not if that existence came to an end at any moment. She felt tainted and beyond redemption, for the dreadful thing was she had loved Titus deeply and part of her still did and grieved for him. She wasn’t fit to be near good and ordinary folk. Isolation she prized and that was what she got, even at work as a bal-maiden at the Carn Croft copper mine. Few people spoke to her and she never made an opening comment, and with her bowed and shut-off manner she was as she intended to be, easy to overlook. There was one thing for which she drew admiration, and jealousy, the remarkable, raven-haired beauty that had led to her downfall, made all the more appealing to men by her unreachable aloofness and the echoes of her sorrow.

  When the thick walls of the stuffy shack were heated by the fire the atmosphere could become overbearing. Her throat parchment dry, Sarah rose from the high tapestry stool and went to the pearlware harvest jug on the bench table. She sipped the water, which she collected every day from a former wine cask, fed by a chute underneath a little trickling waterfall off nearby rocks. She moved the chute away from the cask each night so there would be no overflow.

  ‘Would you like a drink of water, Tabbie? Or I could make you some cocoa. Then I think I’ll slip outside for a breath of air. It’s stopped raining and the wind has dropped at last.’ The stormy weather of the last two days had meant no surface work on the ore-dressing floors at the mine. It meant added hardship, especially for families, for if there was no work there were no wages. ‘I know it’s bitter cold but I’ll be sure to wrap up well.’ It was nice that Tabbie tended to mother her, and tried to convince her she was as worthy as anyone else; the latter fell on deaf ears. Sarah had nursed her own brain-damaged mother until her death; the rest of her family, an aunt and a younger brother and sister, had deserted her after Titus’s death, moving three miles away to Redruth with the help of money offered by her rich mother-in-law, Tempest Kivell. Sarah had refused the same proposal to make a fresh start. She’d rather starve than take charity off a Kivell, even though Tempest maintained the Kivells held a lifelong responsibility to her.

  Tabbie did not reply. Sarah had not looked at her for some time and did so now. Chills trailed up her spine. Tabbie was not apt to answer quickly but she had not heard Sarah at all. Her head was thrown back as far as it would go, and her gaze,
usually shrewd and watchful, was on nothing. She was in a trance and seemed to be in the grip of some awful vision. From the contortion of her hawkish features it was likely a calamitous premonition for someone. Sarah had witnessed this before. Tabbie would never recount what she saw, offering only a vague or enigmatic statement. One time it had been, ‘Pestilence is abroad. A just punishment, some would say.’ Sarah had assumed there would be an outbreak of typhoid or cholera, or animal death – perhaps a dishonest farmer and his family the victims. However, forty-eight hours later talk had spread that Squire Nankervis, who had a passion for exotic plants, spending hundreds of pounds on new discoveries from overseas, had mysteriously lost all the contents of his hothouses and many a fine specimen in his gardens. Joshua Nankervis did little for the villagers, leaving charitable works to his young wife, Tara, with whom Sarah had once been loosely acquainted, but he was not a wicked man. The punishment Tabbie had predicted must have referred to the estate’s head gardener, the strange and daunting Laketon Kivell.

  Tabbie’s amber eyes glittered as if in anguish. She was surely seeing something dreadful. Please don’t let it be a disaster at the mine. Sarah never doubted Tabbie’s powers. Could it be that she was seeing her own death? She had remarked she didn’t fear it, but if she was now being faced by a terrible end …

  Minutes dragged by like hours. Sarah returned to the stool and watched anxiously. At last Tabbie emitted a tremendous sigh and her head fell forward and flopped down. She seemed to have trouble wresting herself to full consciousness.

  Sarah was about to fetch some water when the old woman turned her beady eyes on her. Her expression was often fathomless but Sarah had never seen her intense and harrowed like this.

  Tabbie shuddered, as if she couldn’t shake off the horrors of what she’d just seen.

  ‘You must heed me well, Sarah, for I need to prepare you for something,’ she delivered in her reverberating husky tones, pointing a tremulous gnarled finger. ‘I can tell you were mindful of me being here only in body this past hour. I was out on the downs, with all my limbs working as in my prime. The winds were howling all around me. It was as dark as pitch and the boulders were throwing long, long shadows all around. I knew there was all manner of terrifying things in those shadows and that if I stepped into them I’d never come out alive but be doomed to stay there a prisoner in torment forever.’

  Tabbie’s eyes grew wide and potent. Sarah, mesmerized, drew in a sharp breath. Tabbie never went in for melodrama, what she had to say she said. She reached for Sarah’s hand. With apprehension, Sarah placed her fingers in the bony paw. She was about to be prepared for whatever the fearsome vision represented, perhaps Tabbie’s imminent death. Pray God, not that, she didn’t want to be all alone in the world.

  Tabbie swallowed with difficulty. ‘Then he appeared. The devil, or as good as. You knew him, Sarah.’

  Fear took its debilitating hold on Sarah. The vision concerned her, and this time Tabbie was going to reveal the exact details. Without a shadow of doubt, she knew her beleaguered life was about to be plunged again into adversity. ‘W-who was it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it was your husband, my dear. Titus Kivell. He’s coming back and he’s coming after you, Sarah. He means you grievous harm again.’

  Sarah’s stomach turned to water and for a moment the room spun crazily. She snatched at her breath to keep a grip. Her mixed feelings for Titus whirled in an agonizing circle of love, hurt, repulsion and fear. She’d give anything to see him again, even for a second, but also she wanted to throw off the smallest memory of him forever.

  ‘Tabbie, that can’t be,’ she got out through numb lips. ‘Titus is dead. I watched him die of heart failure with my own eyes, me and many others, both Kivells and people from the village.’

  ‘He’s dead to this world, I grant you, Sarah. But you forget he was buried at Burnt Oak and that means in unhallowed ground. Now he’s back from hell and set on revenge. Worse still, he’s not the Titus we knew at his end. The devil’s taken him back to his prime. He’s young and strong again. He stared at me with burning hatred and I felt as if he had scorched my very soul. He stared right into me and I was able to read his thoughts, and then he tossed that fearsome dark head of his away from me as if I was some loathsome worm. There’s great peril ahead of you, my dear, you and others in Meryen, including Titus’s mother. Everybody hated Titus, but he hated everyone with more than hate itself. He’s back for revenge on those who watched him die. I know the squire wasn’t there but I sense danger for him too.’

  Sarah was taken back to the worse day of her life, that fateful day at Burnt Oak, the community of the Kivells, where Titus had died. Estranged from Titus then, following his violence over his fury that she was not pregnant, as she’d believed on their marriage, she had returned to ask him to take her back, to give her the chance to love and serve him. She had evoked his further rage; she was barren, the result suffered by a few ill-fated women when exposed for years to certain minerals in mine ore, but Titus, already father of a large brood, had wanted more children. A celebration had been underway in Tempest Kivell’s house, of the betrothal of Titus’s only legitimate son, Sol, and Sarah’s childhood friend, Amy Lewarne. Jealous of his son’s joy, bitter that Tempest had always favoured Sol over him, and that she had never loved him because he was the result of rape, Titus had been brooding and getting drunk. After beating Sarah he had sworn he’d kill her and then violate her younger sister, Tamsyn, just a child. Tempest’s timely intervention had saved Sarah’s life, but Titus had grabbed her gun and pushed through the party and attempted to shoot Sol. Believing his mother, who also had ‘the sight’, had cursed him, he had dropped the gun and fallen down, stricken. He’d begged for help but no one had gone to him, not even Sarah after his threats against Tamsyn. If Titus really could somehow hurt anyone from beyond the grave there was no doubt great tribulation was ahead. At least he couldn’t touch Sol and Amy. They had left Meryen with their young children, and Amy’s family, to explore the world.

  Although it was ridiculous to be thinking this way, Sarah clutched at one hope. ‘If Titus’s spirit really does roam and is intent on evil, can’t Tempest keep him in line? He greatly feared her powers. The last place I want to go is to Burnt Oak, but I should go there, Tabbie, and tell Tempest what you’ve seen.’

  ‘No!’ As if the energy of her past years had returned, Tabbie leaned forward and bracketed Sarah’s face with her knuckly hands. ‘Tempest will not be able to prevail against him. No one can. I think it’s very likely she’s had the same vision anyway. Sarah, you are in mortal danger, you must believe me. You must never drop your guard. You have an enemy who abounds with cunning and burns to make you pay the cruellest cost. I will give you a talisman and you must never go forth without it about your neck, but you will need every ounce of your strength, every scrap of common sense and exhortations to the Almighty to withstand the terrible force that is about to come upon you.’

  On her straw mattress that night, in a partitioned corner of the shack’s single room, Sarah touched the topaz and silver pendant resting on her chest. It was one of the fascinating treasures Tabbie had procured, most probably from a shipwreck. Could this splendid piece ward off the evil Tabbie swore was relentlessly heading her way? If Titus was about to haunt her, and others, why wait until four years had slipped by? If she had ventured outside today would she have encountered his spirit? Could his spirit not appear to her within these walls? A stab of fear was eased away by the reassurance that nothing bad could happen in here. Tabbie had no doubt placed a blessing or a spell on the threshold.

  Sleep evaded her, her mind drifted and laboured. One moment she thought the premonition too fanciful – after all, Titus couldn’t really come back from the dead. The next she was beset by anguish and dread, and fear for the others under threat. People might despise her and look down on her, but she wished no one any harm, certainly not her former mother-in-law, Tempest Kivell, who had always been good to her. And still she wre
stled with her confused feelings for Titus and how she would actually feel if she ever really did see him again.

  Two

  Upstairs in the drawing room of Poltraze, Tara Nankervis glanced at the two men in her life and stifled a weary sigh. Both were distracted, neither wanting to be here with her. Joshua, her husband, the squire of Meryen, who rarely joined her at all, was no doubt fretting about either his withered plants or his lover, the thoroughly obnoxious and somewhat frightening Laketon Kivell. Five years ago, he had installed the former master carpenter, also a connoisseur of botany, as his head gardener, but their feelings had died for each other, and Tara was aware of the constant friction that now existed between them. Joshua’s crippling blow had seen the end of his normally placid temperament. He met everything with extreme irritation and bawled at the servants unfairly. He was barely civil to Tara. He was only taking tea with her and his brother Michael to retain the illusion to the servants that he had a traditional marriage.

  The widowed Michael was Tara’s lover and the father of her four-year-old daughter, Rosa Grace, but most likely his thoughts were centred on his burning interest: after painstakingly sifting through old papers and documents to outline the Nankervis history he was recording it in volumes, monastery style. He spent hours buried in the library here rather than at home in Wellspring House, the former dower house, in the grounds, and nowadays less time with Tara. She knew he wasn’t bored with her but he had outgrown their affair. She had a suspicion he was turning elsewhere for lovemaking, for he sought her bed less and less. She had long grown bored with the arrangement but had kept it on, for Michael’s arms were the only ones to hold her. She hated it when the three of them were together; until Joshua’s calamity, with the unspoken agreement that none mentioned the others’ infidelity, they had existed amiably enough.

  Tara had served afternoon tea and the servants had cleared the room, warily skirting around their master, who had complained the marble cake was stale and the servants clumsy. Now what? Embroidery or lacework or a book? There was nothing else to do. The men were not intent on conversation and the harsh weather and gathering darkness meant a stroll outside was inadvisable. Joshua did not like her viewing his withered trophies, anyway. And the dark heaps of destroyed foliage outside were like mocking tombs. She longed to go far away and to be in some distracting company.