For the first time since her enforced marriage to Francis, Julia had a purpose in life, a friend, and hope for the future. For the first time she felt, if not ecstatic happiness, then at least peace.
* * *
It was not to last.
The baby was born on a blustery March day when the waves dashed violently against the cliffs, the wind howled around the house, and the branches of the overhanging trees creaked threateningly.
Julia had laboured all the previous day and all night, while Mrs Durbin hovered anxiously, sponging the sweat from her face with a cloth wrung out in warm water and securing a towel to the bedhead, on which she could hang when the pains became too great to bear. The doctor was sent for; he strutted and tutted but his face betrayed the extent of his anxiety. Both Julia and the baby were weakening before his eyes; if it did not come soon he would lose them both.
Outside the bedroom door Francis paced helplessly, each and every one of Julia’s moans and cries a knife thrust in his heart. Only Selena remained unperturbed, a faint smile twisting her mouth downward as she went about her business.
At last – at last! – the doctor managed a difficult manipulation.
‘Thank God!’ he muttered, and to Mrs Durbin: ‘He’s turned at last! He’ll come now, I think.’
Mrs Durbin bent over Julia, holding her hands and encouraging her to push with her last remaining strength, and with a sudden rush the baby came into the world.
For a moment Julia lay back exhausted, feeling nothing but relief that the hours of pain were over, too weak even to raise her head to look at her baby. Then she felt the first twinge of alarm. Something was wrong. There was no joyous bustle in the room, no healthy protesting cry from her new-born baby, only an ominous silence. She struggled to find the strength to sit up.
‘What is it…?’
‘It’s all right, my lamb. Lie still now…’ Mrs Durbin was beside her in an instant, easing her back against the pillows, blocking her view of the room, but not before she had caught a glimpse of her poor child, bloodstained and blue, in the arms of the doctor.
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ she sobbed. ‘Oh – he can’t be dead! He can’t be!’
‘Oh, hush, my lamb, hush!’ Mrs Durbin’s rosy apple face was crumpled with distress. ‘Maybe it’s for the best…’
‘No… No!’ Julia scarcely heard her, let alone understood. She beat weakly at Mrs Durbin with her hands, desperate only to get to her child. ‘Let me… please! Let me!’
And then at last the baby cried, a thin protesting wail that was music to Julia’s ears.
‘Oh, thank God! Thank God!’ she whispered.
The doctor’s broad shirt-sleeved back was towards her as he worked on the baby but when she glanced at Mrs Durbin Julia was puzzled not to see her own joy and relief reflected in the older woman’s face. Mrs Durbin still looked as if she was about to burst into tears.
The baby wailed again and Julia felt a rush of impatience.
‘Let me have him! Oh, please let me have him!’
Mrs Durbin’s lip wobbled and the tears began to run down her crumpled apple cheeks. ‘Oh my lamb, it’s best you don’t see him…’ She looked imploringly towards the doctor.
He lay the infant in the crib and crossed to the bed. His face was grave, he held his bloodstained hands, as yet unwashed, stiffly in front of him.
‘There’s no easy way to say this, Mrs Trevelyan. Your baby is malformed. It’s a miracle he’s alive now, all things considered, but I don’t think he will live long. And that you must look on as a blessing.’
She stared at him uncomprehending, yet feeling the panic, the horror, the grief, all gathering within her in a great flood tide. ‘But he’s alive! I want him!’
‘He’s not a pretty sight, my lamb.’ Mrs Durbin’s voice was full of tears.
And: ‘I don’t care!’ Julia cried. ‘I don’t care what he looks like! He’s my baby! He needs me! Bring him to me! Bring him to me now!’ They exchanged a glance, the doctor and Mrs Durbin, as if to share the responsibility of deciding what was for the best. Then the doctor nodded.
‘Very well, Mrs Trevelyan, if that is what you want. But please prepare yourself…’
Mrs Durbin wiped her eyes on her sleeve, squeezed Julia’s hand, and crossed to the crib. She wrapped the baby gently in a linen sheet and brought him to the bed. Julia raised herself painfully and held out her arms.
He was tiny – so tiny. How could such a scrap have caused her so much pain? She gazed with love and awe at the little screwed-up face peeping out from the swaddling sheet, still blue-tinged, with a deep indentation around the forehead, but perfect. Button nose, little pursed-up mouth, long eyelashes lying in a dark sweep across his cheek.
‘There’s nothing wrong with him!’ she cried indignantly.
Then she pulled aside the enfolding sheet and, with a rush of utter, paralysing horror, knew what they had meant.
* * *
The baby lived only a few hours.
Julia was distraught. She lay with her face turned to the wall, too weak and wretched even to cry, while her aching body trembled ceaselessly with bouts of dry sobs. Though she had not eaten for two days she refused all food. It was all Mrs Durbin could do to get her to take sips of posset.
Francis, his face grey and heavy with distress, came to sit with her, and when he took her hand between his she did not even trouble to pull it away. For the moment she felt no distaste for his touch; it was almost as if he were not there at all. Nothing was real but her grief for her poor malformed baby. And the guilt that washed over her in waves.
It was her fault – hers alone. She must have damaged the child with her efforts to be rid of it. And she could tell no one. It was a burden she must bear alone.
Julia thought she would die of remorse and hoped that it would be so. To live with this weight on her heart was truly unbearable.
Eight
I did not, I must confess, feel at all well that morning after I witnessed Francis’s smuggling activities. In fact, I felt decidedly peculiar. My mouth was furred, my head throbbed dully and my eyes burned. And the memory of what I had seen weighed heavily upon me too. But the Trevelyans were not paying me to take to my bed sick, and I was anxious to be with Charlotte again and continue building the bridges I had begun yesterday.
As I went down the stairs I noticed that the door on the other side of the hall – the door from which Mrs Durbin had emerged yesterday – stood slightly ajar and I wondered where it led. To the Durbins’ quarters, perhaps? But I rather thought their rooms were at the rear of the house, reached by the back stairs from the kitchen.
Charlotte and Selena were already at breakfast and I was gratified when Charlotte greeted me with a shy smile. She was looking very pretty this morning in a gown of sprigged muslin and there were ribbons in her hair. I smiled back at her, remembering the days when I had been young enough for my hair to flow loose in a shining chestnut curtain over my shoulders; remembered too when Mama Mary had helped me to put it up for the first time on my sixteenth birthday, and how grown-up it had made me look. Would I be here to help Charlotte put her hair up for the first time? It was as yet a long time in the future, of course, but I hoped with all my heart that it would be so.
‘Charity. You slept well?’ Selena enquired, pouring me coffee.
‘Like a log,’ I agreed.
‘You certainly look a little bleary still,’ she commented. ‘You didn’t wake at all?’ Her eyes on my face were narrowed, watchful, and I realised she was trying to ascertain if I had heard anything of the night’s activities.
‘I scarcely even remember my head touching the pillow,’ I said.
Selena relaxed visibly and her lips turned down into that odd smile of hers.
‘It’s the sea air, I expect. Bracing and soporific, especially when you are not used to it. That and the wine at dinner. Put together they no doubt acted like a drug. Oh – do help yourself to eggs. They are in the chafing dish.’
&
nbsp; I froze momentarily as something clicked into place in my aching head, something so shocking I could scarcely believe I was even thinking it.
I moved automatically to the sideboard but my mind was not on what I was doing. I could hear nothing but what Selena had said about how heavily I had slept.
A drug. It described all too well the way I had felt. Heavy-eyed, heavy-limbed, drymouthed, uncoordinated. Why, hadn’t I even compared it myself to the way I had felt when I had been given laudanum for a toothache as a child?
Could it be that either Francis or Selena had slipped something into my wine last night to make me sleep heavily so that I would not hear the activity beneath my window?
My hand trembled a little as I lifted the lid of the chafing dish. I felt very vulnerable suddenly. If they had drugged me so easily once, they could do it again and again. It was a monstrously disturbing thought.
‘What plans have you for Charlotte today?’ Selena asked when I was seated at the table.
I looked across at the fresh innocent young face and felt determination harden within me. I would not let these people and their wicked scheming deter me.
‘I think Charlotte and I will spend today getting to know one another better,’ I said, smiling at her. ‘Then the lessons will come easier, won’t they, Charlotte?’
She nodded, looking relieved. Lessons were something she was a little apprehensive about, I guessed.
We finished our breakfast and when we left the dining room Francis had still not put in an appearance. Unsurprising, really, I supposed, considering that he must have been up for much of the night.
‘Shall we go for a little walk, Charlotte?’ I suggested.
‘Is Tom coming?’ she asked, her face brightening.
‘Oh, I don’t expect so,’ I said, thinking that, like Francis, Tom would be catching up on some much-needed sleep – and thinking too that it really was just as well.
Even if he had not been a smuggler, this really was not the time for the sort of distraction that Tom offered. And if I were to form some sort of bond with Charlotte, it would be best done by spending time alone together, not with the man who seemed to have the power to excite both of us!
* * *
That day and the days that followed, were, I think, the strangest, the most disturbing and at the same time the most exciting I had ever lived through. My mind was in a constant whirl, my emotions so close to the surface that it was all I could do to keep them hidden. My once-simple life had been turned topsy-turvy and nothing would ever be the same again.
For the most part my days were spent with Charlotte, and slowly but surely the understanding I so longed for began to develop between us. As she became more used to me her first reserve began to fall away and I was able to glimpse the impishness Mrs Durbin had spoken of and the bubbling enthusiasm I had witnessed that first day when she had greeted Tom with such excitement.
She was, I discovered, a child who could be as exasperating as she was charming. Sometimes she was a wily little coquette with an instinctive knowledge of how to get her own way – especially with her father; sometimes as much a tomboy as I had been, with no care for scraped knees and grass-stained skirts. Sometimes I took her down to the beach, where she took off her shoes and stockings and waded in rock pools to find limpets and interesting strings of seaweed; sometimes we sat in the gardens, making daisy chains and trying to capture fluffy dandelion seeds that floated by and which Charlotte insisted were fairies.
‘If you catch one you can make a wish!’ she told me, and promptly managed to trap one between her cupped hands. Then she sat holding it in solemn silence for a long moment, lips pursed in concentration, eyes squeezed shut.
‘What did you wish for?’ I asked when she opened her eyes again.
‘Oh, I can’t tell you that! If you tell, your wish won’t come true!’ she admonished me.
I laughed. ‘You wished for a day without a single lesson tomorrow,’ I challenged her.
‘Not exactly. Lessons with you are not so bad,’ she conceded. ‘No, I wished for something very special.’
No amount of questioning from me would persuade her to tell, but next morning when Tom turned up unexpectedly and she threw me a smug look whilst hanging on to his arm I thought that I could hazard a guess as to what her wish had been and wondered if perhaps there might be something in the silly superstition after all!
‘Tom, Tom – are you going to take us to Galidor like you promised?’ she begged, eyes shining.
‘No – I’ve come to talk to your father. Just tedious old business.’
‘But afterwards,’ she pressed him. ‘After you’ve talked to Papa – what about then?’ She looked at me, enlisting my support. ‘You’d like to go to Galidor again, wouldn’t you, Charity?’
I felt the colour begin to rise in my cheeks. All very well to have told myself Tom was not the sort of man I wanted to become involved with – the moment I had set eyes on him again my heart had begun to beat a little too fast and my stomach tied itself in knots.
‘I’m sure Tom is far too busy to spend time with us,’ I said coolly.
‘Charity is quite right.’ Tom’s eyes found mine over the top of her head and I felt my cheeks grow hot. ‘I don’t have time to take you all the way to Galidor today and in any case it’s too far for you, and too steep for your little legs.’
‘Oh!’ Her face fell. ‘You promised!’
‘I did nothing of the sort,’ he replied, grinning. ‘But if I finish talking to your father in time we’ll go for a little walk in the other direction – to Dead Man’s Cove. How would that be?’
‘Oh, yes! Yes! Say you’ll be finished in time! Please, Tom! He must, mustn’t he, Charity?’
‘I’m saying nothing about it,’ I said firmly. ‘It’s very bad of you to bother Tom so.’
‘It’s no bother, sweeting. The pleasure is all mine.’ Again his eyes sought mine, again something sharp and sweet twisted deep within me and I turned away in case it showed on my face and gave me away.
Tom was finished in time and I could think of no good reason to refuse to accompany him and Charlotte on the outing. It was better to go along with them and remain cool and collected, as if it really made no difference to me one way or the other, I decided.
The walk to Dead Man’s Cove, as Tom had called it, was less onerous than the one to Galidor; there were no bits of cliff path that required him to give me his hand to assist me and, whilst I was grateful for that, I was also treacherously disappointed. In any case, for the most part Charlotte was claiming his attention and that was as it should be.
‘Why is it called Dead Man’s Cove?’ she asked curiously as we stood on the path high above the sparkling blue water and the rocks with the sea spray breaking over them in frothy curls.
‘Because a ship ran aground here once and was lost,’ he told her. ‘Every soul on board was drowned before help could reach them.’
‘Oh!’ She stared intently down. Then, after a moment, she asked: ‘Does that mean there are ghosts here?’
Tom smiled. ‘I shouldn’t think so. I’m not sure I believe in ghosts anyway, Charlotte. I’ve certainly never seen one. Have you, Charity?’
‘No.’ I shook my head firmly. ‘I’ve never seen a ghost either.’
‘I have!’ Charlotte said importantly. ‘We have a ghost at Morwennan House.’
‘I don’t think so, Charlotte,’ Tom said gently.
‘We have! I’ve seen it!’ she protested indignantly.
Tom decided to indulge her. ‘So when have you seen it? And where?’
‘When I’ve been in the garden playing. I’ve seen it at the attic window.’
She said it with enormous conviction and though the corners of Tom’s mouth twitched he managed to restrain himself from laughing.
‘Ghosts only walk at night, Charlotte. Not in broad daylight. What you saw was sun and shadow on the window pane.’
‘It was a ghost! Truly it was! It was watching me!’
‘Very well, have it your way. It was a very unusual ghost.’ Tom’s mouth quirked again with amusement. ‘Now, do you want to go down to Dead Man’s Cove or not? Because if we don’t make haste there won’t be time.’
‘Yes, I want to go down,’ Charlotte said promptly and the talk of ghosts was forgotten.
By the time the excursion was over and we were back at Morwennan I had forgotten my resolve to be cool with Tom too. His easy company made it impossible to remain aloof for long and it was only when he left us at the cliff gate and Charlotte asked him eagerly: ‘When will you be coming again, Tom?’ and I found myself inwardly echoing the sentiment that I remembered and caught myself up sharply.
‘You really must stop plaguing Tom,’ I reprimanded her. ‘If you don’t you can be sure he’ll tire of you and not come at all.’
‘Oh!’ Her small face fell.
‘How could I tire of such enjoyable company, imp?’ he teased her, but it was my eyes he was teasing. ‘I’ll come again soon, I promise.’
And in spite of all my good intentions I felt my treacherous heart leap. Whatever he might be, it was not going to be easy to resist Tom.
* * *
That afternoon, like the others, Charlotte and I spent on her lessons. To my relief Francis was busy in his study – that dark little room in the shadow of the trees that I so disliked – and we worked in the sunny parlour.
Though she had received little formal education she was quick to learn, so that teaching her was quite a pleasure and not the onerous task I had expected. I set her some simple sums, and when they were completed we did some reading. We then played a game I had devised to help her with her spelling, which was, I had discovered, very weak. I would come up with a word and she had to think of others which rhymed but were spelled differently, each one counting as a point. Ten points were worth a sweetmeat or an apple.
Morwennan House Page 11