Crossed Bones

by Jane Johnson

  There was nothing she could say to that; so wisely she said nothing, dropping her regard just in time to catch Robert nudging a discarded hat to conceal an object that shone silver against the dark and pitted oak of the table.

  When she lifted her puzzled gaze to his face, Robert gave her a fiercely eloquent look. Go away, the blue eyes blazed at her. For a moment she stood her ground; then, ‘Excuse me, sir,’ she muttered and fled the room.

  She felt Jack Kellynch’s eyes on her back and worse, all the way up the stairs.

  ‘Now, then, Catherine,’ Margaret Harris said as firmly as she could, ‘my husband tells me you were indecorous this morning, appearing in full view of his companions in little more than a chemise. He has asked me to have a word with you: we want no scandal here at Kenegie; and I promised your mother that I would be as a mother to you in her stead.’

  Cat’s head came up at the mention of her mother. Her father, John, a militiaman for Sir Arthur in the garrison on St Michael’s Mount, had been taken by the plague that had swept through the region two years previously, leaving Jane Tregenna and her daughter without income. It was generally whispered that Mistress Tregenna had been cursed by piskies, for since the birth of Catherine there had been no other children; Cat herself suspected there had been little love lost between her parents. Margaret Harris had offered them both positions at the house, but Jane Tregenna regarded herself as far too much a lady now to be a servant again. Instead she had taken herself off to her brother Edward’s well-appointed home in Penzance, leaving Catherine to be taken under the Mistress of Kenegie’s wing, whereby she was generously offered not only the income of a bodyservant, but more education and encouragement than any girl of her upbringing had ever been bred for. Cat knew her mother harboured wild ambitions for her; she probably had her eye on one of the Harris boys. If she lost her position at the manor, she knew she would never hear the last of Jane Tregenna’s bitter tongue.

  ‘My pardon, my lady. I had not meant to give offence. Matty… I heard a disturbance below and was concerned that there might be intruders.’

  ‘Going half naked downstairs to investigate does not seem to me the wisest course of action. Had there been ruffians down there, you would have endangered yourself and placed me, as your guardian, in a most difficult position. Do you understand that?’

  Cat nodded slowly. ‘But, my lady, I was not “half naked”; I held a shawl over my shift to guard my modesty, I swear.’

  The Mistress of Kenegie smiled. ‘And would that have been your best shawl, Catherine, bearing the crewel roses?’

  Cat had the grace to blush. ‘It was.’

  Margaret Harris appraised the girl silently. Cat was nineteen now and comely, even though her hair was that unfortunate golden-red. Her mother, Jane Tregenna, was small and dark, worn out by life’s disappointments; her dead husband had been a crabbed, brown-haired man with the small, close features of the Lizard villages (where it was well known they had gone on all fours till the crew of a foreign vessel wrecked on the coast had settled among them and improved their stature and physical development). An unlikely marriage that had been, and one that hinted at compromises made under pressure: Jane was a Coode, a proper old Cornish family: reputable, deep rooted, well respected. The Tregennas were farmers from Veryan and Tregeare; John had been a third son without even a land-living to fall back on, which was why he had signed himself up as a militiaman. Not the best prospect for a pretty girl from a decent family; and certainly there was no clue in that parentage to the provenance of Catherine’s fox-red hair and long, straight limbs. Nineteen was a dangerous age: the girl herself should be married, and soon. She had seen how her sons William and Thomas watched Catherine as she moved around the house.

  ‘You saw your cousin this morning?’

  Cat frowned. ‘Yes, my lady.’

  Margaret Harris smoothed her skirt. ‘He is a good worker, Robert. Sir Arthur has often said as much. It would not surprise me if he were to offer him the position of steward when George Parsons retires.’ She watched the girl’s face for a reaction. ‘Of course, he would be more likely to progress thus were he settled, with a family,’ she pressed.

  ‘Oh, Robert has a great many family hereabouts,’ Cat said airily. ‘There are Bolithos and Johns in every hamlet and farmstead from Gulval and Badger’s Cross to Alverton and Paul. He’ll never leave the area: he has not that type of ambition.’

  ‘That’s not quite what I meant,’ the lady said quietly. ‘He is a gentle and an able young man: not to put too fine a point on it, quite a catch for a country lass.’ She fixed Cat with her lucent grey eyes until her meaning came clear.

  ‘Oh.’ Cat stared at the patterned rug that stretched between them: the Turkey rug, her mistress called it. It was brightly woven, with gorgeously dyed motifs in cream and crimson and umber, and it glowed like a living thing among the dull, earth hues of the rest of the room: the wood-panelled walls, the granite floor, the heavy, dark walnut and mahogany furniture. She would give her eye-teeth for wool like that to work with. How beautiful the tapestries and embroideries of the Orient must be; how she would love to see them, but it was likely she would never be closer to such work than she was at this very moment, standing on the Turkey rug. She raised her head and looked the other woman steadily in the eye. ‘My cousin is a good man, and I am as fond of him as if he were my brother,’ she said firmly.

  Lady Harris decided that it was not yet the right moment to pursue the subject; but she was determined that before the summer was out, Catherine Tregenna would be Catherine Bolitho.

  Robert came to find her later that day. ‘Will you take a walk with me, Cat?’ he asked.

  It was four in the afternoon; Lady Harris had taken her daughters Margaret and Alice over to Trevaylor to visit the Reverend and Mrs Veale. Smiling, she had made it clear to her servant that she would have no specific duties for her to perform until they returned after dinner that evening.

  Cat shaded her eyes, looking past him across the knot garden and the courtyard towards the open country beyond. Sun spangled the waters of the distant bay and made a fairytale castle of the Mount. High up above the hills, towards Lescudjack, a kestrel hovered, drifting lazily on a current of warm air in pursuit of rabbit or vole. Mare’s tails were strewn across the summer sky: the weather boded fair for another day, and a soft breeze shimmered in the bright leaves of the sycamores and oaks that clothed Rosemorran’s valley. She could find no reason to refuse his offer; nor did she wish to, in truth: she found the house stifling on these hot summer days, and Robert was handsome company: she had no wish to wed him, but it did her pride no harm to be seen walking out with him. Besides, she was keen to discover exactly what it was that had been discussed in so secretive a fashion in the parlour that morning.

  She transferred her gaze to her cousin. Robert was watching her much as the kestrel had been watching for its rabbit: hungrily, his keen blue eyes searching her face for every reaction. ‘Thank you, Robert,’ she said at last, drawing out the moment. ‘That would be most kind. Pray wait for me here while I change my shoes.’

  There was a small window halfway up the main staircase. Cat glanced out of it as she passed only to see her cousin twisting his hat in his big hands, as if he were wringing a chicken’s neck. He jammed it on his head, took it off, stuck it in his pocket, then wiped his forehead with a large coloured kerchief.

  Nervous, she thought, satisfied. And well he might be, for she would never say him yea.

  In her quarters, she took her time, changing out of her working dress into a pretty, full-skirted petticoat of white cotton decorated with Flemish lace. She had bought it at Penzance market with the little she had left after handing the best part of her wages to her mother. Around an overdress of blue wool, laced up the front, with a wide white linen collar, she wrapped the crewel-work shawl, with its pretty tracery of twining flowers and leaves. It was a pity to spoil the delicate effect of these pastel shades with her heavy leather boots, but even Cat’s vanit
y could not countenance spoiling her only pair of satin slippers on a country walk. Sighing, she laced the boots tightly and dabbed a little rose-water carefully on her neck and bosom, where the sun on her skin would surely waft it to poor Rob’s nose.

  He was pacing the cobbles when at last she appeared, but he had the wit not to chide her for being tardy. More sensibly, he said, ‘You look most becoming, Cat.’

  He won a smile for that, but she still corrected him with ‘Catherine’.

  His face fell: she could almost feel the change in his expression as a tangible thing between her shoulder blades as she walked past him towards the lane that ran by the farm cottages.

  ‘Let’s go up to Castle an Dinas,’ she called back to him. ‘I want to blow the cobwebs out of my head.’

  ‘Are you sure? It’s a long way.’

  ‘I do have two legs, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ she snapped back. She quickened her pace, elbows pumping.

  He had noticed, of course. The thought of them made him shiver inside. He fair ran after her. ‘I do have to be back by sundown to help Will with the cows.’

  ‘Best not be wasting time in idle chatter, then,’ Cat declared. She strode out, her skirts swinging wildly.

  They took the footpath across the meadow towards Gariss and Hellangrove. Celandines, scabious and ox-eye daisies studded the grass through which they walked like fallen stars. Cat imagined how she would pick them out in a frieze: little cross stitches of yellow and blue and white against a field of emerald-green.

  To their left the land rose gently through brambled coverts to wooded hills loud with birdsong. The creamy heads of cow-parsley and old man’s beard laced the hedgerows, and a long day’s sunshine had released the hot, peppery scent of herb Robert and the tang of wild garlic into the air. Gulval Downs rose up in front of them, golden with gorse. Invisible overhead, larks poured their hearts out into the azure sky. Cat looked back at her companion, moodily switching the heads off the taller flowers with a willow wand. ‘Come on, you laggard! Have you got lead in your boots?’ She took off running, feeling like the hoyden her mother would have called her had she seen her.

  Forty minutes later they were on the hilltop, in the teeth of a stiff southerly coming in off the sea that flattened the grass on the headland and carved the gorse stands into hawk trees. Cat’s hair whipped back and forth as she sat on a granite cairn in the centre of the earthworks. Eroded and grassed over down the centuries, its warlike origins lost in time, the ancient hill fort curled protectively around her, as if she sat cupped in the hand of the past. Something about the scene made Rob’s heart swell inside him.

  ‘You might be a warrior queen, sat upon your throne. Stay there…’

  She turned to watch him running away from her until he disappeared from view. Discomfited, she frowned; then turned her attention to the sheet of shining sea stretching away to the ends of the world, as it seemed. What lay out there, beyond the horizon, she wondered. Surely marvels beyond price and monsters beyond imagining, exotic lands and other ways of life, where women of talent and ambition were not confined to sweeping and darning and feeding the chickens…

  Robert interrupted her reverie. He held something gingerly in his hands: a circlet of gorse and briar rose and tiny ferns fashioned so that the golden flowers glowed through the spiky foliage like jewels. ‘A crown for a queen,’ he said, and bent to offer it to her on one knee, sunlight pooled in his blue eyes like liquid sky.

  ‘Well, you’d better crown me, then,’ she said peremptorily, though the gesture pleased her.

  He stood and set it gently on her head, and, as he did so, the wind took a tress of her hair and set it blowing free like a great red pennant. He caught it and wound it around his hand, wondering at its silky texture and the fiery sparks trapped within its length. ‘They built these fortresses in King Arthur’s day against the coming of the Danes. Reckon that must make you a prize nabbed from the ships of the sea kings, then,’ he said, grinning. ‘Not proper Cornish like the rest of us.’

  Annoyed by this inference, Cat retrieved her hair from him. ‘Why would I want to be Cornish like the rest of you? Cornwall’s a poor little county full of brigands and idiots and superstitious old biddies.’

  Robert looked pained. ‘And which am I – brigand or idiot?’

  She shrugged dismissively, avoiding the question. ‘What were you discussing with the Master this morning?’

  Rob’s eyes took on a hooded expression; careful, evasive. ‘Nothing important. Jack and Thom had a bit of information for him, is all.’

  ‘Information about what?’

  ‘Oh, shipping and the like.’

  ‘Shipping? What would Sir Arthur care about shipping? You forget: I saw you; and I saw you hide something.’

  But he was not to be drawn. ‘You can see Carn Galva from here,’ he said wonderingly, gazing at the menacing serrations on the distant skyline. ‘The Giant’s Chair. I never knew that.’ He turned, his blond hair blowing around his broad, open face. ‘And Trencrom and Tregoning and the Godolphin Hills. No wonder the chieftain who built his fortress here chose this spot.’ He shaded his eyes. ‘I can even see the Scillies. ’Twould be hard to take the folk here unawares, by land or sea. It’s said they lit beacons from the Mount to here and Trencrom, to Carn Brea, then St Agnes Beacon, and on to the Great Stone on St Bellarmine’s Tor; and from there Cadbarrow, Rough Tor and Brownwilly, all the way through to Tintagel, to warn the king that the raiders were coming. Arthur and the other nine kings reached Land’s End by forced march in two days and gave them battle near Vellan-Druchar. So many were slaughtered, ’tis said, the mill ran on blood rather than water that day, and not a single Dane escaped.’

  ‘Pity he wasn’t around to save Mousehole and Newlyn from the Spanish,’ Cat replied. Her uncle had been among the men who had followed Sir Francis Godolphin on that fateful day in July 1595 to stand against the Spaniards who had overrun the village of Mousehole and fired the church at Paul. Outnumbered and ill armed, the Cornish had been forced to retreat under the bombardment of the galleons’ guns and wait for reinforcements while the invaders burned the better part of four hundred houses in Newlyn and Penzance. Her parents’ generation still spoke of the attack in hushed voices: it was an outrage, an insult that foreign invaders should set foot on Cornish soil, after the glorious defeat of the Armada, a defeat dealt out largely by West Country men.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, shooting him a sharp look, ‘you still haven’t answered my question.’

  Robert stared out across the sea, his jaw set. ‘Are you using the book I gave you?’

  ‘Yes. It was most kind of you to remember that I admired Lady Harris’s copy. It is most gratifying to have one of my own,’ she said stiffly. ‘Some of the slips are very useful, and I have devised a few variations which the Mistress says are exceeding pretty.’

  ‘Good. I am glad to hear that you are practising your craft.’

  ‘I mean to be a master embroiderer and join the Guild.’

  Rob grinned despite himself. ‘And how will you do that from the depths of darkest Cornwall, Catherine? I fear geography is against you. And will you change your sex? The Broderers’ Guild is for master embroiderers, not for little chits, be they ever so clever with a needle.’

  ‘So you gave me the book merely to humiliate me?’

  Rob took her fingers between his two huge hands. ‘Never, Cat, believe me. I am more than proud that you have your commission from the Countess of Salisbury.’

  She pulled her hand away as if burned. ‘How do you know about that? It is a secret. I have been told to say nothing of it.’

  ‘Lady Harris mentioned it; she could not contain her delight: to work the altar cloth for the Howard family’s own church is a great privilege, and that she played her part in the Countess’s decision to give a Cornishwoman such a prestigious task has given her no little satisfaction.’

  Cat bit her lip, colouring. ‘It is a great responsibility. I have never undertaken anything
so large or so ambitious before – I have not even planned it out yet.’

  Rob’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You mean to design it yourself?’

  ‘Of course.’ She glared at him, daring him to question her right to do so.

  It was unheard of that a woman should take it upon herself to create her own grand design; in the natural order of things this was the place of a man. It was why he had bought her the book: to aid her work and ease her way, to enable her to copy a master’s designs. Everyone knew that women had not the capacity for abstract thought; in this, as in so much, men dictated and women followed.

  He suspected, rightly, that, even as Lady Harris had recommended her protégée to the Countess for the task of embroidering the altar frontal, the agreement had been that Cat would be a journeywoman, working to the pattern created by one of the master embroiderers who made their living travelling between the great houses selling their designs. Unfortunately, no one had told Cat this. One day, he thought, she will overstep herself and take a great fall. He hoped he would be there to catch her when she did. ‘As long as you are sure,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Quite sure. But until I know I can do it, I do not want to discuss it. Let us instead talk of the blade that was laid out on our parlour table, the big curved silver knife that you tried to cover with your hat.’

  Robert caught his breath, taken by surprise. ‘The Master said we were to discuss it with no man.’

  Cat laughed. ‘Unless it has escaped your notice, Robert Bolitho, I am no man.’ She watched him, as unblinking as her namesake.

  Rob sighed. ‘For the Lord’s sake don’t tell Matty or the entire county will know by sunrise,’ he warned her.

  Cat crossed herself, solemn at last. ‘On my father’s bones, I swear.’

  ‘You know the Newlyn boat – the Constance – that went missing last week?’

  She nodded. ‘Crew of eight, including Nan Simon’s cousin Elias? She’s come in – they’re alive and well? Nan’s been half sick with worry.’

  Robert shook his head. ‘There’s no good news. She came drifting in through the fog to Mousehole this morning. Jack and Thom were down there, attending to… some business. They caught her bumping against the rocks outlying St Clement’s Isle, with not a soul aboard, the sails hanging limp and the nets unused.’