by Patrick Gale
Consulting the official records office required an appointment but, with a librarian’s resourcefulness, Molly had tracked down an archive at the County Museum that was less formal. Up a flight of stairs off the museum’s gift shop, the Courtney Library announced itself as the oldest established Cornish history research centre in the county, one of those proud claims which shrank in significance as one pondered them. It was a scrum of filing cabinets, bookcases, dusty albums and huge microfiche readers. After the sleek computer consoles and laptops in the British Library, these last seemed as cumbersome and quaintly antique as valve radios or early vacuum cleaners. The room’s fittings did not appear to have been updated since the Seventies but it was a pleasant space. High windows gave out onto the bustle of River Street and between them hung a full length portrait of Arthur Quiller-Couch complete with tweed cap and pipe.
‘Was that the one that believed in fairies?’ Eliza asked.
‘You’re thinking of Conan-Doyle,’ Molly told her. ‘But Q-C wrote some good ghost stories.’
The few reading desks were deserted and the archivist seemed startled by their approach. As he found Molly the Newlyn microfiche 1890–1920 and fussily showed her how to use it, Eliza wondered what kind of person drifted into such a dry, remote sinecure. An historian, she supposed. Someone needing time for their own research into something so removed from daily concerns that they lost all ability to cope with the ordinary; the Development of Wood Joints in West Country Jacobean Joinery, North Devonian Chasuble Embroidery 1626 to 1702 or the Lost Madrigals of a Disgraced Elizabethan Courtier.
‘And how can I help you?’ He had turned to Eliza.
‘She’s with me,’ Molly murmured, concentrating on finding Morris’ grandmother in a raft of fishwives.
But Eliza asked, ‘How far back do your records go?’
‘It depends on the parish,’ he said and she caught a faint whiff of some sad, dead smell; ear wax or a neglected tooth. ‘Where a church survived untroubled they go back a long way. Paul was torched by the Spanish so the early records went with it.’
‘St Just,’ she said. ‘Parish of St Just 1590 to about 1610.’
‘Roseland or Penwith?’
‘Penwith.’
‘Nothing before 1595,’ he told her without even needing to look. ‘And it’s very poor quality. Births, marriages or deaths?’
‘Everything you’ve got.’
‘Take a seat at the other reader please and I’ll fetch it for you.’
She sat across from Molly at the second cumbersome microfiche reader. She clicked on the light and a fan whirred into motion inside. The screen seemed thick with dust but she knew better than to antagonise an archivist.
‘What are you up to over there?’ Molly asked, intrigued.
‘Holiday project,’ Eliza told her. ‘Ssh.’
‘Have you used one of these before?’ the archivist asked, bringing over a roll of film tied with string and a brown cardboard label.
‘All too often,’ she sighed.
‘Right.’ He threaded the microfiche for her nonetheless and began to wind it. ‘You’ll have to go on a long way,’ he said. ‘The files you want are at the other end. And if you’ve used one before presumably you’ll remember to hold this metal flap out of the way while you’re winding or the film gets scratched.’
Left alone she held the flap obediently and wound. Thousands of records whirled by across the screen. Hundreds of hours of tedious, unvarying photography. Evidently others had repeatedly ignored his plea about the metal flap because the film was scored all over with scratches. They danced as she wound, like telegraph wires viewed from a train. Every now and then the screen went blank for a few turns before a fresh title page appeared.
‘Bull’s eye,’ said Molly, finding the record she needed and making notes. ‘One down, seven to go.’
Eliza reached the far end of the reel. Cornwall Parish of St Just Vol 1 1595–1680 she read. The title page, like a blackmailer’s demand or something waveringly held up at the start of an old cine film, was constructed from letters cut from a sheet then painstakingly lined up and glued to a backing card. The joins were clearly visible. Filmed at the Penzance Library, Morrab Gardens, Penzance it went on, in even tinier letters. By permission of the Vicar of St Just. Filmed by the Genealogical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, January 1960.
God bless the Mormons, she thought and wound on.
The word BEGIN squeaked across the scratchy screen followed by a photograph of the precious, leather-bound register, cruelly flattened out with its spine bunched up, the same register which could be viewed, and even handled, at the Records Office if one made an appointment. An elegant page of handwriting came next, describing how the original register had been rebound and restored in 1907, the then considerable cost of £4.10s and 8p being defrayed by the Congregation. And then the register began.
Poor condition was putting it mildly. The ancient pages, blackened by years of greasy finger marks, wood smoke, damp and, quite possibly, incense had been carefully patched and remounted only to be blackened further. Some pages were so dark they might have spent a year being kippered in a smokery. Beneath the surface stains, handwriting crept and spattered. Centuries of education and standardisation away from even the 1907 copperplate, much of it looked like the work of writers who were barely lettered. She squinted. She tried wiggling the focus knob.
‘And another,’ said Molly, taking triumphant notes. ‘And a third. This is a doddle. Last year was wild flowers, which took for bloody ever.’
It was bitterly frustrating. If Trevescan’s niece Rose married Michael Polglaze in 1615, and could be assumed not to have been around during the Spanish raid, when her parents were merely betrothed, it was a fair bet that her birth was recorded here. 1599. 1600. 1601. She could make out enough dates here and there to know she was in the right area of the register but the names eluded her.
‘Something wrong?’ Molly asked seeing her frown.
‘No,’ Eliza muttered. ‘It doesn’t matter really. Only idle curiosity.’ Molly continued winding and making speedy notes then changed to the St Just records for the same period.
Someone cleared their throat. Eliza turned to find the archivist shyly offering her a small maroon volume.
‘I know it feels a bit like cheating,’ he sighed, ‘But this is a transcript of the original. There are gaps but most of it’s trustworthy, I gather.’
‘Oh,’ said Eliza, ridiculously pleased. ‘Bless you!’
The pages were white, modern, barely read, the typeface a charmless sans serif. The printed text took up far less space than the scrawled original and in no time she found the pages corresponding to the murk she had failed to decipher. The layout presumably duplicated, more tidily, that in the original. Reading across the page there was the year, month, date, a surname, s or d depending on sex then the baby’s name. She smiled to see so many familiar names, Penberthie, Tregerthen, yet more Roddas, and Cornish exotica like Jucca and Spargo.
The name should have jumped out at her but the quiet presentation fooled her and her eye swung past it before being drawn back. 1596. Trevescan she read. D. Rose Mary. She made a note of the date, in case the family Bible should need correcting, then flicked idly forward through the burials to the marriages. She forgot the date she had read in the Bible but assumed Rose might have been an old woman of twenty at the time, so started at 1616 then worked backwards. She found her in 1612. A slip of a thing given away by her father at sixteen. She wondered if Michael Polglaze was a young swain or a ruddy-faced, advantageous older man, some friend of the family with conveniently placed fields adjoining theirs.
Once again, the surname was so familiar that she scanned it without registering it. Then, startled, she read the entry again to be sure. It was hard to believe that something so important, so important to a handful of historians and musicologists at least, should have sat so long unnoticed.
Rose was not given away by her father but by Roger Trevescan, Old
Trevescan, Eliza’s Trevescan.
Maybe the transcriber had made a mistake. A singer of madrigals himself, perhaps he automatically wrote the more familiar name without thinking? Eliza whirled through the microfiche, only remembering not to scrape the film when the archivist pointedly coughed into his TLS.
The marriage register was not much cleaner than the baptism one but she found the entry and, knowing where to look by referring across to the transcript, found the signature of the man who gave Rose away. It was a dark squiggle but there was an unmistakable loop midway, a ‘g’ not a ‘b’, Roger not Robert.
Feverish, not caring whether Molly was watching, Eliza flicked back through the register to the burials to find any male Trevescans who died in or after the year of Rose’s marriage. Her heart was beating so hard she felt it like hiccups, in her neck and shoulders. There was the same roster of surnames. Jago. Penberthie. Thomas. A regular sad smattering of unattributed, genderless entries of stillborn child. She felt slightly faint and in need of fresh air. Perhaps he had lived into great old age? Perhaps there was somewhere a great cache of unpublished music, pasted into a wall or tucked beneath a floorboard or merely lost in an archive like this one?
But no. 1616. He lived to see Rose four years into her marriage so he was, what? Forty? Forty-five? Well past an Elizabethan middle age, at least.
Sadly the microfiche readers were not the kind that could produce photocopies so she would have to lodge a request to copy the originals at the County Records Office. In the meanwhile, she copied the relevant pages from the manuscript then waited, like a hissing kettle, for Molly to find the eighth great-grandparent.
Molly looked up, saw her face and grinned.
‘Do you need the loo, or what?’ she asked and the archivist hushed her.
‘Tell you in a sec,’ Eliza whispered. Molly soon finished and, as they walked down the stairs, Eliza came out with it all in a rush. ‘Which means he’s your however many times great-grandfather.’
‘Unless Rose was already due. I’m sure things haven’t changed that much. I bet half the betrothals were shotgun.’
‘So? He’d still be your step-ancestor and it means the madrigal is definitely his and has a flawless provenance. The dates were all wrong before but now they fit and, oh Molly!’ She kissed her, unable to contain herself.
‘I don’t want to pour cold water or anything,’ Molly began gravely.
‘What?’ Eliza felt her face fall.
‘Well. That Roger who died might have been a son of Rose’s named after her uncle.’
‘But…Oh. God. Well yes, he could have been. But there’s no record of a son’s birth in the parish before that, and taken with Roger’s presence at her wedding as well it would seem to be more likely that –’
Molly cut her short, flapping her in the chest with the back of her hand. ‘I’m pulling your leg, girl. Of course it was him! Here. You’d better ring Pearce. He’ll probably want to sell the manuscript now to build a new barn.’
She reached for her mobile and turned it on. It beeped. ‘Hang on,’ she said, holding it to her ear. ‘Message.’ She expertly pressed buttons without looking, straining to hear over the traffic and chatter about them. She hung up and instead of passing the mobile over, slipped it back in her bag.
‘Well thank God we’re over here, already,’ she said, colour draining from her plump cheeks. ‘We can drive up there in ten minutes. Oh Eliza. I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.’
‘What?’
‘It’s okay. She’s fine.’
‘Dido?’ Eliza felt a spasm run through her. She felt sick with fear. Molly was already walking briskly towards the car park.
‘She’s fine,’ Molly repeated. She’s been in an accident and broken her leg but she’s fine. The man took her to the hospital.’
‘What man?’
40
Giles rose to a world transformed by the knowledge that he was about to become a father. It helped that there had been rain overnight so that the lush little garden outside the breakfast room windows and the boats moored in the dock had acquired an extra polish in the morning sun. His worries did not vanish with the good news. He still worried about how Eliza would react to her mother’s death, still wanted to make his peace with Dido, and had not fallen suddenly in love with Julia.
She was not the same Julia, however. How could she be? She was now the mother of his child and by that simple formula of words his fate had been ordered for him. Where he had been at the mercy of impulse, shame and lust, now he found himself with simple obligations whose unambiguous clarity came as a relief.
He would make his peace with Dido and love her, always love her in a fatherly way, and he would set Eliza free while supporting her as he should but the bulk of his love would quite naturally flow to his own child, and his truest support to its mother.
Although marrying Julia before the baby was born would probably give legal protection to his rights as its father, he was at least sensitive enough to recoil from letting her believe that was his sole reason for proposing. So he had not raised the matter at all. She might not want to marry him. She was under no obligation to and she had certainly never dropped any dark hints before now. Not that he had noticed. He would let it rest and trust time to show him a way. Plenty of cohabiting couples had children without marrying. Why should they be any different?
The crab had given Julia a night fraught with bad dreams. Now that she was free to admit she had been plagued by morning sickness (and mid-morning nausea and afternoon pukes) he felt quite justified in ordering her up a paper and a leisurely breakfast in her room.
She laughed at his abruptly solicitous behaviour. ‘I’m not going to fade away,’ she said. ‘I’m not the type. Sorry. Give Dido my love, if you catch them. We could always take her back with us for the first week of the holidays if Eliza could do with peace and quiet for a bit.
‘Don’t,’ she warned as he stooped to kiss her. ‘Sick.’
He had risen late and dawdled over breakfast downstairs – home-made bread, farm eggs – and the sun was already high overhead when he drove out of the hotel’s tiny car park. His nerve failed him at the prospect of taking the steep road – little more than an unfenced slipway – which plunged down the side of the harbour. Turning right instead, he found himself heading out below the church and out of town along the promenade where there were already people strolling, sunning themselves, shading their babies.
Babies. Overnight he had become attuned to the idea of fatherhood and his whole world appeared to realign itself. He found himself noticing small children and their bulky paraphernalia: prams, pushchairs, carrycots, slings.
Missing his turning, he was forced to follow the seafront around to Newlyn where he picked up signs to St Just. A lane took him up through a thickly wooded valley to the road he must have taken last time only he had been in such a daze from his conversation with Mrs Barnicoat that nothing now seemed familiar.
There was no one at the caravan. Peering boldly in at the windows when it was plain nobody was going to answer the door, he found it hard to tell if anyone were still in residence. For all he knew the mess he saw, of rumpled bedding and muddled clothes, was Mrs Barnicoat’s and Eliza had already headed back to London. The one garment on a hanger, a dark blue skirt with little glittery bits decorating the hem, was certainly not a thing he could imagine Eliza wearing.
Or perhaps they had simply gone into St Just for supplies? Perhaps they were off on a day-long excursion to the Eden Project or the Seal Sanctuary?
This was so ill-planned. The perky plaque of St Francis beside the door mocked his good intentions. He could not spend all day waiting here for Eliza to come home but neither could he bear Dido not to know he had tried to see her.
For want of any other paper he wrote a note on the back of one of the car hire documents. Dear Both. So very sorry to hear about your Mum/Granny. Since you don’t seem to be in –
He stopped, realising how bizarre it would seem that he wa
s there, with no warning or explanation, as though he were hunting them down. Which in a sense he was. Much easier to explain himself face to face. He would kill time then come back later.
Realising that the normal, loving thing to do in the circumstances was to buy a present for the mother-to-be, he drove down the hill into St Just. Flowers were out of the question here. Julia could buy more exciting bunches at their nearest roadside stall at home. There were a few little art galleries but they filled him with doubt and he suddenly realised he had no idea if Julia would prefer a tiny Cornish landscape or a bold, rough framed abstract. Earrings, perhaps, or a silk scarf? He guessed such things could be found in wealthier, more touristy St Ives so decided to drive on.
He had underestimated, from his glance at the atlas, how long the coastal route would take. The road not only followed the meandering, rocky coastline but often seemed to have been dictated by the arbitrary boundaries of ancient fields and farms. Wide enough through the former mining communities of Pendeen and Morvah, it became crazily narrow and twisty as it entered the wilder land above Zennor. Whenever he met an oncoming car or coach there was a wincing manoeuvre as one or both of them reversed into a point wide enough to let the other pass. A sign claimed St Ives was only a few miles ahead but it was hard to believe as there were little signs of civilisation beyond the occasional windswept farmstead. High moorland climbed to one side, tiny, stone-hedged fields sloped down to the sea on the other. It was pretty enough now but in midwinter, in the wind and rain, it would be desperately forbidding. Even now there were no boats in sight but distant trawlers and a fishing vessel so small it kept vanishing inside the swell.
Coming down the hill towards Zennor he swung out to make room for a small, red-faced boy having trouble with his cycle chain and remembered the importance of a bicycle for long summer holidays. He recalled the hours he would spend on his, idling, going nowhere in particular because the district was hemmed in by major trunk roads which were forbidden to him, but preferring to stay on his bike, bored and saddle-sore, ankles chafed, fingers oily, than to face the threatening, gin-scented longueurs at home.