The Tenth Gift

by Jane Johnson

  Cat tried to withdraw her hand. “No, sir,” she answered, but her high color told another tale.

  He grasped it tighter. “I do believe our discussions are likely to take longer than expected and that I shall be staying the night at Kenegie,” he said smoothly. “I hope I may have the chance to become better acquainted with you, Catherine Tregenna. Here is a little promissory note for you that I shall make good on later.” And before she could begin to protest, he caught her to him and pressed his full red mouth upon hers. The fume of wine engulfed her as his tongue tried to force a passage between her lips. Cat squirmed and struggled, to no avail. His right arm imprisoned her, twisting her arms behind her back; his left hand clasped itself around her breast and squeezed hard. No one had ever touched her in such a way before: For a moment she thought she might faint. She kicked out, but he was wearing sturdy leather boots and her assault on his ankles had no effect other than to make him clasp her closer still. She felt his laugh rumble through the bones of her chest: Her resistance seemed to add savor to the situation.

  Salvation came in a most unlikely form.

  A harsh voice broke the spell. “He carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness. And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast which was full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten

  horns!”

  Nell Chigwine stood at the threshold of the courtyard door, pitcher under her arm, her other hand outstretched, finger pointing in accusation at the sinning pair before her.

  Surprised by this bizarre interruption, Sir John Killigrew stepped away from his prey. “Away with you, you whey-faced creature! Go share your mad words with the pigs and hens, who will certainly appreciate them more than I!” And away he strode, without even a glance back at Catherine, who now crumpled to her knees in the courtyard, heedless of the dirt and dust.

  But Nell had no interest in the nobleman: All her scorn was directed at Cat. She put the pitcher down, took a pace forward, and stood over her, hands on hips, declaiming her words at full volume like one of the tub-thumpers who now so regularly toured the region.

  “The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the filthiness of her fornication.

  “And on her forehead a name was written: ‘Mystery, Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and of the abominations of the Earth.’

  “Shame on you, Catherine Anne Tregenna, in your scarlet dress and your fornicating ways, for thou art truly Babylon!”

  “Whatever is going on here?”

  The Mistress of Kenegie stood framed in the doorway, her hands balled into tight white fists. She took in the scene at a glance—John Killigrew striding away toward the stable yard, his pipe in his hand, Catherine in the dust with her hair rumpled and her face as red as her dress, Nell Chigwine a figure of righteous triumph. “Such an unholy ruckus,” she scolded the pair of them, “when Sir Arthur is trying to hold a civilized conversation.”

  “Unholy is thy servant,” Nell sniffed. “That dress the temptress wears is enough to provoke the very devil.”

  “My husband’s guests are not all angels, that is true,” Margaret Harris said quietly, “but I think none of them are quite as bad as all that. You had best speak plainly, Eleanor, and explain to me why you were shrieking so stridently.”

  Nell Chigwine’s eyes went as small and black as sloes. “I came out to fetch a pitcher of water and found Catherine fornicating with a man, as brazen as you please in full view of all and sundry.”

  Cat leapt to her feet. “You did no such thing!” she cried hotly.

  “By all that is sacred,” Nell returned primly, her hand laid upon her heart, “I know what I saw. And all know she would do anything to land herself a rich husband.” She smiled slyly. “Even one who has run himself into debt gaining an unholy divorce.”

  “Go about your duties, Eleanor,” Lady Harris said sharply, “and speak of this to no one. If any gossip of what has passed here reaches my ears, I shall know immediately from whence it came.”

  Nell shot Cat a malicious parting glance, took up the pitcher, carried it to the pump, filled it with insolent slowness, and stalked back into the house. No one said a word during the two long minutes this took.

  When the door was firmly shut behind her, Margaret Harris turned back, pale and drawn. “I shall not ask you exactly what passed here, Catherine. But what I will say is that that man has a very bad reputation.” Her eyes indicated the retreating back of John Killigrew, his red hair glowing through a cloud of smoke in the next enclosure. “For very many reasons it were best you kept out of his way.”

  “I did not invite his attentions, madam, whatever Nell Chigwine says,” Cat said in a low voice.

  “You are young, Catherine, and not as worldly wise as you like to think. Not every gentleman by name is a gentleman by nature, and Killigrew is no gentleman. I can only imagine he does not know your identity— ”

  “I told him my name was Catherine Tregenna.”

  Mistress Harris’s eyes glinted. “Had you told him Coode, he would have turned on his heel on you and good riddance. Now go back upstairs and change out of that dress. Scarlet has no place in an honest woman’s wardrobe.”

  “It was my mother’s dress,” Cat said sullenly.

  “I fear that is no great surprise to me. It may not be fair that the sins of the parent be visited on the child, but in your mother’s case personal sin was added to original sin and it weighs heavily upon you, Catherine, though you know it not. For your own best sake I tell you now that there are men with no title, no estate, and no riches who are worth a hundred men like John Killigrew. Your cousin Robert is one, and you should look to him while you may, before your reputation is sullied beyond repair.”

  Cat had little time to think on this strange speech: After supper that night, Polly the footmaid came to fetch Cat from her room. Her eyes were as big as saucers; her nose red from sneezing. “Madam says you are to come at once to her sitting room. Sir Arthur is there, too. He has left his guests.”

  But when Cat presented herself in the little low-beamed room the lady of the house used as her own, she found not only Lady Harris and her husband present, but Robert, too, in his best doublet, with his wild blond hair slicked down. He would not meet her eye when she gazed upon him, questioning.

  Ten minutes later she was out again in the long dark corridor, trembling in outrage and with Sir Arthur’s words ringing in her ears.

  “We will call the banns next Sunday. You and Robert shall have the cottage behind the byre. Tomorrow Matty will start to help you in putting it to rights.”

  So that was to be her life: stuck here at Kenegie forever, married to her dull cousin, living in a hovel behind the cowshed. That night, Cat prayed for the Lord to take her in her sleep. She never wanted to wake up again.

  After tossing and turning for hours, she lit a candle, turned to her pattern for the altar frontal in her book, sharpened her plumbago stick with the little knife she kept for the purpose, and by the guttering light added a clear caricature of Nell Chigwine’s sly face to the serpent.

  CHAPTER 7

  So that ys to be my lyf, trappd for ever here at Kenegy wed to my dull cozen Robert living in a hovel behynd the cow-sheds, large with childe year after year, rasyng a pack of brattes & dying in obscuritee. I can not beare to think about it. I must away from heere. The Countess of Salysbury is to visit Lady Harrys in Agost. If I can compleat the Altar Frontal before then & thus perswade her to take mee away with her, may bee there is a chaunce of escape…

  THE HARSH RINGING OF THE TELEPHONE JOLTED ME OUT of the seventeenth century.

  I went into the kitchen and stared at it as if it might suddenly manifest Michael out of its din. But the voice that started to leave a message was not Michael’s, or any other man’s.

  “Julia?”

  It was my cousin Alison.

  “Alison, it’s brilliant to hear from you. H
ow are you? I’ve been meaning to call you. Life’s not been too great—”

  “Julia, for God’s sake, shut up and let me speak.”

  I stared at the phone, shocked. Alison was such a gentle soul usually. I applied my ear to the receiver again, only to hear her breathing heavily, as if she had run a mile.

  “It’s … it’s Andrew—” And she broke down into great, racking sobs.

  I waited, not knowing what to say. Had he left her again? Andrew Hoskin had always had a roving eye; they’d moved down to Cornwall in part because of some work affair he’d had, but that had been a while ago. Had she left him? She’d been threatening to for years but never had, and I could not imagine that she ever really would.…

  “He’s … he’s dead.”

  “Oh, Alison, no! I’m so sorry. Are you okay—sorry, of course you’re not okay. My God, what happened?”

  There was a long pause as Alison gathered herself. “He … ah … he hanged himself. In the attic. I—” The explanation became the wail of an animal in unbearable pain. It shivered in my bones.

  “Oh, God, Alison, that’s terrible. Stop, stop, please. I’m sure it was nothing to do with you.”

  Why had I said that? I had no idea. Of course it had something to do with her: He was her husband. At the other end there was a sudden ominous silence.

  “Alison? I really don’t know why I said that. Alison?”

  She had put the phone down. I tried to call her back at intervals throughout the day but only succeeded in getting the answering machine. At last I left a message of abject apology and gave up.

  That night I did not read Catherine Tregenna’s little book but resolutely put it away from me and thought instead not about that distant girl, four hundred years dead, nor for once about my own sad life, but about my poor cousin. What must it feel like to share your life with someone who suddenly and with no explanation or warning removes themselves not just from your relationship but from the whole world, irretrievably and forever? However bad their marriage had become, what would have driven the usually buoyant and thick-skinned Andrew to take his own life, in such a brutal manner, and in the very house the two of them had resurrected from the shamble of dust and mildew and rotting timber they had bought so long ago?

  But when at last I turned the light out and went to sleep, it was not Alison I dreamed of, nor Andrew swinging from a beam, but Cat Tregenna. Something was happening to her, something terrible, but I could not quite grasp the nature of the threat, nor see the menace that had come for her. The words “Lord save us!” echoed over and over in my head, and when I awoke, it was in a state of some alarm. Usually I woke slowly, like a diver coming up to the surface from deep under water, but that morning something was different. My skin felt prickly and alert, as if someone had been watching me as I slept. Suddenly fixated by this thought, I hurled the bedclothes from me and leapt out of bed, staring wildly around as if I might surprise an intruder. There was, of course, no one there. Cursing myself for such pointless and neurotic behavior, I made a cup of coffee and called Alison’s number again.

  This time she picked up.

  “Hello?” Her voice was thready and faint, as if coming from a very long way away down a very poor line.

  “Alison, it’s me, Julia. Look, I’m so sorry about my gaffe yesterday, I wasn’t thinking.…” I trailed off, unable to think of anything useful to say.

  “That’s all right. I just couldn’t talk to you—to anyone— anymore. I had to get away from it, from him; from the house.”

  “But you’re back now,” I observed, stupidly.

  “Yes.” She sounded unsure.

  “Look,” I said quickly and without any real thought. “Why don’t I come down and help you with the arrangements and stuff? Give you a break, or a shoulder to cry on—anything, really. It’s no problem, there’s nothing keeping me here.”

  There was a long pause. Then, “Could you? I can’t bear it here. Will you come? Today?”

  “Of course,” I said. After a few minutes of practical arrangements, I put the phone down, my heart sinking. Why had I offered? I really did not want to go all that way—to the end of the world, as it seemed. There were ghosts waiting for me down in Cornwall, and I did not count Andrew’s among them.

  Nevertheless, two hours later I found myself at Paddington buying an open return to Penzance.

  It had been nearly three years since I had visited my home county, commuting back and forth to visit my mother, a particularly dark time in my life. My mother, who had right up to that last year been a remarkably hale and energetic woman, still running marathons at sixty, still swimming at seventy, had suffered a sudden stroke and in a moment, as it seemed, lost not only the use of one side of her body, but her independence and her entire personality, and had ended up in a nursing home that stank of urine and antiseptic.

  It was guilt that drove me to my frequent visits, guilt and fear: a barely suppressed terror at the realization that this was what we all come to in the end. And at least my mother had some moments of comfort in having friends and family around her as she failed. Being a single woman with no children made the prospect of old age and physical and mental decline cut me particularly deep even at thirty-three. As a result, I clung to Michael out of a yawning need that soon had him avoiding late-night phone calls and making more trips away from town than he had used to do, anything, I suspect, to avoid hearing my woes and sensing my pain. It took me some months to realize that my behavior and his more frequent absences—geographical and emotional—had a direct correlation, but even then I had not had the wit to see the relationship for what it really was.

  As the train passed through Liskeard Station, with its pretty little branch line that followed the twisting river valley through rolling wooded hills to the sea at Looe, I remembered how Michael had given in to my badgering and come down with me for a weekend. His family had moved from St. Austell long ago: There was nothing left in Cornwall for him except bad memories of school and camping on the moor, as he told me in no uncertain terms. I remembered how, unable to deal with my tears after I returned alone from visiting my mother at the home, he had abruptly gone for a long walk and left me sitting alone in the hotel garden wondering whether he was ever coming back. Surely, I reasoned with myself now, I was better off on my own than with such a weak and selfish man? For a long while my thoughts were as bleak as the moors through which we passed, and

  I could not concentrate on embroidering my wall hanging to pass the time.

  But as the train approached Camborne and I saw the ruined mine workings on the skyline, my heart leapt up in a most disconcerting way. Swaths of bracken and gorse on windswept hills and lonely heaths punctuated by standing stones and tumuli gradually gave way to rolling farmland, beyond whose boundaries I sensed a huge and empty space. Something about the quality of the light—bright and numinous—suggested the imminent presence of the sea. Just over that horizon lay the end of the line; indeed, the end of the land.

  This was where our family—a fiercely Cornish clan—had originated: West Penwith, the most westerly toe of England. My mother always referred to it as “real Cornwall,” as if the southeast was only for incomers and county traitors, folk whose affiliations lay more closely with (heaven forbid) Devon and the modern world than with Cornwall’s ancient past as an independent nation with its own language, king, and laws. Our ancestors had been tinners before the industry had disastrously failed, and along with it the family fortunes, and many had dispersed far and wide across the globe—to the Argentine and Australia, to Canada and Chile—wherever mining expertise was still a tradable asset.

  I had not had much contact with my few remaining relatives in this toe of land. Some of them—cousins at third and fourth remove—had attended my mother’s funeral, but we had not had much to say to one another beyond the exchange of stock condolences. Alison knew them better than I did. They had properly Cornish names—Pengelly and Bolitho, Rowse and Tucker—and lives that seemed fifty years and
a continent removed from my own. Why Alison and Andrew had removed themselves quite so far from London I had never really understood, beyond the small scandal of Andrew’s affair, but as the train neared its destination, I began to understand. Alison had needed the comfort of her family, but she had also said when she first moved down to this part of Cornwall that it was a magical place, full of powerful energies. I had suspected her of seeking solace in her new surroundings, glossing the landscape with a much-needed mystique. Now, across the wide bay before me St. Michael’s Mount rose out of the sea like a castle from the Age of Legends, wreathed by low cloud and hazy rain, and the hairs rose on the back of my neck.

  The Mount. How many times had that name appeared in Catherine’s book in her tiny, exquisite hand? I gazed at it, feeling the presence of the past. I shivered. Goodness, here we were pulling into Penzance Station and I was feeling shaky and not a little haunted— not the best state in which to greet my poor, bereaved cousin.

  I was quickly brought back to Earth. As the train pulled in, a great, ugly Victorian rail shed greeted me, gray and forbidding, that and a penetrating Cornish mizzle that misted my exposed skin and got into the roots of my hair in the few seconds it took to walk the platform into shelter. Alison was waiting for me beside the station buffet, the garish light making her pale face ghastly.

  We lurched into an awkward embrace and I could feel her slender frame trembling. As I held her I thought sadly how that bold, bright, brazen girl of my twenties—the one who had streaked around the local park, high on E; who had crawled through the churchyard of St. Nicholas, Deptford, at two in the morning, having lost the power to walk after three too many tequila slammers, still determined that I see the memorials to Kit Marlowe and to the great seventeenth-century shipwright John Addey; who had danced at raves and partied till dawn and sworn she would never get old—had been rendered frail and uncertain, her hair showing streaks of gray and her face etched with lines.