The Land of Summer

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘I chose Australia, my dear fellow, because it was the place farthest away and therefore would cost the most to reach!’ The man laughed, throwing his finished smoke away.

  ‘You never had any intention of going there at all, did you?’

  ‘None whatsoever. Took meself to Ireland instead for a bit of sport, and didn’t do too badly for once. Sadly the luck turned when I came back here, as it so often does, although I did win myself a tidy sum last night at the table.’

  ‘In that case why do you have need of money?’

  ‘Because, my dear fellow, I have a very expensive lifestyle, and there is some trouble with a lady, doncher know?’

  ‘How much?’ Julius enquired, sinking down into a chair. ‘How much this time?’

  ‘This will be the very last time, I promise you.’

  ‘I feel somehow I have heard and lived through all this before. Very well.’ Julius eyed him and then stared at his own right foot, which he was tapping anxiously on the floor. ‘Very well,’ he said again, now staring up at the ceiling. ‘I will advance you what you need. I’m not going to give it to you and you are not going to pretend that you are going to pay me back because what I am going to do is advance it to you out of the catalogue money.’

  ‘My dear fellow—’ the man began in protest.

  ‘That is final,’ Julius cut in. ‘How you live from now on, what you exist on and how you earn it is your affair, because I am having nothing more to do with you. How much do you need?’

  ‘Seven hundred pounds.’

  ‘No, you don’t. You are probably hoping for five hundred, so I shall write you a cheque for three hundred and fifty and that is an end to it.’

  ‘I cannot possibly survive on a measly, pathetic three hundred and—’

  ‘You are going to have to, and that is an end to it,’ Julius said abruptly, rising to write a cheque for the nominated amount. ‘And I want nothing more to do with you, do you understand?’

  ‘If that is what you want, that is how it shall be,’ the man sighed. ‘Tell me – how is that delightful little wife I brought you from America?’

  Julius said nothing. He just tore the cheque from his cheque book, handed it over and prepared to leave.

  ‘This time I would advise that you do go to Australia,’ he said, turning back from the doorway. ‘Or you may well regret it, truly.’

  He returned to his room to lie down, for there was some time before he was due to catch his train, and besides, the force of his emotions had brought on a splitting headache, a nausea, as all dealings with the man calling himself Dwight Freeman, Arnold Bonniface, and many other names, always had done. God knows he did not wish him dead, but please God, he did not wish to ever, ever see him again. He was surely born with the sign of the devil engraved on him. Sighing, Julius closed his eyes, longing for sleep to ease the pain.

  At the same time that Julius was resting on his hotel bed, the man who was currently calling himself Dwight Freeman was hurrying past the bulldogs and disappearing into the telephone room, where he put in a telephone call to Julius Aubrey Ltd to see if and when Mr Aubrey was expected.

  Bray Ashcombe had arrived in the house he was renting just outside Portloe the day after Emmaline had arrived. He had done so quite deliberately, having found out on the Bamford grapevine through a friend of Arabella’s who worked at Julius Aubrey Ltd that Mr Julius Aubrey had been delayed by business both in Bamford and now in London, and was not expected to be able to travel down to Cornwall until Christmas Eve at the earliest.

  Desperate to see Emmaline, and using the excuse of now having copies of her book of poems to show the author, Bray persuaded Mr Hunt to allow him to leave a day early on his Christmas holiday and hastened down to Cornwall, feeling that time and luck were on his side.

  As further luck would have it, on the fine sunlit morning when Emmaline and Agnes walked from Gorran Lodge to Portloe and had lunch, Bray had seen the two solitary figures on the strand from his rented cottage window, had watched them arrive in the port and observed them disappearing into the famous old inn for refreshment.

  Bray was able to see all this through an old telescope, one of the fittings in the whitewashed cottage which he just happened, coincidentally, to have rented for Arabella.

  The moment he saw the young woman in the dark red coat and tightly fitting fur hat and cape he knew at once, despite her head’s being bent against the wind, that it was the divine Emmaline. And here she was walking towards him along the golden sands by the undoubtedly sparkling blue sea. It was as much as Bray could do to stop himself from rushing out of his cottage to surprise her.

  Instead he forced himself to wait until later in the day, until after he had seen the two young women retracing their steps, once again following their progress intently with his telescope, so that he could ascertain exactly where they were headed, losing them for a while as they disappeared off the beach in order to escape the tide, but then picking them up on the track as it rose up from behind the dunes, and then following them all the way to where they turned up the lane that finally led them to their own destination.

  Now he took a horse from the nearby livery stables, and, with a copy of Emmaline’s book of poetry carefully tucked into his coat pocket, he rode as fast as the horse would go, which for most of the ride was little more than a sloppy trot followed by a sporadic and idle canter, during which activities the animal still managed to snatch mouthfuls of hedgerow en passant, a snack which he then managed to chew over the heavy bit in his mouth, ignoring all Bray’s kicks and slaps and tugs, delivering his rider finally in a dishevelled lather at the gate of a handsome square house built of dark granite and roofed in fine slate that stood in a windswept meadow overlooking the glorious bay of Veryan.

  ‘Bray Ashcombe to see Mrs Aubrey, and the matter is of the utmost urgency.’

  What with his disordered appearance and his precipitate arrival, one foot over the threshold, Mrs Carew had no intention of letting the visitor in.

  ‘Wait here, sir, please, wait here. Mrs Aubrey is not a well young woman. She has been most unwell, she is here to rest, not to endure visitors,’ Mrs Carew protested, but it was useless. Bray burst into the sitting room with Mrs Carew calling to Emmaline from behind him that she was sorry but he had demanded to see her.

  ‘Mrs Aubrey, forgive me, please. The point is I had to see you, and I had to see you now!’

  ‘Mr Ashcombe, I think you must agree this is no way to arrive, is it?’ Having thanked and dismissed Mrs Carew, Emmaline resettled herself once again by the fireside where she had been quietly reading. ‘I gathered you were going to be in the vicinity, but not so soon, and you do look most frightfully disarrayed. Have you had bad news of some kind? Not your sister, I hope?’

  ‘I think you can put down part of my dismaying appearance to the wretch of a hireling that carried me here,’ Bray groaned, mopping his brow with a bright red handkerchief. ‘What you cannot see, although you can perhaps sense, is my inner consternation. And as for my unannounced arrival – I saw you on the beach today, so I knew you too had arrived, and I simply had to see you, Mrs Aubrey. It is simply no good, do you see? I cannot go on living like this without giving some expression to my feelings, because if I wait it may be too late.’

  ‘My word,’ Emmaline said, staring at the handsome young man who she now realised did look strangely pallid, dark shadows under his eyes, the expression in them one of such intensity that he looked feverish. ‘Are you unwell, Mr Ashcombe? Please, you had better sit down here.’ Emmaline indicated the chair beside the fire, but instead of sitting down Bray seized first one of her hands, and then the other.

  ‘Yes – yes, you could say I was unwell, Mrs Aubrey, but it is a sickness only you can cure,’ he said wildly, fixing her with a look of such longing that it could not fail to astound her. ‘No – no, you must not look like that! No, please do not look at me like that.’

  ‘How am I looking at you?’

  ‘As if I am mad!’
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  ‘Hush, Mr Ashcombe, please. Please do not raise your voice,’ Emmaline urged him, glancing at the sitting-room door. ‘I truly don’t think it quite right, quite proper, that you should visit me like this – and there are other people here whose sensibilities you must consider, truly there are, to say the least.’

  ‘No, no! Please forgive me for disagreeing with you,’ Bray begged her, interrupting, ‘but it is long past the time for being right and proper! Long, long past! You see – oh, how can I best explain? Without making a complete and abject fool of myself? This is about our feelings, Mrs Aubrey – what you feel – what I feel – what you write about! This is about love – the love you crave so much – the love you need, the love you deserve. When first I read your verses, you must know that I lost my heart to the author?’

  ‘Mr Ashcombe,’ Emmaline began. ‘You must understand poetry is one thing, verses are another, life is quite another.’

  ‘You do not deserve to suffer, Mrs Aubrey,’ Bray continued. ‘I know how sensitive you are. I have seen the depths of you, and I love every inch of your shimmering soul. I have loved you from the moment I saw you. I fell in love with you in the time it takes for a man to look at a woman and see a fellow pilgrim – another soul – the woman for whom he has always been searching. Please do not say that you feel nothing for me. I have seen it in your eyes, on your face, in your sadness and – and in the few brief moments of happiness we have had together – I can see you care for me. You cannot continue as you are, you know you cannot.’

  ‘That is my choice, Mr Ashcombe. Now, please, I have not been well, as you know, I must not—’

  ‘You have been made ill by your unhappiness, can’t you see that?’

  Emmaline stared at him. Of course it was true. She had been made ill, but not by unhappiness – by despair.

  Bray, seeing her hesitate, reached forward to take her hands once more, but Emmaline moved away just as Mrs Carew knocked on the sitting-room door and, giving Bray a look that should have turned him to stone, replenished the logs on the fire before retiring once more.

  ‘You really must go, Mr Ashcombe. It is not right that you stay here, least of all in the mood you are in.’

  Realising that he had shocked her with the intensity of his emotions, Bray pulled back a little from what he finally understood was an emotional brink, and began again, in a less emotive tone.

  ‘Mrs Aubrey, what you must believe, first and foremost, putting aside all that I have said – although all that I have said is the truth – is that I am your friend. I have watched how much you have been made to suffer in a loveless marriage, I have seen how a beautiful young woman can be brought to the edge of despair. I can see more clearly than anyone else you know, because I am not part of society, not someone with whom you must observe the niceties, with whom you must follow protocol. You, of all people? You, like me, are a poet – and poets are not bound by these conventions! We are the wordsmiths – the dreamers of dreams – the painters of feelings that will be quoted for ever more! With a soul like yours, you cannot be imprisoned by such a man as your husband! He will kill the artist in you – if he has not already killed you by slow degrees with his neglect.’

  ‘Mr Ashcombe, you mustn’t frighten me in this way. You must go, before you upset me further.’

  ‘How can your heart tell you anything about a man as cold and cruel as your husband, except that he is not worthy of your love?’

  ‘I don’t know, Bray,’ Emmaline answered. ‘That is what I am waiting to see.’

  ‘Will you be all right?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I think I will. Now go – please. Back to Arabella. She needs you. Go.’

  Bray stopped, turned, and looked back at Emmaline. ‘You know?’

  ‘Yes, I am afraid I guessed the day Aggie and I met her fainting in the street.’ She smiled a little sadly. ‘I have seen too many of my friends back home in the early stages of her condition not to recognise her sickness for what it was.’

  Bray sighed sadly. ‘Poor Arabella. She has no one but me, and I am not a practical person, but I have done my best to protect her from all the insults that an unmarried woman in a town like Bamford has to endure. I finally gave in to the realisation that her suffering at the hands of others was unendurable, and brought her away here, to await the great event in this place of temperate climes and seaside walks. There is a doctor I know, an old friend I knew at university, who has promised to attend her. She has been greatly reassured by him and is already much calmer.’ He shook his head. ‘To think that some families put women in her state into mental asylums, and take their babies from them. What a world we live in, so cruel, so heartless.’

  ‘Society judges us when we should be judging society, surely?’

  Bray looked at Emmaline with another of his looks of deep understanding. ‘There, you see! Once again we are twin souls. That is how I feel. And seeing how much Arabella has suffered at the hands of hypocrites – that is why I brought her away.’

  Emmaline smiled at him, happy that he seemed to be calmer.

  ‘Forgive me. In the turmoil of my feelings I almost forgot this,’ he said, putting the slender book he had brought with him into her hands.

  Emmaline stared at the little volume. Was it true, was this her book in print? It did not seem possible.

  ‘I think it looks very handsome,’ he told her, and before she could say anything he leaned forward and brushed her lips with his.

  Emmaline was startled, but not surprised.

  ‘Bray …’

  ‘Emmaline.’

  He touched her lips, but this time with a light finger, and then tapped the book in her hands. ‘Just remember you are here, always, and you have the soul of an angel.’ Before she could say anything more he hurried out of the sitting room, past Mrs Carew, who needless to say had hardly left the hall even to see to her cooking pots, so shocked was she by the precipitate arrival of Bray Ashcombe, and so curious as to the cause of his flinging himself into Gorran Lodge in a manner hardly befitting a gentleman.

  Emmaline glanced down at the book again. It was a wonderful moment, so wonderful that she quite forgave Bray the kiss. After all, a kiss was just a kiss, unless of course you were married to Julius. She turned away from the memory, the excitement that one particular kiss had aroused in her, and sat down to leaf through the little book written by a Lady.

  After they had finished their dinner, Emmaline insisted on helping Mrs Carew and Agnes clear away so that they could all get on with decorating the Christmas tree that the Gorran Lodge gardener had cut and brought in for the festivities. Mrs Carew had boxes full of decorations from previous years, so with a huge fire blazing in the fireplace they set about hanging the tree with a glittering, shimmering assortment of ornaments. As they did so, Emmaline remembered Christmas time back home, with the enormous tree they would all help decorate in the hall and the hand-painted paper chains and bells they would hang everywhere to gladden the house, and in that moment she felt a tidal wave of homesickness, until she saw the look in Agnes’s eyes and the smile on Mrs Carew’s bonny face as they all stood back from the tree to admire the enchantment, and it was then that Emmaline knew that whatever happened she now belonged in England.

  Still unsure quite when to expect Julius, since they had received no definite word, the now pleasantly tired Emmaline went up to bed shortly after ten o’clock. There was a new moon that night, so Emmaline asked Agnes to leave the curtains open, and before she finally retired she and Agnes stood in happy silence looking out at a sea lightly dusted with moonlight under a dark velvet sky, and watching the fast-scudding clouds that flitted intermittently across the face of the crescent moon.

  ‘This is a really beautiful place, don’t you think, Aggie?’ Emmaline said, still standing at the window. ‘There’s just something about it that seems to centre right back where it belongs. It’s ridiculous, but I feel like the person in that story – what was it? About someone who’s unwell, and they go up this mountain, which h
as magic properties, although she doesn’t know it. And when she comes down the other side she’s cured. Sure, it’s a fairy story, I know – but then so many of those wonderful stories come from old legends, and so many of the old legends are based on some sort of fact. And I really feel as though I have climbed a mountain, a journey that started in a rocky barren place, and now I’m beginning a descent into a valley full of sunshine and spring flowers. I don’t know why – don’t ask me, Aggie – I just have the oddest feeling that everything is going to get better.’

  Agnes crossed herself. ‘Well, let’s hope so, Mrs Aubrey, for you certainly haven’t had much luck lately, what with one thing and another.’

  Agnes walked off to put away Emmaline’s gown. What she couldn’t say was that none of the servants at Park House had been able to understand why her mistress had stayed in a marriage which was clearly not a marriage at all. However, now that they were down by the sea, in Cornwall, and Mr Aubrey nowhere in sight, and that poet chap calling, perhaps things would soon look up for her, poor soul. As Mrs Graham had kept saying to anyone who would listen, ‘It’s the abandonment that I would find hard to take, the never being at home, only us for her to talk to, and then her health so poorly lately, the sweet creature.’

  Agnes’s confidence in a rosy future might however have been soon shattered, for within an hour of Emmaline’s snuffing out her bedroom candles and lying in her bed propped up on her pillows to watch and finally fall asleep under the spell of a new moon, a tall, dark, elegant and handsome man, whose face and figure would be all too familiar to the servants at Park House, could be seen disembarking from his train at Truro station, and looking for a cab to carry him on the last leg of his journey to Gorran Lodge.

  ‘Greetings, Mr Aubrey, sir!’ the stationmaster called, hurrying up to him. ‘Your wife be already arrived – Mrs Carew, my cousin, sent someone to collect her here, several days back. You’m come down to see us for Christmas? I dare say you’m might prefer to spend the rest of the night at the Railway Hotel rather than rouse them at the Lodge you’m be thinking, better you not?’