Penmarric

by Susan Howatch

  I went early to Oxford. It will sound immodest if I write that there was no more they could teach me at Eton, but I yearned for deeper studies and was anxious to escape from the restrictions of school life to the freedom of the Varsity. I took my final examinations in the summer before my twenty-first birthday and was awarded a first, a great rarity for a young man only twenty years old. My tutor wanted me to stay on and devote myself to an academic life, but I was weary of studies at last after so much concentrated effort and told him I wanted to rest for a time before coming to any firm decision about my future.

  A friend invited me to stay at his family’s house in London to sample the remainder of the Season, and I accepted. It was a peaceful summer that year, the summer of 1890. England was marking time; the Irish question had been manipulated into abeyance by the conservative government of Lord Salisbury; the labor strikes of the early Nineties were still to come. The world was between international crises; nobody was rattling their sabers at one another and even the spirit of Jingoism had temporarily abated. In London after my toils at Oxford I too began to feel as lulled into false security as the world around me, but then suddenly without any warning my mother entered my life again and I became shackled to the chain of events which was to lead me to that country churchyard in Zillan and to Janna Roslyn’s eyes wide-set and black-lashed behind her widow’s veil.

  Two

  Stephen’s heir was his elder son Eustace, and he had tried to ensure Eustace’s succession … In 1153 Eustace suddenly died.

  —The Saxon and Norman Kings, CHRISTOPHER BROOKE

  In despair Stephen gave up the interminable struggle. He had not long to live and he knew it; now that his destined heir was dead his sole remaining wish was to die still King of England … he acknowledged as his heir Henry fitzEmpress, Duke of Normandy …

  —The Devil’s Brood

  ALFRED DUGGAN

  I WAS ABOUT TO rent chambers in Bruton Street when I met my mother again. I had no wish to outstay my welcome at my Oxonian friend’s house, and although I had earlier planned to return to Gweek after sampling the delights of the Season for two or three weeks, I now discovered that this course of action was no longer open to me. My father had temporarily closed Gweekellis Manor in a gesture I found surprising to say the least and had retreated to a small property he owned in the parish of Morvah on the Cornish North Coast about five miles from Penmarric. He had inherited the property, Deveral Farm, long ago from his mother, who had belonged to a land-owning family in a neighboring parish, but the land had been leased to tenants for decades and I think he had almost forgotten he had property there until in the spring of 1890 the tenant died, the long lease expired simultaneously and certain legal problems connected with the estate required a visit from the landlord. While I was still up at Oxford I had received a letter from him saying he was considering staying on at Morvah for two or three weeks; Nigel was by that time abroad on a Grand Tour of Europe, I was to be staying in London and Gweekellis Manor had suddenly seemed lonelier than usual; besides, his thesis on the subject of Henry II’s coinage reforms was not going well and he thought a change of scenery might improve matters.

  Evidently it did; I was in London by the time his second letter reached me and I learned that he had closed Gweekellis for the summer after deciding to remain at Deveral Farm until the autumn.

  “After so many years spent in South Cornwall,” he had written, “I had quite forgotten how beautiful it is here on the starker, more spectacular North Coast, and I find I have a craving for solitude which my circle of friends would not permit me to assuage at Gweek. Perhaps I shall end my days as a recluse! Let me know when you wish to return to Gweek and I shall make arrangements to open the house for you, but no doubt you will stay in London until the end of the Season and then I dare say you will have invitations to a variety of country houses …”

  This was true; I had indeed planned originally to remain in London until the end of the Season and I had no doubt there would be invitations to the country, just as he had foreseen, but I had been quickly disillusioned by the Season and had found my opportunities to meet so many young girls of my own age and class unrewarding. I might be the elder son of a country gentleman, but I had no title, no wealth apart from my modest quarterly allowance and, as Clarissa Penmar had pointed out so painstakingly, no good looks. To the married seamstress and unwed chambermaid at Oxford I might have seemed rich and aristocratic enough to be attractive, but to young girls of my own class and their aspiring mamas I was a nonentity.

  However, it was exciting to be in London even if the Season did not measure up to my expectations, so after receiving my father’s letter I resolved to stay on in town and make the best of the situation. I did toy with the idea of joining him at Morvah, but he had not asked me to stay, and I was too proud to arrive on his doorstep uninvited as if I were a wayward puppy running up to his master for a pat on the head.

  I was just walking down Piccadilly one morning on my way to Bruton Street to inspect some chambers which were for rent when I met my mother face to face outside the Royal Academy.

  “Mark!” She greeted me as if it were four days, not four years, since we had last met. “You’re just the person I wanted to see! Have you heard the news?”

  “What news?”

  “Good heavens, don’t you read the obituary column of The Times? Your cousin Raymond Penmar is dead! He was abroad apparently—Egypt—and caught cholera. Dead in two days, of course. Terribly sad for Giles. Now listen, Mark. Think what this means. All Giles has now are those two adopted children of his, Harry and Clarissa, and they’re not Penmars at all, not even his own flesh and blood. And I hear young Harry is very wild and so Giles is probably disappointed in him …”

  I listened, too disgusted by her attitude to speak, yet too overcome by the force of her personality to turn my back and walk away. The next moment, before I could protest, she was propelling me into Green Park and forcing me to sit down beside her on the nearest bench. “…I wrote to you at Gweek—didn’t you get my letters? How fortunate that I should meet you like this! God moves in Mysterious Ways sometimes, but he does nonetheless move.”

  “Mama—”

  “Now don’t be disagreeable. Mark. It’s absolutely imperative that we discuss this together …”

  There was no escape. Once we were seated on the bench I crossed my arms and glowered at the lush grass at our feet, but she was too excited to take any notice.

  “… so I wrote to Giles—a letter of sympathy, naturally—and said …”

  She had had the truly amazing insolence to write to this man who had just lost his only son and suggest that now that I was his only surviving male relative (she had, as usual, forgotten Nigel’s existence) he might agree to devise Penmarric to me in his will.

  “I pointed out,” she said, “that it was a point of Honor that the estate should remain in the family.”

  I was speechless, but at last at the moment when I had summoned the words to tell her what I thought of her she said triumphantly, “I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong! You thought Giles would be too offended to reply, didn’t you? Well, he wasn’t! I had a reply to my letter within the week and the letter was everything I could have wished for.”

  “Are you attempting to tell me—”

  “Yes,” she said, “I am. Giles wants to see you. We are invited to Penmarric.”

  I was speechless again. But suddenly I found myself remembering Penmarric, the huge rolling moors of North Cornwall, the tors capped with granite, the graystone walls and square church towers of a strange and distant land. And I thought of that house with its turrets and battlements rising from the cliffs, a shining dream which I longed to cloak with reality but which I had thought would forever lie beyond my reach.

  “Is it really so surprising to you?” my mother was saying abruptly. “Blood usually does run thicker than water, you know.”

  I said nothing. I was still thinking of Penmarric.

&
nbsp; “Mark, there is something I feel I should discuss with you. I had no intention of mentioning it before, but now that your Inheritance has reached such a crucial stage and so much depends on this interview with Giles …” She stopped. “Mark, you’re not listening to me.”

  I roused myself with an effort. “I’m sorry.”

  “You see, I described you to Giles. I said that you looked and thought and behaved like a Penmar …”

  This infuriated me. I had spent too much time trying to be like my father to welcome any statement from her that I bore no resemblance to him. Before I could stop myself I said in my sharpest tone of voice, “I’m just as much a Castallack as I am a Penmar!”

  “Really?” said my mother. “I wish I could be as certain of that as you are.”

  For a moment nothing happened.

  I went on looking at her. She was wearing a voluminous purple gown that was fastened at the throat with a diamond clasp, and presently that clasp was all I could see. I can remember it still. I can close my eyes and see all those diamonds, shoulder to shoulder, a row of jagged predatory teeth that glittered brilliantly in the hard midday light.

  “Well, I never meant to tell you because I wasn’t entirely certain, but you see, I told Giles …” She was talking again, talking rapidly, not looking at me, and her voice seemed alien and remote, the voice of a stranger who spoke of things I did not want to understand.

  “… unhappy when I was young. I had no wish to marry, all I wanted was to keep house for my father, to stay at Penmarric … My father was horrified, he said unless I married within the year he would cut me out of his will … so I married the next man who asked me. Well, I mean, how could your father and I be happy under those circumstances? How could we? I didn’t love him, refused to behave as a wife should … he asked me to leave in the end. My father had to take me back then because there was nowhere else I could go. It was summer. Giles was there. The rhododendrons were in bloom, you should have seen the rhododendrons, they were so beautiful, it was such a beautiful summer … I wanted to annul my marriage to Laurence and marry Giles, but my father wouldn’t have it; He approved of Laurence. The Penmars were still considered upstarts, you see, still nouveaux riches, and the Castallacks of Gweek were such an old and well-respected family … And my father did not approve of marriages between cousins and he had other plans for Giles, an heiress from Launceton. I would have defied my father even then, but. Giles … Defiance didn’t come easily to Giles. After it was all over I went back to Laurence at Gweek. I wanted to show Giles that I too could turn my back on someone I loved and live with someone else … God knows why Laurence took me back. I suppose he felt it was his duty. For five years we lived as husband and wife, five pregnancies, you, Nigel, two miscarriages and—but you wouldn’t remember the baby who died soon after he was born. And then at last my father died and I had the means to escape to London … I never saw Giles again after my father’s funeral, you know. Sixteen years … He never once came to London to see the way his case was being conducted in the law courts. Everything was done through his lawyers. Apart from the occasion of my father’s funeral—when he all but ignored me—I haven’t seen Giles since I left Penmarric just before the Christmas of 1868 … Nine months before you were born.”

  She stopped. There was a long pause before she said in a more normal voice, “So when I heard Raymond was dead and I knew I must write to Giles, I suddenly realized that if Giles knew—if he thought … I never told anyone, you see, because I wasn’t certain. But since you show no resemblance at all to Laurence Castallack …”

  I stood up.

  “But surely you can understand, Mark! If Giles thinks you’re his son he won’t even consider making Harry his heir! Mark, I acted in your best interests! If one day you can inherit Penmarric—”

  “Damn Penmarric.”

  “Mark!”

  “And damn you,” I said carefully and began to run. I ran through the park, raced across those smooth lawns, beneath trees tired with the summer heat, past nursemaids with perambulators and children with hoops. I ran until my breath was sobbing in my throat—and yet still she refused to let me escape. She came after me, and finally I stopped running, sank down on another bench and waited for the inevitable quarrel to begin.

  “Mark …” She was at my elbow at last, scarlet-faced, out of breath but very far from speechless. “Mark, please! Listen to me! I—”

  “No,” I said, “no, you’re going to listen to me. I’ve listened to you long enough. I’m never going to Penmarric. I’m never going to see Giles Penmar. And I never want to set eyes on you again as long as I live.”

  We quarreled for some time. She shouted, bullied, pleaded, cajoled and even cried. And then finally she used the one argument that could persuade me to change my mind.

  “But, Mark,” she said, shedding a despairing tear, “how am I ever to live at Penmarric unless Giles makes you his heir? You know it’s the dearest wish of my life to spend my declining years there! If you don’t want to live at Penmarric yourself, then of course you need not, but … please, Mark, for my sake …”

  I saw it all then as clearly as if it had been set down before me in black and white. I saw the exact pattern of my revenge and of course I must steer to achieve it. When she paused for breath at last I heard myself say shortly, “Very well, Mama, I’ll do as you wish. I do so against my will and better judgment, but if you wish to see Giles I suppose I shall have to accompany you.”

  She was overjoyed; tears of relief shone in her eyes, but if she had anticipated my revenge I doubt that she would have felt so satisfied with her hard-won and odious victory.

  2

  I was still two months short of my twenty-first birthday when I first crossed the threshold of Penmarric. It no longer seemed an enchanted castle to me, only an old house that had been remodeled with pseudo-Gothic clumsiness by my grandfather Mark Penmar. The hall was gloomy and ill-kept, the servants were slovenly and the wainscoting bore the marks of mice. We were ushered into a dreary morning room with dark wallpaper, cumbersome furniture and a threadbare Indian carpet. Windows led out onto the terrace that overlooked the sea, but the terrace was overgrown with weeds and rust had corroded the absurd cannon that had been placed long ago on the flagstones to decorate the battlements.

  It was no better than a neglected tomb, a desolate epitaph to decay.

  “It’s not as I remember it,” said my mother, very white around the lips. “Can Giles have exhausted his financial resources? Surely not! Yet how could he have let the place become like this? Giles was so gay, so fastidious! I think you will be impressed by Giles. He was a tall man with a brilliant smile and a splendid manner. He was handsome.”

  But people change. When the door opened at last I understood why he had never gone to London to champion his cause in person, why he had confined himself so rigorously to Penmarric. A nurse brought in an invalid in a wheelchair; a shriveled, hunched invalid with a lined face and lifeless eyes; I had never before seen a man so close to death yet still, improbably, alive.

  After the nurse had gone I waited for my mother to speak, but she could not. There was a long silence. He was looking at her, not at me. I think he hardly noticed that there was another person present. He looked only at her with his tired dark eyes, and after a long while he said slowly, “How well you look, Maud,” as if he felt in some remote degree surprised by her obvious health and untarnished good looks.

  “Giles,” she said. She did not say any more. She went on looking at him, but presently I saw her glance wander to the shabby surroundings shrouded by that oppressive pall of neglect.

  “I lost interest,” he said. “I lost interest long ago when I first became ill. I continued the fight for Raymond, but now that Raymond’s dead it doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes,” she said. She seemed incapable of speech. She turned as if she could not bear to face him any longer, and as she turned she saw me standing in the shadows. “Mark.”

  I stepped forward.
The man in the wheelchair looked at me without expression,

  “Giles, this is Mark.”

  He said nothing.

  “How do you do, sir,” my voice said stiffly.

  He still was silent. All his energies were channeled toward the effort of visual concentration, but although I nerved myself for his comment that I looked like a Penmar, the comment did not come.

  “I hear,” he said politely at last, a knife-edged sharpness to his voice, “that you’re a talented historian. Allow me to congratulate you.”

  “I … thank you, sir.”

  “Of course your father is a historian of some repute, is he not? How nice for him, is it not, Maud, that he has a son to follow so successfully in his footsteps.”

  My mother went crimson. I had never seen her embarrassed before; I had always assumed she was beyond embarrassment.

  “It’s many years since I’ve seen your father,” he said to me, “but I remember him well. He was one of the few honest gentlemen who have crossed the threshold of this house. A fine man. I was pleased to hear that in your tastes and in your intellectual inclinations you resemble him and not your mother’s family. I would not have cared to leave my property to a man who had inherited the worst faults of the Penmars.”

  Even my mother’s neck was now stained with her ugly blush. I would not have thought it possible for her to have remained silent for so long.

  “Well, Maud,” he said to her coldly, “since I tire easily I suggest we come straight to the point. My fortune is diminished, thanks to the enormous sums I have had to pay in legal fees, but it is still substantial. I propose to leave a third of it to my adopted children Harry and Clarissa and two-thirds to your son. The two-thirds will include the house. I see no reason why I should leave him more than two-thirds of my money since he will inherit a fortune from both you and his father one day, and in fact I consider two-thirds to be an extravagantly generous sum. The only reason why Ì am prompted to such generosity is because Harry and I are on bad terms at the moment and I don’t feel inclined to leave him a penny. I trust that such an arrangement is satisfactory to you.”