Penmarric

by Susan Howatch

  5

  When I arrived home my father was gone and there was no sign of him.

  “He saddled his horse,” said Mrs. Mannack, “and went off looking for you. Terrible worried he were. I told him there was a storm coming up but he took no notice. ‘Never mind the storm,’ he says. He looked in a terrible worried state.”

  I was stricken with horror and remorse. “But which way did he go?”

  “Said he’d ride west to St. Just. Don’t ’ee fret, Mr. Mark. Like as not he sheltered at the inn.”

  He would have ridden to Penmarric. He would have thought I had returned to Giles. I put on a coat and scarf and a pair of riding boots and ran outside into the lane that joined the road to Morvah. The rain had lessened but the wind was still strong and tried to force me backward as I pressed downhill to the church. I had just taken the turning to St. Just when I heard the faint sound of horse’s hoofs.

  “Papa!” I ran forward, my feet slipping in the mud, my teeth chattering with the cold and the damp. “Papa!” I shouted, and the wind whipped the word from my mouth and carried it far over the moors to Chûn. “Papa!”

  The horse rounded the bend in the road. The night was so dark that I could not see the face of the rider.

  “Papa—”

  “Mark.” He was beside me, dismounting from his horse. “Mark, I’ve been so worried about you. So worried.” He held me in his arms and I pressed my face against his chest as if I were still a small child long ago at Gweek. “Where did you go?” he said. “I searched for you. I went all the way to Penmarric, but the butler said you hadn’t been there. Where were you?”

  “At Chûn.”

  “In the storm?”

  “I sheltered—a nearby farm—”

  “That was sensible of you. Poor boy, you’re still shivering from head to foot! Here, take the horse and ride home as fast as you can and take a hot bath. I’ll never forgive myself if you catch your death of cold.”

  “No, I shall be all right… Isn’t there room for us both? Couldn’t we—”

  “No, I’m too tall and too heavy and the horse is too old to carry us both. Do as I say and ride back at once to the house. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I protested but he was adamant, so finally I gave in and did as I was told. As soon as I reached the house I told Mrs. Mannack to heat as much water as possible and retired to my room to peel off my wet clothes. After wrapping myself in a blanket I had just returned to the kitchen to sit by the range when my father walked in.

  “Is the water being heated?”

  “Yes sir,” said Mrs. Mannack.

  “Good. Are you still shivering, Mark?”

  “No,” I said. “No, I’m warm now.”

  “I hope to God you don’t catch pneumonia.”

  “I’m sure I won’t,” I said. “I never catch anything.”

  I was right. I did not catch pneumonia. But the next morning my father confessed he felt unwell and by noon I was already riding into Penzance to fetch a doctor.

  6

  He was ill for ten days. Most of the time he had such a high fever that he did not know me, and toward the end he did not even speak but lay unconscious upon the pillows. On the eve of the tenth day I sent Mannack to fetch the doctor again and returned to sit by the bedside. After a while I took one of his hands and held it in mine, but there was no response and he remained unconscious, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow, his face drawn with sickness and shadowed with death. I went on sitting there, went on trying not to feel wretched and frightened and alone, but at last I released his hand and moved to the window. It was a cold, bleak day. The sea was as gray as the sky, and the long eeriness of twilight was falling over the moors to cast odd shadows upon that godforsaken scenery.

  I tried to pray. “Let him speak,” I thought. “Let him just say …” The words formed yearningly in my mind. “I ask for nothing else. Please … let him speak.”

  And as if in answer to my prayers I heard the faint shifting sound of sheet grazing sheet, and I spun around once more to face him.

  His eyes were open. He looked at me, knew who I was. “Mark.”

  I thought with that searing relief when hope is restored after all hope is gone: He’s turned the corner. He’s getting better. He’ll live.

  “Mark.”

  “Yes,” I said, the words tumbling from my mouth, “yes, I’m here, Papa, I’m here.” I stumbled to the bedside, knelt down beside him, clasped his hand. “Do you want anything? What can I fetch you? What can I do?”

  He said evenly but with a great effort, “There is something I have left undone.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but don’t worry, Papa, you’re going to get better. Everything will be well. You mustn’t worry.”

  It was as if he did not hear me. His eyes, so large, so brilliantly blue, looked at me but could not seem to focus on my face. He said again, “There’s something I have left undone.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “I’ll see to it. I’ll do whatever you want. Tell me what you want me to do.”

  His lips moved. I strained my ears, leaned forward so that his mouth was against my ear.

  “Yes,” I said. “Tell me. Tell me, Papa. What is it?”

  He drew a deep breath. It was the last breath he would ever take, although I did not know it then. And as I strained my whole being to catch the sound of the words I longed so much to hear, he said very slowly, in a distinct, precise voice: “Look after Janna, Mark. See that she wants for nothing.”

  II

  Janna: 1890-1904

  Love and Hate

  Richard thought her “an incomparable woman: beautiful yet gracious, strong-willed yet kind, unassuming yet sagacious (which is a: rare combination in a woman).” Nonetheless, he could not resist insinuations about her scandalous youth: “Many knew what I wish none of us knew … let no one. say more about it, though I know it well. Hush!”

  —King John,

  W. L. WARREN

  Many criticisms have been levelled at Eleanor, both as to what she was and what she did; she has been depicted as a common whore, a woman possessed of the devil, a termagant driven by hatred …

  —Eleanor of Aquitaine,

  REGINE PERNOUD

  ONE

  Eleanor was a famous beauty … She was also notoriously flighty and said to be wanton.

  —My Life for My Sheep,

  ALFRED DUGGAN

  [Eleanor was] probably perfectly virtuous but gossip said that she had more than flirted with Geoffrey of Anjou …

  —King John,

  W. L. WARREN

  HE DIED IN OCTOBER when the roses were gone and the heather was dead on the moors. The rector of Zillan told me. I suppose it was best that I should hear the news from the rector rather than from some old gossip in Penzance, but it seemed horrible that I should hear the news from a clergyman in the course of a casual conversation. I was visiting my husband’s grave; I visited it every week to thank him in my prayers for helping me escape from St. Ives, and even after Laurence began to call at the farm I never missed my weekly visits to the churchyard at Zillan.

  The rector said, “I had a sad piece of news today. A very old friend of mine from Morvah—you have probably seen him in the congregation—such a nice fellow …”

  The rector’s eyes were watchful, as if he knew all there was to know and was telling me that dreadful news in the most compassionate way possible, and when it was over and I had understood what he had said he asked me if I would like to sit down for a while and offered to take me into the church.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, “but no. I’m quite well.”

  I was ashamed that he knew, but then the moment of shame had passed because it did not matter, nothing mattered any more, and all I could do was to stare down at my husband’s grave and watch the short grass blow in the cool autumn breeze, and I thought: Why, why, why does nothing ever go right for me, why do I have to struggle through life with luck always against me, have I not been punished enou
gh for days long since past? Yet there was no answer, just as there never is any answer to unanswerable questions, and all I was left with was the knowledge that Laurence was dead and I was alone.

  But I had always been alone. All I had ever wanted was not to be alone and not to be consumed by loneliness, all I had ever wanted was to be loved and to have security through love—how I longed for security!—but love never lasted and security was always just beyond my reach and it seemed to me then as I stumbled through the heather that I had spent all my life seeking the things that so many people took for granted and always, always without fail, I had ended my searches alone.

  “Laurence!” I cried as I stumbled home across the moors, but he was gone, and the grief was a great darkness that dimmed my eyes so that I could not see. When I reached the farm I went to my room and tried to weep, but I was beyond tears. I sat there dry-eyed in the room where we had loved each other, but when I tried to remember him I could think only of my husband and fancied I heard him laughing at me from beyond the grave.

  “Laurence!” I screamed. “Laurence!” And suddenly Griselda was there, my own dearest Griselda, who had seen me through so many hardships, and with her arms around me I wept as I had not wept since I was a child long ago in that godforsaken little fishing village called St. Ives.

  2

  I was born in St. Ives. I can still remember the one-room hovel where my earliest years were spent. Griselda lived with us then, and every day she would go down to the quay to gut fish. St. Ives was famous for its pilchards, which were cured, packed in hogsheads and exported to Italy, and for its mackerel, which were sent to London and other big cities. Griselda had worked with fish all her life, but my mother, who was her niece, held herself above such lowly employment and used to take in laundry. However, laundering is hard work and my mother was foolish enough to suppose that it is not necessary to work hard in order to improve one’s position in the world.

  Her inevitable end might have been otherwise if my father had not been the man he was, but his work as a fisherman kept him constantly away from home and he had an unfortunate inclination to spend his wages even before he reached the door of our cottage on his return from the sea. He was a Frenchman who loved to be gay and generous. He used to bring me home little toys from Brittany and, once, gingerbread from the Channel Islands. He did not start to bring home the gin until later, but once my mother had abandoned her laundering for the painted shutters of Shrimp Street he drank more and more until nobody wanted to give him a place on their fishing boats. I was nine when he died. He fell down in the gutter and was run over by a carriage. My mother did not attend his pauper’s funeral because she was ill herself by that time and died two weeks later in a workhouse.

  Women such as my mother, I learned later from the Evangelist Mission for the Redemption of Fallen Women, did not as a rule live to a ripe old age.

  But I was not like my mother. I was willing to work hard, as hard as I could to escape from the stink of fish and the stench of the crooked alleys and the reek of the yellow-toothed harbor rats. The local ladies of quality who occupied themselves with Charity to the Poor were of the opinion that I must be consigned to an orphanage, but I knew better. I washed my hair and my underclothes and my smock and borrowed some shoes and then I walked up to Menherion Castle, the grandest house in all St. Ives.

  By a most fortunate chance I found there was a vacancy for a scullery maid. Inexperienced girls with a clean, neat appearance were being considered for the post.

  “You are rather young,” said the housekeeper, who was a kind woman, “but you seem a bright little girl and if you promise to work hard …”

  Oh, how I worked! I spent nearly nine years at Menherion Castle, and during the early years I managed to work my way up from the sculleries to the stillroom until finally I became one of the housemaids. Even Lady St. Enedoc, the mistress of the house, began to notice my efficiency, and the housekeeper told me that if I did not become swollen-headed with conceit I should go far.

  At last when I was fifteen my greatest triumph came: I was appointed personal maid to the eldest daughter of the house, Miss Charlotte, who was only a year my senior, and this meant that I was able to look after all her lovely clothes and dress her hair and above all to have the opportunity of conversing with her. I had never conversed at length with a lady before and at first was very shy, but Miss Charlotte was sweet and unaffected so that I soon overcame my nervousness.

  By that time I had learned to speak correctly—or at least as correctly as a girl of my station could have hoped to speak—and, what was even more valuable, I had learned how to behave and about the code of etiquette to which the upper classes conformed. Not long after my arrival at the castle I had been befriended by the butler and he had taught me a little arithmetic and the letters of the alphabet when he had heard that my most cherished ambition was to be housekeeper one day; no servant might aspire to such a position, of course, if she could not read or write or calculate.

  Miss Charlotte also helped me to read by letting me look at her fashion magazines, which were sent to her from London, and later allowed me to borrow her novels and take them away to my room in the servants’ wing. She also let me have her dresses which she no longer chose to wear, and ironically it was because of Miss Charlotte’s generosity in this direction that my troubles began. I wore one of her old dresses to the servants’ Christmas party in the servants’ hall; I must have looked fetching in the dress, for I was never without a partner during the dancing, but afterward while I was on an errand in the main wing of the house a disaster occurred. I met the master of the house, Sir Bertram St. Enedoc, and he, inebriated with an overdose of Christmas spirit, made it clear he found the dress as charming on me as the footmen had done.

  I escaped as adroitly as I could, but I was alarmed. I had no desire at all for any nonsense of that kind. I was ambitious but not stupid, and I was quite intelligent enough to understand that the road to success in life did not lie between the sheets of Sir Bertram’s bed whenever Lady St. Enedoc chanced to be looking the other way. I wanted only to keep my position as Miss Charlotte’s maid and perhaps be housekeeper one day. I was not like my mother, who thought there was an easier road to comfort and security. Besides, I thought Sir Bertram a repulsive old man and was not in the least stimulated by the idea of succumbing to his heavy-handed attempts at seduction.

  Unfortunately Lady St. Enedoc was unable to believe her husband so easily resistible. Rumor of her husband’s weakness reached her, and soon after my eighteenth birthday I was told to pack my bags and leave.

  3

  There is nothing more impossible to fight than rumor or that dreadful phrase “no smoke without a fire.” No one believed I was innocent. Jealous tongues called me “scheming” and “fast” and “sly.” Even my friend the butler looked at me as if I were a fallen woman. Furiously angry yet too proud to stage a dramatic scene protesting my innocence, I walked away from the castle with my bead held high and told myself I was quite polished enough to obtain an excellent position elsewhere.

  But I had reckoned without Lady St. Enedoc’s malice. And I had reckoned without the fact that I had been summarily dismissed with no references.

  No one would look at me.

  At last when my savings were spent and I was at my wits’ end to know what to do, I left the lodging house above the town and went back to the crooked alleys and Griselda.

  “My, my,” she said disapprovingly, “we’re powerful high and mighty these days—far too high and mighty to take humble work. Thee’s like yurr mother the way ’ee gives yurrself airs. What’s wrong with a shop? Or one of they new hotels?”

  I recoiled from the idea. Once one has ever worked in a grand household such as Menherion Castle, one feels that working in a shop is a waste of one’s training and experience. But Griselda’s remark about my mother made me think again and swallow my pride.

  I worked for six months in a furniture shop, and then one of my employer’s cust
omers, a lawyer called William Pomeroy, having heard of my training, offered me a position as his housekeeper. I was overjoyed at the thought of returning to respectability at last, so I accepted eagerly. The house was out at Carbis Bay near St. Ives, a beautiful house overlooking the sea; I was in charge of a cook, a maid and a gardener—a small establishment after the St. Enedocs’ perhaps, but I was naturally delighted to be a housekeeper with a house of my own to supervise.

  It was a month before Mr. Pomeroy made his intentions clear, but it takes less than a month to fall in love with a house and a way of life. I was never foolish enough to suppose he would marry me, but I did believe that if we reached the agreement he suggested I would at least have a degree of security.

  I spent an entire evening weighing up the situation. Mr. Pomeroy was a widower of thirty-five and not unattractive, although I personally felt no desire to swoon whenever he entered the room. He was witty and amusing and not unkind. I felt he would treat me well. Besides, it was not as if I were giving myself in return for money; I did an honest day’s work and was paid an honest wage, for I wanted to work hard in a respectable environment, not to slip down into the gutter so that I was throwing open a pair of the painted shutters of Shrimp Street to beckon the passers-by.

  I was not like my mother. Another aspect of the situation was that I would be nineteen on my next birthday. Most girls of my class were by that time either wives or mothers or both. It would be foolish to hold back from Mr. Pomeroy on account of squeamishness, modesty was out of place in such a situation, and anyway Mr. Pomeroy had by this time probably heard the rumor that I had been Sir Bertram’s mistress and would not believe any maidenly protestations I might be foolish enough to make.