A Cornish Betrothal

by Nicola Pryce

  Constance rushed to her side, pouring amber liquid into a glass from a crystal decanter. ‘Mama, here, have a sip of mead . . .’

  ‘He is alive,’ Lady Melville repeated. ‘And he will come home . . . I just hope I live long enough to see him.’ She coughed again, starting to retch, gasping for breath as if she were drowning.

  Constance rang a brass bell. ‘We need to get you back to bed . . . the shock’s too great.’ She held up the glass again. ‘Mama, please have some more mead, it soothes your cough.’

  The door opened and an equally frail woman rushed to Lady Melville’s side. ‘Lady Melville, let me help you . . . you’re not strong enough to be up.’ There was panic in her glance, and I recognized her at once: Mrs Alston, Lady Melville’s adored housekeeper.

  ‘I’m so sorry – it’s my fault. Lady Melville’s had a shock – I had no idea she was quite so frail.’

  Lady Melville’s bony fingers clutched Mrs Alston’s wrist. ‘He’s alive,’ she whispered. ‘He’s coming back. Dearest, dearest Edmund is coming home.’

  Mrs Alston’s jaw dropped. She knelt by the chair. ‘How can that be? Mr Edmund’s coming home?’

  Tears streamed down her cheeks and I stared into her incredulous eyes. She adored Edmund: she had been his wet nurse, then his nursemaid, staying with Lady Melville as her loyal housekeeper.

  ‘He lived that day, he didn’t die. He escaped. We don’t know any details except he was a prisoner and he escaped . . . and that eighteen months ago he was in a convent in Brazil. But he was taken from there to serve on a Portuguese vessel. He was very weak, Mrs Alston.’

  ‘But he was alive.’ There was such hope in her eyes, such love, and I had to look away, staring out of the window as they helped Lady Melville back to bed.

  The room was unfamiliar to me. Constance and her mother must have moved into the servants’ quarters to be nearer the kitchens. It was small, cramped, but at least it was warm. A heavy dresser crowded against the wall, a cluttered table crammed beneath the small window. Two clocks were ticking loudly, an assortment of vials and bottles standing neatly on a silver tray. A bottle caught my attention and I hurried over to it, holding it up to the light.

  The thick brown glass obscured the contents and I pulled the cork. It was half-empty, a full bottle next to it, and my unease spiralled. I read the label.

  J. Reynold, chemist and druggist from Richmond, London, wishes to inform the nobility, gentry and public that all medicines, elixirs and lozenges are prepared and sold on the same terms as in London, under the supervision of Dr Lovelace, renowned physician of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London.

  I turned the bottle round, my hands shaking – Dr Lovelace’s Cough Elixir. Two spoonfuls to be taken three times a day. Behind me, the drapes of the bed drew open and Constance came to my side. ‘What’s wrong, Amelia?’

  I held up the bottle. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘Mrs Alston bought it from an itinerant doctor. He was on his way to Truro from Bodmin. Amelia, you’re frightening me – don’t look like that.’

  ‘Connie, this is as good as poison.’ Fear made me sound too harsh, but I could not help it.

  ‘He was a doctor . . . he knew exactly what Mama needed.’ She looked terrified and I knew I had spoken too fiercely.

  ‘There are imposters out there,’ I whispered. ‘They are unscrupulous fraudsters who prey on the vulnerable – they tell you what you want to hear . . . but it’s all lies. They sell their miracle cures at exorbitant prices and they do such harm. Has Lady Melville lost any teeth?’

  ‘No . . . Oh, Amelia . . . she’s been very sick.’

  I took Lady Melville’s hand, putting her nails to the light. That faint blue tinge. ‘Lady Melville, please don’t mind me asking this, but have you had stomach cramps, pain and vomiting?’ She nodded and I turned to Mrs Alston. ‘Mrs Alston, when did you buy this?’

  Her knuckles turned white as she gripped her skirt. ‘Just the other day. He came to the door . . . he was on his way to Truro . . . he knocked on the door and asked if anyone would benefit from his medicines. He said the dampness of the dell would bring on rheumatism and coughs. He was very pleasant . . . he was so knowledgeable. He was a doctor from London, bringing his remedies to the country. He said country folk needed the same opportunity as those in London.’

  I tucked Lady Melville’s hand under her counterpane and forced a smile. ‘From now on, I beg you – no more of this. You’re to take beef broth three times a day . . . You’re to have four glasses of port a day and spinach and buttered eggs. I want you to drink as much beer as you can manage. Have you hyssop in the garden? Can you make an infusion?’

  Mrs Alston nodded. She looked as pale as Lady Melville, the same dark patches under her eyes, and I took her hand, examining her fingernails. I held her chin to the light, catching her waxen complexion. ‘What are you taking, Mrs Alston?’

  Her lips puckered, terror in her eyes. ‘Rheumatic Lozenges and Cordial Balm of Gilead. He said it would cure my aches. He was a doctor . . . a real doctor.’

  ‘No, Mrs Alston,’ I said, gathering up every vial and bottle I could see, ‘he’s a horse doctor, a quack, and he’s doing untold harm. All this must go . . . every drop.’ I opened each bottle, emptying everything on to the fire, throwing the glass bottles into the flames. ‘He’s undermining the medical profession – making a mockery of real doctors.’

  Making a mockery of the man I loved.

  Neither of us had any appetite, staring at the plate of cold ham with no thought of eating it. The door to the kitchen was ajar and we sat listening to the sound of clattering and frantic chopping, anxious voices asking whether there were potatoes in the storeroom. We were in what I knew to be the servants’ hall.

  ‘How long have you lived like this?’ I whispered.

  ‘A year, maybe more – the servants started to leave so we closed up the east wing. Mama lost interest in everything – she seemed to just give up. She’s been hurrying my marriage, but you’ve brought us such hope. She will be all right, won’t she? Amelia, don’t look like that. She will live, won’t she?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure she will – given plenty of good food and fresh air. I’ll send you some balm for her lips . . . and rub it on to her elbows and heels to stop them from getting sore. These horse doctors are a huge concern. Dr Nankivell puts posters up all over Truro but most people who buy the remedies can’t read. I’m sorry, I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Neither am I. Come, I’ve got something I want to give you . . . something I should have given you before. I was going to bring it to you for Christmas, but I couldn’t leave Mama . . . We don’t keep the coach horses any more and I had no chaperone.’

  ‘I’m the one at fault, Connie. I should have come long before now . . . I’m so sorry. I’ve been very preoccupied with the new infirmary. I’ve been asked to plan their physic garden and supply the plants from Trenwyn . . . it keeps me very busy.’

  ‘It’s good to keep busy.’ She sounded wistful, leading me through a small door and up a set of steep steps that curled in a spiral. ‘Who’s that doctor your family admire so much? The one whose mother married Silas Lilly?’

  I could hardly say his name. ‘Dr Bohenna.’

  ‘Will you ask him to visit Mama? Please, Amelia, do your best to persuade him. I’ll find the money. Please, ask him to come.’

  At the end of a narrow passage she opened a small door, and as I stepped into the minstrels’ gallery I felt a sudden, terrible dizziness. I had to stop and breathe. It was as if Edmund was in the room. I could feel him behind me, just as he had stood those eight years before, both of us tiptoeing forward, eavesdropping through the grilles on our parents as they discussed our marriage in the great hall below. Edmund had sounded so sure: Our parents will agree, I know they will. It’s a good match . . . our families have known each other for generations – it’s just a matter of sorting out the details.

  He had taken my hand and kissed it softly, placing it against
his heart. Father’s going to insist I go to London and I can’t disobey. I have to go – but the morning of my twenty-first birthday, I shall come straight back to Cornwall and marry you – so you better be ready.

  Everything was flooding back as if it were yesterday. My parents had agreed to our engagement but I knew they thought Edmund too young – too impressionable, Papa had said. The icy air was making me shiver, like the passing of a ghost.

  Constance walked swiftly ahead along the heavily beamed landing, the dust sheets draping like shrouds on the furniture around us. She opened the shutters and light filtered onto the portraits beside me. Suddenly they were there – Edmund and Francis staring back at me from their gilded frames. What were they, fifteen, sixteen? Both so alike with their dark black hair curling about their shoulders. Both were wearing fine silk jackets and matching breeches, both the same height and stature, as if one was the mirror of the other. The only difference being that Edmund was holding a violin and Francis a lute – the youths I had known all my life, friends of my brother, Frederick: all of us laughing, growing up together, spending the summer of 1789 without a worry in the world.

  The youth I had loved so well. I looked deep into Edmund’s eyes and my heart lurched. I had forgotten the gentleness of his smile, the kind, almost lost look in his eyes. His cousin Francis’s eyes looked as sharp as they had always been, following me across the room as he had always done, but Edmund’s eyes looked vulnerable, even lonely. Was that what Father had meant when he called him impressionable?

  ‘Come, Amelia.’ Constance took my hand, pulling me along the dusty wooden corridor with its heavy oak doors in their pointed arches. She opened the end door and a musty dampness stung my nostrils. ‘This is Edmund’s room,’ she whispered. ‘Wait and I’ll open the shutters – we should have brought a lamp.’

  Icy cold penetrated my cloak. Further dust sheets hung from the furniture like ghosts watching us and I forced myself to breathe. Edmund’s face had become suddenly so clear – as if he was watching me looking at his possessions. I could feel his presence in the room and intense pain flooded through me as cruelly as before. Every sore I thought healed seemed to be ripping open. It was his vulnerability I remembered, his gentleness, as if the world was too baffling a place for him and he needed my strength.

  Constance pulled back the curtains and diffuse light flooded the room; the brocade drapes hanging round the huge oak bed turned deep burgundy, the tapestries on the walls merging pink and blue. But the mustiness remained, the smell of damp, unbreathed air. Constance pointed to a small ebony box lying on the dust-sheeted table.

  ‘This is what I want to show you. It was sent by the Admiralty – it contains Edmund’s possessions from the ship.’

  A knot tightened round my heart. ‘Is that all there is . . . from his ship? So very little?’

  She nodded. ‘So very little. I haven’t told Mama yet. There’s a letter from the Admiralty explaining that they don’t have room aboard ship for the possessions of those that die – they just keep their personal belongings. Apparently, they hold an auction and send the money back to the families. There’s a list of what was in the trunk and how much everything went for – his Bible was in there, but I have it by my bed. I don’t understand why there’s so little on the list.’ She walked slowly to the box and turned the key.

  So little on the list. My heart wrenched. ‘Edmund wrote to me . . . he said his possessions were going missing.’

  ‘Missing?’

  ‘Yes . . . from his trunk. But he was advised to say nothing. Oh Connie, Edmund would have been an easy target for malevolence of any sort. He was desperate to be accepted . . . but the truth is . . . some of the men on the ship made his life hell.’ Tears pooled in my eyes. ‘He should never have joined the navy . . . he wasn’t strong enough to overcome any bullying.’

  Inside the box a huge shell glinted in the half-light and I lifted it out, taking it to the window. It was the most beautiful shell I had ever seen, and tears blurred my eyes, making it hard to read the inscription: For where thou art, there is the world itself, and where thou are not, desolation. ‘Oh, Connie!’

  Her arms slipped round me. ‘Don’t cry, Amelia . . . please don’t cry. I’m sure he’s coming back. He’ll come back, and everything will be how it should be.’ Her lips quivered, and I held her to me, the pain so intense I thought my heart had burst. ‘Your letters to him are in there – and the miniature you sent him. Take the box home with you. Here . . . take it. It’s not too heavy.’

  I could not speak, but placed the huge shell back inside the casket.

  ‘Amelia,’ Connie whispered, ‘there’s something else I want to show you – in Francis’s room.’

  Chapter Nine

  We wound carefully up another set of stone steps leading to a single room at the top of the ancient Tudor turret, opening the iron-studded door to complete darkness. Constance unbarred the shutters to yet another set of dust sheets hanging like phantoms around us. Our breath filled the air as icy cold took hold.

  ‘Francis could have had a room downstairs but he chose this freezing garret. Edmund said it was because Francis wanted to remind everyone he wasn’t really family – that he was an outsider.’ Her mouth hardened, the same bitterness I had detected earlier entering her tone. ‘Which I think is rather hurtful, considering we always treated him as family.’

  She shut the door, taking my hand, leading me across the unpolished floorboards to pull off a dust sheet. ‘This is his trunk – it contains all Francis’s belongings but Mama wants nothing to do with it. She ordered it up here and locked away the key. She refused to look inside . . . but while she’s been so ill, I had the chance to take the key and I’ve kept it.’ Her mouth clamped tight.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Mama keeps everything from me – everything.’ She reached for a set of keys hanging from her waist and turned the lock. ‘I have to tell you something – Father went bankrupt, Amelia, that’s why we live so frugally. His business concerns were a shambolic mess. The estate is mortgaged and the London house sold to pay the most pressing of his creditors. Father was a gambler and a womanizer. He was a fraudster and Francis was no better.’ She looked up. ‘You don’t seem shocked?’

  I shook my head. ‘Edmund told me in his letters. I assumed you knew.’

  She reached into the large trunk, pulling out a bundle of papers. ‘And I have to tell you something else . . . it’s like a flame burning inside me. The truth is, Francis wasn’t set upon by thieves on the way back from Plymouth . . . he was murdered when he was in Plymouth Dock . . . brutally murdered by the husband of a woman he’d taken for a . . . well, you know what I mean.’ She handed me a pile of papers. ‘I’m sorry . . . I shouldn’t have just blurted it out like that. I should have warned you. I can see you’re shocked. I was shocked too – I still am.’

  I held the folded newspaper to the window, reading it carefully. ‘It’s the account of the trial – of the two men accused of his murder. The woman’s husband and brother were convicted and hanged? Connie, what was Francis thinking, going after a married woman?’

  ‘Exactly!’

  I glanced back at the newspaper. ‘In Plymouth Dock as well, not on the way back to London?’

  Constance’s eyes turned to steel, her voice equally hard. ‘According to the landlord of the tavern, Francis extended his stay. He had booked in for a further two nights.’

  I felt my cheeks redden. ‘Connie, I’m shocked, but I can’t say I’m surprised. Edmund wrote to me about Francis and his wild living. He said he was expecting to share a farewell breakfast with him before he boarded his ship, but Francis didn’t turn up. Edmund waited on the quayside for almost two hours and Francis nearly didn’t come. He was only just in time to see him off. Obviously he’d found more enjoyable company.’

  ‘You knew he was so unprincipled?’

  ‘Yes, I knew both your father and Francis were unprincipled. And I knew about your father’s financial irregularities. In f
act, I knew about their womanizing, but this is quite horrible – the woman’s husband and brother beat Francis to death?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes . . . like I once watched Francis beat a dog to death.’

  I stared back in horror. ‘No . . . surely not?’

  ‘As God is my witness. I was too late to save the poor thing. I took him to the grooms who released him from his pain. But Francis would have left him to suffer.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘Yes, it was. But what’s more terrible is the lack of compassion I feel for Francis – when I read that report all I could see was the look in that poor dog’s eyes.’

  A shiver ran down my spine. She had witnessed what I had always felt – a cruelty in Francis that seemed to bring him pleasure. The newspaper shook in my hand.

  ‘The murder happened just behind their house – in a notorious alley.’ I held it to the light of the window. ‘There were signs of a fight . . . then they dragged him down the lane and left him dangling over a pigpen. The pigs were destined for loading and made short work of him. They found what was left of Francis’s body but he’d been . . . well . . . I don’t need to read this out. The innkeeper identified him by his jacket and boots . . .’

  She reached for another cutting. ‘Both men denied it, but the innkeeper gave solid evidence against them. He saw Francis leave with the woman and swore, on oath, that Francis had booked in for another two nights. The husband and brother worked the night shift in the forge, but they must have come back unexpectedly. The pigpen was just behind their house. Here’s his testimony.’

  I read it aloud. ‘Susan Drew was employed to wait on tables. Her work was efficient, and he had no complaints. He says . . . I saw Francis Bainbridge touch her in an inappropriate manner and she did not stop him or act displeased. He was waiting for her when her work finished, and it is my belief that everyone in the inn knew exactly what was intended by the two of them . . .’