White Rivers

by White Rivers (retail) (epub)

  ‘There’s another way round it. You don’t know these clayers as well as I do. They’d sell their souls for a few extra coppers jingling in their pockets.’

  Skye clamped her lips together before she exploded with rage. His father, Walter, had loved the clay with a passion, and he’d also loved and respected the men who worked it. The clayworkers were stalwart, loyal men, who had served Killigrew Clay well for decades. Theo had little or no understanding of people’s feelings and certainly no compassion, confirmed in his next statement.

  ‘So we pay the wench to go away, and put a bit of money her father’s way to persuade him to calm the rest of the hotheads down until the orders are completed, and then we send the Jerries back. Nobody loses face then. The wench could turn out to be carrying a by-blow, of course, but that needn’t be a problem. I know a quack who’d deal with that.’

  Skye felt murderous towards him then. To carelessly scheme to rid a young girl of the possible child she was carrying, was evil as well as severely against the law. Only someone with the black heart of a devil could concoct such a plan.

  At the same moment, she felt a stab of fear as Theo’s words brought home to her something she hadn’t even considered before. She too could be carrying a child, a child that wasn’t – couldn’t be – her husband’s. The shock of it almost numbed her brain.

  ‘I see that you ain’t averse to the idea,’ Theo went on more smoothly when she said nothing. ‘I’ll set things in motion, then, shall I?’

  Skye let out her breath, feeling as if she had been holding it forever. Her voice shook with rage. ‘I’d never agree to it. It’s wicked. Tell me the name of the girl and I’ll go and talk to her.’

  ‘And what the hell good is that going to do? I tell you, if this ain’t nipped in the bud, we’re in for big trouble.’

  ‘I insist that you let me see what I can do, Theo. I’ll go and see the family tomorrow. Where do they live?’

  He glowered at her, his face dark with fury. ‘In one of the cottages overlooking Clay One.’

  ‘You mean where our parents and grandparents once lived?’

  She knew this would infuriate him. Theo never liked to be reminded that his family had such humble beginnings, but it seemed eerily ironic to Skye that many of the problems the Tremaynes and Killigrews had faced over the years began and ended in the same place, in a never-ending circle.

  ‘The same,’ he snapped. ‘And it’s Roland Dewy’s daughter who’s the troublemaker, name of Alice. But you’ll do no good, unless you take a pay-off with you. It’s the only thing these yokels understand.’

  ‘Get out, Theo. I’ll let you know the result of my meeting with Mr Dewy and his family when I’m ready to do so,’ Skye said deliberately, giving the clayworkers all the dignity they deserved.

  ‘Well, don’t leave it too long with your bloody do-gooding,’ was Theo’s parting shot. ‘I won’t be responsible for any trouble brewing, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  Skye wilted after he had gone. It was terrifying how quickly life changed. This morning she had lain blissfully in her lover’s arms, and already it seemed like a lifetime ago. Since then she had met with her husband’s accusations and her cousin’s vile, bruising insults. And now she had undertaken to do what she could with the Dewy family, while wrestling with the fact that Alice Dewy’s problem could be her own…

  She suppressed her panic with great difficulty. There was no use worrying over something that may not happen. The more urgent thing was to see if she could placate the Dewy family, and persuade Alice not to see the young German again.

  She felt a swift sympathy for her. If the girl was as taken up with the boy as Theo so unpleasantly described, and as passionate a clayer’s daughter as most of them were, then she knew she had a pretty hopeless task ahead of her.

  By now, she felt completely wrung out. It had been an exhausting day, from the long train journey home and saying goodbye to the love of her life, to Philip’s bad temper, and then Theo’s boorishness. She had borne the brunt of it all, and she wished desperately that she could bury her head in the sand like an ostrich and not have to contend with any of it.

  To make matters worse, Philip didn’t come home all evening, and she spent frustrated hours wondering whether or not to sit up for him. To risk his wrath and get more tongue-pie as her mother used to call it, or to be ready with sympathy and understanding if he was in one of his rare contrite moods…

  In the end she went to bed, remembering he had said he wouldn’t disturb her and hoping he meant it. She tried to make her mind a total blank. She wouldn’t think about tomorrow, and she couldn’t bear to think of yesterday…

  * * *

  Skye was woken abruptly by the sound of rapid hammering on her bedroom door, and by the housekeeper’s voice calling her name urgently. It was still very dark outside, with only a pale moon and a sprinkling of silvery stars to lighten the night sky. It was still a long way from morning.

  In an effort to gather her senses, she realised she thought she had been hearing other voices in her head, but she had simply thought she was dreaming. Now she knew that she was not, and she grabbed her dressing-gown and wrapped it tightly around her, filled with dread as she opened her bedroom door.

  ‘What is it, Mrs Arden?’ she said thickly.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Norwood, ma’am,’ the housekeeper gasped, avoiding her eyes as much as possible. ‘There’s two constables downstairs, and they’ve come wi’ such terrible news. I don’t rightly know how to tell ’ee…’

  Skye pushed past her, and hurried down the stairs to where the two young constables were standing awkwardly. She felt almost sorry for them, knowing they could never be the bearers of good news in the middle of the night. And knowing exactly what they had come to tell her. It was more than a sixth sense. It was an inevitability.

  ‘It’s my husband, isn’t it?’ she said quietly.

  ‘I’m afraid it is, ma’am,’ the first one said. ‘There’s been a terrible accident, and the poor man stood no chance, no chance at all.’

  ‘Would ’ee care to sit down, ma’am? And maybe the housekeeper could fetch ’ee some brandy,’ suggested the other.

  ‘I’ll do it right away,’ Mrs Arden said, standing close behind her and clearly glad of some direction now. ‘The poor soul will be needin’ her comfort, after hearing such a shock.’

  ‘I don’t need it,’ Skye snapped. Were they all fools? She didn’t need anything, except to be told that it wasn’t true.

  ‘Please take the drink, ma’am,’ the first constable urged uneasily. ‘’Tis quite often that the shock don’t properly register at once, see?’

  ‘I see,’ she answered, obliging him and leading the way to the drawing-room. What happened now? she wondered. Did she have to go and identify the – the – she suddenly flinched, as the word refused to come into her head.

  ‘Please tell me exactly what happened,’ she said instead, her voice a mite shriller than before.

  One of the young constables cleared his throat. ‘It seems that Mr Norwood was taking a drive up on the moors and lost control of the car. Do you know if he’d been drinking, ma’am?’ he asked. ‘You understand that we have to ask these questions, and I don’t mean to upset you unduly.’

  How much more upset could she be, than hearing that her husband was dead? But she tried to answer the question. ‘He may have been drinking. I’m not sure. I had only just returned home from a visit to Bristol when he left the house. I don’t know where he went from here.’

  She saw them glance at one another and pushed down the rising hysteria. Maybe she should say he’d probably gone off like her cousin Theo did, to visit some floosie or other… But that wasn’t Philip’s style, any more than killing himself was. She couldn’t bear the thought of that. Skye smothered a sob and drank down the brandy Mrs Arden handed her, at a single stinging gulp.

  ‘Please go on,’ she managed, after a moment or two.

  ‘Well, ma’am, Mr Norwood’s car crash
ed into the old standing stone up on the moors near the clayworks. The one they call the Larnie Stone. It has a strange hole in the middle where you can get a glimpse of the sea, and ’tis meant to have magical powers, some say, but you may not have heard of it, not being from these parts…’ His voice trailed away uncertainly as the woman in front of him began to laugh hysterically now.

  Oh, she’d heard of it all right. Wasn’t that where the old witchwoman once told her that Morwen Tremayne and Celia Penry had taken a potion to see the faces of their true loves? The place where Celia had been raped by Ben Killigrew’s cousin, and then the two of them had committed the ultimate sin in getting rid of the child before Celia drowned herself with the shame of it all. Oh yes, Skye knew of the Larnie Stone all right…

  It was said that shock affected folk in different ways, but the constables had never seen anything like this before, and they didn’t care to see it now. ’Twasn’t right…

  ‘You two be on your way now, and I’ll see to her,’ Skye heard Mrs Arden say, as calmly as if she was bidding her sons goodbye. ‘Come back tomorrow and we’ll sort things out then when she’s got some of her family around her.’

  And then Skye heard no more as the motherly arms of the housekeeper went around her as she lost control of her senses and fainted for the second time in two days.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The doctor gave orders for Skye to be sedated and allowed to recover from the shock of her husband’s death in her own time. For three days the house was hushed, as if everyone needed to walk around on tiptoes for fear of disturbing Mrs Norwood. But her nerves were so on edge that no amount of sedation made her completely unaware of what was happening.

  As if any of it made it any better. As if the muted voices took away one iota of the sheer horror of knowing that after a blistering argument, her husband had driven off in a wild rage and killed himself. As if there was any way of blotting out the fact that history had yet another hideous way of repeating itself.

  Reminding her that the Larnie Stone had played an important part in her family’s past, and reviving a long-forgotten garbled memory that Charlotte had once gossiped to her. How much of it was true, or how much had been embroidered over time, Skye never knew. But part of Morwen’s turbulent and romantic past had included a bittersweet affair that had begun when she had travelled to London with Ran Wainwright on a business matter, and shortly afterwards Ben Killigrew had tragically died.

  Admittedly, Ben Killigrew had already been ill and had died from a heart attack, Charlotte had said… but the circumstantial similarities constantly tormented Skye. She too had been away from home on a business matter that had developed into a romantic liaison and then her husband had died. And even the doctor’s assurance that it hadn’t happened from any act of self-destruction, but that the final bursting of the horror inside Philip’s head had caused the car to skid and crash… even that couldn’t quench the overpowering sense of guilt in her mind.

  It was a similarity too poignant to face, yet too terrible to ignore. For three days she simply closed herself off from everything, her senses dulled with the prescribed drugs, which did no more than put off the grieving time.

  It was her children who finally drew her out of her abject misery, as Wenna clung to her and begged to know when their father was coming home.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Celia said, brash with her own anger and pain. ‘You know Mrs Arden told us so and that we shouldn’t talk about it because it will upset our mother.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t we talk about it?’ Wenna wept. ‘I want my Daddy, and Oliver cries every night because he can’t see him.’

  ‘He’s just a crybaby and so are you,’ Celia declared rudely.

  ‘I’m not,’ Wenna said fearfully. ‘Mommy went away and she came home, so why can’t Daddy?’

  Listening to them, Skye dragged herself from the depths of her own guilt, recognising the fear in Wenna’s young voice and following her reasoning. She had been lying on her bed, resisting the need to return to reality, but now she opened her arms to the little girls. Wenna rushed into them, while Celia stood sullenly by, finding it too difficult to show the emotion she held tight inside, and burning up with the sense of betrayal that her father had left her.

  Her father’s daughter to the limit, thought Skye.

  ‘Listen to me, my darlings,’ she said huskily. ‘It’s true that your daddy is dead, but we can talk about him whenever you want to. We may not be able to see him any more, but as long as we still talk about him and think about him, he’ll always be alive in our hearts.’

  As she went on in the same controlled manner, Wenna continued to snuffle against her mother’s shoulder, but she was soft and pliant and ready to take in everything Skye told her. Celia stood stiffly, unable to accept anything but the inescapable fact that Philip was dead.

  When her pet rabbit died, it was Philip himself who had told her in his clinical way that once something was dead, it was dead, and those that were left had to go on as best they could. And she was having none of this nonsense about her father still being in their hearts.

  After a few minutes she flounced out of the room, and left the other two together.

  ‘You won’t go away and leave us again, will you, Mommy?’ Wenna whispered fearfully.

  ‘Of course not. We’re all going to look after each other, the way Daddy would want us to.’

  She shivered as she spoke, sensing that she might have more of a problem with Celia than the other two. Wenna was so trusting, and Oliver was too young to really understand what was happening; but Celia had an old head on her shoulders, questioning everything, and totally resentful of the fact that Philip had died.

  There was a hardness in Celia that Skye hadn’t even realised before now. It would stand her in good stead on many occasions, but right now she seemed determined not to shed a single tear for her father. And that wasn’t healthy.

  ‘When are you coming downstairs, Mommy?’ Wenna said with a new tremor in her voice as Skye leaned back against the pillows for a moment with her eyes closed.

  ‘Right now, darling,’ Skye answered at once.

  She discovered how wobbly her legs were as soon as she put her feet to the ground, but she knew this had to be done. It was the first step back to normality, and she couldn’t let others do the things that were her responsibility. She knew that Charlotte had been here, and that she and Theo and Betsy had already organised the burial, which was only four days away now. How could the widow hide herself away as if none of this had anything to do with her?

  Skye flinched as the word came into her mind. Widows were very old ladies wearing black who were only a step away from death themselves… and the minute she thought it, she knew it was far from the truth. Since the Great War, there were many young widows in the parish, and many children who would never know their fathers. And here was she, hiding behind her own guilt and grief, when they had dealt with it all so stoically and bravely.

  She walked unsteadily downstairs, holding her daughter’s hand, and when Mrs Arden saw her, there was more than a hint of relief in her eyes.

  ‘’Tis good to see you, ma’am. For a while we feared…’ Her voice trailed away with embarrassment, and Skye finished the sentence for her.

  ‘For my sanity, I suspect, Mrs Arden.’

  ‘Ah well, when a lovely young woman such as yourself loses her man, ’tis a tragedy that would turn anyone’s mind. But you’m strong, the way your family’s always been strong.’

  And besides, now that I’m no longer tied in marriage, I can always turn to my lover to cheer me up…

  Skye caught her breath as the wicked thought surged into her mind. It was a thought she didn’t want, and wouldn’t entertain. In fact, the last person she wanted to see right now was Nick Pengelly. It would only compound her feelings of guilt, and nor could she bear to hear the platitudes that everyone made at such a time, especially from him. It would simply twist the knife in her heart.

  ‘Ever so many fol
k have sent their condolences, ma’am,’ Mrs Arden said, following her and Wenna into the drawing-room. ‘There’s flowers and letters and cards come for you too.’

  ‘I see them,’ Skye murmured, her eyes filling at the kindness of people. The floral scent in the room was almost cloying. She wished the housekeeper would take them all away, but it would be too churlish and ungrateful to say so, and she couldn’t bear to read all the cards and letters until later.

  ‘That Mr Pengelly has telephoned half a dozen times,’ the housekeeper went on. ‘He wanted to see you, but I put him off. I hope I did the right thing. The doctor said you were to stay in bed until you felt the need to get up yourself and not to see any visitors you didn’t want.’

  ‘You did quite right,’ Skye mumbled, ignoring the way her heart had jumped at the mention of his name. And hating herself for the feeling.

  ‘Besides, ’twouldn’t have been right to show him into your bedroom, even if ’twere on business,’ Mrs Arden went on innocently.

  But he had been there before. In her bedroom, in her bed and in her heart. He knew every part of her more intimately than any man had ever done… was more inventive a lover than Philip had ever been…

  ‘Mr Theo said you’ll have to see un sometime, o’ course,’ Mrs Arden went on uneasily, seeing how Skye’s gaze had become fixed. ‘There’s legal things and all to see to, but there’s plenty of time for that after – well, after.’

  ‘After the funeral. Yes, I do know the word, Mrs Arden. And I must do something about it.’

  ‘I told you ’tis all taken care of, ma’am. And Mrs Vera Pengelly has already arranged to take care of all the children on the day – yours and Mr Theo’s.’

  It was like listening to the funeral arrangements of a stranger. Others had done everything necessary, and she was being gently put aside as if it had nothing to do with her, like an anonymous extra character in a drama. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair to Philip to back away from giving him his final send-off in the way the generous-hearted Cornish folk referred to it.