‘I don’t fear it—’ Morwen said quickly. He shook her shoulders gently.
‘Then don’t act so jealously. It doesn’t become my lady.’
‘Your lady?’
His arms held her more tightly. She could feel the strength in them. She could see the hunger in his eyes and feel the passion in every pore of him as his fingers moved to the soft swell of her breasts.
‘There’s no lady in the world can compare with mine,’ he said seductively. ‘Must I repeat it every day of my life before you believe it?’
‘Yes!’ she said joyfully, laughing back at her strong, passionate husband who was making it very plain that he desired nothing more at that moment than to possess her. He wanted her as she wanted him, with a wildness and a tenderness more beautiful than life itself.
‘Ben—’ she said weakly, ‘you just reminded me that I’m the lady of the house – and this is our drawing-room. The servants may come in at any minute—’
‘Then we had best continue this delightful interlude in the privacy of our bedroom. And if it takes all night, then dinner can wait!’
And before she had time or wish to say another word, he had lifted her in his arms and taken her towards the stairs, and begun to carry out his promise.
* * *
Jack Tremayne’s problems were now out in the open, and his parents hadn’t been as distressed as Jack had expected. If Hal and Bess were sadder than they let on because Jack was moving to lodgings in Truro, they could hardly deny the joy in the boy now, and know that the apprenticeship in the boat-building was right for him.
Since Ben’s intervention, it was all settled with great speed, and Jack became apprenticed to the Boskelly Boat Builders, Truro, and shook himself free of the clay at last. The Boskelly brothers were pleased with his enthusiasm and surprised at his natural skill and feeling for wood, and felt they had got themselves a bargain.
A few days later, Ben had business with the Killigrew Clay accountants, and went on to the works to consult with Hal and the pit captains. Morwen was feeling more content than she’d been in weeks, sure of Ben’s love, chiding herself for ever doubting him.
How could she be so foolish as to continue fretting over Jane Askhew? Morwen was Ben’s wife, and nothing could change that. Ben had chosen her out of all the world. It was a thought that continued to charm her.
That afternoon she had her pianoforte lesson with David Glass. She was a quick but impatient learner. She knew where to put her fingers on the keys, but her mind was always on the next chord, the next sequence, so that time and again the young tutor sighed inwardly, wishing that the beautiful Mrs Killigrew would realise that what had taken him years of study and practice couldn’t be taught in a day!
‘I’m tired of scales, Mr Glass!’ she exclaimed in frustration. ‘And the little tunes you’ve taught me are for babies! Teach me something more lively, won’t ’ee? Won’t you?’
She corrected herself quickly, trying very hard of late to live up to Ben’s image of the lady of Killigrew House. Her soft Cornish accent would never change, and nor would she want it to, but she could learn to speak more correctly.
David Glass sighed audibly now. He had the forlorn look of a chastised puppy when he despaired of a pupil. Mrs Killigrew wanted to run before she could walk, but he was learning that when her lovely mouth set in that obstinate line, he may as well comply with her wishes, or he’d hear nothing but crashing discords for the rest of the lesson. He rummaged in his music bag for a simplified jig and placed it in front of her.
‘I fear you may be just as frustrated when you try to play this as you appear to be with the scales, dear lady,’ he said bluntly, his round face flushed. Morwen looked at him, putting a hand on his arm and making him blush even more.
‘Mr Glass, ’tis not you I’m angry with, but myself! I do so want to play for my husband, and I fear he’s tired of hearing boring runs up and down the piano! Please don’t lose patience with me. I’m impatient enough for us both!’
He cleared his throat. He could hardly bear to see the melting plea in her lovely eyes. If he was a young man eager for a woman’s love, it would be sheer torment just to be near her once a week.
As it was, he loved the gentleness and the fire in her, the scent of her skin, the contours of her body, but she need never fear more ardent attentions from him. He guessed that she was as innocent of his inclinations as her husband was aware of them. In David Glass’s eyes, Morwen Killigrew was perfection, but as untouchable as the stars.
If she sometimes wondered about the waft of perfume from the young man’s body as he stretched out a hand to point out the notes on the music, then Morwen put it down to a thoughtfulness on the tutor’s part not to offend his pupils, and nothing more.
‘Teach me the jig, Mr Glass!’ Morwen said determinedly, and David put all other thoughts aside and concentrated on trying to get the erratic rhythm of the jig into Morwen Killigrew’s uncertain fingers.
* * *
She was being far too ambitious. She should have listened to the tutor’s words of caution. She knew it now, an hour after David had gone, and no matter how she tried, her performance still sounded more like caterwauling than a recognisable tune!
How could she be so foolish as to think she could play it? Or anything at all? In a fury, she crashed both hands over the keys, her loosened hair flying about her shoulders, her face flushed with anger at herself.
‘That’s no way to treat a sensitive instrument, Morwen!’
She heard the faintly amused voice with a sick feeling in her stomach. She swivelled round on the piano stool. She knew at once who the visitor would be.
Jane Askhew… Miss Finelady… shown into the house by the servants as an old friend. Finding her own way to the drawing-room, and hearing Morwen’s pathetic efforts to perform like a lady. Like the lady she was not, nor ever would be.
Morwen reached behind her and crashed down the lid of the instrument, knowing her face was even more fiery. She caught the flash of sympathy in the other girl’s eyes, and it shamed her even more.
She hardly noticed the small child hiding behind her mother’s fine skirts at the awful noise that had led them to the right room. All she registered was the difference between them. The cultured young lady and the clayworker’s daughter.
‘That’s a terribly hard piece to play, isn’t it?’ Jane said quickly. ‘It took me ages to master it. Perhaps I could help you a little. May I, Morwen? You’re forgetting to play sharps instead of naturals.’
Morwen hardly knew how she came to be standing, and Jane at her place on the stool. The lid was opened, and Jane’s agile fingers were trilling over the keys and transforming Morwen’s noise into the jig tune. At each difficult passage, Jane paused and pointed out where Morwen was going wrong.
Jane only meant to be helpful, but to Morwen, the gall of being overheard by this girl in her moments of temper made things a hundred times worse. She couldn’t take in anything Jane told her, and stood tautly beside her, her eyes stormy.
She heard Ben speaking to Mrs Tilley outside the room, and the next minute he was inside it, smiling delightedly.
‘Your tutor deserves a medal, darling! The improvement is nothing short of miraculous—’
Ben stopped, suddenly aware of the three people in the room, and even more aware of the tension there. Morwen, scarlet-faced and furious at his mistake. Jane, acutely embarrassed and realising what she had done.
The little girl recognised the nice man who had played with her, released her mother’s skirt and ran towards him. Ben automatically scooped her up in his arms, and with a choked sound in her throat, Morwen rushed from the room.
‘Morwen, come back!’ Ben ordered. ‘We have guests—’
‘Then you entertain ’em. They be your guests, not mine!’ she shouted back furiously, tears stinging her eyes.
The little tableau left in the drawing-room, Jane and Ben, the child in his arms, was the right one, the fitting one. In a second, the
confidence of the last four years was wiped from her mind, and she was Morwen Tremayne, the clayworker’s daughter, and nothing more. She would never be anything more.
A short while later Ben came crashing into their bedroom, angrier than Morwen had ever seen him. He kicked the door shut behind him and strode across to where she lay dry-eyed and staring up at the ceiling. She flinched as he jerked her to a sitting position by her wrists.
‘You’re hurting me!’
‘What in God’s name got into you just now? Jane felt terrible—’
‘Jane felt terrible? What about me? What about your wife? Don’t my feelings count, when your lady-friend comes mincing into the house as though she owns it, and shows me up for the ninny that I am!’
‘You’re more than a ninny if you can let your bloody insane jealousy take over any semblance of good manners. I was ashamed of you—’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ she retorted bitterly. ‘I’ll bet ’ee regretted ever marrying me when ’ee saw the two of us together. Her so fine, and me so plain-speaking. I was born to the clay and ’twas a bad day when ’ee ever dragged me out of it and thought ’ee could turn me into a lady, wasn’t it?’
She heard her own voice become more countrified by the second and couldn’t seem to stop it. It had a will of its own, as though it possessed her. Reminding her that deep down she was still what she had always been. She gasped as Ben shook her until her teeth rattled and the room spun.
‘I never thought I was married to an imbecile, but I’m beginning to think so now!’ he raged at her. ‘Don’t act the simpleton with me, Morwen. Have some respect for yourself, and others will respect you in return.’
He let her go suddenly. She fell back against the pillows where they had loved so passionately in what seemed like another life. His eyes looked her up and down contemptuously. He spoke in a clipped, contained voice.
‘We have guests in this house. They came to visit my father and pay their respects to you, the way civilised people do. I expect you to receive them and to offer them refreshment. At present Jane is sitting with my father and introducing her daughter to him. I expect to see you tidied and downstairs in half an hour, and making our visitors welcome.’
He was gone before she could throw something at him.
He couldn’t make her do this, she raged. She would leave Killigrew House before she submitted to such humiliation…
Very slowly, her fury subsided. It was what they would expect of a clayworker’s daughter, wasn’t it? That she couldn’t handle such a situation. That she would flounce and sulk and weep… exactly the way she had already done, Morwen thought in mortification.
They wouldn’t think she could rise above it all, and act as though nothing had ever happened. They would never expect her to ask Jane to play for them, and listen attentively, and enquire politely about her husband, Tom, away at the Crimea. They would never believe she had the aplomb to behave like a lady after showing her claws like an alley cat…
Her chin lifted, and her blue eyes gleamed at the challenge. She moved away from the bed and caught sight of herself in the mirror. Black flowing hair as unkempt as a horse’s mane, her face like roses in full bloom, her mouth still trembling. But she would show them. She would show them all.
Chapter Nine
It was hard to tell who was more surprised at the serene vision who graced the Killigrew drawing-room half an hour later. Morwen ordered tea and biscuits to be sent in, and presided over them as if she had been doing so all her life. Her lemon afternoon gown was immaculate, her face cooled with rose-water and fanning, her hair coiled becomingly around her head.
Cathy Askhew’s small face had shown bewilderment when the beautiful poised lady entered the room, as if wondering if this could really be the same person who had swept out like a hoyden.
Morwen’s appearance was a total triumph, and her ragged nerves gradually settled down as she saw the undoubted admiration on Jane’s face, and the distinct surprise and approval on Ben’s.
‘Have you had news of your husband lately?’ she asked Jane politely, every inch the hostess.
‘Nothing very positive,’ Jane said unhappily, and although she covered her sadness quickly, Morwen felt guiltily cheered by the realisation that Jane was missing her husband very much. ‘His letters are guarded, but the true reports of the dreadful war are what he sends home for the newspaper. He tries to shield me, but he doesn’t try to dress things up for his readers. You’ll know that from the Despatches From Abroad columns he writes, of course.’
Morwen kept the interest fixed on her face, though she rarely read the war columns under Tom Askhew’s name, or anyone else’s. She was appallingly ignorant of the progress in the Crimea, and felt an unexpected shame to know it.
‘It was never Tom’s way to gloss over bad news for his readers. He was always a blunt-speaking man—’ Ben put in.
‘Yes, he was,’ Jane said with a half-smile.
‘Please stop speaking of him in the past tense!’ Morwen said quickly. Such talk was almost an omen to her superstitious mind. ‘I’m sure you’ll be seeing him again very soon.’
‘I hope so,’ Jane said. ‘Cathy misses her father. I’d like to come here now and then, Morwen, if only to let Cathy see Ben and old Mr Killigrew. My father is awkward with children, and it’s good for her to have a younger man to tease her and play with her. I’m afraid that when Tom comes home, she’ll have forgotten how to play, how to be a child!’
Morwen felt even more guilty as Jane’s calm, frank voice went on. She clearly wanted no more from Ben than to be a substitute uncle to Cathy. She saw Ben’s eyes watching her. Did he expect her to snub Jane now?
‘Please come here whenever you wish,’ Morwen said evenly. ‘I know little about the war, but Ben is very interested in its progress. To hear more of it first-hand from your husband’s letters will interest him, I’m sure.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Morwen. And perhaps you could visit me in Truro sometime? I’d like to think we were friends. Ben tells me your brother has begun work for Boskellys. If you’re visiting him at all, come and take tea with me.’
‘Why – thank you. That would be very nice.’ The invitation took her by surprise, and Morwen mumbled for the first time since her reappearance. She took a deep breath, and spoke more warmly.
‘Thank you, Jane.’ It was also the first time she had ever spoken the other girl’s name to her face.
It was still a relief when the visit ended. By then Cathy had decided that the pretty lady wasn’t such an ogre after all and had taken a liking to Morwen, climbing on to her lap and fingering the necklace around her throat.
And Morwen had found it bittersweet to be holding Jane Askhew’s daughter, feeling her warm little body pressed close to hers and seeing the trusting eyes so like her mother’s. She had disliked this child before even seeing her, she remembered with a stab of guilt. But she couldn’t dislike her any more. Cathy was a little charmer, and Morwen could only yearn that one day she too would be blessed to have such a child…
Ben took his wife in his arms when the Carrick family carriage had taken the visitors back to Truro. Morwen waited almost fearfully for what he had to say. Were they to have an inquest on the events of the afternoon?
‘You constantly surprise me, Morwen Killigrew,’ Ben said softly. ‘But then, you always did, which was one of the things that made me love you in the first place.’
‘Only one of the things?’ she said huskily. Ben gave a low laugh.
‘Oh, there are a few more,’ he commented. ‘Some of them madden me, and some of them fill me with such pride I wonder just how so much intelligence can be closeted in that beautiful head.’
Her mouth curved into a smile. Her heart lifted.
‘Intelligence? I thought I was an imbecile—’
‘You shouldn’t believe everything you hear. I think we’ll forget a few of today’s happenings, and begin again from right this minute. Agreed?’
‘Agreed!’ Mo
rwen said with vast relief.
Even though she had sunk her boats. She had held out the hand of friendship to Jane Askhew, because she had had no other choice. She had invited her here, and received invitations in return, and she still wasn’t sure how it had all come about.
But it was done, and there was no undoing it without causing a bigger rift between her and Ben. For the moment the rift was healed, and Morwen had no wish to breach it again. And the visits didn’t have to begin at once. They could be delayed on any number of reasons…
* * *
It seemed that Jane didn’t feel the same way. In the next few weeks she called at Killigrew House three times, and Morwen was forced to smile and entertain, and wonder at the eagerness with which Ben greeted her, wanting news about Tom, and of the ships docking at Falmouth spilling out their wounded with even more lurid tales of the Crimea to be related in The Informer, and tossing Cathy into the air to her squeals of delight.
Morwen’s serenity didn’t last. She was irritated by Ben’s change of manner whenever Cathy was running about the house, and ached to fill the house with their own children, not someone else’s. Ben seemed so attached to the child…
She snapped at him when he suggested a picnic by the sea the next time Jane came.
‘I’m sick of making arrangements for Jane and her daughter. When did we last take a picnic to the sea? It would be nice for the two of us to go there—’
‘Very well. Ask Cook to fill a basket and we’ll go,’ Ben said coolly. ‘When do you suggest? Today? Tomorrow? We have every day at our disposal, Morwen. I’m your puppy-dog, to be called to heel whenever you wish.’
‘Now you’re being ridiculous—’
‘And you’re showing the green of your eyes again. Do you realise how much time Jane spends with Father when she comes here? Hours spent with a sick old man, Morwen. I just thought it would be nice to give her and Cathy a little treat in return for her kindness in sitting and reading to him.’
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