Polsinney Harbour: A heartwarming family saga set in Victorian era Cornwall

by Mary E. Pearce

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes. It’s something I said.’

  In a few words Maggie explained about her suggestion concerning the boat. Brice listened. He understood. But it did nothing to soften his mood.

  ‘You certainly made a mistake there. What made you think that Uncle Gus would ever do such a thing? The way he feels about the boat, he’d just as soon give his soul, and most seamen would feel the same.’

  ‘I know! I know!’ Maggie said. ‘And oh, how I wish I had thought more clearly before speaking about it to him! But anyway, it’s my fault, as you see. It isn’t anything you’ve said or done and I wanted you to know that.’

  Where they stood, on the narrow road that wound its way steeply up from the harbour and skirted the edge of the rising cliff, they were some half mile out of the town and it lay below them, grey in the wind, an irregular jumble of slate roofs and smoking chimneys, the houses and the narrow streets all sunk in their Sunday afternoon stillness and quiet.

  But Polsinney, even on the Sabbath, was never completely deserted and down on the far side of the harbour, overlooking the fish-quay, a number of fishermen leant on the rail, gossiping and smoking their pipes and watching the luggers that curtseyed and bobbed, moored close together in the harbour pool. Outside the shelter of the harbour there was still a big sea running and although it was not yet high tide, the waves already covered the foreshore and reached as far as the undercliff, where they reared themselves up against the revetment, fifteen or twenty feet high, and sought to hurl themselves over the edge.

  Brice turned and leant on the parapet and Maggie did the same. The wind was now full in their faces, blowing in from the open sea, and below them, at the foot of the cliff, the green and white water seethed and tossed. Brice glanced sideways at Maggie’s face; then he looked straight ahead again, across the bay to Struan Point. A kind of angry detachment was slowly taking possession of him, and, in a spirit of defiance, he yielded himself up to it.

  ‘It isn’t just your idea about the boat that has made Uncle Gus the way he is. It’s because he knows I’m in love with you.’

  Maggie remained perfectly still. She too was looking straight ahead.

  ‘Did you have to say that?’ she asked, and her voice, though quiet, was like a cry, ‘Where is the point in saying that?’

  ‘Foolish, isn’t it?’ Brice said. ‘After keeping it secret all these years, to go and blurt it out like that! I suppose it’s the sort of mood I’m in. ‒ I’m taking my revenge on Uncle Gus.’

  ‘You mustn’t think of him like that. I know he can be provoking sometimes, and he was specially so today, but surely I’ve explained why that was?’

  ‘I’ve loved you all along,’ Brice said. ‘Right from the start, more than ten years ago, when you first came to us at the farm. I think you must have known that because I didn’t try to hide it then.’

  ‘Yes, I knew you felt something for me … but I thought it would change when you knew the truth when you found I was having another man’s child.’

  ‘I thought so, too, but I was wrong. I soon found I loved you just the same and I could do nothing to alter it. I did my best to hide what I felt but I think Uncle Gus has known all along. That’s why he’s always making these jokes about my finding myself a wife.’

  ‘Yes, he knows,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Has he spoken about it to you?’

  ‘Yes. Twice.’

  ‘So you knew I still loved you, if only from him?’

  ‘I did my best not to believe it. I hoped you’d find somebody else. But yes, in my heart, I knew all along.’

  ‘No doubt my uncle Gus thinks it’s a judgment on me because I did nothing to help you when my mother turned you out of the house. He’s always despised me for that and of course he’s right. I was a paltering, spineless fool. But God knows I’ve paid for that, over the past ten years, by loving you and longing for you and not being able to speak of it.’

  ‘You are speaking of it now.’

  ‘Yes, there’s no going back on it now. Somehow there’s relief in that.’

  Still leaning over the parapet, he turned his head to look at her, and, for the first time in his life, allowed his feelings to show in his face, so that Maggie, when she met his gaze, found herself almost overwhelmed. Just for an instant their eyes held but then abruptly she bent her head and stared blindly down at the sea boiling over the rocks below.

  ‘Brice, don’t look at me like that. Please.’

  ‘Why not?’ he said harshly. ‘What have I got to lose – now?’

  ‘People might be watching us.’

  ‘They’re too far off to see us plain.’

  ‘If you love me ‒’

  ‘If! Dear God!’

  ‘Then please don’t make things difficult for me.’

  ‘But you’ve known about it all along, so why should it be difficult now?’

  ‘That’s a foolish question to ask. Things are always more difficult once they’re ‒ once they’re out in the open.’

  ‘You’ll put it out of your mind in time. That’s what you did before. You’ll say to yourself, “Poor Brice,” and then you’ll put it out of your mind.’

  ‘No, I shan’t. Not after today. That will be impossible now.’

  ‘Why? Does it mean something to you, then?’

  ‘That’s another foolish question,’ Maggie said impatiently. ‘I’m a woman, not a stone, and to have a man look at me and speak to me as you’re doing now ‒’ Her voice failed her. She took a deep breath. She was careful not to look at him. ‘Of course it means something to me but it happens that I’m married to Gus.’

  ‘You don’t have to remind me of that.’

  ‘No, I know I don’t,’ she said, ‘but perhaps I have to remind myself.’

  Her words, spoken so quietly, were almost drowned in the noise of the surf, but Brice heard them all the same. They were words that took him by the throat.

  A big sea came running in, hurling itself against the cliff and rearing up in a great folding curve that licked its way up the granite wall and broke over the parapet. Brice and Maggie leant back on their heels but the spray caught them even so and they tilted their faces away from it, eyes closed while the stinging drops skittered and splashed over them.

  The green and white wave curled back and sank, teeming at the foot of the cliff, and Brice and Maggie, standing together, their hands on the cold wet parapet, could feel the sea’s mighty power pulsing vibrantly in the granite blocks. Brice turned and looked at Maggie’s face; it was wet with spray, as though with tears, and he watched her as she wiped her cheeks with a corner of her knitted shawl; then he looked out to sea again.

  ‘So,’ he said, very carefully, ‘if things were different and you were free, you would be willing to accept my love?’

  ‘If things were different,’ Maggie said, still in the same quiet voice, ‘I would be in your arms by now.’

  Another big sea came in and Brice watched it as though in a trance. Outwardly he was perfectly calm; his eyes were half-hidden under their lids and his face might have been carved in wood; and only by the quickening of his breath did he betray the tumult within as his heart leapt with the leaping wave.

  The wave rose, higher and higher, climbing the wall with slow-seeming swiftness, and this time Brice and Maggie held their ground, letting the spray break over them, each glad of its cold sharp sting. They glanced at each other, blue eyes meeting grey, and then turned again into the wind; and so careful were they to keep their faces expressionless that nobody, seeing them there together, could have guessed what message had passed between them in that one quick, deep glance.

  Brice felt that his lungs would burst and when, in a while, he spoke again, his voice was not quite under control.

  ‘You chose wisely, didn’t you, saying that here and now, in this public place where you are safe? Otherwise …’

  ‘No,’ Maggie said, firmly. ‘There can never be any “otherwise”. It must always be like this. A
nd I didn’t choose the time or the place. It was something that just happened to me. But always, in future, after today ‒’

  ‘We must be as we were before. Do you think I don’t know that? But what you’ve just said … you can’t take it back … it’s mine now till the day I die. But you don’t need to worry, you know. When we meet, in the ordinary way, I shall keep my feelings to myself. I’ve had plenty of practice in the past. As for my uncle Gus, I know he has a down on me, but ‒’

  ‘Brice, I must tell you something he said, only a few days ago, when I spoke to him about the boat. He was talking about dying ‒ no, wait, let me finish ‒ and he said he knew that when he was dead you and I were bound to marry.’

  ‘He knows that you care for me, then?’

  ‘He knew it before I did myself.’

  ‘No wonder he hates me the way he does.’

  ‘He doesn’t hate you,’ Maggie said. ‘It’s just that you’re young and he’s not. You can walk and he can’t. And sometimes he thinks you wish him dead.’

  ‘You don’t think that?’

  ‘Of course I don’t. Neither does he, in his heart of hearts.’ Away in the town the church clock struck three.

  ‘Brice, I must go. I really must. He’ll be wondering what’s become of me.’

  ‘Maggie, wait,’ Brice said. ‘Maggie, I want you to understand ‒ it’s what I was trying to say just now ‒ that I am not the sort of man … I mean, whatever I feel for you, and whatever I said about Uncle Gus just now, I wouldn’t ever do anything that would hurt his feelings in any way.’

  Maggie smiled at him with her eyes.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me that. I know what sort of man you are.’

  Drawing her shawl more closely about her, she turned and walked away from him, the wind now whirling behind her, sending her hurrying down the hill. Brice, resisting the impulse to watch her all the way down, leant further over the parapet and stared at the water seething below. The cold spray came up into his face and he tasted its salt tang on his lips.

  ‘You haven’t gone off with him, then?’ Gus said as Maggie, coming in on a gust of wind, struggled to close and fasten the door.

  ‘No, not yet!’ she answered lightly. She hung her shawl up on its hook and faced him with a resolute smile.

  ‘No, you wouldn’t do that, would you, cos that’d mean losing all those things you married me on purpose to get?’

  The extreme bitterness of these words drove the smile from Maggie’s lips. She stood before him, silent and still; and he, seeing the look in her eyes and the way the colour drained from her cheeks, was suddenly stricken with angry shame.

  ‘God! Why do I say such things?’ he said in a voice that was wrung from him. ‘And why do you always take it so meekly, without ever hitting back at me? I suppose it’s because I’m a crippled old man and you can’t help feeling sorry for me. But you shouldn’t be so considerate and kind. You should damn well give as good as you get and let me have it hot and strong.’

  ‘Well,’ Maggie said, recovering, ‘when I’ve thought of something, perhaps I shall.’

  ‘Surely that isn’t so difficult? There’s plenty of things you could throw up at me that’d catch me admidships if you liked. You could scuttle me in no time at all.’

  ‘Is it to be a sea-fight, then?’

  ‘Damme! Why not? Tes what I deserve!’

  Suddenly he waved his hand.

  ‘For pity’s sake sit down in that chair,’ he said. ‘You make me feel so small as a worm, standing over me like that.’

  Obediently Maggie sat down, and they looked at each other across the hearth, the firelight glimmering in their eyes. ‘Hadn’t I better get the tea?’

  ‘No, I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Jim will be in presently.’

  ‘Then I’d better get a move on with what I’ve got to say to you.’

  For a little while longer, he looked at her. His mood of the past few days was quite gone. He could read a great deal in her face and because he knew her very well he could guess what had happened between her and Brice. It was only what he himself had foretold, after all, but now that it had come to pass and he saw the sadness of it in her eyes, he found he was able, once and for all, to put his own feelings aside and accept it without jealousy.

  ‘I suppose you’ve sorted things out with Brice? Begged pardon for my bad behaviour and made peace with him on my behalf?’

  ‘Well,’ Maggie said, uncertainly.

  ‘And I would say, by the look of you, that you got your own feelings for each other sorted out at the same time.’

  Maggie, speechless, looked down at her hands.

  ‘You don’t need to feel guilty,’ he said. ‘It was bound to happen sooner or later and if it’s happened today, well, I have only myself to blame. I drove you together, didn’t I, by picking on Brice the way I did? And tes only where you belong after all. If anyone should feel guilty it’s me. And I do feel guilty. That’s just the trouble. Tes because my conscience is troubling me that I’ve been behaving the way I have.’

  Maggie looked up.

  ‘Why should your conscience be troubling you?’

  ‘You know well enough what I mean. Tes because of what I’ve done to you. Such a mess I made of things when I tied you down all those years ago! I thought it was such a clever plan ‒ to marry you and provide for you and learn Brice a lesson at the same time. I felt sure that you and him would come together in your own good time but I thought I’d be out of the way by then and that everything would go suant for you. But my clever plan went astray and here I am, still alive, nothing but a wretched hinderment, getting in the way of your happiness. But tesn’t no good railing about it. We’ve got to schemey to put it right.’

  There was a pause. He studied her.

  ‘What I said to you just now, about you going off with Brice … that was just a bit of spite but I’m not being spiteful now … I’ve thought about it oftentimes and I reckon that’s what you ought to do.’

  ‘Go off with Brice?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘You surely don’t mean it?’

  ‘I surely do. Look at me! ‒ I’m as tough as old boots! I could live to be old as Methuselah and what chance of joy will you have left by the time you’ve seen me into my grave? But if you and Brice and young Jim were to go clean away from here ‒ Guernsey would be a good place to go ‒ you could start a new life together there and nobody would ever know but that you and Brice were man and wife and boy Jim your son by him. Your name’s Mrs Tallack right enough so you wouldn’t have to tell lies about that. Twould all be as simple as ABC. And as for my bit of property, I should see Frank Rogers about that and come to some arrangement whereby ‒’

  But here Maggie broke in on him.

  ‘Do you think I would do that to you?’ she asked in a tone of sad reproach. ‘Go off and leave you alone like that, after all you’ve done for me?’

  ‘I thought if you knew you had my blessing, you would find it easy enough.’

  ‘No, it only makes an impossible thing even more impossible.’

  ‘You mean, if I was to beat you, you would leave me soon enough.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, with a little smile, ‘but it’s no good your beginning now, because I should know it was just a trick.’

  ‘Perhaps I should have spoken to Brice, not you.’

  ‘He would only say the same. You’ve told me often that Brice would always do what’s right, so how could he ever treat you like that? And how could he ever leave his mother?’

  ‘You and Brice should think of yourselves. You’re still young, the pair of you, and got your own lives to live, but Rachel and me are both grown old, and if you and Brice’ve got any sense, you’ll leave the dead to bury the dead.’

  ‘And what about Jim in all this? What would he say to such a plan, that he and I should go with Brice to some strange place, goodness knows where, and leave you here all by yourself? It’s out of the question. You must
see that it’s so much out of the question that I don’t know how you can talk of it.’

  ‘So you won’t allow me to set you free?’

  ‘No, never,’ Maggie said. ‘I am your lawful wedded wife and you will just have to put up with me!’

  ‘I suppose; if I was to tell you the truth, I knew all along what your answer would be.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ she said, gently scoffing.

  ‘I had to say it all the same and if you should ever change your mind ‒’

  ‘I shall never change my mind.’

  ‘H’mm,’ Gus said, and was silent a while, still looking at her intently as he pursued his own thoughts. At last he came to a decision. ‘Well, if you won’t let me set you free, at least there’s one thing I can do. ‒ Give Brice the boat, as you asked me to.’

  ‘But I ought never to have asked you that. I told Brice I’d suggested it and he said at once that I had done wrong.’

  ‘No, you did right. Tes a good idea. Oh, I know I’ve said this and that, and been dragging my anchor about it all, but that was the devil at work in me. I’ve been wrestling with him for days but I’ve thrown him brave and fitty at last. Why should I hold on to the boat? I shall never sail her again. Tes just my selfishness, no more than that. Much better fit if I give it to Brice and that’s what I intend to do. ‒ For your sake, since it’s what you want, and for boy Brice’s sake, too, so that he knows I mean well by him in spite of the way I treat him sometimes.’

  ‘You’ve made up your mind, then?’

  ‘Yes. Fair and square. I’ll send for Frank Rogers first thing tomorrow morning. But I don’t know what boy Jim will say when he hears I’m giving the Emmet away.’

  Jim, however, though surprised, showed nothing but pleasure on hearing the news and had only one question to ask.

  ‘Uncle Brice will still take me into his crew just the same, won’t he?’

  ‘Of course he will!’ Gus said. ‘And if so be you should ever fall out with him, why, I’ll build you a new boat of your own! ‒ A bigger and better boat, even, than the old Emmet!’

  The next day, true to his word, Gus sent for Frank Rogers, who came in the early afternoon and drew up the deed of gift whereby that lugger known as the Emmet, registered PY 19, with all her gear and tackle and everything pertaining to her, was given up by the present owner, Edward Augustus Tallack, and became the personal property, without let or hindrance, of the donor’s kinsman, namely nephew, Brice Henry John Tallack; ‘this gift being made in a spirit of goodwill, affection, and esteem; signed in the presence of witnesses this day, the twelfth of April, in the Year of Our Lord 1880’.