Penmarric (16 page)

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.

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 customers, 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.

I decided it would be wrong to disappoint him of his high expectations.

I myself expected nothing. I was not in love with him although I liked him well enough. One did not expect rapture from someone in those circumstances, and so because I expected nothing I was not disappointed. After a while I think I was vaguely surprised by how easy it was. His liberties meant nothing to me, although after a time I was grateful enough to try to please him as much as possible, and the benefits I received from our association continued to be more than adequate in compensation for any discomfort I suffered.

I had no regrets at all until I was pregnant. After that everything ended very quickly and I was back with Griselda again in that disgusting hovel while she mixed me an equally disgusting potion to cure my ills.

I became sick. For two days I did nothing but moan and pray to die, but at last it was over and I was alone on my back in that flea-ridden room with only the mice for company while Griselda gutted fish down by the quay. By the time she arrived home on the evening of the second day I felt that I had more than learned my lesson.

“I shall never, never go through that again,” I said between my teeth. “Never. And no man lays one fingertip on me again until I’m wearing his wedding ring.”

Griselda, nettled by my lack of appreciation of her potion, said that I need not have got myself into such a predicament. “There be ways and means,” she added in a sour voice, “Ways and means.”

“You can keep them,” I retorted ungratefully. “I’m finished with all that. It never meant anything to me anyway.”

I stood by my word. Throughout the next five years I moved from job to job, each post worse than the one before, and throughout the years I was constantly confronted with the menace of my past trying to repeat itself. It was only when I was thoroughly convinced that I was destined to work for a succession of foolish men and dismissed by a succession of jealous wives that I found an employer who was so happily married that he was not in the least interested in pestering me with illicit attentions. The work he offered me was the most menial I had yet encountered, but I was too desperate for employment to refuse him when he asked me to serve behind the bar of his little tavern.

I approached the prospect of being a barmaid with great dread, but curiously enough it was not as bad as I had feared it would be. My disdainful, high-handed air proved attractive; the bar became flooded with customers and the landlord, delighted with me, said I gave his establishment “class.”

Three years passed; on the whole I was not too unhappy. I was just wondering in despair if I would spend all my life serving ale to rough fishermen when at last my luck turned. One light spring evening shortly before my twenty-seventh birthday the door of the taproom was flung open-with a bang and in walked Jared Roslyn.

I found Jared attractive. By that time I was resigned to the fact that I was unlikely to fall wildly in love with anyone, but not even my disillusionment could prevent me from finding some men more attractive than others. Jared definitely interested me. He was a tall, solid man with dark hair and eyes and a tight-lipped mouth. I discovered that he was a bachelor, a fact that surprised me, for he was at least as old as I was and rural folk often marry young. I concluded that his good looks had enabled him to get his own way too often to necessitate the purchase of a wedding ring.

He was the elder of two sons, he told me, and his father, although a mere farmer, actually owned land in the moorland parish of Zillan several miles away to the west. My interest in him deepened, especially when he began to describe his home, “the most beautiful farmhouse between Penzance and St. Just,” but I had no illusions about the likelihood of his asking me to marry him. It was a pity that by this time I was socially so far below him; if we had met directly after my dismissal from Menherion Castle I might have had more chance of becoming his wife, but men with expectations like Jared Roslyn do not marry barmaids. “Why don’t you ride with me to Zillan on your next free afternoon?” he proposed one hot August evening, but I knew what lay behind that proposition. He had reached the stage where he could barely contain his lust.

“Why, how delightful!” I said. “But how do I know I will end my journey at Roslyn Farm and not in some tavern along the way?”

For several days after that I thought I had lost him, but I was wrong. He reappeared a week later and with him was a small, wiry man of about sixty, very agile, with a merry laugh and alert, sparkling blue eyes.

It was Jared’s father, John Henry Roslyn. He was a widower, Jared had told me, and had lost his wife the previous year after nearly thirty years of happy marriage.

“So this is what makes you take that long journey to St. Ives so often, you young rascal!” he said accusingly to Jared, and added to me: “I can’t say I blame him. You’re pretty as a picture, my dear. Treat yourself to a little glass of port or whatever you young ladies drink nowadays, and Jared and I’ll have a pint of bitter apiece.”

It seems, I know, quite absurd to admit it, but his words touched me and brought unexpected tears to my eyes. To hear him. call me a “young lady” as I stood behind the bar of that common little tavern made me feel as if I were in the drawing room of Menherion Castle. But it was not only his kindness that impressed me; I decided that I had never before met anyone so cheerful or nimble-witted as he was. Beside him Jared seemed a ponderous oaf in contrast.

They came regularly to the tavern after that, but I soon lost interest in Jared. I looked forward to their visits, and afterward I would retire to my tiny bedroom in the attic and not even mind the cramped space, the stuffiness or the tapping of the mice in the wainscoting. And then one day at the end of summer old Mr. Roslyn came to the bar alone.

We had been talking for only a minute or two before he said suddenly, “This is no place for a young lady like you. You should have a house to manage like other young ladies. Could you keep house?”

I hesitated, not sure what he meant. “For you?”

“For me and Jared and my younger boy Joss. It’s a full year now since my wife died and everything’s in a pretty mess. We have two servants, a deaf old woman who’s eighty if she’s a day and her granddaughter, Annie, who’s a sweet child but half-witted. There’s nothing I’d like better than a good housekeeper.”

“I …” I hesitated again. It was really most awkward. “Well, that’s most kind of you and I’m very grateful for the opportunity, but I could only come on the understanding …”

“Well, of course you’d be Mrs. Roslyn,” he said, “No nonsense about that part of it. I wouldn’t ask a respectable young lady to come to be housekeeper for a widower and two bachelors unless I could offer her a way of keeping up her respectability.”

I stared at him. Around us people laughed and shouted. Someone called for a drink but I did not move.

“Well?” said old Mr. Roslyn, suddenly brisk and businesslike. “Will you?”

There was another moment of silence. Then: “Yes,” I said. “Yes. Thank you.”

“Good!” he said with his wide, gap-toothed smile, his lined face wrinkling with pleasure. “Nothing could please me more.”

“But—”

“Yes?”

“Your first wife … isn’t it a little soon? I—”

“She’s been dead over a year, my dear, and one can’t grieve forever. She was a good woman and I miss her, but nothing’s going to bring her back. Besides, isn’t it a tribute to her that now she’s gone I hate to live without a woman in the house?”

. “Yes … yes, I had not thought of it like that.”

“Tomorrow I’ll see the rector of Zillan and have him call the banns, and before I leave here I’ll call on the parson, whosoever he may be, and have him call the banns in this parish too. Would you prefer to be wed here in St. Ives?”

“I … have not been a churchgoer.”

“In that case Zillan would be best.” He drank deeply from his beer and smiled at me again. “I’ll make the arrangements.”

“I …. I’m a little overwhelmed.”

“Of course—only natural. Sure you wouldn’t like time to think it over?”

“No,” I said. “No, I’ve no doubts at all. It’s just that  … I had not expected, thought …” I broke off in confusion. Then: “Jared—”

“Never mind Jared. He could have had you but he let his chance slip by. I often told him he’d regret it one day if he went on expecting every woman he fancied to forget all thought of wedding rings so long as he talked to her sweetly enough, so this’ll teach him a lesson.” He laughed, finished his beer and stood up to go, but on his feet he hesitated. The laughter died from his eyes.

“Just one thing, my dear,” he said. “Don’t expect too much. I’m an old man past my prime. I can’t offer you as much as Jared could. If you’d rather marry Jared, you’d best say so now before it’s all too late, because, I’ll have no goings-on in my house under my own roof. Either you marry me and leave Jared alone or else you marry Jared and that’s that. I could jolt him into proposing matrimony if you wanted him badly enough.”

“I’ve no desire to marry Jared,” I said, and it was true. I knew Jared would soon bore me; he was too uncouth, and because I knew I could outwit him I had no respect for him. But old Mr. Roslyn’s wits were so sharp; I respected him enough to be sure that he would not bore me as Jared would. “I would rather marry you,” I added in honesty. “Truly I would.”

“Well, bless you for that, my dear, but may I ask why? Jared’s a good-looking man, don’t you think, and I’m sixty-two years old and ugly as sin! Explain to me why you say that.”

“You’re kind,” I said, “and you understand. I want nothing else.”

We were married a month later.

I had been married four years when I first saw Laurence Castallack. On the whole the marriage had turned out well enough; certainly my position was far better than it had ever been in St. Ives, even though I now had to work just as hard and sometimes harder than I had ever worked before. Life as Mrs. John Henry Roslyn, the wife of one of the more prosperous farmers in Zillan who owned his own land, was certainly respectable and secure, but it was also filled with a multitude of daily tasks such as managing the dairy, attending to the hens and pigs, cleaning and sweeping the house, laundering and ironing the clothes, and cooking, baking, brewing and distilling in order to ensure that there was always sufficient to eat and drink in the pantry. Fortunately I did have some help, but the deaf old woman who had worked for my predecessor died during my first winter at the farm, and her granddaughter Annie was too simple to work on her own initiative without constant supervision. I had brought Griselda with me from St. Ives to share my good fortune, but since she knew no more about managing a farmhouse than I did my responsibilities as mistress of the house weighed upon me all the more heavily. Matters did improve when my husband engaged two girls from Zillan village to help me with the cleaning and cooking, but I found I still went to bed exhausted every night. However, since my husband had discovered that he was not so young as he used to be where certain matters were concerned I was never kept from sleeping as soon as my head touched the pillow. My husband had had aspirations, it was true, and did occasionally manage to fulfill them during the first months of our marriage, but later his failures became merely embarrassing to us both and after our first anniversary he made no further attempts at intimacy.