The Ugly Sister (38 page)

Dr Harris three miles away. Ethel back with water. God knows I had little experience of wounds, scarcely knew what to do for the best. The other maid shut the front door. ‘More light!' I snapped – she carried the single lamp nearer and lit two candles.

Bram muttered something as I pressed gently at the wound.

‘What?'

‘It was not – a trap?'

‘God no, Bram, not a trap, I swear! How you could think it.'

He raised his head an inch or two. ‘Oh well, … There it is.' He coughed to clear the blood from his throat. ‘You know, Emma …' He tailed off.

‘Yes?'

‘You're the only one I ever really …' He did not finish the sentence. His head fell forward on his chest and life left him.

O
LIVER
S
LADE
was tried at Bodmin Assizes in October 1840 for the murder of Abraham Fox.

I did not have to give evidence at the trial, but Mr Gascoigne went. He said it lasted a bare fifteen minutes. Slade confessed to the killing and offered no defence. He refused legal help or advice. With no case to argue the jury brought in a verdict of guilty and the judge put on the black silk cap.

‘I found it difficult to believe it was all over,' Mr Gascoigne said. ‘The judge's homily was of the briefest, and the condemned man was led away. He had no expression on his face – seemed almost to be unconscious of what was happening. Before I left the court they were preparing for the next case.'

Slade was hanged on 30 November.

In the previous August I had had a miscarriage. No one knew except Dr Harris, Sally Fetch and Ethel. I had done nothing to rid myself of his child. If it had been born I should have brought it up as my own at Killiganoon. Betsy Slocombe had borne and brought up one or more – probably two – illegitimate children here, so why should not I?

A month after Bram's death Tamsin left Place House with Celestine and went to live with her mother – our mother – in Richmond. She left a pile of debts which I discreetly discharged during the following months.

She never wrote to me again, but I heard from my mother that she held me responsible for Bram's death and the collapse of her life at Place House. Perhaps, if you looked at it from her point of view, I was.

Desmond and Mary did not go back to Place, preferring to remain at Tregolls. As the years passed they became it seemed almost as much husband and wife as brother and sister. They were very much alike and grew more alike: decent, kindly, narrow, good-living people, withdrawn, a little ingrown, and completely different from their vigorous, thrusting elder brother and sister. I sometimes thought the shadow of their mother's mental derangement weighed too heavily on them. They watched each other for tell-tale symptoms.

Samuel came to inhabit Place at intervals and Anna Maria and Edward would drive over with their ever-increasing brood in the summer, but for quite long periods Place was empty except for a quartet of servants. Samuel became MP for Bodmin and was knighted shortly afterwards. He was High Sheriff for Cornwall in 1849. He remained unmarried throughout his active life but like his father kept a mistress – called Harriet Hill – but not at Killiganoon and much more discreetly. The year before he died he married her and so legitimized his eleven-year-old son, much to the scandal of the county.

I remember going to his funeral at Place, with my husband and our two sons, who happened to be on leave at the time. I recalled Uncle Davey's funeral almost exactly forty years before and the many members of the Cornish aristocracy and gentry who attended in their black coaches. This time, united in disapproval, most of the gentry sent their coaches empty, and these filled the wide drive before the house in a most melancholy way. It was a wake within a wake.

The moral change in the country since the young Queen and her Consort had come to the throne had been steady and here was dramatically pointed. However the young John Samuel – now Spry – was bright-eyed if tearful, and seemed likely to survive the disapproval. So did Harriet, my new cousin.

B
UT
I am anticipating.

Killiganoon passed out of the ownership of the Spry family shortly after I left. It was sold to a Mr Thomas Simmons.

In 1841, almost thirty years ago now, I replied to a letter recently received from the Hon Jonathan Eliot. I have it before me.

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for your long and very kind letter of the seventh. I do greatly appreciate it, and have given much thought and sentimental feeling to your proposal of marriage.

I want to be completely honest with you, for as yet we know each other so little. I am twenty-eight, and for the first twenty-six years of my life I suffered a severe disfigurement. Now it has been partly put right but I sometimes wonder whether I still carry the scars of that injury in my character, in my nature. (Someone once told me that I do.) The feeling of being set apart from others, the feeling of being unwanted, of being an outcast, is still strong at times.

In my life I have been much in thrall to two men, one who softened me by his saintliness, the other who was the opposite of a saint. They are both dead.

I believe I do want companionship and a settled life. I believe I do want the settled life that marriage brings – should bring. But I do not know if I truly love you. You have told me that you love me, and I do believe you, and that feeling is already a warmth in my heart. But marriage is for life. Shall we in a long life find the best in each other or discover the worst?

You cannot answer me, except at another meeting. That perhaps will come soon. But even then there is the risk. Perhaps you will be able to convince me, Jonathan, that the risk is worth taking. Even as I sit here writing this I am
greedy
for a normal life. Can you help me to find it? If so I will marry you.

Your affectionate friend

Emma

I remember after finishing it I spilled the young cat from my lap as I sanded the ink and reread what I had written. Then I sat for a long time head in hands, struggling with my thoughts and emotions – half tearful. There was so much more to say, and yet nothing more to say.

Then I took out another sheet of paper and put the date on it. 15 March 1841. In some ways it was an even more difficult letter to write. I began it.

‘Dearest Charles …

First published in 1998 by Macmillan

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