The Gossamer Cord (16 page)

“Very.”

“The West Country is famous for it, you know—Devon and Cornwall.”

“So I have heard.”

“You did tell me last time we met that you had left school last summer. Shall you stay at home or take up some career?”

“Because of my sister’s sudden marriage, I have not thought of anything but that. Until the baby is born I think we shall be quite preoccupied with that.”

“And you will be here often, so that we shall be neighbors. I am sure they are very happy at Tregarland’s about the child.”

“Oh, yes, they are.”

“It will be a comfort…after what happened.”

“You must be referring to Dermot’s first wife. I think he is very happy now. That other is all in the past.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I suppose people round here know all about his first marriage.”

He lifted his shoulders as though to imply what did I expect.

“Did you know her?”

“Not personally. I had seen her around. She lived with her mother in one of the cottages right on the cliff looking down on West Poldown. One saw her around quite a bit. She worked at the Sailor’s Rest.”

“The Sailor’s Rest? Isn’t that the inn on the west side overlooking the river mouth?”

“That’s it.” He grinned at me. “Something of a mésalliance, I fear.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Shock waves ran round the place when they married. I can’t imagine old Mr. Tregarland was very pleased with the choice of his son and heir. People liked her. Annette, she was…Annette Pardell. Mrs. Pardell still lives in…er…Cliff Cottage, I think it is called. She never got over it. She’s a widow and Annette was her only child. You didn’t know this?”

“No, not the details. Dorabella told me that Dermot had been married before and that his first wife had died. She had drowned when bathing.”

“Annette was a great one for the sea. They say she was in it every day during the summer. A big, strong girl, the last you’d think to go that way. She’d been swimming since she was a child. They came down here from the North of England—Yorkshire, I think. I gathered Mrs. Pardell had some sort of pension, enough to get by. She rented Cliff Cottage and has been there ever since she came to Cornwall. Annette was a fine-looking girl. Mrs. Pardell had plans for her and was not too pleased when she landed up in the bar. She was an excellent barmaid, bright and saucy. You know the sort. She got on well with the men customers, and the women liked her, too. There was talk when she married the son of the big house, as you can imagine—and then she died like that.”

“Was Dermot very upset?”

He was silent for a while.

“I don’t know,” he said at length. “But I don’t think it had been very good at the house. You know how it is. Annette did not really fit in. And there was the baby…”

“What baby?”

“Oh…she was going to have a baby. That was why she shouldn’t have gone swimming. She was not in a fit state to do so. It was foolish of her. There was no one about apparently. It was early morning. She’d always liked a swim first thing in the morning. The temptation must have been too strong for her. Of course, in her condition, she should have known better. She went down to that beach below the Tregarland gardens and went in from there. Her body was washed up a week or so later. There was mystery for a few days, but her bathrobe and slippers were there on the beach to indicate what had happened.”

“What a terrible tragedy! And the baby…”

“I reckon they are overjoyed now that there is another little one on the way.”

“Oh, yes. They are thrilled, of course.”

“I understand that. And I am delighted because it means that you will be down here often, and you and I can have a little rendezvous. You can’t invite me to Tregarland. I am wondering whether I can ask you to my place. This is the first time that stupid feud has been a nuisance.”

“Tell me about yourself,” I said.

He lifted his shoulders. “What do you want to know?”

“You love your estate. I believe Jermyn Priory has been in your family for years.”

“Yes. It was a priory in the fourteenth century. In the sixteenth it was destroyed with countless others and later the house was built using some of the stone from the desecrated priory. My family came here at that time and we have been here ever since. My father was a younger son, and I did not inherit the place until two years ago. I have an excellent manager. We get on well together and he lives in a house close to the Priory. He has an efficient wife who has taken upon herself to see that I lack nothing. I have a good housekeeper and am surrounded by excellent people, so I am well cosseted. There! You couldn’t get better than that from Mrs. Brodie.”

“You seem to be well satisfied with life.”

“Up to a point. I often go to London and now and then travel on the Continent. I should like to see more of my neighbors, but it is surprising how this stupid feud gets in the way. It’s ridiculous after all these years. But there it is.”

“Perhaps if you made a few advances…?”

“I did try once and was refused. The Tregarlands are not very sociable, you know. The old man is a bit of an enigma and he is the head of it. He lives rather like a recluse now, but he had quite a reputation in the past. He was once a very merry gentleman—very fond of the ladies—traveling around, living riotously. Dances, card parties, and then suddenly he became ill. It was the gout, I believe, which incapacitated him somewhat. He married in his forties, but he didn’t really settle down then until the gout grew worse. His wife died a few years after Dermot was born, and then Mrs. Lewyth and her little boy came to live there. She looks after him very well, I believe. There’s a rumour that she is a distant relation—a poor one—but no one seems quite certain of that.”

“I am not sure, either.”

“Well, he has become much more sober since then. Enforced, of course. But all that was years ago.”

He looked at my empty tankard.

“Would you like another?” he asked.

“No, thanks.”

“I see you are a wise young woman. It is rather potent.”

“Yes, it certainly is.”

“You’ll get used to it in time.” He smiled at me. “As we can’t invite each other to our houses, we shall have to have a meeting place. Not too often here.” He raised his eyebrows. “For obvious reasons, we do not want to figure too often in the news bulletins. We will go somewhere else. There are some interesting places around here.”

“I daresay I shall be going home soon.”

“We must meet before you do and make arrangements for your next descent upon us.”

I felt very pleased that he had suggested this, and we arranged to meet two days later in the field where I had fallen and we would go out to the Horned Stag, which was a little way out on the moor.

We parted at the boundary and I rode back to Tregarland’s exhilarated by the encounter, but I could not stop thinking of Annette who was to have had Dermot’s child and had, one morning, foolishly gone swimming in the sea.

Next morning I could not resist going along to have a look at Cliff Cottage, There it was, as Jowan Jermyn had described it, set on the west cliff, looking down on the town. It was very neat, with white net curtains at the windows and a front garden which was clearly very well tended.

I lingered and a woman came out of the cottage. I had a notion that she had seen me through the lace curtains.

She did not speak; she had a somewhat dour expression—one might say bellicose almost, as though she were warning me to keep away.

“Good morning,” I said pleasantly.

She nodded acknowledgment of the greeting and somehow managed to imply that, as far as she was concerned, that was the end of the encounter.

I was disappointed. I had hoped she would be like so many of the people hereabouts, eager for a little chat.

I said: “I was admiring your garden.”

I had hit on the right note, for her expression softened ever so slightly. I had guessed she was devoted to her garden. I pressed home my advantage.

“How do you manage to get these lovely things to grow here? It must be difficult, for you would get the full force of the wind, I imagine.”

“Aye,” she said grudgingly. “The wind’s a problem.”

“It must be hard work, and, of course, you have to choose what will thrive.”

“You a gardener?” she asked. Her voice was quite different from the soft Cornish accent which I had been hearing all around me. I remembered that Jowan Jermyn had said she came from the North.

“Not an expert one,” I said, falsely lying by implication, for I was no gardener at all. “But it is a fascinating hobby.”

“You’re right. Gets a hold of you.”

“Those firs…they are…?”

“Lawson’s cypress. Make a good hedge. The rate they grow, too!” She was definitely relenting. “They came through the post in an envelope…just a little packet, a bunch of sprigs. Now look at them.”

“Miraculous,” I said, gazing rapturously at them.

“They grow stubby…not tall, then they stand up to the wind. That’s something you have to think about in this place.”

I knew that it would be fatal to try to take the subject away from the garden.

She volunteered: “Climate here is soft and damp. Plants here are four weeks in advance of those in the North.”

“Is that so? What healthy-looking plants those are. What are they?”

She looked shocked because I did not know something so commonplace.

“Hydrangeas, of course. Grow like wildfire here because of the damp. This is going to be a good year for the roses.”

“Is it?”

She nodded sagely. “I know the signs.”

“You have some lovely ones.”

“Some varieties, yes. I’d like to get my hands on a good Christmas rose.”

“Can’t you…er …get your hands on one?”

“There’s one variety I want. ’Ee, it’s gradely, that one. I’ve only ever seen one in these parts. In the big house garden.” Her face hardened perceptibly. “Up at Tregarland’s. They’ve got just the one I’d like. They can grow it, and they’re as exposed as I am. Can’t get one anywhere. I’ve tried. I reckon it’s a hybrid. It’s a special sort. Like a Christmas rose yet different…in a way. Not quite, you see. I’ve never seen one just like it.”

“Wouldn’t they give you a cutting or something?”

I was afraid I was betraying my ignorance of horticulture and that she would sense there was some ulterior motive behind all this.

“I wouldn’t ask them. I wouldn’t have aught to do with them.”

“Oh, that’s a pity.”

I had blundered.

She said: “Well, I’ve got work to do.”

She nodded curtly. It was dismissal.

I had imagined a cosy chat, being invited into the house, perhaps a glass of homemade cider or elderberry wine. Far from it! I should find it very difficult to get any information out of her.

I wanted so much to talk to her, to hear about the daughter who had worked as a barmaid at the Sailor’s Rest, who had married the heir of Tregarland’s, who had met an untimely death. But there would be nothing of that from Mrs. Pardell.

Disappointed, I retraced my steps.

I wished I could talk to her. She would be down to earth; there would be no flights of fancy, only solid facts. I believed I could have had a clear picture from her.

But why did I want it? It was all in the past. Yet what I had learned had made me think differently. People were not always what they seemed. Dermot himself…the charming, rather debonair young man on a walking tour in the German forest had given no hint of the tragedy in his life which could not have left him unscathed. How different he would have seemed—to me at any rate—if I had known that he had had a wife who had been drowned not long before her baby had been born. Then there was the old man who had led a riotous life and nowadays was more or less a recluse with a keen and, I was sure, mischievous delight in what was going on around him. Matilda, of course, was easy to know. Her son Gordon puzzled me a little. He was so aloof, so wrapped up in the estate toward which Dermot seemed almost indifferent.

On the way back to Tregarland’s an idea came to me.

I really did want to see more of Mrs. Pardell, and I should have no excuse for calling again. I could not just hang over the fence and gaze at the garden. And if I did, it would not be long before she would discover my ignorance. And then I imagined that shrewd Northern lady would soon suspect other motives—particularly when she discovered I was a guest at Tregarland’s and the sister of Dermot’s second wife. How much did she know? The Cornish were suspicious of foreigners and she would undoubtedly be dubbed one.

I decided to act on the idea which had come to me. It might misfire, but there was no reason why I should not give it a trial.

When I returned to the house, I went to the garden which sloped down to the sea and the private beach—that beach where Dermot’s first wife had gone to bathe on that fateful morning. I stood for a moment, letting the faintly scented air gently caress me. It was beautiful here, but I kept thinking of Annette’s coming down the slope. She would walk slowly, being heavily pregnant. How could she have done that? She must have known what a risk she was taking. I was lost in thought until I reminded myself why I was here.

I saw one of the gardeners at work some little way off, and I went to him.

I knew his name was Jack, so I said: “Hello, Jack.”

He touched his cap and leaned on his spade.

“Nice day, Miss,” he said.

“The gardens are looking beautiful.”

He looked pleased.

“They’ll be a real treat in a week or so. Let’s hope us don’t get no more of them there winds.”

“They are the garden’s biggest enemy, I suppose.”

He scratched his head. “There be others, but you can’t get away from them there winds. And here…well!” He lifted his shoulders in a helpless gesture.

“You’ve got that plant,” I began. “Is it some sort of Christmas rose?”

“Oh…I do know what you mean. It be a Christmas rose…with a difference like. It’s not one that you come across every day of your life.”

“Could you show it to me? I’d like to see it.”

I followed him up the slope a little way.

“It be over ’ere, Miss. There. Beauty, ain’t she?”