Nick gazed down at Isabel’s sleeping face. Hers was a child’s face at that moment, soft, warm and slightly flushed, framed with tiny damp tendrils of honey-brown hair. She looked absurdly young and Nick could see why Laurence Trevennor had thought her young for her age. She had said some rather naive things yesterday, yet she could argue and order like a self-assured adult. Nick traced her soft red lips with a light fingertip and wondered what would come forth from them when he woke her, the tired vulnerable femininity of last night or her usual self-righteousness and indignation. Her breathing was regular and deep, her body warm and pliable against his. He liked the feel of her in his arms and thought it a pity she didn’t possess a more pliable nature. Then the task of lugging her across the cliffs and through the villages and coves to Crantock would be less cumbersome.
Picking up one of her hands he rubbed his thumb over the edges of her bitten-off nails and marvelled at the neat job she had made of it. He decided not to wake her yet and lowered her gently onto the cold hard ground, then made his way to the cave’s mouth to see what weather the early morning had brought. As he stood there in the cold light of day he found it difficult to believe in Laurence’s worries over Isabel’s safety. The more likely danger was that Edmund Kempthorne would try to sweet-talk her out of her inheritance. And given that the coach accident was almost certainly caused by Gyver Pengelly, who was a greedy man and valued no one’s life, only their possessions, it was probably a coincidence. If he wanted no witnesses to his misdeed alive, however, then Isabel’s life was in danger from him and it was better Pengelly thought she was dead for the moment.
Isabel began to come to, instinct warning her that she had lost her source of warmth and protection. She woke with a terrible start and found herself looking up at the damp cave roof. Horror engulfed her as she realized her worst nightmare was real but she quickly forced it aside. With a struggle she got up on her heavy legs and sore feet. Her fear that she had been abandoned and left trapped a hundred feet below ground dissolved when she saw Nick’s bag lying on the crate. She sat next to it and considered her feet and whether her shoes would fit over the makeshift bandages.
She bid Nick a good morning when he reappeared but he shrugged it off as an unnecessary pleasantry.
‘There’s a heavy mist coming in from the sea spreading over the cliff so we should be able to slip into Portreath unnoticed.’
‘Will we find the way there in the mist?’ Isabel said, concern making the dimples on either side of her mouth more pronounced. ‘We might lose our way and fall over the edge of the cliff.’
‘When will you learn to trust me?’ he said tartly, but wondering why he had not noticed her enchanting little dimples the day before. ‘’Tis a mist, not a fog. The cliff path will be quite visible as we tread the way and I know my way over the North Cliffs blindfolded.’
‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ Isabel responded mildly, determined that from now on she would ignore his ill humour. After all, he was no more than an ignorant common oaf.
‘I have been thinking. I want you to take me to the estate of Menadarva which is set a little way back from the cliffs in this area, or if you insist that we go to Crantock, I want you to take me on to Trewinton. The Bevilles there will gladly give me refuge.’
‘Not in those clothes they won’t. They wouldn’t let you in even by the back door. They’d probably set their dogs on you.’ He threw the bag over his shoulder and said at her angered face, ‘Let’s get things straight once and for all, Miss Isabel Hampton. I promised Laurence I’d take care of you until your wedding day and unless I can see that no one anywhere offers you any danger, that’s the way it’s going to be. Do you understand that? Have I made myself perfectly clear this time?’
Isabel sprang to her feet and glared at him. ‘Perfectly,’ she snapped contemptuously, then pushed past him and began the walk back to the ladders.
Nick grinned to himself at her anger and said, speaking to her back, We’ll go up the same way we came down so you don’t have to fear you’ll fall down the shaft, and when we get back to grass I’ll carry you. I’ll get you a more suitable pair of shoes in Portreath. It’s no trouble to me getting you through the mist and down into the village.’
Isabel wanted to ask if he could also walk on water but kept the sarcasm to herself. He was a persistent boaster as well as a vulgar boor. She said, over her shoulder, ‘And what is to be done with my shoes?’
‘I’ll throw them down the shaft. They’ll never be found.’ Nick prodded her shoulder and she whirled round to voice her objections but he spoke first. ‘Just one other thing. When we’re in company I don’t want you to speak. I’ll say you were born simple-minded, so just stand about looking idiotic. I’m sure you can manage that easily enough.’
Isabel did not rise to the bait. ‘That won’t be necessary,’ she said, with a small smile.
Nick wasn’t amused. ‘I won’t allow you to be difficult with me. You’ll do as I ruddy well say.’
‘I used to spend hours talking to Ginny, my maid,’ Isabel explained sounding patient with him but looking superior. ‘I can mimic her perfectly.’
‘Talk to me on the way to Portreath and if I’m satisfied you sound convincing then maybe I’ll let you speak.’
Isabel found the reach to the ladders from the platform truly terrifying but the climb up a lot easier than the one going down. The air on the surface was bracing and damp and helped to wake up her tired limbs. As Nick made tidy work of replacing the shaft’s concealing cover, she listened to the sounds of the sea. It seemed quieter with the mist masking it from view, and not so threatening. Nick lifted her none too gently into his arms and set off, looking dour. Isabel found she was quite comfortable and with the wind coming from behind them his big body shielded her from the biting wind. She looked around but could see only a few feet in any direction in the white hazy world.
She waited a while then began the mimicry of her maid. ‘I’ll have to become a new person, Mr Nancarrow, have a new name,’ she said, in a soft Cornish accent. ‘My housekeeper at Truro had a little niece called Jenna. ’Tis such a pretty name I’ve always believed. How about Jenna Trelawney? Has a nice ring to it.’
Nick was impressed by her accent, there wasn’t a note of her own unmistakable educated voice, but he did not tell her so. ‘Trelawney’s too well-to-do,’ he said stiffly. ‘Think of something more ordinary.’
A few minutes thought, then, ‘How about Stevens? My first nursemaid was called Stevens.’
‘It’ll do.’
‘What shall I say if I’m asked why I’m with you?’ she asked in her own voice.
‘Tell them you’re my woman.’
Tour wife, you mean?’
‘My woman,’ Nick corrected her. ‘Folk know me for a man who won’t put a noose round his neck. From now on use the other voice and don’t call me Mr Nancarrow.’ He lowered his voice into a deliberate seductive tone. ‘The women I sleep with call me Nick.’
The last remark had the effect Nick desired. Isabel blushed and turned her face quickly away. ‘I… I… don’t have to sleep with you. I won’t!’
‘You did last night,’ he said, to prolong her embarrassment.
‘We did not do anything!’ Then Isabel saw through the satisfied smirk on his full wide mouth and rallied. ‘You said yesterday that people would think it strange if you were in the company of a woman.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said, so close to her ear it sent shivers down her neck. His next sentence added to his bawdy theme. ‘I’ll tell folk I’ve decided I want my creature comforts more often and readily to hand.’
Isabel ignored this. ‘And where am I supposed to have come from? You cannot tell people I just materialized from out of thin air.’
‘That’s simple enough. I’ve only just got back from up north, around Bude, where I was training coach horses. We’ll say I met you up there and brought you back with me. I keep my private life to myself and folk will assume I’ll want to try to keep you out of sight. Collecting you from somewhere quiet will account for my sudden disappearance from your uncle’s house and Gwithian.’
‘In that case we don’t need to skulk about like two people who have or are about to commit a crime.’ We still need to be inconspicuous. The less known about you and me the better. And don’t forget your new voice. Think of yourself as Jenna Stevens from now on, because when we’ve climbed down this high platform of cliff we’ll be at Mundy Cottle’s cottage at Portreath.’
Mundy Cottle looked Isabel over once then beckoned her to sit down at the huge scrub-top table in her kitchen. She viewed Nick with a definite air of disapproval and did not extend the same welcome to him. Isabel sat down gratefully on the first chair she had seen in nearly twenty-four hours. She looked curiously from Mundy Cottle’s reproachful glances at Nick to his deliberate look of assumed innocence as he stood warming his back against the fireplace, his head between two black beams of the low ceiling.
The cottage was wonderfully warm and filled with the delicious aroma of freshly baked bread. The furniture was dark and serviceable. There were snowy white runners on the tops of shelves and a chest of drawers. Framed against all four thick walls and edged with lace were many embroidered Bible texts. The numerous cupboards and shelves were bursting with jars of dried herbs, preserves, pickled fruit, vegetables and eggs, and crudely carved and cheap paste ornaments. Lanterns lit by seal oil stood about. Clean linen and stacks of perfectly pressed children’s clothes lay everywhere. Some of the ornaments looked as if they had been made by children’s hands. The children responsible for them were quietly watching Isabel from a polite distance.
‘You’re lucky to find me home,’ Mundy said, tight-lipped, looking at Nick. ‘I always attend a preaching down in the harbour at five o’clock. ’Tis the only way to start a day.’
‘We would have waited for you,’ Nick returned, with a smile full of charm.
Mundy sniffed. ‘I’ll get ’ee a bite to eat, maid,’ she told Isabel. ‘I’m fasting today but there’s no need for thee to go hungry.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Cottle,’ Isabel replied, speaking as her alias. Her mouth was watering at the sight of two neat rows of warm barley bread in front of her.
‘Don’t come from round these here parts telling by your accent,’ Mundy said, cutting a thick slice of crusty bread and buttering it. ‘Here, have this to be going on with. You d’look famished to me, you poor little soul. I’ll put some bacon on for ’ee, you look like you could do with a good meal.’ She snorted and turned to face her other visitor. ‘Well, out of my way, Nick Nancarrow. Can’t cook with a great ox like you standing in the way.’
Nick grinned and moved to sit in the window seat which looked out down over the fine yellow sand of Portreath’s beach. Immediately the Cottle children swarmed over him, sitting on his lap, draping over his shoulders, hanging on to his arms.
‘Well, you lot still like me,’ Nick smiled at the children, while looking meaningfully at their busy mother.
‘You know my views on living in sin,’ Mundy said, slamming a pan down on her brick oven. ‘If a maid’s good enough to be used she’s good enough to be made a wife. Mr Westley would never approve of such goings on. Do you some good, boy, to hear un preach one of these days. Look at her,’ she pointed at Isabel who felt as guilty as if she had done the thing she was being jointly accused of. ‘She’s just a maid. Taken in by your fine fair looks, I shouldn’t wonder. Won’t get her very far, will it, eh? Not to the marriage altar. You should be ashamed of yourself, Nick Nancarrow!’
Mundy Cottle was dressed as severely as her censure. Somewhere in her forties, her short fat body was modestly draped from chin to toes in dove grey and covered with a voluminous white apron. Her greying hair was scraped up at the back of her head in a bun and topped with a floppy untrimmed cap. She bustled about her kitchen until breakfast was prepared and on the table.
‘Well, come on, young man,’ she ordered Nick. ‘I don’t suppose the good Lord will mind me feeding a sinner.’
You’re a fine woman, Mundy Cottle,’ Nick said light-heartedly, picking up his knife and fork as he sat opposite Isabel. ‘There’s not a better cook than you in the whole of Cornwall, I always say.’ He wound a thick slice of bacon round his fork and before biting into it he inclined his head at Isabel. ‘Jenna’s had a bit of trouble with her shoes, Mundy. Can you help?’
Mundy looked under the table and saw Isabel’s feet swathed in Nick’s neckerchief. When she looked up, Isabel was saying grace over her meal and Mundy’s chubby red-cheeked face was transformed with a look of approval on it.
‘There’s hope for you yet, m’dear,’ she said, brushing a straying lock of Isabel’s hair from her eyes in a motherly movement. ‘You obviously come from a good home.’ Nick snorted over a mouthful of bacon. Mundy pulled in her lips and turned her back on him. ‘Never mind him, Jenna. So that’s your name is it?’
‘Aye, Mrs Cottle. Jenna Stevens.’
Isabel ate delicately until she received a hard nudge from Nick’s boot on her leg and a pointed nod from his head. She frowned at him and piled her fork higher with food.
‘Where d’you come from then, maid?’ Mundy asked, standing back with her rough red hands clasped under her bosom, watching Isabel.
‘Um, up Bude way.’ Isabel blushed at the lie and straightaway told another one. ‘’Tis where I met Nick.’ She hoped Mundy Cottle knew no one from Bude because Ginny had come from Falmouth and the accents differed.
‘More’s the pity for you then. Leading a young maid into temptation, teaching her the wicked ways of the world. He’s been up to no good ever since a small boy. Lets Satan get the better of him. Mr Westley would soon sort un out. I’ll find out when he’s down this way next, you’d enjoy listening to him preach. Mind you, I say that, but I can tell you myself, you’re on the way to Hell and suffering if you don’t mend your ways.’
Isabel ate shamefaced, longing to be able to tell Mundy the truth of her association with Nick.
‘Got a drop of ale, Mundy?’
Nick’s question made Mundy whirl round as if she had been stabbed in the back. ‘You know there’s no Devil’s brew to be found in this house, Nick Nancarrow!’
‘Some of your lot do drink in moderation, Mundy,’ Nick pointed out, waving his fork at her.
‘Well, I don’t hold for it, one drink d’lead to another,’ Mundy retorted stiffly. ‘It don’t do to give the Devil a foothold. I’ll pour ’ee both up a cup of herb and honey tea.’
Nick laughed heartily. ‘Then get on with it, woman. We’ve been here half an hour and thirsting to death.’
Isabel stared open-mouthed at his rudeness, but she wasn’t unmoved by the way his laughter had lit up his sapphire eyes and made his perfectly moulded mouth powerfully attractive. How could she think of him like this? She jerked her head back to the remnants of her meal and tucked into it.
Mundy poured hot water onto a mixture of dried rosemary and honey in two huge mugs and placed them, stony-faced, on the table. She squealed when Nick squeezed her tightly to him and planted a hearty kiss on her puffed cheek.
‘Come on, Mundy, you know you’ll always love me whatever I do.’
‘Nick Nancarrow! Whatever will you do next! You’re enough to get on my gidge.’ Mundy clasped a hand to her heaving bosom. Her brood of children giggled. Nick laughed. And then Mundy was laughing herself and smoothing Nick’s hair with both hands. ‘Look at the state of you, hair all to lerrups and never tied back properly, buttons missing on your coat, always half clothed. I’ll get ’ee another neckerchief while I’m out getting the maid a pair of shoes. Julia Triggs should have something for you both in her used boxes. I’ll go now before the cove becomes alive. Now you let go of me and if Jenna wants another drink, just you make one for her. You know where the things are kept. There’s no need for her to stand up on they poor feet till she gets some proper shoes to put on ’em. Oh, and there’s some porridge left in the cauldron if you want some.’
Isabel watched the interchange in bemused silence when Nick playfully slapped Mundy on the bottom. What liberties he took, this handsome, common man, yet Mrs Cottle seemed to be very fond of him. Nick had taken her to two people he referred to as friends of his, and he planned to take her to another. Someone who doubtless liked and trusted him as much as Charlie and Mrs Cottle did. Uncle Laurence and Mrs Christopher felt the same way too. It was warm and comfortable in Mundy Cottle’s home and Nick clearly belonged here. She wished that, now she was lacking all the things dear and familiar to her, she could feel a part of Mundy Cottle’s home too, that she could make friends with his friends. But that could never be so, because Nick Nancarrow hated her and she was only passing through.
She desperately wanted to tell Mundy that she and Nick were not lovers and never would be. But now she had something more pressing she needed to ask her, something of the utmost delicacy, and she wished Nick and the children were not there.
‘Let’s have a look at they feet, maid,’ Mundy said, after she put on her shawl and bonnet.
Isabel obeyed self-consciously, holding her feet out from under the table, and received an immediate tittering of small faces. She had always felt uncomfortable with children and they continued to stare when she whispered something in Mundy’s ear, while blushing furiously. Mundy whispered back discreetly after shooing the children away. She judged Isabel’s feet to be about the size of her eldest daughter Martha’s, took a handful of coins from Nick to pay for everything and left. Isabel was relieved her children went with her.
‘They’re only a few of ’em,’ Nick said, after the door closed behind them.
‘A few of what?’ Isabel asked, finishing her tea and taking the liberty of helping herself to another slice of bread and butter. The sea air had always increased her appetite when she’d stayed at Gwithian and after the harrowing events of yesterday she was ravenously hungry. She took a bite of bread and shifted about uncomfortably on her chair, wishing with all her heart that Nick would go out too.
‘Mundy’s children,’ he explained. ‘The eldest is about my age, the youngest about three. The curious thing is, though I’ve known her all my life – I used to play with her older children as a boy and I’ve visited her every time I’ve been back in these parts since I grew up and left home — I’ve never seen her husband. All I know is that he’s a stone-mason and worked on the harbour wall put up in the cove ten years ago.’
‘Who is Mr Westley? Presumably not her husband.’
‘Oh, she means John Wesley, the preacher. The Cottles are staunch Methodists. Mundy’s been trying to get me ‘saved’ for years.’
‘I see,’ Isabel said stiffly, becoming withdrawn.
‘So do I,’ Nick said, amused. ‘You’re one of the Anglican brigade that strongly disapproves of Methodism. Well, I’ve got a lot in common with John Wesley and his brother, Charles. We’ve slept in barns and the open air and are energetic in what we believe in. We’re loyal to our friends and causes. They’ve done better than the lawful Church in most places, restoring Christian fellowship like it ought to be.’
‘Have they really?’ Isabel said grittily. ‘Well, they’re given only a quiet reception at Truro.’
‘Maybe so, but without the strength of enmity they used to get. ‘Tis said the Wesleys are as brave as lions. Do you think I am, Isabel?’
Isabel ignored the question. He was mocking her again and using her Christian name as though they were close friends.
Nick got up and poured hot water from Mundy’s great kettle into their mugs then added spoonfuls of rosemary and honey. ‘Sorry there’s no sugar to put in it. Mundy won’t have it in the house. John Wesley preaches against it because of the cruelty of the slave trade. Did you know that?’
‘I don’t approve of making men slaves either,’ Isabel snapped. She looked at the steaming liquid in the mugs and urgently, but as graciously as she could, rose to her sore feet. ‘I… I’m going out the back.’
‘Good idea. Mundy keeps a nice earth closet out there – nearly good enough for a lady to use,’ Nick said, then adding without tact, ‘You’d better get on with it, it’s not good to hold yourself for so long.’
Isabel swept past him but halted when he said, ‘Watch out for Mundy’s pig. He’s a good mater but very fierce. He’s been known to try to eat folk before now.’ He gulped down his drink and reached the door before she did. ‘I’m going down into the cove to see if the news of Laurence’s death and the accident is abroad.’
Isabel was vexed. If she had waited one more minute she would have been spared her embarrassment. She rushed to this small wooden closet put up amid the vegetable patch of the back garden. Inside she hurried herself because there was no lock on the inside of the door and she had a horror of someone bursting in on her. As she hastened back to the cottage, she looked warily about for the pig. There wasn’t one to be seen and she wondered crossly if Nick had amused himself again at her expense.