Yesterday, Cuby and Clemency had been out all day with the Tregony Hunt. After early fog, when the going had been wet and almost blind, they had drawn a fox near Creed and had had a fine run for over an hour before losing him in one of the upper reaches of the Fal. Nobody seemed to mind, and, the weather turning sunny, they had gone on to find another fox, and had killed about three in the afternoon. It had been a glorious day in the open air and both girls had come home tired and muddy and glowing with content.
Today they had been occupied with other things, small things, house and parochial things, which in their way were the perfect foil to yesterday’s excitements. They had walked with John’s little boys on Porthluney Beach, and Cuby had returned home to write letters, one to her brother, one to her aunt. At dinner they had entertained the Rev. C. T. Kempe, rector of the parish of St Michael Caerhays, with which were joined the parishes of St Dennis and St Stephen-in-Brannel. Mr Kempe, a second cousin, was a cheerful outgoing man who seemed so certain of his future in the afterlife that he neglected his dress and his circumstances in this. After dinner they had strolled back to the rectory with him to look in again at his great pig, Alexander, which he was convinced was the largest in the world. It measured, he claimed, nine feet from snout to tail-tip, stood four feet high and weighed over 600 lbs. It had already won him prizes, but it was now become so fat it could not get to its feet unaided. Then they walked on together, sick visiting with Mr Kempe in the scattered cottages.
Returning at six they had found horses at the door and that their friends Captain and Mrs Octavius Temple from Carvossa had called in on their way home from staying with Lady Whitworth near Mevagissey. So it was a pleasant and jolly tea time, and seven o’clock before they left.
A happy, comfortable day. A happy, comfortable way of life, country-house life at its best, unexpectedly made more easy for the time being by the surprisingly good sale of Trevanion’s last remaining unencumbered farm near Grampound. Like Restronguet, sold earlier, this had belonged to the family since Bosworth Field, and it was the property Trevanion had intended to retreat to and live in under the terms of the marriage settlement, if that had come to pass. The proceeds of the sale would not last for ever, but just in time it had taken the most pressing creditors off their backs. Sufficient unto the day . . .
After Valentine’s defection Cuby had accepted the fact that she would not marry now – at least for some considerable time. There was no suitable man, young or otherwise, on the horizon. About a month ago her brother had brought up the name of a rich lawyer from Torbay who had recently lost his wife and might be lacking in companionship; but Cuby had not encouraged the idea that he should be invited to spend a week at Caerhays. John had not pressed. He was very fond of his younger sister and liked to have her at home. The arrangement with Warleggan was about as much as he could stomach. He had been driven into it; but now that it had fallen through he did not feel he could harry her into some new match purely for the money that match would bring. The disappointment at Valentine’s defection was at first profound: disappointment and panic, for he knew how his creditors would pounce; but the sale of the farm had removed the axe from his neck. So, making a virtue of necessity, he had expressed his own relief that he would now never be related by marriage to Smelter George.
Cuby lived from day to day and enjoyed each one as it passed. Tomorrow there would be hunting again . . .
Sometimes she thought she would perhaps never marry now. She had never of course loved Valentine, and she knew she had been wrong – flirtatious and silly – to encourage Jeremy as much as she had. For she knew she had never really loved him either. In a perverse way she had enjoyed his attentions, been flattered by his ardour. Conceit had been at the bottom of it, she realized with self-critical contempt, not really attraction. She blamed herself and was glad that it was over.
She looked after John’s two little sons, worked samplers with her mother or with Clemency, superintended plantings in the gardens, watching the new shrubs growing up under the protection of the tall trees, the brilliant cold sea between the low black rocks, the gentle sloping of green and russet cliff. She had taken up the piano again. She had children here, John’s children; why did she ever need any of her own?
She sometimes thought she would never come to care for anyone in the way that men expected her to care. Particularly in the way Jeremy had expected her to care. He had seemed to demand so much, of which she had never at any time been capable. Was she cold? Frigid, even, as they called it nowadays. Perhaps. The fact that she was attractive to men did not necessarily make them attractive to her. Her affections were of the stabler and staider kind. Love of family, love of comfort, love of home. She wanted no more.
Her brother was in very good spirits at supper. Offering Mr Kempe snuff at dinner – a habit he never personally indulged in – John had flipped open the top of the silver snuff-box and found it entirely empty, except for eight guineas which he had put there in October and completely forgotten. It had set him in a good temper for the rest of the day.
This evening he began to discuss London, and his younger brother Augustus’s letters, and the temptations open to a young man of good name but no property. He spoke of these temptations with disapproval, but with a hint of envy in his voice, Cuby thought, as if he would once again like to be subject to them himself. All the games of chance they played at Crockford’s for high stakes: Jeu d’Enfer, Faro, Blind Hookey, Vingt-et-un, and, of course, whist. He had personally been there when a man called Leary played whist without a break from Monday night to Wednesday morning, and then only broke off because he had to go to a funeral. It was on that occasion that the Duke of Wexford had lost £20,000.
How difficult it was to get into the Argyle Rooms: some said you were easier in Debrett’s than past those gilded doors! How the courtesans flaunted themselves; it was known that the most exclusive of them paid £200 a season for a front box at Covent Garden, as a shop-window for their own allurements.
Dinner at the Thatched House in St James’s Street, he remarked wistfully, smacking his lips, where Mr Willis presided in an apron stitched with gold thread! Then down to the St James’s Coffee House; as an ex-Dragoon Guardsman he was welcomed; the little Coffee House had become almost a private club for the Guards; trouble was you could not keep all the undesirables out; sometimes the fashionable bullies would force their way in; then there were fights.
His mother said reprovingly: ‘Those days are well past, John. And I am sure Augustus will not consider such dissipations appropriate to his small salary. Indeed he knows well that we cannot ever help him even with the smallest debt.’
‘I remember “Soapy” Wargrave,’ said John, taking a gulp of port. ‘My senior officer at the time. Very rich man who impoverished himself at the tables. Almost broke! Then he had a great run of luck – won a fraction of his losses back. He was beginning to learn his lesson by this time, so he went immediately out and spent all his winnings on presents: jewellery and wearing apparel for his mistresses, so that, he said, “those rascals in the salon stand no chance of winning it back again!”’
‘I’m afraid that is not a very moral story, John,’ said Clemency, smiling.
‘Fraid he was not a very moral man. When we were stationed at Windsor he took up with one of the ladies in waiting to the Queen, Lady Eleanor Blair – quite a passionate affair, I believe; but when we returned to the Portman Street barracks it cooled off – at least on his side. She was very angry, very tight about it, I gather, sent him a letter demanding the return of the lock of hair she had given him. D’you know what Wargrave did – terrible thing, I think. He sent his orderly up to Windsor with a packet containing more than a dozen locks of hair of all colours – fair, dark, auburn – and invited her to pick out her own!’
Both the girls laughed. John helped himself to more port. A thin disapproving smile crossed Mrs Bettesworth’s lips.
She said: ‘From such elegancies as those, John, it will no doubt seem quite demeaning of me to mention mere domestic details, but I will do so before Carter returns. He must have new livery soon. As Harrison must, and Coad and the rest. The men’s coats are becoming quite threadbare.’
‘Let ’em make do,’ said John. ‘At least they are paid now, which is an improvement on recent times. Get Mrs Saunders to put two maids to repairing the coats.’
‘Coad’s does not even fit him,’ said Cuby.
‘Well, he is a bigger man than Trethewy. And of course younger. He is the one most likely to split the seams!’
‘We cannot get new coats for him without getting them for the others.’
‘I am not sure that I like Coad,’ said Clemency. ‘He is a little intrusive.’
‘He’ll settle down,’ said John, stretching his legs. ‘Not been trained properly, that’s all. What can you expect, getting a man from the Hicks.’
Supper ended. John Trevanion retired to his study to smoke a cigar. Mrs Bettesworth took up her needlework, but after a few minutes set it down again and said:
‘Dear me, I do get so sleepy these days. I wake so early, that is the trouble. I wake before dawn and lie watching the day break. There is nothing I can do at that time except wait for the house to wake. But because of that – as a consequence – I am sleepy in the evening before it is proper time.’
Clemency exchanged a private smile with Cuby: they heard this speech almost every night. Whether it was true or not they could not say, but it did not convince the more with repetition.
After they had kissed their mother good night Clemency suggested a game of chess; but with the prospect of an early rise for the hunt tomorrow Cuby demurred. They played one game of backgammon, and then Clemency decided to stay down and read for a while, so Cuby kissed her and went in to put her lips to John’s brow as he sat in a wreath of idle smoke turning over a news sheet devoted to racing.
So then to bed. She lit a candle at the lantern in the hall and went up with it, shielding the flame from draughts with her cupped hand. Past her mother’s room and into her own. She began to light the six other candles.
She agreed with Clemency about Coad. He had come only in November, with a good reference from the Hicks of Truro, but instead of settling down in the right way, as John predicted he would, he seemed to her to be settling down in the wrong way, so that, as he became more familiar with his surroundings, he became more familiar with the people in those surroundings; or tried to. She knew that the older maids did not like him, and thought that one or two of the younger maids found him too pushing for their own good. Particularly Ellen Smith, who was a nice girl but could not resist the sight of a man. So long as it merely remained at the state of ogling and giggles no one would come to any harm. But how long would it remain so innocent? Not long, if Coad had his way.
As she lit the sixth candle the curtain rail rattled and a soldier stepped out.
She screamed, loud and clear.
‘Ssh!’ he said.
She put her knuckles to her mouth when she saw who the soldier was.
‘Jeremy!’
‘Ssh!’ he said again.
They stared at each other.
She was wearing an old but attractive frock of indigo velvet, with muslin sleeves at the upper arm and tighter transparent muslin to the wrists.
‘Jeremy!’ she whispered again.
‘I have come to see you,’ he said. ‘I have come to take you away.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘No matter for the moment. Will anyone have heard?’
‘I don’t think so.’
They listened. The house was silent. One of the dogs was barking, but it was far away. Jeremy took a deep breath to speak again but Cuby held up her hand.
There was a tap at the door.
‘Yes?’
There was another tap and then the handle turned and Mrs Bettesworth came in.
‘Did I hear you cry out, Cuby?’
Although seconds only had passed, Jeremy had slid back behind the curtains of the bed.
Cuby passed a hand over her eyes. ‘Yes, Mama, I’m sorry . . . When – when I came in the room I was thinking of Coad; and the air – the air created by my closing the door made the curtains move. For a moment I thought there was someone in my room!’
‘Oh.’ Her mother hesitated. ‘I see. So you are all right? There is nothing amiss?’
‘Thank you, Mama, nothing.’
‘You are quite sure?’
‘Quite sure. Good night again.’
‘Good night.’ Mrs Bettesworth took her time about withdrawing.
Cuby stared at the long-fingered hand that came to hold the curtain, the scarlet sleeve with the gilt cuff, the slowly emerging figure of the young man who for more than three years had loved her devotedly. Lank hair, but curling at the ends and dark, worn long and a little untidy – somehow it was like a soldier’s hair – ; fresh complexion, strong nose, blue-grey eyes with heavy lids, clever mouth, small cleft in the chin. Looking at her. Staring at her. Feasting his eyes on her. She didn’t love him and never had. Hadn’t she realized that only these last few weeks, when she had had time to pause, to reflect, to decide her own life?
‘Jeremy, my heart near stopped! . . .’
‘I’m sorry, there was no other way of breaking my presence to you.’
‘I still don’t understand – anything.’
There was a pause.
‘You’re very pale,’ he said.
‘I – haven’t yet recovered . . . The shock . . .’
‘Sit down. Is this water?’
‘Yes, but I don’t want it.’ Neither did she sit down.
He came slowly into the room. ‘Are we likely to be disturbed again?’
‘Why?’
‘Because I want to talk to you.’
‘Clemency might come. But it’s unlikely.’
‘Will anyone hear our voices?’
‘Not if we keep them down.’
Somehow, to her indignation, she found herself a part of his conspiratorial web.
‘How did you get in?’
‘A ladder to the roof.’
‘Have you been here long?’
‘An hour perhaps. And an hour or so outside.’
His eyes were heavy on hers. He had grown up so much this last year; his face was set with resolution.
He said: ‘Who was this Coad you spoke of?’
‘A footman. I had to invent something to explain to my mother.’
‘Not a future husband, then?’
‘No . . .’
‘Just as well. For I am your future husband.’
‘Oh, Jeremy, please be sensible.’
‘I have been sensible – as you call it – too long. I consider it being insensible, what I have been until now.’
After a moment she said: ‘Why did you come?’
‘I’ve told you.’
‘Well, you must go immediately! It is not right for you to be here in this way!’
‘But you cannot get rid of me before I choose to go. That opportunity passed when your mother came in. Now they will know that you lied about my being here.’
‘You are not being very chivalrous.’
‘All’s fair in love.’ He came near enough to put a hand very lightly on her arm. ‘Look, my dear. I shall never touch you without your consent, understand that. But I want to talk to you. We have all night. Pray do sit down and listen to what I have to say.’
With the first glint of a troubled smile she said: ‘Where is your horse?’
‘Tethered behind the house. Near the builders’ workings.’
‘He will get restive.’
‘Not for a while. And it is not horse, Cuby, it is horses.’
He caught the flicker of her hazel eyes as she turned to look behind her. She took a chair, sat down.
‘Very well. I will listen. But have we not said it all before?’
He perched on the bed, one boot, highly polished but with a few splashes of new mud adhering, slowly swinging with a nonchalance he did not feel.
He said: ‘I have come for you. To take you away. I have money enough for us to live on. The mine we opened is paying higher dividends and should make me moderate independent. I am going back tonight to rejoin my regiment in Brussels. If you come with me we shall ride only to Launceston tonight and stay at the White Hart.’
‘Come with you? Jeremy, I am very, very sorry. Have I not tried to explain often and often—’
‘Yes, but then Valentine was about—’
‘And before. I have tried to explain . . .’
He took her hand, turned it over, palm up, held it quietly. It lay there like a not-quite-tame animal which any moment might spring away.
He said: ‘I want to marry you. I – I want you to become a part of me – each to become a part of the other . . . I want to claim the honour of knowing your body intimately – and your mind and your heart. Cuby, I want to take you into the world and to live with you always, to – to experience everything that the world offers, in your company – to talk to you, to listen to you, to face with you all the dangers and the sweets . . . the pains and the pleasures, the – the exhilaration, and the joys of being young – of challenge and fulfilment and happiness.’ He stopped, short of more words with which to break down her defences. She sat head down, but listening.
He said sombrely: ‘I know I can marry someone else. I know you can. But it would be for us both a retreat into a half life, never breathing deep, never feeling all there is to feel, passing one’s days without the ultimate and – and vital flavour . . .’
‘Why are you so sure of all this – for me as well as for yourself?’
‘It is in me to be sure,’ he said, stroking her palm. ‘Come away with me now. As I said, we’ll spend the night in Launceston – as cousins or whatever you like to give the journey the necessary respectability. We’ll take the London coach tomorrow, be married in London, then travel straight to Brussels. It may not all be easy, comfortable, safe – in the way that perhaps living here is easy, comfortable, safe; but it will be everything else I can make it for your pleasure and happiness. My beloved, will you come?’
The spaniel was barking again in the easy, comfortable, safe depths of the house. She sat in the easy, safe, comfort of her bedroom with a red-jacketed young soldier stroking her palm. This room she had only occupied since the new castle was built, but most of the furniture she had known all her young life. She was sitting in one of the green velvet bedroom chairs in which fifteen years ago she had sat to have her first hunting boot laced up by the maid. In the frame of the faded gilt mirror showing damp spots over the mantelshelf were stuck little mementoes she had collected from time to time: a ball programme, a tie-pin which had belonged to her father, a sprig of rosemary from a picnic, a crayon drawing Clemency had made of her. An embroidery workbasket with pieces of silk slipping out of the lid was on another chair; in front of it slippers and a pair of kid gloves. The curtains of the bed were of heavy yellow brocade, the window curtains of a similar material but faded with the sun. Her room. Her privacy. Invaded by a rather formidable young soldier.
‘Will you come?’ he said.
Even if she loved him, which she did not, his proposition was beyond the impractical, bordering on the insane. How to break it to him gently, deflate once again the vain and pitiful hope so that he would go quietly, leave her and go, not too badly hurt, return to his regiment able and willing to lead and enjoy a life without her? It was such a pity, for, had circumstances been different, he would have made her a better husband than Valentine, and she would have made him a better wife. It was a pity that she was not the sort of girl he imagined her to be. Nor ever had been, nor ever conceivably could be. He imagined her warm, gentle, yielding; but she was cold, hard, firm. Family meant far more than any love-sick young man. Far more. John and Augustus and Clemency and the little boys, and Mama, and the great splendid castle, and the wonderful vistas, and the noble woods and the gentle cliffs and the ever changing yet unchangeable sea. She was a Trevanion of Caerhays and that was all. And that was enough. More than enough.
For the first time in several minutes she looked up at him, and he was watching her. Something stirred, crawled, came to life within her. Of course it had not been entirely absent in the past, but it should not come up now. Must not come up now. Suddenly, as if aware of the danger, caution, common sense, calculation started screaming at her. She put her free hand up to her mouth.
‘Will you come?’ he asked again.
‘Yes, please,’ she said.