There was a glorious sense of serenity over the whole countryside that spring evening. It was as if the entire county was ready to embrace the new season with welcoming, open arms. The air was perfumed with wild flowers; and in the sky above, there was only the glitter of the myriad stars to disturb the heavens. It was a night to make even the most staid of married women feel like a young girl again.
Morwen Killigrew Wainwright was nowhere near to fitting the former description yet. To her, it was just a romantic, perfect night for loving… but even as the thought danced through her head, she knew there was something that had to be discussed and aired with her husband before considering such delights. She glanced at him across the splendour of the drawing room and spoke determinedly.
‘What are we going to do about Bradley?’ she said.
Even as she said it, she felt an odd sense of unease. It was as though she was hearing the words drop like pebbles in a pool, whose ripples would spread out and linger long after the moment.
She knew she was being over fanciful, but she also knew that the question had been left too long unsaid. She sipped her glass of hot gingered chocolate, seeing the heavy frown darken her husband’s handsome face.
He barely looked up from studying his newspaper, the flickering gaslight in the room accentuating his strong features. And for a moment, Morwen marvelled that while she had thought this night so magical, here was a man who saw nothing but the black and white print of a miserable newspaper.
‘The children’s behaviour is supposed to be your responsibility, honey,’ he drawled, using the term that Morwen had once found so charming, and which now seemed to be spoken more with sarcasm than anything else.
If there was anything guaranteed to rile her lately, that was it. And he knew it. It was as though he took great enjoyment out of seeing her fume. She had never been one to suffer fools lightly, and Ran was nobody’s fool.
She put down her glass on the side table with a clatter. Sometimes, Ran frustrated her beyond words. There were even times when she felt she didn’t know him at all. Times when, remembering how the stubbornness of her first husband’s last years had tormented her so, it seemed, eerily, than Ran was turned out of the very same mould. It was hard to credit. Ben Killigrew and Randall Wainwright had seemed so different from one another, and yet…
And those times when Ran’s irritability ate away at her, were times when she longed so guiltily for Ben’s very Cornishness, instead of the hard business brain of the American she had later married. It had seemed wonderful beyond belief to have found such love twice in a lifetime, but maybe such good fortune was more than any one person deserved, and there was bound to be a reckoning… The unease of such a thought made her bite the inside of her cheek until she winced with the self-inflicted pain.
But a sudden surge of nostalgia for those far-off days took her unawares. They had been so alike, she and Ben; born into different classes, but still born of the same hardy stock and the same background. They belonged. Cornwall was in their blood, as it had never been in Ran’s, and never would be, as she had discovered too late.
The impatient rustle of the newspaper jerked her thoughts back to the man seated opposite her now on the elegant sofa. When had he changed from the vital and dynamic man she had married, she thought, in some amazement. Or was it Morwen herself who had changed, sitting back and letting her man take over the running of the clayworks that had once been her life, and simply failing to acknowledge how single-minded was the cancer of ambition in him?
‘All right, let’s have it.’ He practically snapped out the words. ‘You want me to thrash Bradley’s hide for some petty misdemeanour, is that it? He’s nine-years-old, for God’s sake, Morwen. He’s feeling his feet and growing robust. You should know about treating boys differently from girls, and giving them some leeway when they start growing up. He’ll not thank you for turning him into a mummy’s boy.’
‘I would never do that! I didn’t do it with Walter or Albert, did I? Nor with Justin. I won’t have you accusing me of being soft with the boys, Ran!’
To her fury, he dismissed the names as carelessly as if he was swotting flies on the wall.
‘Walter and Albert were never your boys in the true sense of the word. You raised them, but you never gave birth to them, did you? Nor to Primmy, who’s turning into a precocious little madam, if you want my opinion. They were never yours, Morwen, so you can’t take the credit for the way they turned out. And as for your own pair, Justin and Charlotte—’
‘I certainly think I can!’
She bridled at once. She’d heard enough, but for now, she could ignore his scathing reference to her natural son and daughter. But she felt sharply defensive at this dismissal of her surrogate motherhood of the other three.
‘Ben and I took them in and brought them up as our own, and they wanted for nothing. Ben saw to that. He was the best father they could ever have wanted. You know that!’
She didn’t miss the derision that came into Ran’s eyes at this. He’d had little time for her first husband, and Morwen didn’t need telling that it had been a mistake to throw up his good points at this moment. It usually had the effect of coarsening Ran’s tongue, and this time was no exception.
‘It’s a pity the bastard died so young, then. If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had to listen to these constant references to the saintly Ben Killigrew!’
‘He was no saint, and I don’t pretend that he was. But he was my husband, and he cared for my brother’s children as much as I did, and I won’t have you belittling his name.’
She leapt up from her chair, angered by his cursing, and swept out of the room with her head held high, knowing that nothing was resolved about Bradley’s latest escapade of stealing apples from one of the local farmers. It wasn’t a terrible crime, and it was one that the tolerant farmers would probably overlook from one of the popular young Wainwright children, but it was still something that had to be stopped before it got out of hand…
She walked swiftly, still with the easy, sensual grace that had so seduced Ben Killigrew into wanting her when she was no more than a lowly bal maiden in the great china clayworks called Killigrew Clay that his father owned.
Her eyes were salty as Ran’s raucous voice followed her. She tried not to listen to the final snide remark that it was a pity she couldn’t resurrect Ben Killigrew from his grave in St Austell churchyard, since Ran was bloody sure he was the one she still hungered for in her bed, alive or dead.
‘I can’t stand much more of this,’ she muttered beneath her breath, as she went stiffly upstairs in the house Ran had named New World in deference to his American roots.
It had enchanted her so much then; it did nothing to enchant her now. She closed her eyes for a moment, as if to shut out the bad temper that seemed to be the only emotion Ran could give to anyone lately.
For a second, she remembered how it had been with Ben, when he was told he had a heart defect that could kill him at any moment. The shock of it had changed his personality totally… and perhaps to react so badly against such a death sentence was forgivable… but she was certain Ran didn’t have the excuse of being told that a fatal illness was shadowing his every movement.
If he had, she would surely sense it. She had always had the uncanny Cornish intuition for such things, and she knew that in Ran’s case, it was just sheer bloody-mindedness that made him the way he was. That, and the undoubted sense of anxiety that was becoming more and more evident about the china clay fortunes lately. The threat of strikes and the demands for more pay when profits were low made this hardly the best of times. But he didn’t have to take out his business worries on her and the children, and she hardened her heart against him.
A whiff of herbs and wild flowers teased her nostrils from the landing above. It came from the arrangements of aromatic blooms that the old housekeeper kept in the great jardinières on the landing. No matter how costly the container, Mrs Enders had declared for as long as Morwen could remember that nothing filled them more splendidly than the fragrance and healing properties of nature’s own garden. It was a sentiment that earned Morwen’s full approval. She was of this land, and she understood.
Morwen stood quite still, breathing in the scents of the Cornish waysides and moorlands, lost in a world of misery for present fortunes, and a frustrated longing for the past. It did nothing to settle her jangled nerves, and she knew full well that it was a futile, foolish thing for a mature woman to spend so much time dreaming, especially one who was now mother to eight, for pity’s sake!
They didn’t all live with Ran and herself at New World. After Morwen’s second marriage, Albert and Primmy had chosen to live at Killigrew House with their grandparents, and had now set up an establishment of their own in Truro. Albert had proved to be a talented artist, and held exhibitions in the town. The two of them mixed with artists and potters, and with what Ran scornfully referred to as the more poncey fringes of society, while Primmy’s musical entertainments on their Bohemian evenings, belied her childish frustration with the pianoforte.
Morwen openly admired their independence, and was always happy to see them and hear about their different world. But when all the children and relatives came visiting together, it seemed that this house, however spacious, was about to burst at the seams.
And ever more frequently these days, Morwen felt a great and guilty need to be out of a house that could be as confining to the senses as a prison cell, to run free and wild on the open moors, as if she was a young girl again.
She knew very well she should quench such feelings, but she no longer bothered to deny them. Days that could never come again were sometimes the best of all days. And maybe it took a mature mind to recognize that fact, and even more so, to accept it, she thought.
But far too often now, she seemed to stand outside herself and her family duties, no longer the woman in her forties with three grown-up adopted children who had been the fruit of her brother Sam and his wife Dora; mother of Justin and Charlotte, who had been born to her and Ben; and the young ones that were hers and Ran’s: Bradley, Luke and Emma. She stood outside of all of them, and just became herself.
This was just such a moment, when the sweet imagery of the past filled her mind. When it seemed that she was no longer Morwen Killigrew Wainwright, respected wife and mother, but Morwen Tremayne, as fey and spirited as the wind. And trying not to be overawed at being summoned with all her family to the big house in St Austell town on old Charles Killigrew’s whim of an invitation.
It had been her seventeenth birthday, but she had been of no more importance than any other of his bal maidens working in the linhays and stacking clay blocks up on the moors at Killigrew Clay. She had been gauche and young and nervous at the invitation; and then the son of the house had looked at her and been charmed by her, and told her she was beautiful…
‘Oh Ben, why did you have to die?’ she mourned in silent accusation into the scents and creakings of New World. ‘Why did everything have to change?’
Sometimes she tried to imagine how things would have been for them now, if the awful accident when Ben’s ship had foundered taking the clay blocks to France, hadn’t accelerated the heart attack that took him from her… and the memories wouldn’t go away, even though she knew she was being totally disloyal to the man downstairs, with whom she had found love a second time.
Suddenly, all her nerves jumped as she heard two things simultaneously. The clink of bottles and glasses from the drawing room below told her that Ran had begun his nightly heavy drinking again, which was also ironic, since Ben too, had succumbed to the drink.
And six-year-old Emma cried out in her sleep for her ‘Mammie’. Contrary to the way that finer folk than she was insisted on their children saying ‘Mother’, Morwen had stubbornly let hers choose their own name for her, and she had gloried in the fact that they chose to call her ‘Mammie’, as she still called her own mother.
Emma called out fretfully again, and Morwen pushed the memories out of her mind, and hurried along the landing to the child’s bedroom. But even as she did so, her daddy’s wise old words seemed to swirl around in her head with an inevitable and somehow warning ring to them:
‘We can’t ever go back, Morwen love. You know that. All we can do is go on the best we can. ’Tis all any of us can ever do.’
She went swiftly into the small bedroom that was painted in light colours for her youngest daughter, and put a bright smile on her face as she saw Emma’s hot little figure sitting up in her bed, her blue-black hair tumbling about her shoulders.
‘What’s wrong, my lamb? Did you have a bad dream?’
Emma shook her head. Her voice was squeaky thin. ‘I woke up and there was shouting. I was afraid. Was it you and Daddy shouting, Mammie?’
‘We were just talking, my love, and I daresay it was a bit loud for so late in the evening. It was nothing for you to worry about.’
Morwen smoothed back the dark hair and tried to look reassuringly into the large, candid blue eyes that all the children had inherited from her family. In particular, this darling child had her mother’s eyes. Always, they seemed able to see through the façade of story-telling, and to ferret out the truth like a dog worrying a bone…
It was another of her daddy’s old sayings, and Morwen knew this was going to be a bad night for her too. When Hal Tremayne’s words intruded so sharply into her senses, it always indicated that Morwen’s peace of mind was disturbed. It boded a restless night, full of dreams and uncertainties… and with every likelihood of a migraine headache in the morning.
She folded the child securely in her arms and began a rocking motion with her. She had been born an optimist, but the bright and joyous future she had begun with Ben Killigrew all those years ago, walking to Penwithick church as a bride, with garlands of wild flowers perfuming her hair, seemed as elusive and far away as ever.
‘Shall we go and see Grandma Bess tomorrow?’ she murmured into the tangle of Emma’s hair. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
As she heard the mumbling assent from her daughter, she relaxed a little. She pushed aside the thought that it was her own need that made her suggest a visit to the Killigrew House that she had handed over to her parents when she married Ran Wainwright and moved into New World with her children.
Killigrew House was where her association with the Killigrews had begun to change from that of lowly employee to wife and mother. And every time her troubled relationship with Ran flared up, it was the place where she wanted to return.
There must be something wrong within her, to want to cling so much to the past, Morwen thought uneasily. Some clever head doctor could possibly tell her what it was, but she had never had much truck with any doctors.
They could do all sorts of things to make folk well, but the old women on the moors could do as well, if not better, with their herbal remedies and potions and charms…
And Morwen too, was reputed to have healing, calming hands… hadn’t they comforted old Charles Killigrew in his dying days?
‘Mammie, you’re hurting me,’ she heard Emma’s wailing voice say now, and she realised she had unconsciously tightened her grip on the child with the memory of an old moorland witch-woman, whom she hadn’t thought about in years.
But it was all entwined in the past that seemed intent on dogging her tonight. Old Zillah, and her evil-smelling cottage, and the two young girls who had gone there begging for a potion to find their true love. Morwen and her best friend, Celia, who had eventually died a horrible death in the milky-white waters of a clay pool…
‘I’m sorry, lamb,’ Morwen said quickly to Emma. ‘It’s just that I love ’ee so much that sometimes I feel as if I could crush ’ee to death—’
‘Why are you talking in that funny way?’ Emma said at once, as Morwen unconsciously lapsed into the old patois of the moors. It was a soft and comfortable way of speaking that had been smoothed out and tidied up during her latter years as the respected wife of a businessman and landowner; and as the part-owner of Killigrew Clay.
‘Was I?’ she said woodenly.
‘You were talking like those people at the clayworks, the way Grandma Bess talks too. It fits Grandma Bess, so I don’t mind when she does it,’ she added generously, ‘but Daddy doesn’t like it, does he?’
Daddy didn’t like a lot of things these days, Morwen thought with a sigh. She bent to kiss the flushed little cheek, and told her daughter to try to sleep now, because tomorrow they’d definitely go into St Austell town and visit Grandma Bess.
‘Maybe we’ll go up to Killigrew Clay one day soon too, if Walter will agree to it. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
She listened to herself, and wondered uneasily just how dangerous it was to try to keep too tight a hold on a past that was gone. Not that Killigrew Clay itself would ever be gone from her heart or her pocket, Morwen thought, more prosaically. She was still part-owner, along with her husband and her father.
And to the outside world the clayworks were still a prosperous and thriving business, high on the moors above the town. The physical evidence shone out over the countryside where the white spoil heaps, whose discarded quartz and mineral deposits glinted like diamonds in the sunlight, were an ever-present reminder of the fortunes gained by the Killigrews from china clay.
Killigrews and Tremaynes; and now Wainwrights, she added silently, for their lives had become too intertwined to separate one from the other.
And Walter, her brother Sam’s son who had always been her best-beloved, she thought unashamedly, no matter that it had been her sister-in-law Dora who had borne him, was now the fine and respected Works Manager of one of the biggest clay concerns in Cornwall.
She had such a fierce pride in Walter, such a damnable sense of pride that was hard to contain at times, but of all the older ones, he had turned out the best. And she wasn’t so stupid as not to see it and to know it. And it was still incredible to her that he was a husband now, and soon to become a father himself. Life moved on…
Once Emma was settled, Morwen went silently back along the passage to her own room. Ran wouldn’t come upstairs for hours yet, and when he did, he’d sprawl across the bed, practically insensible from the drink. It was too much like the curse that had caught up with Ben, and the comparison certainly didn’t help her to deal with it.
It was surely a cruel twist of fate to have been blessed with two such passionate, virile husbands… and then for both of them to be dragged down by the same demon.
She was still tossing and turning in the big bed they shared, when she was aware of someone or something beside her bed. She felt her heart leap, wondering if she had conjured up some unearthly apparition through all her introspection.
Because just for one moment, for one spectacular, delirious moment, she thought it was Ben standing there… and then the tall, masculine figure moved slightly, and in the low light from the landing, she could see that it was Ben’s son.
‘Mammie, you’d best go and see what’s wrong with your husband,’ she heard Justin urge.
He always used the formal term when he was disturbed by Ran’s drinking, and at other times he rarely called him anything but ‘Father’, which kept him at an emotional distance.
‘I’ll get up right away,’ Morwen said at once, hearing the crashing about from the floor below. How she had missed the noise before, she couldn’t think… unless she had simply shut Ran out of her mind.
‘Shall I come with you?’ Justin said.
‘No. You go back to bed. I can handle him,’ she said quietly, knowing of old that Ran would turn on the boy at once with his sarcastic remarks.
Not that Justin was a boy any longer, she thought swiftly as she pulled on her dressing robe. He was a handsome young man now, and nearing his twenty-first birthday, which was an occasion they would all be celebrating in a few weeks’ time. And she recognized that the very fact of Justin reaching his majority seemed to be bringing out the worst in Ran lately.
As if, with her son’s coming-of-age, Ran was seeing a glimpse of his own mortality. It was ridiculous for a man in his virile years to think that way, but she couldn’t apply Ran’s resentment of Justin to any other reason.
Unless… it surely couldn’t be because of the boy’s education and sharp brain. Of all the children, Justin was the acknowledged clever one. He was the one who had gone to college in Truro and followed a legal career, was now working in Daniel Gorran’s Accountancy and Legal Chambers, and was very likely to inherit the practice when the old man passed on.
It surely couldn’t be jealousy on Ran’s part, although he himself had once had a legal leaning, and had considered working with Daniel Gorran himself when he first came to Cornwall from New York. Loyally, Morwen wouldn’t put Ran’s feelings down to anything as petty as jealousy. Still, Justin could always hold his own in an argument with his stepfather, and usually won. Maybe that was what galled him so much.
Morwen tried to push the family squabbles out of her mind and hurried down the staircase to where Ran was muttering angrily to himself in the drawing room. She closed the door swiftly behind her, thankful for its solid oak construction that muffled any sounds.
It was an unwritten rule of the house that if doors were left open, they invited anyone to come in, but the younger ones and servants alike knew better than to interrupt when doors were tight shut.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Morwen said sharply. ‘Are you determined to waken the whole household?’
‘And why should I not, if I feel so inclined? It is still my household, I believe, Ma’am?’ he said, oozing a drunkard’s elaborate sarcasm.
She sighed, moving across the soft carpet to him, and placing her hand on his arm. She spoke more pleadingly. ‘Please Ran, don’t let’s fight. Come to bed.’
The moment the words left her lips, she knew she had chosen them badly. But then, she hadn’t chosen them at all. It was the most natural thing in the world for Morwen to speak openly and frankly about anything and everything.
But when Justin had woken her, she had simply slipped a loose dressing robe over her night-gown without bothering to tie it at the waist, and she saw how Ran’s dark eyes gleamed now at the realization.
His hand reached out to fondle the softness of her breast, and to her chagrin, she felt its ready reaction and her own quickening breath. But this wasn’t the time or the place, and her earlier romantic mood had vanished. She was in no mood now to respond to a drink-sodden lover, or so she believed…
‘Is that an invitation, honey?’ he said in a softer, deeper voice, and, despite herself, she caught her breath at its sweet seduction. It seemed so long since he had been this way, that she felt herself weakening, despite herself.
‘If you like,’ she said huskily. ‘Only please leave the bottles behind, Ran.’
‘Are you suggesting that if I have any more I shan’t be able to perform?’ he said, still with the mockery he seemed unable to resist these days.
‘No, I didn’t think that,’ she said, her beautiful eyes steady, and refusing to be provoked. ‘But I prefer to have my husband’s undivided attention when he makes love to me, and not to be sharing him with a bottle.’
For a few seconds he said nothing, and then he drew her to him, his arms hard and powerful, and holding her so tightly she thought she would break. He buried his face in her neck, and then his kisses roamed over her closed eyelids and cheeks, to the tip of her nose, and finally sought her open, waiting lips.
‘I’m a prize bastard to you sometimes, honey, and I know it,’ he muttered in a voice that was heavier with desire than with the effects of drink now. ‘But God preserve me from ever taking so much liquor that it blinds me to all that you mean to me.’
‘Then let’s go to bed,’ she whispered again, aware of the hardness of that desire through the softness of her gown.
And he was still holding her in his arms, and still kissing her, as they left the room with the door wide open. They were hungry for love, and everything else was forgotten but their need for each other.