Spring days in Cornwall could be as seductively warm as a summer’s day in upcountry England. This was just such a morning, and a glorious burst of sunlight glinted on the whiteness of the towering spoil heaps above St Austell, exposing all the glittering fragments of quartz and mica and other minerals that mingled with the discarded earth before the china clay was extracted.
The boys had climbed part-way up the biggest mountain that was locally and quaintly known as a sky-tip, leaving their struggling small sister a long way behind as she vainly tried to keep up with them on her short, sturdy legs. The eldest boy turned to laugh at her, then wobbled, losing his balance and sliding down the length of the sky-tip, to crash in a heap at the bottom.
Emma squealed as he fell onto her, all the breath knocked out of her. And then it was Bradley who was yelping, as he was hauled up by the scruff of his neck by one of his brother Walter’s pit captains.
‘Now then, young feller-me-lad, you’ve been told a hundred times that it’s dangerous to play on them heaps,’ the man said, scowling.
Bradley wriggled, none too pleased at being held this way by a man who might be a slice above most of the clayworkers who toiled for the family business of Killigrew Clay, but was still an employee. And it was well known that the man’s sons were ne’er-do-wells, who hung about the waterfront at St Austell, while Bradley was about to be sent to one of the best schools in Truro, and could hardly ever stop bragging about it.
‘You’d best leave me be, George Dodds,’ he yelled, in his loudest voice. ‘Or I’ll tell my brother you’ve been cuffing me.’
The man let him go with a careless laugh, and Bradley fell sprawling back onto the spoil help. Clouds of white clay dust rose around him, covering him from head to foot, and he was furious to know he resembled a circus clown more than an owner’s son.
‘You can tell him what you like, you young bugger,’ Dodds said, with no more respect in his voice than if he spoke to a bal maiden. ‘’Tis certain sure that Mister Walter will believe me more’n he believes you, from what I’ve been hearing lately. I pity the likes of the teachers in this fine school you’re going to. They won’t know what’s hit ’em.’
The small girl was looking from one to the other of them in astonishment. Nobody ever spoke back to her brother like that, and she was still pondering on why Bradley didn’t lash out at the pit captain, when, as if from nowhere, the middle one of the three came scrambling down the slopes of the spoil heap, and landed with a flailing of arms and legs at his brother’s feet.
‘Get up, Luke, you gorm,’ Bradley scowled at him, venting his anger on his younger brother now instead of the pit captain. ‘I’m going to Grandma’s, and you two can follow or not as you please. I’m tired of this place, and I’ll be glad to get away from it.’
‘And you mind and tell your mammie how you came to look so comical, young sir. She’ll enjoy the sight of ’ee, I’m sure,’ George Dodds called after him mockingly, as Bradley tried to march through the soft white slurry that clogged his boots and hindered his proud progress.
‘Bloody stupid oaf,’ Bradley muttered beneath his breath, but not quietly enough to stop the other two from hearing. Emma gasped, while Luke stopped in his tracks, so that she almost fell over him.
‘Grandma Bess says you’ll never go to heaven if you say those words,’ she stated.
Bradley scowled, glowering down at her from the superiority of his nine years.
‘I hope I don’t then. I’d rather go to the other place where I’ll be sure to meet up with some of the old Killigrews, and then I’ll find out why they stayed in this miserable backwater for so long, instead of moving upcountry like any sane body should.’
‘Well, you’re not a Killigrew,’ Luke said, always one for infuriatingly pointing out the obvious. ‘You’re a Wainwright, same as us.’
Bradley’s handsome face darkened, and the blue eyes that were the hallmark of his mother’s family glared at him. He gave Luke a swift punch in the gut that drew a howl of complaint from his brother, and strode away from him.
Luke didn’t have to remind him of his name. He’d grown up with it, but he couldn’t forget his rage when Grandma Bess had shown them all the names recorded in the big family bible at Killigrew House one Sunday. He’d been no more than knee-high to a flea then, as Grandad Hal had been forever saying, but that was the day he’d discovered that his mother had married for a second time and lost the proud name that was so respected in the county of Cornwall. He hadn’t even known that his mother had once married into the Killigrews.
Bradley learned that day that he and his siblings had been born very soon after the second marriage to Randall E Wainwright. He’d never seen eye to eye with his father, and from that moment on, the name of Wainwright had seemed to him to be of far lesser importance than Killigrew, and still did.
Even his mother’s maiden name of Tremayne had a fine Cornish ring to it. Some of his uncles and male cousins, of course, still continued it. And it was well known in the district, if not the world, Bradley thought expansively, that Killigrew Clay had become a flourishing china clay business once again, after a fluctuation in fortunes some years ago.
But at that point he was always forced to admit to the common knowledge that its new burst of success had been mainly thanks to the money and intervention of business skills brought to it by his own father, Randall Wainwright. All the same, none of it held the same charm for a boy with too much pride, and a strong streak of snobbery, as the Cornish name of Killigrew.
Heads down against the moorland breezes now, the three children left the area of the spoil heaps on the high moors above St Austell town and the glittering sea beyond, and Bradley brooded on his lot. Why couldn’t he have been his uncle Matt Tremayne’s son, and been born in the golden land of America across the Atlantic Ocean like his cousin Cresswell? And like his father, Ran Wainwright himself, who was the cousin of Cresswell’s mother.
There was such a mish-mash of them all, Bradley scowled, still smarting from George Dodds’ taunting, and from the fuss in his father’s study that morning. He’d been summoned there after breakfast.
He could see by his father’s florid face and heavy eyes, and his mother’s troubled ones, that something was up. Something was definitely up. It was his favourite expression of the moment. And he stood defiantly awaiting whatever censure was to come, displaying a mute insolence that irked Ran more by the minute.
‘You’ve been stealing apples, I understand,’ he said at once, never one for wasting words.
‘They were lying on the ground, no good to anybody, so I just helped Farmer Penwoody in clearing ’em up,’ he said, far too jauntily for Ran’s mood. For his cheek, he got a cuff around the ear that sent his senses spinning.
‘So you don’t yet know the difference between asking for something, and stealing other peoples’ property, is that it?’ Ran said. ‘And is this the boy who wants to go to Justin’s old school in Truro and carry on the family name?’
‘What family name?’ Bradley said, still on his private crusade. ‘Justin was a Killigrew, while I’m only a—’
He caught the sparkle from his mother’s eyes, and paused. Maybe it was time to go back over his tracks, and he looked up at Ran with the blue eyes that could be so deceptively innocent when he chose.
‘I’m sorry, Father,’ he said abjectly. ‘I know it was wrong, and I promise not to do it again.’
‘Good,’ Ran said, frowning, and never quite sure who was getting the better of whom where Bradley was concerned. ‘And I’m sure if you ask Farmer Penwoody, he’ll let you take your pick of the fallers any time.’
‘All right,’ Bradley said, avoiding his mother’s glance. But if his father was short-sighted enough to think that having free rein to the apple orchards was the same as the excitement of pinching them, he was quite sure his mother was not.
But the censure had been short-lived, and his father had more important things to worry about than apple pinching. There had been a disastrous clayworkers’ strike early in the year, which had left many of them penniless. Yet now there was even more dissent among them, and rumblings of more ludicrous pay demands, and Ran Wainwright had called a meeting of his pit captains and all the other owners and pit captains in the area, to quell it quickly.
Ran was anxious to be gone into St Austell where the meeting was to be held. Too anxious to waste time on piddling childish misdemeanors. Business had to come first. There needed to be a solid front on this, and no more threats of wildcat strikes – or worse still, organized marches into St Austell to storm the Killigrew offices, as in times past.
Morwen had bundled Bradley out of the study before he could irritate his father further, and told him he could take the younger ones up to Killigrew Clay if he had a mind to it.
‘Can’t I go by myself?’ the boy sulked. ‘Why do I have to take the babbies with me?’
‘Because I want to see Grandma Bess on my own, and I promised Emma I’d take her there. So when you’ve had an hour or so at the clayworks, you can all come visiting at Killigrew House and then come home with me in the carriage.’
‘We can’t walk all that way,’ Bradley protested. ‘And I don’t aim to carry Emma!’
Morwen sighed. Was there ever a child so keen on objecting at every turn?
‘I wouldn’t expect you to. Gillings will take you in the cart. You can walk down to St Austell, but don’t stray from the proper pathways. I don’t want you three young ones to be wandering over the moors by yourselves.’
‘Why not?’ Bradley said at once.
She glowered at him. Loving one’s offspring could sometimes be stretched to the limits, she thought. But she’d never been one to evade an honest answer.
‘Bad things can happen. Old mine workings can cause accidents, and there may be strangers about who would do you harm,’ she said vaguely.
‘And witch-women?’ Bradley said eagerly. ‘I heard tell of them at school, Mammie. Do you know of them?’
‘Maybe I do, but this isn’t the time for telling,’ she said briskly. ‘Go and remind the others to get ready, and I’ll ask Gillings to bring the cart around to the front of the house. I’m going into town with your father.’
She and Ran had driven silently towards St Austell, as distant as though the loving that had ended last night’s quarrelling had never happened. She remembered the loving with a rush of pleasure. It been so tender and so beautiful… Morwen glanced at the profile of her husband and sighed. Why couldn’t it always be like that?
For an hour or so, it had seemed as if the old Ran had come back to her, the strong, passionate man who had wanted her so badly, even while she was still married to Ben. The man who had shown her the glory of love in a small London hotel room, and banished all thoughts of guilt. For if Ben had no longer wanted her, then this man did, and she had felt loved and cherished, and a woman once more.
‘How long do you think the meeting will take?’ she said, softer and huskier than usual as the memories of those times filled her mind.
‘God knows,’ he said in his clipped American accent. ‘When it ends for the day I’ll be home, but don’t be surprised if it’s not until the early hours.’
‘Ran, it’s eleven o’clock in the morning! It can’t go on into the early hours of tomorrow!’
‘You don’t understand, honey. It’s best for small groups to discuss things privately, as well as collectively. I mean to do all I can to nip this strike threat in the bud before it begins.’
‘It’s really serious then?’
He looked at her witheringly.
‘Where have you been these past months, woman? Of course it’s bloody serious. If you haven’t been listening to me, you’ve been reading it in the papers, I presume? Tom Askhew’s been putting in a damn sight more than his two cents’ worth in The Informer.’
She flinched, hearing the dislike in Ran’s voice. None of them liked the brash Yorkshireman who’d run the newspaper down here for a time, and then gone back up north with his family for a few years. Then he’d returned to Cornwall, better heeled and more powerful than before, and wielding ever more influence to get his radical views into print. But even worse than his frequently vindictive accounts in the newspaper, according to Ran he was a strikers’ man, if ever he saw one.
And talk of the ominous threat of strikes among the clayworkers was very much on everyone’s lips right now. If they came to fruition, it would be just up Tom Askhew’s alley, Ran frequently said, to whip up the clayworkers into action. He’d do it, if only to get back at the business he despised, and more especially the family who overlorded it. He had no love for the Killigrews, nor anyone who married into them, which included Tremaynes and Wainwrights. The only exception was for the daughter that he doted on. And even there…
Morwen was perfectly sure that the sharpest thorn in Tom Askhew’s side was the fact that his adored Cathy had never wavered from her determination to marry Walter Tremayne. And after several years of marriage now, she was to have a child. The couple were overjoyed, as were Morwen and Ran, but in the local kiddley-winks Askhew had been heard to say sourly that it would just be another little bugger with the Tremayne hallmark on it, and more working fodder for the clayworks.
‘You’ll sort it all out, dar, I know you will,’ Morwen said swiftly to Ran now, more confidently than she felt.
He gave a half-smile. ‘Your faith in me does you proud. But my name’s Wainwright, not Tremayne, and it sure as hell ain’t Killigrew. I daresay Ben might have known how to handle them, and your daddy would have had a fair chance of quelling any riots in the old days. But when it comes to a brash colonial, they suddenly go deaf.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t call yourself that! After all these years, you’re practically as Cornish as the rest of us.’
‘And you’re talking moonshine, honey,’ Ran said drily.
They both knew it. It took more than ten years of marriage to a Cornishwoman to absorb what had been in the blood for generations. Morwen wondered if there was anywhere else in the world quite so insular as here. It was the first time she considered it with resentment.
‘Is Daddy joining you for this meeting?’ she asked, ignoring the jibe.
‘Naturally. It’s as much his concern as mine, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I would, yes, but the men—’
‘The men will just see old Hal Tremayne getting his two pennyworth of interest out of Killigrew Clay’s business, the same as he always did before he so-say retired. Don’t worry. It would take more than a roomful of raucous clayworkers to make him forget himself and give away the true state of affairs.’
Yes, thought Morwen. Even now, there would be some who still fiercely resented the fact that Hal Tremayne had come up in the world to be one of the bosses. And even more so to realize how much money Hal had put into it, when none of them knew he had any. It was a well-kept family secret, known only to the older ones, on Hal’s own insistence. He was a simple man, who cared nothing for power and money, but he’d accepted what was offered to him with dignity, and was wise with his advice when it was needed.
‘And what of Walter? I can’t imagine he’d leave Cathy too long at this time.’
Ran shrugged. ‘You never made much fuss when it came to your birthing time, and Cathy seems a sensible girl, for all that her father’s such a hot-head.’
‘Ran, I wish you wouldn’t always refer to Tom Askhew in that way,’ Morwen said wearily. ‘He’s not a monster, for pity’s sake—’
‘You’d consider him more like a saviour in one respect, I daresay,’ Ran drawled, glancing sideways at his wife and seeing the swift colour stain her cheeks.
‘Don’t be ridiculous—’
‘I’m not ridiculous, nor blind, nor forgetful. I know just how thankful you were when he came on the scene and lured your Miss “Finelady” Jane away from Ben. That was your name for her, I believe?’
‘I was young and foolish then. And Ben and Jane were never more than friends,’ she snapped.
He laughed outright now. ‘And you were never jealous of them, were you, honey? You seem to forget I knew your brother before I knew you, and learned all about the family history before I came over here.’
His reference to her brother Matt made her forget all about Tom and Jane Askhew. Matt had been the only one of her brothers to leave Cornwall, to prosper in the goldfields of California more successfully than any of them could ever have dreamed possible. And when he’d come home on a visit with a wife and son some years later, it was Matt who had been the real saviour of their dwindling family fortunes.
The prodigal son had returned, and in returning had been the catalyst for so many things. Not least, the fact that his wife was American and had a cousin in New York with a yen to see this south-west corner of the country that held itself so much apart from the rest of England. And the cousin’s name was Randall E Wainwright.
‘Don’t worry about this meeting today, Morwen,’ Ran said. He was more gentle now, misunderstanding her look as she stared ahead without seeing any of the surrounding moorland.
‘Then I won’t,’ she said, turning on a bright smile for him. ‘You, Daddy and Walter make a formidable team, and the clayworkers know that already.’
He nodded, satisfied. They had reached the old Killigrew House, where her parents lived, and he leaned forward in the carriage to kiss her. Later, Gillings would meet the younger children at the foot of the moors and bring them to the house, eventually taking Morwen and the children home.
She clung to Ran for a moment, and as she did so she felt a small shiver run through her, like a premonition that something bad was about to happen. She wished she could ignore it, but such feelings were rarely wrong.
‘Just take care,’ she said, knowing it was as much as she could say, for if she voiced her fears, he would dismiss it out of hand. Such fanciful Cornish forebodings had no place in a hard-headed businessman like her husband.
She alighted from the carriage and watched it trundle away towards the town centre and the meeting house where the bosses, pit captains and the clayworkers out of their shift would be gathering. She knew just how it would be. It would start out in a civilized manner, with everyone having their say… and by the end of it there would be jostling and pushing, cursing and fisticuffs.
There would be more than one bloodied nose, maybe a lot worse, and quite probably the constables would be called in to quell it all, and haul a dozen or more off to the cells to cool off for the night.
Those of them that were still in one piece would most likely crawl off to ‘Kitty’s House’, the bawdyhouse along the coast from St Austell, for the kind of comfort and pleasure that many sage wives turned a blind eye to, while their menfolk blithely imagined they knew nothing of their activities. It was always the same pattern after a rowdy meeting: the cells or the bawdyhouse or the Blue Boar kiddley-wink…
She gave up worrying about their doings. She was going to find out what the rest of the family had been doing lately. Her mammie was always a great source of news, Morwen thought with a smile. She hardly went anywhere these days, and she wasn’t a gossip, but somehow the information always came her way. And it would be good to hear how the rest of her large family fared.
Bess Tremayne had spent a lifetime caring for other folk. Firstly in the little clayworker’s cottage high on the moors, where Hal and herself and the five children had lived, snug as bugs. And then, when the children had mostly grown and gone their own ways, in the larger place, halfway between the high moors and St Austell town, that Charles Killigrew had offered them when Hal’s status in the clayworks had been raised.
Hal had argued and blustered about being given charity, but it had been herself and Morwen in particular who had persuaded him that he’d be a fool to turn his back on where fate was leading him. And a true Cornishman had never been one to argue with fate.
And now, there was this. Bess looked around her with some satisfaction on that April day when the windows gleamed and sparkled from the maids’ diligence, and everything was pristine clean from her own administering. For she’d been a worker for too long not to want to see to the furniture polishing herself, and she prided herself on the fresh smell of herbal creams and polishes that permeated Killigrew House.
Killigrew House! Even as she surveyed her domestic domain, a smile curved around Bess Tremayne’s lips for a moment. Who’d ever thought she’d be mistress here, for pity’s sake! Sometimes she still wondered if she was dreaming, and she’d wake up in the mean little cottage where they could see the stars through the rafters, where she’d spent her days working in the linhays at the clay pits, and her nights sewing dresses and underpinnings for finer folks than herself.
‘Mammie, are you ailing?’
Bess jumped as she heard her daughter’s anxious voice. She hadn’t heard the Wainwright carriage arrive, and she gave Morwen a cheerful smile now.
‘I’m as right as ninepence, my lamb. Just thinking, that’s all.’
Morwen bent to kiss her creased cheek, making little fuss about it. As a family they weren’t given to too much kissing, and Bess wouldn’t want anything made of the fact that it was rare for Morwen to find her mother just sitting and thinking. But Morwen was relieved to see that there was really nothing wrong, and that Bess rang for tea and biscuits to be brought in. It was still difficult for her to act the lady, and it had taken a long while before she’d finally got used to sending for refreshments instead of seeing to it all herself.
When they were both settled with cups of steaming tea in their hands, Bess turned to her daughter.
‘As a matter of fact, there is summat I’m fretting over, but I didn’t want to say it just yet.’
Morwen put her cup down on her saucer and gave her mother her wide, unblinking blue stare.
‘Well, now you’ve got this far, you’d better go on, hadn’t you? You can’t dangle half a story in front of me, or worse still, just the sniff of it!’
Bess sighed. ‘You know what they say. Once you put a thing into words, ’tis there for all eternity.’
‘I thought that was when you put it in writing,’ Morwen said drily, knowing there’d be no hurrying her mother until she was ready to speak. Bess nodded slowly.
‘Well then, ’tis our Freddie and Venetia,’ she said.
Morwen looked at her in surprise. Freddie had turned out to be the least complicated of her brothers after all. She would have reserved that judgement for Matt, her beloved, dreamy Matt, but he was far away with his family in California, and had found his own level of contentment.
Sam – darling Sam – had died many years ago now in a tragic accident, but his memory could still stir her heart with sorrow. And Jack was a flourishing and well-respected boat-builder, away in Truro with his delicate wife Annie, who had blossomed so amazingly after the birth of the son that had defied all the doctor’s advice.
But Freddie had seemed so happy with his Venetia – the Honourable Venetia Hocking Tremayne, Morwen reminded herself with a hidden, though uneasy smile.
‘What’s wrong, Mammie?’ she said, her voice a mite huskier.
‘Nothing exactly,’ Bess said uneasily. ‘’Tis just a feeling, from summat our Freddie said, that’s all. I’m probably making mountains out of emmet-hills.’
‘And you’re probably not. So why don’t you share it with me, and then we’ll both have summat to fret about?’
Morwen reflected that it was true what Emma had said. When she was with her mother, it was easy to slip back into the old comfortable way of speaking. But so what? Who was to hear, and who was to care?
‘Well, ’twas just the way our Freddie spoke when they invited us to tea in that rambling great place of theirs. They took us round the stables as usual – you know how Venetia can’t resist showing off her horses, and then our Freddie said summat about expanding, and mebbe goin’ in for racing as well as breedin’, see?’
‘Well, what’s wrong with that? Lord knows they can afford it with all the money her father left her—’
Bess went on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘And then he got quite cagey, the way he does when he’s saying summat and meanin’ summat else.’
Morwen nodded, understanding her mother’s own brand of logic, and knowing there was more to come.
‘It was when he said so casually that the real place to be for breedin’ and racin’ was Ireland.’
‘I daresay he’s right about that,’ Morwen said.
Bess’s blue eyes were filled with a momentary pain. It was the way they had looked after they’d come and told her that her first-born Sam had died in Ben Killigrew’s rail track accident on the moors. The way they always looked when she sensed instinctively that one of her brood was going to leave her.
Morwen drew in her breath. ‘You surely don’t think they’d up stakes and move to Ireland, do you?’
‘Mebbe they would and mebbe they wouldn’t. I’m only saying what I heard, but I’ve got a bad feeling about it, Morwen. I don’t want to lose another of my sons.’
Sons! They were always so special, Morwen thought, but without more than a smidgin of resentment, since she knew she felt the very same way. All of hers were special too, from Walter down to little Luke.
Her girls were special too, she thought hastily. In many ways there was a sweet telepathy between mothers and daughters, a womanly sisterhood that could never be denied. But a boy would always hold the key to his mother’s heart. And the look that passed between mother and daughter then made her almost wish she’d been born a boy too.