Morwennan House Read online

  I was surprised too that she should have opened the door to me herself. In a house this size I imagined there must be servants to carry out so mundane a task. But Selena answered my unspoken question at once.

  ‘I saw the carriage from the window. It is unfortunate that it is so difficult for it to come right down to the door but there is no space for turning. One of the disadvantages of building a house into the side of a cliff, I’m afraid. But the position suits my brother well. He likes to be within sound of the sea.’

  I nodded, feeling now more shamed than anything. If Selena had seen the carriage, had she also seen me standing like a pillar of salt, staring at the house?

  ‘Come inside and we’ll have a dish of tea,’ she said. ‘You must be famished after your journey.’ Her eyes swept the drive. ‘Is Durbin bringing your trunk?’

  Colour tinged my cheeks.

  ‘I don’t have a trunk. My things are here, in my bag.’

  ‘Good heavens! I never travel without at least three trunks!’ She laughed slightly. ‘Well, come inside anyway.’

  The hall I stepped into was square and dim. Hardly surprising, since even outside, the thick tracery of trees had shut out the light.

  ‘Leave your bag here,’ Selena said. ‘Durbin can take it up to your room when he has attended to the horses.’

  Reluctantly I set it down. It had become a lifeline to me and I wanted to hold on to it.

  ‘This way.’ Selena started across the hall and it was as I made to follow her that I saw the mirror, hanging over a small oak bureau that stood against one wall, and my heart came into my mouth again.

  It was a large mirror in an ornate wooden frame. The very twin of the mirror from my dream – the one in which I had once seen the reflection that was my face, yet not me. The breath caught in my throat; I stared at it as if mesmerised, unable to believe what I was seeing.

  ‘I’ll have some water heated later so that you can freshen up before we eat,’ Selena was saying. ‘I’m sure you will want to change out of your dusty clothes.’

  ‘Thank you.’ My voice was faint.

  I turned my back on the mirror, following her across the dim hall and into the parlour. To my immense relief it was much lighter, a large square room with comfortable furnishings. Though the mantelpiece and fire surround were of Cornish granite, they did not look cold as the outside of the house had done, for they had absorbed the heat of a thousand fires, and on the hearth a brass fender and fire-irons gleamed. Pretty porcelain was aligned along the mantelpiece on either side of an ornate carriage clock and a mirror hung above it. But this one, gilt-framed, held no terrors for me. There was a large central table and a small straddle-legged one in a corner on which a vase filled with white roses had been set. The window seat was padded and covered in bright chintz; when Selena invited me to sit down I made for it instinctively and saw at once why this room was so much lighter than the hall.

  It faced the sea. With no trees to block out the light the sky was clear and blue, the view of the cove uninterrupted. Directly in front of the house, well-tended lawns sloped down towards the beach and on either side the cliffs were emerald green, soft, dim brown and sharp white in the bright sunlight.

  ‘What a beautiful view!’ I exclaimed.

  Selena smiled faintly. ‘It is, yes. As I told you, my brother likes to be close to the sea.’

  I perched on the window seat where I could see the sea and the sky as well as the room and the trapped feeling in my chest began to ease.

  ‘I expect you are anxious to meet your charge,’ Selena said.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

  ‘She is staying tonight with her grandparents,’ Selena said. ‘The squire at Penallack – you remember I told you about him? Anyway, I thought it best that you should have the opportunity to settle in before beginning your duties.’

  I was surprised by this. I had thought Charlotte and her father, Francis, would be here to greet me, Charlotte perhaps a little shy and hanging back behind her father’s legs, and I had even planned what I might say to put her at her ease. To learn she was not here was something of a disappointment.

  ‘Her grandparents love to have her,’ Selena went on. ‘And she loves it at the Hall. Small wonder – they spoil her outrageously. My father has given her a pony and is teaching her to ride, and she enjoys the company of her cousins – my brother Adam’s children. It can be very lonely for her here, as I suppose it is for all only children.’

  I nodded. There had been plenty of times in the overcrowded rectory when I had wished I did not have to share a bedroom with Patience and Hope, plenty of times when I had thought that since I was an outsider it would have been nice to have some of the advantages of being alone. But I would certainly have missed the company of the boys and the adventures I had shared with them. And the trappings of wealth that were apparent in this comfortable room could never make up for the lack of company of one’s peers or siblings.

  ‘There would have been others, of course,’ Selena continued. ‘But, as I think I told you, Charlotte’s mother died giving birth to her.’

  Again I nodded. ‘Yes, you did mention it.’ The death of both mother and baby in childbirth was commonplace, but that did not make it any the less of a tragedy. ‘And your brother never married again?’ I said.

  ‘No.’ Her tone was short, clipped. Her lips tightened over it. I realised she was not going to say any more. For a moment the silence hung heavy in the room and I glanced around, expecting to see a portrait of Francis Trevelyan’s dead wife, and thinking it might give me some idea of what Charlotte would look like. But there was none. A seascape – rather wild and frightening, a little alien in the cheerful room; a watercolour depicting a bowl of fruit that might, I thought, have been painted by one of the ladies of the family; a tapestry sampler, but no portrait. Perhaps Francis Trevelyan did not want to live with a constant reminder of the wife he had lost.

  The door opened and a small apple-cheeked woman came in with a tray. I caught a strange, almost furtive, expression on her face when she looked at me and wondered at it. It was only natural, I supposed, that she should be curious about the newest member of the household, but somehow this was more than mere curiosity…

  She set the tray down on the table with a jerk that sent the porcelain cups clattering.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Durbin,’ Selena said sharply. ‘That will be all for now. I’ll pour the tea myself.’

  She did so, adding a spoonful of cream to each cup and bringing one over to me.

  I sipped it gratefully. It seemed a very long time since I had breakfasted at Penwyn Rectory. A lifetime ago.

  ‘Perhaps I should warn you,’ Selena said. ‘My brother is not always an easy man. He guards his privacy quite jealously. I hope you will come to regard Morwennan as your home, and find the rooms we have set aside for you to your liking. But there are parts of the house that we must insist remain our domain. My brother would take exception to your invading them.’

  I frowned, puzzled that she should deem such an admonition necessary.

  ‘I’ll show you around the part of the house that you are free to use,’ she said, rising and smoothing down her skirts. ‘And I’ll show you your own room at the same time. I expect you would like to unpack so that your gowns do not become too creased in that bag of yours.’

  I put down my tea cup. I had, I must admit, been hoping I might have a second cup. But at the same time it was a relief not to have to continue this rather uneasy conversation.

  Selena led the way through the living rooms. Like the parlour, the dining room looked out over the sea, but to my dismay the study, where, she said, I was to give Charlotte her lessons when Francis was not using it, was off the hall, and just as dark. In the kitchen a meal was clearly under preparation, but of Mrs Durbin or any other staff there was no sign. The whole house, in fact, seemed to echo with emptiness.

  Clearly Durbin had come in whilst we had been taking tea, however, for my bag was no longer where I had le
ft it in the hall. Selena led the way upstairs, along to the far end of a narrow landing way. There she threw open a door.

  ‘This will be your room.’

  It was quite small but more than adequate for my needs – the first time in my life I had had a room to call my own. It was on the side of the house, so that although it was partly shadowed by the trees I could also glimpse the sweep of the cliffs and the bay beyond. Durbin had set my bag down in the middle of the floor and a closet door stood ajar, emptied, I could see, to make hanging space for my clothes. Far more space than I would need!

  ‘I’ll leave you to unpack your things then,’ Selena said. ‘And I will let you know when my brother returns home. He will be, I know, most anxious to meet you.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m anxious to meet him too.’ But I was not. I was full of misgiving. I was wishing heartily that I was anywhere but here at Morwennan House and very afraid that this whole episode was going to be an unhappy experience. It was, I knew, too early to judge, but all my instincts were warning me. This was not a happy house. I could only hope I would not end up feeling as trapped here as I had always felt in my dream.

  * * *

  In the event I saw Francis Trevelyan before he saw me. I had taken my gowns out of my bag and hung them in the closet and I was stacking my undergarments neatly in a drawer when I heard voices outside.

  I went to the window and looked out. A path led along the side of the house beneath my window, between it and the trees. Two gentlemen were walking along it deep in conversation. Both were tall but there the resemblance ended. While the one was athletically built, in white buckskin breeches and green cloth coat, the other was portly, his tailcoat straining over his plump chest and his knee breeches over sturdy thighs. Though they both wore pigtail wigs and cravats, the face of the one was finely chiselled and tanned from the wind and sun, whilst the other – older than his companion by around ten years, perhaps forty to the other’s thirty – was jowly, and his cheeks had the high colour of a man a little too fond of his port. One of them, I felt certain, was Francis Trevelyan, and I hoped with all my heart that he was the younger of the two – for I did not care at all for the look of the other – yet my instincts were all telling me otherwise.

  I stepped as far as I could behind the curtain, so that if they looked up they would be less likely to see me, and peered down curiously. Almost immediately beneath my window they stopped and their voices floated up to me.

  ‘Five hundred pounds,’ I heard the older man say. ‘Take it or leave it. It’s worth double that on the open market.’

  I could not hear what the other replied, but a moment later the man I felt sure was Francis Trevelyan tucked his malacca cane under his arm and the two men shook hands to seal, I assumed, whatever deal it was they had been making.

  They moved on then, along the side of the house and out of my line of sight. And I was left thinking that if I was right, and the portly man was indeed Francis Trevelyan, I did not like him any more than I liked his house.

  * * *

  ‘We have a visitor dining with us this evening,’ Selena said when I had freshened up, changed into a clean gown, and ventured back downstairs. ‘It’s unfortunate, as this is your first night with us, but there it is. Francis has been doing business with him and invited him to stay for dinner before he realised that you had arrived.’

  I was a little surprised at that. Not, of course, that Francis had been doing business, since I had witnessed the deal, but that he should have been unaware that I was due to arrive this afternoon. It was, after all, his own carriage that had collected me and I would have thought that he would have been interested enough to meet the person who would have charge of his daughter’s education not to have forgotten.

  As if she had read my thoughts Selena gave a short laugh.

  ‘When he is doing business everything else goes out of my brother’s head,’ she said. ‘He is a self-made man, as I am sure you realise. As the second son he was not entitled to any consideration on the family inheritance and he has not built himself a small fortune by allowing anything to stand in his way. Charlotte’s welfare is entrusted to me for the most part and I do my best to see that he is not hindered by everyday distractions.’

  I nodded, but I could not help feeling it was a poor kind of father who considered his motherless daughter a distraction.

  ‘Thomas Stanton comes here quite frequently, as you will discover,’ Selena went on. ‘When he and Francis are not closeted in Francis’s study discussing fresh deals – and toasting the ones they have already made in the best champagne – he makes a great fuss of Charlotte. She is extremely fond of him, though I’m not at all sure I like that. I have no idea who the Stantons are or where they hail from, and I have to say I don’t like strangers under my roof.’

  She broke off, realising no doubt what she had said and anxious that she might have given me offence.

  ‘Your case is different, of course,’ she said. ‘You can hardly be held responsible for the fact that you were a foundling. But when it comes to business… There was a time when I never had dealings with anyone unless I knew something about them. Now… Still, he’s a handsome fellow, Tom Stanton. At least he has that to his credit.’

  A faint colour rose in my cheeks as in my mind’s eye I saw again rippling muscles under fine broadcloth and buckskin and a strong suntanned face beneath a pigtail wig.

  ‘Has he a wife, this Tom Stanton?’ I asked before I could stop myself, and at once felt my flush deepen. Why, it sounded as if I was mad for a man – any man – I, who had never had a suitor, nor even looked for one.

  Selena, however, seemed not to notice my sudden loss of composure.

  ‘I really couldn’t say,’ she replied. ‘As I said, I know almost nothing of the man.’

  I nodded, staring down at my hands and vowing to watch my tongue more carefully in future. And certainly not to allow myself unseemly thoughts about a man I had merely glimpsed through a casement window!

  * * *

  It was almost an hour before voices from the hall warned us that the men were emerging from the study. It had been an awkward hour. Selena was, I thought, a rather cold person, yet instinctively I knew that that coldness hid a darkly powerful personality that would make her a dangerous person to cross. Selena was used to ruling the roost here at Morwennan and anyone who got in her way would suffer for it. I also suspected that she had a fiercely jealous nature. From her comments it was not hard to deduce that she had disliked and resented Charlotte’s mother, and she seemed to feel a certain resentment towards Charlotte too. My heart went out to the little girl and I resolved to try to bring some love and happiness into her life as well as education. I knew only too well what it was like to feel unwanted and unloved.

  But for all Selena’s icy self-possession there was something else, something I could not make head nor tail of but found most disturbing. Every so often I would feel her eyes on me and when I met them I thought that beneath that calculating, speculative look I could see smouldering excitement. I tried to tell myself I was imagining things – heaven alone knew my imagination had already run away with me this afternoon! – but at the sound of the footsteps and voices in the hall I was aware of it once more – a sort of anticipation that was almost tangible. Selena rose, smoothing her skirts, and her eyes were very bright. She went to the doorway and called out: ‘Francis, Charlotte’s new governess is here. Perhaps you would like to come and meet her before we go in for dinner.’

  I rose from the window seat, trying to look demure as a governess should. I heard Francis say something to his companion and then his footsteps once more, coming closer. Selena glanced at me and that strange expression was there again on her face. She held the door wide and stepped aside. The portly figure of the man I had seen on the path outside filled the doorway.

  ‘Good day, Miss—’

  He stopped short, his voice fading away. But it was the look on his jowly face I shall never forget.

  Fr
ancis Trevelyan was staring at me as if he was unable to believe his eyes.

  He was staring at me as if he had seen a ghost.

  Three

  Startled and puzzled as I was, the silence seemed to me to go on forever. Then I heard Selena say in tones that were apparently concerned and yet somehow at the same time almost amused: ‘Francis? Is something wrong?’

  He recovered himself but I could not but be aware of the effort it took. The colour had blanched from his florid cheeks, now it came flooding back, higher than ever. He took a step into the room, still staring at me, and when he spoke I had the impression that the pretence at normality was for the benefit of his associate, standing unseen behind him, rather than for mine.

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss Palfrey. I trust you had a pleasant journey.’

  ‘Passable, I believe,’ Selena said. Again I had the impression she was laughing at him.

  I think I first realised in that moment that I was part of an elaborate game that I did not understand. Selena’s stares at me in the church that first day I had met her, her readiness to offer me the position of governess to Charlotte after only the briefest of interviews, the fact that Charlotte had been despatched to stay with her grandparents to ‘give me the chance to settle in’. Selena had known in advance what her brother’s reaction to me would be and had been anticipating it with malicious excitement. Yes, I was a part of some elaborate game she was playing. I did not understand it, and I did not like it one bit. More than ever I wanted to pack my bag and leave this gloomy house, leave the intrigue and the disturbing undercurrents. I wanted to run, like the child I had once been. But I was not a child any more and for me at least this was no game. It was supposed to be the beginning of a new life and suddenly I was angry that Selena should be playing with me this way, as if I were no more than a pawn on a chessboard.