Bride of Pendorric (9 page)

then she turned a rapid somersault and did a few more handsprings on the grass, going farther and farther away from me until she reached the north door. She went through this and I was alone.

I returned to my book but I found that I kept looking up at the windows. I had been right when I had thought so many windows would be disconcerting; they really were like the eyes of the house. It’s all this talk of ghosts, I thought. Well, I had been warned of the superstitions of the Cornish, and I suspected that Lowella had mischievously tried to frighten me.

The north door opened with a crash and I saw the brown face, the dark ponytail, the light blue blouse and dark blue shorts. ” Hallo 1 Uncle Roe said I was to look after you in case you were lonely.”

” Well, you’ve been doing that after your fashion,” I told her. ” I couldn’t find you. I went up to your room and you weren’t there. I hunted everywhere and then I thought of the quad. So I came here. What would you like to do? ” ” But you were here a little while ago.”

She looked at me blankly.

” You told me the story of the brides,” I reminded her. She clapped her hands over her mouth. ” She didn’t, did she?”

“You’re not … Hyson, are you?”

” Of course not. I’m Lowella.”

” But she said …” Had she said she was Lowella? I was not sure. ” Did Hy pretend she was me?” The child began to laugh.

“You are Lowella, aren’t you?” I persisted.

“You really are.” She licked a finger and held it out and said;

” See my finger’s wet?”

She wiped it.

” See my finger’s dry?”

She drew it across her throat.

” Cut my throat if I tell a lie.”

She looked so earnest that I believed her.

” But why did she pretend she was you?” Lowella’s brows puckered, then she said: “I think she doesn’t like being the quiet one. So when I’m not there she thinks she’ll be me. People who don’t know us much can’t tell the difference. Would you like to come to the stables and see our ponies?”

I said I would; I felt that I wanted to escape from the quadrangle as I had from the graveyard that morning.

Dinner that night was a comfortable meal. The twins did not join us and there were the five of us. Morwenna said that when I was ready she’d show me the house and explain how it was run.

” Roe thinks that just at first, until you’ve settled in, you would like things to go on as they are.” Morwenna smiled at her brother affectionately. ” But it’s to be as you want. He’s very insistent on that.”

” And don’t think,” put in Roe, returning his sister’s look, ” that Wenna will mind in the least whatever you want to do in the house. Now if you should want to root up her magnolia tree or turn the rose garden into a rockery, that would be quite another matter.” Morwenna smiled at me.

“I’ve never been much of a housekeeper. Who cares? It’s not really necessary. Mrs. Penhalligan’s a treasure. I do love the garden, but of course if you want anything changed …”

” So,” cried Roe, ” the battle of the trees is about to begin.”

” Don’t take any notice of him,” Morwenna said. ” He loves to tease us. But then I expect you’ve discovered that by now.”

I said I had and that I knew nothing of gardening and had always lived in a tiny studio which was as different from a mansion as any place could be.

I felt very happy to hear this banter between Roe and his sister because the affection which lay beneath it was very obvious. I was certain that Roe was anxious that Morwenna should not feel put out because he had brought a wife into the midst of their household, which could easily bring a lot of change. I loved him for his consideration of his sister; and when they asked me questions about Capri and were very careful not to mention my father, I guessed that Roe had warned them of my grief.

How considerate he was of us all; I loved him all the more because he never made a show of his care for us, but hid it under that teasing manner.

Morwenna and Charles were clearly trying to make me feel at home, because they were kindly and so fond of Roe. I was less certain of Rachel. She seemed absorbed in impressing on the servants that she was an honoured member of the family; she was a little on the defensive I thought, and, when her face was in repose, I fancied I caught a bitterness in her expression.

We sat in one of the small drawing-rooms drinking coffee which was served to us by Mrs. Penhalligan while Charles and Roe talked estate business, and Morwenna and Rachel, one on either side of me, launched into a description of local affairs. I found it all very interesting, particularly after the brief glimpse I had had that morning of the little village. Morwenna said she would drive me into Plymouth when I wanted to shop because it would be better for me to have someone who knew the shops the first time I went.

I thanked her, and Rachel said that if by any chance Morwenna wasn’t available I could count on her.

” That’s nice of you,” I replied.

“Only too pleased to do all I can for Roe’s bride,” she murmured.

Bride! Bride! I thought impatiently. Why not wife, which would have sounded so much more natural? I think it was from that moment that the eeriness of the house seemed to close in on me and I was conscious of the darkness outside.

We went to bed early, and when Roe and I were walking along the corridor on our way to our rooms on the south side I looked out of the window to the quadrangle and remembered my conversations with the twins that afternoon.

Roe stood close to me as I looked down.

“You like the quadrangle garden, don’t you?”

“Apart from the eye like windows which are watching all the time.” He laughed. ” You mentioned that before. Don’t worry. We’re all too busy to peep.”

As we went along to our bedroom Roe said: ” Something’s on your mind, darling.”

” Oh … it’s nothing really.”

” There is something then.”

I tried to laugh lightly, but I was aware of the silence of that great house and I could not stop thinking of all the tragedies and comedies which must have taken place within those walls over the hundreds of

years they had been standing. I could not feel indifference to title past, which in such a place seemed so much closer than it possibly could in my father’s studio. I blurted out what had happened that afternoon.

“Oh, those terrible twins!” he groaned.

” This story about the Brides of Pendorric …”

” Such stories abound in Cornwall. You could probably go to a dozen places and hear a similar story. These people are not coldblooded Anglo-Saxons, you know. They’re Celtic—a different race from the phlegmatic English. I know of course that they may have haunted houses in Huntingdon, Hereford and Oxfordshire—but they’re merely houses.

According to the Cornish, the whole of Cornwall is haunted. If it’s not the pi skies it’s the knackers from the mines. There are the Little People in their scarlet jackets and sugar-loaf hats. There are foot lings who are born feet first, which is supposed to be a sign of their magical powers. There are pillar families—those inheriting power from fishermen ancestors who rendered some service to a mermaid; there are witches, white and black. So of course there are a few common ghosts. “

” I gather Pendorric has that kind.”

” No big house in Cornwall could possibly be without at least one.

It’s a status symbol. I’ll bet Lord Polhorgan would give a thousand or two for a ghost. But the Cornish won’t have it. He’s not one of us, so he’s going to be denied the privilege of being haunted. ” I felt comforted, though I scorned myself for needing’re assurance ; but that child this afternoon had really unnerved me, chiefly because I had believed I was talking to Lowella. I thought Hyson a very strange little person indeed and I did not like the streak of mischief, the almost gloating pleasure in my uneasiness which I had noticed.

” About the story,” I said. ” After all, it concerns the Brides of Pendorric of whom I am one.”

“It was very unfortunate that Lowella Pendorric died exactly a year to the day after her wedding. That probably gave rise to the whole thing.

She brought the heir into the world and departed. A common enough occurrence in those days, but you have to remember that here in Cornwall people are always looking for something on which to hang a legend. “

” And she was supposed to haunt the place after that?”

He nodded. ” Brides came and went and they must have forgotten the legend although they’d tell you now that Lowella Pendorric continued to walk by night. Then my mother died when Morwenna and I were five years old. She was only twenty-five.”

” How did she die?”

“That’s just what revived the legend, I imagine. She fell from the north gallery into the hall, when the balustrade gave way. The wood was worm-eaten and it was very frail. The shock and the fall combined killed her. It was an unfortunate accident, and because the picture of Lowella hangs in the gallery the story soon got round that it was Lowella’s influence that caused her to fall. Lowella was tired of haunting the house, they said, so she decided Barbarina should take her place. I am certain that the part about having to haunt the house until another bride took her place started at that time. You’ll hear now that the ghost of Pendorric is my mother Barbarina. Rather a young ghost for such an old house, but you see we haunt in relays.” “I see,” I said slowly.

He put his hands on my shoulders and laughed; I laughed with him.

Everything seemed comfortingly normal that night.

The woman in the riding jacket and blue-banded hat had begun to haunt my thoughts and I found myself drawn towards the spot where her picture hung, whenever I was alone in that part of me house. I was not anxious that anyone should guess how much the picture attracted me, because I thought it would appear that I was affected by this ridiculous legend.

It was so realistic that the eyes seemed as though they nickered as you watched them, the lips as though they were about to speak. I wondered what her feelings had been when she felt the balustrade giving way beneath her weight; I wondered if she had felt an unhealthy interest in that other bride . as I was beginning to feel in her.

No, I told myself. I was merely interested in the painting and I was certainly not going to allow the legend to bother me.

All the same, I couldn’t resist going to look at the picture. Roe found me there two mornings later. He put his arm through mine and said he had come to take me for a drive.

“We don’t take after her, do we?” he said.

“Morwcnna and I are both dark as Spaniards. You mustn’t feel morbid about her. She’s only a picture, you know.”

He drove me out to the moor that morning; and I was fascinated by mat stretch of wild country with its tors and boulders so strangely shaped that they looked like grotesque parodies of human beings. I thought that Roe was trying to make me understand Cornwall, because he knew that I had been upset by the legend and he wanted to make me laugh at it.

We drove for miles, through Callington and St. Cleer, little towns with grey granite facades, and out on to the moor again. He showed me the Trevethy Quoit, a Neolithic tomb made of blocks of stone; he pointed out the burial grounds of men who had lived before history was recorded; he wanted me to know that a country which could offer so much proof of its past must necessarily be one of legend. He stopped the car high on me moor, and in the distance I could see that fantastic formation of rock known as the Cheesewring. He put his arm round me and said: ” One day I’ll take you farther west and show you the Merry Maidens. Nineteen stones in a circle which you will be asked to believe were once nineteen girls who, deciding to defy tradition and go dancing in a sacred place, were turned to stone; and indeed the stones lean this way and that as if they had been caught and petrified in the midst of a dance.” His eyes were very tender as he turned to me. ” You’ll get used to us in time,” he went on.

“Everywhere you look in this place there’s some legend. You don’t take them seriously.”

I knew then that he was worried about me and I told him not to be because I had always prided myself on my common sense.

” I know,” he said. ” But your father’s death was a greater shock than you realise. I’m going to take extra special care of you.”

“” ITien,” I replied, ” I shall begin to feel very precious indeed, because I fancy you have been taking rather a lot of care of me ever since that awful day. “

” Well, remember I do happen to be your husband.”

I turned to him then and said almost fiercely, ” It’s some thing I couldn’t possibly forget for a minute . even if I wanted to.”

He turned my face up to his and his kiss was tender. ” And you don’t want to?”

I threw myself against him, and as I clung to him, his grip on me tightened. It was as though we were both trying to make each other understand the immense depth of the love between us. It was the comfort I needed.

Roe could always emerge from an emotional scene with more case than I could, and in a short time he was his old teasing self. He began to tell me stories of Cornish legends, some so fantastic that I accused him of inventing them.

Then we both started inventing stories about the places we passed, trying to cap each other’s absurdities. It all seemed tremendous fun, although anyone listening to us would have thought we were crazy. As we drove back in these high spirits I marvelled at the way in which Roe could always comfort and delight me.

During the next few days I spent a great deal of time in Roe’s company. He would take me with him when he went on his rounds of the farms and I was welcomed everywhere, usually with a glass of some home-made wine or cider; I was even expected to eat a Cornish pasty as they came hot from the oven.

The people were warm and friendly once I had overcome a certain initial suspicion which they felt towards ” foreigners ” from the other side of the Tamar. I was English; they were Cornish; therefore to them I was a foreigner.

” Once a foreigner, always a foreigner,” Roe told me. ” But of course marriage makes a difference. When you’ve produced a little Cornish man or woman you’ll be accepted. Otherwise it would take all of fifty years.”