Lady of Spirit, A (10 page)

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” came out of Maggie’s mouth before she could close her teeth on it.

Lizzie looked at her curiously. “What does that mean?”

But thankfully, they had reached the end of the harbor promenade and Mr. Polgarth handed her down onto the rocks, where a path wound up and around the bluff that would take them up to the house on the promontory. And in the scrambling and pointing out of views and trying to keep their hats on their heads in all the wind, the opportunity for explanations blew away and out to sea.

*

When the giddy foursome finally gained the top of the bluff and made their way into the garden, Maggie was feeling a distinct glow. The Lady had once told her that her mother had been quite firm on that point: “Horses sweat. Men perspire. Ladies glow.”

Maggie was glowing with a vengeance now, and she had the uncomfortable feeling that some of the flowers from her hat might by now be halfway to the Channel Islands. But she felt wonderful, being out of doors again in such amusing company. She and Lizzie had been happy to notice that Tigg and Michael Polgarth had taken a liking to one another—or perhaps it was merely a case of Tigg relaxing his protectiveness of herself and Lizzie enough to appreciate the other young man’s honesty and good humor.

The fact that Lizzie allowed their handsome friend to hold her hand on the way up the cliff path when it was not strictly necessary for him to do so in order to assist her may have gone a long way to creating the companionable rapport between the two young men.

Maggie had the presence of mind to drag Lizzie to their room to repair the wind damage before they presented themselves for tea.

“Lizzie Seacombe, how shocking you are,” she said, taking down her hair and brushing it vigorously. “Such public displays of affection!”

“To you and the sea birds.” Lizzie twisted up her own heavy mane around her head in a French braid and rammed pins into the knot at the back. “And neither of you are going to tell on me.” She clasped her hands rapturously. “I still cannot believe that Tigg cares for me.”

“I know—his taste in female company is definitely lacking.”

Lizzie stuck out her tongue, then the smile returned as if she could not keep it away. “I feel quite dizzy with it—with him, Maggie. It is as if I had never seen him before the pocket watch bomb in Munich—and now I cannot see him in any other way but as that man who called me ‘Lizzie-love’ when he thought me unconscious.”

Maggie’s heart seemed to contract with longing. What would it be like to feel this way about someone? To be so happy that it permeated you through and through?

“I am glad you do,” she said, squeezing Lizzie’s hand and pulling her out the door. “Tigg is a fine, intelligent man, and he has the Lady’s permission to treat you as rather more than a companion, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, he told me so. Not that it would have mattered if he didn’t.” She clattered down the stairs, laughing, and was still smiling as they reached the sea parlor, where Tigg and Mr. Polgarth were waiting for them.

The Lady and Mr. Malvern were already in conversation with the Seacombes as Tamsen bobbed a curtsey and ushered them in.

Grandmother glanced at the watch on its pearl brooch at her breast. “Was I not clear that tea was at four o’clock?”

Goodness. They were only ten minutes late. It was Hobson’s choice anyway—if they had not taken those minutes, they would have had a lecture on the state of their hair and dress.

“I’m sorry, Grandmother,” Lizzie said, when Maggie did not reply. “We climbed the cliff path and it was rather more of a walk than we all expected, having not gone that way before.”

“In future you will be more considerate of others and mind the time. Howel, please ring and we will have the tea brought in. Again.”

Grandfather did so, and the Lady stepped forward. “Mr. and Mrs. Seacombe, may I present Maggie’s escort from the company offices this morning? This is Mr. Michael Polgarth. He—”

Grandmother dropped the plate of cakes, sending petits fours bouncing and rolling about on the low table and scattering crumbs on the carpet.

“Grandmama!” Claude started forward. “Are you ill?”

Breathing deeply, Grandmother bent forward as though she had been struck, her fingers wrinkling her pearl-gray taffeta skirts. Maggie turned in appeal to Grandfather, but he stood near the bell pull, as rigid as the cliff face below the house. What could be the matter? Had they both recognized Michael as a lowly clerk, and were so offended by his presence in their home that they were one step away from an apoplexy? Oh dear, this was dreadful!

The Lady controlled her own surprise and glanced at Tamsen in a manner that made that young lady jump to her duty and begin picking up the little cakes at top speed. The girl brushed the crumbs onto the china platter and hustled it from the room—and still the Seacombes had not spoken.

“Mrs. Seacombe, are you sure you are quite well?” Claire inquired. “Shall I call someone? Send for a doctor?”

Grandmother came out of her fixed stare rather like a swimmer coming up from a great depth. “No,” she said hoarsely. “There is no need.”

“Perhaps some smelling salts? Or lavender from the garden? Maggie, do run down and pick some. I understand it is most calming to the nerves.”

Grandmother, her attention thus directed exactly where Maggie did not want it, said, “I never expected this to happen, but I am not in the least surprised that
you
are the engineer of it.”

Maggie’s jaw sagged.

“Get out of this house,” Grandfather rasped.

“I beg your pardon?” the Lady said, the astonishment in her tone glazed in the thinnest layer of ice. “To whom are you speaking?”

“Him. That bounder there.” Grandfather jerked his chin in Michael’s direction, and in response, Tigg stepped a little closer to the other young man, as if offering his support. “No one bearing that name shall ever set foot in this house. Take your leave at once.”

“Mr. Seacombe,” Lady Claire remonstrated in horror, “Mr. Polgarth is here at my invitation. There has been nothing in his conduct that would elicit such a degree of incivility. In fact, he has been kind enough to do you a great service in looking after Maggie when she became separated from our party.”

“That’s because like attracts like,” Grandmother snapped. “You have been deceived, Lady Claire. Your remarks do you credit, but they will have no bearing on my husband’s wishes. Mr. Polgarth, Nancarrow will see you out.”

But Maggie had had enough. “That’s all right, Nancarrow,” she said to the butler. “I will do it. I find myself quite in need of some air.”

Michael Polgarth’s manners did not desert him. He bowed to the Seacombes, and then to Lady Claire and Mr. Malvern, whose jaw was working in a manner that Maggie had only seen a very few times, usually in connection with the underhanded activities of Lord James Selwyn. Then, head held high, he strode from the room, Maggie at his heels.

What must he think of me?

Maggie did not have the courage to unlock and open the big front door, used only on formal occasions, so she directed Mr. Polgarth through the empty drawing room and out the French doors onto the terrace.

What must he think of all of us?

“Mr. Polgarth, I am so sorry.” Tears of mortification threatened to well up, but she held them back. “I do not know what came over them. I had no idea they were capable of such—”

“You have nothing to apologize for, Miss Margaret.”

“Please, I beg you, call me Maggie.
They
call me Margaret and it takes all the pleasure out of knowing my mother had a reason to give me that name, even if I do not know what it was. And I
must
apologize. I have never been so humiliated in all my life—and considering the last day or two, that is saying something.”

The length of this speech took them through the rose garden and out onto the lawn and the cliff-top. Just at the place where the order of the mowed grass was disrupted by wildflowers and tussocks of sea-grass and thrift, Mr. Polgarth stopped and turned to her.

“You have been nothing but kind to me, so please do not abase yourself for something you have not done. And if I am to call you Maggie, then you must call me Michael. If you do that, I shall tell you a story.”

The dam broke, and a fat tear rolled down Maggie’s cheek, to be dried almost instantly by the wind. “Do not patronize me, too. I cannot bear it.”

“Patronize you!” In agitation, he took her hand and pulled her along the cliff path, heading west, in the direction from which she and Lizzie had seen the red lamp flashing in the night. “That is the last thing I would do. I have put it badly. I mean only that I have information about my family that may be of interest to you—and give you some little understanding of your grandparents’ behavior.”

Maggie stopped dragging on his hand like a boat anchor and took a skipping step to catch up.

He released her, and her fingers felt a little chilled in the absence of the warmth of his. “Come,” he said over his shoulder. “I cannot speak of these things while the windows of Seacombe House look down on us.”

She followed him along the path for nearly a quarter of a mile. The house was lost to sight behind them, and when the way was split by a huge fissure in the cliff face and it meant going inland some distance to continue around it, he clambered down the slope a little way and into a copse of trees that spilled into the gap. At the foot of the cliff, waves lapped on a tiny beach, but he did not walk down the zigzag path.

Instead, he found an outcrop of flat granite, worn smooth by the action of hundreds of years of weather, and folded himself onto a shelf of stone. He patted the warm surface next to him, and Maggie joined him, folding her skirts decorously around her so the wind would not pluck them up and expose her knees.

“I used to come here as a child,” he said. “My parents had a cottage there.” He pointed to the other side of the gap, where a collection of snug stone cottages spilled down the gentler slope and had access to the sea. Colorful fishing boats bobbed on the water, the ones closer in beached by the outgoing tide.

Was this where the red flashes had come from? Maggie could swear it was—but at the same time, it had been at night and she and Lizzie couldn’t see landmarks or judge distance with any accuracy.

However, that was a question for another time. There were more urgent questions to be asked now. “Is that when you became acquainted with my grandparents?”

“No, I have never spoken to them before this afternoon.”

“Then how—? Why—? I don’t understand.”

“When we lived here, my uncle lived with us as well for a few months. We children thought it a great lark—he was home from university and he was our favorite of our various relatives—dashing and funny and always willing to spare a moment to hear a child’s confidence. He had a tremendous store of terrible riddles, too, some of which I still remember, after all this time.”

“Tell me one.”

“Very well—what has a foot but no arms?”

Maggie thought for a moment. “A ruler?”

Michael laughed. “You are much better at it than we ever were. He stumped us every time, and the sillier they were, the more we were stumped. Of course, it didn’t help that he was a tremendous mimic, and half the time was telling them in someone else’s voice. Part of the joke was to figure out who he was playing, and then what the riddle meant.”

A little piece of herself fell into place, and the question uppermost in Maggie’s mind began to solidify into certainty. “What was his name?”

“Kevern. Kevern Polgarth—born and raised on the tenant croft at Gwynn Place. When my father and mother married, they came down here to Penzance so Dad could ply his trade as an animal doctor. Uncle Kevern was studying science and engineering at the college in Truro, and he would stay with us on his vacations while he worked on the great steam engines in the mines.”

“Wheal Porth,” Maggie breathed.

He reared back to stare at her. “How did you know that? That is the mine on the other side of that headland, there.” He pointed further down the coast. “You can just see the engine tower above those trees.”

“I think I begin to understand.” She reached into the pocket of her skirt. “I found this, hidden under a floorboard in my mother’s old room, the first day we came.”

He read the letter swiftly, then again, more slowly. At last he folded it up and handed it back. “So you do know.”

“I know nothing. Only that a young man whose name began with
K
met my mother one May Day and expressed his admiration for her. Nothing else.”

“Your grandparents have not told you your mother’s story?”

Maggie could not keep the bitterness in her heart from spilling into her tone. “They barely speak to me, and when they do, they speak as they do to the servants—or at best, a companion they have hired to attend my sis—cousin.”

He gave her the courtesy of acceptance, and did not try to convince her that she must be imagining things. “Then let me tell you what I know—which is family history according to my aunt Mariah, who by all accounts was great friends with your mother, though your grandparents would have favored that friendship even less than they favor yours with me.”

“Who were my mother and aunt to be friends with, then, if they could not choose their own companions?” Maggie wondered aloud. “The daughters of rich folk?”

“I imagine so. The Seacombes are, of course, the first family in these parts, but there are several families of lesser but most respectable consequence in town. They would have encouraged friendships in that quarter. Certainly not with the children of a poultryman down here between terms, no matter how ambitious they were or how successful they became in their respective careers.”

“Tell me about your uncle.”

“Your letter appears to have been written shortly after they met. All four—Dad, Uncle Kevern, Aunt Mariah, and Aunt Tressa—had gone to the May Day celebrations in town, where your mother was crowned Queen of the May.”

“Which had nothing whatever to do with her being a Seacombe.”

“I am sure it did not,” he said with equal gravity. “But in all fairness, she was reputed to be a great beauty. My aunt Tressa enjoys miniatures, and she painted a portrait of Catherine from memory that day, crowned with flowers.”

Maggie resisted the urge to clutch at his arm, but she could not control the urgency in her voice. “I have never seen a single picture of her. Please, does this painting still exist?”

“It does as far as I know. After her husband died, she came back to keep house for my father at Gwynn Place, so it will be there on the farm if it is anywhere.”

Maggie resolved on the spot that on Wednesday, no matter what anyone said, she would go with the Lady to Gwynn Place and find that picture. “Go on.”

“Following the May Day celebrations—and presumably this meeting on the beach that he writes of— Kevern and Catherine became inseparable.”

“How did they manage, if my grandparents did not approve?”

He grinned. “The same way any of us would manage—by stealth and subterfuge. My aunt says they met in the
sawan
at night and would come back to the cottage along the beach at low tide. Sometimes they would go downalong with my father and my aunts, where no one would know them, and laugh and sing until the wee hours of the morning.”

“Downalong?”

“That’s a Cornish expression for the lower part of town—the docks, the fishing boats, the taverns and inns along the harbor.”

Where no one would know them, indeed.

Michael glanced at her. “The next part is not so happy—are you sure you wish to hear it?”

“I have never been more sure of anything in my life.”

“Very well, then.” He paused a moment, gazing out to sea, where the gulls swooped and mewed. “By the end of July, your mother suspected she might be expecting you, and told my uncle. Aunt Mariah said he told her afterward that he flung himself to one knee and proposed on the spot, and that Catherine accepted.”

Maggie could picture the happy scene, and her heart filled with a joy it had never known before. She had been wanted. She had been no more than a suspicion—a twinkle in her father’s eye, as Lady Dunsmuir might say—but yet she had been wholeheartedly wanted. Her throat closed up, and tears sprang to her eyes once more.

“Catherine told your grandparents, and you can imagine their reaction.”

“Only too well,” Maggie whispered.

“They had planned a marriage for her much more grand than to a mere student from a farming family, its connection with Gwynn Place notwithstanding. Catherine was immediately packed off to the Continent, with a story put about that she was visiting her sister, who at that time was living in Paris for several months while her husband attended to his business affairs.”

“I take it that was not true?”

“No. She and Aunt Mariah, who had studied to be a nurse, spent the autumn and winter in Cornouaille, which lies opposite us in Brittany, in a tiny seaside village called Baie des Sirenes.”

“Bay of the Sirens? No, wait—Mermaids.”

“Is that what it means? I have no aptitude for languages—numbers are what speak to me. In any case, in the spring, that is where you were born. We heard later that there had been complications, and she was so debilitated by grief at her family’s hardness of heart that she did not have the strength to fight.”

The hollow that Maggie had always been conscious of deep inside filled now with an echo of that grief. Grief for what she might have known. Grief for what she did not and could never know. And above all, grief that the two people most intimately connected in this business—her grandparents—had rejected her mother in her moment of greatest need and were continuing that rejection to the second generation.

“Do my grandparents blame me?” she whispered. “For Mother’s death? For dashing all their dreams and plans for her because she loved the wrong man?”

“From all accounts, she loved exactly the right man,” Michael said gently. “I do not presume to know what is in their hearts, but I do know this … you are all that remains on the earth of a much beloved son and uncle. You know what that means, don’t you?”

The pieces that she had not considered before fell into place. “You—are my cousin. My father’s brother’s son.” And there was more. “That means Polgarth the poultryman is—my grandfather!”

From out of nowhere, joy leaped up into the hollow inside her, and expanded and filled it, warming places that had been cold and empty her entire life.

She grasped Michael’s hand. “It is true, isn’t it? The one person at Gwynn Place besides the Lady with whom I feel truly at ease, truly comfortable—is my own grandfather?”

“It is true. Though I must say, if you have a hidden talent for terrible riddles, I will disown you here and now.”

Maggie laughed in delight. “No danger there, though I have been told I have a talent for mimicry, to say nothing of an aptitude for chickens. Do you know that I have been studying genetics, and hope to make it my life’s work?”

He smiled at her with something akin to triumph. “There. You see? Even if I were not certain, that would clinch it. I had my suspicions before, because when Elaine and Charles Seacombe returned from Paris, they had two daughters instead of one. But this information gives me certainty. Oh, won’t Granddad be amazed and glad!”

And what a change that would be!

“But Michael, you have not told me the end of the story. What happened to my father?”

The smile faded somewhat. “I will end this tale, and then we will talk of happier things. Uncle Kevern, who was not permitted to see you or have anything to do with you once the Charles Seacombes had you, did what many young men do when their prospects seem dim. He joined the Royal Aeronautic Corps, and was killed in an airship crash while on maneuvers—oddly, very close to Baie des Sirenes. My father’s practice was in its infancy then and no one in the family could afford to bring Kevern home for burial, but Mariah, who by then was engaged to a French boy, made certain that Kevern was buried in Baie des Sirenes with Catherine, in a single grave.”

This time the tears did well up and spill down her cheeks. “I am glad,” she cried hoarsely. “I am more glad than I can say that they did not come back here, to be separated in death—for him to be in France, and her to be under my grandparents’ disapproving eye in the churchyard every single Sunday until they die.”

“Do not be too hard on them, Maggie.”

“What else can I be? They separated my parents and if it had not been for Lizzie’s mother, I might likely have gone to the workhouse!”

“Maggie, if you only knew what our feelings were when we heard the Seacombe airship had gone down in the Thames, with total loss of life. I don’t think my grandfather has ever fully recovered.”

“Then I must be the one to tell him the real story of what happened, when we go up on Wednesday.”

“May I listen in?”

“If you don’t, I will be terribly disappointed. Michael, you do not know how this knowledge has changed me.” Maggie’s voice wobbled and she swallowed. She must get this out before she broke down altogether. “I have a family that I respected before ever I knew I belonged to it. And now to know that I was truly wanted—that my parents loved one another and intended to make a life together—it is almost too much to take in.”