The Land of Summer (33 page)

‘Agnes might not want to come. I have not asked her,’ Emmaline reminded him with a look.

‘Oh, Agnes will come, I promise you. She will not be parted from you. She is your little pug dog, is she not? And Mrs Carew will organise any other help that’s necessary. It’s a bit of a walk to the village, but since you’re going there for the
air
and the exercise that will all be to the good. And please – please do not look so disconsolate. Dr Proctor would not have advocated this convalescence unless he thought it absolutely necessary.’

Confined to the house until all arrangements had been made for her journey to Cornwall and her stay at Gorran Lodge, Emmaline began to fret about what was happening to her book of poetry and what the exact plans for it might now be. Unfortunately, it was not possible for her to invite Bray Ashcombe to the house without giving rise to unnecessary speculation …

‘Of course!’ she exclaimed out loud, halfway through the reading lesson she was giving Agnes, and causing her maid to jump.

‘Course what, madam?’ Agnes wondered. ‘I ain’t said nothing.’

‘No, no, Aggie, don’t give it a thought,’ Emmaline said with a smile. ‘I have just remembered something I must do, that is all – and I want you to help me. I want you to take a note into town.’

‘To Mr Hunt’s bookshop again, is it, madam?’ Agnes enquired with a small rise of her eyebrows.

‘I think it better if you carry in a note, rather than my using the telephone, because I am not altogether sure that at this very busy time of year messages will get passed on with the greatest of speed.’ Emmaline finished writing her short note, placed it in an envelope, sealed it and gave it to
Agnes
. ‘You will need to take it in when we have finished this lesson, if you will.’

She had suggested to Bray that he should call between the hours of 2.30 p.m. and 4.00 p.m., making it as clear as she could without giving the message any added sense of drama that she was expecting him in company. She suggested that if his sister was well enough now then she would be pleased to see her at Park House. When he received the note Bray understood perfectly well that he could not and would not be received as a solo visitor, but since he could not do exactly as suggested for a very particular domestic reason, he invited a friend of his, a Miss Lamb, to accompany him as if she were his secretary. He was of course delighted to be asked up to Park House, not only because he had some page proofs of Emmaline’s poems that Mr Tully had given him the day before hot off the presses next door to show her, but because he would be seeing the young woman who had already begun to haunt his dreams, and whose handkerchief he still kept hidden in his desk at the shop.

Arriving on the stroke of half past two in the afternoon, Bray introduced Miss Lamb to Emmaline by way of a message on the card he handed to Wilkinson, and waited to see if they would be allowed admittance.

After what seemed to Bray to be an uncomfortably long wait, a hiatus that was in fact no more than a matter of a minute or two, Wilkinson
returned
to say that Mrs Aubrey would be happy to receive them in the drawing room.

‘Forgive me,’ Emmaline said, after shaking hands with her visitors. ‘I was expecting to see your sister again.’

‘And most kind of you too, Mrs Aubrey,’ Bray replied, ‘to have invited us both up to see you. But sadly Arabella, my sister, is still not fully recovered, and has retired to the country, where I shall shortly be joining her. Miss Lamb here is to take my place, temporarily, in the bookshop.’

He gave Miss Lamb an affectionate glance, which she returned in full.

‘Miss Lamb is a particularly assiduous reader of poetry. You might say she is a muse to every passing poet.’

‘A muse, truly?’ Emmaline gave Miss Lamb a considering look. She had quiet good looks, and such a shy manner that it occurred to Emmaline that there must be more to her than was perhaps revealed at first acquaintance.

‘She inspires so many of us …’

‘Well, that is charming, I am sure, but, Mr Ashcombe, what a coincidence that you should be leaving Bamford.’ Emmaline laughed lightly, indicating to her visitors that they might be seated. ‘I have also been ordered to leave Bamford for reasons of health, and to take the sea air.’

‘I had no idea you were not well, Mrs Aubrey,’ Bray said with concern. ‘I trust it is something from which you will soon be recovered?’

‘A passing affliction, Mr Ashcombe,’ Emmaline
replied
. ‘One I am assured will be cured by rest and sea air.’

‘Before you go away, Mrs Aubrey,’ Bray said, ‘I wonder whether you would have time to look at these and let me know what you think of them. I’m sure they are the sort of thing that will appeal to you.’

He handed her a sealed envelope which contained the page pulls of her verses, an enclosure about which, Emmaline devoutly hoped, his muse, Miss Lamb, did not know anything.

‘Thank you, Mr Ashcombe,’ she said, putting the envelope safely beside her. ‘I shall look forward to reading these – they are short stories?’

‘Indeed, Mrs Aubrey. You will find them most entertaining. And you have not yet told me whether you will be going away for very long?’

‘I am to go to Cornwall, Mr Ashcombe, to a house belonging to my husband’s family. It is called Gorran Lodge, somewhere on a place called the Roseland Peninsula,’ Emmaline replied, and immediately wondered why her visitor had changed colour. ‘Now, what is wrong? You look as though you have seen a ghost. Is this the effect Cornwall has on people? If so I think I shall change my mind, and stay at home.’

‘Forgive me, Mrs Aubrey,’ Bray said hurriedly, recovering his composure. ‘It – it is just that that is exactly where my – my sister has gone to recuperate. And I have every intention of going down to Cornwall to visit her at Christmas.’

‘That really is a coincidence, Mr Ashcombe,’
Emmaline
replied, herself considerably heartened by the knowledge that there would be at least one good acquaintance of hers staying not very far from her in the unknown county of Cornwall. ‘Who knows?’ she added. ‘Perhaps we may even meet during the holiday. Now, if you will excuse me, Mr Ashcombe, I am in the middle of preparing to leave.’

Emmaline rose to show the meeting was at an end, at which both Bray and his companion did the same.

‘Just one other thing, Mrs Aubrey, before I take my departure,’ Bray said. ‘These – these stories I have brought for you to read. I hope you do not mind them in proof form – but if you would rather wait, the first copies of the published book should be in the shops in a matter of days.’

‘I see,’ Emmaline replied, getting the message. ‘Of course I would eventually like to see the stories in their final form, so perhaps when you come to Cornwall you might bring a copy then – and somehow I am sure we can contrive to make sure I see it.’

She smiled, and Bray smiled back, taking her words as an invitation to go and visit her on the Roseland Peninsula – which indeed, in view of the time she was probably going to be spending there, was precisely how Emmaline had hoped Mr Ashcombe would take them.

Chapter Ten

IT WAS A
long and a tiring journey, first by coach from Bamford to Bath and from there by Great Western locomotive to the busy stannary town of Truro, a town which had grown so prosperous from tin and copper mining that in 1877 it had been accorded city status, even though the cathedral was only very recently completed. The journey by rail from Bath to Truro took over six hours, since the train stopped at every station along the line, so to help pass the time Emmaline gave Agnes the reading lesson of her life, before reading out loud to her from the book on Cornwall that Bray Ashcombe had sent up to Park House for Emmaline just before they left.

‘It seems it was Truro’s position close to the convergence of the Truro and Fal rivers that made it so important both as a river port and a tin-mining centre, Aggie. That and the fact that it was one of the stannary towns, which I gather means tin had to be brought to the city for official testing and stamping until the last century. Anyway, by all accounts it has been a very prosperous and
indeed
fashionable town, so we are not going to be stuck away in a totally uncivilised neck of the woods, thanks be.’

‘I never been so far from home, madam,’ Agnes said, looking wistfully out of the window as the train slowly passed through a vast cutting made of long unbroken banks of sand and clay. ‘It’s like I imagine a foreign country might be, is this, it really is.’

‘It will possibly seem even more foreign once we get into the countryside itself. From what I have seen from our carriage, it is somewhat under-populated. It seems so strange to me to see so few people on stations, or in villages and towns, as you can imagine.’

However, Truro itself was busy enough, they noted, as they alighted from the train and searched the long line of carriages waiting outside the station for one bearing the Aubrey crest on its doors.

Sure enough, near the head of the queue, Agnes soon identified a hansom drawn by a single tired-looking and aged grey gelding which had turned shock white with age, the animal dozing in its shafts with its nosebag still in place while an equally tired-looking coachman sat also half asleep on his box, most of him buried beneath a thick green wool rug.

Once woken by Agnes and reminded of his task, the driver took his passengers on the last fifteen-mile leg of what turned out finally to be an eleven-hour journey, decanting the two by now
utterly
exhausted young women at the front door of a house set at the end of a long tree-lined drive at the top of a winding lane that led nowhere else. There was an oil lamp stuck on a pole outside the door, blazing a welcome in the darkness of a moonless night, while Emmaline could hear the pounding of waves on sand far below them, and smell salt on the stiff sea breeze.

The door was opened to them at last by a large red-cheeked woman with a shock of hair as white as the coat on the carriage horse and a smile as broad as a half-moon.

‘Well, you poor dears!’ she exclaimed. ‘You must as be a-cryin’ out aloud for some’at to eat and some’at warm to drink, my poor dears, after your journey – so come you in, come you in and be welcome at Gorran Lodge. We got a fine supper waitin’ on you,’ she continued as she bustled them into a hallway lit by a roaring log fire, the coachman following behind with the luggage. ‘And we got stones in your beds and fresh linen to sleep in so don’t you worry about one more thing now, you hear me? After a journey like that, what you’ll want is some’at good and warm inside of you and somewhere good and warm to rest your heads.’

In a dark-panelled dining room warmed by yet another roaring fire, blazing with bone-dry whitened logs that had drifted up on sandy beaches, and lit by a dozen thick-waxed candles that stuttered and fluttered and danced in the draughts that sneaked round heavy dark red
velvet
curtains, Emmaline and Agnes sat and ate a supper of thick pea soup and home-made bread, fresh chicken roasted in butter and herbs with big floury potatoes and large succulent carrots, and the most delicious home-cooked apple pie dotted with thick Cornish cream of which two weary travellers could have dreamed. Across Emmaline’s button-booted feet a large rangy lurcher with a salt-and-pepper coat slept, his tail occasionally flicking and his whiskers twitching as he dreamed, while on Agnes’s knee, out of sight and much to Agnes’s delight, sat a large and deeply contented cat, entirely black except for the very end of its tail, which was as white as if it had just been dipped in a paint pot. Mrs Carew, their welcoming cook and hostess, hovered between the table and her many ovens.

When they had finally finished their dinner, Emmaline felt as if she must be already a little better, for not only did she feel restored physically, but ever since she had crossed the threshold of Gorran Lodge she had felt better in both her head and her heart, as if a weapon that had been stuck in her side and constantly twisted had been inexplicably removed and the wound miraculously healed.

‘Have you always lived in Cornwall, Mrs Carew?’ Emmaline asked as Agnes helped the good lady to clear.

‘Always have, never been anywhere else and never want to, my dear, not ever. When you have the good luck to be born in Cornwall, that
is
where you stay, my dear, and that is God’s own truth.’

Emmaline stared around at the brass pots hanging on the walls, at the large cream jugs in different sizes ranged across the wooden surfaces, together with the vast cream-coloured baking bowls. From the ceiling hung herbs in bunches, swaying slightly when the draught from the fire made itself felt, or when a larder door was opened as Mrs Carew went to fetch some fresh butter, or some newly prepared dish that had to be put back into one of several ovens.

Here was a room where fishermen, their wet things removed, could sit and talk of months away at sea, months when they must have dreamed of just such a winter evening when it seemed that neither wind, nor rain, nor storms, could come between them and the joys of home.

‘My husband, God rest his soul, was taken at sea, some ten years ago, and so it was that I came to work for Mr Aubrey senior here. It is a sad fact that I would rather have worked for a family that had made Cornwall their home, but beggars can’t be choosers, and certain it is that widows can’t be either. Now, my dears, would you help yourself to more of my apple pie? There’s cream there, and plenty of it too.’

Emmaline smiled up at Mrs Carew, and in that moment it seemed to her that the housekeeper was an angel dropped from heaven. The last thing she wanted was another helping of apple pie, but seeing the hope in Mrs Carew’s face she
could
not disappoint her, even if it meant leaving off her stays the following morning.

By the time Agnes had helped her undress, both of them concealing yawns, and neither of them able to keep their eyes open, Emmaline knew she was about to fall into probably the deepest sleep she had ever known. It did not seem possible that her life could be transformed in such a short time, in a matter of less than a day, that in that moment of night-time arrival it had seemed to her that all her troubles were not simply forgotten, but quite disappeared.