Merryn Hall, Lamorna,
Ms Melanie Pentreath
23a
Clapham
Dear Mel,
Thanks for returning the agreement to rent the Gardener’s Cottage and for the cheque. I’m enclosing your receipt and a map giving directions from
I’m looking forward to meeting you here at Merryn Hall next month. As I said on the phone, I shall probably still be up in London when you arrive, but Mrs Irina Peric, who looks after the place for me, will give you the key to the cottage. Could you ring her a couple of days beforehand on 01736 455836 to tell her when to expect you?
I’m sure you will find Lamorna a peaceful haven for your studies – it’s an enchanting place. As your sister will have told you, I have only recently inherited the Hall and you will see there is an awful lot of work to be done to the house and grounds. However, you should find the cottage is comfortable enough.
Yours sincerely,
Patrick Winterton
Merryn Hall, Lamorna
Adeline Treglown
The Blue Anchor
Harbour Street
Newlyn Easter Monday, 1912
Dear Mrs Treglown,
My cook, Mrs Dolly Roberts, who I believe to be your sister-in-law, has let it be known that you are seeking a position for your girl and she assures me the young woman is sober, honest and industrious.
I have need of a general housemaid I can also train up as lady’s maid, and
I was most sincerely sorry to learn of your troubles.
Yours truly,
Emily Carey (Mrs)
Chapter 1
A mile and a half out of Newlyn, turn left past the pottery on the crossroads, Patrick had scrawled in thick-nibbed fountain pen at the bottom of the photocopied map he had sent. But Mel hadn’t noticed a pottery sign in the dark and had veered left at what she hoped hadn’t been the wrong junction. Why did all these little roads appear to go round in circles, she asked herself crossly, and why were there hardly any signposts?
It was a pity this had proved such a nightmare journey, for Mel had been looking forward to this trip for ages. Ever since David Bell, the Senior Tutor at the college in
There were more ways than one of losing your bearings, she thought miserably as she steered the car around yet another bend ... what was that! She slammed her foot on the brake as a missile hurtled out of the dark. An owl – she glimpsed a dazzle of shiny eyes above a curved beak before the bird swerved off into the night a second before impact. Mel sat for a moment in shock, then, her heart still thumping, eased her foot off the brake and the car rolled forward once more. Only for her to lurch to a stop again around the next corner: a T-junction. Which way now, for goodness’ sake? She wrenched up the handbrake, glanced at the clock – eight-fifteen, it really was dark for an April evening – and stabbed on the navigation light.
In the weak beam Mel squinted at Patrick’s map, flexing her neck and shoulders against the beginnings of a headache. Her finger traced the faint lines of roads all running into one another, then along the one she was seeking. It zig-zagged past Merryn Hall, before turning left through the village of Lamorna and down to Lamorna Cove itself.
She wound down the window and leaned out, shivering, peering through the rain for a signpost, a landmark, to match up with the map. But there was nothing. She must be very near Lamorna now, surely, but if she wasn’t careful she might be driving around all night. She took her duffel bag from the passenger well and scrabbled about for her mobile, then tapped in the contact number Patrick had underlined at the top of the map. The words ‘no network coverage’ flashed up on the screen.
I wish Jake were here. The treacherous voice crept unbidden into her mind. Jake had a knack with maps and cars as well as with cats and televisions. Unfortunately, in the end, he hadn’t had a knack with Mel. Jake was gone and she would have to get out of this mess by herself.
The thought gave her resolve. It was a nuisance, but she would just have to retrace her route. Hoping another car wasn’t going to careen around the corner at this particular moment, she executed a five-point turn in the small space available and set off back the way she had come. Luck was on her side, for after a few minutes she found what she had missed the first time – a narrow road leading off to the left.
Lamorna was in a valley, so her hopes rose when the road started to wind downhill, the hedges towering on either side. After a while the slope became steeper, the twists in the road more regular and every ounce of her concentration was required to keep the car on the road. At least the rain seemed to be easing.
She began to look out for signs of habitation. A short while later, the hedgerow on her side gave way to a low stone wall lined with trees. Soon a pair of gate-posts loomed in the darkness. She slowed the car. Could this be it? She lowered the side window to look. A battered board, half-covered in ivy, hung lopsided from one post. The words ‘erryn Hal’ were just visible on the cracked paint. Relief flooded through her as she swung the car between the posts.
Pitch black. No, she could glimpse a small blur of light, there, in the distance between the black hulks of trees. The headlights picked out a winding muddy drive full of potholes and lined with great banks of vegetation on either side.
The rain had stopped at last and she bumped the car down the drive for a couple of hundred yards until, before her, the yellow glow of a porch lantern picked out two great columns of a Georgian portal. At its base, three semicircular steps rippled out towards a battered flagstoned forecourt grown up with weeds. The porch light was the only sign of life.
Mel hesitated, then parked at the edge of the forecourt and switched off the engine. She sat for a moment listening, gazing around, trying not to think about all those corny Gothic horror films she had watched as a teenager, the ones in which the heroine arrives at the dark deserted castle on a stormy night, seeking sanctuary, only for the front door to creak open and the terror to begin ...
Pull yourself together, she thought. There are no vampires in
As far as you know ... the words, spoken in a creepy voice, as frequently rehearsed by her brother William when they were children, floated into her mind.
Oh, don’t be silly, she remonstrated with herself. There is no point sitting here if you want supper and somewhere to sleep. So she pushed open the car door.
The only sound was the dripping of rain on leaves. The house waited in the damp darkness, the glass in the windows reflecting ebony in the porch light. She could just make out a pattern of crenellations in the stone, like castle battlements, high above the porch, disappearing left and right into the gloom. Trees, shrubs and brambles grew right up to the Hall on either side of the courtyard, and indeed across the front of the house so that in the dark she could gain only a limited sense of the scope of the frowning building. The cumulative effect was of desolation and decay, and of something more ominous.
The last drops of Mel’s little stock of courage drained away. There was hardly need to knock on the door, for the house was clearly empty. After her long journey from one world into another there was no one to meet her, no welcome. Just this great hulk of a place that almost willed her to go away.
When a cracking noise came from the undergrowth, she spun round, all senses suddenly alert. She waited; the darkness waited. It must be a bird, she told herself, but her head throbbed with tension. She was, after all, alone in the remotest part of wild
She looked up at Merryn Hall and shivered. What had she expected to find? A pretty cottage nestling in the manicured grounds of a small country mansion? A warm welcome, old-fashioned country hospitality? In his letter, Patrick had prepared her for something a bit crumbly, but not this ... It was the desertedness and the air of, yes, of lurking menace, that bothered her.
Who was Patrick, come to think of it? A friend of a university friend of her sister Chrissie’s. Someone Chrissie herself hardly saw now and whom Mel had never met.
Scenes from her nephew Rory’s favourite Disney video flashed through her mind. She could be a modern Beauty, coming upon the Beast’s castle in a wilderness, seeking sanctuary and finding something quite different. Though in her elderly leather jacket, mud-splashed jeans, and with her red hair lank, she would hardly be first in line for the part of Beauty.
Feeling braver, she pulled her bag off her shoulder and walked towards the porch, intending to try the bell just in case. It was then she noticed something fluttering against the flaked paint of the front door. Up the steps she pulled a folded piece of paper out from under the brass knocker and pinched it open. A message was pencilled in sloping block capitals:
dear mel,
forgive me. i waited until
yours respectfully,
irina peric
Mel studied the formal phrases, the carefully drawn letters. On the phone, Irina spoke with an Eastern European accent, stressing the first syllables of words and softly rolling her r’s.
The matter drifted to the back of her mind. Her attention was already on climbing back into the car and continuing down the road to find the cottage before she dropped with exhaustion. As she felt in her pocket for her key, she looked up to see the clouds were thinning and a most beautiful moon emerged in a veil of mist to illuminate her way.
It was another twenty minutes before Mel shut the front door of the Gardener’s Cottage behind her and surveyed the pile of luggage sprawled across the hallway. Supper in a moment, she told herself, eyeing the carrier bag containing the small stock of food she had culled from her store cupboard at home. Supper then unpack what she needed for the night. That was all she could face now with her headache taking hold. She was weary, bone weary.
She let out a long breath, then, defying cautious animal instinct, she marched down the hall and began to explore the cottage, turning on all the lights as she went. There was a sitting room to the right of the long hall, before the stairs, a room with a polished dining table and chairs to the left; at the back, a dingy kitchen with a round pine table, beige Formica worktops, a fridge, stocked with dairy products, and a washing machine. Overhead, the strip light flickered and hummed. Turning it on and off several times failed to cure the problem. Beyond the kitchen was a stone-floored bathroom with a white suite but no shower.
Upstairs were two bedrooms and a boxroom. All neat and clean, though the furniture was shabby. Making her way carefully back down the steep staircase with its faded runner she noted the chipped paint on the rough stone wall and saw exactly why Patrick had trouble letting the place. It would be fine for her for the next month. Comfortable, shabby but strangely familiar. Today’s well-to-do holidaymakers demanded modern fittings, fresh paint and shiny new furniture.
Her plan was to spend the month walking in the footsteps of some of the painters who had settled in and around the nearby fishing town of Newlyn and Lamorna at the turn of the twentieth century, surveying the places they had painted, visiting museums and archives and working up her notes into a book she had been commissioned to write. This she would finish on her return to
The Gardener’s Cottage did feel like home – too much like home, Mel saw as she dumped the bag of food on the kitchen table and opened a wobbly cupboard door to find herself staring at her mother’s breakfast china: white porcelain with tiny hedgerow flowers painted around the rim. She picked up a cereal bowl and turned it in her hands. Every morning of her childhood for as far back as she could remember, Mel had scraped her spoon over this pattern ... and for an awkward minute she was back with her brother and sister in their cheerfully messy Victorian semi in the leafy suburbs of Hertfordshire, rushing to finish breakfast as their mother, Maureen, smart with suit and briefcase, chivvied them to get into the car now or they would have to walk to school.
The Pentreaths’ china bowls were gone now, the house sold, the pain of letting go of their childhood home a further sorrow after their mother’s death nearly a year ago. Mel replaced the bowl and shut the cupboard, leaning against it, as if to lock up the memories. If only it were that easy.
Once again the doubts rolled in. Four weeks in this place, alone with her thoughts, when she was emotionally so fragile – why on earth had she come? Suddenly she longed to be back in her flat in Clapham, looking out on the carefully tended strip of garden where yellow and white spring bulbs would soon be giving way to rich blue ceanothus and purple lilac. Except Clapham didn’t seem right any more either. Her flat hadn’t felt like home since Jake had left. There weren’t enough books to fill the gaps on the shelves, and the pictures he had lifted from the walls had left ghostly shapes behind that shouted their very absence – and his. She knew David had been right – she really did need to get away.
It was three weeks ago that she had been coming out of one of those interminable college faculty meetings in which everything is thoroughly discussed but nothing decided, when the Senior Tutor had caught up with her.
‘Mel, do you have a moment? A quick sandwich, maybe?’ David looked at his watch. ‘I’ve another meeting at two, but ...’
They wove a way through the stream of students towards the staff café and soon Mel was picking at quiche and salad, trying to inject some life into her voice as she answered David’s routine queries about her work. She mustn’t let him know quite how bored she was with it all at the moment, how colourless was the round of teaching and marking – indeed, how dreary everything seemed. She was wrung out. But he seemed to have read her mind.
‘Mel,’ he said gently. She flinched at his searching gaze, knowing that her eyes were dark-ringed in her tired, pale face.
He smiled, a grizzled, avuncular man, with springy silver hair and lively eyes that belied the fact that he too was feeling the strain. The pressures of providing for increasing numbers of students in cramped conditions and with limited funds were taking their toll on everybody. David was, Mel knew, looking forward to retiring at the end of the summer term, leaving teaching and administration so that he could pursue the historical research he never had time to do.
Now he said, ‘Do tell me to mind my own business, but I was watching you in that meeting back there. You looked as though all the cares of the world were on your shoulders.’
‘It’s listening to John O’Hagen,’ Mel tried to laugh, referring to the Angry Young Man of the Arts Faculty, ‘banging on about union rules again. I know technically he’s right, of course, but we can’t threaten industrial action about every little thing. We have responsibilities. God.’ She rolled her eyes in a sudden flash of anger.
‘Now you’re more like your usual self.’ David reached over and squeezed her clenched fist. ‘A year ago, you know, you would have been talking him down across the table.’
‘I would, wouldn’t I?’ Mel gave him a ghost of one of her most dazzling smiles, then slumped into round-shouldered misery once more. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not very good company at the moment.’
‘You’re always good company,’ said David. ‘But you’ve had a bad year one way or another ...’
‘It’s not been great, no.’
‘How are the family doing?’
Mel pushed a chunk of quiche into her mouth and chewed, which bought her time to consider the question. ‘I haven’t a clue what my brother William is thinking. He’s always been the sort to get on with things. Shuts his feelings out. It’s much easier to talk to Chrissie, my sister.’ She was silent for a moment, then rushed on. ‘It’s just not fair, though – the cancer taking Mum so quickly. I keep going over what happened. Did we try hard enough to get her the right treatment? Shouldn’t we have noticed earlier that she was so ill? She had been losing weight and getting tired, but I didn’t realise—’
‘You mustn’t feel guilty,’ David cut in, picking his words carefully. ‘It sounded as though there was little you could do with such a virulent form of the disease.’
Mel looked at her plate. ‘That’s what the doctors insisted.’
They both ate in silence for a moment, then David said, almost casually, ‘And then there’s Jake.’
‘And then there’s Jake,’ said Mel, reaching for her water glass and taking a gulp as if it were some nasty-tasting medicine. David knew Jake well. For the irony was that Mel’s ex-boyfriend was also a lecturer in the Arts Faculty – in Creative Writing – and she came across him all the time, at the coffee-machine, by the photocopier, in the café. She had taken care at this morning’s meeting to choose a seat that meant she wouldn’t have to see his face every time she looked up. But even so, she was aware he would be sitting, restlessly doodling crazy cartoon faces on his A4 pad, and she couldn’t block out the lazy tones of his voice, once soft in her ear alone, or his comments, as ever acerbic and to the point.
‘Mel, I’ve a suggestion to make,’ David said suddenly. ‘You’re due a term’s study leave sometime next year, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. It’ll be five years since my last,’ said Mel, who had, like everyone else in the Faculty, calculated to the day when her next paid sabbatical was due.
‘What are you working on at the moment? Have you any plans?’
‘I do, actually. I’ve been researching artists in Cornwall,’ she replied, ‘the Newlyn School of painters at the end of the nineteenth century, and their links with the artists who settled in Lamorna up the coast.’
‘Ah, don’t remind me. Stanhope Forbes – was he
‘Yes, and his Canadian wife Elizabeth. Then there were Thomas and Caroline Gotch ... Walter Langley. They’re the more famous ones. And then later, in Lamorna, Harold and Laura Knight, Sir Alfred Munnings ...’
David nodded. ‘I know, the one who painted horses?’
‘That’s right. Grosvenor Press, the art-book publishers, have asked me to write a book about the Newlyn and Lamorna artists and their work. I was planning to finish the research for it over the next couple of months, visit
‘Sounds an interesting commission.’
‘Oh, it is. It’s the women I’m particularly drawn to. They had so much personal and professional freedom, but some of them had to struggle so hard. Laura Knight, for instance, found herself a penniless orphan ...’ She stopped, realising she was waving a fork around to emphasise her points, scattering crumbs. David was looking at her, a lopsided smile growing on his face.
‘Why don’t you start your sabbatical now?’ he suggested. ‘Take the summer term off, don’t wait until next year. If you combine it with the summer break you’ll have nearly six months’ writing time without distractions.’
Mel’s face lit up for a moment, then the light died.
‘It sounds fabulous,’ she said, ‘but aren’t I supposed to be taking the “Nineteenth-century Painting” seminars next term? And “An Introduction to Modernism”? And who’ll look after my MA students?’
‘Mel, I had an email from Rowena Stiles last week,’ David said, watching her reaction, and Mel couldn’t help frowning.
Rowena had arrived as cover for a term when Mel had been away on compassionate leave eighteen months before. There had been talk about finding her a permanent position, but then she announced she was to follow her banker husband to
David continued: ‘She’s back in
‘You’d already asked her, then?’ she said, sitting up straight in her seat.
‘No, of course not. She had got in touch because she was looking for work. Relax.’
Mel thought for a moment, measuring up the tantalising glimpse of freedom, like a chink of light through a door in a dark room, against the prospect of Rowena taking over her work again. Rowena knew her stuff, all right, but she liked to be in control and had an abrasive manner. Mel was proud of the fact that she herself got on well with her students. Her dramatic red hair and colourful bohemian dress sense gave her a bona fide artistic air, and she was always generous with her encouragement and not too hard on those who delivered their work late. By contrast, they had to watch their step with Rowena. And the latter might not be content just to stand in temporarily this time, once she had got her feet under Mel’s desk ...
But a whole term off, starting next week when they broke up for Easter? Then the long summer break? It was tempting – very tempting.
‘Rowena does an excellent job, Mel,’ David said firmly. ‘I know she can be ... assertive ...’
‘Pushy and manipulative’ are the words you’re skirting round, Mel thought. She wondered what had happened to that hot job at the
‘Are you sure you’re not trying to get rid of me?’ she teased him, a smile transforming her tired face.
‘No, don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘Mel, I’m saying this to you as a friend. If you don’t take some time away, I’m frightened you’ll make yourself ill. And I won’t have you getting to that stage. Think about it over the weekend, then come and see me on Monday.’
The more she thought about it, the more attractive the idea seemed, but there was one problem.
‘I haven’t got anywhere to stay. It’s Easter and everything’s booked up.’ Mel was on the phone to her sister Chrissie the following Sunday evening. Chrissie, who lived in
‘Wait a minute, Rory, darling, I’m on the phone. Sorry, Mel. Where exactly would you want to go?’
‘
‘Ah, the Wild West. Mum used to love that part.’ Chrissie sighed. Their parents had met at school in
‘Patrick who?’
‘Patrick Winterton. Friend of Nick’s?’ Nick had been a boyfriend of Chrissie’s at
‘No,’ Mel said shortly. ‘I don’t know Patrick.’ Chrissie was always doing this, assuming that she, Mel, knew everyone Chrissie knew. And with Chrissie’s vast acquaintance this could prove impossibly confusing.
‘He studied History at
In the dim glow of the wall-lights with their crimson frilled shades, the sitting room in the cottage looked dingy but cosy. Apart from a huge silver television crouching in a corner like an alien spaceship, the furniture seemed as old as the house. A horsehair sofa with wooden arms, two matching fireside chairs, all with lace antimacassars laid over their backs, were arranged before the small fireplace where a neatly piled pyramid of paper, kindling and wood awaited the touch of a match. A fire would probably cheer up the room, but there was no point lighting one this late. Mel wondered idly where more wood might be stored. Another task for the morning.
She sank down onto one of the chairs. It was surprisingly comfortable. As ever, her professional interest drew her to the pictures on the wall. Instead of the cheap reproductions and mass-produced prints that landlords of holiday cottages often inflict on their tenants were half a dozen fine watercolours of flowers.
She got up to view the one hung above a mahogany bureau. The weak light reflecting off the glass forced her to lift it off the wall in order to study it properly. The words magnolia sargentiana robusta were painted lightly beneath the delicate rendition of three pale pink flowers on a woody stem, followed by the initials P.T. She noticed the needle-fine detail of the stamens, the light wash of colour blushing deeper towards the centre of the blooms, the gloss of the wood. It was meticulously observed and executed.
She replaced the magnolia and moved to consider the others. There was a creamy rhododendron macabeanum, a scarlet camellia, a purple iris and two kinds of rose. Each picture was as exquisite as the last. And each was signed P.T. Before she replaced the sixth and last on the wall, she turned it over hoping for a date. But the brown-paper backing was blank.
A plastic travel alarm clock on the mantelpiece, looking as out of place as the telly in this dingy Victorian setting, showed five to ten. Mel went to haul the suitcases upstairs.
In the larger of the two bedrooms the Victorian oak double bed, she was relieved to see, was made up with a plump duvet, rather than old-fashioned sheets and blankets. However, the musty smell was, if anything, more intense in here. She dumped the cases on the floor, wondering where she would stow everything tomorrow. By the door was a rough-hewn chest-of-drawers with a wedge of cardboard under one front claw foot. A cracked jug stood in a washing bowl on top and Mel, clutching an armful of clean underwear, traced its painted pattern of storks with her finger.
With her free hand she pulled at the knob of the top drawer, intending to stuff the underwear in it, but the drawer wouldn’t move. She dropped the clothes on the top and tugged at it with both hands. It opened halfway and stuck. Mel peered inside.
Caught at the back was a wad of yellow newspaper which she gently eased out and unfolded. The date was ripped but she held the edges of the tear together until she could read the words March 1912. Almost one hundred years ago. Her attention was caught by a short piece about a train-load of unemployed tin miners and their families leaving
She turned the paper over. Amidst the advertisements for patent remedies and ladies’ fashions was another news article.
tragedy at newlyn
Soon after
Mel read it twice, wondering why someone had kept it. Was it just to line the drawer, she wondered. She refolded the paper and dropped it back in the chest.
As she pulled on an old T-shirt nightdress and brushed her teeth at a little washbasin she thought about events at the Blue Anchor a century ago, imagining that His Majesty’s sailors must have been propping up the bar when the fire broke out, and presumably fought the flames whilst the worse for wear. She wondered at the serendipitous way other lives had leaped out of the past and into her consciousness. She had only been looking for somewhere to stow her knickers and had been given a story instead.
Just then, there was a particularly loud creak from outside on the landing. Mel, lying in bed, tensed up, her sixth sense switched onto high alert.
It’s just the wooden stairs settling, she soothed herself. As fear slowly receded, the ghouls of doubt and sorrow clamoured for attention instead, and waves of desolation washed over her. She cried a little, feeling as vulnerable as a child lost in the dark. Eventually, as she used to when tiny, she cuddled a pillow for comfort. When she slipped into fitful sleep, she could almost hear her mother’s voice whispering, ‘Everything will look better in daylight, darling.’ She only hoped that without her mother there this mantra would still hold true.
As she slept, the house whispered its secrets.
I lay everything in the drawers like Jenna said except the books Mr Reagan gave me. Then I see the paper in the bottom of the bag. I smooth it out. No need to read it again, I could tell you every word by heart. And what it means. That I’ve lost everything before I even found it. And because of that I’m sent far from home to this bare attic room with its sight of the early-evening sky. Outside, the rooks whirl in dozens, nay, hundreds, chattering and arguing like fishwives on market-day. Look at them go! Off they swarm to the pine trees on the hill beyond.
A clatter on the stairs. ‘Pearl?’
It’s Jenna. Quickly I fold the paper, open the top drawer of the chest and shove it inside, just as she bursts into the room.