The Penwyth Bride (The Witch's Daughter Book 1) (2 page)

I rose early with the servants before the heat grew too oppressive, and made my way to the kitchen garden. What I saw there made me bite my lip.

Withered blooms of buckram met my eye; I could see that the sun had baked the soil around the carrots and French mallowes like a kiln. The lettuces were long gone, spoiled by caterpillars. I could perhaps save the rampion and parsnips, for they grew late-season, but all the herbs had died except for the hardiest sprigs of thyme.

I had all I could do to blink back the tears. Though the voices of all plants were a constant reminder that I was bound to the earth in an affinity that only few now understood, this little kitchen plot was most special to me, and my prime occupation in life. It lay before me in ruins, the plants’ sad murmurs stilled as the sun blazed out their lives.

“Miss Persia!”

I wiped the moisture from my lashes. “What is it, Betty?”

The housemaid’s eyes slid from mine before I could see the veiled contempt. She was ten and already well-versed in the indirect insolence of the serving class. The river nettles in my pillow last night may well have come from her.

“Mistress be asking for thee. She awaits thee in the drawing room.”

“Thank you.”

I looked sadly at the shriveled row of radishes.

“She wants thee now, miss.”

“Of course. I am coming.”

Little Betty flitted away with enviable speed through the kitchen door. I followed as quickly as I could, picking my way over the buckled flagstones carefully so that I should not stumble.

The dark interior of the hallway soothed my overheated skin. I stopped by the sideboard in the dining room on my way to the morning room where I knew my stepmother would be waiting impatiently, and drank a tumbler full of tepid barleywater. My mouth was still dry as I entered.

Sarah Eames sat at her writing desk, tapping the end of a quill against her chin thoughtfully. Age had begun to blur the sharp angles of her cheek and nose, but her eyes retained all of their piercing directness. She wore a handsome blue-striped gown made from the new callimancoes that I had heard were all the rage, and I self-consciously clutched the skirt of my home-woven dimity.

Dutifully I moved forward and pressed my cheek against hers in welcome.

“Persia, there you are. Good God, your cheek is as hot and damp as a sheepdog’s tongue. Whatever have you been doing?”

“I’ve been out in the garden, Stepmother.”

“Cutting blooms, I suppose.”

“No,” I whispered miserably. “The kitchen garden.”
My stepmother sighed the sigh of martyrdom. She did not need to tell me that a well-bred lady confined her outdoor interests to the cutting gardens or perhaps a tasteful wilderness, not the squat vegetables of the kitchen plot.

“Be seated, Persia. I have news of great importance to tell you. I hold in my hand a letter from my sister. You perhaps remember mention of her?”

“She-she lives Cornwall,” I answered, feeling pleased that I paid attention at some point to my stepmother’s droning monologues.

“That is correct. Jocasta married very respectably, a baronet in Cornwall, and has two children now grown up.”

“Indeed.”

“A daughter about your age, as well as a son.”

She said the last with significance. I stared at her blankly.

She sighed again.

“A
son
, Persia. A son of marriageable age.”

“Oh. Oh!” I sat up, fully comprehending at last.

“My nephew Damon has just returned from a tour on the Continent. I understand from his mother that he has turned out quite handsome, with pleasing manners honed in the French court, and a good education. And I know he is of respectable background, and will inherit his father’s property--”

“--in Cornwall,” I breathed. Visions of the sea crashing against jagged cliffs popped into my head, foam and froth bleeding over rock, and a queer tension suffused me.

“None of your dreamy vagueness now, Persia. Pay attention. I have something to say to you.”

I blinked and with an effort focused on her. Instead of the lecturing posture she usually adopted when she wanted to ‘say something’ to me--always for my own good--I was surprised to find a trace of guilt shadowing her face.

“You are long past marriageable age, and for that forgive me. I promised your papa long ago that I would find you a suitable match, but somehow time slipped away and matters more pressing always seemed to take precedence. But no more. Now I know why the good Lord always stopped my hand when I took up the cause of your marriage.”

Sarah stood up and moved to the window, the callimancoe fluttering with her passage. She still retained an elegant figure, her one claim to beauty.

“You are invited to visit my sister in Cornwall. The sea air will do you good, as will the change, but do not harbor any illusions about the purpose. I quite detest sentimentality so I will be blunt. It is to see if you and my nephew Damon can form an attachment.”

Panic suddenly flooded me. “But I don’t want to go,” I blurted.

“And why not?”

“Because . . . because . . .”

Sarah waved her beringed hand, sending sparks from the jewels over the wainscoting. “If you are worried about your clubfoot, I tell you there is no need.”

“No . . . well, yes, I am worried about my foot, but I am more worried that . . .”

That others will learn I am a witch
.

She waited for me to speak with unconcealed impatience. Since my stepmother’s first coming, we three--my father, Sarah, and myself--entered into an unspoken compact never to speak of my mother nor my ‘alleged’ witch heritage. Sarah never knew of the secret torments that dogged my life at the Great House, and I never thought to complain of them to her. I knew better.

“Who will look after my garden and my birds?” I offered lamely. “The doves will quite perish--”

“You will go.” Sarah cut across my objections ruthlessly. “I cannot hold back the interest that your money is beginning to generate among the yokels of the district. I’ve had inquiries from Squire Hardesty about you . . . you may remember, he’s a widower with three children under the age of five. I’ve also fended off less tactful requests to meet you from the schoolmaster and the curate. Country bumpkins! Damon Penwyth is young, he’s handsome if his mother is to be believed, and he’s fresh from Europe.”

She pinned me with her hawkish eyes that used to fill me with trepidation, but that now filled me with something else, something elusive that I could not quite grasp.

“Go to Cornwall, Persia. Do your best to please.”

And then I had it.

It was hope.

CHAPTER TWO

The speed in which the two sisters worked stunned me. A favorable reply had been sent to Cornwall by Express Rider, and such was the wonders of our kingdom’s new turnpiked roads that Lady Penwyth’s acknowledgement was being read out to me by my stepmother at dinner five days later. Within a fortnight I found myself riding by private conveyance southward, flying over the gleaming Tamar River after a week-long seasoning in the bustle of posting-inns and horse changes.

Sarah Eames insisted on the extravagance. “I don’t wish to live in fear of you boarding the wrong stage,” she snapped at my rare objection to any plan of hers.

After two days on the road I learned to appreciate the relative luxury of my form of travel, especially after listening to the abuses endured by those in the post-coach. My private conveyance marked me out as a Person of Consequence. Though I detested the bowing and scraping of the innkeepers, I was thankful for my private chambers, away from the malodorous smoke-glazed common rooms and curiosity of inebriated day laborers and their screeching women.

Private conveyance, however, could not insulate me from the miseries of summer travel: flies, stenches, shocks to the spine, and stifling heat. As we moved southward down the western lip of the Cornish peninsula, the climate changed. Savage summer sun now slid through puffs of sea mists, but the flies, smells, and jolts still continued unchecked, and no anodyne could remove the headache always feathering along my temples.

At the Three Lions in Hayle, where I gulped a dish of bubble-and-squeak brought to me by the innkeeper’s daughter, the inn buzzed with talk of the impending pilchard run, spoken in a soft drawling English very different from the chopped Northern dialect used to my ear. “Any day now, the fish will drive into Godrevy Point, and oh, miss, so many of them!” the innkeeper’s daughter gabbled at my query, cheeks pinkening. “Fair takes ‘ee’s breath to see so many flashing and slapping in the water, and you think they’d never all be eaten, but ‘ta, they are by April, and then we wait for the next run. They be God’s minder that He loves the Cornish!”

After I stiffly climbed back into the coach, I could not suppress a steady increase in nervousness creeping through my stomach as Coachman Bobbet and his sun-creased partner, pistol at the ready should a highwayman dare menace, guided the horses onto the turnpike bound for St. Ives, as per Lady Penwyth’s direction. St. Ives was the sea-side town where I was to be met by a member of their household--perhaps Damon himself, Sarah Eames hinted--for the final stage of the journey. The unmarked Cornish roads, Lady Penwyth wrote apologetically, crisscrossed and double-backed without warning; any stranger would get hopelessly lost, even with explicit direction.

My feelings about the entire enterprise were mixed. The haste in which my stepmother packed me off gave pause. But I had buried my doubts when a sensation of liberation had filled me as the coach rolled away from the Great House. I harbored no illusions about my welcome by the Penwyths, however. To them I was a rich bridepiece for their son, welcome for my money rather than my company.

The sordid flavor of the visit was mitigated by a flame burning inside the dark anxiety of my heart. In Cornwall, no one knew me as the daughter of Ioanthe Eames, the Witch of Little Ithlington, and I intended to keep it hidden. At home, both my rank and a healthy dose of fear that my stepmother had ladled liberally over the villagers kept me from suffering the same fate as my mother. I would have to take great care here never to expose myself to the godly who hated my kind. Leaving the environs of Little Ithlington, as much as I was beginning to warm to the idea, presented me a risk.

Still, a secret corner of my soul whispered, perhaps, just perhaps Damon Penwyth, who would know nothing of my mother or my own affinity to the earth, would fall madly in love with . . .

I then remembered my clubfoot. I swallowed over a sudden constriction.

“Be thee sick, miss?” said Hazel, the maid my stepmother sent to accompany me on the journey. She braced herself on the other side of the coach as far from me as possible.

I took a deep breath. “No. I am thirsty, that is all.”

“Eh.” The syllable dropped from thinned lips. Grinding toil and a fondness for muggety leached the emotion from Hazel, and it was her lack of imagination that allowed Sarah Eames to choose her to escort me on the journey. She knew that Hazel wouldn’t put up with any of my nonsense.

Hazel handed me a bottle of gingered ale. Politely I sipped the warm liquid as I turned my attention from the monotonous brown wastes of the Cornish peninsula to the birdcage at my feet. Sarah let me bring one of my precious birds with me, and I chose a bright canary, his little eyes alert, his song so cheerful.

I lifted the cloth shroud draped protectively over the bars and peeked inside. The tiny creature looked the worse for wear, drooping on its swinging perch. I assured it that the ordeal would soon be over.

Hazel’s compressed lips disappeared altogether. Her prune-black eye, speculative and hard, raked me.

Witch spawn
.

Settling the cloth back around Pretty Peter’s cage with casual haste, I fished two books out of my carpetbag. The first, Moore’s
Fables for the Female Sex
, a conduct book given me by my stepmother, I rejected in favor of
The Divers and Fantasticall Legends of Land’s End
by the Reverend Sprull, Don at Christchurch College. This book sat unread for many years in my grandfather’s library--the print date was 1637--but the morning after I learned I was to go to Cornwall I stumbled over its cobweb-shrouded spine as it inexplicably lay in the middle of the hallway floor.

A blast of sea-soaked air pummeled the coach, carrying the scent of brine into the cabin. The finger-thin line of silver gilding the horizon had widened into an arc of blue where the Irish Channel dissolved into the Atlantic Oceans and the utter reaches of the other side of the world.

I leaned back into the squibs. The faint rush of crashing waves melded with the thud of hoofbeats, and I clutched the book to my lap--the swaying was too great for comfortable reading-- and fought the sensation that I was driving forward into the past. Whispers flew thick in this air, and memories floated like a miasma over its surface. This land felt stoppered in time, and fiercely resisted incursion.

With an effort I brought my mind to what I had already devoured out of the Reverend Sprull’s treatise: that it was said that King Arthur ruled England from his Cornish seat of power, and that Merlin still roamed Cornwall’s warren of bogs and moors awaiting Arthur’s return. Tristan met his Isolde here, while sea creatures called merrows were thought to swim disconsolately through the halls of the sunken kingdom of Lyonesse. The Duchy itself was divided into districts called Hundreds, and I shivered to find that the Penwith Hundred was also known as the Bloody Hundred because of many ancient battles fought over its rich tin mines. I wondered if the present family either took from, or, more improbably, gave its name to the Hundred.