Read Crossed Bones Online

Authors: Jane Johnson

Tags: #Morocco, #Women Slaves

Crossed Bones (8 page)

So that was to be her life: stuck here at Kenegie for ever, married to her dull cousin, living in a hovel behind the cowshed. That night, Cat prayed for the Lord to take her in her sleep. She never wanted to wake up again.

After tossing and turning for hours, she lit a candle, turned to her pattern for the altar frontal in her book, sharpened her plumbago stick with the little knife she kept for the purpose, and by the guttering light added a clear caricature of Nell Chigwine’s sly face to the serpent.

7

So that ys to be my lyf, trappd for ever here at Kenegy wed to my dull cozen Robert living in a hovel behynd the cow-sheds, large with childe year after year, rasyng a pack of brattes & dying in obscuritee. I must away from heere. The Countess of Salysbury ys to visit Lady Harrys in Agost. If I can compleat the Altar Frontal before then & thus perswade her to take mee away with her, may bee there ys a chaunce of escape

 

The harsh ringing of the telephone jolted me out of the seventeenth century.

I went into the kitchen and stared at it as if it might suddenly manifest Michael out of its din. But the voice that started to leave a message was not Michael’s, or any other man’s.

‘Julia?’

It was my cousin Alison.

‘Alison, it’s brilliant to hear from you. How are you? I’ve been meaning to call you. Life’s not been too great – ’

‘Julia, for God’s sake, shut up and let me speak.’

I stared at the phone, shocked. Alison was usually such a gentle soul. I applied my ear to the receiver again, only to hear her breathing heavily, as if she had run a mile.

‘It’s… it’s Andrew – ’ and she broke down into great racking sobs.

I waited, not knowing what to say. Had he left her again? Andrew Hoskin had always had a roving eye; they’d moved down to Cornwall in part because of some work affair he’d had, but that had been a while ago. Had she left him? She’d been threatening to for years, but never had, and I could not imagine that she ever really would…

‘He’s… he’s dead.’

‘Oh, Alison, no. I’m so sorry. Are you OK – sorry, of course you’re not OK. My God, what happened?’

There was a long pause as Alison gathered herself. ‘He… ah… he hanged himself. In the attic. I –’ The explanation became the wail of an animal in unbearable pain. It shivered in my bones.

‘Oh, God, Alison, that’s terrible. Stop, stop, please. I’m sure it was nothing to do with you.’

Why had I said that? I had no idea. Of course it had something to do with her: he was her husband. At the other end there was a sudden ominous silence.

‘Alison? I really don’t know why I said that. Alison?’

She had put the phone down. I tried to call her back at intervals throughout the day but only succeeded in getting the answering machine. At last I left a message of abject apology and gave up.

That night I did not read Catherine Tregenna’s little book, but resolutely put it away from me and thought instead not about that distant girl, almost four hundred years dead, nor for once about my own sad life, but about my poor cousin. What must it feel like to share your life with someone who suddenly and with no explanation or warning removes himself not just from your relationship but from the whole world, irretrievably and for ever? However bad their marriage had become, what would have driven the usually buoyant and thick-skinned Andrew to take his own life, in such a brutal manner, and in the very house the two had resurrected from the shamble of dust and mildew and rotting timber they had bought so long ago?

But when at last I turned the light out and went to sleep, it was not Alison I dreamed of, nor of Andrew swinging from a beam, but of Cat Tregenna. Something was happening to her: something terrible, but I could not quite grasp the nature of the threat or see the menace that had come for her. The words ‘Lord save us!’ echoed over and over in my head, and when I awoke it was in a state of some alarm. Usually I woke slowly, like a diver coming up to the surface from deep water, but that morning something was different. My skin felt prickly and alert, as if someone had been watching me as I slept. Suddenly fixated by this thought, I hurled the bedclothes from me and leaped out of bed, staring wildly around as if I might surprise an intruder. There was, of course, no one there. Cursing myself for such pointless and neurotic behaviour, I made a cup of coffee and called Alison’s number again.

This time, she picked up.

‘Hello?’ Her voice was thready and faint as if coming from a very long way away down a very poor line.

‘Alison, it’s me, Julia. Look, I’m so sorry about my gaffe yesterday, I wasn’t thinking…’ I tailed off, unable to think of anything useful to say.

‘That’s all right. I just couldn’t talk to you – to anyone – any more. I had to get away from it, from him; from the house.’

‘But you’re back now,’ I observed, stupidly.

‘Yes,’ she said, sounding unsure.

‘Look,’ I said quickly and without any real thought, ‘why don’t I come down to help you with the arrangements and stuff? Give you a break, or a shoulder to cry on: anything, really. It’s no problem, there’s nothing keeping me here.’

There was a long pause. Then, ‘Could you? I can’t bear it here. Will you come? Today?’

‘Of course,’ I said. After a few minutes of practical arrangements, I put the phone down, my heart sinking. Why had I offered? I really did not want to go all that way – to the end of the world, as it seemed. There were ghosts waiting for me down in Cornwall; and I did not count Andrew’s among them.

Nevertheless, two hours later I found myself at Paddington buying an open return to Penzance.

It had been nearly three years since I had visited my home county, commuting back and forth to visit my mother, a particularly dark time in my life. My mother, who had right up to that last year been a remarkably hale and energetic woman, still running marathons at sixty, still swimming at seventy, had suffered a sudden stroke and in a moment lost not only the use of one side of her body but her independence and her entire personality, and had ended up in a care home which stank of urine and antiseptic.

It was guilt that drove me to my frequent visits, guilt and fear: a barely suppressed terror at the realization that this was what we all came to in the end. And at least my mother had some moments of comfort in having friends and family around her as she failed. Being a single woman with no children made the prospect of old age and physical and mental decline cut me particularly deeply, even at thirty-three. As a result, I clung to Michael out of a yawning need that soon had him avoiding late-night phone calls and making more trips away from town than he had before, anything, I suspect, to avoid hearing my woes and sensing my pain. It took me some months to realize that my behaviour and his more frequent absences – geographical and emotional – had a direct correlation, but even then I had not had the wit to see the relationship for what it really was.

As the train passed through Liskeard Station, with its pretty little branch line that followed the twisting river valley through rolling wooded hills to the sea at Looe, I remembered how Michael had given in to my badgering and gone down with me for a weekend. His family had moved from St Austell long ago; there was nothing left in Cornwall for him except bad memories of school and camping on the moor, as he told me in no uncertain terms. I remembered how, unable to deal with my tears after I returned alone from visiting my mother at the home, he had abruptly gone for a long walk and left me sitting in the hotel garden, wondering whether he was ever coming back. Surely, I reasoned with myself now, I was better off on my own than with such a weak and selfish man? For a long while my thoughts were as bleak as the moors through which we passed, and I could not concentrate on embroidering my wall hanging to pass the time.

But, as the train approached Camborne and I saw the ruined mine workings on the skyline, my heart leaped up in a most disconcerting way. Swathes of bracken and gorse on windswept hills and lonely heaths punctuated by standing stones and tumuli gradually gave way to rolling farmland, beyond whose boundaries I sensed a huge and empty space. Something about the quality of the light – bright and numinous – suggested the imminent presence of the sea. Just over that horizon lay the end of the line; indeed, the end of the land.

This was where our family, a fiercely Cornish clan, had originated: West Penwith, the most westerly toe of England. My mother always referred to it as ‘real Cornwall’, as if the south-east was only for incomers and county traitors, folk whose affiliations lay more closely with (heaven forbid) Devon and the modern world than with Cornwall’s ancient past as an independent nation with its own language, king and laws. Our ancestors had been tinners before the industry had disastrously failed, and along with it the family fortunes, and many had dispersed far and wide across the globe – to the Argentine and Australia, to Canada and Chile – wherever mining expertise was still a tradeable asset.

I had not had much contact with my few remaining relatives in this toe of land. Some of them, cousins at third and fourth remove, had attended my mother’s funeral, but we had not had much to say to one another beyond the stock exchange of condolences. Alison knew them better than I did. They had properly Cornish names – Pengelly and Bolitho, Rowse and Tucker – and lives that seemed fifty years and a continent removed from my own. Why Alison and Andrew had removed themselves quite so far from London I had never really understood, beyond the small scandal of Andrew’s affair; but, as the train neared its destination, I began to understand. Alison had needed the comfort of her family; but she had also said when she had first moved down to this part of Cornwall that it was a magical place, full of powerful energies. I had suspected her of seeking solace in her new surroundings, glossing the landscape with a much needed mystique. Now, across the wide bay before me, St Michael’s Mount rose out of the sea like a castle from the Age of Legends, wreathed around by low cloud and hazy rain, and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

The Mount. How many times had that name appeared in Catherine’s book in her tiny, exquisite hand? I gazed at it, feeling the presence of the past. I shivered. Goodness, here we were pulling into Penzance Station, and I was feeling shaky and not a little haunted; not the best state in which to greet my poor bereaved cousin.

I was quickly brought back to earth. As the train pulled in, a great, ugly Victorian rail shed greeted me, grey and forbidding, that and a penetrating Cornish mizzle which misted my exposed skin and got into the roots of my hair in the few seconds it took to walk along the platform into shelter. Alison was waiting for me beside the station buffet, the garish light making her pale face ghastly.

We lurched into an awkward embrace, and I could feel her slender frame trembling. As I held her, I thought sadly how that bold, bright, brazen girl of my twenties – the one who had streaked round the local park, high on E; who had crawled through the churchyard of St Nicholas, Deptford, at two in the morning, having lost the power to walk after three too many tequila slammers, still determined that I should see the memorials to Kit Marlowe and to the great seventeenth-century shipwright John Addey; who had danced at raves and partied till dawn and sworn she would never get old – had been rendered frail and uncertain, her hair showing streaks of grey and her face etched with lines.

During the time Alison and Andrew had lived in Cornwall, my cousin and I had maintained our friendship through long phone calls and periodic visits by her to London, when she would escape her married state as we pretended to flirt with younger men in pubs along the river. She had never encouraged me to visit the Cornish house: this would be my first sight of it, except in a thousand before-and-after photos.

Alison and Andrew’s home was a short drive from the station: a rambling converted farmhouse in the hills to the north and east of Penzance. She had loved it from the start, even though it was neglected and abandoned: no one had lived in it for years. She had practically bullied Andrew into buying the place, having seen its potential from the outset, and Andrew, with so much to make up for, had eventually given in and let her have her way with it, and his money. They had lavished a great deal of effort, imagination and time on their home: you could see that at soon as you entered the driveway. A formal garden had been planted: concentric circles of box enclosing bay trees and beds of lavender and hand-laid pebble paths which ran between the beds. A fountain occupied the centre of a sunray patio made of smooth white pebbles against a dark ground, but the water was still and silent, pocked by the rain.

Inside, the house was fresh and bright – walls painted in old white, soft pale-green carpets, ethnic rugs in cool colours, modern paintings of seascapes and fish which looked to be originals, solid furniture in heavy dark wood, but absolutely no clutter. Instead there was a sense of space, simplicity and serenity. I did not feel Andrew’s presence in any of it. The ambience was that of studied order and balance. It was hard to believe a man had so violently, and so recently, ended his life under this roof.

‘I’ve put you in our room. I hope you don’t mind – I just can’t face sleeping there at the moment. It’s got its own bathroom, and a lovely view,’ she added apologetically.

‘That’s fine,’ I lied, though the idea of it made my skin crawl.

On the landing, I watched as she inevitably fixed her gaze on the stairs to the attic, then looked away sharply, remembering.

She made us a pot of tea, and we took it out into the back garden. There, amid fragrant beds of peppermint and thyme, she told me how the two had renovated the farmhouse together room by room as the money came in, right the way up to the attic, which they had converted only this year. They had dug up the old cobbles and concrete of the yard and replaced them with flowers and trees and herbs. And for a time that had been enough: hard physical work that exhausted them and devoured their time, throwing them together in a shared project in which they both took pride, and in which they buried their troubled past. But it was as if converting the attic had been the last straw. Ever since they’d finished that, Andrew had withdrawn into himself, becoming gradually more taciturn and short-tempered – very different from the convivial, rumbustious Andrew I had always known – started drinking heavily, neglected first his family, then his work. He was an internet trader, and it had not taken long for his business to fall apart and the debts to mount up.

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