Chapter Five

A t the Coach and Horses on Kennegy Downs, just outside Penzance, Nat descended from the stagecoach and stretched his long limbs. Stiffness ached down his back and into his hips. Was he getting too old for such long journeys by uncomfortable, rattly old stagecoach? He could have bought a horse and ridden down in his own time, but a hankering to see the blue Cornish skies and the wild green ocean of his childhood had spurred him on. Not enough to hazard the mail coach though.

Lockhart and Talbot had left the coach at Whitchurch, thank goodness. Despite his attempts to feign sleep, Lockhart, with his slight claim to knowing Nat, had attempted on several occasions to engage him in a conversation he did not want to participate in. Nat and the other passengers took rooms overnight at the White Hart, and, after a substantial breakfast of beef and porter, were on their way again early the next morning.

Nat, his stomach full, had leaned back in his corner, his head resting on the upholstered back of his seat, and managed to snatch a few extra hours sleep. This latter was not helped in any way by the guard blowing his post horn with far too much enthusiasm as they approached each and every tollgate. Nor was the noise created by the changing of their four horses every two hours supportable. His sleep was, perforce, of the interrupted type, and not conducive of good temper.

The farmer parted company with the coach at Salisbury, where their stop was at the Red Lion in Milford Street for the midday meal. A dour looking elderly gentleman, with a strong reek of tobacco about him, took his place.

Nat paid little attention to the towns and villages the road passed through until they reached Bridport and stopped for the second night at the Bull on East Street. The following morning, the driver, who no doubt would find himself dismissed if he were late, was keen for them to be on their way, so breakfast was a rushed affair guaranteed to be detrimental to the digestion. Nat contented himself with a quickly fried steak and a cup of strong black coffee. And then it was on again. It was to be another two full days of traveling before his goal was reached.

But now he was here, and, of course, no one knew he had arrived, so no transport had been sent. As the coach rattled back out onto the road, he shouldered his valise and turned toward the inn. Would old Zack Chenoweth still be there in his accustomed place behind the bar?

Pushing the door open, he ducked his head under its low lintel and entered the gloomy taproom, the smell of old soot, tobacco, and ale strong. Yes, much as he remembered it from his boyhood at Treloar Court. Along one side of the room ran a plank-topped bar with a variety of pewter tankards hanging from hooks on the substantial beam above it. A few snugly private booths lay along a second side, and a motley collection of wooden chairs and tables lay scattered across the slate-slabbed floor. All empty but for two old men playing drafts near the empty hearth, and a large dog sprawled in the patch of sunlight streaming in through the leaded front window.

As Nat entered, the dog, a shaggy beast that might have been a wolfhound, raised its head and eyed him, before deciding he merited no interest and dropping his head to the floor again. Could that be one of old Captain’s pups? Captain himself couldn’t still be alive, surely? Not after eleven years.

Nat set his valise on one of the tables and approached the bar, aware of the close scrutiny of the two old men. No doubt eyeing up his scar, which was enough to render him unrecognizable to those who’d known him as a boy. He knocked on the wood. “Hello? Landlord? Anyone there?”

Footsteps sounded and a sturdy young man of about his own age emerged from the rear of the inn, wiping his hands on a cloth. “Yes, sir? What can I do for you?”

Nat stared. “Jacka?”

The young man also stared. “Nat?” Then he seemed to recover himself. “I mean, Mr. Treloar . Or should I say Cap’n Treloar?”

Nat held out his hand. “Don’t Mr. Treloar me, Jacka. Surely I’ve not been away so long that you’ve forgotten the pranks we used to get up to together? And it’s major now, anyway.” Somehow, seeing his boyhood friend again after all these years had loosened his long-tethered tongue. He managed a smile, the skin on the right side of his face tightening and pulling at the scar. “But what’s put you behind the bar here?”

The two old men were now openly listening, and even the dog had bestirred himself to lift his head again.

Jacka took Nat’s hand, and they shook like the old friends they were. “I’ve been landlord here since I wed Old Zack’s granddaughter, my Delen.” He grinned. “Last I heared of you, you was off fightin’ them Frenchies. I’d not ha’ known you ’til you spoke.” Jacka’s honest eyes ran over Nat’s face, and for once Nat felt none of his usual self-consciousness. He didn’t mind Jacka seeing what war had done to him.

Jacka grinned. “Make a good pirate now, you would.” As boys, they’d played at being pirates, shipwrecked sailors, and smugglers on the beach and in the woods around Roskilly House.

“It’s all over now,” Nat said, his hand going to his scar, but not, for once, to hide it. “All done and dusted, with Boney a prisoner on Elba and fat old Louis on the throne.” He grinned, conscious of how the scar tissue pulled one side of his mouth down as though he’d suffered an apoplexy. “Though how secure those arrangements are, I’ve no idea. But I shan’t think about that. I’ve resigned my commission and come home to let Cornwall work its magic on me. Nothing will drag me back into the army.”

Jacka grinned wider still and fished a bottle of brandy out from beneath his counter. “You’ll take a glass with me? For old times?”

Nat eyed the bottle. “I will indeed, but I won’t ask you where it came from.”

With an elaborate wink, Jacka filled two glasses with generous measures and they toasted one another before knocking back the fiery liquid. “Ah,” Nat sighed. “Nothing like a tot of something that’s paid no duty.”

Jacka chuckled. “Ask no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.” He refilled the glasses.

This time, Nat left his on the bar. “Steady on, or I’ll not find my way back to Roskilly, or if I do, my sainted mother will see fit to box my ears for drunkenness.”

They exchanged glances, faces for a moment serious, then Nat chuckled. “But I’d like to see her try, now I’m no longer a boy.”

Jacka downed his brandy. “Aye, ’tis a man grown I see before me today. A warrior returned, by the look o’ you. I won’t ask, and you don’t have to ever tell me, lessen you want to, that is.” He poured himself a third measure. “That’s good stuff, if I ses it myself. Nothing like stoppin’ work for a quick pick-me-up. You’ll be staying at Roskilly, then?”

Nat nodded. “I think I can put up with it. I imagine things will have changed since I was last here, as that was more than three years ago. By luck, my regiment was back in England when my aunt’s husband died, or I wouldn’t have been able to attend the funeral. But I stayed with her at Bodilly House then, not Roskilly, and only went there to pay my respects to my grandfather who was thought too frail to attend the funeral.” He rubbed his nose. “I’d be staying there now, with my aunt, if she hadn’t closed it up after my uncle died and gone off to Oxford to stay with my cousin Ewella.”

Jacka’s brow furrowed. “You’ll not have heard about the old man, then?”

A chill hand closed around Nat’s heart. “No. What about my grandfather?”

“Over two year ago now, it were. Sir Hugh were struck down with an apoplexy. Rumor had it, he were at death’s door, but rumor were wrong, and I hear as he’s confined to his bed but determined to cling onto life.”

Nat digested this disturbing information. An apoplexy was a serious calamity that should, perhaps, have carried his grandfather off, and yet, the old man still seemed to be alive. Two years was a long time to continue confined to a bed. “Does he have his faculties still?”

Jacka could only shrug. “I can’t answer that, I’m sorry to say. My sister, Bessie, you remember her?”

Of course he remembered Bessie. Hard for Nat to suppress the color rising up his face as he nodded, but at least the interior of the inn was dark. What young man doesn’t remember his first?

Jacka continued. “Her girl, Patience, works at the Court now, and she ses as how the old master has a special nurse who does everythin’ for him. The other servants don’t get near him.” He slanted a sideways look at Nat. “Organized by Mrs. Treloar.”

Nat sighed. “It seems I’m returned in good time. I’d hate to not have seen my grandfather before he goes. And by my reckoning, he must now be approaching his ninetieth year.” He grinned. “Although he always seemed old to me even when I was a boy.”

Jacka nodded. “To me too.” He hesitated, as if reluctant to say something.

“Go on,” Nat said. “If you have something you need to tell me, spit it out.”

Jacka rubbed his bristly chin. “Things’ve changed more than you’d think since your grandfather took to his bed. Mrs. Treloar, she hired in a man to do the work old Sir Hugh used to do. To manage the estate and mines, and the shipbuilders at Falmouth. Bessie says her Patience and Dickon don’t like the man one bit. He lords it about the place as though it’s his, and Mrs. Treloar… well, Bessie says there’s rumors about her an’ him.”

“What rumors?”

“I don’t like to say, what with her bein’ your mother.”

“You know why that doesn’t matter to me. What rumors?”

Jacka lowered his voice. “That her and Mr. Trefusis, her agent, are more than just employer and manager.”

Nat regarded his friend in silence for a long moment. Over by the window, the dog rolled onto its back, legs in the air, relishing the warmth of the sun. “And do you think them true?”

Jacka shrugged. “Not for me to say. But that Jan Trefusis is a handsome man for his age. He do come in here from time to time and my Delen, she told me women do like his looks. With your own father bein’ dead these twelve years, could you blame your ma for lookin’ at him wi’ lively eyes?”

Nat shrugged and picked up his spurned brandy glass. “Waste not, want not.” He downed it in one gulp. “I don’t know and I don’t care. Enough of this idle talk. It’s a tidy way to Treloar from here and, as you can see, I’m togged out like a gentleman.” He indicated his only slightly dusty top boots. “You wouldn’t want me traipsing through fields dressed like this, would you? Do you perhaps have a horse I could borrow?”

Jacka returned the brandy bottle to its place beneath the counter. “I do that, but it won’t be what you’re used to as a fine soldier. This way.”

Picking up his valise, Nat followed Jacka to the rear of the inn where a door opened into a small stableyard. Hens scratched at a neatly stacked muck heap on top of which sat a cockerel, and a pair of fat geese stood on the other side of a wooden gate, peering between the rails. A scrawny boy of about twelve was busy sweeping the cobbles with a besom. Along one side of the yard ran an open shed, housing a flat farm cart and a shabby pony cart. On the other ran the stables. Jacka led the way through their wide doorway into a flagstone corridor off which a number of stalls opened. In one of them, a stout bay cob was tethered by a rope and log.

“This is Bosun. He’s not tall, but he makes up for his lack of height by his width.” He slapped Bosun’s large quarters and a cloud of dust rose. “Your long legs shouldn’t hang too far down.”

Nat had seen and ridden worse. He checked over Bosun’s sturdy legs for blemishes with a practiced hand and found none. “He’ll do me fine. Does it matter when I bring him back to you?”

Jacka shook his head. “Keep him a week, if you have to. I don’t need him at the moment, and if I need to go to Penzance, I’ll put the pony between the shafts of the cart and take that.”

They shook hands on the deal.

Rather less than half an hour later, Nat emerged from the stableyard astride Bosun, his valise fastened to the back of the saddle with some old rope, and took the lane opposite the inn. Overhead, a clear blue sky smiled down on the weary traveler, and Nat pushed any doubts he had about returning to his boyhood home out of his head. He would just glory in being alive, in the warmth of the sun, in the measured tread of a horse’s hooves beneath him, and in the birdsong in every tree and bush.

*

Late in the afternoon, with lessons, dinner, and piano practice over, and the weather still holding fine, Caroline and Yves, accompanied by an excited Hetty and a bounding, yapping spaniel, set off down the narrow path Yves assured Caroline would lead to the beach.

Hetty, dressed very prettily in a long-sleeved lemon gown, dainty white gloves and a capacious bonnet that would indeed prevent every inch of her skin from catching the sun, skipped along at Caroline’s side, while Yves and the dog scurried back and forth in front of them, trying to encourage them to hurry. Caroline, conscious of being required to set a good example, had similarly attired herself to Hetty in long sleeves, gloves, and a bonnet, and was even now regretting this fashion choice.

“I think I shall take my bonnet off and leave it here until we return,” Hetty said, her hands going to her bonnet strings. “Mama is so mean to make me dress like this on such a beautiful day. I’m far too hot already.”

As Caroline was thinking just the same, she could hardly argue. However, Hetty was a redhead. “I think you might need to keep well covered,” she ventured. “With your delicate skin.”

“Oh, poof,” Hetty exclaimed. “Don’t tell me you’re to be as fussy as Miss Hawkins was, and always make me do as Mama says?”

Caroline, regretting she could now no longer remove her own bonnet, sighed. “It’s well known that those with auburn hair need to be more careful in the sun. And besides, if you were to catch the sun, and, heaven forbid, develop freckles , it would be more than obvious to Mrs. Treloar that I haven’t been making you obey her command.”

Hetty put a dainty hand up to touch her nose. “I do have one or two freckles already, I suppose, even though I dab them with lemon juice every night before bed. But nevertheless, it’s so unfair that Yves gets to run about uncovered like this, when you and I must hide every inch of ourselves under clothing. How is it boys are allowed freckles, but we girls aren’t?”

Yves came running back at that moment, before Caroline was forced to find an answer for this question, his blonde curls bouncing. “Hurry up, can’t you? Dash and me want to paddle in the sea.”

“Dash and I ,” Caroline corrected.

The rugged stone walls to either side of the path had fallen back by now and instead they were walking through the start of the sandhills. From up ahead came a distant roar, and a tantalizing smell Caroline didn’t recognize. She’d read about the sea and beaches in books, and glimpsed it from afar on her coach journey down to Cornwall, but this would be the first time she’d seen it up close.

The path underfoot turned from solid to soft sand, the gentle rises bedecked with grass resembling long green needles that blew and rattled in the breeze. A breeze which snatched at Caroline’s large bonnet as though it were a sail.

Yves raced on ahead with Dash, disappearing from sight between the hummocks, and Caroline hurried her steps, which was difficult on the soft sand that gave beneath every step. She was supposed to be looking after Yves, and that meant keeping him in view the whole time, surely?

As she emerged from the sandhills, she caught her breath in astonishment. Before her opened a vista such as she’d never imagined could exist. The golden expanse of a huge beach stretched to left and right, edged for most of its extent by the same rolling sandhills as she’d just negotiated. In the far distance, or so it seemed, the sea rolled white-capped waves up the beach, and to right and left, at the opposing ends of this wonder, tall cliffs rose toward twin rocky headlands.

“Good heavens.”

Hetty caught up with her. “Yes, it is rather striking, isn’t it?”

Caroline nodded. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s… so huge.”

Yves and Dash were already pelting across the sand toward the sea. A sudden worry overcame Caroline. “We’d best follow him. How safe is the sea?”

Hetty wrinkled her nose. “Like this, I believe it’s safe enough. But ask not if the sea is safe, but rather, can we trust Yves not to get completely wet. Come along, we’d better run.”

Beyond the hot, dry sand, a wide line of dark seaweed separated it from the wet sand. Once they’d stepped over that, they could run more easily. They caught Yves up on the sea’s edge, where he was pulling off his boots and stockings while Dash splashed about in the shallows, biting at bits of bobbing seaweed. As Yves had sat down in what almost amounted to shallow water, he was already halfway to being wet all over.

Hetty picked up his boots and tucked his stockings inside them.

“Don’t go in too far,” Caroline cautioned, not liking the size of the waves that kept on coming, one after another, like some relentless threat.

Yves paid little attention, but ran into the sea, squealing with delight and kicking up a spray of water, his little dog joining in the fun.

The next wave ran in across the sand, diminishing as it came, and threatened to soak Caroline’s feet. She and Hetty retreated out of its reach.

“I think the tide is starting to come in,” Hetty said.

“Is it always like this?”

“The tide’s on the turn,” Hetty explained. “It’s low tide at the moment, but Miss Hawkins told me it ebbs and flows with the moon. It’ll reach that line of seaweed we had to step over when it does, but it’ll take six hours to do that.”

Caroline had read about tides but never seen one, nor had one explained to her. “Are you sure we’re safe?”

Hetty nodded. “It comes in very slowly. I like it better when it’s in, for the waves are so much bigger. Quite splendid to stand and watch. Like so many white horses galloping up the beach.”

Caroline wasn’t sure she would agree with Hetty on that, but it might be interesting to come down here and see for herself what it was like when the tide was in.

Yves had ventured out a bit further and was now knee deep, the legs of his skeleton suit soaked to a darker blue. As each wave rolled toward him, he did a little leap over it, and Dash was now swimming. There was no denying that the sea was a thing of excitement for a child. Had she still been a child herself, she might have wanted to emulate Yves.

However, just at that moment, a much bigger wave rolled in, and this time it caught Yves as he jumped, wetting him to the chest and bowling him over. He floundered for a moment, and his head went under as a second wave followed the first.

Hetty gave a little scream, clapping a gloved hand to her mouth.

Caroline couldn’t afford to hesitate. Instead, she hitched up her skirts and ran into the waves, the chill of the water, even though it was summer, a shock on her legs. The sand under her feet felt unstable, as though it were being sucked back out to sea, and as another wave rushed in, she lost sight of Yves for one heart stopping moment.

There was the dog, swimming still, but where was its owner?

Yves’s blonde head, darkened by the water, bobbed up only a few yards distant. She seized him by the arm and heaved him upright, sheltering him from the next wave with her body. Now she was soaked to well above the waist as well. Snatching him up in her arms and holding him pressed to her chest, she struggled back to dry land with him, much hampered by her soaked gown and the fact that he was wriggling. He was also heavier than he looked.

Hetty, hopping from one foot to the other just out of reach of the waves, was still holding Yves’s footwear. “Is he all right? Yves, you know you shouldn’t go in that far. You’re too small.”

Yves struggled with renewed determination in Caroline’s arms. “Put me down, please. I’m quite all right.”

Caroline set him on the sand, completely soaked, just as she was. Dash bounded out of the water to join them and gave himself a vigorous shake, spraying Hetty, who leapt back with a squawk.

Yves pushed his wet hair out of his eyes, a grin spreading across his face. “That was such fun! Just like Robinson Crusoe. I’m going to pretend I’ve been washed up on a desert island, like he was. Only the natives have rescued me. That’s you two. But you’re friendly natives, which is good.” He did a little dance of glee, oblivious to his waterlogged state. “Caroline, you can be Miss Tuesday, as today is Tuesday, and Hetty can be Miss Wednesday. Just like Man Friday.” He glanced down at his dog, who gave another shake. “And Dash can be Dog Saturday.”

“You’re both awfully wet,” Hetty said, with a hint of wistfulness. “I’d like to paddle in the sea, but Mama says I’m not allowed to. It’s not ladylike.” She eyed Caroline up and down. “And now I see why.”

Caroline smoothed her wet skirts down. This was awful, and despite the heat of the day, she was now cold, so Yves must be as well. Only her first day and she’d nearly let her small charge be washed out to sea before her eyes. And now she was going to have to go back to Roskilly looking like a drowned rat, and so was he. Although perhaps they both might dry off a bit first.

Dash gave a warning bark. He was staring down the beach at the rapidly approaching figure of a rider. A man astride a sturdy bay cob.