High Tide At Midnight

Vanessa hunched a shoulder. ‘Oh, you know what I mean. After all, you were pretty involved with him. He’s lucky to have got away as lightly as he has.’

‘Without having to make an honest woman of me, do you mean?’ Morwenna was controlling her temper with some difficulty. ‘Is that what you all think?’

Vanessa shot her an uneasy glance. ‘Well—not precisely. But Guy is sleeping with Georgina—and being utterly blatant about it, so….’

‘So naturally you all assumed that I’d fallen into bed with him with equal ease.’ Morwenna forced a smile. ‘I can’t pretend I’m flattered, or does Guy usually restrict his attentions to pushovers?’

‘Well, let’s say he doesn’t usually waste a great deal of his time on frightened virgins,’ Vanessa returned derisively.

Morwenna caught her bottom lip savagely in her teeth. ‘I see.’ She was silent for a moment. It was difficult to know which was worse—the assumption that she had been Guy’s pliant mistress or the alternative inference that she had not been sufficiently attractive to him for him to have attempted seduction. She would have preferred not to be ranged in either category.

She managed a light laugh. ‘Actually our relationship was based more on mutual convenience than anything else,’ she said, digging her hands into the pockets of her sheepskin coat to conceal the fact that they were trembling. ‘We—we both needed someone to be seen around with. And I don’t blame Guy at all for confining himself to ladies with money. Now that our positions are reversed, I’m doing more or less the same thing.’

‘You are?’ Vanessa gave her a slightly flabbergasted look. ‘I don’t follow you.’

Morwenna allowed her smile to widen. ‘Well, I’m not going down to Cornwall for my health’s sake, let’s say.’

‘No?’ Vanessa was openly intrigued. ‘Is there a man?’

Morwenna achieved a giggle quite as smug as anything Georgina had produced.

‘Of course there’s a man,’ she said without a tremor, crossing her fingers superstitiously in the shelter of her pockets. ‘I’d hardly be travelling to the back of beyond at this time of year otherwise.’

‘Well!’ Vanessa’s tone was frankly congratulatory. ‘I always knew you couldn’t possibly be as innocent as you looked. Have you known him long?’

Morwenna shrugged. ‘Long enough,’ she said airily. Since I was a small child, she thought hysterically, in dreams and stories, and please don’t let her ask me how old he is or any other details. I don’t care if she does think me a gold-digger or worse. Anything’s better than being regarded as a charity case. And I’ll never see any of them again, so they can think what they like.

Vanessa was speaking again. ‘And do your plans include marriage, or is that an indelicate question?’

‘Oh, that would depend on a lot of things,’ Morwenna said hastily. ‘I—I prefer to cross that bridge when I come to it.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘And if I can persuade him to provide the money to send me to painting school next year, I may never have to cross it at all.’

‘I see,’ Vanessa said blankly. ‘Well, all I can say is that I wish you luck.’

‘Thank you,’ Morwenna laughed. ‘But I don’t think I shall need it.’ Her tone implied a total confidence in her own power of attraction, and for a moment she despised herself for playing Vanessa’s game, but what did it matter after all? They were never likely to meet again. Once she was out of the way, Morwenna guessed that her cousins would breathe a sigh of relief and put her out of their minds. In a way she could see their point of view. While she had remained at the Priory, they could never feel their inheritance was truly theirs. She was a wholly unwelcome reminder of the old days, and relations between the two families had never been on the most intimate terms.

But it was chilling to have to recognise that she was now alone in the world with her own way to make. There had been times, not long ago either, when she had inwardly rebelled against the loving shelter of the Priory, when she had been sorely tempted to thrust away her father’s and Martin’s concern for her and take off on her own like so many of her contemporaries. In some ways now, she wished she had yielded to the impulse. At least now she would not feel so bereft.

Later, as she stowed her solitary suitcase and her haversack, with the bulky parcel of canvases attached, on the luggage rack and felt the train jerk under her feet as it set off on the long run to the West, a tight knot of tension settled in the pit of her stomach. She watched the platforms and sidings slip past with increasing despondency. In spite of her brave words to Vanessa, each one of which she now bitterly regretted, she knew she might well be embarking on a wild goose chase.

She swallowed past a lump in her throat. The request that the Trevennons should store her mother’s pictures until she was able to come for them had seemed quite a reasonable one when she had first formulated it. Yet what right had she, a stranger among strangers, to ask any favours at all? Wouldn’t she have done better to have stayed in London and hardened herself to sell the pictures? That would have been the sensible thing to have done instead of tearing off on this quixotic journey to a corner of England she only knew from bedtime stories and a few romantic images on canvas.

She sighed unhappily. For better or worse, she had started on her journey and she wished very much that she could put out of her head the fact that someone had once said it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

CHAPTER TWO (#ub6d25297-9eff-5c73-b164-eaa51dc5ceb2)

HER mood of depression had not lifted by the time she reached Penzance, and matters were not improved by the fact that it was pouring with rain from a leaden sky. Morwenna surveyed her surroundings without enthusiasm. She wished that funds permitted her to summon a taxi and order it to drive her to Trevennon, but she knew that would be a foolhardly thing to do when she had no idea how far the house might be situated from Penzance. For a moment she toyed with the idea of finding somewhere to spend the night in Penzance, but she soon dismissed it. Top priority was getting out to Trevennon and leaving the pictures there.

Her hair was hanging round her face in wet streaks by the time she had found a newsagent and bought a map of the area, and she was thankful to find an open snack bar where she could shelter and study the map in comparative comfort. Trevennon itself was not marked, but she soon found Port Vennor as she drank her coffee and ate a rather tasteless cheese roll. Spanish Cove was marked too, so she knew roughly the direction to aim for.

As she emerged from the snack bar, a gust of wind caught the door, almost wrenching it from her hand, and catching her off balance for a moment. Morwenna groaned inwardly. Her mother had told her all about the southwesterly gales, but she had not bargained for meeting one as soon as she arrived. Walking down to the bus stop, it occurred to her that she wasn’t sure exactly what she had bargained for. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more hare-brained and impulsive her actions seemed. She eased the rucksack into a more comfortable position on her shoulder and bent her head against the force of the rising wind.

One thing was certain. She would soon find out if she had been a fool, and she found herself hoping with something very like a prayer in her heart that Dominic Trevennon would be a kindly and understanding old man who would not demand too many stumbling explanations of her arrival, unheralded, on his doorstep.

When she arrived at the bus stop, she found that she was not alone. Another girl was waiting, sheltering from the wind in a nearby doorway. As Morwenna stopped to put down her case, she gave her a frankly speculative look. She had a short, rather dumpy figure which wasn’t helped by being enveloped in the voluminous folds of a black cape reaching to her ankles. Her face was round and friendly, and quite pretty, and she smiled as Morwenna put down her case.

‘Miserable day.’

‘Yes.’ Morwenna looked around her. ‘And it gets dark so quickly at this time of the year.’

‘Have you got far to go?’

‘I’m not sure really. I’m trying to get to a house called Trevennon.’

‘Trevennon?’ The other looked startled for a moment. ‘It’s quite a long way. You want to ask to be set down at a place called Trevennon Cross.’ She was silent for a moment, then she said, ‘Look—I’m not trying to be rude. But are you quite sure that’s where you want to go?’

Morwenna was no longer very sure of anything, but she lifted her chin with a confidence she was far from feeling. ‘Of course. I’m looking for a Mr Trevennon—Dominic Trevennon. Do you know him?’

‘Not personally.’ The other girl’s mouth twisted wryly. ‘He doesn’t exactly welcome outsiders on his sacred preserves.’

Morwenna groaned inwardly. So much for the benevolent old gentleman of her hopes, she thought.

‘You make him sound a formidable character,’ she said, trying to speak lightly.

‘He’s a bastard,’ the other girl said shortly. ‘Behaves like one of the Lords of Creation, hanging on to that barn of a house and his piece of crumbling coastline as if he was defending one of the last bastions of Cornwall. He hates tourists and he doesn’t go a bomb on casual callers either, but if he’s expecting you, it should be all right.’

Morwenna’s heart sank even more deeply. The white-haired grandfatherly figment of her imagination was turning into one of the autocrats of all time, so what kind of a reception was she going to get?

‘You seem to know a great deal about him,’ she commented.

‘Not through choice, I assure you. My brother and I have a small studio pottery at St Enna which is pretty near Trevennon. We want to extend it and open a small shop, but we were refused planning permission, and Dominic Trevennon was behind that. He was afraid it might attract tourists near his precious estate. He values his privacy very highly, does Mr Trevennon.’

Thanks for the warning, Morwenna thought bleakly. She glanced at her watch. The bus would be arriving any minute now. It still wasn’t too late to change her mind. Could this really be the man her mother had spoken of with such nostalgic affection, or had the passage of time simply changed him out of all recognition?

‘I’m Biddy Bradshaw, by the way,’ the girl went on. ‘I’ve been doing the rounds of some of the gift shops, trying to get some firm orders for the Easter trade.’ She gave a tight little smile. ‘If we had our own shop, it would make things much easier. The shops are fairly co-operative round here, but they want commission on what they sell for us, naturally, and there isn’t that much profit just at the moment to share around.’

Morwenna nodded, conscious of a slight feeling of awkwardness as she introduced herself.

Biddy’s eyes were alight with interest. ‘Morwenna? But that’s a Cornish name. I didn’t realise you were from this part of the world.’

‘I’m not. But my mother spent most of her childhood here, and I suppose it seemed a natural choice for her.’

Biddy shrugged slightly. ‘I suppose so—if you have a taste for tragic legends. Oh, here’s the bus at last.’

She clambered up the steps of the single-decker while Morwenna followed. ‘You want the stop after mine,’ she directed as Morwenna paid for her ticket. ‘Turn left at the Cross and follow the road until it brings you out at the house. You can’t miss it,’ she added. ‘It doesn’t lead anywhere else.’

Morwenna would have liked to have questioned Biddy further about Trevennon, but the bus was fairly crowded and she was aware of all the potential listening ears, so she confined her questions to general ones about the area itself. Biddy was cheerful company, and Morwenna felt oddly desolate when she announced eventually that they were coming to her stop.

‘You want the next one, don’t forget,’ she said as she got to her feet. ‘Good luck.’ She paused. ‘If you—do decide to stay for a while, look us up at the pottery.’