Witching Hour

‘That’s better,’ Elsa said with rare approval. ‘Now go and change out of that damned ol’ frock before that young man gets here.’

‘I’ll do nothing of the sort.’ Morgana lifted her chin and her green eyes flashed. ‘It’s perfectly suitable. This is the dress I got for Daddy’s funeral.’

‘Looks like the next funeral it goes to should be its own,’ Elsa sniffed. ‘But please yourself, though I can’t see no sense going round looking like something the cat dragged in. You’m not a bad-looking maid when you try.’

‘I’d better go before you turn my head completely,’ Morgana said lightly as she picked up the tray.

‘No danger of that, I reckon.’ Elsa’s fierce gaze softened as they swept over the girl’s slim figure. ‘You don’t fancy yourself like some I could mention.’

Morgana hid a smile as she carried the tray out of the kitchen. Elsa was not usually so forbearing, and Morgana could only attribute her unusual delicacy this time to the fact that up to the time of the funeral she herself had been seeing a great deal of Robert Donleven, and might react with hostility to any overt criticism of his sister—because she was well aware that Elaine Donleven was the subject of Elsa’s veiled remark.

Yet if she was honest, she had to admit that Elaine wasn’t one of her favourite people either, though she would have been hard put to it to say why. Ever since Elaine had come to live at Home Farm and help Robert run the riding stables there, relations between the two girls had been perfectly civil, but no more.

Perhaps it was inevitable it should be so, she thought as she went along the passage. After all, the Donlevens had bought the Home Farm, as Robert’s mother had made smilingly clear on more than one occasion, as an interest for her husband when he retired from being ‘something’ in the City of London. In the meantime it was run by an efficient manager, and Robert and his sister had started the riding stables there, again as a hobby rather than a living. Morgana felt sometimes that Elaine mentioned this rather more than was strictly necessary, as if to emphasise the gulf between those who had to work, and those for whom the world was a playground.

Apart from exchange trips to France and Germany when she was at school, Morgana’s holidays had been spent in and around Polzion, and she sometimes could not contain a little surge of envy when she heard Elaine talk so carelessly of skiing at Klosters, and beach parties in the Bahamas. Nor did it help to feel, as she often did, that Elaine intended her to feel envious.

Robert, on the other hand, was very different. For one thing his hair was inexorably sandy, instead of being deep auburn like Elaine’s, but his temperament was far more unassuming than his sister’s, and he took the day-to-day running of the stables far more seriously than she did, although ironically, Elaine was a spectacularly better rider. But then, Morgana thought, she did not have his patience with beginners.

For herself, she enjoyed Robert’s company. She liked him, and suspected that given time her feelings could become much warmer. Ever since the funeral, he had been assiduous in his attentions, sending her flowers, and phoning nearly every day. She was grateful for this, and a little relieved too, if she was honest. The Donlevens had always been charming to her, but she had been aware all the time in little ways that they felt Robert could do better for himself than the daughter of a country hotelier. Now that it was public knowledge in the area that, since her father’s death, the long-forgotten entail had come into force and that soon she and her mother would probably be not only penniless but probably homeless as well, she had wondered whether any kind of pressure would be exerted to persuade Robert to let their relationship slide.

If so, it clearly hadn’t worked, or had had the opposite effect, she thought, smiling a little as the image of Robert’s pleasant regular features and clear blue eyes rose in her mind. And of course he was the fair man Elsa had seen in the cards and he was going to propose to her and take her away from all this.

She was grinning to herself as she carried the tray into the drawing room, but the grin faded a little as she encountered the gaze of Miss Meakins, sitting bolt upright on the edge of her usual chair, clutching her knitting bag as a drowning person might clutch a lifebelt. Miss Meakins was elderly, and harmless, and Morgana felt sympathy for anyone whose life was a succession of cheap hotels, but she found Miss Meakins passion for attempting to be unobtrusive a trial. ‘Without wishing to be a nuisance …’ and ‘I wonder if I might …’ preceded even the most normal of requests and she seemed to spend most mealtimes in a state of permanent agitation.

A hotelier’s lot is not a happy one, Morgana thought grimly as she set down the tea tray.

‘Have you any idea where the others are, Miss Meakins?’

‘Major Lawson usually goes for a walk before tea,’ Miss Meakins said primly.

Major Lawson, Morgana thought, wasn’t daft. She and her mother sometimes wondered about him. They usually had two or three permanent guests each winter at Polzion House, but Major Lawson wasn’t in the usual mould at all. When his booking had originally been received, her father had been inclined to pooh-pooh his rank, saying he had probably been a clerk in the stores who had decided to promote himself after discharge. ‘Or a con man,’ he added cynically. But Martin Pentreath had been wrong.

Major Lawson was a tall, quietly spoken man, but there was an indefinable air of command about him. His clothes were not new, but their cut was impeccable, and the suitcases he’d brought them in were leather, and had been expensive. But in many ways he was an enigma. When pressed, he would talk about Army life, but he spoke in generalities with a certain diffidence. And he was a loner. Miss Meakins’ flutterings had not the slightest effect on him. He enjoyed walking, and he spent a good deal of time in his room, working on a small portable typewriter. He was very tidy about his work, whatever it was. They’d only found out about it by chance, through Miss Meakins—‘Not wishing to be any trouble, dear Mrs Pentreath, but the constant tapping … comes so plainly through the wall.’

Her eyes had gleamed with curiosity as she spoke, but it was doomed to be unsatisfied. Major Lawson had never volunteered why he spent several hours each day typing, and none of the Pentreaths were prepared to ask him. In the end Major Lawson was moved to another room, well out of earshot—to Miss Meakins’ secret chagrin, Morgana suspected.

Quite suddenly she knew she had to get out of the house for a while. It was ridiculous, because it was almost dark, and almost certainly raining, but she needed to breathe fresh air and be completely alone for a while. Since her father’s death, she had been rarely alone. Her mother had needed her and there were always things to be done, and at first she had welcomed this because it meant there was less time to think, and to worry and ask herself what she was going to do. But now, when there was so little time left for thinking and planning, she had to get away on her own for a while. It had been building up inside her all day, this need to be alone, to escape. That was why she had felt so restless earlier.

She flashed a brief smile at her mother as she passed her in the doorway. ‘I’m going out for a little while.’

‘Just as you please, dear,’ Mrs Pentreath responded.

Morgana went into the hall and on into the small cloakroom which opened off it. Her old school cape was there, and she swung it round her shoulders, pulling the hood up over her cloud of dark hair. As she re-emerged into the hall, the telephone rang, and she crossed to the reception desk to answer it.

‘Polzion House,’ she said crisply.

It was a relief to hear Robert’s quiet ‘Hello, darling. Just ringing to find out how everything went today. What’s he like?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. He didn’t show up.’

‘Well, that’s pretty cavalier,’ Robert was plainly taken aback. ‘Hasn’t there even been a message?’

‘Nothing at all. We’ve spent the whole day on tenterhooks, and all to no avail.’

‘I suppose he could have had an accident,’ Robert said slowly.

‘We thought of that.’ Morgana laughed. ‘And at this moment he’s breathing his last at the foot of Polzion cliffs. I wish he was,’ she added hotly.

It was Robert’s turn to laugh. ‘Darling, what a little savage you are! It’s a good job my respected mama can’t hear your fulminations.’

‘Meaning her worst fears would be fully justified?’ Morgana asked coolly, then relented. ‘I’m sorry, Rob. Your mother can’t help the way she is, any more than I can. And I won’t say anything shocking in front of her, I promise. I’m just a little uptight over this whole business, that’s all. And the atmosphere in the house is deadly at the moment—Elsa prophesying doom all over the place, and Mummy’s trying to be optimistic and see a silver lining in everything. I was just going for a walk when you rang.’

‘In the direction of the Home Farm?’ he enquired hopefully.

She sighed. ‘Not really. I do need to be on my own for a time. You understand, don’t you?’

‘I’ll try to anyway,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You know I’m here if you need me. Perhaps I could pick you up later when you’ve walked your blues off, and we could have a drink somewhere.’

‘Now that would be nice,’ she said. ‘See you.’ She was smiling as she put the receiver down. Robert was sweet, she thought, and she’d forgotten to tell him he was the fair man that Elsa had seen in the cards, but it didn’t matter. Gems like that would keep, and she would enjoy telling him later, over their drink.

As she went out of the house, closing the side door carefully against the gusting wind, Morgana wondered why she hadn’t considered going down to the Home Farm, because until Rob had mentioned it, it hadn’t even crossed her mind to do so.

Was she being totally fair to him? she wondered. He wanted to help. The phone calls proved that. He was kind and concerned, and he’d been furious when he heard about the entail, calling it a ‘load of outdated nonsense and prejudice’. And although she agreed with every word, it wasn’t what she wanted to hear right now.

Nor did she really want to hear him ask her to marry him, which she suspected he might do. If and when he proposed, she wanted it to be for the right reasons, and that was quite apart from the fact that deep in her bones she felt they didn’t know each other well enough yet.

Of course, it might be that they would never know each other well enough. She and her mother might have to leave Polzion and go miles away, and eventually, inevitably, the gap that she and Rob had left in each other’s lives would be filled with other people. Journeys led often to lovers’ partings as well as their meetings, she thought with a little grimace. And ‘lover’ was a strong way of describing Rob, although she enjoyed the moments she spent in his arms. He was a normal man with all the needs which that implied, but he was not overly demanding. He preferred to let their relationship proceed steadily rather than sweep her off her feet into a headlong surrender they might both regret later.

But if she went to him now, with all her doubts and her troubles, he might interpret her need for comfort and reassurance rather differently, and that would simply create more problems.

‘And just now I have as many as I can handle,’ she muttered against the moan of the wind.

She buried her hands in the pockets of her cape, her fingers closing round the familiar shape of her small pocket torch, and it was that which decided her where to go for her walk. Her original intention had been to follow the lane round, perhaps even as far as the village, but now she knew she wanted the open spaces of the stretch of moorland behind the house. Even in summertime, it seemed bleak, the few trees bent and stunted under the power of the prevailing westerly gales, but Morgana loved it, in particular the great stone which crowned its crest.

It was an odd-looking stone—a tall thick stem of granite with another slab balanced across its top. In some guide books it was referred to as the Giant’s Table, but locally it was known as the Wishing Stone because it was said that if you put your hand on the upright and made a wish, and then circled the stone three times, the top slab would rock gently if the wish was to be granted. At all other times, of course, it was said to be immovable, but Morgana had always thought that a really desperate wisher could probably give fate a helping hand with a quick nudge at the cross-stone.

Sometimes she’d wondered if there had once been other stones there, so that the hillside above Polzion had resembled Stonehenge or Avebury, until people had come and taken them for building. Yet it was intriguing that they had left this one, and she had asked herself why often. Maybe it was because they sensed its power, or more prosaically perhaps it was because the cross-stone had proved more difficult to shift than anticipated.

Anyway, there it stood, like a mysterious signpost to a secret in the youth of mankind, surviving the initials which had been carved on it, the picnics which had been eaten in its shadow, and all the attempts of vandals to dislodge it, squat and oddly reassuring in its timelessness.

As she picked her way across the thick clumps of grass and bracken, the wind snatched at her hood, pulling it back from her head, and making her dark hair billow round her like a cloud. She breathed deeply. This was what she had wanted—the freshness of damp undergrowth and sea salt brought to her on the moving air. Rob would think she was mad if he could see her now, she thought, stumbling a little on a tussock of grass, but then he hadn’t been born here as she had. In fact she’d often wondered what had prompted his father to buy the Home Farm in the first place. Perhaps under his rather staid appearance he was really a romantic at heart, remembering the pull of the boyhood holidays he mentioned so often. Certainly Morgana doubted whether his wife’s wishes had much to do with his decision. Mrs Donleven’s roots seemed firmly grounded in the Home Counties.

Morgana was out of breath by the time she reached the wishing stone. The wind had been blowing steadily against her all the way, and by all the natural laws the stone should already have been rocking precariously on its pediment. But it wasn’t, of course. She leaned against the upright, regaining her breath, and looking about her. She could see the lights of Polzion House below her, and away on the right those of the Home Farm. She couldn’t see the village, because it was down in a hollow in the edge of the sea, where the surrounding cliffs provided a safe harbour for the fishing and pleasure boats.

She thought suddenly, ‘This could be the last time—the very last time that I stand here.’ She put her hand on the stone and it felt warm to the touch, but perhaps that was because she herself suddenly felt so cold.

It couldn’t happen, she told herself passionately. This was her place, her land, and she refused to give it up to an uncaring stranger.