Another Life: Escape to Cornwall with this gripping, emotional, page-turning read

Her dark hair flew out behind her, blue-black in the sunlight, blue-black against the whiteness of her pin-tucked blouse. Her black riding habit held high above her ankles, revealed slim black-clad legs and small riding boots.

Her mother, Helena, dressed also in a riding habit, watched her from the window of her bedroom and smiled. Isabella was still free. Free to be anything she chose, God willing. She watched the girl run and duck under the lower branches of the fir, circle the small fountain and head for the path to the lake.

Helena suddenly saw from a distance what she had been avoiding facing. Isabella was no longer an angular child, but fast becoming a rounded young woman. A child may charge around the garden like a highly strung horse, but it would be considered unseemly in a woman.

Helena had tried and failed to get Daniel to educate his daughter as he would have educated his son, if he had had one. Helena was sure that his disappointment in not having an heir was not the reason. Each time she asked, he smiled indulgently.

‘What is the point, my love? My daughter is going to be a beauty like her mother. She will marry and have children and have no need of an education.’

‘But, Daniel, education is a means of broadening Isabella’s mind and will help her converse on a range of subjects. I know you think my music and my education is wasted, but it is not. I may not often play for anyone else, but I play for myself …’

And while she was saying these words to her husband, the waste of her own talent would often consume Helena, for she knew her words were as dandelion fluff blowing across the fields. Daniel had closed his mind to her arguments.

Helena knew that in questioning Isabella’s narrow education she was also questioning her own life. This yearning she had for something … something more than this comfortable, undemanding existence.

She moved away from the window and walked into her sitting room. She stood for a moment looking at her beautiful piano, then she lifted the lid and sat down letting her fingers rest lightly on the keys. Music was an extension of herself, part of the nature of who she was. The only way she had to express herself.

Her father had considered ambition in a woman unseemly and had been afraid her music would prevent her finding a husband. Despite assurances from Helena’s professor of music in Rome that she had a rare talent, he had resolutely insisted that to even consider playing at concert level was out of the question. Helena’s fingers played a sombre little tune. She could have travelled to Vienna, Paris, London … She closed the lid gently. She had been separated from her music professor and sent to study English in London, with the Vyvyans. If her marriage to Daniel Vyvyan had not been exactly arranged, it had been hoped for. Both her father’s family and the Vyvyans had known each other for generations.

Daniel had generously bought her the piano as a wedding present. He played himself, jolly little popular tunes, and he had thought it would be nice for them to play together when they had guests. However, Helena’s playing, even if she tried to match her playing to his, so outshone his own ability, so impressed and astonished their friends, that Daniel felt inadequate.

Daniel Vyvyan did feel threatened by Helena’s intelligence, by her musical talent and her undoubted beauty. He wished her sometimes more … ordinary in all aspects of her character. He was twenty years older than his wife and he was intensely jealous of the young men who gathered around her like bees attending their queen. It was not just young men either, he was much envied by his friends.

On occasions, riding over his land, he would kick his horse to a gallop, furious that Helena should have turned out not to be as compliant as he would wish. The point of marrying a much younger woman was that she should be malleable, not have an intellect that made him feel exposed.

Politics and philosophical debate should be kept for the club and had no place in the drawing room. In his view, women should exchange gossip, run the household, and look pretty.

Helena, seeing the time, ran down the wide staircase to the hall. She picked up her own and Isabella’s riding crops from the rack by the front door, which stood open to the morning. Benson had brought the horses round and they stood in the spring sunshine, shaking their heads, restless to be away.

Isabella rounded the corner of the house, her face flushed with running. Her eyes lit up when she saw Helena and the horses.

‘Mama, I thought you were never coming, it is the most wonderful day to ride.’

‘Indeed,’ Helena said, smiling at her daughter when she should have scolded her dishevelled appearance.

‘Isabella, you will need your jacket, it is not yet warm enough to ride without one. Go quickly and pin back your hair securely or it will catch in the trees and unseat you.’

Once mounted, Helena and Isabella turned their horses away from the house and down the long drive. Isabella glanced back at the huge ungainly house. The many windows of her home always seemed like eyes watching. So many of the rooms lay empty and unused.

‘I thought we would ride to the old stables, Isabella, to see how Mr Welland is getting on with your chest of drawers.’

‘Could we ride down to the cove, Mama, and then up the cliff path to the village? The horses love the sea.’

‘I think it better we return that way. It is near noon and we must not disturb the men’s luncheon.’

They rode in companionable silence, skirting around the top acre field on the edge of the wood towards the village, which lay in the valley below them. The mist still lay over the houses and only the spire of the church protruded above it.

A small three-masted schooner with all her sails unfurled to catch the wind was heading out to sea as graceful as a butterfly on the surface of the water. Isabella, watching her, asked, ‘Papa says he might buy a small trading ship, Mama.’

‘I believe he is seriously thinking about it, Isabella. Trade is so good these days, and he and Sir Richard Magor are talking of sharing the cost.’

The horses shook their heads and snorted, and Helena and Isabella set off down the hill, only loosening the reins and giving them their heads when they reached the flat. Isabella rode ahead and her laughter came to Helena like small birds’ cries on the wind. She smiled, wanting to laugh out loud, too, for the sunshine warm on her face, for the changing colour and beauty of the fields, for the sea below them and for the intense pleasure and wonder she had in her daughter who was so much a part of her and Daniel, and yet so uniquely herself. Helena lifted her face to the sky. She had much, much to be grateful for.

Isabella sniffed in the scent of wood shavings and glue as they entered the boatyard, which was housed in the old stables belonging to the Vyvyans. There were three men working on the hull of a boat, sanding and planing planks of wood. It was evidently hot work in the sheltered yard for one of them had removed his shirt. He had his back to them and seemed engrossed in what he was doing. His fair hair flopped forward, striking against the darkness of his skin. His back was long and smooth and brown, and the muscles in his arms moved and swelled as he planed a piece of wood, back and forth, back and forth.

Isabella could not move. She was transfixed by the sight of the half-naked boy. Her heart hammered in her chest. Her mouth felt dry and her body strange and hot as if she had a fever. She could not turn her eyes away.

Ben Welland lifted Helena down from her horse and came round to help Isabella dismount. He followed her eyes and issued a sharp command to his son.

‘Thomas – get thy shirt on, we have company.’

The boy looked up startled and noticed the women for the first time. He stared straight at Isabella with vivid blue eyes, so deep they were almost purple. With an easy and laconic grace he unhooked his shirt from a piece of wood and pulled it over his head, then with a curt nod turned back to his work.

Ben Welland led Helena and Isabella to the edge of the yard and opened one of the stable doors into a workshop. Isabella hardly listened to the conversation between her mother and the carpenter. She was feeling very odd indeed.

Isabella’s chest of drawers lay in a corner covered with a sheet.

‘I hope this pleases thee, Ma’am.’

Ben pulled the sheet away and Helena and Isabella gasped. A small, exquisitely carved piece of furniture was revealed. Helena had ordered a chest of drawers for Isabella’s room and this far exceeded her expectations.

The wood was plain and light with capacious drawers, polished smooth as an apple; but it was the work on the front of the drawers and all around the edges of the top of the piece that was so skilfully done. Instead of brass handles there were round knobs carved in the shapes of leaves and flowers.

With a cry Isabella moved forward to touch and look closer. There were slender trees and birds nestling among the flowers. Squirrels and tiny dormice, all carved to fit the piece and make it seem as one piece of wood.

‘Mr Welland,’ Helena exclaimed, ‘this is an exquisite piece. I have never seen a piece of furniture like it. I know your work and expected it to be beautiful, but this … Isabella?’

‘It is perfect, Mr Welland. It is … wonderful. I thank you so much for it. Mama has had my room newly decorated, and this … I love it! I truly love it.’

Mr Welland was well pleased, but he was a dour Yorkshireman and not given to excess. ‘Well, Miss, don’t take on. It is my son, Tom, thee has to thank. I carved the piece, but it was Tom who wanted to try the decoration. He said the wood lent itself to shape and there is no doubt he was right.’

‘It looks as if he will one day be as good a carpenter as his father,’ Helena said diplomatically.

‘Aye, and more so. He grows bored sometimes with the plainness of wood. He sees shapes where others do not. I let him have his way with the drawers on the understanding if thee did not approve or thought it too fancy, he must make more plain ones for thee.’

Helena smiled. ‘How could we not approve? For a gentleman’s room it might be too ornate, for a young girl it is imaginative and skilfully done. Is this his first work of this kind?’

‘Aye, it is, Ma’am.’

‘May we thank him?’

Mr Welland hesitated and Helena, noticing, said, ‘You must be proud of him?’

Ben Welland looked at her with eyes that were possibly as vivid as Tom’s once, and were now the colour of a faded sky.

‘Aye, Ma’am. I am proud, but I hope to keep the lad with me. Keep him here in the yard. But he is restless for more intricate and complicated carving, for which I know he has the skill. Trading ships are being commissioned faster than we can build them and we could not live by furniture alone, fancy or no. Tom has always been skilled with a piece of wood, even as a bairn.’

Helena smiled again, understanding. ‘But, interesting as boatbuilding is, Tom will need more imaginative work one day and you are afraid of losing him. Our praise of his work might hasten that day.’