The Penwyth Bride (The Witch's Daughter Book 1) (9 page)

In no time the silence began to close in on us. “Mr. Roger Penwyth’s spotted horse is very fine,” I said at random.

“What’s that?” Susannah dragged her gaze from the window and fixed her almond eyes on me.

“His horse, the one of unusual color, white as snow, and spotted with great plashes of black. Its pace was very even, I think, though I know little--”

“You rode Roger’s horse?” Susannah interrupted.

I gave her a level look. “He found me yesterday on the moor and brought me home on it.”

“On the piebald?”

“Yes, piebald.” I said slowly, remembering Tom Pyder’s words rather unwillingly. “That is the name of the color.”

Her face flushed. “Oh Persia, aren’t you the lucky one. To ride Roger’s piebald!”

“I did not feel my luck at the time,” I replied dryly.

She hardly heard me. “Avallen is the finest mare in the Hundred. I’ve seen Roger ride her to St. Ives and back in a morning, and then hunt in the afternoon, and she goes as fresh then as she did when the sun rose. I wish he would let me ride her.”

“Why won’t he?”

“Because Roger is Roger,” she replied, and stabbed the needle again.

I carefully selected a red thread and held my tongue.

“I haven’t been thrown from a horse since I was twelve,” she burst with touchy pride. Then her glare wavered, lowered. “But the piebald . . . they do say piebalds are enchanted by the knackers.”

“Knackers?”

“Ghosts of the mines,” she replied absently, her mind elsewhere. “Or spirits of long-dead tinners. Depends who you ask.”

The hair at the nape of my neck began to rise, imperceptibly so, and I shivered.

A sly look crept across her face as she noticed my reaction. “Roger is not like the rest of us, you may have noticed.”

“Oh, no?” I looked as encouraging as I could. I remembered her incautious comments of the previous evening, and I burned with curiosity.

“Mama would be unforgivably angry if she caught me gossiping . . . but it is such a monstrous horrid tale!”

She shuddered with relish.

“You may not know, but Papa’s line of the family is the degraded one. Roger holds the property from the Penwyth line direct. In fact, all this around us--” she swept her arm wide in the direction of the moor and the distant horizon where I knew the gulls screamed and the sea crashed against the rock “--this entire Hundred took its name from a long-ago prince of Penwyth.”

Just as I suspected, I thought with satisfaction.

“Roger calls Damon and me cousin, but the fact is we are very distantly related. Roger lives on the original property, Lyhalis. It overlooks the sea.”

“Lyhalis overlooks the sea? How thrilling.”

“I hate the salt air. Anyway, to the . . . murder.” She lowered her voice dramatically, and I leaned closer.

“Heron Penwyth, Roger’s father, brought home a woman from the outer islands, a miserable place with stunted people, Mama says, but Heron had fallen madly in love with Morgreth, as she was called. They say she had a rope of golden hair as thick as a man’s arm, with green eyes like a cat’s.”

“Green eyes,” I repeated.

“They also say she bewitched Heron, for no one trusts the folk of the Isles. Well, she must have done so, for he
married
his lowborn lover, and none of the Polite ever visited him again. When Roger was born, there was no christening in the church, nor any At Home celebration, though they did throw coin before the vestry in Lyhalis village. No one had ever seen Roger publicly, and it seemed like they were hiding him. The gossips also say that my father had actually gone down to Lyhalis to see Roger, for my father had always remained on good terms with Heron . . . perhaps he was the only one to do so, for Roger’s father sounds like a nasty brute not unlike Roger himself. But Heron threw him out.”

“How odd!”

Susannah’s voice dropped to a whisper. “But the story grows odder. Lindy Tompkins, the woman who brings the fresh rushes, told me that Morgreth had put a spell on Heron to drive him to madness so that she could have Lyhalis all to herself. Heron had taken to marking his arms with a penknife, like he was drawing on his own flesh!”

I gasped, and she shivered deliciously.

“Yes, and he had begun to let his hair grow in, and to avoid wearing his wig. Lindy Tompkins confirms that my father visited Lyhalis as often as every day, he had grown so worried about Heron and his mad behavior. But Morgreth put such a strong spell on Heron that he was enslaved to her will and would hear nothing against his wife. Then, one night, Morgreth acted.”

I clutched the neglected linen on my lap.

“Morgreth bewitched Heron to drown himself in Lyhalis cove. Oh, it was raining cats and kittens, Lindy says, on a black night with a blood moon rising. But Morgreth had not bargained that her spell might take a turn. Heron brought Roger with him down to the cove . . . and there he tried to drown his own son.”

A muffled moan escaped my lips.

“Yes, horrible,” Susannah agreed with a smile of relish. “But Morgreth, seeing that her spell had gone awry, saved Roger. No one knows how, for Heron was a big man, they say, and in his prime quite strong, but she wrested her baby away from her husband as they floundered in the rising surf. Heron lost his balance and fell under the waves, but Morgreth managed to put Roger on the flat rock shelf that juts out from the cliff’s edge in Lyhalis cove. Somehow she lost her grip and fell back into the water where the current pulled her under.”

“Oh no,” I whispered.

“Oh yes. Heron and Morgreth both drowned. They never found their bodies, not that
that
isn’t common with the dangerous currents. The servants fetched Roger, for they knew something had gone amiss, and brought him to the Hermitage.”

“Here?” I exclaimed, surprised.

“Yes. Roger lived here until he had a terrible quarrel with my mother, and left. He was about fifteen years old, I think, but she did not stop him; they hated each other. I was glad he was gone, too. He was a beast to live with, I can tell you. Once he shouted at me in a horrid manner when I borrowed some sketching pencils and paper from his workbook. How was I to know I had spoiled his portfolio?” She sniffed in irritated reminiscence. “Mama had him whipped for insolence.”

I thought of the haunted edge feathering Roger’s eyes, the famous green eyes inherited from his witch-mother. I thought too of my own marred bloodline, and felt a certain sympathy for him. “I don’t wonder why he was beastly. He had a lot to bear.”

“I suppose.” Now that her story had finished, she moodily picked at the fraying edge of her linen sampler. “Where did you say Roger found you yesterday?”

“At a place he called Tol-Pedn-Penwith.”

My mind skittered from the memory; me, on the tip of the rocky tower, black chasm at my feet, arms spread, ready to fly . . .

“Tol-Pedn-Penwith,” she repeated. “How did you get so far on your . . . oh lord.”

A trace of guilt finally crept into her voice. I looked up quickly to find her shrugging. “Make sense that Roger would find you there,” she said. “He was probably coming home from visiting the woman he uses.”

“He uses?”

“Don’t be so ladylike.
His lover
. You do know what that is, I suppose? She lives out there, Roger’s woman.”

“Roger has a lover?” My mind had difficulty grasping it. Roger did not seem the type to keep a woman, unlike, I realized reluctantly, the suave Damon.

“Her name is Tamzin Fulby. She lives alone in an old tinner’s cottage near that tor. Lord, how I envy her independence! No one bothers her out there except for Roger.”

Susannah eyed her sampler critically. “They say Tamzin is a witch. Would fit, too, if she is. Sons are like their fathers, so I suppose Roger inherited his taste for them.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

My head buzzed with Susannah’s story for the rest of the afternoon and most of the next day while I sorted beads at Lady Penwyth’s request. I did not wonder any longer about the source of Roger Penwyth’s melancholia--clearly it was the result of an unhappy history. But I was curious at what had happened between Lady Penwyth and Roger to make them dislike each other so much that he would leave the Hermitage at a fairly tender age.

I also curious why Roger would take a witch for a lover when one had killed his father.

I stole a glance at Lady Penwyth’s serene profile as she sat at the opposite end of the sopha table, absorbed in the beadwork. I held no doubt she could fly into a terrible temper, if Jenny’s whipped back were any indication.

“And have you heard from my sister Sarah?” Lady Penwyth said as I stared at her, pondering. She had not looked up from the purse she had been embellishing with amber-glass beads.

“I . . . no . . . that is, she sent me a letter begging me to mind my manner, and if you use the New Style calendar to mark the year instead of the Old Style, that I might be taught it. Oh, and she sends you her love, I forgot to say . . . ”

“Of course she does, don’t trouble yourself over the omission,” she said, sleekly cutting off my stammers.

Carefully she selected a fat bead gleaming with green-black iridescence, a beetle on the end of her needle. “I noticed a rather large box had come with the Express.”

“Oh! My stepmother had sent me some things from a dressmaker in London.”

“London! My word.”

An elegant finger stirred the collection of beads.

I had the sense that she was waiting for elaboration, so I continued. “It contained a tin of powdering paste for my hair.”

“Ah-hm?”

The fingers stirred again.

“And a few gowns,” I finished.

Lady Penwyth smiled. “My sister is thoughtful,” she said, delicately plucking another bead from the box.

I felt it prudent to nod and focus my attention back to the tray before me. I did not want to say that the box had been Sarah Eames’ way of hinting that I should exert myself socially.

“In the summer months here those with property are too busy with harvest to have much time for anything more elaborate than a card party,” Lady Penwyth continued. “But in the fall there is a subscription assembly at St. Ives, and many other delightful occasions to celebrate hunting season, so you may not have to wait long to open your tin of powder yet.”
I murmured indistinguishably and ignored the familiar lunge of dread in my chest.

Lady Penwyth licked the tip of her needle and picked up another bead.

“Damon has returned from his engagement in Hayle,” she said. “So perhaps we shall see one of your new gowns tonight at family supper.”

Beads soared through the air as I knocked the box over. With apologies I clumsily knelt on the carpet to scoop up the tiny colored globes scattering like rainbow mercury, biting my lip at the hours of work wasted.

“Never mind, Miss Eames,” Lady Penwyth sighed wearily. “I’ll ring for Nanny.”

###

It had been seven days since Lady Penwyth had asked Jenny to maid me; now she scratched on my chamber’s door and bade me let her enter.

Since it was never my habit to question anyone, even a servant, I let her in without comment on her absence.

In any case I was beginning to wonder how I would dress for family supper, eyeing a particularly complicated frock that Sarah Eames had sent from London. The ice-blue color could only be achieved by a careful wash of indigo dye and would need to be sponged rather than scrubbed in a tub. The frock’s alarmingly low-cut stomacher was embroidered with seed-pearls that snagged the lace fall edging the elbow-length sleeves, and the petticoat, bucked and starched until it was as stiff as a sheaf of hay, would be certain to bang against my bad foot instead of swishing easily.

“A fine dress, miss,” Jenny said to me as she shook out the folds. A trace of envy ghosted across her porcelain face, and her cornflower blue eyes, lashed thickly with a black fringe, caressed the fabric. “The cloth be so light.”

“It is French cambric,” I answered, allowing her to stroke the sleeve. When would she ever wear such a thing? I could not deny the girl, born in a cottage instead of a house, the brief pleasure.

“French cambric,” she repeated carefully, tasting the syllables on her tongue. “Mistress don’t have cambric among her things, I know. Nor Miss Susannah. Be it a new fashion?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“And this?” She held up a buffon, woven with gossamer threads that sparkled in the waning sunlight. I explained that the scarf was to wrap about my neck and bust, for I did not like the display that the low-cut stomacher afforded my breasts.

A touch of scorn, swiftly veiled, quirked her mouth. Jenny might never hesitate to use any weapon at hand against a man, but I was not so bold.

“And what be this?” she asked, pointing to Pretty Peter in his cage. “I never seen an animal kept indoors except for rattailed spaniels. Another fashion?”

“Of a sort. Canary birds are kept for their song, but I don’t know how fashionable the practice is.”

She asked me a few more questions about the fripperies coming out of my London-box. I answered her questions readily, feeling no annoyance. Jenny plainly hungered to learn about life above stairs. I saw in her the flame of envy, the kind that had driven my mother toward her excesses and her successes.