The Tenth Gift (10 page)

Cat stared at her. “Why ever not?”

“Because as Catherine thee’ll never be wed in this world,” the Ægyptian said, and limped painfully away.

T
HAT NIGHT, IN
the confines of her narrow cot, Cat pondered the old woman’s words. She had been thinking about the gypsy’s pronouncements all day; they had woven a complete cat’s cradle of a tangle in her head. Sometimes she thought she had pulled a thread away from the muddle and that it shone bright and clear in her hands—for example, that she need not fear marriage, for she would not be wed. But then that thought was spoiled by the realization that if she were never to marry, then that was a fearsome thought indeed. To be consigned to work all her days away at the whim of whatever household she fetched up in, to depend on the charity of others— was that not even worse than marrying Robert, who while dull and not the least bit rich was at least a decent, hardworking man who would keep her in whatever comfort he could afford? Then she thought about the great sorrow the Ægyptian had spoken of. Was the pestilence coming again to this corner of Cornwall? It had already carried off her father, a tough and sturdy man: If it could bring him low, it could sweep all in its path. Or would war explode suddenly on their peaceful shores, as it had at the end of the last century? The gypsy had told her, though, that perseverance would save her, so surely neither war nor plague was destined to take her life. And what of the long journey she had been promised, which would finish by uniting Heaven and Earth? That was in the end the question that vexed her most.

Perhaps she would be taking the road to London after all, to live in a great house and move in high society, and who knew then what her future might be? Even though the memory of Sir John Killigrew pawing her made her hot with shame and disgust, it proved that great men found her pretty enough to kiss. And maybe the Ægyptian was plain wrong when she said Cat would never marry. After all, she had
said that “as Catherine” she would never wed “in this world”: Perhaps another world awaited her in another place, if the Countess of Salisbury took her away from here, to be her private embroiderer and maid. Perhaps that fine lady would have a different pet name for her.

This thought carried her to the matter of the altar cloth, for surely such a great project was all about perseverance? Fired by conviction, she drew her design out from beneath the bed, unrolling it with care.

The Tree of Knowledge stretched before her in the candlelight, stylized and elegant. Birds sang in its branches, flowers of all types bloomed in a blaze of glory, small creatures played at its foot. On either side of its trunk the man and woman leaned, their bellies pressed modestly against the wood, Eve’s hand fixed around the fruit that promised knowledge and damnation.

Cat gazed long and hard on her design, and the more she looked upon it, the more she became convinced it contained the key to the conundrum. She traced its graceful contours, running her fingers over the rough linen as if it might somehow speak.

“A long journey,” she whispered to herself. “A union between Earth and Heaven.”

And suddenly the cat’s cradle was unraveled and there the answer lay: the Wood of Life, with its roots buried deep in the Earth and its branches reaching up to Heaven, reuniting the worlds of the sacred and profane in a single elegant symbol. For Cat, that was enough. She had her sign: Her destiny was clear.

Tomorrow, after church, she would devote her free afternoon to working on the altar frontal that would save her, would carry her on a long journey and provide her with a fine new life, away from Kenegie, away from Rob, away from Cornwall as she had always dreamed it would.

I
WAS IN THE GARDEN WITH
A
LISON A FEW DAYS LATER
when my mobile phone rang. We’d just come back from the solicitor’s office in Truro, where they were handling the probate of Andrew’s will. There had been an accident on the A30, causing a huge backup of traffic, parking in Truro had been difficult, the clerk had lost a crucial form that required Alison’s signature, and we were both tired and a little fraught. Relaxing in the canvas chairs with a new piece of embroidery—a simple scarf with peacock feathers worked into the corners in a combination of satin stitch and chain— with the larks singing high overhead, and a glass of chilled chenin blanc, was proving wonderfully recuperative. So when the harsh polyphonic noise of the ring tone sounded, it was a most unwelcome intrusion. How unwelcome I was not to guess.

“Hello?”

Stupidly, I had not checked the screen before answering. Michael’s voice caught me unpleasantly by surprise.

“Ah, you’re still alive, then?” He sounded faintly disappointed. “I left you several messages, but you never replied,” he accused.

I said nothing.

“Where are you?” he pressed.

“I’m down in Cornwall with my cousin Alison, though it’s none of your business where the hell I am.”

There was a pause, an intake of breath at the other end of the line. He wasn’t used to hearing me feisty and self-sufficient, let alone downright rude. Then he laughed. It was, I thought, a rather
nervous-sounding laugh. “How amazing. So am I. In Cornwall, that is.”

Alison reached across the table and took my mobile from me. “Hello, Michael. Yes, that’s right, she’s here with me. Trevarth Farm, just above Gulval, in the hills north of Penzance.” She listened for a moment, then nodded. “If you’ve got the Landranger map, it’s clearly marked. Just ask anyone you see on the road if you can’t find it, or call Julia for more instructions once you’re closer. We’ll expect you in forty minutes. There’s a crab salad for tea—I hope you’re not allergic to shellfish.” She pressed the red button, closing the connection, and handed the mobile back to me.

I stared at her. “What on earth did you do that for?”

“You two need to make a civilized end to your affair, for Anna’s sake. Shake hands and start behaving normally toward one another. After all, you can’t avoid each other forever, and you might as well do it while I’m here as referee.”

“That’s easy for you to say, but I’m not ready to see him again. I’m going to have a shower,” I said stiffly, levering myself out of the chair.

“Put on your red dress!” she called to me as I went in. “It makes you look really pretty.”

W
HEN
I C
AME
back down again forty minutes later, clean and tidy from my shower, my hair bound back, my makeup refreshed, and the red dress on simply because it was the only thing that didn’t require either washing or ironing, I found that Michael had somehow already arrived. He was sitting with his back to me in an old deck chair, knocking back a glass of wine and chuckling at something Alison had just said, looking annoyingly at home.

“Where’s your car?” I demanded crossly. “I didn’t see it in the drive.”

He swiveled at my voice. “It’s lovely to see you, too,” he returned, struggling to rise from the deck chair. I prayed for a painful tangle of
collapsed wood and limbs, but Michael managed to disengage himself without serious mishap, looking typically elegant in cream linen shirt and a pair of stone-colored chinos. His eyes swept over me, taking in the contours of the red dress appreciatively. “I took a taxi. It seemed the most sensible option to let a local do the legwork. He knew where it was at once.”

I was damned if I was to be so easily charmed, nor chastely kissed. I stood there with my hands on my hips feeling suddenly furious at the effect he still had on me. “What are you doing here? In Cornwall, I mean.”

He raised an eyebrow, then turned back to Alison. “I see what you mean.”

I drew up a chair a little way from the table and sat down, glaring.

“I, ah, had a little business down here. Some property of Anna’s she wants to sell. She sends her love, by the way.”

The mention of her name made me go cold. Anna had links with Cornwall? Goose bumps stood out on my arms as if a sudden breeze had caught me. I gave him the sort of flat-lidded look I imagine cats give those they most despise. “Oh, I see. Freeing up a bit of capital for a second honeymoon, are you?” I said acidly, and he had the grace to look away. “Where is it, then, this ‘property’?”

“Mousehole village. A cottage, that’s all, but derelict. Anna’s had a tenant in it for ages, and he’s just passed on. It came to her on her twenty-first birthday, but this was the first she told me of it, too. She’s a secretive little thing sometimes.”

“So where are you staying?” Alison asked, eyebrow raised.

“I’m booked into a little hotel there. Bit pricey, but I guess I can’t begrudge my fellow Corns an honest dollar. Or even a dishonest one.”

I stared out across the garden to the valley and the sea beyond. Through the bright lattice of trees I could just make out the tower of a church above the seafront at Penzance and a little stretch of the glittering bay beyond. Mousehole lay a few miles away, past the headland that marked the westerly extent of Mount’s Bay. I recalled from Cat’s little book that it was where a fishing skiff called the
Constance
had
been found washed up, all its crew missing, and a “Turkish blade” stuck in her planking.

“I’d love to see it,” Alison said. “The cottage. Some of these quaint old places have so much character, especially when they’ve been left to rot for a while. I could give you some advice on how to do it up, get a good price for it.”

I glared at her, willing her to stop. It was just the sort of project Alison needed to distract her from the misery of Andrew’s death, but selfishly all I could think was that every bit of profit made out of the cottage was a contribution toward Michael’s new life with Anna. If I thought about them at all (and I had tried very hard not to), I wished them poor and discontented, not rich and happy.

But Michael was animation personified. He leaned across the table and patted her arm, giving her the smile that lit up his face, the one I thought he reserved for me. “Great. Come down tomorrow—I can’t say I’m looking to do much with the place, just get it into shape and put it on the market as fast as we can, but I’d love to know what you think. As Julia can tell you, I’ve not much gift in the matter of interior design—my Soho flat’s been cheerfully rotting about my ears for years, but I don’t think you’d find it very quaint!”

At this point, I could stand it no longer. Pushing my chair back so violently that its feet scraped the granite with an unforgiving screech, I headed for the shelter of the house, feeling two pairs of eyes drilling into my back as I retreated.

I fled upstairs and flung myself facedown on the bed, all my emotional elastic snapped and flabby. Tears that I had been holding back for ten days spilled out in a torrential flood. I made so much noise, I didn’t hear the footsteps on the stairs or the opening of the door, so when the mattress gave suddenly as someone sat down, I sprang up with my heart hammering.

Michael sat there, looking at once appalled and shamefaced. He pulled a large and crumpled handkerchief out of a pocket and wiped my face with it, smearing unglamorous strings of snot across my cheek. Furiously, I pushed his hand away and ran into the bathroom,
shutting the door behind me. There, I splashed my face with water and stared at myself in the mirror. Daylight is a teller of harsh truths: I never understand why people design their houses to let more of it in. Unless you have the tight, gleaming skin of a fit twenty-year-old, daylight will cheerfully illumine every wrinkle and blemish and sag, and leave you feeling like an age-old, careworn hag, even after you’ve exfoliated every atom of dead skin away, moisturized with cream that costs more per ounce than pure frankincense, and applied with care and expertise the world’s most expensive makeup. I had done all these things less than an hour ago. Now I looked like a hurricane victim.

Viciously, I rubbed my face clean with a flannel and went out to face the lover who had rejected me without the slightest enhancement or disguising mask. Let him see the effect he has had, I thought; let him see the damage done.

But when I came out, I found him with his back to me, hunched over. He looked upset: I knew the contours of his body so well, I could tell even from this view that he was agitated.

“Why did you come here?” I said quietly, and was glad that my voice did not tremble.

He started guiltily, got up and turned to face me. In his hands he held my book, his parting gift to me.

I strode across the room and took it from him, cradling it against my chest protectively.

“Alison’s been telling me about the book,” he said, sitting back down with what seemed a feigned nonchalance. “It sounds fascinating.”

“It is,” I said, hugging it closer.

“I’d love to have a proper look at it.” He held his hand out, and for a moment some traitorous instinct in me believed he was reaching for me.

“I’m sure you would.”

His eyebrows rose. “Julia, don’t be angry with me.”

“I think I have every right to be angry with you, don’t you?”

“I never meant to hurt you, truly I didn’t.”

“Then what are you doing here, rubbing my nose in it? All that stuff about bloody Anna’s bloody cottage? How can you imagine it’s okay for you to just turn up out of the blue like this? I came three hundred miles to get away from you and now here you are, in my face, reading the bloody book you gave me as a good-bye-and-get-stuffed present!”

By now I was yelling at him, all reserve gone. He went pale. He never had coped with extremes of emotion well.

“Calm down. Please. I wanted to know you were all right, so I phoned your mobile a couple of days ago and Alison answered it. She said she was worried about you, so I volunteered to come down and sort out the cottage for Anna so that I could see you.”

I glared at him, thinking. Alison and I had gone swimming at the lido a couple of days ago, a lovely old Art Deco affair down on the seafront where you could paddle endlessly around an enormous seawater-filled space, gazing at the cerulean sky and St. Mary’s church and pretend you were on the Riviera. I remembered seeing Alison on the phone at one point as I lazily breaststroked my way around the deep end, but I hadn’t realized it had been my phone.

“Very gracious of you, I’m sure.”

“Not really.” He shrugged. “Truth is, for … er … various reasons we’re going to need some extra cash.”

I had to suppress the small, mean smile that rose up inside me. Not such a bed of roses after all. Well, that was some consolation.

“In fact, it’s a funny thing, but the book”—he gestured toward it—“came from a house clearance down here. It must have been down here in Cornwall ever since—when was it, 1634?”

“No, 1625.” I narrowed my eyes. He obviously didn’t know I knew it had come from the very house we were sitting in. I could have let it go, but somehow I didn’t want to. “Alison said she and Andrew sent it up to you along with a load of other old books. To sell for them.”

He reddened. “Ah. Well, I thought you’d appreciate it, it being an embroidery book and all. Kept it for you for a while, actually, then
forgot all about it until … well, you know. So really, I gave it to you in error. In all honesty, you ought to let me have it back again when you’ve finished it, so I can sell it for Alison. Funerals cost a bit nowadays, and I gather Andrew was rather on his uppers.”

What a snake he was. As soon as he got his hands on it, I knew he’d sell it, all right, but I bet the full price fetched would never make it into Alison’s pocket. “When I’ve finished reading it, then perhaps,” I lied, and watched his face soften with relief.

“Come here, old thing,” he said at last, holding his arms wide.

Like a mindless automaton I found myself walking toward him, and then my head was resting on his shoulder and I could smell the ironed-linen smell of his shirt and a trace of his usual cologne, heated by his body, beneath. He cupped my head against him, and I felt the beat of his pulse quicken. The book dug uncomfortably into my breast as he held me closer and, suddenly aware of my weak stupidity, I pulled away, cheeks flaming.

“Go away,” I said. “Don’t do this.”

He rubbed his face and I remembered how many times I had lain propped up on my elbows over him, easing away the tension lines on his forehead with the pads of my fingers.

“It’s not so easy to forget you, Julia, whatever you may think. It’s not been easy for me these past weeks.”

“Good. Now go away.”

T
HAT NIGHT
, I stayed in my room and immersed myself in Catherine’s book. Midnight passed, the moon rose and the stars wheeled, but I did not see them. The owl hooted in the woods and I was still reading at two in the morning, because the notes in the margin had suddenly revealed themselves to be not just a needlewoman’s daily journal, but a devastating historical puzzle.