The Tenth Gift (15 page)

I
T HAD BEEN HARD TO SLEEP AFTER READING THESE LAST
entries in Catherine’s little book. I had just about gotten my head around her descriptions of daily life at Kenegie and the petty frustrations and jealousies of living in a small, closed community. I had taken the more unfamiliar words and spellings in my stride, skipping those that continued to evade me, but now she had completely thrown me. I had been enjoying her acid comments about her coworkers, her fierce anguish at being forced to marry her cousin, who struck me as a decent enough man; I had even been rather looking forward to discovering something of what a seventeenth-century wedding entailed—the domestic details, the dress, the meal arrangements, and of course Cat’s reaction to becoming a married woman. I found myself charmed by this long-dead girl, felt caught up in her distant life, her hopes and fears. I wished, too, to know more about
the altar cloth she had started, whether the Countess of Salisbury ever reappeared or not: I wanted to hear that that fine lady and Cat’s mistress had been suitably astonished by the ambition of her vision and by her skill in executing her grand design when she finally presented them with her Tree of Knowledge. I had—I should admit now—rather hoped to track down this magnificent artifact and make it the subject of a distinguished magazine article, suitably illustrated and as elegantly written as I could manage. I had even—God help me—entertained the idea of asking Anna for a few useful contacts in placing such a piece.

The brief and bloody encounter with the raiders had astonished me. I had lived in Cornwall for my first eighteen years, and no one in all that time had so much as mentioned the words
Barbary
and
pirate
in the same breath. I did not know what to think: that all the history of the region I had ever been taught rested on a false foundation, or that Cat was a fantasist, easing her anxiety and boredom by means of some wild fiction. If it was the former, then I had to find out whatever I could on the subject. I decided that after accompanying Alison and Michael to view the cottage at Mousehole, I would make my excuses and visit Penzance Library to trawl the Internet and the local history shelves for whatever I could find about Cornwall in the early 1620s.

A little voice nagged at the back of my mind: How likely was it that, snatched by slave traders, Catherine could have taken and kept her embroidery book and her writing implement with her and managed to continue her journal in the desperate conditions of such a ship’s hold? And if she had managed such a feat, then how had the little book ever made it back to this country, and more specifically to Alison’s house, so close to where Cat had been taken from in the first place? But if Cat
had
been driven by her own difficulties to take shelter in fantasy, the story she had created would surely make her England’s first writer of prose fiction, predating Daniel Defoe by almost a century. Either possibility rendered the book a valuable
object, and as such made me even more determined to keep it away from Michael.

W
E PARKED ON
the outskirts of the village and walked down its winding main road, exclaiming in delight as we rounded the corner and emerged suddenly into a wide, sunlit harbor.

“How extraordinary!” Michael’s eyes shone as he took in the array of small, brightly colored craft bobbing within the protective arms of the quay, the tumble of cottages lining the steep hillsides around the cove.

If you removed the cars and the yachts, the street lamps and the tourists, it was a scene that had changed very little in a couple of hundred years, I thought wistfully. There were not many places left in the world like this, and most of those had lost a lot of their soul, but Mousehole retained something of the rare conviviality of a village in which a local community lived out their lives and watched the tourists come and go like the tides. Outside the grocer’s a blackboard had been attached to the railings overlooking the harbor, and on it someone had chalked in large, unsteady letters, “Happy birthday Alan, 73 today!” A group of elderly women who evidently shared the same hairdresser—a hairdresser who had perfected a single style of gray-helmet perm— were gathered at the bus stop gossiping cheerfully. As we passed I heard one of them say, “… and he got up and went off down to the boat, never even noticed she were dead,” which for some reason merely made her listeners chuckle, as if it was the sort of oversight men here made all the time.

“It’s up here,” Michael announced after consulting a hand-drawn map. Even from where I stood, I could tell it was Anna who had made it. Anna was just the right person to draw maps—neat, precise, painstakingly accurate. If she’d been charting oceans at the time of Magellan, there would have been no fanciful monsters curling up out of the deeps, no “heere be dragons,” no siren mermaids or other
unnecessary curlicues, but merely the legend “open water.” It was probably this very lack of imagination that had enabled Michael to continue his illicit liaison with me all this time.

The street he led us up was too narrow for traffic. Instead, people had filled it with effusive containers of flowers and bizarre prehistoric-looking plants like giant, fleshy black rosettes, and outside one particularly eccentric dwelling, half of an old rowing boat with terra-cotta pots of geraniums ranged along its thwarts. Anna’s cottage was lime-washed and had shutters of a pretty, faded blue. Seagull droppings mired the windows and chickweed grew on the roof, but even so it was exquisite.

Inside, however, the chocolate-box illusion was dispelled. Dark, dingy, and filthy, the cottage exhaled a great gassy breath of mildew and damp as soon as Michael opened the door. The low ceilings were yellowed, not just with age but with nicotine: The old man who’d rented must have been a pipe-smoker. The armchairs were stained and threadbare along the arms, and the back of one had been ripped down to the stuffing, where a cat had used it for sharpening its claws.

“Poor thing,” said Alison. “It is in need of some care and attention, isn’t it?” For a moment I thought she’d spied the resident pet, gone feral since its owner’s demise; then I realized she meant the house.

Michael smiled wryly. “That’s what the estate agent said, but all I thought she meant was that it could do with a lick of paint and some new carpets.”

“Ah, estate agents,” Alison said, rolling her eyes. “What do they know?”

Boxes marked
Books
and
Crockery
had been stacked against one wall. Michael made immediately for the first of these piles, took down the top box, and started emptying its contents onto the floor, eyeing the contents avidly. Did he suspect there were more antiquities like
The Needle-Woman’s Glorie
hidden away down here? I crouched beside him to examine what he brought out of the box. The top layer consisted of paperbacks gone brown with age, the sort of
fiction that had long since passed out of fashion—Second World War novels and luridly packaged American detective stories. Nothing of interest there.

“How long has this place been in Anna’s family?” I asked idly.

Michael frowned. He picked up a plain-jacketed, ex-library hardback, flicked to the title page, scanned it, shook the book in case something had been hidden inside it, discarded it with the rest. “Oh, ages. I don’t know.”

“It seems to have been stuck in a time warp,” I persisted. “Hasn’t Anna ever been here?”

He looked up at me unhappily. “Not as far as I know. Why would she?”

“Well, I’d want to have a peep at my inheritance. Seems a bit cavalier to take the weekly rent and just let it fall into rack and ruin. I feel quite sorry for the poor old man who lived here.”

“Look, it’s nothing to do with me. I just came down to go through the stuff that’s left, make sure the clearance people didn’t miss anything important.”

“Like the book you gave me?”

Catherine’s little book was in my shoulder bag. I felt it there, emanating such strong signals I was almost surprised Michael couldn’t sense its presence.

“Stop sniping, both of you,” Alison snapped. “Come on, Julia, let’s have a poke around.” She took me by the arm and fairly wrestled me out of the lounge. We ducked our heads under the lintel and found ourselves in a small dark kitchen.

“Can’t you try to be civilized with each other?”

I made a face. I was wishing I hadn’t come. It was easier to nurse my righteous hurt away from Michael. Besides, Cat’s story was haunting me. I had a sudden powerful urge to run outside into the sunlight, away into the open with her little book.

“I think I’ll go for a walk,” I told Alison. “I’ve got a bit of a headache.”

She looked surprised. “Oh, okay. Do you mind if I stay for a while?”

“Do what you want.” It was rude, but I didn’t feel much like making the effort. I was still angry at her for encouraging Michael to come down here.

By the time I got back to the living room, Michael was on his third box. “Anything interesting?”

He shook his head, looking grim. “A load of old rubbish.”

“All you deserve,” I said under my breath, and marched out of the door.

I
WANDERED OFF
to find myself a suitably quiet and sunny spot in which to sit and read, but I had not gone more than a few yards before a tiny old woman beckoned to me. As I got closer, I realized that she was suffering from some kind of strabismus, which had caused her left eye to be directed in a different direction from her right eye. Feeling embarrassed, as if I had mistakenly reacted to her call when she was in fact hailing someone else, I turned, but there was no one else on the street. “Hello,” I said cautiously.

She came down the hill toward me. “You’re searching for something, my dear.”

“No—just wandering around, taking in the sights.”

Her smiling face was as softly wrinkled as the leather of an old Chesterfield sofa, one eye looking over my shoulder, the other unnervingly focused on my chin. I had no idea which one to respond to. She leaned in closer. “I can tell you are searching,” she insisted. She patted my hand. “It will be all right, you’ll see.”

She was obviously a bit mad. I smiled. “Thank you, that’s nice to know. You live in a lovely village, and I’m going to have a jolly good look around it now.” I stepped away, but her grip tightened.

“What you are searching for you will have to travel to discover,” she urged me. “And what you find will not be the thing you thought
you went to find. It will be”—and here she beamed at me as if bestowing the blessing of all the angels—“far more wonderful than anything you have imagined; it will remake your life. But if you stay here, fate will catch up with you. Annie Badcock never lies.” A cloud drifted over the sun and she broke the connection between us suddenly. “They were here.” She winked at me. “They came across the ocean and took them away. People have forgotten. They have forgotten all the important things. But the past is stronger than they know. It is a great black tide which will sweep us all under in the end.”

And with that she was off, limping away down the hill without a good-bye or even a backward glance. I stood there, staring after her, nonplussed. Had she read my mind, or was she just crazy? But perhaps, that irritating little voice at the back of my mind prompted, perhaps she really knows something.
Annie Badcock.
The name was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I’d come across it.

“I
F YOU TOOK
down the internal wall between the old scullery and the breakfast room, you could open up the kitchen and make it a lot brighter.”

There was light in Alison’s eye. She looked as if she might burst into hysterical laugher or tears at any moment. Perhaps poking around the old cottage had reminded her too much of renovating the farmhouse with Andrew. But there was a determined thrust to her jaw: She needed a project, for the money as much as for the distraction. We were sitting out on the terrace at the Old Coastguard Hotel finishing a bottle of rosé after eating local fish and Cornish cheeses, and as soon as the waiter had cleared our plates away, Alison had covered the table with sketches and notes.

Michael was in her thrall, nodding and asking questions. “And you think all this could be done for how much?”

“Sixteen, seventeen thousand. I know some good local craftsmen and you could use me as project manager. I’d be happy to oversee it.”

“I’ll talk to Anna, see what she thinks. It makes sense, though, I can see that. No one’s going to buy the cottage in the state it’s in at the moment.”

“Not full of old rubbish,” I added helpfully.

He pursed his mouth, which made him look prissy and mean; I could see the old man he could soon become if he allowed the negative side of his personality to hold sway. When he turned back to Alison again, it was with his left shoulder held higher as if to block me out of the conversation. Pain lanced through me but I said as blithely as I could manage, “I’m going to take the bus into Penzance. I’ll see you later, Alison. I’ll get a taxi or something.”

“Oh, okay.” She frowned, as if expecting an explanation.

“Some things I need to buy,” I said, not wanting her to see that I was feeling territorial and upset. I got up and slung my bag over my shoulder.

“Aren’t you going to say good-bye to me?” Michael said, looking put out.

“I was under the impression we’d said good-bye some time ago,” I said coolly. I felt his eyes on me as I walked away.

H
ALF AN HOUR
later I was tucked away on the first floor of the local library with an ancient PC and a dodgy Internet connection. I Googled “barbary pirates cornwall” and waited. Seconds after I clicked Search I was offered the choice of more than twelve thousand entries containing this unlikely combination of words. I picked a few at random and in a very short space of time had begun to feel as if I were inhabiting a sort of alternative universe in which an entire buried history existed under the surface of the world I knew.