The Tenth Gift (4 page)

In her quarters, she took her time, changing out of her working dress into a pretty, full-skirted petticoat of white cotton decorated with Flemish lace. She had bought it at Penzance market with the little she had left after handing the best part of her wages to her mother. Around an overdress of blue wool, laced up the front, with a
wide white linen collar, she wrapped the crewel-work shawl with its pretty tracery of twining flowers and leaves. It was a pity to spoil the delicate effect of these pastel shades with her heavy leather boots, but even Cat’s vanity could not countenance spoiling her only pair of satin slippers on a country walk. Sighing, she laced the boots tightly and dabbed a little rosewater carefully on her neck and bosom, where the sun on her skin would surely waft it to poor Rob’s nose.

He was pacing the cobbles when at last she appeared, but he had the wit not to chide her for being tardy. More sensibly, he said, “You look most becoming, Cat.”

He won a smile for that but, “Catherine,” she corrected him.

His face fell: She could almost feel the change in his expression as a tangible thing between her shoulder blades as she walked past him toward the lane that ran by the farm cottages.

“Let’s go up to Castle an Dinas,” she called back to him. “I want to blow the cobwebs out of my head.”

“Are you sure? It’s a long way.”

“I do have two legs, in case you hadn’t noticed,” she snapped back. She quickened her pace, elbows pumping.

He had noticed, of course. The thought of them made him shiver inside. He fair ran after her. “I do have to be back by sundown to help Will with the cows.”

“Best not be wasting time in idle chatter, then,” Cat declared. She strode out, her skirts swinging wildly.

They took the footpath across the meadow toward Gariss and Hellangrove. Celandines, scabious, and oxeye daisies studded the grass through which they walked like fallen stars. Cat imagined how she would pick them out in a frieze: little cross-stitches of yellow and blue and white against a field of emerald green.

To their left the land rose gently through brambled coverts to wooded hills loud with birdsong. The creamy heads of cow parsley and old-man’s beard laced the hedgerows, and a long day’s sunshine had released the hot, peppery scent of herb Robert and the tang of
wild garlic into the air. Gulval Downs rose up in front of them, golden with gorse. Invisible overhead, larks poured their hearts out into the azure sky. Cat looked back at her companion, moodily switching the heads off the taller flowers with a willow wand. “Come on, you laggard! Have you got lead in your boots?” She took off running, feeling like the hoyden her mother would have called her had she seen her.

Forty minutes later they were on the hilltop, in the teeth of a stiff southerly coming in off the sea, flattening the grass on the headland and carving the gorse stands into hawk trees. Cat’s hair whipped back and forth as she sat on a granite cairn in the center of the earthworks. Eroded and grassed over down the centuries, their warlike origins lost in time, the outlines of the ancient hill fort curled protectively around her as if she sat cupped in the hand of the past. Something about the scene made Rob’s heart swell inside him.

“You might be a warrior queen, sat upon your throne. Stay there.…”

She turned to watch him running away from her until he disappeared from view. Discomfited, she frowned, then turned her attention to the sheet of shining sea stretching away to the ends of the world, as it seemed. What lay out there, she wondered, beyond the horizon? Surely marvels beyond price and monsters beyond imagining, exotic lands and other ways of life, where women of talent and ambition were not confined to sweeping and darning and feeding the chickens…

Robert interrupted her reverie. He held something gingerly in his hands: a circlet of gorse and briar rose and tiny ferns fashioned so that the golden flowers glowed through the spiky foliage like jewels. “A crown for a queen,” he said, and bent to offer it to her on one knee, sunlight pooled in his blue eyes like liquid sky.

“Well, you’d better crown me, then,” she said, peremptory, though the gesture pleased her.

He stood and set it gently on her head, and as he did so the wind
took a tress of her hair and set it blowing free like a great red pennant. He caught it and wound it around his hand, wondering at its silky texture and the fiery sparks trapped within its length. “They built these fortresses in King Arthur’s day against the coming of the Danes. Reckon that must make you a prize nabbed from the ships of the sea kings, then,” he said, grinning. “Not proper Cornish like the rest of us.”

Annoyed by this inference, Cat retrieved her hair from him. “Why would I want to be Cornish like the rest of you? Cornwall’s a poor little county full of brigands and idiots and superstitious old biddies.”

Robert looked pained. “And which am I—brigand or idiot?”

She shrugged dismissively, avoiding the question. “What were you discussing with the master this morning?”

Rob’s eyes took on a hooded expression; careful, evasive. “Nothing important. Jack and Thom had a bit of information for him, is all.”

“Information about what?”

“Oh, shipping and the like.”

“Shipping? What would Sir Arthur care about shipping? You forget: I saw you, and I saw you hide something.”

But he was not to be drawn. “You can see Carn Galva from here,” he said wonderingly, gazing at the menacing serrations on the distant skyline. “The Giant’s Chair. I never knew that.” He turned, his blond hair blowing around his broad, open face. “And Trencrom and Tregoning and the Godolphin Hills. No wonder the chieftain who built his fortress here chose this spot.” He shaded his eyes. “I can even see the Scillies. ’Twould be hard to take the folk here unawares, by land or sea. It’s said they lit warning beacons from the Mount to here and Trencrom, to Carn Brea, then St. Agnes Beacon, and on to the Great Stone on St. Bellarmine’s Tor, and from there Cadbarrow, Rough Tor, and Brownwilly, all the way through to Tintagel to warn the king that the raiders were coming. Arthur and the other nine kings reached Land’s End by forced march in two days and gave them battle near Vellan-Druchar. So many were slaughtered, ’tis said the mill ran on blood rather than water that day, and not a single Dane escaped.”

“Pity he wasn’t around to save Mousehole and Newlyn from the Spanish,” Cat replied. Her uncle had been among the men who followed Sir Francis Godolphin on that fateful day in July 1595 to stand against the Spaniards who had overrun the village of Mousehole and fired the church at Paul. Outnumbered and ill-armed, the Cornish had been forced to retreat under the bombardment of the galleons’ guns and wait for reinforcements while the invaders burned the better part of four hundred houses in Newlyn and Penzance. Her parents’ generation still spoke of the attack in hushed voices: It was an outrage, an insult that foreign invaders should set foot on Cornish soil, after the glorious defeat of the Armada, a defeat dealt out largely by West Country men. “Anyway,” she said, shooting him a sharp look, “you still haven’t answered my question.”

Robert stared out across the sea, his jaw set. “Are you using the book I gave you?”

“Yes. It was most kind of you to remember that I admired Lady Harris’s copy. It is most gratifying to have one of my own,” she said stiffly. “Some of the slips are very useful, and I have devised a few variations which the mistress says are exceedingly pretty.”

“Good. I am glad to hear that you are practicing your craft.”

“I mean to be a master embroiderer and join the Guild.”

Rob grinned despite himself. “And how will you do that from the depths of darkest Cornwall, Catherine? I fear geography is against you. And will you change your sex? The Broderers Guild is a guild for
master
embroiderers, not for little chits, be they ever so clever with a needle.”

“So you gave me the book merely to humiliate me?”

Rob took her fingers between his two huge hands. “Never, Cat, believe me. I am more than proud that you have your commission from the Countess of Salisbury.”

She pulled her hand away as if burned. “How do you know about that? It is a secret. I have been told to say nothing of it.”

“Lady Harris mentioned it—she could not contain her delight. To work the altar cloth for the Howard family’s own church is a great
privilege, and that she played her part in the countess’s decision to give a Cornishwoman such a prestigious task has given her no little satisfaction.”

Cat bit her lip, coloring. “It is a great responsibility. I have never undertaken anything so large or so ambitious before—I have not even planned it out yet.”

Rob’s eyebrows shot up. “You mean to design it yourself?”

“Of course.” She glared at him, daring him to question her right to do so.

It was unheard of that a woman should take it upon herself to create her own grand design; in the natural order of things this was the place of a man. It was why he had bought her the book: to aid her work and ease her way, to enable her to copy a master’s designs. Everyone knew that women had not the capacity for abstract thought; in this, as in so much, men dictated and women followed.

He suspected, rightly, that even as Lady Harris had recommended her protégée to the countess for the task of embroidering the altar frontal, the agreement had been that Cat would be a journey-woman, working to the pattern created by one of the master embroiderers who made their living traveling among the great houses selling their designs. Unfortunately, no one had told Cat this. One day, he thought, she will overstep herself and take a great fall. He hoped he would be there to catch her when she did. “As long as you are sure,” he said quietly.

“Quite sure. But until I know I can do it, I do not want to discuss it. Let us instead talk of the blade that was laid out on our parlor table, the big, curved silver knife that you tried to cover with your hat.”

Robert caught his breath, taken by surprise. “The master said we were to discuss it with no man.”

Cat laughed. “Unless it has escaped your notice, Robert Bolitho, I am no man.” She watched him, as unblinking as her namesake.

Rob sighed. “For the Lord’s sake, don’t tell Matty or the entire county will know by sunrise,” he warned her.

Cat crossed herself, solemn at last. “On my father’s bones, I swear.”

“You know the Newlyn boat—the
Constance
—that went missing last week?”

She nodded. “Crew of eight, including Nan Simon’s cousin Elias? She’s come in—they’re alive and well? Nan’s been half sick with worry.”

Robert shook his head. “There’s no good news. She came drifting in through the fog to Mousehole this morning. Jack and Thom were down there, attending to … some business. They caught her bumping against the rocks outlying St. Clement’s Isle, with not a soul aboard, the sails hanging limp and the nets unused.”

Cat frowned. “But it’s been fair weather this past week. There have been no waves high enough to overturn a boat.”

“And certainly not a well-made vessel like the
Constance.
Thom said the sides were raked, though that might have been the rocks, but Jack swears the gunwale was split by something like a grapple.”

Cat’s eyes went wide. “And the blade?”

“Left between the planking in the bilges.”

“It looks like no blade I’ve ever seen.”

“Nor I, and I like it not.”

“What does Sir Arthur say?”

“There’s been an increase in attacks by privateers on shipping off the south coast, but up to now it’s been mainly unaccompanied merchantmen that have been struck and their cargoes taken. Nothing unusual about that, and heaven knows our own boys have been guilty of similar attacks on French and Spanish merchant ships all through the British Sea. But I cannot understand what profit there is to be made in attacking a fishing skiff.”

Cat shuddered. “Perhaps ’tis sheer mischance?”

Robert made a face. “Perhaps. But mischance does not explain the presence in the boat of a Turkish blade.”

“Turkish?”

“Truly, Cat, I can say no more without earning the master’s ire. I have already said too much. Rumors spread like wildfire in this region, and Sir Arthur is concerned that there will be widespread panic over something that may prove to be no more than an isolated incident.”

She gripped his arm. “Rob, are you telling me there are Turkish pirates in these waters?” Her eyes shone. “How … exotic. I would dearly love to see one.”

Robert stared at her in disbelief. “I am sure you say such things to pain me, Catherine. For myself, I pray to God that I never have the misfortune to encounter such a creature, for they are little more than beasts. Some of the tales I have heard …” He shook his head at Cat’s avid expression.

“Come now, the day draws on and I must take you back. I have the excitement of the cows to attend to, and no doubt you have some duties to carry out for Mistress Harris’s return; and we’ll have no more talk of pirates.”

Cat untangled the gorse circlet from her hair. With the next great gust of wind she tossed it seaward and together they watched it buffeted till it sprang apart and rained its flowers down upon the rocks.

I
PUT THE BOOK ASIDE, ASTONISHED
. I
DON’T KNOW WHAT
I had been expecting, other than notes on the patterns that the book contained, thoughts about the colors of thread and the type of stitch one might use to execute the design, but this sudden window into the past was like a glimpse of treasure.

I found myself wondering whether Michael had read any of Catherine’s cryptic, faded entries, or had merely glimpsed them and seen them as defacements, maybe even beaten down the price with the dealer because they spoiled the edition? I could easily imagine him doing just that, complaining about a small or imagined flaw, always seeking a bargain, a way of saving money. I could not count
the number of times I had turned away, embarrassed, as he haggled with some hapless stallholder or trunk seller. The idea of him trawling through his favorite used-book shops of Cecil Court seeking a suitable farewell gift for me made me nauseous. How long had he been preparing for that moment? How long had he and Anna been back on “good terms”—and just exactly what did that mealy-mouthed little phrase mean? I imagined the pair of them, dark-haired and olive-skinned, similar in build, elegantly intertwined—had this rapprochement overlapped with our trysts for days, for weeks, or for months? I ran to the bathroom and threw up till my eyes and nose burned with bile.

When I came back to my bed, feeling shaky and void, the book was waiting for me on the l amp-table. My notebook lay beside it, filled now with my own scribbled interpretations of Cat Tregenna’s journal entries. I had pored over the strange formation of her letters, the bizarre spelling and unfamiliar sentence structures of another age for more than three hours, filling six pages of my notebook, though my handwriting was in no way as neat as that of the young embroiderer, being marred with crossings-out, underlinings, question marks where I could not make sense of a word. Hardly a pretty artifact for someone to discover four hundred years hence. And yet, for all the difference between our times, I felt a strong connection with Catherine Anne Tregenna, and not just for our shared love of embroidery. I, too, had grown up in Cornwall, and like her had dreamed of escape.

On a new sheet of paper I wrote her name, then idly sketched a curling vine around the capitals: a simple cross-stitch exercise to work on a sampler, the sort of thing with which a young girl might have begun her needlework education in times past. I wondered if Catherine had done this very thing: picking out her name in a simple, plain color before embellishing it with leaves and flowers. My knowledge of Jacobean needlework told me that it would have been unlikely that she would have been able to work with anything very
fine for her first attempts. If she had come from a poor family, even one that had some social aspirations, she would probably have been limited to practicing on hessian or sacking and roughly dyed hanks of homespun wool, most likely wool she had had to color herself with vegetable dyes culled from the herb garden and hedgerows—woad for blue, madder for red, and broom or onion skins for yellow. And most certainly she would have had no access to the pretty skeins of colored silks, like those that as a child I had kept obsessively in their box arranged according to the spectrum, that glided so smoothly through all those squares of perforated binker-cloth we used in sewing classes at school.

I finished my sketch and held it at arm’s length. It was then that I saw what had been right beneath my nose: Catherine Anne Tregenna, with the capitals thus emphasized: CAT—Cat. I laughed aloud. I had wondered why she was not Kate or Cath; Cat seemed a remarkably modern sort of moniker for a seventeenth-century girl. I felt a sudden warm affection for this long-dead woman who had imposed her own lively chosen familiar name upon the world. Did she live up to her self-appointed totem animal? I wondered. Was she neat and sly, eyes slightly aslant, ever watchful? Did she move soft-footed around the manor house where she worked and smile quietly to herself at the foolishness of others? I could imagine her, small and dark, curled in a big wooden chair on cushions she had made herself, under the light of a narrow window, picking out the tail feathers of a fabulous bird with needle and bright threads on a length of pale linen—a runner for a dressing table, perhaps, the edging for a bedcover, or even the altar cloth so briefly mentioned. That commission intrigued me. What fun it would be to track down such a treasure and know a little of its provenance, maybe even follow the progress of its creation through the pages of the little book.

I passed my hand affectionately across the age-foxed title page. Sixteen twenty-five: the best part of four centuries away. At thirty-six and unmarried, my circumstances would in the seventeenth century
have elicited both pity and ridicule. A spinster; an old maid: of no use to anyone and with no place in society. Pretty much the same as now, which was not particularly cheering; but what did I really know about the early seventeenth century? For me, it occupied a rather hazy space between the glorious Tudors and the Civil War and Restoration. I decided that before continuing with my translation of Catherine’s journal, I should make an effort to set it in a bit more context.

I went to examine my bookcase to see if there was anything there that might educate me further. From college, some poetry and Shakespeare plays with commentaries; Penguin guides to literature; a little gentle philosophy—nothing of much specific use. On the dusty bottom shelf of the bookcase in the spare room I found a set of children’s encyclopedias that probably dated from my grandmother’s schooldays. I hefted them out onto the floor. They gave off a whiff of mildew and face powder, the very smells I associated with being a child in the house my grandmother shared with her crabby older sister, and I wondered whether the scent was real or imagined, a memory that had imposed itself on the object by association. I had loved these encyclopedias and had spent hours poring over their neatly engineered pull-out sections dissecting an apple, a frog, and a fly; a steam engine; a medieval castle. I flicked through one of the volumes, finding in a short space long, detailed, and illustrated articles on the history of art, Greek mythology, human anatomy, the Trojan War, and the English feudal system. Two volumes further on (past the discovery of penicillin, wildlife on the savannah, Chaucer, and Galileo) I found just what I was looking for.

I put the other five volumes back on the shelf and took the sixth to my living room, settled myself into the leather sofa, and started to read.

F
ORTY MINUTES LATER
, I felt replete with information. For what purported to be a children’s compendium of knowledge, the encyclopedia
had proved a challenging and frankly spicy read, full of surprising details. I had known that James I was the son of the executed Mary, Queen of Scots; what I had not known was that he had a Danish wife, and flaunted such a succession of male favorites that when he inherited the English throne, it was openly voiced that “Elizabeth was King; now James is Queen!” Nor had I known that James had come poor and unpopular to the throne, with a seriously extravagant spending habit that drove the country deeply into debt. In the end he had sold off titles and land and had stopped paying the navy; asserting his divine right to do as he pleased and dissolving Parliament rather than risking criticism. He had attempted to marry off his surviving son, Charles, to the rich Spanish Infanta at a time when England was fiercely Protestant; the Spanish had high-handedly rejected the marriage proposal and a humiliated Charles had eventually married Princess Henrietta Maria of France some months before the death of his father, coming to the English throne in March 1625 at the age of twenty-five, just six years older than Catherine Tregenna.

Even more interesting was the fact that King James’s chief adviser had been Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. Wasn’t the Countess of Salisbury mentioned as the source of Cat’s commission? In a sudden fever of excitement, feeling like an amateur detective, I went back to
The Needle-Woman’s Glorie.