Page 20 of By Marsh and By Moor
“Yes, what do you want?”
A man appeared at her elbow.Jed recognised him as one of a family of five brothers who’d lived beside the churchyard.
“En’t you Jed Trevithick?”the man said.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“I didn’t know you at first.”His disbelieving gaze took Jed in from head to toe.“We all thought you were dead.”
“Well, I en’t.”Jed craned his head to see into the cottage.“What’s become of my aunt and sister?”
“Your aunt is gone from the village these three years and more.Went back to Exeter, I think.And your sister’s up at Penwick’s.”There was something slightly odd in the way he said it.
“Oh.All right.Thank ‘ee.”
He withdrew, Solomon following him.The man shut the door, and Jed was left standing, bewildered, in the front garden.
“Who’s this fellow Penwick?”Solomon asked.
“A gentleman as owns half the land hereabouts.Carrie has gone to work in his household, I suppose.”
He spoke absently, staring up at the cottage.The plank he had nailed over a hole in the door was still there, and so were the lines he’d carved into the windowsill as a child—he’d had a hiding from his father for that.But at the windows hung bright green curtains he’d never seen before, not the old blue ones that his mother had made up years ago.And chickens clucked from a new coop somewhere around the corner of the house.
He turned his head to find Solomon watching him with sympathy in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Jed said.“Here I was, thinking I’d be offering you the hospitality of my hearth and home… And instead we have to traipse out to Penwick’s house, and probably sleep in his stables.”He gathered himself.“Come on, no point hanging around here.”
Penwick lived up on the headland, a mile or two outside the village.The shortest path there would take them through the heart of the village, across the green and past the smithy.Jed had spent years picturing this moment: the old familiar sights and sounds that would greet him, the childhood friends who would address him by name.Now he found he was reluctant to take that path across the village.Reluctant to discover what else might, like his childhood cottage, have undergone some unexpected and unsettling change.There would be time enough for that later.
Instead, he led Solomon around by the woods.They hiked up the long, sloping road that climbed the headland, the sea sparkling below them.A little boat bobbed in the bay, and two small figures were gathering cockles in the very spot where Jed had been pressed.
They came to a pair of ornate granite gateposts set in a high wall.Beyond the gate, a manor house was visible through the trees at the end of a short driveway.As a boy, Jed had sometimes clambered over that wall on a dare, to steal an apple or a plum from the garden.He had never been inside the house, of course.
“We’ll go round to the kitchen door,” he said, avoiding the main gate and leading Solomon down a side lane which he knew would take them to the stables and the back door.
But before they had gone more than a few yards, they met a well-dressed man about Jed’s age.It was Penwick, the master of the house.
“Afternoon, sir,” Jed said, tipping his cap.He had hoped to slip around the back without running into any of the family.
“Trevithick,” Penwick said.He was staring in shock.“You’re alive.”
“That’s right, sir.”
“You had better come into the house.Your sister will be overjoyed.”
“Into the house?”Jed repeated, puzzled.
Penwick cleared his throat.He looked oddly sheepish.“You must congratulate me, Trevithick.Your sister did me the great honour of accepting my hand in marriage.”
Jed could only gape, dumbstruck.
Penwick’s gaze flickered sideways to fall on Solomon.“And, ah, bring your friend.”
“My name’s Dyer, sir,” Solomon said, putting a hand to his cap.
Penwick gave him a distracted nod.“Well, come along, both of you.”
He led them around to the front of the house.In the hallway, he murmured something about finding his wife and slipped away, leaving Jed and Solomon to the care of a maid, who showed them into a parlour.
