Page 13 of The Christmas Retreat
‘I’ll send you pics. They’re both tall and fair, with narrow, aquiline noses, like my mother.’
‘Andyou,’ I said, although actually I couldn’t remember a time when Evie’s short hair had not been either hennaed a fluorescent orange or dyed some other bright colour and stood up from her head like a cockatoo’s crest. Last time I saw her it had been bubblegum pink.
‘True, I do seem to have the family hooter.’
That nose, along with her beady dark blue eyes, added to the cockatoo effect, but also oddly, together with her height and lean, angular frame, she could look quite distinguished, despite the hair.
Since I possess none of these family attributes, I asked, ‘Who doItake after?’
‘Must be your father’s side. He wasn’t very tall and his hair was the same sort of toffee colour as yours, but darker. And hehad hazel eyes, with gold flecks. It’s such a long time ago, I’d quite forgotten that!’
My thick, straight hair is an odd shade of caramel and my eyes, a mossy grey-green, unfortunately without the gold flecks.
‘Tell me what else you found in the trunks,’ I urged, but Evie wasn’t to be hurried.
‘It took a considerable time to sort and evaluate the contents of the larger trunk, but two documents were particularly illuminating.’
‘And they were …?’ I prompted.
‘Well, the first was a copy of Lewis Madoc’s will, dated early 1919, soon after he lost his wife to the Spanish flu. He evidently wanted to provide for Arwen, should anything happen to him while she was still a minor. He was twenty years older than his wife. This was prescient of him, because he too succumbed to the flu at the start of May that year. Their death certificates are both there. Arwen was extremely unlucky to lose both parents to the Spanish flu, since the epidemic was fizzling out by then.’
‘Did Lewis have a lot to leave her?’ I asked.
‘Sadly, since apart from his work he only had an annuity that ceased at his death, nothing much, other than debts. Once his estate had been settled and those paid off, there would be little, if anything, left.’
‘How do you know?’
‘The will makes that clear – and also names his cousin, Cosmo Caradoc, as Arwen’s guardian if she was still a minor at the time of his death.’
I remembered that Evie had told me that Arwen left the Slade in 1919 and that she had studied there between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, and I said, ‘But she was of age. She must have been eighteen by the time her father died.’
‘Actually, Ginny, at that time you only reached your majority at twenty-one,’ Evie said patiently. ‘Also, women’s suffrage was still very much an ongoing battle.’
‘OK, but even if this Cosmo character became her guardian, he must have agreed to her going to live with Milly in Cornwall, mustn’t he? I mean, we know Granny was born there in 1920.’
‘In fact, we know she must have been there before then, because those two Cornish seascapes in Charlotte Vane’s possession are signed and dated September of 1919. Arwen seems to have had the helpful habit of writing the date and subject matter on the reverse of all her artwork.’
‘Does that mean you’ve found more?’
‘I certainly did. For a start, Arwen filled up the space at the top of the large trunk with a random selection of things, including a folder of very accomplished drawings she must have done at the Slade. That’s where I found her parents’ death certificates and her father’s will, too – but also a letter from Cosmo Caradoc, Arwen’s guardian. It’s evidently in answer to one she must have sent him as soon as she learned the terms of the will. Caradoc expected her to make her home with his family in North Wales, but Arwen was far from keen on the idea.’
‘You know, the name Cosmo Caradoc sounds vaguely familiar,’ I said, and was unsurprised when Evie told me he had been a well-known artist of his time.
‘Mainly known for large pastoral scenes and interiors with figures. His work was popular in his day, but has fallen out of favour since. He was from a wealthy family and lived in a remote hamlet called Seren Bach, on the coast of North-West Wales.’
‘If Arwen had always lived in London, I shouldn’t think she would have liked the idea of leaving her friends and her studies at the Slade behind and moving there!’
‘No, you can tell from Caradoc’s reply to her letter that she’d told him about a plan she’d hatched to move to Cornwall with Milly and Edwin.’
‘That seems like a reasonable idea to me,’ I said. ‘Did he agree?’
‘No. He told her it was quite unsuitable and she was much too young to make such decisions for herself. Also, since her father had sought to secure her future by naming Caradoc her guardian, he expected her to fall in with his wishes.’
‘That sounds a bit pompous and autocratic,’ I commented. ‘Positively Victorian!’
‘Hewasborn in the Victorian era and old enough to have a daughter about the same age as Arwen – the letter mentions this, and that he was a widower – so hardly one of the Bright Young Things who were emerging by the end of the Great War,’ Evie agreed. ‘He did say that there was no reason why Arwen shouldn’t carry on her studies in his studio and that there was quite a flourishing little artists’ colony in the area.’
‘That’s a bit more like it, although it doesn’t sound as if Arwen had much say in the matter. So …?’ I frowned. ‘If she did go there, how did she come to be living in Cornwall only a couple of months later?’
