Mermaid of Penperro Read online

  The idea of running away had been with her since the solicitor’s visit, but fear had held her back. With Bugg, foul as he might be, she had security. She had lived and traveled with her mother for six years, more than long enough to know how precarious was the life of a single woman who had only herself upon whom to rely, even a woman with her mother’s talent. A woman could not blithely sally forth into the world as could a man, confident of finding work and of being able to preserve his physical safety. Konstanze knew she often had her head in the clouds, but she was not ignorant of practicalities, or of the dangers of leaving Bugg’s protection.

  She forced herself to remember Bugg sitting atop of her on the floor, beating her with the crop, his breathing growing loud and heavy with excitement.

  There came a time when the dangers of the unknown were preferable to the miseries of the familiar. She would not give John Bugg one more year of her life.

  Chapter Two

  Near Penperro, Cornwall

  “Look at it, Hilde! Just look at it! It’s perfect,” Konstanze said to her middle-aged maid as the driver of the wagon pulled to a stop in front of a gray stone cottage. It was a stark rectangle on the slope of a bare green hill, with no landscaping to soften its features. The only ornamentation was a small porch, no more than a foot deep, whose thin walls were formed of gnarled sticks of driftwood fitted close together.

  “Wunderbar,” Hilde grumped. “It looks cold,” she said in German, her native language. She had been lady’s maid to Konstanze’s mother Mary—or Marguerite, as she’d called herself—all through her years on the stages of Europe, beginning with her first performance in Vienna. Hilde knew a little English, enough to shop and to tell other servants what to do, but otherwise she stuck stubbornly to German.

  “I know it is not much compared to Bugg House,” Konstanze replied in German, “but it has its advantages.”

  “Nicht Buggs.”

  “A fine feature indeed, you must agree.”

  As the driver unloaded their trunks, Konstanze took out a heavy iron key and went up the two stone steps to the pale blue front door, pausing to touch the driftwood of the porch. She remembered studying it as a little girl. She had no other real memories of the house, and only brief flashes of her great-uncle that could have been as much imagined as recalled.

  The key worked easily in the lock, and the door swung open on the sitting room with its whitewashed walls and wooden floors. The dark, warped beams of the low ceiling came to within a few inches of the top of her head in places, making her glad that she was not a tall woman. A massive stone hearth dominated the end wall, and beside it a tiny staircase led to the upper floor.

  Bright Cornish sunlight shone in as well as it could from the small, deep-set windows. The furniture, such as there was, was covered in dust sheets. At the far end of the wall on her right a doorway opened into the kitchen. It was a mirror image of the sitting room, including staircase, only in here the covered shapes suggested cupboards, a worktable, and the tools of cooking. There was also a door, leading out back to a yard and outbuildings.

  She caught the musty smell of mice, and spiders had made free use of beams and corners, but other than that the cottage looked to be in good condition, with no water stains upon the walls or around the windows. Someone had taken care to shut up the house after her great-uncle had died, and she supposed she had the executor, Thomas Trewella, to thank for that. She would have to speak with him soon, for he and his solicitor and hired agent were the only links between Cornwall, herself, and Bugg, and given her own evidence of his diligence in his duties as executor, she assumed he would soon be asking questions about the new tenant at the cottage. She didn’t want him sending those questions to Kent, to Bugg.

  She climbed the narrow, creaky kitchen stairs to the room above, with its pitched ceilings painted white and its small bed. There was a faint scent of decay, and she found the dried remains of a small bird beneath one of the windows. Likely it had flown down a chimney and been unable to find its way out. A narrow doorway, devoid of door, led into the other bedroom. As below, there were no signs of water damage, which put to rest any concern about leaky roofs. The wood floor was dark with age and severely warped—a ball would have rolled a strange, irregular path across its surface—but it felt solid beneath her feet, its planks still tight together for all that each footstep drew forth a different note from the squeaking timber.

  She went to one of the casement windows and swung out the sash, fastening the metal latch upon the peg that would hold it open against the wind. She rested her forearms on the deep sill and leaned outside. Hilde was below, issuing gruff orders to the wagoner, Mr. Mogridge, as he dragged their trunks inside. He appeared to be ignoring Hilde, though Konstanze caught one fiery glare of annoyance he shot at the maid.

  Konstanze turned her face into the breeze, catching its damp saltiness tinged with the scent of green growing things. She knew that the coastline was only a few minutes’ walk away, just around the shelter of the hill, and yet she could not hear the surf. She closed her eyes, the sunlight red through her lids, goose pimples from the breeze on her arms even as the sun warmed her skin.

  She had been forced to stay with Bugg for only three more days after his experiment with the riding crop. The moment he left town to attend to business, she and Hilde had set to work packing, both her own belongings and any portable wealth upon which she could lay her hands. There was precious little.

  In a perfect world she could have left Bugg with only her own meager possessions from before her engagement, counting on pride and a noble heart to carry her through. Her lack of funds coupled with memories of her final, increasingly hungry years with Mama, however, argued for taking the silverware, the coffee service, a hideous ormolu clock, and every scrap of jewelry in the house. She had pawned the lot in London, feeling like a thief as she did so. She was the lady of the house, and pawning the silver should have been her option, but however much she rationalized her actions she still felt guilty shame for taking the items. She knew, though, that Bugg’s anger when he discovered the missing things would be only a dribble in comparison to the deluge of fury that would come when he discovered her absence.

  She was glad she would not be there to see it. He had always been jealous of her company, keeping her all but caged up at home, needing to know where she was at every moment, making her swear to stay in when business called him away. Like a sheep she had agreed, counting her obedience as the cost of security.

  The placid sheep, pushed too far, had finally bolted. It would do what it must to avoid both the wolves and recapture. She smiled at the image of a sly sheep, creeping along ditches and peering over hedges for signs of danger, its eyes narrowed in cunning wariness.

  She opened her eyes and looked out upon the beautiful, bare Cornish landscape, not a Bugg in sight.

  For two years her heart had been bound tight and buried under a rock, and the moment she had decided to leave Bugg she had begun to lift that rock away. For the first time in almost two years she felt the urge to sing stir within her. She heard in her head the three opening chords to one of her favorite pieces by Mozart, the fortepiano notes sounding as clear to her as if the instrument were in the room behind her. She opened her mouth and her throat to song.

  “Ridente la calma Nell’ alma si desti,

  Nell’ alma si desti,

  Ne resti un segno Di sdegno e timor. ”

  Smiling peace, Awake in my soul

  Let no trace remain

  Of anger or fear.

  The song felt as if it came from the depths of her heart, both a prayer and a thanksgiving. The high, pure tones vibrated the bones of her face, the highest notes seeming almost to come from somewhere above and behind her, issuing forth into the bright, clear air. She repeated the gentle, simple verse again and again, the music filling her soul and her senses, leaving no room for Bugg or misery or regret.

  When at last she sang the final note, and heard in her head the fortepiano’s f
inish, she looked down and saw that Mr. Mogridge was staring up at her with his mouth agape. She felt a flush of mixed pride and embarrassment. Hilde was standing beside him, her lips pressed tight together, her eyes blinking rapidly. “It has been long since you have sung,” the maid said gruffly in German.

  ‘Too long,” Konstanze said.

  “Ja.”

  “They’ll like you at Talland Church, Miss Penrose,” Mr. Mogridge said. He had told them he worked a farm a few miles outside of Penperro. “They’re proud of their singing in Penperro, like any good Cornish folk, but they don’t a one of them lay a finger on what you can do.”

  “Thank you,” Konstanze said, enjoying the compliment, but then she remembered that she should not be drawing undue attention to herself, and felt a twinge of unease. She and Hilde had changed transportation three times since Exeter, in hopes of further confusing any trail she might have left for Bugg to follow. She had taken her great-uncle’s name, Penrose, and referred to herself as Constance rather than the more exotic Konstanze.

  There seemed no way in which Bugg could follow them here, and while news of new residents might excite local curiosity and gossip, there should be no reason for tales of Constance Penrose and her foreign maid to find their way to Bugg. Still, that did not mean she ought to be making a spectacle of herself. You could never trust a Bugg to stay where he ought.

  Penperro Harbor

  “The man is becoming a pest,” Tom Trewella complained to his good friend Matthew Jobson, the vicar of Talland Church. They were standing on the low bridge over the stream that flowed into the small, narrow harbor, watching Robert Foweather as he directed his fellow Preventive officers in maintenance work on their boat.

  “He hasn’t the wit to track a cow through the mud. He’s easily enough evaded,” Matt countered. He was in his early forties, but looked much older due to his wild head of pure-white hair. They watched as Foweather laid his hand down upon freshly varnished wood. He pulled his palm quickly off and wiped it on his blue jacket, permanently marring the wool.

  “He may have the brain of a jellyfish, but he’s tenacious,” Tom said. “He’s going to find all our caves sooner or later.” Just last week the man had stumbled upon a favorite hiding place of the local smugglers. The caves were used for quickly storing smuggled goods unloaded off fishing boats or privateers in the dark of night. The goods would wait there until they could be safely hauled inland, to barns or cellars, and thence sold to private citizens or to those who would haul the goods even farther inland to be sold.

  Foweather and his seven-man crew had arrived two months ago. They were members of the newly formed Preventive Water Guard Service, and had been permanently stationed to Penperro. According to Foweather, king and country had had enough of Cornish smuggling, by God, and he was here to see that the Crown got its rightful due. They were at war with France! The king needed his taxes!

  The folk of Penperro had not been sympathetic to this patriotic cry, although they had been a bit more amenable to one of the Preventive Service’s other purposes, which was to help preserve life in the event of shipwreck. It was perhaps only that fact that kept the crew from encountering real trouble.

  “Hallo there, Mr. Trewella!” Foweather called from the boat, spotting them and waving happily. He was a tall man with fine bones padded with a layer of fat that made him look clumsy and childish. His dishwater blond hair was white at the ends from sun and salt, his nose and plump cheeks were permanently red, and he had the deep creases around his eyes of a man who spent much of his time squinting against the glare of sun off the water. He trotted across the gangplank to the pier, daintily picked his way through the fish piled in front of the packing house, then came up to join them on the bridge.

  “I’m almost getting used to the smell of fish!” he declared. “I never thought I’d say that.” Foweather had erroneously fastened onto the notion that Tom was his friend, and a man he could trust in his efforts to rid the Cornish coast of the scourge of smuggling, by God!

  “Still no luck with finding lodging in town?” Tom asked. The entire Preventive crew had been forced to live on a confiscated, derelict smuggling sloop hauled in from Fowey, as no one in Penperro would rent them rooms. He felt a curious mix of pity, fondness, and annoyance for Foweather. By profession the man was his enemy, and yet he was too simple and innocent a being for Tom to hate him, or to even wish him harm. He was a pest and a problem, but like a shoe-chewing puppy, one could not in good conscience do him a serious injury.

  “There is the most damnable shortage of housing in this town that I have ever come across. We did get an offer to use a storage room in the Old Pallace,” he said, nodding over his shoulder at the packing house, “but it smells worse in there than out here. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think no one wanted to rent to us.”

  “Surely that cannot be the case,” Tom said, trying to look astonished. He would not endanger Foweather, but that sure as hell didn’t mean he couldn’t take out his frustrations in other ways, like a bit of too-subtle ribbing. “I know that the folk of Penperro care deeply about the welfare of the men sent to us on the king’s business.”

  “There are prayers in your name said nightly,” Matt concurred. Tom knew the prayers might not be favorable, but they were prayers nonetheless.

  “Truly?” Foweather asked, his face brightening. “I had started to worry that they might be more against us than for us. Some of my men say that you Cornish don’t consider yourself part of England, and see us English as invaders, set on squeezing you dry of every last penny.”

  “Nonsense!” Tom declared. “Why, my great-grandmother was English. That makes us nearly brothers.

  “Quite right! Quite right!” Foweather said, cheerily clapping Tom on the back. “Brothers with one goal in common: ridding the Cornish shores of the scourge of smuggling, by God!”

  “By God!” Tom and Matt both agreed.

  Foweather’s chest puffed up, and he gazed with pride for some moments at his boat. Then, abruptly, he turned to Tom and Jobson. “I say, do you know where my men and I can get a decent meal? Mrs. Popple at the Fishing Moon has served us rancid meat nigh on a dozen times now.”

  “Shameful,” Matt said, shaking his white head and staring at the ground, lips pursed in disapproval.

  “”Tis a miracle she and her husband stay in business at all, serving food like that,” Foweather said.

  “Wiggett does decent pasties,” Tom said, referring to the baker whose shop was up the narrow lane behind them. “Other than that, though, I’m afraid there are not many options.”

  “Wiggett’s pasties it is, then. My thanks to you.”

  “Anything you need, just let me know.”

  “Right! Best I get back to the boat, else my crew will shirk their duties.” He seemed reluctant to go, but when neither Tom nor Matt said anything more he uttered another “Right!” and trotted back to his boat.

  Tom and Matt watched him reboard. “How did he manage to live into adulthood?” Tom wondered aloud.

  “God protects fools and children,” Matt answered. “Do you need any further proof of His existence?” After a few more words they parted ways themselves. Tom stepped off the bridge and turned right, up the lane on the west side of the stream. The stream itself was blocked from view by the houses and shops that pressed up against it, their foundations making up the banks of the narrow waterway. Penperro was situated in the bottom of a rocky cleft, and those houses and shops not at the bottom or surrounding the harbor were forced to cling to the steep slopes above. Narrow stone stairways had been hewn out of the rock, winding between and behind the houses.

  Tom’s house was one of those clinging to the steep side, some ways up the stream from the harbor. Its stone walls were covered in gray slate shingles as protection against the sea air, the window sashes painted a vivid ultramarine. His housekeeper had insisted on having flower boxes on the low wall in front of the house, which now spilled a profusion of orange and yellow nasturt
iums. The public stairs passed below this floral bounty and then continued behind his neighbor’s house, and thence to the path that led to the rough shoreline. The flagstoned yard before his front door was only two feet wide, and used only by visitors.

  Tom went in through the kitchen door in back, sniffing appreciatively at the odors of cooking that met his nose. He went to the hearth and found the Dutch oven, its open face turned to the flames, a chicken roasting within. Further investigation revealed a bubbling pot of mushy peas—his favorite—as well as boiled potatoes and a sweet pudding with dried apples and nuts.

  Mrs. Toley, his housekeeper, appeared suddenly from the pantry with a chunk of cheese in her hand, making him start. She was a painfully thin, intense woman in her late forties, widowed eight years ago when her husband, a fisherman, was lost at sea. She had never had children. “Dinner will be ready shortly. Can I get you something to hold you over? I could heat the fish stew from yesterday. There’s a beef pie and biscuits, as well.”

  “No, thank you, I’ll wait,” he said, moving away from the open range, feeling the dread of a child caught in a misdeed, and the same desperate need to escape. He knew what was coming.

  “Cheese? You could have cheese, and I bought some Spanish oranges today—”

  “No, Mrs. Toley, please, I’ll save my appetite for dinner—”

  “The peas are ready; you could have those now—”

  “I’ll eat in half an hour,” Tom said, panicky, holding up his hands palms out as if he could hold her back as she approached, her face blank while she pursued inner visions of culinary possibility, no doubt picturing him seated at a table mounded with food, eating for hours on end. He began backing out of the kitchen, pushing against the door with his shoulder blades.

  “Or there’s a nice bread pudding with currants I was saving for your supper tonight, although you’d have to do without the custard sauce, but cream would do nicely—”