“It’s no trouble, Mrs. Henley. The boy’s twelve and sturdy as they come.”
She’s glad to leave the shawled women behind as she follows Richard around the end of the inlet, where the coastal path veers away from the road. The path is like a tunnel, green on every side. Above, too; the boughs of the trees touch in the middle. They remind Isabel of the arched roof of a church. It smells like spring, sweet and forest-like. The path is high enough she can’t smell the seaweed, but she can hear the water, and when she licks her lips, she can taste the salt.
Tom Holder’s son, who looks closer to sixteen than twelve, doesn’t say a word as he carries her case to Trevernan Cottage. Sweat drips down his forehead, and after a while he stops and puts the case down to remove his jacket, which Isabel offers to carry.
The path climbs for a while and then, narrowing, moves down to the water. The river has swallowed up all the seaweed here. The water laps at the rocks. She wants to walk out to where the land turns away and the river becomes the ocean. She wants to see if the pebbly little waves are higher there. The desire is so strong, so sudden, it makes her suck in her breath and hold it. She doesn’t just want to see the ocean; she wants to feel it, the way she used to long for George’s arms around her—the way she still does sometimes.
She drags her gaze away from the water. There’s nobody about but her and Richard. The green tunnel seems to be closing in on her. When she pictured the cottage, far, far away at the southern tip ofCornwall, she imagined it would be remote and isolated, but she never envisioned anywhere as lonely as this.
After some fifteen minutes, the dirt path opens onto a wider gravel path, which leads to a squat stone cottage on one side and down to the water on the other. The sound of the river washes away her worries about taking the cottage sight unseen. She has to resist the urge to go right down to it and wade in. Growing up in Norfolk, she felt similar, and even in town, she sensed a hint of the feeling whenever she was near the Thames. Only she has never felt the tug of the ocean as strongly as here, today.
“This here is the cottage.” Richard points superfluously, dragging her from her thoughts.
She turns away from the river. A small oak, still a sapling, grows by the side of the house, not far from the door. The gray of the slate roof is a shade darker than the walls, which are made of stones roughly cut into misshapen bricks. To the left of the cottage is a lower building with a roof made of thatch. Moss grows in the mortar between the stones.
“That’s the old pilchard shed,” says Richard. “It hasn’t been used since old Nance died.”
The gravel path leads to the low front door. Richard says, “The coastal path is used by the revenue men. You’ll see them going by on patrol, looking for smugglers.”
“Are there many smugglers in these parts?”
Richard doesn’t answer. The door makes a scraping noise on the doorstep when he pushes it open. Behind it lies a small, gray kitchen. Apart from a wooden table, two spindle-back chairs, and the low wooden beams across the ceiling, everything in it is made of stone: the flagged floor, stone counter, stone sink, stone fireplace, with only a blackened metal rack for cooking. There isn’t an open range like they had in the kitchen in Greenwich. It’s like living in a cave, she thinks. Cold and dark like one, too.
A high step leads into the room. The single window is small and set far back in the wall, which is about a foot thick. The glass in thewindow is poor, painting everything the purply gray of dusk. Richard sets her case down and she gives him a shilling, which, judging by the unguarded pleasure on his face, must be a lot. She chides herself inwardly; she must be better about these things. She has nothing to spare now.
“Mrs. Dowling will come soon,” Richard says. He sounds as if he wishes to go but feels bad about leaving her. “Will you manage until then, Mrs. Henley?”
His father must have told him about her situation. She’s not a child. Poor, yes, and that will take some getting used to, but she’s not helpless—not entirely.
“Thank you,” she says. “I believe I shall manage just fine. Please convey my gratitude to your father for his assistance.”
The boy says he will and bolts. The small kitchen sighs empty behind him. It smells musty and damp. Isabel tries to open the window, but it’s stuck fast, so she opens the door again and then sits down on top of her case, her face in her hands. She knows she must get up and look at the rest of the cottage. She must unpack and learn how to do things, simple things, such as make a fire and cook food. But she’s so weary from the journey she cannot contemplate anything other than sitting here. She feels as if she’s in a trance, as if the events of the past months are a dream. As if she could look up and see George coming toward her, arms out, the years in between erased by the sound of the river.
The wind has picked up and there are proper waves now; she can hear them. The rushing makes the longing in her rise again. If only it were a dream, if only she could wake up and start a new day at home in Greenwich.
At the crunch of steps on the gravel, she looks up. Mrs. Dowling curtsies awkwardly and says, “I received word from Mr. Holder. It’s an honor, Mrs. Henley.”
Isabel says, “It’s a pleasure,” though right now, nothingis.
“I shall show you the cottage,” Mrs. Dowling says. She’s not wearing a black shawl like the women in the village, but a navy blue one with a delicate knitted lace pattern. The wool looks fine and soft withwear. She has gray curls that try to get away from the handfuls of pins stuck in her hair. Conscious of it, Mrs. Dowling keeps pushing the hair back from her face. The wind doesn’t help.
Mrs. Dowling is looking at her—inspecting her, Isabel thinks. Is she saying those things to herself that people used to say when they heard how she ended up the daughter of Admiral and Mrs. Farnworth of Woodbury House? That with hair the color of wet sand and eyes the gray of the Atlantic in winter, with freckles that congregate in such numbers on her arms and legs in summer they blend to form an almost orange canvas, she looks like a child of the sea and not of the fair-skinned, dark-haired Mrs. Farnworth?
Isabel’s features are the opposite of her late mother’s: her nose and mouth large, her eyes somewhat small, but still in proportion so that most consider her handsome, though it’s generally accepted she doesn’t possess anywhere near the level of beauty of Alice Farnworth.
Of course, Mrs. Dowling cannot know these things. She didn’t know Isabel’s father; she can’t compare her to him. Nor did she know Isabel’s mother, unless they met that one time, nineteen years ago. As far as she’s aware, Mrs. Dowling doesn’t have any connections in London, nor in nearby Greenwich. She may be inspecting Isabel, but she cannot have heard the rumors—cannot find herwanting. Like the fishwives in the village, Mrs. Dowling cannot possibly know the other reason Isabel has moved to Cornwall, besides her evident poverty.
Downstairs, there are only two rooms in the cottage: the small kitchen and a larger sitting room with a second stone fireplace, this one with a chimneypiece to match the wall, and two more spindle-back chairs. A stack of logs is piled on either side of the fireplace. The doors are so low even Isabel has to lower her head. A narrow set of open wooden stairs leads from the sitting room to a small bedroom upstairs, under the rafters. “It has a staircase,” Mrs. Dowling says, as if this is some choice piece of fruit in a pie. “You don’t often see that in a cottage like this. Mostly, it’s ladders, you see, if there’s an upper floor at all. You’ll find bed linens in the chest. The privy is out the back. Just two steps into the garden.”
Isabel expects cobwebs, dust, grime—Mrs. Dowling says the cottage hasn’t been lived in for three years—but the rough stone surfaces are spotless. She tries to picture going out to the privy at night. She wants to ask if there’s a chamber pot or if she shall have to purchase one, but it seems a private sort of thing to inquire about, so instead she asks to be shown the garden. Mrs. Dowling makes her way down the stairs and through the back door. There is a small shed that turns out to be the privy and a patch of grass, some shrubs, and a path that leads through them. “Where does that go?” she asks.
“I’ll show you.”
Mrs. Dowling goes ahead on the path. It’s shaded and overgrown. At the sunlit end of it, they step into something very different from the simple, dark cottage—something akin to paradise. Another patch of grass pushes up against a low wall of mossy gray flags, piled on top of one another in what seems to be a haphazard sort of fashion. The stones are covered in ivy and white and magenta-pink flowers. Bees flit among them. There are flat gray stones on the ground, too, forming a small terrace, with a wooden bench on it that’s painted white and a square wooden table, also whitewashed. The paint is old and dry from the sun. In some places it’s flaking, but something about this bench, about the fact that someone has taken the time to paint it, makes her ache with sudden feeling. She turns away from Mrs. Dowling lest the landlady sees it in her face—raw, rising tears.
The terrace looks out across the river, which by now has turned a powdery blue in the sun. A plump apple tree spreads its branches across the bench. On a hot day there will be shade in the afternoon. The wind sweeps the water into tufts, like cream on a pudding, swaying the boats at anchor, and in the distance the headland on the other side lies in a green, still haze. Again she feels the sudden, heavy tug of desire, to go across the water and see the land on the other side; to find the open ocean, to swim in it. It flusters her and she’s glad she’s looking away from Mrs. Dowling.
To the left of the patch of grass, half hidden by an overgrown bush, is a stone well. “This here is the well,” Mrs. Dowling says, followingher gaze. “It’s deep enough that the water isn’t brackish. You may want to clear some of this hawthorn.” A pause, then, a little uncertainly: “I hope it’s to your liking.”
