cucumbers according to the old receipt Hepzie found in The Lady’s Most Precious Possessions . Ellen’s cheeks stayed red until they toned down, seemingly of their own moving, to look by the best light what might have been considered a golden brown. (Not until herself became a lady was she properly blanched, by sitting in a drawing-room, and driving out in a closed carriage, and keeping such late hours the fits of yawning forced the blood out of her cheeks.)
Ellen Gluyas was a hoyden by some standards. Pa would have liked a boy, an industrious one, to help about the farm and make amends for his own poor husbandry. What he got was a strong girl he did not properly appreciate, who did such jobs as she was asked to perform, and drove him home from Penzance when drunk on market day.
Sober, he was jovial enough, and she could forgive his being an idle muddler. But drunk, he became passionately abusive and unjust. Once he knocked her down in the slush as punishment for a gate himself had left open. While still a boy he jammed a thumb in a cheese-press, and instead of a nail, had a brown horn-thing growing there. It frightened her to catch sight of it.
Captain Purdew was still shouting, ‘… advise you … below,’ as he stooped to initiate her descent by the companion-ladder, ‘… Mr Roxburgh waiting on his breakfast … steward bringing … appetite ….’
Lowering her head she mastered a sudden distaste for the last of the flung spray. Or was it the captain’s damping words? In any event, Mrs Roxburgh returned by stages to the close, and by now sickening, constriction of the cabin, where she found her husband groping for his boots and complaining a great deal.
‘We got what we wanted at least. From the word go, we are at sea!’ Nor could he find his shoe-horn.
When finally he straightened up, Mr Roxburgh exclaimed, ‘Do you know what a sight you are? You are soaked!’
‘Yes.’ The crude little glass nailed to the wall for their convenience confirmed it. ‘Not soaked, that is. But a sight.’
‘You’ll do well to change at once, and not run the risk of being laid low with rheumatic fever for the rest of the voyage.’
Mr Roxburgh spoke in the voice he used when expressing fears for himself. She recognized it at once, and its tone brought her lower still.
‘I intend to change,’ she assured him without enthusiasm.
But she continued standing, waiting for her husband to finish dressing and remove himself to the saloon.
Then she tore off her scarf and bonnet, which were not so much wet as limp with moisture. So with all her outer garments. Her habitually well-kempt hair, dulled by salt, had strayed across her cheeks in tails. Her skin, mottled by the imperfect glass and watery stare of dazed eyes, brought to mind some anonymous creature stranded at a street corner in a fog of gin and indecision.
But Ellen Roxburgh did not remain for long oppressed: the canvas crowded back around her, together with the sting of spray, both on the deck of Bristol Maid , and farther off, along the black Cornish coast.
On reaching the age of discontent it seemed to her as though her whole life would be led on a stony hillside, amongst the ramshackledom of buildings which gather at the rear of farmhouses, along with midden and cow-byre. Poor as it was, moorland to the north where sheep could find a meagre picking, and a southerly patchwork of cultivable fields as compensation, she admitted to herself on days of minimum discouragement that she loved the place which had only ever, to her knowledge, been referred to as Gluyas’s. She would not have exchanged the furze thickets where a body might curl up on summer days and sheep take shelter in a squall, or the rocks with their rosettes of faded lichen, or cliffs dropping sheer towards the mouths of booming caverns, for any of the fat land to the south, where her Tregaskis cousins lived, and which made Aunt Triphena proud.
Some professed to have heard mermaids singing on
Ellen Gluyas was a hoyden by some standards. Pa would have liked a boy, an industrious one, to help about the farm and make amends for his own poor husbandry. What he got was a strong girl he did not properly appreciate, who did such jobs as she was asked to perform, and drove him home from Penzance when drunk on market day.
Sober, he was jovial enough, and she could forgive his being an idle muddler. But drunk, he became passionately abusive and unjust. Once he knocked her down in the slush as punishment for a gate himself had left open. While still a boy he jammed a thumb in a cheese-press, and instead of a nail, had a brown horn-thing growing there. It frightened her to catch sight of it.
Captain Purdew was still shouting, ‘… advise you … below,’ as he stooped to initiate her descent by the companion-ladder, ‘… Mr Roxburgh waiting on his breakfast … steward bringing … appetite ….’
Lowering her head she mastered a sudden distaste for the last of the flung spray. Or was it the captain’s damping words? In any event, Mrs Roxburgh returned by stages to the close, and by now sickening, constriction of the cabin, where she found her husband groping for his boots and complaining a great deal.
‘We got what we wanted at least. From the word go, we are at sea!’ Nor could he find his shoe-horn.
When finally he straightened up, Mr Roxburgh exclaimed, ‘Do you know what a sight you are? You are soaked!’
‘Yes.’ The crude little glass nailed to the wall for their convenience confirmed it. ‘Not soaked, that is. But a sight.’
‘You’ll do well to change at once, and not run the risk of being laid low with rheumatic fever for the rest of the voyage.’
Mr Roxburgh spoke in the voice he used when expressing fears for himself. She recognized it at once, and its tone brought her lower still.
‘I intend to change,’ she assured him without enthusiasm.
But she continued standing, waiting for her husband to finish dressing and remove himself to the saloon.
Then she tore off her scarf and bonnet, which were not so much wet as limp with moisture. So with all her outer garments. Her habitually well-kempt hair, dulled by salt, had strayed across her cheeks in tails. Her skin, mottled by the imperfect glass and watery stare of dazed eyes, brought to mind some anonymous creature stranded at a street corner in a fog of gin and indecision.
But Ellen Roxburgh did not remain for long oppressed: the canvas crowded back around her, together with the sting of spray, both on the deck of Bristol Maid , and farther off, along the black Cornish coast.
On reaching the age of discontent it seemed to her as though her whole life would be led on a stony hillside, amongst the ramshackledom of buildings which gather at the rear of farmhouses, along with midden and cow-byre. Poor as it was, moorland to the north where sheep could find a meagre picking, and a southerly patchwork of cultivable fields as compensation, she admitted to herself on days of minimum discouragement that she loved the place which had only ever, to her knowledge, been referred to as Gluyas’s. She would not have exchanged the furze thickets where a body might curl up on summer days and sheep take shelter in a squall, or the rocks with their rosettes of faded lichen, or cliffs dropping sheer towards the mouths of booming caverns, for any of the fat land to the south, where her Tregaskis cousins lived, and which made Aunt Triphena proud.
Some professed to have heard mermaids singing on
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