The object of the reference quickly bowed his head, not through modesty but in a stubborn determination not to make eye contact with someone who was patently grasping at straws. Such determination was to prove in vain. The preacher was at Davey’s side before he could reach the pitch-pine doors. The man offered him every cliché of condolence in the book before introducing him to the rain-coated couple as “Hannah’s grandson.” The Canadian wouldn’t even have bothered to correct the preacher had not the information invoked immediate and unmitigated looks of hostility from the two dwarfs. Davey was forced to confront them whether he liked it or not. They were both even shorter than he’d first thought. With wrinkled, wind-tanned flesh and dark, furtive eyes, they might also have been brother and sister.
At the threshold to the moan of the wind and the hiss of rain the woman spoke up. “Us didn’ know as how Hannah had a grandson. Ask me husband. Never spoke of ’un, did her, Len?”
By now Davey knew that whatever else had gone, the Cornish dialect hadn’t died out in North Cornwall. “Len” confirmed it. “Oi bide there were none but a nephew and he lived a brave way away. Foreign parts, Oi reckon. By the way, we’m Len and Hilda Verran.”
Davey didn’t extend his hand.
The object of their attention addressed them in a slightly Southern accent, filched from excessive observances of Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. “You are addressin’ the very same! Across the water from where we stand,” Davey added, pointing toward Newfoundland. “I come from afar, ma’am, but I represent her other four kin—all of them residents of this island if not exactly in Cornwall but none of whom, from mental distress or other preoccupations, are able to be here with us this afternoon.”
Mrs. Verran attempted a smile. “We was her closest friends, we was, as well as her Tintagel cousins. She did mention of ’ee, didn’ her, Len? Full of kind words for ’ee, she was. Her was allus speaking of your friend and that lovely house you two do have. Down by the Pacific Ocean, Oi think her did say?”
“Was allus saying,” her diminutive husband interrupted. “Talked of little else when her moind was working. Not that that were too often. Till we persuaded her to go into the Home we had to spoon-feed her, you. And bravun more’n that, Oi don’ moind a-telling of ’ee. If ’twasn’ for Hilda here, Hannah Bryant would have been in some messy state, you. Hilda made her loife worth living these past years. Whole village will tell ’ee that. Little to show for it, though there’s some will tell ’ee otherwise. Spiteful bastards!”
“Come now, Len, no need for bad language,” his spouse reprimanded, offering Davey such a sickly leer that he could have upchucked.
By this time Hannah’s nephew also gathered the Verrans were fluent liars. The old girl would never have mentioned Ken and himself in the same breath, let alone their sharing a house. His betting was they’d been through her correspondence like an avid brace of ferrets. More, he knew of no Tintagel cousins, though the idea brought with it the earlier vague notion that they looked somehow familiar. Not that at that point he sought further elucidation.
Davey’s palms sweated with discomfort. These two unwholesome relics of Aunt Hannah’s final phase of life, he told himself, reeked of cupidity. A brace of money-grubbers, they obviously scented potential recompense from him. Perhaps they’d also discovered the fact that his aunt had died skint, that she didn’t even own Lanoe, the house she’d lived in, as that had reverted to Alyson and him when Hannah’s sister-in-law, their Aunt Nora, had died
As Davey stared down at the Verrans, he imagined how, as arduous little maggots, they must have wriggled their way into his aunt’s trust as her pain-wracked body moved steadily toward its final state of collapse. Whether they had or not, peasant cunning determined that he now be regarded as a potential stone to be turned carefully over lest there be further trove from an unwanted link to Hannah they hadn’t contemplated, turning up now at her funeral.
He told himself he hated them for that—detested them for thinking he was going to be an easy make. Then he drew back. Where, he thought, suddenly bewildered, was his mind taking him? A kind of contempt for their mercenary attitudes over his aunt was one thing, but he was experiencing visceral feelings that went far beyond that. Whence came this vigorous loathing of an odd little couple who had been utter strangers until minutes earlier?
He decided to blame it on the recently experienced funeral service. It had jabbed strange questions and released doubts in him that had lain dormant for decades. In their thick Cornish accents this couple merely confirmed with a vengeance that he was back in his ancestral lands. It had all happened too quickly, with not enough space between the jerky train and the thick fog of his depression and the driving up to the chapel on the blustery headland and being pitchforked back into the bluff and energetic Methodism that had pursued him in his childhood.
He sought now as alternative to play little games with the Verrans—wild fancies that would curb his sudden animosity and hopefully distance himself from the pair. “Aunt Hannah was so modest,” he began. “She never wanted to talk about all that coal-mine money Uncle Petherick left her after he immigrated to Pittsburgh. And I guess she told you more, as her best friends, than she ever told me about the Texas property of old Petherick’s daughter, Loveday, and the oil well she inherited from her second husband?”
Stroking a beardless chin, Davey looked out of the tall doors at the leaden sea. “Funny,” he mused, “I guess most of the fortune she was left came from the United States rather than Canada where all she got was the Alberta ranch. I don’t expect she left too much over here, did she? Then the house was never exclusively hers, of course. When her dear sister-in-law died, Cousin Alyson and I divvied up the proceeds of Lanoe House with her and let her stay there rent-free while she lived. Not that she needed anything like that with all the American loot. Then who am I telling? You got all the information when the will was read, of course.”
Hilda Verran could contain herself no longer. She let out a hiss of air surprisingly loud for one of her stature. What will? We b’aint heard of no will! There bin no will read, has there, Len? Jest a penny or two lying about the house, and bits o’ furniture that was hardly more’n matchsticks. Curtains was in rags from the first day Oi see’d ’em!”
Her husband glanced up at Davey’s face and probably saw the smirk lurking there. He grabbed at her sleeve. “There were a derelict old Austin out back. No more’n a pile of junk that was! Least it help pay getting her into the Breakers. Otherwise she’d have been on the parish.”
Davey thought the man was expecting his sympathy, when he felt much closer to erupting in laughter. Fortunately for the Verrans that was the moment the organist and preacher elected to depart. There was a smile for Davey from the uncertain musician, who then accorded the preacher a grudging nod as the tall figure, now wrapped in a bright yellow oilskin, bolted the doors of the chapel behind all five of them. He gave his erstwhile congregation a deep-throated adieu before stepping toward his muddy vehicle and, Davey hazarded, another funeral on his scattered circuit of rural Primitive Wesleyan chapels along the North Cornwall coast. The lady left on a bicycle.
The three remaining regarded one another. In accordance with his earlier resolution Davey smiled at them both as two upturned faces, their expressions flitting from anxiety through skepticism to outright hostility with the regularity of traffic lights.
Their disconcerted looks were matched with an excited, high-pitched babble. Mr. Verran was the loudest, his spouse the more voluble, but it still remained a hysterical chorus from the little couple. “Will? Oh, no, sir! No bloody will!”
“Her never, ever mentioned that money, did her, Len? Money in America? Money in H’Alberta? Never! Never! Be sure on that, maister.