“Her left nothing in Lanoe that a Gypo would drop by for!” Len chimed in. “Oi can tell on ’ee that! Cryin’ poor mouth, with all that tucked away over there! Regular miser, then, was our Hannah Bryant! Devious biddy!”
“Miser and hypocrite! A lettin’ of us slave over her all them years! And to think her could’ve had a regular bunch of servants awaitin’ on her every wish and whim!” Hilda paused for a breath.
Davey shifted his weight onto the other leg. Their frantic litany was beginning to bore him. It was then he came to a decision that was to have far-reaching implications, far more than he could have ever anticipated. Besides, his adopted playfulness was shot with cunning. He suddenly saw a way of temporarily ridding himself of these tiresome two who claimed to be cousins and at the same time extending their punishment for their greedy insinuation into old Hannah’s life.
“Maybe she did make a will,” he began, “and then hid it somewhere in the house. Auntie was so suspicious about a lot of things.” A fresh inspiration sustained his invention. “Of course, it would be made out to you people. There was really no one else, you see. She told Cousin Alyson and me that the proceeds from the house would be all we’d ever get. She might have mentioned the North Cornwall Hunt or some dogs’ home in Newquay as beneficiaries, but that would have been before you guys moved in. I mean, before she had your help and loving care.”
They exchanged quick glances. Davey felt he could feel them secretly slobber over the references to both fox hunt and dogs’ home. He felt sure they would be aware of the two incidents in his aunt’s life of which she moaned endlessly. One involved the littering of her land by defecating foxhounds, the other her spirited defence of her treacherous dog who apparently had turned on her, disfiguring her face and nearly biting her to death.
The Verrans couldn’t contain themselves. “Oh, her would’ve had no truck with the loikes of they!” Hilda shouted.
“Sued the master of hounds over the North Cornwall and the shit its dogs dropped all over her lawn!” her husband exclaimed. And, as further elaboration: “And Oi reckon she were moinded to have all bloody dogs outlawed after she were savaged by her own. No, my handsome, there’d be no money going to them outfits. Not bloody likely!”
“More than that Oi reckon we got no more to say.” Whether Hilda was merely upset by her husband’s language or whether she was fearful of one of them saying too much—now that the prospects of personal enrichment had become so much closer—Davey was unsure, but he opted for the latter. Articulation was always risky where he and they came from: he recalled afresh how deep went Cornish superstition.
“I have an idea,” he volunteered. “Why don’t we all slip over to Lanoe and see what we can find?” Then, lest they were reluctant to accompany him, he added, “There’s a problem of time, you see. I mean, if in Canada and the U.S. they don’t hear of a will, they might simply regard her as intestate and hand over all her assets to the state.”
Even as he said it, Davey thought his spur-of-the-moment argument crass, but he realized at that juncture he was relying not so much on his powers of persuasion as on the blindness of the greedy. He blew the gods a kiss as the Verrans scrambled over each other verbally to shout their instant agreement with his cockeyed proposal.
In a matter of minutes both their ancient Morris Mini van and his rented Rover were revving loudly against the cry of the wind. As the two vehicles headed south on reaching the coastal highway, the dwarfs quickly passed him and he lost sight of them. That didn’t faze him, though. He was looking forward to driving at a leisurely pace through the network of narrow, leafy lanes on leaving the main road and heading for Pentudy with its fondly remembered Celtic cross dominating the village green. It was at least twenty years since he’d seen the village where “Lanoe” was his family’s “dower house” and where each Bryant generation had gone in succession from the neighbouring parish where the eldest sons had always farmed so that the two village churches shared in the family christenings, marriages, and occasional burials over at least three centuries.
But during that return to the past Davey was to learn that the “new Cornwall” he was about to experience, albeit briefly, was savagely different from the one he’d left behind. Of course, he was about to change his mind concerning a whole lot of things, not least about his relatives dead and alive, his lifetime companion back in British Columbia, and finally himself.
FOUR
Cornwall had always been a place for Davey Bryant that shored up romantic and conservative beliefs. Everything about it served not only a faith in the past but proclaimed that past would endure. The very granite and serpentine from which the peninsula had been honed by millennia of grinding seas affirmed the stubbornly permanent finger poking out from western Europe. So did the unceasing surf that pounded it. Likewise the wind-scoured skies that turned silver mist into azure in one powerful breath. Raven-haunted moors would never be fields, Dozmary Pool would never dry up, and the scream of gulls and swoop of martins would festoon the cliffs facing fabled Lyonnesse forever.
All these images and convictions had entered Davey’s soul, from its first beat in that farmhouse reached only by unsurfaced, fern-bordered lanes and where drinking water, sweet with purity, was carried by sturdy men and women in giant buckets from the moss-screened well at the foot of the elm-clad hill where badgers lived in centuries-old setts.
And if the time warp wasn’t enough, there was also the isolation: a mile’s walk between heather and fern to the neighbouring farm whose tenants might not be seen for a month and whose presence might only be proclaimed by Mrs. Hoskyn’s calling to her upfield calves or the sound of her husband’s milk pails as he strode at sunrise to the cowshed and the clanging of their handles as he dropped them under an udder—weirdly muffled on morning mist—came to him over the boulder- and bracken-strewn valley. Seven miles away to Wadebridge, just under that to Camelford. But where were you when you reached such places?
Davey knew early in life that he lived some two hundred and fifty miles from London and eight hundred miles or so would get him near John o’ Groat’s, the northernmost tip of the British Isles, but all that was nothing to a boy accustomed to standing on Tregardock Cliffs and staring across toward North America over two thousand seven hundred miles westward and recalling how many of his relatives had sailed over there in the past hundred years or so. More Cornish folk, proportionately, than had fled the famine in Ireland.
All these verities that made pygmies of time… Then there were the domestic intimacies that had snared him yet more firmly: the great brass bed of his birth glowing dim in the flickering oil-lamp light, where his mother had groped and gripped at the bedclothes in the bridal bedroom of ancient Polengarrow, where red Virginia creeper grew over slate sidings screening mother and son from the teeming life of the surrounding farm.
He remembered other things: the burr of soft Cornish voices always in the ears; the smell of saffron-laden kitchens never far from the nostrils; the ubiquitous slate stiles in the hedges for pedestrian shortcuts along paths beaten by carless country folk walking from village to village, town to town; the huddled county town of Bodmin, full of friendly fish-and-chip shops but with grim, high walls for both a prison and a lunatic asylum through whose giant gates the mentally stricken would shuffle at full moon after having trudged down so many paths bordering fields and clambering over so many stiles, from white cob cottages often thirty or forty miles distant.
But now this kaleidoscope of recollections began to wobble. Instead of footpaths he was aware of so many gas stations festering the highway. Rows of new concrete-faced houses littered the outskirts of Delabole and Camelford as they had, indeed, of the Tintagel where he’d begun his journey in the wake of the Verrans.
Pylons suspending high-tension cables sprawled across fields double the size of those he’d left behind as their hedgerows had been bulldozed and where he now saw tractors at work rather than horses. Every now and then there were giant billboards that made him grind his teeth, and the far-off China clay pits around St. Austell seemed to have tripled in number whenever they hove in to view. Nor was he prompted