The Fire Child Read online

  For ten minutes I try to find the best position for this vase. I imagine Nina Kerthen, behind me, shaking her head in polite dismay. And now the self-doubt returns. I am sure that Nina Kerthen would have got this right. She would have done it impeccably. With her blonde hair harping across her slanted, clever blue eyes, as she squinted, and concentrated.

  Abandoning my job, I gaze down, sighing. The varnished yew wood of the table reflects my face in its darkness. A crack runs the length of the table, breaking the image in two. Which is appropriate.

  People tell me I am attractive, and yet I never truly feel beautiful: not with my red hair and my peppering of freckles, and that white Celtic skin that never takes a tan. Instead I feel flawed, or broken. Cracked. And when I look very hard at myself I can’t see any beauty at all: only the deepening lines by my eyes, far too many for my age – only thirty.

  A delicious breeze stirs me. It comes from the open window, carrying the scents of Carnhallow’s flower gardens, and it dispels my silliness, and reminds me of my prize. No. I am not broken, and this is enough self-doubt. I am Rachel Daly, and I have overcome greater challenges than sourcing the correct wallpaper, or working out what a tazza is.

  The seventy-eight bedrooms can wait, likewise the West Wing. I need some fresh air. Pocketing my phone, I go to the East Door, push it open to the serenity of the sun, so gorgeous on my upturned face. And then the south lawns. The wondrous gardens.

  The gardens at Carnhallow were the one thing, I am told, that David’s father Richard Kerthen kept going, even as he gambled away the last of the Kerthen fortune, en route to a heart attack. And Nina apparently never did much with the gardens. Therefore, out here, I can enjoy a purer possession: I can wholeheartedly admire the freshly cut green grass shaded by Cornish elms, the flowerbeds crowded with summer colours. And I can straightaway love, as my own, the deep and beautiful woods: guarding and encircling Carnhallow as if the house is a jewel-box hidden in a coil of thorns.

  ‘Hello.’

  A little startled, I turn. It’s Juliet Kerthen: David’s mother. She lives, alone and defiant, in her own self-contained apartment converted from a corner of the otherwise crumbling and unrestored West Wing. Juliet has the first signs of Alzheimer’s, but is, as David phrases it, ‘in a state of noble denial’.

  ‘Lovely day,’ she says.

  ‘Gorgeous, isn’t it? Yes.’

  I’ve met Juliet a couple of times. I like her a lot: she has a vivid spirit. I do not know if she likes me. I have been too timid to go further, to really make friends, to knock on her front door with blackberry-and-apple pie. Because Juliet Kerthen may be old and fragile, but she is also daunting. The suitably blue-eyed, properly cheekboned daughter of Lord Carlyon. Another ancient Cornish family. She makes me feel every inch the working-class girl from Plumstead. She’d probably find my pie a bit vulgar.

  Yet she is perfectly friendly. The fault is mine.

  Juliet shields her eyes from the glare of the sun with a visoring hand. ‘David always says that life is a perfect English summer day. Beautiful, precisely because it is so rare and transient.’

  ‘Yes, that sounds like David.’

  ‘So how are you settling yourself in, dear?’

  ‘Fine. Really, really well!’

  ‘Yes?’ Her narrowed eyes examine me, but in a companionable way. I assess her in return. She is dressed like an elderly person, yet very neatly. A frock that must be thirty years old, a maroon and cashmere cardigan, then sensible, expensive shoes, probably hand-made for her in Truro forty years ago, and now, I guess, polished by Cassie, who looks in every day to make sure the old lady is alive.

  ‘You don’t find it too imposing?’

  ‘God no, well, yes, a bit but …’

  Juliet indulges me with a kind smile. ‘Don’t let it get to you. I remember when Richard first brought me home to Carnhallow. It was quite the ordeal. That last bit of the drive. Those ghastly little moorland roads from St Ives. I think Richard was rather proud of the remoteness. Added to the mythic quality. Would you like a cup of tea? I have excellent pu’er-cha. I get bored with drinking it alone. Or there is gin. I am in two minds.’

  ‘Yes. Tea would be brilliant. Thanks.’

  I follow her around the West Wing, heading for the north side of the house. The sun is restless and silvery on the distant sea. The clifftop mines are coming into view. I am chattering away about the house, trying to reassure Juliet, and maybe myself, that I am entirely optimistic.

  ‘What amazes me is how hidden it is. Carnhallow, I mean. Tucked away in this sweet little valley, a total suntrap. But you’re only a couple of miles from the moors, from all that bleakness.’

  She turns, and nods. ‘Indeed. Although the other side of the house is so completely different. It’s actually rather clever. Richard always said it proved that the legend was true.’

  I frown. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Because the other side of Carnhallow looks north, to the mines, on the cliffs.’

  I shake my head, puzzled.

  She asks, ‘David hasn’t told you the legend?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. I mean, uhm, he told me lots of stories. The rowans. The evil Jago Kerthen …’ I don’t want to say: Maybe we got so drunk on champagne on the first date and then we had such dizzying sex, I forgot half of what he told me – which is totally possible.

  Juliet turns towards the darkened shapes of the mines. ‘Well, this is the legend. The Kerthens, it is said, must have possessed a wicked gift, a sixth sense, or some kind of clairvoyance: because they kept hitting lodes of tin and copper, when other speculators went bust. There is a Cornish name for those with the gift: tus-tanyow. It means the people of fire, people with the light.’ She smiles, blithely. ‘You’ll hear locals telling the story in the Tinners – that’s a lovely pub, in Zennor. You must try it, but avoid the starry gazy pie. Anyway, Richard used to rather drone on about it, about the legend. Because the Kerthens built their house right here, on the bones of the old monastery, facing Morvellan, yet that was centuries before they discovered the tin at Morvellan. So if you are suggestible it rather implies that the legend is true. As if the Kerthens knew they were going to find tin. I know, let’s go and have some pu’er-cha and gin, perhaps they go together.’

  She walks briskly around the north-west corner of Carnhallow. I follow, eager for the friendship, and the distraction. Because her story disquiets me in a way I can’t exactly explain.

  It is, after all, just a silly little story about the historic family that made so much money, by sending those boys down those ancient mines. Where the tunnels run deep under the sea.

  162 Days Before Christmas

  Morning

  David is drawing me. We’re sitting in the high summer sun on the south lawns, a jug of freshly squeezed peach-and-lemon juice on a silver tray set down on the scented grass. I’m wearing a wicker hat, at an angle. Carnhallow House – my great and beautiful house – is glowing in the sunlight. I have certainly never felt posher. I have possibly never felt happier.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he says. ‘Hold for a second, darling. Doing your pretty upturned nose. Noses are tricky. It’s all about the shading.’

  He looks my way with a concentrated gaze then returns to the drawing paper, his pencil moving swiftly, shading and hatching. He is a very good artist, probably a much better artist – as I am realizing – than me. More naturally talented. I can draw a little but not as skilfully as this, and certainly not as fast.

  Discovering David’s artistic side has been one of the unexpected pleasures of this summer. I’ve known all along he was interested in the arts: after all, I first met him at a private view in a Shoreditch gallery. And when we were in Venice he was able to show me all his favourite Venetian artworks: not just the obvious Titians, and Canelettos, but the Brancusis in the Guggenheim, the baroque ceiling of San Pantalon, or a ninth-century Madonna in Torcello, with its watchful eyes of haunted yet eternal love. A mother’s never-ending love. It was so
lovely and sad it made me want to cry.

  Yet I didn’t properly realize that he was good at making art until I moved here to Carnhallow. I’ve seen some of David’s youthful work on the Drawing Room wall, and in his study: semi-abstract paintings of Penwith’s carns and moors and beaches. They are so good I thought, at first, that they were expensive professional pieces, bought at a Penzance auction house by Nina. Part of her painstaking restoration, her dedication to this house.

  ‘There,’ he says. ‘Nose done. Now the mouth. Mouths are easy. Two seconds.’ He leans back and looks at the drawing. ‘Hah. Aced it.’

  He sips some peach-and-lemon contentedly. The sun is warm on my bare and tanning shoulders. Birds are singing in Ladies Wood. I wouldn’t be surprised if they went into close harmony. This is it. The perfect moment of good luck. The man, the love, the sun, the beautiful house in a beautiful garden in a beautiful corner of England. I have an urge to say something nice, to repay the world.

  ‘You know you’re really good.’

  ‘Sorry, darling?’

  He is sketching again. Deep in masculine concentration. I like the way he focuses. Frowning, but not angry. Man At Work. ‘Drawing. I know I’ve told you this before – but you’re seriously talented.’

  ‘Meh,’ he says, like a teenager, but smiling like an adult, his hand moving briskly across the page. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘You never wanted to do it for a living?’

  ‘No. Yes. No.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘For a moment, after Cambridge, I considered it. I would have liked to try my hand, once. But I had no choice: I had to work, to make lots and lots of boring money.’

  ‘Because your dad burned up all the fortune?’

  ‘He even sold the family silver, Rachel. To pay those imbecilic gambling debts. Sold it like some junkie fencing the TV. I had to buy it back – the Kerthen silver. And they made me pay a premium.’ David sighs, takes another taste of juice. The sun sparkles on the glass tilted in his hand. He savours the freshness and flavour and looks past me, at the sun-laced woods.

  ‘Of course, we were running out of money anyway: it wasn’t all my father’s fault. Carnhallow was absurdly expensive to run, but the family kept trying. Though most of the mines were making losses by 1870.’

  ‘Why?’

  He picks up the pencil, taps it between his sharp white teeth. Thinking about the picture, answering me distractedly. ‘I really must do you nude. I’m embarrassingly good at nipples. It’s quite a gift.’

  ‘David!’ I laugh. ‘I want to know. Want to understand things. Why did they make losses?’

  He continues sketching. ‘Because Cornish mining is hard. There’s more tin and copper lying under Cornwall than has ever been mined, in all the four thousand years of Cornish mining history, yet it’s basically impossible to extract. And certainly unprofitable.’

  ‘Because of the cliffs, and the sea?’

  ‘Exactly. You’ve seen Morvellan. That was our most profitable mine, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it’s so dangerous and inaccessible.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘There’s a reason Morvellan has that strange architecture – the two houses. Most Cornish mineshafts were exposed to the air, only the pumps were protected, behind stone – because machinery was deemed more important than men, perhaps. But on the cliffs, above Zawn Hanna, the Kerthens had a problem: because of the proximity of the sea, and consequent storms, we had to protect the top of the shaft in its own house, right next to the Engine House.’ He stares at me and past me, as if he is looking at the mines themselves. ‘Creating, by accident, that poignant, diagonal symmetry.’ His pencil twirls slowly in his fingers. ‘Now compare that to the open-cast mines of Australia, or Malaysia. The tin is right there, at the surface. They can simply dig it out of the ground with a plastic spade. And that’s why Cornish mining died. Four thousand years of mining, gone in a couple of generations.’

  His cheerfulness has clouded over. I can sense his darkening thoughts, tending to Nina, who drowned at Morvellan. It was probably my fault, letting the conversation stray in this direction. Down the valley. Towards the mineheads on the cliffs. I must make amends. ‘You really want to do me nude?’

  His smile returns. ‘Oh yes. Oh, very much, yes.’ He laughs and peels his finished drawing from the volume, and slants his handsome head, assessing his own work. ‘Hmm. Not bad. Still didn’t get the nose right. I really am better at nipples. OK’ – he tilts a wrist to check the time – ‘I promised I’d take Jamie to school—’

  ‘At the weekend?’

  ‘Soccer match, remember? He’s very excited. Can you pick him up later? I’m seeing Alex in Falmouth.’

  ‘Of course I will. Love to.’

  ‘See you for dinner. You’re a great sitter.’

  He kisses me softly before striding away, around the house, heading for his car, calling out for Jamie. Like we are already a family. Safe and happy. This feeling warms me like the summer weather.

  I remain sitting here in the sun, eyes half-closed, mind half-asleep. The sense of sweet purposelessness is delicious. I have things to do, but nothing particular to do right now. Voices murmur in the house, and on the drive. The car door slams in the heat. The motor-noise dwindles as it heads through those dense woods, up the valley to the moors. Birdsong replaces it.

  Then I realize I haven’t looked at David’s drawing of me. Curious, maybe a little wary – I dislike being drawn, the same way I dislike being photographed: I only do it to indulge David – I lean across and pick up the sheet of paper.

  It is predictably excellent. In fifteen minutes of sketching he has captured me, from the slight sadness in my eyes that never goes away, to the sincere if uncertain smile. He sees me true. And yet I am pretty in this picture, too: the shadow of the hat flatters. And there in the picture is my love for him, vivid in the happy shyness of my gaze.

  He sees the love, which pleases me.

  There is only one flaw. It is the nose. My nose is, I am told, cute, retroussé, upturned. But he hasn’t sketched my nose at all. This nose is sharper, aquiline, more beautiful: this bone structure is from someone else’s face, someone else he drew a thousand times, so that it became habitual. And I know who. I’ve seen the photos, and the drawings.

  He’s made me look like Nina.

  Afternoon

  The drawing lies on the grass, fallen from my hand. I am awake, and surprised that I slept. I must have drifted off in the indulgent warmth of the sun. Gazing about me, I see nothing has changed. Shadows have lengthened. The day is still fine, the sun still bright.

  I sleep a lot in Carnhallow, and I sleep well. It is like I am catching up, after twenty-five years of alarm clocks. I sometimes feel so leisured that my latent guilt kicks in, along with a hint of loneliness.

  I haven’t got any proper friends down here yet, so these last solitary weeks when I haven’t been in the house I’ve been using the hours to drive and hike the wild Penwith landscape. I love photographing the silent mine stacks, the salt-bitten fishing villages and the dark and plunging coves where, on all but the calmest days, the waves throw themselves psychotically at the cliffs. Though my favourite place so far is Zawn Hanna, the cove at the end of our own valley. Morvellan Mine stands above it, but I ignore its black shapes and instead gaze out at the sea.

  When occasional summer rain has sent me indoors I’ve tried completing my mental map of Carnhallow. I’ve finally counted the seventy-eight bedrooms and it turns out that there are, in fact, eighteen, depending on how you categorize the tiny, sad, echoing box rooms on the top floor, which were probably servants’ quarters, though they have an odd echo of the monastic cells which must once, I presume, have stood on this ground, in this lush little valley.

  Some days, standing alone in the dust of this top floor, when the sea-wind is combing through the rowans, it feels like I can hear the words of those monks, caught on the breeze: Ave Maria, gratia plena: Dominus tecum …

  At
other times I linger in the Drawing Room, my favourite part of Carnhallow, along with the kitchen and the gardens. I’ve checked out most of the books, from Nina’s volumes on antique silverware and Meissen porcelain to David’s many monographs on mainly modern artists: Klee, Bacon, Jackson Pollock. David has a particular liking for abstract expressionists.

  Last weekend I saw him sit and stare at the solid black and red blobs of a Mark Rothko painting for an hour, then he closed the book, looked at me, and said, ‘We’re all astronauts, really, aren’t we; interstellar astronauts, travelling so far into the blackness we can never return.’ Then he got up and offered me Plymouth gin in a Georgian tumbler.

  But my biggest personal discovery has not been porcelain or paintings but a small dog-eared volume of photographs, hidden between two big fat books on Van Dyck and Michelangelo. When I first opened this battered little booklet it revealed startling monochrome images of historic Kerthen mines and the miners within them.

  The photos must, I reckon, be nineteenth century. I look at them almost every day. What amazes me about them is that the miners worked practically without light: all they had was the faint flicker of the tiny candles stuck in their felt hats. Which means that the moment the camera’s magnesium flash exploded was the only time in their lives when the miners properly saw where they worked, where they had spent every waking hour, digging and hewing and drilling. One precious fraction of brightness. Then back to lifelong darkness.

  The thought of those miners, who once toiled their lives away in the rocks right underneath me, stirs me into action. Get to work, Rachel Daly.

  The drawing is folded and set on the tray, which is warm from the sun. I carry the tray with the lemon-scented glasses into the coolness of the house, the airiness of the kitchen. Then I open my app. There are only two significant places left to explore: I’ve left them to last because they are the ones that give me the most concern. They are the worst of Carnhallow’s challenges.