Arwen
My dearest Milly,
As promised, I am dashing off this note to say I have arrived safely at Triskelion and to give you my first impressions.
It is early morning and I am writing this in my bedroom, which is so big it could easily accommodate the whole of our lodgings in London! It is sumptuously furnished and at the back of the house, with a distant view of the sea beyond the long, sloping lawn.
An actual housemaid in cap and apron brought me early morning tea and seemed to be astonished to find me up and dressed already. She informed me that breakfast was not served until eight and the ladies rarely went down until half past.
It was so kind of you to see me off at the station and I admit I cried a little as your dear face vanished from view when the train pulled out …
However, I am determined that my stay in Wales will not be a long one and, if I don’t return to Cornwall with you after your visit in September, I will most certainly soon follow on.
I told this to Mrs Fry, when she commented on my having only one trunk, a carpet bag and the knapsack Papa used when painting en plein air, and she said she hoped I was not going to turn out to be a headstrong, silly and ungrateful girl.
I don’t think she stopped talking once during that interminable journey and I found her high-pitched, clipped voice as irritating as a wasp buzzing around my head.
What a strange little creature she is! Her head and bust are so large, then the rest of her tapers away to those tiny little feet, so that she reminds me of nothing so much as a desiccated shrimp.
I am to call her Aunt Maude, by the way, although since she is merely a distant connection of my guardian, I don’t think there can be any relationship at all.
While she rattled on, I gleaned a good deal of information about Mr Caradoc and the household at Triskelion, but most especially about Beatrice Caradoc – Bea, as Aunt Maude called her – on whom she appears to dote. Evidently, I am but a candle to the sun, in comparison …
She told me it was a pity I was so very tall. Apparently dear Bea is so small and dainty that one of her admirers, a Mr Mark Prynne, had said she could be a visitor from fairyland!
I managed to suppress my unruly and often sarcastic tongue with some difficulty and she went on to tell me that Mark Prynne is the second son of the family who own much of the land in the district and have an extensive estate in the next village, St Melangell.
It seems that during his last leave, he and Bea came to an understanding, but since she was very young nothing was officially announced.
Then she said:‘This seemed all to the good when he was severely injured last year and brought back to England, quite out of his senses and struck blind – so of course there could be no question of Bea marrying him then.’
Then she told me the unfortunate man had been recovering in a hospital for servicemen set up by some grand lady in her own home in Devon, and had regained both his sight and his faculties.
He will soon be coming home and she was sure an announcement of their engagement would quickly follow.
The young man’s elder brother was killed in battle last summer, so that Mark Prynne is now the heir to the Castle Newydd estate, which she said was a most fortunate circumstance.
It all sounded very mercenary and calculating, but I may be doing my cousin Bea an injustice for she might truly be in love with him.
I asked Maudie – for so she has become in my mind, although I must take care not to call her this to her face!
– if his family would be pleased about this and she said that since Bea was Mr Caradoc’s only child and her late mother had been quite an heiress too, she had no doubt that they would, for no one’s income was what it had been before the war.
She spent the rest of the journey speculating about the wedding and seemed quite sure they would spend most of the year in London, for a love of gaiety and all that the metropolis had to offer them was one of the things that had drawn them together.
The young man had an income of his own, inherited from a godfather.
Plainly I was expected to envy my cousin Bea’s good fortune, but no, I have no wish to be a little dab of a female, dependent on a man for my existence.
I was happy to be tall, with an aquiline nose like Mama’s, which had given her handsome face such character and authority.
And Papa had adored her, so not all men desired the same qualities in a wife …
Maudie also bemoaned the fact that Mr Caradoc had become even more reclusive and also needlessly penny-pinching, even denying Bea a London season after leaving school, where, despite coming out not being what it was before the war, she was sure she would have made a great success!
You can imagine that by the time we reached the final station and were met by a large and very grand car with a chauffeur (tell Edwin I much prefer his little Ford!), my head was spinning with all this information and I felt quite exhausted.
I even lost interest in the mountainous scenery.
Eventually Mrs Fry informed me that the large fishing village we were passing through was St Melangell, and a few minutes later we had climbed a small hill and the hamlet of Seren Bach – which means Little Star – was laid out before us, in a small valley on a promontory almost completely surrounded by the sea, so that it was nearly an island!
We swept past a huddle of cottages around a green and across a small bridge, and there was Triskelion, a large white stone building with a sweep of gravel before it.
As we went up the stone steps to a large and ancient-looking door under a pillared portico, over which was carved the same curious symbol of three hares in a circle that had been on the seal of my guardian’s letters, it opened, spilling out warm light and revealing a middle-aged woman of generous proportions firmly upholstered, rather than clad, in drab black, and with her grizzled hair pulled back into a high bun.
She was introduced as the cook/housekeeper, Mrs Bradley.
She told us that dinner had been held back for us and Maudie said we would not change tonight, just wash and come straight down.
As I was led to my grand bedroom I wondered, given the limitations of my wardrobe, what exactly Maudie expected me to change into, unless she thought my Norfolk jacket and skirt merely a drab chrysalis, from which would soon burst forth a bright social butterfly.
This thought amused me as I tidied up and then joined her at the foot of the stairs, and we went together into the dining room where my guardian and his daughter awaited us.
I don’t know why I had pictured Cosmo Caradoc as an elderly man, like Papa, when I knew very well he was more Mama’s age, a good twenty years younger, so I was temporarily dumbfounded to find him so tall, dark and commanding in appearance – and you were right, for he is very handsome in a dark and intense way.
He stared at me intensely when we were introduced and then said abruptly that I looked very much like my mama when he first met her at my parents’ wedding, except my eyes were a dark grey rather than her light blue!
From the way he said it, I suspected he had had a soft spot for her.
Bea, who merely said, ‘How do you do?’ in the same clipped high voice as Maudie, was just as her aunt had described her: small, dainty, extremely pretty, with her waving black hair in a chignon.
Her eyes are as dark a blue as her papa’s, but I thought her rosebud mouth looked sulky.
She was attired in a pale pink dress that seemed to me to have an excess of frills and ribbons, and she did not seem to think much of me, or my blouse and skirt.
Over dinner I was too overwhelmed by tiredness, the realization that I was so very far away from those I loved and everything familiar to me, and the strangeness of my current surroundings and company, to notice what I ate.
I did not revive for some time and then it was to find Bea and Maudie discussing the latest fashions and a dress pattern and some material that Maudie had obtained for her in London.
‘Of course Miss Hughes, who is the dressmaker in the nearest town, will not do it justice,’ Bea informed me, before adding: ‘I suppose Aunt and I will have to introduce you to what little local society there is – and apart from the Prynnes, who have a large estate nearby, there is only the vicar and his family and the doctor and his daughter. I hope you have brought more suitable clothes for the country, for everyone will be quite shocked at the shortness of your skirt … not to mention your hair.’
I thought this rather rude of my cousin, to whom I was not warming, so I said firmly, and with a challenging glance at Mr Caradoc, that since I had no desire to be introduced into local society, my lack of suitable country clothes and hairstyle wouldn’t matter.
‘I am an artist and mean eventually to earn my living by my brush, so my time will be spent working during my stay here,’ I finished defiantly.
Maudie pursed up her lips at this, and said I was still quite a child and must do as my guardian bid me, as if I was eight, rather than eighteen!
Mr Caradoc said very gravely, so that I didn’t know if he was serious or not, ‘You must understand, Bea, that your new cousin is not a frivolous and empty-headed chit like yourself, but serious-minded and quite determined about her work, and means to pursue her studies while under my guardianship.’
My eyes again met his deep set and compelling dark blue ones and I thought I might as well lock swords with him now, as later, so I said firmly that, as I had written to him, I had no need of a guardian, for in the autumn I planned to take up residence in Cornwall with my friends.
He replied that since he found my plan of living with a friend not much older than myself and her brother totally unsuitable, he could not agree to it and could only hope that I found the surrounding scenery as inspiring as he did, for my home would be at Triskelion for at least the next three years.
Then, before I could argue the point, he smiled in a way that suddenly made him look much less formidable and suggested that I should settle into Triskelion and see how I liked it, before continuing to argue the point.
I let it go for the moment and in fact was so tired that I went early to bed.
But I am now refreshed after a good sleep and, since it is almost eight, mean to go down and beard the dragon himself over the breakfast table before the others come down!
While he seems to understand my desire to work and to be taken seriously as an artist, so that a summer spent here will be more useful than I expected, yet he must be made to accept that that will be the extent of my stay at Triskelion.
I know you were afraid that when I got here I would find I liked it so much I would wish to make my home here, but I can assure you that will not happen.
And your other great fear, that Bea would replace you in my affections, is equally groundless, because anyone less likely to turn into a bosom friend I never met.
I expect as I write this you are setting out for Cornwall to view the cottage and I do hope it is as perfect as it sounded.
My letter will be waiting for you on your return and possibly a longer letter by then, too.
And I hope to receive one from you as soon as possible, for I want to hear all about Smuggler’s Cottage.
Your loving friend,
Arwen