history of Brodmaw Bay. After dropping Olivia at school, Lillian returned as she had promised she would, to give Jack the motherly TLC she really needed no excuse to lavish on her son. They were an affectionate family, naturally and uninhibitedly demonstrative in their affections for one another. Sometimes, when they watched television together, it looked to James like Jack was welded to his mother. James thought it wonderful. He was just sorry that adolescent self-consciousness would probably, fairly shortly, inhibit his son’s tactile nature. And when it did so, where his parents were concerned, it would likely do so for ever. It was a shame.
Lillian’s return gave James the time to lock himself away in the study and learn about the idyllic settlement beside the sea on the way to capturing their hearts and futures. He planned to drive to Cornwall early the following morning. He would take the family car, their beaten-up old Saab, rather than the Jaguar. The Jag would likely add another ten grand to the speculative value of any property he viewed in the mind of the seller, should he spot somewhere they might like to make an offer for on his trip. He knew enough about the traditional shrewdness with which Cornish folk dealt with outsiders, to guard against that sort of opportunistic profiteering as best he could.
Fewer than four hundred people lived in Brodmaw Bay. It had grown over the years. At the time the Domesday Book had been compiled, it had been a coastal hamlet of sixty souls. So it had not grown that greatly in the nine hundred-odd years since then. Topography determined its physical size. The land rose steeply behind it and its harbour sat at the centre of a claw-shaped breakwater hewn from the coastline by nature. To either side of it, the land receded sharply, isolating the area that could actually be built upon.
Then there was its economy. It survived on what its fishing fleet brought in. The prosperity or poverty of the town was determined entirely by the weight and character of what was landed in the nets. There was no land worthy of cultivation in the area. Thin soil and salt saw to that. There had never been a tin mine in the vicinity worth working. Everything, ultimately, depended upon the catch.
There was some patronage and had been down the centuries. The Penmarrick family were local and very wealthy. The wealth was long established, but its source was obscure. It could not be fish, James concluded, wryly. Crabs and lobsters would always have fetched a fair price at the market towns inland. But not profit on that scale. It seemed to be dynastic wealth. But the Penmarricks held no baronial title bestowed in Norman times by a grateful king. It was a bit of a mystery where the money came from.
He thought that perhaps it originated in tin deposits or land owned elsewhere. It could have been generated abroad at some time in Britain’s imperial past. Maybe a distant Penmarrick ancestor had been a successful mercenary in the pay of the Crown during the century of war with the French in medieval times. Or there was piracy, which had brought immense rewards from about the fourteenth century on. It did not greatly matter. Richard Penmarrick was rich and generous and rightly popular. That was what counted. In Brodmaw Bay, his was a powerful and very influential voice.
The only really unusual thing about the history of this Cornish fishing village was its association with witchcraft. The first trials had come in the aftermath of the Black Death, in the fourteenth century. But they had been followed by a further, even harsher incidence of persecution inflicted by one of the Witchfinder Generals in Cromwellian times. His name had been Jacob Ratch. There were some etchings of the executions, women in the black habits they had been ordered to wear for their interrogations.
The images were grim and pitiful. James thought that the witchfinder must have been very enterprising in his accusations and questioning to
Lillian’s return gave James the time to lock himself away in the study and learn about the idyllic settlement beside the sea on the way to capturing their hearts and futures. He planned to drive to Cornwall early the following morning. He would take the family car, their beaten-up old Saab, rather than the Jaguar. The Jag would likely add another ten grand to the speculative value of any property he viewed in the mind of the seller, should he spot somewhere they might like to make an offer for on his trip. He knew enough about the traditional shrewdness with which Cornish folk dealt with outsiders, to guard against that sort of opportunistic profiteering as best he could.
Fewer than four hundred people lived in Brodmaw Bay. It had grown over the years. At the time the Domesday Book had been compiled, it had been a coastal hamlet of sixty souls. So it had not grown that greatly in the nine hundred-odd years since then. Topography determined its physical size. The land rose steeply behind it and its harbour sat at the centre of a claw-shaped breakwater hewn from the coastline by nature. To either side of it, the land receded sharply, isolating the area that could actually be built upon.
Then there was its economy. It survived on what its fishing fleet brought in. The prosperity or poverty of the town was determined entirely by the weight and character of what was landed in the nets. There was no land worthy of cultivation in the area. Thin soil and salt saw to that. There had never been a tin mine in the vicinity worth working. Everything, ultimately, depended upon the catch.
There was some patronage and had been down the centuries. The Penmarrick family were local and very wealthy. The wealth was long established, but its source was obscure. It could not be fish, James concluded, wryly. Crabs and lobsters would always have fetched a fair price at the market towns inland. But not profit on that scale. It seemed to be dynastic wealth. But the Penmarricks held no baronial title bestowed in Norman times by a grateful king. It was a bit of a mystery where the money came from.
He thought that perhaps it originated in tin deposits or land owned elsewhere. It could have been generated abroad at some time in Britain’s imperial past. Maybe a distant Penmarrick ancestor had been a successful mercenary in the pay of the Crown during the century of war with the French in medieval times. Or there was piracy, which had brought immense rewards from about the fourteenth century on. It did not greatly matter. Richard Penmarrick was rich and generous and rightly popular. That was what counted. In Brodmaw Bay, his was a powerful and very influential voice.
The only really unusual thing about the history of this Cornish fishing village was its association with witchcraft. The first trials had come in the aftermath of the Black Death, in the fourteenth century. But they had been followed by a further, even harsher incidence of persecution inflicted by one of the Witchfinder Generals in Cromwellian times. His name had been Jacob Ratch. There were some etchings of the executions, women in the black habits they had been ordered to wear for their interrogations.
The images were grim and pitiful. James thought that the witchfinder must have been very enterprising in his accusations and questioning to
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