Read Online Penmarric by Susan Howatch - Free Book Online Page A

spend all day there selling the farm produce.”
    I felt appeased. After we had parted I walked down the path to the lane before I looked back over my shoulder, but she had already gone back into the house and the front door was closed. When I reached the lane I glanced back a second time as if unable to believe that she was no longer watching me, and strangely enough my instinct was correct. The curtain on one side of the parlor window moved slightly; she had been watching me all the time.
3
    I was so disturbed by the meeting and so restless that I was quite unable to sleep that night and arose the next morning feeling that the last thing I desired was to accompany my father to church at Zillan and lunch afterward with Mr., Mrs. and Miss Barnwell at the rectory. But I could hardly explain to my father that I would have preferred to ease my intolerable restlessness by walking to Penzance and buying a discreet list of female names and addresses from the head porter of the Metropole Hotel. Controlling myself with an effort, I accompanied him meekly in the ponytrap to church and spent the entire service, I regret to say, imagining what might happen if Mrs. Roslyn and I were alone together behind the locked door of a darkened room. It was not that I was irreligious; on the contrary, I was then much more religious than I am now, for my father had instilled churchgoing habits into both Nigel and myself at an early age, and this religious background was so closely interwoven with my father’s standards which I admired so deeply that my acceptance of it was complete. Despite the post-Darwin tides of atheism I had encountered at Oxford and the independence of thought fostered by the academic climate, it had never occurred to me not to believe in God and worship Him dutifully every Sunday, and even later in life when I moved toward agnosticism I still derived a sense of security from regular attendance at church. Hypocritical perhaps, but when I was twenty I was not aware of any hypocrisy. My father believed, and if he believed, then I believed too.
    During the first hymn I glanced over my shoulder and nearly dropped my hymnbook when I saw Mrs. Roslyn in one of the back pews. I had not seen her enter the church and had assumed she was not attending matins that week. When I managed to look at her a second time I noticed the ugly hunched old crone who was standing next to her and realized with a shock that this must be the mysterious Griselda who had accompanied Mrs. Roslyn to Zillan on her marriage. The old crone looked little better than a fishwife. I wondered what her connection was with Mrs. Roslyn, and not for the first time I began to speculate about Mrs. Roslyn’s early life in St. Ives.
    The service ended at last, but there was no chance for a word with Mrs. Roslyn, for she and the crone left immediately and I was detained in the aisle to be introduced to the rector’s wife and daughter before we all retreated to the rectory for luncheon. As I had suspected; the meal turned out to be dinner served early to spare the servants undue labor on the Sabbath, and I ate hungrily as I observed my host and his family. Mrs. Barnwell was a gossipy woman with a long nose that clearly enjoyed poking its way into other people’s business; I was surprised that the rector, who was an interesting man, should have selected such an uninteresting woman to be his life-long companion. Their daughter Miriam at first appeared to be as dreary as her mother, although where Mrs. Barnwell was garrulous Miriam was quiet and where Miriam was sedate Mrs. Barnwell was effusive, but after lunch when Mrs. Barnwell suggested coyly that her daughter might take me on a “grand tour of the garden,” I found that Miss Miriam Barnwell was not nearly so negative as I had supposed. I had felt sorry for her, knowing how hard it was for daughters of clergymen to meet suitable young men, and reflecting how isolated her existence must be at Zillan rectory, but I soon