Page 7 of The Cornish Widow

Chapter Four

Harriet stopped sweeping and leaned on her birch broom. A swirl of dust and dirt eddied in the breeze provided by the open windows of what might, if one’s imagination were particularly vivid, eventually be considered a parlor. Upstairs, Bertha was still crashing about and, in the kitchen, Lydia and Theo were bickering. Again. This was ridiculous. She didn’t have the tools to clean this place nor the skills, and neither did the children. It was never going to be habitable. And she doubted very much if Mrs. Trevelyan had meant what she’d said. She’d probably gone off to her undoubtedly lovely clean home and forgotten all about her impoverished new neighbor.

She swiped a strand of hair out of her eyes and tried to tuck it under her headscarf. If it wasn’t for the fact that they’d have been turned out on the streets in Bath, she’d never have accepted this offer, made through her late husband’s solicitor. The one he happened to have shared, unbeknownst to Harriet, with his great-aunt. The one who, solemn-faced, had informed them that Ben had left nothing but debts that had taken most of their belongings, leaving them only the tiniest annual stipend on which to live. Buying those stagecoach tickets with almost the last of their money and heading west back to her home county had seemed the most sensible thing to do. Cornwall, both her and Ben’s birthplace, had been calling to her, offering her the security of a home, despite the fact her parents were both long dead.

Theo crashed into the parlor. “Mama, Mama, there’s a wagon coming. I saw it from the front door.”

He ran to the parlor’s front window, from which she’d just pulled down the most moth-eaten set of cobwebby curtains she’d ever seen, and she followed. The view to the left showed the track, the ground rising away beyond it towards distant, hazy hills. Sure enough, on that track and heading towards the cottage was a wagon, piled high with what had to be pieces of furniture. Two women sat on the seat and a man walked by the head of the single horse, his hand on its bridle.

Lydia hurried to her side, her hair now also safely under a scarf and her dress as dirty as her mother’s. “They’re coming here, aren’t they? That lady said she’d send someone and she has.” Relief tinged her voice as she was no doubt counting on help with all this unaccustomed cleaning. And hopefully a real bed to sleep on that night. Harriet had to admit she shared her daughter’s hopes.

The wagon lurched closer. Good heavens. It appeared Mrs. Trevelyan had indeed lived up to her promise. Perhaps Harriet shouldn’t have been so doubting, but she was unused to people doing kind things for her. “Theo, run upstairs and tell Bertha. And mind you tread on the edges of the stairs. I don’t think we should trust our weight to the centers. Not until we’re sure.” They didn’t need him putting his foot through them tonight, and possibly breaking his leg.

“Even me?” Theo argued. “Bertha, yes, because she’s so fat, but not me.”

Harriet opened her mouth to reprimand him for his rudeness, but he’d gone, thundering up the stairs and quite definitely not treading carefully on the edges. Instead, she put his bad behavior away to deal with later, smoothed down her dress and retied her headscarf to control her unruly hair before hastening into the kitchen. By the time she reached the open front door, followed by Lydia, the wagon was just drawing up outside.

The man at the horse’s head, a giant of a fellow with a kind, weathered face and startlingly blue eyes, whipped his cap off to reveal thinning gray hair. “Mrs. Penhallow?” His voice held the rich vowels of Cornwall Harriet remembered from her childhood, bringing another lump to her throat. What was all this emotion? She’d learned not to show it to anyone in the last sixteen years, but somehow, Cornwall was drawing it to the surface.

Struck dumb for a moment, she nodded, and he made her an awkward little bow.

“Mrs. Trevelyan, she did send us over to help you out. I’m Locky Massen, and this be Mrs. Keneder, the mistress’s housekeeper, an’ this here is Bronnen, the housemaid.”

Harriet surveyed Mrs. Trevelyan’s servants. Mrs. Keneder, whom Locky was helping down from the driver’s seat, was a stout woman of late middle age, wearing a starched white apron and a matching mob cap. She had a look about her of industry and capability. Bronnen, on the other hand, now getting down from the wagon on her own, had a cheeky air that might well bode trouble—probably for any men she met. She had a mass of auburn curls inadequately contained by a white cap, its strings hanging loose under her chin, and couldn’t have been much older than Lydia.

Mrs. Keneder took charge the moment her small, booted feet touched the ground. “We’ve a wagonload of furniture here that needs unloading.” Her gimlet gaze fastened on Theo. “You’re small but no doubt strong. You can help Locky get it all down. Set it outside for now, though, while we women make a start on the house.” She nodded at Harriet, and Bertha, who had just emerged from the house and was having a sneezing fit thanks to all the dust. “Five of us workin’ hard should get it done in no time. We’ve brought our cleaning things with us. I doubt old Brewinney even knew what a broom was, so the Mistress told me to bring everything I thought we’d need.”

“Actually,” Lydia said, with the tone of one who’d be happy to relinquish hers, “there’re two brooms.”

“Well, that’s as maybe. I’ve brought better ones, along with mops and buckets. We’ve fuller’s earth and fine sand to scrub the floors with and oil for any woodwork as needs it. We want that furniture and the mattresses inside before it gets dark and the night chills start.” She glared at the low-set sun as though her gaze might slow its progress.

Oh, what a relief it was to have someone in charge who knew what they were doing and had brought the wherewithal to do it. Harriet relinquished control of the cleaning with a grateful sigh, although Bertha’s face betrayed her resentment at the intrusion of another servant of similar standing to herself. Mrs. Keneder began by striding inside and throwing commands out to left and right. Even Lydia didn’t object, but set to with Bronnen to wash the bedroom walls and scrub the floorboards on her knees. Who’d have thought it?

And Mrs. Keneder was quite right. Five people working like canal navvies brought about a kind of miracle on the cottage that Harriet would have never thought possible. In a matter of a few hours as darkness closed in, all the windows had been cleaned, inside and out, no spiders or cobwebs remained anywhere, and, best of all, the dust had gone. The floors had all been scoured with the sand and fuller’s earth, the walls and ceilings washed down, and Locky had set about putting the rusty range to rights.

Very shortly, they were all able to work together to bring in the furniture. The four beds went upstairs in pieces, to be reassembled in the bedrooms by Locky and his eager apprentice, Theo. “Why does Theo get a room to himself?” Lydia protested while this was being done. “I’m older than him.”

“Because you’re a girl, you silly child,” Mrs. Keneder retorted, unfolding a sheet for the first completed bed with a snap. “And he’s a boy. You’ll have to share with your ma. He can’t. No more than you can share with him.”

“Even Bertha’s getting a room to herself though. Just not me.”

“Bertha only has the box room,” Harriet said. “There’s barely room for more than her bed in there.”

Bronnen snickered, and Lydia glared at her but kept on working, perhaps afraid that if she stopped, Mrs. Keneder would vent her temper on her. Harriet smothered a smile that would have annoyed Lydia still further. This house was going to be very different to the house in Bath where the children had grown up, but at last she was feeling more confident about living here.

Once Locky and Theo were downstairs again, Harriet presided over the distribution of the downstairs furniture: four ladder-backed oak chairs for the lone table in the kitchen—all scrubbed, of course; a faded but still serviceable chaise longue for the parlor and several other well-worn upholstered chairs; a dark-oak sideboard for the kitchen and a box of crockery to display on it; a once brightly colored but now sadly faded rug for in front of the parlor fire, and a rather fine escritoire. Whoever had dispatched the wagon had seen fit to include some ornaments and a few pictures for the walls, which, once distributed, gave the little house a much more homely feel. Could it have been Mrs. Trevelyan herself? Surely not. She was a lady, so more likely they had Mrs. Keneder to thank for these touches of comfort.

Bronnen and Harriet unpacked the hamper: bread, butter, pots of jam and honey, milk in an enamel jug. “You can get more o’ that from the farm up the lane, if you takes your jug over with you, an’ a basket,” Bronnen said. “That’s where my ma lives. She do chat on a bit but she’s happy to sell to anyone as calls.”

Harriet found places for all the goods in the now spruced up and mouse-free larder: cheese, pickles, a large cooked ham, tea, some apples, two sacks of flour and small ones of sugar and salt, and a bottle of brandy that brought a heavy scowl of disapproval to Bertha’s face. Had it come in on that ship Lydia had spied, or one like it? Even though she’d been brought up in Truro, Harriet had been well aware that a lot of the brandy the men drank had never paid any duty. The men her father had known had all seemed secretly proud of this fact. Were the children right, and had they found themselves in a den of smugglers? Best not to ask.

At last, everything was done and, under Locky’s close supervision, Theo had lit the range, something he’d never done before but took to with enthusiasm. One of the sheds out the back had proved to be harboring a substantial pile of driftwood, which, added to the supply that had arrived in the wagon, would certainly do to start with.

Mrs. Keneder settled her bulk into one of the kitchen chairs with a sigh. “A proper job we’ve made of this.” She smiled at Harriet, the first smile she’d deigned to bestow on her. “A nice cup of tea’s needed now, I should think. Fill the kettle, Bronnen, there’s a good girl.”

The maid disappeared outside to the well that had provided them with the water for their cleaning, and returned in a few moments with a bucket of clean water. This she filled the iron kettle with then sat said kettle on the freshly blacked range, whose fire was beginning to roar. Mrs. Keneder nodded to Bronnen, whose face was covered in smuts from doing the blacking. “Why don’t you take the boy down to the cliff edge and show him where to get gulls’ eggs from, when they’re laying? They make a tidy breakfast for a growing boy.”

Theo, also filthy of face, hopped from one leg to the other. “Can I go, Mama? Can I?”