Page 18 of The Christmas Retreat
‘They do sometimes fly low across the road around here,and it was probably bigger than your car,’ he said sardonically. ‘Where are you headed for?’
‘Triskelion.’
‘That figures,’ he said enigmatically. ‘You’re nearly there. I’ll wait while you back the car out to make sure it’s OK, but then I’ll have to go because I’m picking my little girl up and I’m already running late.’
His rather brusque manner was like a dash of cold water to the face and, feeling somewhat ruffled, I said, ‘Don’t bother waiting, I’ll be fine.’
But he must have ignored this, because after I’d started the engine and bumped back on to the tarmac, his dark, tall shape loomed up by my window again.
‘The engine sounds fine and there are no flat tyres,’ he said. ‘Go straight down the hill and across the bridge. You’ll see the gates to Triskelion opposite. Just take care because the road is starting to freeze over, now the temperature is dropping.’
‘Thank you,’ I began, but he was already striding off back to his own car, as if he was wearing seven-league boots.
Arwen
Letter from Arwen Madoc to Milly Vane, Saturday 31 May 1919
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 thetrain 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 anunderstanding, 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, butno, 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.
