Page 2 of The Cornish Widow

“You can see the sea,” twelve-year-old Theo, ever the optimist, piped up, hopping from one leg to the other as though he might need to find the privy very shortly. If there even was one. “It looks like we’re on top of some cliffs, but there might be a beach. With sand and waves. Maybe caves. Can we go and look, Mama? Can we?” His voice rose in desperate pleading.

Harriet sighed, although not so deeply as Bertha had. She might as well let both the children go. It would give her time to form a plan of action with Bertha. Something that needed to be done swiftly as the late September evening was approaching. “Off you go then, but if there are cliffs, keep well back from the edge in case they’re crumbly. I don’t want you having an accident on your first day here.”

“First day?” Lydia scowled. “You say that as if there’s going to be a second day.”

Harriet bit her lip. Of course there was going to be a second day, and a third, and so on into a distant infinity. They had nowhere else to go and were lucky old Mrs. Bolitho had seen fit to offer this… this hovel. No, she mustn’t think of it like that. She had to be positive. It had four walls and a roof, at least, which was more than they’d had yesterday. It was going to be their home, come what may. The old adage that beggars can’t be choosers sprang to mind. Since Ben’s untimely death at Waterloo, they’d definitely become beggars.

But she didn’t want to think about Ben.

“Come on, Lydia.” Theo, buoyed by the resilience of youthful optimism, grabbed his sister’s hand. “Let’s go and explore.”

Lydia spent exactly three seconds wrestling with whether to join her brother in his enthusiastic explorations before her curiosity got the better of her. However, holding hands with her younger brother was clearly not the way she wanted this to go. She snatched her hand back, and the two children ran off, Lydia holding up her skirts the better to run.

Silence would have descended had the cottage not been on the coast, where the distant rumble of the waves in the cove below was a constant, and so were the raucous cries of the wheeling gulls overhead. A stiff westerly blew, reminding Harriet that it was autumn, and winter would soon be upon them. Before that, they needed to make sure this cottage, whatever it was called, was windproof and watertight. Because they were going to have to make do and mend here, and stick it out, come what may.

Thanks to Ben. But she’d sworn not to think about him.

Bertha set her pudgy hands on her hips and scowled. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s been living here for a long time.”

Harriet nodded. “At least the roof appears to be in reasonable condition, though.”

Bertha’s expression said that this was small comfort, and Harriet had to admit she was right. About everything.

The cottage did indeed look as though no one had lived there for a long time, with dirty, ragged curtains at filthy windows, tall weeds jostling the foot of the walls, and an unloved, uncared for air about its exterior. But they’d have to make the best of it. Harriet suppressed another sigh. “Well, let’s go inside and take a look. We haven’t anywhere else to go, so we’re going to have to.”

She pushed the front door, which might once have been painted blue, wider open and stepped through it, Bertha right behind her. Was this the kitchen? Hard to tell. At least there was a table, dustcovered and littered with the remnants of what had to have been someone’s long-ago last meal in the house. And a stone sink. And was that filthy, rust-encrusted object a kitchen range? Could it be made to function?

Bertha harrumphed loudly as she ran a finger through the dust on the table. “Fancy leaving your dirty dishes out like this. What sort of a person lived here, I’d like to know? Did a moonlight flit, I’d wager, owing rent.”

Harriet nodded. “At least Mrs. Bolitho has said we don’t have to pay her any rent. That was very kind of her.”

Another harrumph from Bertha who had formed a low opinion of their benefactor, Harriet’s late husband’s great-aunt, even though neither of them had met her as yet.

Harriet pretended she hadn’t heard. She’d better take a quick look at the rest of the house before the children came back, just in case it was even worse. Although, how it could be worse than this first glimpse lay beyond her imagination.

There appeared to be two good-sized rooms downstairs, if you didn’t count the lean-to pantry—was it even a pantry?—tacked onto the back of the kitchen. A huge, inglenook fireplace took up most of the adjoining wall in the second room, sharing its chimney with what remained of the range. Some cobweb-shrouded, high-backed wooden chairs stood in front of it, one with a dirty blanket heaped on it. In a corner, a rickety door gave onto a twisting spiral staircase whose treads creaked with every step Harriet took. She took care to place her feet at the edges, for fear of the wood being rotten.

On the first floor, a narrow landing provided three more doors. To two bedrooms, if you could call them that, and a box room. No beds though, unless that pile of filthy rags heaped in one of them could be called a bed. The small, leaded windows badly needed de-spidering and a good clean, but the plasterwork seemed to be intact, and at least the windows still had glass in them. Really, if she looked beneath the liberal layer of dirt and dust, this was quite a nice house…

Well, it could be a nice house. Nothing like the one they’d rented in Bath though. Within walking distance of Lydia’s school.

Briefly, the image of the home she and Ben had shared when he was home on leave from the army flashed into her head. Small, but perfectly appointed, with a kitchen in the basement and quarters for Bertha, Mrs. Birch the cook, and Daisy the parlor maid in the attic. How she’d once loved that house… where her children had been born and she’d been so happy in the first year or two of her marriage. Until… No. She wouldn’t think about that. There’d still been happy moments in amongst the… No. She had to stop remembering. She just had to be thankful that French dictator had escaped his island prison and set out to reclaim France for himself. Thankful for Waterloo…

This was a new beginning and she had to make the most of it.

She snatched herself out of her reverie. She also had to be practical. This was her reality now, for both herself and her children, and nothing she could do would change anything, and even if she could have changed it, would she have wanted to? She had to be thankful for what she still had. Thankful to Napoleon, and to Mrs. Bolitho, who had come to her aid when she found herself homeless, despite her worry that the lady nurtured some ulterior motive for her sudden kindness. She’d think about all of that later.

She retraced her footsteps down the corridor and creaking stairs and into the cottage’s sitting room. If that was what she was going to have to call it.

Running footsteps sounded outside and Theo charged into the cottage, his dark curly hair blowing in the breeze. “I saw a ship, Mama! Down in a beautiful little bay with real waves and sand. And it’s a proper ship with sails and sailors!”