Penmarric Read Free

shadow, a masculine complement to her dominant personality. When I was a child not yet eleven years old she subjugated me as she subjugated Robert Yorke—by sheer force of character—but once I was no longer a child I was no longer so easily held in subjugation. But a relationship had sprung into existence between us that day at the townhouse, and throughout the ten years that followed before I finally broke her will and reversed our roles, we were never indifferent to each other.
    “You are ten years old,” said my mother to me during that first confrontation in London, “and you have never seen your Inheritance. I intend to remedy that immediately. We leave for Penzance tomorrow.”
    Evidently this was the sole reason for her request to see me. Ten was judged to be an age when I could clap my hands in delight when I saw my Inheritance for the first time.
    Naturally I was excited at the prospect of seeing Penmarric; I thought I would be able to explore the grounds, ride around the estate and tour the house from top to bottom. This, however, was not what my mother had in mind. After an arduous journey to Penzance, three hundred miles away from London in the southwest, we stayed at a hotel on the esplanade called the Metropole and next morning hired a carriage to begin another wearisome journey north over the moors to the parish of St. Just. I was too young to appreciate the scenery; all I knew was that it was a world away from my home at Gweek, from the peaceful estuary and fishing boats. I looked at the landscape of this alien strip of Cornwall and my child’s mind thought: The devil would feel quite at home here. For the scenery was bleak and powerful, dominated by stretches of arid moors without trace of a tree or house, and the moors snarled into towering hills crowned with outcrops of black rock. The emptiness of the landscape combined with the steep gradient of the road produced sweeping views; I remember looking back toward Penzance and glimpsing the castle of St. Michael’s Mount shimmering far off in the blue of the bay.
    For a moment I wished that St. Michael’s Mount were my Inheritance, although naturally I did not dare admit as much to my mother.
    As we moved inland the mines began to dot the harsh landscape and I had my first glimpse of the copper and tin industry for which Cornwall had been famous for centuries, the stone towers of the engine houses, the black belches of smoke, the eerie piles of slag. There were two mines on the Penmarric estate, my mother told me, but only one, Sennen Garth, was still operating. The other, King Walloe, had been closed for decades,
    “Can I go down the mine?” I inquired hopefully.
    “Good gracious, no, child, you’re not an artisan. … Now, look out of the window and you can see the coast of the North. There! Is it not a magnificent view here from the top of the ridge? There are three parishes side by side which border the sea. St. Just is the one to the west, Morvah is straight ahead of us, and Zennor is to the east of Morvah. Penmarric, of course, is in the parish of St. Just.”
    “Which parish are we in now?”
    “Zillan. It’s an inland moorland parish lying behind Morvah. … Robert, tell the coachman to hurry!”
    We continued westward, through the gray mining village of St. Just and out along the road to Land’s End, but presently we turned off the Land’s End road and headed north to the sea.
    “Now,” said my mother at last. “Tell the coachman to stop, Robert.”
    The carriage rolled to a halt.
    “Get out, child.”
    I did as I was told. The spring breeze blew lightly against my cheek and the sun was warm as it shone from the spring skies. There were wildflowers already by the roadside, and beyond the wildflowers the banks of gorse were poised to burst into a blaze of yellow blooms.
    My mother grabbed my arm. “Look.”
    I looked. Across a shallow valley, beyond a spinney of trees unusual in that barren landscape, stood a castle built on