Sara Seale Read online

  Sara Seale

  TREVALLION

  An engagement of convenience could matter little to either party in the circumstances, but it would seem that timid Anna Crewe was the last person to be involved with the headstrong Peverils: Gran, who had always ruled the family; Ruth, antagonistic for reasons of her own; Rick, still in love with his beautiful cousin who, like all the Peverils, took what she wanted and did not count the cost. A summer at Trevallion brought many changes to all of them, but for Anna it was a summer that changed her whole life.

  All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the Author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the Author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

  First published 1957 This edition 1975

  For copyright reasons, this book may not be issued on loan or otherwise except in its original soft cover.

  ISBN o 263 71770 4

  Made and Printed in Great Britain by C. Nicholls & Company Ltd The Philips Park Press, Manchester

  CHAPTER I

  The bright sunshine of mid-June spilled gently over the quiet London square. In this, the lunch hour, the square was deserted and empty of the patients from the nursing home who used it to sit or walk within its railed confines. Rick Peveril preferred it this way. He liked to walk, still with his stick, aware that he need not make conversation with other patients, that the square, however dull and arid, could, in the lunch hour, be translated into something that was not of the city.

  There was someone else there, he realized almost at once; then his annoyance passed. It was the little Crewe girl, sitting on a bench, motionless. She would not interfere with his hour's privacy. She had come, he supposed, as usual, to visit the young airman in Ward B. She had come every day for the past fortnight and he had got used to seeing her, flying up and down the corridors with her long coltish legs, bringing absurd gifts; a bunch of tired flowers bought off a barrow, fruit which had never been ripe or very good, magazines which were often old and dog-eared.

  He walked over to her. Even as he did so he became aware that they were comparative strangers; that, like himself, she had probably come to the square to be private.

  "It's Anna Crewe, isn't it?" he said, and she turned to look at him with wide hazel eyes drowned in tears.

  "Yes," she said, and peered at him closer through the tears. "Is it Mr. Peveril?"

  She stood waiting, not for his affirmative, he thought, but because, at that moment, she could not care who he was. Whatever was troubling her was too momentous for her to mind one way or the other.

  "Why not sit down? " he said. "No one will ever come here until the lunch hour is over. It's a fine, good day."

  "Yes, it is, isn't it?" she said, and sat down obediently on the hard, dusty bench.

  "Are you waiting to see young Mason again?" he asked, sitting down beside her, but her eyes stretched suddenly in painful stress and the tears welled over again.

  "Yes—no," she said, and clasped her hands together tightly in her lap. "He's gone, you see."

  "Gone?" Rick frowned. "I didn't know he was due to come out."

  "Neither did I. There was a letter waiting at the nursing home. He's back on his flights."

  "But didn't he tell you? You were here yesterday, weren't you?"

  "Yes. I was here yesterday."

  She sat, straight and stiff, beside him, like a child who must not let the grown-ups know its secret shame, and when he next spoke it was with a gentleness that seemed unfamiliar in him.

  "Hadn't you better tell me?" he said. "Tell you what?"

  "The reason for this distress—this—whatever it is." "It's nothing to do with you."

  "I daresay, but talking to a comparative stranger can help. You can say things to a stranger that you can't to people who know you better—don't you agree?"

  "Yes," she said on a long sigh. "Yes—I think you're right."

  "Well then?"

  "We were going to be married," she said with a sudden rush. "At least, I thought so. He had it all planned, I thought I'd given up my job at the office and now-"

  "Now?"

  "He left a letter saying it was all a mistake. He'd been a little—a litde drunk, he said, when he asked me. I didn't know —it was all in the letter he left for me today."

  "He left a letter for you at the nursing home?"

  "Yes. I didn't know, you see, that he wouldn't still be there."

  "But surely—if you'd both got as far as planning marriage-"

  She looked beyond him, to the shrubs and stunted trees which bordered the dusty paths, to the impoverished grass which made a sad London lawn.

  "I suppose it was my fault," she said. "I—I took it for granted he was serious. But he was dull, he said, stuck in a nursing home for weeks on end and nobody visiting him but me. I didn't know that men could propose from boredom."

  "Men sometimes propose for many strange reasons," he observed dryly. "Haven't you any experience, Anna?"

  She looked at him suddenly with a direct, questioning gaze, her lashes still wet with tears, and he felt a swift, irrational anger against the unperceptive young man who had let her down. i

  "I'm not what Toby's been used to, Mr. Peveril," she said gently. "I—I suppose I should have known."

  Rick Peveril moved his stiff leg. The bench was hard and uncomfortable and the girl beside him reminded him suddenly of his own failure in love. Should he, too, have known? But that had been altogether different. He and Alix had been brought up together, they had been a great deal older when their affair had come to a head, but he, although life had already taught him not to be unprepared, had still been caught in amazement and bitter humiliation.

  "These things can hurt damnably," he said. "But you're young, Anna—how old?"

  "Nineteen."

  "Nineteen! Hardly an age at which to take such matters seriously."

  "Don't you think so?" Her voice was grave and very polite. "One's age doesn't seem to me to be very important. One can feel—bereft—at nineteen, twenty-nine or forty."

  "True, but at nineteen one can throw off the effects more easily, perhaps."

  "Perhaps." She did not sound convinced and presendy she said with a queer little undertone of panic: "I don't know what to do."

  He raised his eyebrows enquiringly but said nothing. What did she imagine one did do, poor innocent, when one thought one's world had been knocked from under one's feet?

  "I told you I'd given up my job," she said. "I can't go back—even if they haven't already filled my place."

  "Why not?"

  She looked down at her folded hands, not wishing, perhaps, to meet his eyes. Her profile was delicate and suddenly rather touching, the impertinent pony-tail a litde pathetic.

  "I was foolish, I suppose," she said. "All the girls in the office had special young men. They—they laughed at me because I hadn't. So when Toby—when I thought—well, I boasted a bit, I'm afraid. I threw up my job to get married, and—and—I couldn't go back and say he'd—he'd walked out on me."

  "There are other jobs," he said impatiendy, but remembered in the same moment the shame of being jilted, the reluctance to meet the curiosity of acquaintances who did not really care.

  "Yes," she said, "but there's my room, too—my room at the hostel. Someone else is taking it over at the end of the week."

  "You do seem to have burnt your boats," he observed.

  "Have you no family?"

  "No."

  "No relations whatever?"

  "No. I was brought up by an aunt who died about two years ago. She—she didn't have much money, and didn't awfully want me. I was rather a duty, I'm afraid. The solicitors found me this job. I don't
think they'd be very helpful again."

  "I think I might be able to help," he said suddenly, and she looked at him with startled eyes.

  "Oh, no," she said quickly. "I didn't mean—I wouldn't dream of accepting money. I—I'm sorry to have inflicted my troubles on a stranger."

  His own indecision had passed. He looked at her with the rather chilly appraisal she had come to associate with him, and his mouth was a litde twisted.

  "I wasn't proposing to offer you money, my dear," he said blandly. "But I might have a temporary job, including a home, for you, if you're prepared to consider something a trifle unconventional."

  She looked at him dubiously, her mind, no doubt, already concerned with alarming possibilities, and he smiled with a certain cryptic amusement.

  "My proposal is entirely respectable," he said. "In fact, that's exactly what it is—a proposal."

  Her mouth opened slightly.

  "A proposal of marriage?" she asked with admirable calm.

  "Not exactly. Shall we say a period of engagement to suit us both, to be terminated at our mutual convenience."

  "I—I don't think I understand."

  He traced a pattern in the gravel with his stick.

  "Surely it's plain enough," he said a shade intolerandy. "I'm offering you a home for the summer which will give you time to take stock of yourself and your future. You will be able to assure the girls in the office that you are indeed engaged—also, incidentally, give the young man a slap on the chops. It might even be the means of getting him back, if you still want him."

  "And you," she asked with gentle courtesy, "what will you get out of it?"

  "I?" said Rick, and his face creased into lines that were not amused. "I have an entanglement of my own which might become tiresome. Shall we say I need you as a—protection?"

  She regarded him gravely but did not speak. She could not imagine that the rather ruthless-looking Mr. Peveril was in

  any need of protection. He would, she thought, have no uncertain way of dealing with an importunate entanglement. She studied him objectively, her mind, as yet, hardly taking in his extraordinary suggestion. Some women, she supposed, might find him attractive, but to her, with her thoughts still filled with Toby's golden charm, his dark looks did not appeal. His black hair and dark skin gave him a forbidding air which was not softened by the hard, steel-grey eyes and beaky nose. A man whose temper might run high; a man to be careful of.

  "Have you finished with your stock-taking?" he asked, and she looked away, flushing a litde.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Peveril, I didn't mean to stare," she said. "I was only thinking that I would imagine you to be your own best protection."

  "I've evidently misled you," he replied with the same twist to the corners of his mouth. "The protection you would afford me would be purely nominal, just as mine would be in your own case. For you a face-saving, shall we say, and for me a buffer, perhaps, between myself and my family."

  "They want you to marry against your will?" she asked, frowning.

  He shrugged.

  "If you like. My problem has old roots which needn't concern you."

  "I think," she said gently, "that anything which has provoked such a strange offer should concern me."

  She was suddenly rather formal and older than her avowed nineteen years, and he was conscious of a fleeting surprise that, so far, he had not flustered her.

  "True," he admitted rather curtly. "Well, for what it's worth to you, I was once going to marry a certain young woman. We quarrelled and she made a runaway match with somebody else. She is now a widow."

  Anna wrinkled her forehead, looking puzzled.

  "But then your way is clear, surely," she said. "Or don't you love her any more?"

  "Perhaps I never loved her—certainly not in your sense of

  the word," he replied enigmatically, and had a moment's cynical memory of that fierce, tempestuous courtship. "My family, however, are being a litde importunate. My grandmother had always set her heart on this union, and now the way is, as you say, clear, she sees no reason why she shouldn't have her way."

  "Your grandmother!" she exclaimed without thinking. "She must be very old."

  He smiled wryly, following the trend of her thoughts.

  "I'm still young enough to own a grandmother," he retorted mildly, "though I can appreciate that to you I must appear to have one foot in the grave."

  "Oh, I didn't mean——" she said quickly, but, glancing at him in embarrassment, knew that she had. Quite old, she had thought indifferently, noting the lines in his face and a hint of grey in his hair.

  "Of course you did—why shouldn't you?" he said. "Actually I'm thirty-six—getting on for thirty-seven. My grandmother is over eighty and a very indomitable old lady. I'm the only one of the family who's ever stood up to her."

  "And who else is there?" she asked, beginning to be curious.

  "My sister. There was another brother but he was killed. My mother died some years ago, my father more recently." "And you all lived together?"

  "We all lived together. The Peverils are Cornish, you know, and have a great feeling for the family. In those days, of course, there was also Alix."

  "Alix?"

  "A very distant cousin, but my grandmother counted her a Peveril. There aren't many of us left. Alix spent her school holidays with us and later—well, later she was usually around."

  Anna glanced at him under her lashes. Was Alix, she wondered, the girl who had quarrelled with him and run away with someone else? It seemed impertinent to ask.

  "You live in Cornwall and own a quarry, Toby told me,"

  she said, thinking suddenly that it was appropriate that he should. There was a touch of granite about his personality, or might it be smuggler ancestors that gave him an air of ruth-lessness?

  "Quite right. The quarry, or mine, has been in our family for four generations. The first Peveril developed it and his son built Trevallion."

  "Trevallion?" She lingered on the word as if it gave her pleasure.

  "The name of our house. Have you ever been to Cornwall?"

  "No. My aunt—well, we didn't have holidays, and she didn't care for the country, anyway."

  The first patient from the nursing home appeared, seeking an unoccupied bench, and Rick glanced at his watch.

  "Two-thirty," he said. "They will be coming out. Now, what do you think?"

  She realized then that he had been talking to fill a gap, or, perhaps divert her from his original suggestion until it suited him to press it. He was not, she thought, a man who would talk for the sake of talking.

  "I don't know," she said, thrown suddenly into confusion. "It's all so strange ... we hardly know one another."

  "True, but that should make it easier, don't you think?"

  "Easier?"

  "Yes. My proposition is purely a matter of convenience to both of us. The fact that we are comparative strangers should help, don't you think?"

  She twisted her fingers together in her lap and one foot began to scuff the gravel path as if she were a child unsure of the right answer.

  "I don't know . . ." she said unhappily. "There's Toby and—I can't readjust my ideas so quickly . . ."

  He looked at her with a passing tenderness for the young, for the mistakes of youth, for their sense of outrage that such things could happen to them. She was in love with love, perhaps, or was it the planes in the sky, the desire of the

  earthbound to be free as those other golden gods were free?

  He stood up, resting his weight on his bad leg, conscious that the stiffening was lessening and pain already a thing of the past.

  "Well," he said, "think it over. I shall be here till the end of the week. You might do worse, you know. Trevallion is a pleasant place in the summer, and—later, I can, perhaps, help you towards another sort of future."

  She looked up at him, blinking nervously.

  "It—it sounds rather cold-blooded," she said.

  "Why not? You and I mean nothin
g to each other. It's merely a case of helping out."

  "I don't think," she said, "I could ever help you out, Mr. Peveril. You would always get what you wanted in the end."

  CHAPTER II

  When the office closed at half-past five next day, Anna took a bus from the City to Marble Arch, just as she had done each day for the past fortnight, and walked along the Bayswater Road, automatically turning off into the quiet street which led to the square and the nursing home. She felt as she had on going to be interviewed for her first job, a hollowness of the stomach and a weakness of the legs, a dread amounting almost to certainty that she would be turned down as unsuitable. Anna lifted her chin and stepped out more briskly. It was no good, she told herself sternly, always to anticipate the worst; it was no good to lack confidence and advertise to the world that one was vulnerable. But when she asked for Rick Peveril at the almoner's office and was directed to a small sitting-room on the ground floor reserved for the walking patients, the palms of her hands were damp from nervousness.

  He sat by himself in the window watching visitors arrive at

  the nursing home. He turned as Anna closed the door behind her and got to his feet without hurry.

  "Good evening, Anna," he said. "Come and sit down."

  She moved to a chair in the window and sat on the extreme edge. The room seemed very small and quiet and smelt faintly of antiseptics.

  "How is your leg today?" she enquired politely because he was clearly waiting for her to speak first.

  "Getting along nicely, thanks. This last lot of treatment should clear up the trouble, they seem to think."

  "Did you have an accident?"

  "Yes. My foot got crushed in the quarry about a year ago. It didn't respond as it should to local treatment, so they sent me up here."

  "I'm glad you're better," she said. "I believe this is a very good nursing home."

  Seeing him again, she thought he looked more forbidding than ever, but now he smiled unexpectedly and the hard lines of his face softened surprisingly.

  "What a polite litde exchange," he said. "Hadn't we better get down to business?" She glanced at the door and he added indifferently: "We won't be disturbed. I've arranged for privacy for half an hour."

  "You expected me, then?"