Invitation To A Cornish Christmas. Marguerite Kaye
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were formed from leaves. ‘It’s beautiful,’ Treeve said, tracing the design with his fingers.
‘This one is made using a mixture of hammering and pierced work,’ Emily said, swapping the box for a salt lined with dark blue glass. ‘I buy the glass linings, obviously, and then make the framework to fit each exactly. And here,’ she said, unrolling a piece of chamois leather, ‘are some earrings which I’ve been working on. The stones are paste, I can’t afford precious gems.’
‘Bluebells?’ Treeve asked, gazing down at the tiny flower-like earrings set with blue glass.
‘They are, how clever of you to notice.’
‘It is you who are clever. These are wonderful pieces. And so diverse.’
She beamed. ‘Thank you. I must confess, I enjoy the variety.’
‘Such craftsmanship, I would have thought it would have earned you your fortune.’
‘Sadly not. If I wished to make my fortune, I’d have to set up on a much larger scale, and make much grander pieces too, as my father did. Dinner services, tea services, serving dishes, epergnes, that kind of thing. But aside from the fact that is simply not possible here, I prefer working on smaller, more modest pieces.’
Emily took the earrings from him, rolling them carefully back in the chamois leather before picking up a cloth. He watched her polishing the floral trinket box, a small frown furrowing her brow, her generous lips pursed in concentration. She was wearing a plain gown of soft wool the colour of a pale wintry sky. She had rolled the sleeves up to expose her forearms. Tanned and slender yet far from frail, he could see the ripple of the muscles under her skin as she worked, and dammit, he found it absurdly arousing. She wore her hair up in a knot. There was something arousing too, yet vulnerable, in the long line of her exposed neck as she bent over her work.
Looking up, she caught his eye and smiled faintly, offering him the little box. ‘If you look closely, you’ll see my hallmark.’
‘“EF”,’ Treeve read. ‘If your father was so well known, and you were his apprentice, couldn’t you continue to use his mark?’
‘No. It wouldn’t have been permitted, I was never his official apprentice.’ She got to her feet, retrieving a walnut tea caddy from a shelf, and took out the silver spoon inside. ‘There, you see. “RF”, for Robert Faulkner. That was my father’s mark.’
‘More flowers,’ he said.
‘He made it for my mother. It runs through the female line, the love of nature. There is a beautiful rose garden attached to the big house in Stornaway—that is the main town on the Isle of Lewis. It’s a walled garden, to protect it from the harsh weather. I remember the scent on a sunny day—we did have them in Lewis, every now and then.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Perfume so strong it made you dizzy.’
‘You are never tempted to go back? I do understand what you meant about ghosts, but—being here at Karrek House has also dredged up a plethora of happy memories for me. Things I had quite forgotten.’
‘I can’t possibly go back,’ Emily said bleakly. ‘My happy memories are now tainted for ever. Besides,’ she added, before he could ask her what she meant, ‘more than likely my cousin will have dug up the rose garden and planted potatoes. John-Angus never could see the point of flowers. Needless adornment, he’d have said of that spoon. It’s one of the few of Papa’s pieces I kept.’
Where had the rest gone? The obvious, painful answer, was that they were sold, so Treeve did not ask. He set the spoon down carefully. ‘I can see you’re busy, but I was hoping that I could persuade you to take a walk with me.’
‘Don’t you have other matters to attend to?’
‘I’m beginning to realise that if I wanted to, I could tend to estate business twenty-four hours a day. But I don’t want to. Bligh deprived me of a walk with you the other day, and legal business took up all of yesterday. I’ve earned a break, but I know that your work must come first, I don’t want to…’
‘I work to eat, it’s true, but I reckon I too have earned a break. Do you think the weather will be kind enough to us to allow us to go further than the beach?’
‘I made a special plea to the weather gods,’ Treeve said, ‘in the hope that I could persuade you. The clifftop path from here towards Porth Leven is beautiful.’
‘I’ll fetch my cloak,’ Emily said.
Treeve’s pleas to the weather gods had been answered, it seemed, for it was a lovely afternoon, the skies pale blue with a weak lemon sun, the breeze as gentle as it was possible to hope for at this time of year. Crossing the top of Budoc Lane by St Piran’s church they avoided the village, making for the path that hugged the clifftops.
Emily was wearing one of her favourite dresses of russet-and-cream-striped wool. She had dressed carefully yesterday morning too, in another of her favourite gowns, telling herself that she was merely getting the use out of them, knowing perfectly well she was hoping Treeve would call.
‘Are you immune to the cold?’ she asked, hugging her cloak around her, for he was hatless and gloveless, without even a greatcoat.
‘Try standing on the open deck of a ship in a storm,’ he replied. ‘The cold I never mind, it’s being soaked to the skin that gets to you.’
‘What about the heat? Have you been to the tropics?’
‘I’ve been around the world several times over. I always laugh when I hear people in England complain about the weather. True enough, we have a bit of everything, sometimes all four of our seasons in a day, but it’s all in moderation.’
‘I’ll try to remember that,’ Emily said, smiling. ‘The next day I’m confined to my cottage by the torrential rain, unable to work because it’s as dark at midday as midnight.’
‘What do you do, on those days?’
‘It might sound stupid but sometimes, when it’s really wild, I like to go outside. There’s something so—so elemental about the storms here, you know? Standing on the headland, with nothing in front of you but the horizon, on days like that it can feel as if you’re the only person left in the world.’
Treeve cocked an eyebrow. ‘And that’s a nice feeling, is it? Is that why no one even knows about your little cottage industry? I mentioned it at dinner to the eldest Miss Treleven and…’
She came to an abrupt halt, turning towards him angrily. ‘You told her I was a silversmith!’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘I don’t want people talking about me. I mean,’ she amended, for her words had sounded disproportionately defensive, ‘that I prefer not to be the subject of gossip.’
‘I was expressing my admiration, not gossiping.’
‘You hadn’t even seen my work at that point.’
‘My admiration was for your determination to make your own way in life, Emily, for the guts it must take, and the skill to make a living for yourself and, to use your own words, to “cut your cloth to suit your purse.”’
Embarrassed, she felt her cheeks heating, but she could not keep the resentment from her voice. ‘I also told you that I don’t want to be pitied.’
‘It seems to me, it is you who sees yourself as a pitiful creature. I certainly don’t, and nor did Miss Treleven.’
The truth of his words were like a punch in the stomach. ‘I was too hasty,’ she said stiffly. ‘I apologise.’
‘Don’t look so stricken. Whatever travails you’ve endured since your father died…’
‘Are my business, no one else’s.’
Treeve