Cold Harbour

He stopped pacing and said to her angrily, ‘Don’t you care? Do you even give a damn?’

‘When I was thirteen, Major Osbourne,’ she told him, ‘Anne-Marie broke my right thumb in two places.’ She held it up. ‘See, it’s still a little crooked. She told me she wanted to see how much pain I could stand. She used one of those old-fashioned walnut crackers – the kind you screw very tight. She told me I must not cry out, however much it hurt, because I was a de Voincourt.’

‘My God!’ he whispered.

‘And I didn’t. I simply fainted when the pain became unbearable, but by then, the damage had been done.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. A playful prank turned sour, that’s all. Where my father was concerned she could do no wrong.’ She poured herself another cup of tea. ‘How much of all this have you told him, by the way?’

‘I simply said that we’d learned through our Intelligence sources that your sister had been killed in a bad car accident.’

‘But why tell me and not him?’

‘Because you looked as if you could take it, he didn’t.’

He was lying, she knew that instantly, but at that moment, her father walked past the window. She stood up. ‘I must see how he is.’

As she got the door open, Craig said, ‘None of my business, but I’d say you’re the last person he’d want to see right now.’ And that hurt, really hurt, because in her heart, she knew that it was true. ‘Having you around will only make it worse for him,’ he said gently. ‘Every time he sees you he’ll think it’s her for just a split second.’

‘Hope it’s her, Major Osbourne,’ Genevieve corrected him. ‘But what would you suggest?’

‘I’m driving back to London now, if that would be of any help.’

And then she saw, knew beyond any shadow of doubt. ‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? I’m what you came for.’

‘That’s right, Miss Trevaunce.’

She turned and left him there by the fire and went out, closing the door behind her.

Her father was gardening again, pulling weeds and throwing them into a barrow. The sun was shining, the sky was blue. It was still a fine soft day as if nothing had happened.

He straightened and said, ‘You’ll be off on the afternoon train from Padstow?’

‘I thought you might want me to stay on for a while. I could phone the hospital. Explain. Ask for an extension of leave.’

‘Would it alter anything?’ He was lighting his pipe, his hands shaking slightly.

‘No,’ Genevieve said wearily. ‘I suppose not.’

‘Then why stay?’ He returned to his weeding.

She moved round her tiny bedroom making sure she hadn’t forgotten anything and paused at the window watching her father working down there. Had he loved Anne-Marie more because he couldn’t have her? Was that it? She’d never felt there were any similarities between herself and the rest of the family. The only one on either side for whom she’d had any genuine feeling was her Aunt Hortense, but she, of course, was something special.

She opened the window and called to her father, ‘Major Osbourne is going back to London now. He’s offered me a lift.’

He glanced up. ‘Kind of him, I’d take it if I were you.’

He returned to his digging, looking at least twenty years older than he had an hour earlier. As if he had already crawled into the grave with his beloved Anne-Marie. She closed the window, took a last look around the room, picked up her case and went out. Craig Osbourne was sitting on a chair at the door. He stood up and took the case from her without a word as Mrs Trembath came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron again.

‘I’m going now,’ Genevieve said. ‘Look after him.’

‘Haven’t I always?’ She kissed Genevieve on the cheek. ‘On your way, girl. This is no place for you and never was.’

Craig went to the car and put her case on the rear seat. She took a deep breath and approached her father. He looked up, and she kissed him on the cheek. ‘I’m not sure when I’ll be back. I’ll write.’

He hugged her hard and then turned away quickly. ‘Go back to your hospital, Genevieve. Do some good for those that can still be helped.’

She went to the car, then, without another word, aware of the strangest sense of release in his rejection of her. Craig handed her in, closed the door, stepped behind the wheel and drove away.

After a while he said, ‘Are you okay?’

‘Would you think I was crazy if I told you I felt free for the first time in years?’ she said.

‘No, knowing your sister as I did and after what I’ve seen here this morning, I’d say that makes a certain wild sense.’

‘And just how well did you know her?’ Genevieve asked him. ‘Were you lovers?’

Craig smiled wryly. ‘You don’t really expect me to answer that, do you?’

‘Why not?’

‘Hell, I don’t know. Lovers would be entirely the wrong term. Anne-Marie never loved anyone but herself in her life.’

‘True, but we’re not talking about that. We’re discussing the flesh, Major.’

He was angry for a moment then a muscle twitched in his cheek. ‘Okay, lady, so I slept with your sister a time or two. Does that make you feel better?’

She sat face averted and for ten miles they didn’t exchange a word. Finally, he produced the pack of cigarettes, one-handed. ‘They have their uses, these things.’

‘No thanks.’

He lit one himself and wound the window down a little. ‘Your father – quite a guy. A country doctor, yet according to that plate on the gate back there he’s a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.’

‘Are you trying to tell me you didn’t know that before you came down here?’

‘Some,’ he said. ‘Not all. Neither you nor he figured much in Anne-Marie’s vocabulary when I knew her.’

She leaned back, arms folded, head against the seat. ‘The Trevaunces have lived in this part of Cornwall past memory. My father broke a family tradition of centuries by going to medical school instead of to sea. He came out of Edinburgh University in the summer of 1914 with a talent for surgery which he was able to put to good use in the field hospitals of the Western Front in France.’

‘I imagine that must have been one hell of a postgraduate course,’ Craig said.

‘During the spring of 1918 he was wounded. Shrapnel in his right leg. You probably noticed that he still limps. Château de Voincourt was used as a convalescent home for officers. You see how much of a fairy story it’s beginning to sound?’

‘You could say that,’ he said. ‘But go on. It’s interesting.’

‘My grandmother, holder of one of the oldest titles in France in her own right and proud as Lucifer; the elder sister, Hortense, sardonic, witty, always in control; and then there was Hélène, young and wilful and very, very beautiful.’