“Then it is ugly?”
She pulled her hand away again. “Oh, poh, you’re joking now. As if you’re s’ innocent as all that! I’m not the only girl you’ve kissed an’ fondled.”
“I never said so. But love doesn’t end there.”
“No, it does not.”
“Well ? “
She put both hands up to push her hair away from her forehead. “Oh, it’s nothing special nothing to get excited about. The best part is the kissing and fondling.”
“Not everyone says that.”
“There, I tell you, and straightway you contradict! “
I said: “Meg, perhaps it is loving the right person. Like kissing the right person. For instance if I kiss you I take much pleasure of it. But if I kiss well … if I was to kiss Annora Job, who is a pretty girl, just as pretty as you, it would not pleasure me at all. Why not? I don’t know. But that’s the way it is. Now perhaps that is the way it is with love “
“Are you telling me I don’t love Dick?”
“I’m not saying anything. I don’t know. Perhaps you don’t know. But might it not be part true? That you love him one way and perhaps not another?”
“No, it is not! ‘Ow dare ye say such things, Mauganl I only said`… oh, tis no use talking! I’ll go.”
As she got up I got up. As she turned to pad away on angry sandalled feet I caught her arm and pulled her round.
“Meg.”
“Leave me go
I kissed her a few times, not well, for she struggled, but on the eyebrow, on the ear, on the lip. “Now you’re no better than they thieves!” she said breathlessly.
“Stay awhile,” I pleaded. “Please stay. No one’ll miss us for an hour.”
She looked at me, again uncertain, but there was a glint of kindness in her eyes. “If you promise not to be lickerish.”
“1 promise.”
We lay there lazily for ten minutes in the sun. I sucked a piece of grass and looked up at two choughs planing into the wind. The sun was gilding their black wings, transforming them. I wished it would gild ours.
Meg went across and gathered a sheaf of bluebells, then came to sit beside me again.
“A pity you hasn’t your book, Maugan. Then you could read to me again.”
“There’s nothing so good in books as there is in life.
“Such as love I suppose.”
“Such as love, you rightly suppose.”
“Which you, never ‘aving’ad it, d’know all about.
“I’ll know if you’ll teach me.”
“Hoh, some teaching you’d need.”
“I’ll be a quick learner.”
“Quick learner! I reckon in no time you’d be trying to give me lessons!”
“Maybe we could both learn.”
“Oh, Maugan, change the talk. It’s carnality so to go on all the time.”
“I don’t think so. I’m asking a favour of you, that’s all.”
“A favour! My dear life! “
“Well, wouldn’t it be?”
She stared at me with compressed lips, breathing deep. But she could not keep up her exasperation and began to laugh. I leaned over and kissed her teeth.
She stopped quick at that. “Maugan, please, what’re ye trying to do? I’m married. Do that mean naught? Have ye no thought for Dick? Have you no “
“Maybe I shall have thought for him sometime later. Not now. I’m sorry, but not now. I want you, Meg. I’m asking you. Truly, meekly, as a great favour.”
She put her fingers on my mouth. “Don’t speak so. Twouldn’t be fair. And” she glanced round “you can’t mean here?”
“Here. Safer than any dark corner of Arwenack. There’s no one in a mile, and no one ever comes here for no one knows of it, except Belemus and me, and he’s in Fowey visiting the Treffrys. Here in the warm wind where it’s light and clean … Prove to me love’s not ugly.”
She stared at me and for the first time I could see temptation and indecision in her eyes. It almost staggered me, now that she was so near yielding, that I had got so far. I waited, not taking even a deep breath.
The temptation faded. “No, Maugan, what can I be even thinking of? No!”
She began to get up and I caught her shoulders and pulled her down. She struggled and then was still. We lay there looking at each other, while the wind thrust through the trees and the may blossom drifted down. I began to smother her face with kisses, and then, with some instinct that at the last she would rebuff me in this open place, half pulled her, half caressed her into moving under the branches of an old elm where there was privacy and shade. The young bracken was crushed with our weight. At the last when I knew I had almost won there was a horrible fumbling with clothes which might even then have brought hesitation and self doubt back. She turned towards me and tried to speak but I said: “Sweet Meg, now I know Kilter lied. Oh Meg, let me love you. Sweet Meg, don’t deny me now.”
And she did not. In later years I was to learn that a woman’s attitude to love is only an extension of her attitude to life; and Meg was never one in ordinary dealings to measure or grudge a gift.
When my father came home next day he was in a black mood that found fault with everything and everyone. I was at a loss to account for it.
Now he took me really to task for having laid hands on the Irish vessel. It seemed that she belonged to Sir Denison Ferguson, who had been raising Cain to have a commission appointed to investigate the robbery, and it was only by strenuous efforts that he, Mr Killigrew, had blocked the appointment. He had done this by accepting the task of opening up an inquiry himself, jointly with Mr Hannibal Vyvyan, to discover the culprits. This was going to be a delicate matter and a tedious one, for there were people in Penryn, he had heard, who were prepared to stand up and swear that the raid was the work of his bastard son. They had no proof, of course, but the accusation would look bad. Care must be taken so to arrange the inquiry that the trouble-makers should not be called. A report must be in the hands of the Privy Council by July, or they would send Sir Ferdinando Gorges from Plymouth to complete the inquiry. Gorges, being a creature of Essex, must not be allowed to come.
However, the full and real cause of his angry mood emerged later, when he told me that Sir George Fermor had postponed the wedding. Sir George, he said, had come to the conclusion that John and Jane were yet too young for marriage let them wait another six months. He would reconsider the matter in August when Jane was 16.
“There is some deep device behind the postponement that I like not. It was all arranged for next month, and I went up there expressly to discuss the details. This was a thunderstroke.”
“D’you think it is the money, sir? It’s a vast amount to find, and all in gold.”
“I think not. I made the carefullest inquiries before ever proposing the match. He is very wealthy.”
“D’you think it may be that he has heard we are in debt?”
“I told him as much but not of course the extent. No one knows the extent, for my debtors are well scattered and unknown to each other. That is what preserves me at all! … Anyway, it will add acutely to our problems through the summer … Perhaps by August the Spaniards will have landed, and then we shall have no debts, nor no life neither ~ “
Loving a woman is not an act in isolation. No fences of the mind or body screen its effects from everyday life. Meg and I lived in the same house, ate in the same room, could meet by accident three or four times daily. Yet while we were often near each other there was little chance of true conversation and no privacy for anything more. May brought in the rain and no further meetings were possible in the whitethorn glade.
For ten days she kept me in ignorance of her true feelings. With greater experience perhaps I would have known, but I did not then. For ten days she kept out of arm’s reach. Then one evening I was sitting reading by the fire in the big drawingroom chamber. My grandmother and Mrs Killigrew were there, the latter working a sampler, Lady Killigrew poring over a letter which had come by the wool stapler that evening. Supper had been done an hour and dusk was falling. Someone came into the room with a branch of candles, and I knew it was Meg. Without looking up I heard her move to put the candles on the side table where they usually stood and then for a few seconds she did not move to go out. I glanced at the mirror on the wall and saw she was looking at me. I turned my head and she quickly lowered hers and went out.