The Rival Potters Read online

  He loved Tremain. Heart and soul, he belonged to the place and would devote his life to it, as his late grandmother had done. Charlotte Freeman, who had been Charlotte Tremain before her marriage, had had no difficulty in imbuing into her unusual grandson her own sense of dedication. ‘But who would have expected it?’ Miguel had once accidentally overheard her say to Old Ralph. ‘Who would have imagined that such pride in an English home could be inborn in an offspring only half English and whose formative years were spent in a foreign environment?’

  ‘Aye, he’s a good lad,’ his grandfather had said. ‘You’ll be leaving your precious heritage in safe hands when you go.’

  “We will be leaving it,’ Charlotte had corrected gently. ‘You have served and loved the place as diligently as I. It is ours equally.’

  Concealed by a half-open door, Miguel had been unable to see their faces. But he knew that a smile accompanied the old lady’s words, and he knew the quality of it. Warmth and affection had always been there when talking to her husband, and it had always been there for himself.

  Deborah brought him back to the moment by saying, ‘Aren’t you ever lonely in that huge place? I mean…the three of you living in your separate wings…so isolated from each other…’

  Startled, because such a thought had never occurred to him and he had certainly not expected it to come from her, he said, ‘I’ve never thought about it. I never have time! The days are too busy. And we’re not isolated. At least, my father and I are not. We take all our meals together, even breakfast because he insists on getting up for it. On his good days he gets out and about with me. There’s nothing he enjoys so much as driving all over the estate and seeing how everything is getting along. He used to ride, when he was able to, and during my grandparents’ last days he brought them regular reports about every development. That pleased them because in his youth he had taken no interest in Tremain. Only on bad days now, when his injuries plague him, does he shut himself off with a decanter for company. I have learned to leave him alone then, but not for too long.’

  ‘And Aunt Agatha?’

  He smiled. ‘She never changes.’

  ‘Still being indulged by Pierre?’ Deborah’s tone was kindly, not critical.

  ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone? Don’t forget that she is my aunt as well as yours because she married my mother’s elder brother, the legendary Joseph.’

  ‘It sounds as though you disliked your uncle.’

  ‘How could I? I never knew him. He died long before I was born. But of course I haven’t grown up in these parts without hearing things —’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as the way he died. People still whisper about it, and about Carrion House which they declare to be haunted, or worse. “’Tis cursed!” they say. “Violent deaths be natural to that there place. In times begone the bodies of a woman an’ ’er lover were walled up there, an’ ’tis said as ’ow folk’ve disappeared, nivver t’be seen agin!”’

  She gave a passable imitation of the local dialect, making him laugh.

  ‘Good — you’re laughing. You don’t do it enough, Miguel.’

  ‘Perhaps because I don’t see you enough, to make me.’

  Her lovely eyes saddened. She reached out and touched his hand. ‘Dear Miguel, are you unhappy? Or don’t you smile so much these days because you are lonely? My mother wishes you would come to see us more often. Why don’t you?’

  Because I don’t want to thrust my company on to you, he wanted to say. Because I wouldn’t be able to hide how I feel, but meeting casually like this, spending a brief time riding alongside you, I can keep things light and impersonal. Because seeing you too often would make me want you more and more and then I would certainly give myself away and you would begin to avoid me. Because of several things but one in particular — I don’t trust myself.

  He evaded the disturbing touch of her hand by moving on and saying lightly, ‘So people still declare that Carrion House is haunted, do they? I heard that tale when I first came here, but didn’t believe it. Nor do I believe it now. I can’t see Aunt Agatha going to such pains to care for the place on her son’s behalf if she believed it either. She spends endless time preparing for Lionel’s coming, poor soul.’

  ‘Is he coming?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard, but she lives in hope.’ As Grandmother Charlotte had once done, he reflected. There was a tragic similarity in the two situations.

  Deborah said thoughtfully, ‘Had he wanted to, surely he would have returned when he heard of the bequest all those years ago, but he didn’t bother.’ She finished lightly, ‘Perhaps he was alarmed by Carrion’s history!’

  If he were, thought Miguel, it could be understandable. Lionel must surely have heard the details of his father’s violent death. Although it had occurred some months prior to his own birth, the facts were public knowledge and could not have been withheld from him for ever. Joseph Drayton’s body had lain in Carrion’s summer house for a week, stabbed through the nape of the neck just below the skull. The exotic interior of the place had lent a macabre touch…Oriental furniture, rich carpeting, silken cushions piled on a luxurious divan…and Joseph Drayton’s figure, clad only in a Chinese robe, sprawled on it, as if awaiting a lover.

  Or left there by one.

  How it happened and who was responsible, had never been discovered. His widow had returned to her former home, Tremain Hall, there to give birth to his son and there to remain. Twenty-one years later, she had sold Carrion House to her brother Maxwell, who settled his estranged wife in it: spoilt Phoebe, tiresome Phoebe, who for all her faults surely didn’t deserve to die by strangulation in the midst of the tawdry, gaudy setting she had created for herself?

  But these things belonged to the past and Miguel had no intention of reviving them now. If Deborah’s knowledge of events was scanty, let it remain so. Let her attribute the unhappy reputation of Carrion House merely to local legend.

  He said, ‘Remembering Lionel, I doubt if he would pay much heed to superstition.’

  ‘I have only the vaguest recollection of him.’

  ‘He was very much like his father, I’m told.’

  ‘Then he must have been handsome, because everyone recalls my late uncle as a very good-looking man. But Martin was always nicer, always kinder, my mother says. Dear Uncle Martin. I remember how he welcomed me on a visit to the pottery when Olivia took me there as a child, and how his workers were at ease with him, and what a happy place it was — and still will be, with Olivia and Amelia at the helm, not to mention Meg Tinsley to help them, still the best turner in all the potteries.’

  They were reaching the point where she would take the road to Cooperfield and he, having no excuse to accompany her, would ride downhill and re-enter Tremain Park, returning to the vast house in which he occupied the Heir’s Wing, with his father in the Master Wing and his aunt in the West. Lonely? He had never thought about it, but now he realized that what the place lacked was the echo of voices and the sound of life. Once it must have been filled with both, but there was only one way in which they could be revived — with a wife and a family of his own; with young people growing up there and marrying and rearing their children, as generations of Tremains had done before.

  When Ralph Freeman, a man lacking equal estates but successful in his own field, married Charlotte, who was to inherit the Tremain fortune, he too had made the place his home. ‘Didn’t much want to,’ he had confessed to Miguel one day, in his bluff way, ‘but I wanted dear Charlotte a great deal more, so it was worth it. And I’ve never regretted it; never felt like an intruder or a guest or anything like that. I was her husband and as such I established myself here, and in time the place came to mean as much to me as it does to her.’

  In a short time, Deborah halted again. ‘I often pause here to look down on Tremain Chapel. How pretty it is! My mother once told me that her sister married your father there and what a pretty bride she must have made. That
struck me as an odd way of putting it — not that she was a pretty bride, but that she must have been, as if she, her twin, hadn’t seen her. So of course I asked what she meant. “Weren’t you there?” I said, and she said no. That was all.’

  ‘I never liked Phoebe, my father’s wife. She made me far from welcome when my father brought me to Tremain. She couldn’t be blamed for that, of course, since she had neither seen nor heard of her husband for more than twenty years and had long since concluded she was a widow. Turning up with a son of seventeen must have been an unpalatable shock.’

  ‘And so she went to live in Carrion House?’

  He nodded. ‘It was the only house she wanted, so my father persuaded Agatha to sell it to him, which she did willingly enough. It had fallen into a terrible state of neglect, but Phoebe insisted on it being restored to her liking, whatever the cost.’

  ‘And then didn’t live to enjoy it very long. Perhaps the superstitions aren’t superstitions after all and the place does have a curse on it, as some villagers declare.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. Pay no heed.’

  ‘I don’t really, but all the same, don’t you think it odd that she bequeathed Carrion House to her nephew and not to her daughter?’

  ‘Olivia didn’t like it.’

  ‘I know. She told me. But not why she didn’t like it.’

  ‘Olivia is too realistic to be troubled by superstition.’

  ‘Don’t try to dampen my imagination, sir! It can’t be done.’

  ‘Then find another outlet for it.’

  ‘I try. I scribble poetry. I paint. I’m no good at either. I am now trying my hand at designs for decorative pottery. I mean to show them to Olivia when I’m satisfied with them, but at the moment they lack originality. I have studied the pots in the Drayton Museum — all lovely, but I want to do something different. Something in complete contrast.’

  ‘Then I must show you some of my mother’s Mexican pots.’

  ‘You have them still? Aunt Amelia once told me about them.’

  ‘Of course I have them still. They are amongst the few things I possess of my mother’s. She would never be parted from her cooking pots, and when she and my father left Mexico for Grenada, she insisted on taking them with her. You’ve probably heard that she was a servant in a Mexican household before she met my father and became what people here call his “mistress”. To me, she was a wonderful mother. To him, she was a wonderful wife. Before she became either she had saved his life after an earthquake…he was dug out of the rubble badly injured and she nursed him back to health. She was beautiful in every way.’

  A warm smile wreathed Deborah’s face. ‘And she had a splendid son,’ she said, ‘and I would love to see her Mexican pots. When may I?’

  ‘Today, if you wish. I shall finish all essential work by early afternoon.’

  ‘Then early afternoon I shall present myself at your door, after which I shall call on Olivia and Amelia at the pottery.’

  She waved and blew a kiss to him as she rode away. The kiss meant nothing and he knew it, but a glow of happiness and anticipation accompanied him until he reached the family chapel and memory suddenly gripped him. He could see all of them again, walking up toward the great house — Old Ralph and Charlotte, Olivia and Agatha and Phoebe, then the household staff following at a respectful distance…butler and housekeeper, footmen and underfootmen, housemaids and scullery maids, all in their Sunday-best. From within the coach, sitting beside his father, he had taken a good look at everyone, suddenly apprehensive and remembering his father’s words as they drove along the road from Burslem. ‘We will arrive just when they are coming out of chapel. I have planned it so because my parents will then be in mellow mood and Christian charity will compel them to welcome us.’

  ‘But why shouldn’t they?’

  ‘You will find out, my son.’

  He recalled again his father’s unease, covered with much bravado. Throughout the long voyage from Grenada and the long coach journey via Stoke-on-Trent, even during the two days spent in Liverpool on business which had demanded immediate attention, his father’s spirits had ebbed and flowed, but since Conchita’s death these variable moods had been understandable and therefore to be forgiven. But shortly before reaching the immense wrought-iron gates opening on to Tremain’s three mile drive, he had cleared his throat and said, ‘There’s something you ought to know, Miguel. Should’ve told you before. Cowardly of me to shirk it. So here it is — before I met your mother I had a wife. Still have. If she’s still living at Tremain our reception may be — well, unpredictable. Got to face it though. Come so far; can’t turn back. Nor do I want to. This is your rightful home and I’ve come to claim it for you. And there’s something else. When I left my wife she was with child and making a great to-do about it. Anyone would’ve thought no woman had ever given birth before and the tortures of hell awaited her. She didn’t want to be a mother, and as things were I didn’t want to be a father. All the same, I shouldn’t have turned my back on them and I’m not going to do so now. Well, here we are — and that’s the family chapel where we were married, an ill-matched pair if ever there was one. Some day you’ll be married in it, too, and you’ll make a better Master of Tremain than I am likely to, but please God you will choose a better partner for the marriage bed than I did…’

  After a long moment, Miguel had said, ‘If she your wife was with child, then you have another. One who was born before me. It is he who should inherit, not I.’

  ‘But I choose otherwise. That was my reason for staying in Liverpool. I visited the family lawyers there and legalized everything — your identity and naming you my heir.’

  ‘But if another son was born before me, I won’t want to usurp him. Surely I can refuse to?’

  His father was a genial man, but hated being thwarted.

  ‘I forbid you to. Understand? And let’s hope it wasn’t a son.’

  It wasn’t. It was Olivia, a half-sister whom he liked on sight.

  As for choosing the right wife in marriage, there had been no doubt in his mind on that point for a very long time.

  On an impulse, he dismounted and entered the chapel and walked to the altar rails and let his imagination take over. It was a foolish thing to do and he knew it, but he could visualize only Deborah’s lovely face turning to smile at him as they knelt together.

  Abruptly, he left, and continued on his way to the great house where life seemed to be standing still. But this afternoon, for a brief while, it would come alive again because Deborah Kendall would walk through its doors.

  Chapter 2

  The pump had stood in the middle of the potters’ yard for as long as Meg Tinsley could remember, and that was going back a long way. She was in her mid-forties now and still working at Drayton’s as head turner, with a team of twenty workers under her, boss of the whole shed. She had come a long way from being Meg Gibson, the village whore. She was respectable now, a widow earning good wages with a bonus at Christmas and an extra shilling for every hundred pots she turned; likewise each of her workers received an additional threepence or sixpence for the same number, depending on their skill and the quality of their work. No other Master Potter in Burslem paid so well, but Martin Drayton had always been a generous employer and now he had gone his widow, Amelia, was carrying on the tradition.

  On top of this affluence, Meg occupied a cottage down Larch Lane. What matter if it had once housed that old witch, Ma Tinsley? The woman had been laid to rest nine years ago, her troublesome spirit along with her.

  Meg took a swill of cold water, then dropped the iron drinking cup. It swung clanking on its chain as she wiped her hands on her potter’s slop and turned back to her workshed, but some impulse made her glance over her shoulder as she went. There had been no particular sound to attract her attention and all she saw was the gatekeeper’s lodge beside the entrance gates and beyond them a stationary coach. It must have been there for some time, she decided, since she had heard no rumble of wheels. N
o doubt it had deposited a customer and was awaiting his return.

  Then why not drive into the yard, as everyone did? There was a sign directing visitors to the main doors, ample space to accommodate carriages of all kinds, and tethering posts for horses. There was no need for anybody to wait in the lane outside.

  The coachman sat patiently on his box. She was on the point of beckoning to him when a movement from within the coach halted her. A man leaned from the window, his glance wandering comprehensively over the sprawling sheds and the cobble-stoned yard, finally settling on herself.

  She shivered. At this distance his features were indistinct, which made her reaction illogical. Nevertheless, it was there; chilling, oddly frightening. She turned sharply on her heel and closed the door of the turners’ shed firmly behind her.

  Once inside, she forced her mind to think of other things — Abby Walker, for one. The girl worried her. At fourteen she was as tempting as a piece of ripe fruit. She plainly enjoyed masculine attention; was even persuaded to court it by her slut of a mother who brazenly plied a profitable trade and looked upon a pretty daughter as a possible asset to business, meanwhile making sure the girl earned useful pence at the pottery.

  That was where Abby’s girlhood differed from her own. Meg’s mother had never suspected what her daughter had been forced to do to ease their circumstances. The extra coins she had brought home were reputedly earned by putting in extra hours at the turning wheel. Once established, the lie had never been questioned and the supply of old Ma Tinsley’s herbal brews to lull her mother’s ceaseless pain had been worth every penny. But Abby had no such incentive. She had only her mother’s loose morals for guidance.

  Sometimes Meg had been tempted to talk to the Master Potter about Abby. Martin Drayton had been an understanding man, always compassionate, never condemning. If she had gone to him and said, ‘Master Potter, there be a girl in my shed wot needs protecting; a girl with talent who’ll rise in t’pottery unless ’er ma makes ’er earn money other ways,’ he would have removed the girl from Kate Walker’s influence somehow. By discreetly suggesting to the woman that she could earn more on the streets of some rising Midland town without the encumbrance of a daughter?