A Cornish Orphan Read online

  WHAT READERS HAVE TO SAY ABOUT SHEILA JEFFRIES’ BOOKS . . .

  ‘Stunning. Beautifully written, with an exquisitely poetic narrative’

  ‘One of those rare books that stays with you long after you’ve finished reading it’

  ‘The most heart-warming book I have read in a long time. I did not want it to end’

  ‘Fabulous read’

  ‘Sheila Jeffries is an amazing storyteller’

  ‘One of the best books I have read. I couldn’t put it down’

  ‘Brilliant’

  ‘The prose is simply superb. When the sheer beauty of words can evoke tears, that’s the sign of a gifted writer’

  ‘Of all the books I have bought, this is the best’

  ‘Every page was a pleasure to read’

  ‘Spellbinding’

  ‘A truly unique book, one that I would highly recommend. I can’t wait for her next’

  ‘A book to touch your heart’

  ‘This novel is sweet and insightful and shows a good understanding of human emotions’

  ‘I heartily recommend this book’

  ‘I thought all the characters were brilliant’

  ‘I thoroughly enjoyed it and the insight into the afterlife was so interesting’

  To my lovely sister, June.

  Chapter 1

  Porthmeor Beach, St Ives, 1929

  ‘There’s something red out there in the sea. It could be a child.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There . . . look . . . between the waves. See it?’

  ‘Briefly. It’s too small to be a person. I reckon it’s a red cloth, or a coat.’

  ‘But it moved . . . I saw it!’

  ‘Wishful thinking, lad.’ Vic scrutinised his son’s expression. An eager, over-zealous face, reckless and compassionate. ‘Don’t you go out there, Arnie. We’ve done enough. We got ’em all – tragic it is – a tragic day for St Ives.’ Both men glanced towards the top of the beach where the bodies of drowned sailors were laid out in an orderly line, their staring eyes covered in an assortment of fabric: sailcloth, old curtains, even coats. It had been hard to find enough to cover them all, to give them dignity after they’d been dragged, heavy and limp from the sea, or disentangled from the foam-spattered wreckage and seaweed piled on the shore.

  ‘There wouldn’t have been a child on a cargo ship,’ Vic said. ‘Forget it, Arnie.’

  But Arnie Lanroska wasn’t one to give up. He was a strong, young Cornishman, a proud member of the lifeboat crew, a baritone in the male voice choir, a husband, a dad. His keen eyes searched the swell of silver waves, still massive from the storm that had raged through the night, driving a ship onto the rocks. Splintered and smashed, she had capsized with terrifying speed, in the dark, the crew flung into the sea, without lifejackets, before the lifeboat could even be launched.

  Arnie felt he was the last man standing, watching the tide, believing someone was out there, clinging to a piece of timber. Alive. Abandoned. He sensed it. As if in response, the sea tossed it up again. Momentarily he saw a tumble of blonde curls, a tiny, lost, expectant face, appearing and disappearing in the troughs between waves.

  ‘It’s a child. A little girl.’ He stripped off his sweater and trousers. Arnie was exhausted, but the glimpse of that small face touched a raw memory in his heart and gave him energy.

  ‘I’m sure it’s a child. I have to go in, Dad.’

  ‘I hope you’re not right.’ Vic squared his aching shoulders and stood guard as his son stripped down to his swimming shorts. In the lion-coloured light of an October afternoon, Arnie dashed through the clods of seafoam the wind was tearing from the fringes of the Atlantic.

  He dived into the green curl of a towering wave, cutting under the surf, his strong, lithe body swimming expertly above the undertow of an ebbing tide. The longing in his soul drove him forward. A little girl. He’d always dreamed of a little girl who would look at him with shining eyes and call him Daddy. He and his wife, Jenny, had two boys, Matt, nine, and Tom, five, but their first child had been stillborn. Perfect, but dead. A girl. Heartbroken, Arnie had cradled her in his rough, cupped hands, her skin cold, her sleeping face uncannily like his mother, the delicate features distinctly a Lanroska. ‘You’ll live in my heart, for ever,’ he’d whispered, and he could see her now, as he thrashed his way through the hungry sea. It reopened the disappointment etched so deeply into his heart when he’d stared bleakly at her closed blue eyelids and realised he would never see his daughter’s eyes. A door had slammed over their dreams, the lock tightening with every moment of holding their dead baby girl, the helpless heat of Jenny’s tears as she’d pressed her shocked face close to his. The cruellest blow had come from his own grandmother, known as Nan, who had turned on the grieving couple with tight-lipped, imperious spite. ‘It’s your fault that baby was stillborn. I warned you – but, no, you didn’t listen, did you?’ It hurt bitterly, especially as Nan seemed triumphant, showing no compassion when her chilling prediction came true. It had caused a rift in the family. Jenny and Nan hated each other and the boys were kept away from Nan despite her grand house and magical garden where they might have enjoyed playing.

  Arnie had grown up in St Ives, close to the sea, listening to its voice, its secret inner world, its rages and its peace. It was how he knew the child was out there; he felt her pulse beating across the water, sensed her life in the same way as he could sense a dolphin before it appeared.

  A cone of sunlight sprinkled stars upon the water as he surfaced. Momentary light. He swam through timber and flotsam. And then, in a ribbon of clear water, he saw her: a little girl, her cheeks flushed, her fists clinging to the broken half a door. She wasn’t crying. She was silent, her eyes assessing him through tendrils of honey-coloured hair.

  Any possibility of bonding with her quickly vanished with the storm-surge heaving and plunging around them. He’d have to grab her and go, swimming on his back, hands clasped around her chin. She wasn’t going to like it. She would be terrified, and too small to understand he was rescuing her, not trying to kill her.

  ‘Don’t worry, little one, I’m Arnie. I’ve come to get you.’ That didn’t sound right, shouted into the wind. The child looked at him silently. Did she speak English? There was no time to find out. ‘Let go of the wood. I’ll hold you safe.’ Arnie touched her small arm and felt the tension in her as she tightened her grip. She wasn’t going to let go. All he could do was keep her afloat and stay with her. Until what? The ebbing tide wouldn’t carry them ashore.

  Arnie waved and shouted towards the beach with all the power he could muster in his voice. ‘I need some help. A child. Alive.’ From the crest of the next enormous wave he saw Vic’s solid navy-blue figure on the sand. ‘Need help!’ he yelled again, and moments later Vic had torn off his clothes and dived into the sea.

  ‘Who’s this? A princess?’ Vic surfaced beside them, his hair slicked back by the water, showing his bald patch. But his eyes had a sparkle and the child responded with a slight quiver of her lip, then a shift of the terror in her eyes, a silent, steely message. She wasn’t going to let go of the door, even for Vic.

  ‘You hold tight then, Princess,’ Vic said. ‘We’ll have you snuggled up by the fire in no time.’ Together, father and son steered the broken door through the waves with the child on it. Still she didn’t cry. Splinters drove into Arnie’s hands as he clenched the rough timber, fighting to keep it steady. His muscles burned with the effort of swimming only with his legs, his arms pushing the door through the turbulent water. The relief of feeling the sand brush his feet was huge. Emotional. After twelve harrowing hours of rescues, using his last reserves of strength to haul bodies from the sea. Trying not to care too much. Trying not to shout at God ab
out why not a single one of them was alive, despite their efforts, despite the prayers going on in the village church. And now – to find a little girl, alive and not crying. A miracle that echoed down the corridors of Arnie’s mind, right back to the stillborn baby. This little girl was safely ashore. Alive. Her eyes open. A pulse beating in her neck. Arnie wanted to collapse on the sand and weep instead of striding manfully out of the sea with Vic. Carefully they put the door down on soft white sand.

  ‘There you are – you’re safe now, Princess.’ Vic squatted down and got eye contact with the shocked little girl. Arnie gulped. It was always the same. His dad, one step ahead of him, knowing exactly what to do, how to talk, how to warm the coldest heart with the light of his smile. An inappropriate thought at a time like this. He watched the child slowly unfasten her small hands from the wooden door. She examined them, a frown drawing her downy eyebrows together. Then her eyes widened, searching the beach. Who was she looking for? Arnie sat himself between her and the line of dead bodies, not wanting her to see them.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked, but she didn’t answer, her big eyes glancing over him as if the question was quite irrelevant.

  Vic shook his head. ‘She doesn’t want to talk,’ he advised. ‘Best let her be. Maybe she don’t speak English.’

  ‘ARNIE!’ He turned to see Jenny bustling along the sand, a blessed figure in her fruit-stained apron and shabby blue dress, her plume of dark hair blowing sideways. A group of village women were with her, their faces unusually serious after the storm had brought unasked for tragedy to their beach.

  ‘Your hands!’ Jenny immediately noticed his bleeding fingers. ‘They’re full of splinters.’ Her eyes glowed with concern. ‘I’m so proud of you – a proper hero, aren’t you? Now, enough is enough, Arnie – and you, Vic. Time to come home.’ Then she gasped, noticing the child still sitting on the door. ‘Is that . . . a child . . . from the wreck? Surely not.’ She knelt down on the sand and looked at her. ‘Darling. You poor little mite.’

  The villagers gathered round, curious, wanting to help, wanting to share the ambience of hope her rescue had generated.

  ‘Where’d you come from, dearie?’

  ‘Where’s yer mum and dad?’

  ‘Was you on that ship?’

  The bewildered child looked from one to the other, and for the first time a single teardrop escaped down her rounded cheek.

  ‘She don’t look Cornish, do she?’ said Maudie Tripconey, always one to spread controversy. ‘Don’t belong ’ere, that’s for sure.’

  Jenny reached out and touched the little girl’s face. ‘She’s freezing. She’s dangerously cold. I’m taking her home.’ She scooped the wet child into her arms, and the little girl didn’t resist but leaned her face against Jenny’s comforting shoulder.

  ‘Look at her red velvet dress,’ Maudie Tripconey said. ‘She came from a rich family. Look at the lace petticoats underneath. That’s quality lace, that is. You be careful, Jenny, what you’re taking on.’

  ‘She’s a child in need.’ Jenny flung a contemptuous stare at Maudie. ‘Now no more of your doom and gloom. We need to get her in the warm. It’s getting dark now. And you two men, stood there shivering – where’s yer sweaters? Come on – hot soup waiting on the stove. Some for you too, little one.’ She pulled at her shawl, and wrapped it round the silent child who was studying Maudie Tripconey with just a hint of hostility in her eyes.

  ‘If she’s an orphan, she should go straight to the orphanage,’ Maudie Tripconey called as Jenny swept by with the child in her arms. ‘You wait ’til your nan hears about this. She’s up there watching by her garden gate.’

  ‘I don’t care what she thinks.’ Jenny walked on, refusing to look up at Nan’s gabled house, its windows like watching eyes high on the cliff above the little harbour town.

  But Maudie wouldn’t or couldn’t stop berating the family. ‘You can’t feed your own two boys, Jenny Lanroska, leave alone feed another one.’

  ‘Hold your tongue, woman.’ Vic’s direct, honest eyes challenged Maudie who shut her mouth and folded her arms in defiance.

  Arnie and Vic gathered their boots and sodden clothes in two disorganised bundles and followed Jenny’s determined back, the child’s face with its tumble of bright hair bobbing over her shoulder. Being careful to avoid the line of dead bodies, she walked up through the rocky end of the beach, past the lobster pots and fishermen’s sheds, and into the cobbled street. Their home was in the Downlong area of St Ives, a huddle of granite cottages on the saddle of land between the harbour and Porthmeor Beach.

  Still the child was silent, but her eyes were closing, the lids heavy. She was falling asleep, listening to Jenny singing. A Cornish sea shanty, sung by generations of home-going fishermen and tin miners; whether they were wet, cold, tired or destitute, there was always the singing. Spreading hope, spreading peace. Soon the deep voices of Arnie and Vic were joining in, even as they stood back to let the undertaker’s cart roll by on its way to the beach. Two shaggy black horses, a black, covered wagon, a grim-faced top-hatted driver. Followed by a second cart. And a third.

  But the Lanroska family went on singing. Singing a lost child to sleep. A child saved from the tragic wreck. An orphan. Who was she? It didn’t matter. The Lanroskas had taken her to their hearts.

  Jenny carefully unbuttoned the red velvet dress from the sleeping child, the fabric dark with seawater. Mindful of the need to get her warm, she had laid her on the rug in front of the Cornish range, its door flung open to the purr of flames and the soothing heat of burning driftwood. The ornamental brass on the huge black stove had a reassuring gleam, and the flames tinged the steam from the big kettle and made flickering reflections in all the cooking pots, the brass bellows and fire tongs. Jenny hung the sodden dress over a drying rack where it steamed with an unfamiliar perfume, exotic and spicy, as if it had been kept in a drawer infused with an evocative eastern fragrance. The dress had a pocket with something hard and knobbly inside. Jenny didn’t investigate; her priority was to remove the child’s wet clothes, and wrap her in something warm. She opened the lid of the tall oak settle and pulled out a cream hand-knitted shawl that had belonged to her mother.

  Under the dress were the layers of lace petticoats which she deftly peeled off, and under it was a liberty bodice, a pair of frilly bloomers and a vest. All soaking wet and awkward to remove from the sleeping child whose cherubic face didn’t change even when Jenny rolled her to and fro and sat her up to get the clothes off. It was when she peeled off the last garment, a vest, that Jenny made a shocking discovery. The child had smooth, creamy skin, but her little back was covered in ugly red weals, criss-crossed over her tender shoulder blades and down over her buttocks and the backs of her legs.

  ‘Arnie!’

  ‘What is it, love?’ Arnie left his bowl of soup and came to her, appalled to see Jenny’s eyes brimming with horrified tears.

  ‘Look. Look at her. The poor little mite. She’s been beaten.’

  Arnie knelt on the rug, his face glowing in the firelight, and together they stared at the little girl’s back while she slept.

  ‘Those marks . . . they look inflamed . . . some are weeping. What could she have done to deserve it? How could anyone hurt a child so badly?’

  ‘Looks like she was whipped with the buckle end of a belt,’ Arnie said grimly. ‘It must be hurting – but she wasn’t even crying. She’s a brave little girl.’

  ‘I was praying her parents were alive,’ Jenny said. ‘But now . . .’

  ‘Whoever did that should be hung, drawn and quartered. Doing that to a child.’ Arnie reached across the sleeping child and drew his wife close to him, their heads pressed together in wordless emotion. It felt the same as the moment when they had gazed down at their dead baby. But now it had moved on into a new life, a new chance, a chance to heal and nurture this strange, shipwrecked, silent child. ‘We have to keep her,’ Arnie whispered, and the words hung in the air like a pair of ornate entrance gate
s, metal, and shining, and strong.

  Jenny nodded, overwhelmed by the unbreakable bond she had with Arnie, thinking it was a precious gift of love and protection for this little girl. Jenny’s pragmatic, maternal mindset told her she couldn’t linger and indulge the intense feeling. She must tend to the child’s needs.

  ‘Fetch me the iodine and the roll of cotton wool,’ she said. ‘And I can’t wrap her in a scratchy shawl. Silk. She needs some silk. Mother’s blouse.’

  While Arnie rummaged in the dresser drawer for the iodine, Jenny opened the lid of the settle again and fished out the blue silk blouse her mother had loved so much. It would make a cool, kind layer against the child’s injured back.

  ‘How old would she be?’ Arnie asked as Jenny dabbed the dark gold iodine tincture gently over the wounds, blowing on them to dry it.

  ‘Six – maybe seven – we won’t know until she talks. We don’t even know her name.’ Jenny rolled up the sleeves of the silk blouse and threaded the child’s arms into it. ‘A good job Mother was petite. Even so, it’s miles too big. She’s very deeply asleep, Arnie, and I must watch her all night – she could be ill from getting so cold – I mean, really, dangerously ill. Hypothermia, they call it . . . and I know we can’t afford the doctor. I’ll nurse her as best I can.’

  Arnie made the fire up, piling chunks of driftwood and nuggets of coal scavenged from the harbour beach. He spread a tartan rug over the wicker chair. ‘You sit here with her, Jen. And when you think she’s properly warm, bring her into our bed. Let her sleep in between us.’ He lit a new candle from the fire and replaced the stump of wax in the brass candle-stick. ‘I’m bone weary. It’s been a hard day – worst day of my life, Jen. I need to sleep it off. Can’t ever forget those bodies laid out on our beach. I’ll never go down there again without remembering. It’s brought sorrow to our happy town.’

  Jenny nodded, torn between comforting her shattered husband and nursing the child. She let Arnie settle her in the chair, wrapped in the blanket, with the child’s still damp mane of hair draped over the arm of the chair, the curls rippling as they dried in the firelight. ‘Kiss the boys goodnight for me,’ she said, glad that she’d asked Millie from next door to put Matt and Tom to bed. She listened to the thump of his footsteps climbing the narrow stairs, heard him go into the boys’ bedroom, the comforting twang of bedsprings as he tucked them in. Then the sound of him slumping into the sagging mattress they shared in the front bedroom. Normally they slept with the curtains drawn back, with the moonlight and starlight and the eternal pounding of the waves. But tonight, Arnie had closed the shutters as if to shut out the world.