Marta and Josephine nodded, but Lancaster shook his head. ‘I came here as a child. We used to holiday in Cornwall with my grandmother.’
His wife looked at him curiously, as if his childhood memories were new to her. ‘Are we the first to arrive?’ Marta asked casually, not quite brazen enough to enquire specifically about Marlene.
‘No, the Reverend Hartley and his wife came over this morning, and Mr Fielding has been with us since yesterday. Everyone else is arriving later this afternoon.’ So Archie was still on the road, Josephine thought, and would no doubt be taking his time; there was little point in travelling with a Hollywood star unless you planned to make an entrance. ‘It’s just as well you’re staying for a couple of days,’ Trannack added. ‘There’s rough weather coming in later, and you won’t get on or off the island until it’s passed.’
‘Even at low tide?’ Mrs Lancaster asked, looking anxiously across to the cobbled pathway, which seemed so safe and inviting.
The chauffeur smiled, apparently accustomed to her scepticism. ‘It changes quicker than you’d think. You get a southerly gale and a swell building, and the causeway’s covered for days at a time.’ He went into a detailed explanation of neap tides, wind direction and the cycle of the moon, which Josephine tried in vain to follow. ‘In an emergency, three or four of us might get across at low tide if we roped ourselves together, but thankfully we don’t have many emergencies on the island.’
‘Well, if we’re here for the duration, it doesn’t bother me,’ Lancaster said. ‘It just gives us all a chance to get to know each other better.’
He beamed round at them, and Josephine could already see by the look on Marta’s face that she was unlikely to change her mind about people called Gerald. Trannack opened the rear door and Lancaster stood aside to let the three women get into the back seat, but his wife hesitated. ‘Can we walk across the causeway?’ she asked, looking appealingly at her husband, and Josephine got the impression that she was trying to delay her arrival at the house for as long as possible. ‘Some air might be nice after the journey.’
The chauffeur hesitated, wrong-footed by the request, but Lancaster saved him the trouble of replying. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, darling. How long do you think that would take? Get in.’
She did as she was told, and Marta glanced at Josephine, who rolled her eyes. She hated the way that Lancaster had so publicly dismissed his wife’s suggestion, even if it was impractical: Marazion Station was set apart from the town, where the causeway began, and to access the Mount on foot would first have involved a lengthy walk across the sand and pebble beach, which stretched for miles in front of them. The car took them out into a narrow country lane, parallel with the railway track, and they travelled back the way they had come until they reached Marazion. Josephine looked with interest at the little market town, which seemed to be organised around one winding street with houses straggling up the hill on the left-hand side. Its ancient buildings and curiously named alleyways intrigued her, suggesting a rich past independent of its connections to the Mount, and she hoped for a chance to explore it more thoroughly before they left Cornwall.
Trannack turned right and drove down onto the beach, heading towards an impressive mass of rock which marked the beginning of the causeway. ‘That’s Chapel Rock,’ he said, slipping effortlessly into the role of guide. ‘The pilgrims used to wait there for the tide to go out, but they pulled the chapel down during the Civil War.’
‘Which side were you on?’
‘The right one, of course,’ he replied, without missing a beat, then added: ‘We held out for the King as long as we could. The Prince of Wales stayed at the Mount on his way out of the country. There’s a little room off the south terrace where they hid him – you’ll see it later on, no doubt. Mind you, the current Lord’s ancestor was for Parliament, but we don’t hold a grudge down here.’
He smiled at her in the rear-view mirror, and Josephine remembered how welcome she had felt the last time she was in Cornwall, staying with Archie’s family. ‘Do you live on the island?’ she asked, already fascinated by its history.
‘Yes, in the village. My family’s been there since the seventeen hundreds, but that’s not unusual. Most of us go back a few generations, usually doing the jobs our fathers did. There’s not as many of us as there used to be, mind, and even fewer since the war, so you have to be able to turn your hand to most things now.’
The car took the causeway slowly, its tyres bumping over the cobbles as they left the mainland behind. On either side, flocks of oyster catchers searched for food along the shoreline, plunging their bills deeply into sand left bare by the fallen tide, and the smell of seaweed was rich and pungent. Up ahead, the path’s halfway point was marked by a square stone embedded with a cross, another reminder of the island’s holy origins; the image was already stark, silhouetted against an increasingly angry sky, but a carrion crow perched on the upright post gave the scene a still more ominous appearance. ‘Not exactly robins and festive cheer so far, is it?’ Marta whispered. ‘I hope they’ve lit the fires.’
Rachel Lancaster took a handkerchief from her bag to wipe some condensation from the window, and as the sleeve of her coat fell back, Josephine noticed a faint bruise on her arm. She would have thought nothing of it had it not been for the brusque exchange she had just witnessed, but now she wondered if the careful arranging of the scarf was down to something more disturbing than nerves. ‘Have you come far?’ she asked, conscious that the couple hadn’t spoken a word since getting into the car.
‘From London,’ Rachel said. ‘We live in Somers Town, near Gerald’s work, but we came down yesterday and broke the journey overnight. It’s our wedding anniversary today. This trip is Gerald’s present to me.’
‘You were married on Christmas Eve?’ Marta said. ‘That was brave, with so much to organise already at this time of year.’
‘I suppose it was, but neither of us has particularly happy memories of Christmas from when we were children, so we thought we’d make up for it, didn’t we, Gerry?’ She leaned forward to squeeze her husband’s shoulder and he nodded, but his eyes remained fixed firmly on the Mount. ‘And it’s not as if we have big families to juggle, so most of the time we can just please ourselves.’
The silhouette of the castle grew more defined as they neared the end of the causeway. It had obviously been built to accommodate its unique position, rising steeply from dramatic areas of exposed rock, and its features sharpened gradually into a blend of the sacred, the military and the domestic: fortress walls, softening at intervals into more picturesque turrets, parapets and terraces, with a church rising up from the centre, its tower marking the highest point of the island. It was a strange mixture to find in such close proximity, and yet there was a harmony about it, Josephine thought, a simple honesty about the relationship between God and war over the centuries.
The causeway joined the island to the left of its compact harbour, and the car drew up by the first cluster of buildings. Modest, traditional stone cottages rubbed shoulders with a solid Victorian lodge and a handsome white house in the Regency style. A museum and gift shop stood on one corner, opposite the lych-gate to a tiny cemetery. To the right, a wider, cobbled road ran past an attractive row of cottages that fronted the harbour, their lamps already lit against the early gloom. The village seemed self-contained and detached from the castle’s grandeur, Josephine thought, but she guessed that the lives of each set of inhabitants must be closely connected.