Treviggen

John Fuller Edward

Description

Emma Courteis just wanted to live quietly with her daughter in Cornwall and paint.That wasn't to be.It's only human to want revenge, but when you follow that path, you sometimes you get more than you planned. And sometimes, when you start something, you may find it can't be stopped... so you'd better be ready to do anything.But what happens when the worst has happened and you want forgiveness?Treviggen is a brutal and sensual romantic thriller, set in the rural Cornwall of some decades ago, as it was or might have been.

Sujets

• Cornualles
• Cornwall
• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 05 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781803138770
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2022 Edward John Fuller

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 9781803138770

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Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd



This book is for Hannah Gordon,
my inspiration and the woman I love.


Contents
Seventeen Minutes to Four
Reason to Remain
Brer Fox and Brer Wolf
Hill Top Farm
A Woman’s Revenge
Absolution on Condition
Na Zdrowie
Loe Bar
Dead End Road
Betrayal
Bad Sport
Party Time
Obsession Stops the Machine
Him of All Men
The Random Factor
Across the Moor
Leskernick
Reunion
Gifts from Madron
Live and Let Live
Sacrifice
Treviggen
Acknowledgements



1988


Seventeen Minutes to Four
And so we endure
The passing of the years
Waiting for the longed-for thing to come
And in the end, there is no evil that escapes us
SEMONIDES
The landscape of a bleak, overgrown dream. Hart’s-tongue fern and adder’s-tongue fern, stonecrop and prickly sedge, sitting as witnesses, fluttering in the winds of a spring gale. Hawthorn and blackthorn, dwarf cherry and medlar, swaying and creaking over the green hedge wall of the sunken lane. Too early to fruit but all of them would blossom tomorrow. The young man saw them all but they had no meaning for him, as he limped away from the crushed and twisted metal. And the girl? She was beyond all caring. The white flowers of the stonecrop tinged with red.
•
On another wet night in early April, a woman sat alone in her car, trying to get it to start. It was an old car now; it had aged with her. Emma had been expecting trouble. First they’d said it was the plugs, then the points, then the carburettor, then the electrics; now even the local garage was tired of taking her money. She’d come out armed with various tools and cans of squirt-on, add-in stuff; they proved no more use than the alternate pleas and threats she heaped upon the engine. It had started first time so sweetly at home; now she was stuck in this windswept college car park, it wouldn’t go.
A sudden sheet of hail began rattling down on the roof and windscreen, blue-white hailstones, the size of bird’s eggs. Windblown dead leaves swirled about the car like bats in the darkness. It would be a long and uncomfortable journey home by bus and foot. Emma had no intention of incurring the expense of a taxi; it would cost her more than she could afford to have the car picked up and repaired again. Bloody-mindedly, she tried the ignition once more; sometimes if you did it very quickly, you could take the thing by surprise. The starter motor let out a horrible shriek of protest, then she heard the clicking caused by the dying battery. Emma flung the keys down on the passenger seat in disgust. She would sit in the shelter of the car until the hailstorm stopped, reluctant to begin the miserable odyssey home.
A rap on the window made her jump. It was Brian Morton, one of her fellow teachers. Emma taught art, part time, in evening classes to adults, when the school turned into a night college. Brian was on the permanent staff and taught history, or propaganda, as Emma saw it. Two hours before they’d been having a heated argument in the staff room. They usually did whenever the subject of Celtic nationalism came up. Brian was an enthusiastic devotee; Emma wasn’t interested. For some reason however he still regarded her as part of his natural constituency and never tired, like tonight, of trying to convert her. He was a young man but sporting the gravitas of glasses and a beard.
“With a name like Morton you’re probably not Cornish anyway!” she’d suggested to him mischievously.
“I am Cornish,” he’d hissed back and stormed off, very red.
Emma wound down her window and the gale blew in. Brian was clutching his jacket about him and hopping from one foot to the other in a vain attempt to keep warm.
“Won’t she go then?” he asked innocently.
“No, it’s let me down again.”
“Can’t say I’m surprised. I told you what to do with it last time—”
“Yes and I didn’t do it,” interrupted Emma irritably, “it’s not my fault, I’m not mechanical.”
“You’re lucky I saw you from the common room window, the others have all gone home. Maybe it would help if you came to union meetings with rest of us.”
They stared at each other awkwardly.
“Want another push then?” Emma smiled guiltily.
“If you don’t mind please Brian.”
“I do mind,” he insisted, “it’s bloody cold. Bring her in in the daylight next time and let me have a look at her. Meanwhile, take off the handbrake and—”
“I know, I know,” agreed Emma with a sigh, being quite familiar with the procedure by now. Brian trotted round to the back of the car and began pushing the heavy Cortina toward the gentle slope that led down to the main road. As Emma felt it slowly gather speed, she put the gear lever into third, lifted her foot slowly off the clutch and switched on. The car spluttered into life, it enjoyed bump starts. Emma vengefully revved up the engine. Brian reappeared, puffing, by her window.
“Everything all right then Emma? Can I go home too now?”
“Brian you’re a saint,” she answered sweetly, “how can I ever make it up to you?” Brian grimaced, then reluctantly smiled back. All said and done, she was his favourite opponent and anyway she was much too good looking to leave stranded by the side of the road.
“Modify your reactionary opinions,” he said, “and try to behave better in school.” They wished each other goodnight and Emma set off home.
•
The darkened streets of Bodmin were almost empty, except for small groups of youths braving the weather, heading for the pub or the chippy. Emma rounded St Petroc’s church, standing in isolated grandeur and headed south to the road junction for Wadebridge and the coast. It could be said that Brian was not alone in recognising her charms. Emma was, as she put it, ‘getting on a bit now’; she was forty-five, though she could have passed for ten or fifteen years younger than that. A fine featured, handsome face, perfect soft skin, extraordinary translucent hazel eyes and a full-lipped sensual mouth, all framed by a luxuriant sweep of honey blonde hair. She wasn’t very tall but she kept fit with walking and swimming and tennis and managed to stay somehow slender and voluptuous in all the right places. Of course signs of ageing were beginning to appear: lines here, veins there, grey hairs blending with the blonde but these served to soften and mature her good looks, adding that touch of vulnerability. Still, as she herself always said, it was personality that got you through in the end.
Alas, none of this did her much good, for Emma was alone. Emma had some traits of personality that many were inclined to regard as… difficult. She was the product of a strict old-fashioned upbringing that had thrust her unprepared and unwanted into the modern age. While her spirit had rebelled against the stuffy hypocrisies of that upbringing, she had found little of value to replace its mocked virtues in the world she lived in. Painfully open and honest, a dreamer with an artistic temperament, a shy, gentle, idealistic individual, she was a natural object of society’s suspicion and contempt. Such attempts as she did make to ‘fit in’ always seemed to founder, leaving her with the conviction that she didn’t belong anywhere, certainly not here. More than all of this, there was one determining factor in her later life that had proved an insurmountable wall to those men not put off by her serious character. Emma was a widow and she carried that with her, always.
Nine years and counting, almost a decade gone that he had never seen. Stephen had swum out to rescue a child and been drowned in the treacherous waters of Whitesand Bay. The child, floating like an imbecile on a rubber lilo, had soon after been picked up by a lifeboat. Emma could remember that afternoon with crystal clarity: the boy’s negligent useless mother screaming at Stephen to save her son while Emma had warned him not to go. He was a strong swimmer, physically fearless, he’d put his hand to her cheek in gentle reassurance, smiled, kissed her, then run across the beach into the sea. Long after she’d seen him disappear beneath the waves she couldn’t believe he’d gone forever. Not until the coastguard had recovered his lifeless body and laid it at her feet. So had gone the centre of her life.
Stephen had been an architect and Emma was an artist. They had struggled financially for the first years, then tastes had changed and Stephen had become successful. They had bought a house in London, the cottage here had been their second home,