The White Camellia E-Book

Juliet Greenwood

• Herausgeber: Honno Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

1909. Cornwall. Her family ruined, Bea is forced to leave Tressillion House, and self-made business woman Sybil moves in. Owning Tressillion is Sybil's triumph – but now what? As the house casts its spell over her, as she starts to make friends in the village despite herself, will Sybil be able to build a new life here, or will hatred always rule her heart? Bea finds herself in London, responsible for her mother and sister's security. Her only hope is to marry Jonathon, the new heir. Desperate for options, she stumbles into the White Camellia tearoom, a gathering place for the growing suffrage movement. For Bea it's life-changing, can she pursue her ambition if it will heap further scandal on the family? Will she risk arrest or worse? When those very dangers send Bea and her White Camellia friends back to Cornwall, the two women must finally confront each other and Tresillion's long buried secrets.

Leseprobe

The White Camellia

The Suffrage Ladies’ Tearoom

by Juliet Greenwood

HONNO MODERN FICTION

For Annette Morris. Bookseller, dancer, and free, independent spirit.

Contents

Title PageDedicationAcknowledgements Author’s note PART ONE Chapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveChapter ThirteenPART TWO Chapter FourteenChapter FifteenChapter SixteenChapter SeventeenChapter EighteenChapter NineteenChapter TwentyChapter Twenty-OneChapter Twenty-TwoChapter Twenty-ThreeChapter Twenty-FourChapter Twenty-FiveChapter Twenty-SixChapter Twenty-SevenChapter Twenty-EightChapter Twenty-NineChapter ThirtyChapter Thirty-OnePART THREE Chapter Thirty-TwoChapter Thirty-ThreeChapter Thirty-FourChapter Thirty-FiveChapter Thirty-SixChapter Thirty-SevenChapter Thirty-EightChapter Thirty-NineAbout the PublisherAlso by Juliet Greenwood and available from Honno PressCopyright

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to thank everyone at Honno Press, and in particular my inspirational editor, Janet Thomas, from whom I continue to learn more than I can ever say.

Thank you to the NW Novelistas, the most supportive group of writers, for invaluable advice and support – and cake! Thanks as well to my reading group for cheering me on, and to my fellow dog walkers for keeping me going and propelling me back towards the computer each morning.

Thank you to my family, and Fran Cox, Sally Hanson, Marian Florence Dawtrey, Beth Bithell and Claire Liversage, for dragging me out when I disappear for too long. To Liz Ashworth, and to Nadine Feldman for long distance conversations, and to my wonderful and supportive friends and neighbours, particularly Dave and Nerys Haynes, Delyth and Catrin.

Author’s note

Both the tearoom The White Camellia, and the The Suffrage League of Women Artists and Journalists are fictitious. They are, however, based on the many ladies’ tearooms and suffrage organisations that gave women a first taste of independence and enabled them to campaign over decades to improve women’s lives, and achieve a voice, a legal existence, the right for education and professional qualifications, and the ability to earn (and keep) an income – the self-determination that we take for granted today.

There are many excellent books on the subject of the suffrage movement; the following are just a small example.

Margaret Forster Significant SistersLucinda Hawksley   March Women, MarchHelen Mathers Patron Saint of Prostitutes: Josephine Butler and a Victorian ScandalMelanie Phillips The Ascent of Woman

PART ONE

Chapter One

CORNWALL 1909

It had not changed.

Sybil stepped to the very edge of the cliff and gazed down at the rambling old house below her, topped with a maze of chimneys, a crumbling reminder of its Jacobean finery.

There was no finery left in Tressillion House, she thought grimly. Even from this distance, the place held an air of ruin and abandonment. No smoke rose up through the chill morning from warm fires within. No bustle of servants, no carriage waiting to take the ladies on their rounds of visits and charitable works in the neighbouring village of Porth Levant. Not even Hector, the stallion, steaming in the frosted morning, taking the master of the house on an inspection of the mine, just visible on the next headland.

This was what she had set in motion, all those years ago. The perfect revenge.

Sybil shivered. She unwound the scarf from her head and breathed in deeply the salt blowing in from the sea, her eyes following the North Cornish coast as it vanished into the distance in the crash of spray against rocks.

The wind tugged at her, loosening her curls from the silver clasp at the base of her neck, sending tendrils of brown hair in a wild dance around her face. Sybil turned back to the house below. She had dreamed of this for so long. The moment she would have Tressillion House helpless at her feet. When the Tressillions − who had once had more than they could ever need, but had not thought twice about taking the last hope from people with nothing − would be destroyed, the survivors learning what it was like to be totally dependent on others.

Was this how revenge felt? Sybil hugged herself, pulling the folds of her coat around her, bent almost double by the grief coiling deep in her belly.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

Sybil straightened, banishing any emotion from her face. ‘Indeed.’ She turned to meet the square, squat little man emerging from the smart new Ford automobile, one hand struggling to keep his hat on his head.

‘The best view of Tressillion House,’ he remarked. ‘You can see, Miss Ravensdale, just what an exceptional property this is. There’s none finer this side of Truro.’

‘So I see, Mr Roach,’ she replied, almost managing to banish any hint of irony. On their first meeting, the solicitor had made obvious his contempt at a spinster, not in the first flush of youth, daring to invade his offices in broad daylight for all the respectable citizens of St Ives to see. He had changed his tune a little too quickly at the sight of her gleaming new Chevrolet, shipped all the way from New York, and speaking more of true wealth than any flash of diamonds.

Tressillion House had proved a more than usually difficult properly to dispose of, and there were impatient creditors snapping at Mr Roach’s heels. She must have seemed like a miracle, a rich hotelier from America dreaming of owning a property in Cornwall. Who else, the gleam in Roach’s eyes declared, would be fool enough to live in an isolated mansion fallen on hard times, with the rollers of the North Cornwall coast clawing at the rocks on wild nights, and ghosts creaking amongst its rafters?

Sybil replaced the scarf around her head. ‘Shall we go?’

‘Of course, Miss Ravensdale, of course.’

Sybil settled herself behind the wheel of the Chevrolet as Roach made his way back to his own vehicle. Officious little man. She grinned to herself. She knew his opinion of her. He wasn’t the first, and he wouldn’t be the last, to so blatantly assume there was a rich lover somewhere in the background, and that she could only have secured her prosperity with her skirts above her head.

‘Idiot,’ she snorted.

As they set off, she glanced down once more to Tressillion House. Her hands gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles white. The old hatred for the Tressillions was still there, for all her grief, as fierce now as it had burned inside her as a child. Let them know how it felt to be cast aside as if they were nothing. To feel the cold fear of being torn from their roots, the only protection of the poor, thrown out into a pitiless world, without even the rule of law to help them.

Not that the Tressillions would ever end up on the streets. Sybil sniffed. They would never know the fear of the workhouse, or the even greater terror of being a young girl thrown onto the mercy of strangers. They wouldn’t even remember the lives they had cast to the desperate winds so long ago.

At the next bend in the lane, she hesitated. Roach was out of sight. The entrance to a field lay ahead, the space wide enough in front of the gate for her to turn round. She had seen Tressillion fallen, just as she had always promised herself she would. There was nothing more for her here.

There had been once, but not now. She could vanish. Never go near the house. She had taken the precaution of settling her bill at the hotel in St Ives. There was nothing to stop her starting the long drive back to London immediately, and booking the next passage of the Mauretania back to New York.

Across the fields, she could make out the chimneys, taller now she was seeing them from below, just as Leo had described them.

‘They were our castles, our hiding places,’ he would say, those sharp, photographer’s eyes of his glowing with the memory. ‘It’s where we felt safe. Especially from him.’

Sybil stopped the Chevrolet at the turning place. It hadn’t truly struck her before, just what a desperate kind of safety that must have been: children hiding high up on those intertwined networks of roofs, sloping and disjointed, where just one slip could lead to disaster. And the grief came, tearing at her, a physical agony impossible to ignore.

Having seen it, there was no turning back.

‘Heaven help me,’ muttered Sybil, squaring her shoulders as she set the Chevrolet racing to catch up with her guide.

* * *

Sybil followed Mr Roach’s Ford through the twists and turns of the lane to the driveway in front of the house.

‘It is an exceptional property,’ Roach remarked, as they stepped out onto the gravel. ‘Its history is said to go back to Tudor times, at the very least.’ He took a sly glance in her direction. Sybil hid a smile. As she had hoped, he assumed she was an American who had never before stepped onto English soil, easily impressed with the glamour of the minor English aristocracy, but accustomed to things on a far larger scale.

Roach cleared his throat. ‘It’s too small to be a true manor house, of course. More likely a gentleman’s retreat. A number of improvements were made during the last century, when the family came into some considerable wealth.’ He waved his arm expansively towards the sea. ‘And the grounds are, for their size, quite magnificent.’

‘And in need of work,’ replied Sybil, taking in the overgrown paths and the rotting roses in the flowerbeds. Leaves blackened by last night’s frost hung greasily from stems that had given up the struggle to stay upright. The cupid at one side of the main path had succumbed to the winter storms and lay facedown in the mud. The Grecian temple at the far end, once a splendid viewpoint over the bay, was almost entirely overgrown with decaying bindweed, the protective shrubs grown into straggling bushes, their bleak branches, even in winter, extinguishing the view entirely.

‘Of course, of course.’ Roach coughed. ‘And reflected in the price, naturally. There’s not a property of this size for such a price in all of Cornwall. Not with these magnificent views.’

‘I understood servants were hard to find, and that many houses are now falling into disrepair. We live in changing times, it seems.’

He smiled thinly. ‘Shall we see inside?’

He opened the front door, leading the way into a large hallway, pulling open wooden floor-to-ceiling shutters covering sash windows, revealing dust and the mummified remains of a raven.

Sybil paused at the foot of the large wooden staircase. The interior of Tressillion was not quite as she had expected. She had always imagined it as large and airy, elegance and opulence shining from every chandelier and gilded mirror, and with diaphanous drapes at the windows, swaying in the breeze. A child’s dream of a fairytale palace with every comfort anyone could need.

Instead, the wooden panelling on the walls, darkened by time and polishing, and the even darker heavy balustrade on either side of the stairs, stood heavy and oppressive, as if no sun had ever been allowed to enter. Not such a fairytale after all. She shivered once more. Leo’s father had ruled his family with a rod of iron, banishing those who defied him. Even in the bustling streets of New York, Leo had never quite been able to escape his father’s watchful eyes, his listening ears, his conviction that he was right, and his way the only one possible.

She could not breathe. Her heart was racing. It took all her willpower to follow Roach as he led her through the drawing rooms, with chairs swathed in dust sheets gathered around empty grates, and a grand piano, snowy with dust; a library scattered with papers, where the mice had made inroads into this unexpected feast.

The public rooms done, she followed him in silence as he led her up the stairs to the bedrooms on the first floor. Here too, the furniture had not been removed. Sheets covered the ghosts of armchairs and sprawled carelessly over tarnished metal bed frames. In the final room, overlooking the sea, a sheet had slipped, revealing the dull sheen of a mirror on a dressing table still scattered with empty scent bottles.

‘Everything’s here waiting as if they’ve just left,’ she said, shuddering. She picked up a hairbrush, its back patterned with the extravagant bloom of a white camellia worked in silk.

‘It can all easily be cleared away,’ he reassured her. ‘The furniture is being sold with the house. There are some good pieces amongst them. Most of the personal trinkets have been removed by the family, and there’s a firm in Truro who will dispose of anything you do not wish to keep.’

‘Yes.’ She replaced the hairbrush carefully where its shape in clean mahogany stood out from the dust. ‘It just seems a little forlorn, that’s all.’ She glanced up at the ceiling. ‘The servants’ quarters are above, I take it?’

‘Yes. In the attics. The roof is sound. There is no sign of damp.’

‘I’m sure.’ Sybil hesitated. She’d no wish to see the no-doubt mean little rooms, sparse of any convenience, given to those who worked each waking day of their lives to keep the family in comfort. And there was no need. It wasn’t as if she was going to stay. Roach was already moving back towards the door. Sybil glanced once more around the room.

Where the rest of the bedrooms had been crammed to the gills with furniture and heavy ornaments, following the old Victorian fashion, this last room was barely furnished at all. There was a wardrobe and a chest of drawers next to the bed, along with a dressing table and armchair. Few pictures hung on the walls. A small sketch over the bed caught her eye. Sybil moved closer. It was a rough drawing, in an amateur hand, of tables and chairs set next to a tall window.

‘The White Camellia.’

Roach turned at her exclamation. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Oh, nothing.’ She straightened up. ‘I thought it looked familiar. But of course there are so many tearooms springing up all over the place nowadays. I must have been mistaken.’

‘Yes, Miss,’ said Roach, losing interest and heading to the door.

Sybil turned back to the drawing. Her friends in New York believed she had come up from nothing, making her fortune solely by hard work and determination. But of course nothing was ever that simple. They didn’t know about The White Camellia, tucked away in a side street on the outskirts of London’s Covent Garden, providing a safe place for women to escape their families, and for those who had nowhere else to go.

She smiled, remembering the earnest conversations of women huddled over tea and buns, revelling in their freedom from appearing meek and corseted, from never being allowed an opinion that might chase a respectable husband away. They were daring, those women, for leaving the house unchaperoned, risking being mistaken by the police for a woman of the streets. The poorer girls, eking a living as ill-paid clerks, were terrified of what the future held when they could no longer support themselves. They came for the plentiful tea and cheap buttered toast, and the hope that lay in the talk of strategy and protest, of equal pay and a vote for all, regardless of sex or birth.

The older women were as ambitious as the young. Their mothers and grandmothers had frequented the White Camellia when it had been a hotbed of agitation against the slave trade and, rather than returning to quiet domesticity following abolition, had turned their new-found political skills to other causes.

I owe them my life, thought Sybil, turning abruptly away. Her sleeve swept the small table beside the bed, sending something flying onto the Persian rug at her feet. Mr Roach had his back turned. Swiftly, Sybil plucked up the little object. It was a button, carved in ivory in the shape of a camellia. It lay in her hand, tiny and impossibly delicate.

Who had lived here? She glanced back around the room, taking in the sparse furniture, the forlorn air, the dressing table with its brush. Her eyes blurred. Who had Leo’s father kept here?

There was a scratching at the window. Sybil gasped. She and Roach both swung round as the scratching turned to a gentle tapping, quiet but insistent, on the windowpane.

Roach recovered first, his pale face suffused with a mortified pink at being spooked so easily. ‘The tide must be turning. The wind has changed.’

‘I expect so,’ said Sybil, pushing up the sash, allowing the twigs of cherry to creep in with the sea air.

She was a fool to hope, even just for one minute − but she still scanned every branch for a rustle or an unnatural stirring, as the wind died down once more.

‘You’ll need to have that tree chopped down,’ announced Mr Roach behind her. ‘I don’t know what the family were thinking, allowing it to stay so long. It’s far too near to the house.’ He coughed, recalling his urgent need to sell this monstrosity at any cost. ‘I’m sure Mr Jonathan Tressillion, the current owner, will make sure the job is done before any sale goes through.’

‘There’s no need,’ said Sybil. She would never allow the tree to be touched, whatever it might be doing to the foundations. The house could fall down first. ‘I would rather it remained.’ She shook herself. What kind of fool was she being, clinging to a hope of ghosts she didn’t believe in, in a house that would never be hers? A house she had once sworn she’d tear down, brick by brick. A house she had no intention of buying.

‘I’d like to see the kitchens,’ she said.

‘Yes, indeed.’ Roach sounded relieved. ‘You’ll find the kitchens more than adequate. A little old-fashioned, of course, but that can easily be remedied.’ He gave an ingratiating smile.

Sybil was only just able to stop herself informing him that she wasn’t a fool, thank you very much, and she’d already bought and restored four old wrecks in far worse a state than this, turning them into increasingly elegant and desirable hotels across New York, and making a small fortune along the way.

‘Of course, you ladies are far more familiar with the conveniences of modern appliances, and the owners have looked into installing a generator to provide electricity. I’m assured the range is still in good working order, and many of the pots and pans − indeed, even the dishes and the cutlery – remain. It would take very little expense to bring the house up to an excellent standard of comfort and elegance once more.’

He was right, of course. But who would see Tressillion’s potential, let alone take the chance? After the scandal, no respectable family would wish to breathe life back into these abandoned rooms. Her dream of seeing the place fall into nothing, bit by bit, might come true after all.

Sybil frowned. That was the thing about revenge. The passion came from a place and a time, and a particular wrong. Once, she had wished to obliterate all the memories here, never thinking that one day there might be some she would give her life’s blood to keep alive.

‘Shall we go?’ said Roach, his hand on the handle of the door.

‘Of course,’ murmured Sybil, taking a last look around the room, slipping the white camellia button deep in her pocket as she hastened after him.

Chapter Two

Viewing the rest of the house was cursory. Roach’s irritation increased as she failed to exclaim or give any sign of having fallen in love with the place. Sybil followed him out of the front door, back into the driveway, lost in her own thoughts.

‘Thank you,’ she said, rousing herself as he turned the key in the lock. ‘That was most interesting. I would like to look around the grounds, before I make a decision.’

‘Of course.’ His tone was impatient, his fingers stealing to his pocket watch. ‘I’m afraid I have a client waiting for me in Truro, Miss Ravensdale, I shall be late as it is. We can see the extent of the land from here. It takes several hours to walk the entire circumference, however, and it was an unusually heavy frost for this part of Cornwall last night. Perhaps you would like to make another appointment?’

‘I’ve no wish to put you to any trouble. I shall be perfectly happy to explore on my own. Just to get a feel of the place,’ she added, as he began to protest.

‘I see.’ He smiled, the glint of a possible sale back in his eye. ‘Perhaps you would like to keep the key. You can bring it to the office on your way back.’

‘No!’ she exclaimed, her voice sharp. There was too much temptation as it was. Once back inside the house, who knew where her treacherous heart might lead her? Roach blinked. ‘That is,’ she added quickly, ‘I wouldn’t like to be responsible for any damage. I can easily come back to see the house another day.’