Free Crossed Bones by Jane Johnson Page B

correlation, but even then I had not had the wit to see the relationship for what it really was.
    As the train passed through Liskeard Station, with its pretty little branch line that followed the twisting river valley through rolling wooded hills to the sea at Looe, I remembered how Michael had given in to my badgering and gone down with me for a weekend. His family had moved from St Austell long ago; there was nothing left in Cornwall for him except bad memories of school and camping on the moor, as he told me in no uncertain terms. I remembered how, unable to deal with my tears after I returned alone from visiting my mother at the home, he had abruptly gone for a long walk and left me sitting in the hotel garden, wondering whether he was ever coming back. Surely, I reasoned with myself now, I was better off on my own than with such a weak and selfish man? For a long while my thoughts were as bleak as the moors through which we passed, and I could not concentrate on embroidering my wall hanging to pass the time.
    But, as the train approached Camborne and I saw the ruined mine workings on the skyline, my heart leaped up in a most disconcerting way. Swathes of bracken and gorse on windswept hills and lonely heaths punctuated by standing stones and tumuli gradually gave way to rolling farmland, beyond whose boundaries I sensed a huge and empty space. Something about the quality of the light – bright and numinous – suggested the imminent presence of the sea. Just over that horizon lay the end of the line; indeed, the end of the land.
    This was where our family, a fiercely Cornish clan, had originated: West Penwith, the most westerly toe of England. My mother always referred to it as ‘real Cornwall’, as if the south-east was only for incomers and county traitors, folk whose affiliations lay more closely with (heaven forbid) Devon and the modern world than with Cornwall’s ancient past as an independent nation with its own language, king and laws. Our ancestors had been tinners before the industry had disastrously failed, and along with it the family fortunes, and many had dispersed far and wide across the globe – to the Argentine and Australia, to Canada and Chile – wherever mining expertise was still a tradeable asset.
    I had not had much contact with my few remaining relatives in this toe of land. Some of them, cousins at third and fourth remove, had attended my mother’s funeral, but we had not had much to say to one another beyond the stock exchange of condolences. Alison knew them better than I did. They had properly Cornish names – Pengelly and Bolitho, Rowse and Tucker – and lives that seemed fifty years and a continent removed from my own. Why Alison and Andrew had removed themselves quite so far from London I had never really understood, beyond the small scandal of Andrew’s affair; but, as the train neared its destination, I began to understand. Alison had needed the comfort of her family; but she had also said when she had first moved down to this part of Cornwall that it was a magical place, full of powerful energies. I had suspected her of seeking solace in her new surroundings, glossing the landscape with a much needed mystique. Now, across the wide bay before me, St Michael’s Mount rose out of the sea like a castle from the Age of Legends, wreathed around by low cloud and hazy rain, and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.
    The Mount. How many times had that name appeared in Catherine’s book in her tiny, exquisite hand? I gazed at it, feeling the presence of the past. I shivered. Goodness, here we were pulling into Penzance Station, and I was feeling shaky and not a little haunted; not the best state in which to greet my poor bereaved cousin.
    I was quickly brought back to earth. As the train pulled in, a great, ugly Victorian rail shed greeted me, grey and forbidding, that and a penetrating Cornish mizzle which misted my exposed skin and got into the roots of my hair in the few seconds