The tree was a pyramid of lights, but not at all Clare's idea of a Christmas−tree, which ought to be loaded with glittering balls of glass and draped with tinsel; yet it was odder still, on an unconventional tree, to put just one doll. She would have liked to ask why, but the question would have seemed disparaging.
Niall blew out his taper: then, crossing the room, he turned out the two oil−lamps. The fifty or sixty little candles on the tree illuminated the room far more brightly than the combined lamplight and firelight had done. Both Clare and Miss Geary looked wonderingly about them.
“It's a beautiful room,” said Miss Geary, meditatively. “One would not imagine, from the outside...”
“I know,” Niall interrupted her. “You mean it's too ambitious for so small a cottage. Rum, isn't it? The place is out of proportion.”
“It's not a big house, then?” Clare asked him.
“Very small, really. I mean, for what the builder presumably intended it to be. There's only one other room downstairs besides this: the little parlour across the hall that we use for our dining−room. Come, I'll show you! Never mind,” he added to Miss Geary, “don't hurry off. I'll convoy you back to your gate.”
They moved out into the little hall, which was no more, in fact, than a short, flagged passage from which two other doors led off and which ended in a staircase, mounting steeply and turning at a small landing.
Niall picked up a lamp and opened one of the doors to show them the little parlour: a cottage room with white−plastered walls above a low wainscot, furnished with an unstained oak table and chairs and an old−fashioned, high sideboard. The stone flags of the floor were uncovered except for a skin rug before the open hearth.
“The other door goes to the kitchen and usual offices,” Niall explained. “And that's really all there is downstairs.”
“It seems a very old house,” Clare said. “I suppose it's much older than Paston Hall?”
“About a hundred and fifty years older,” said Niall. “This,” he went on with mock sententiousness, “is the original manor of Brackenbine, the seat of the Trethewys. Paston Hall represents the debased taste and distorted values of a mid−Victorian Sterne suffering under the influence of low taxation, the New Plumbing, and Sir Gilbert Scott.”
“I wouldn't call our plumbing very new,” murmured Clare. “It's prehistoric.”
“Well, there isn't any at all here,” said Niall, complacently. “That simplifies matters in a hard winter. All I have to do is to fit the pump with a straw overcoat. But it's also one reason why we can't keep a servant.”
“You had a girl in the summer, though, hadn't you?” Miss Geary asked Mrs. Sterne. “I thought she seemed a nice girl.”
“I must keep an eye on the candles,” said Mrs. Sterne abruptly, turning back into the drawing−room. Miss Geary followed her.
“Yes, do,” remarked Niall. “The old place is three−parts timber,” he explained to Clare. “It would burn like a match factory.”
Clare heard Mrs. Sterne replying to Miss Geary's question about the servant: “Ah yes, Janet. She was a good girl, poor thing. She really did look as if she was going to stay and then she took her holiday last July... stayed with her aunt in Pentabridge....” Mrs. Sterne's voice became indistinct as she moved further into the room, and Clare caught only another phrase or two: ”... put into hospital... just the height of the epidemic... died in a few days.”
“There!” exclaimed Niall, lifting the lamp high and approaching the end of the passage where a roughly−squared black beam stretched across, supporting the wall above the stairway opening, “there you see the Builder, his Mark!”
He held the lamp close, and in a plain shield deeply carved in the wood of the beam Clare read the initials 'I.T.' She repeated them.
“Yes,” said Niall. “'I' for John, the Waterman. John Trethewy, that stands for. Captain John Trethewy, I should say.”
“Was he your ancestor?”
Niall seated himself on a big oak chest that stood at the foot of the stairs. “Sit down here and I'll tell you about him,” he said. “My mother's started another gossip with your teacher, so there's no hurry.” He dropped his voice, giving her a rapid smile as she sat down beside him: “The sprite may want to flit off like a bat, but the schoolgirl must wait on her mistress!” And, before she could consider whether to respond to his sudden acknowledgment of their conspiracy, he had resumed in his former tone:
“Captain John Trethewy is the earliest ancestor we can trace with any certainty. He was the son of a respectable apothecary of Truro. At least, I say so. My mother says I've invented that bit. But anyway, John was put to study medicine, and his father appears to have had a share in a merchant ship, so I argue that he was a man of some substance and it is probable that he apprenticed little John to his own trade.
“But John had an itch to roam. He went to sea, perhaps in the ship his father had a share in, perhaps in one of Old Noll's—we don't know. But he does speak of Blake's bombardment of Algiers as if he had actually been there, so I think it probable that he shipped as a naval surgeon.”
“Speak?” Clare asked. “Did he write a book?”
“Well, if you can call it a book. Jottings, rather. Observations on divers curiosities of Nature collected in the course of sundry navigations; all written in most chirurgeonly Latin.
“We don't quite know how he fared at the Restoration,” Niall continued. “But some time later he appears to be voyaging prosperously out of Bristol to the Gulf of Guinea and from there to the American Plantations with slaves; there are some hints also that he cruised the Caribbean for a time, less respectably—though there again, my mother would say that's my romantic fancy. In any case, he conducted his navigations with prudence and was able to put away a considerable number of pieces of eight in his old oak chest—perhaps this one—until the day when he fell foul of the Sallee Rovers. Making for Guinea, he is boarded by a galley off the coast of Barbary, and then, as he pathetically notes, bereft of all but his breeches he is sold to a most miserable slavery, southwards from Same.”
“Well, he had sold the poor negroes in America,” Clare said.
“Yes,” agreed Niall, “and in his wretched state of bondage it was some consolation to him to know that the profits of those transactions were safely enchested in Truro. However, reading between the lines, I divine that his slavery was not so harsh as you might think. It seems that he was bought by a powerful noble, a Kaid, as he calls him, of those parts, and carried off to his castle in the mountains. There, by and by, he finds occasion to demonstrate his art as a surgeon, and from that day he advances steadily to a great degree of favour. From the liberty he was allowed I suspect that the old fellow—though, of course, he wasn't so old then—must have satisfied the formal requirements of Islam and become a True−Believer; though he is naturally reticent about that in his notes. The fact is, however, that he was able to travel freely about over a large part of Morocco, and when he finally made up his mind to escape, he not only found the facilities to do so, but he left Barbary with considerably more than he took into it. There is a passage which can only mean that he sailed away in a boat of his own, manned by Christian slaves whom he had somehow or other managed to release. “Still, his experience seems to have cured him of his desire to rove. Sometime before the Glorious Revolution he bought this estate of Brackenbine and settled down to live as a country gentleman; his old father presumably by this time obiit.”
“He must have been quite wealthy, then?” Clare asked.
“Well enough off,” agreed Niall. “But the interesting thing is that you can deduce that the old chap had ideas larger than his fortune. You'd have expected that after his hard life he would have wanted a comfortable little estate in his native country—just a small place where he could browse about among his herbs and botanise in the hedgerows. But instead of that he comes out here, a long way from Cornwall, in a district that was pretty lonely and wild at that time of day, buys a large tract of woodland with old Akenshaw Hill in the middle of it, and blows the major portion of his hard−earned coin on building miles and miles of high brick wall all round his property. We know he built the wall first, and we know what an expense it was and how he worried over it until he got it finished. That, to my mind, is the reason for the odd disproportion of this house. He had planned a spacious mansion, but the wall took all his money—or far more than he had estimated—so he is forced to compromise with a cottage, but he won't abandon his plan altogether, so he builds one room in his cottage to the proportion of the house he would have put up if the money had stretched so far.”