The Rector's Daughter (Part Two of The People of this Parish Saga) Read online

  THE RECTOR’S DAUGHTER

  (Part Two of The People of This Parish Saga)

  Nicola Thorne

  Publishing History

  First published in hardback by William Heinemann Ltd., Michelin House, 81 Fulham Road, London SW3 6RB in 1992. Published in paperback by Mandarin Paperbacks in 1993.

  Unabridged Audio Edition published in 2001 by Isis Publishing Ltd.

  This E book edition revised by the author and published in 2013.

  Copyright © by Nicola Thorne 1992,1993,2001,2013

  The Author has asserted her moral rights

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 434 22805 2

  Cover illustration by Nigel Chamberlain

  Design by Ruth Wrixton

  Author website www.nicolathorne.com

  E book preparation Witley Press Ltd, Hunstanton, P36 6AD

  Synopsis

  'She was every inch the parson’s daughter, with the clear light of Christian courage showing through. But there was something else: she was a woman of the world too, a woman, clearly, who had lived'.

  Sophie Woodville's return to Wenham, the thriving Dorset market town of her birth, is not a happy one. Her secret marriage to George, heir to the Woodville baronetcy, incurred the wrath not only of her husband's family but also of her own. Now George is dead, tragically young, and his widow and two children have come home.

  The loss of the Woodville heir is keenly felt by the whole parish, but most of all by his own family. His mother is seriously ill and the wild, indulgent lifestyle of the only surviving son, Carson, has already brought the once venerated family name into disrepute. Worst of all, the estate is in such desperate financial straits that they may have to sell the ancestral home.

  Sophie is no stranger to misfortune, and her strength enables the Woodvilles first to forgive and then to lean on her. However she herself is almost brought to grief by a passionate attachment most unsuitable in a rector's daughter. Then rescue for the family fortunes appears in an unlikely form; but at a high price. Carson, the darling of Dorset's maids and scourge of their fathers, must marry for money, just as his father had done ...

  About the Author

  Nicola Thorne was born in South Africa and, after a spell in New Zealand with her mother who was born in Wellington, came to England as a child where her parents finally separated. She spent her youth in the North of England, where she was educated first at a convent school and then a co-educational school. After completing her education at the London School of Economics she then spent most of her adult life in London. She has made a long career as a writer and is the author of over fifty novels. For a number of years Nicola has been among the top most borrowed authors from public libraries in the UK (PLR statistics) and many of her books have been published in foreign languages apart from English. After fifteen years spent in Dorset, she now lives in Devon.

  By the Same Author

  Return to Wuthering Heights (also e-book)

  A Woman Like Us (also e-book)

  The Perfect Wife and Mother (also e-book)

  The Daughters of the House (also e-book)

  Where the Rivers Meet (also e-book)

  Affairs of Love

  Pride of Place

  Bird of Passage

  Champagne

  Champagne Gold

  A Wind in Summer

  Silk, a novel

  Profit and Loss

  Trophy Wife

  Repossession, a novel of psychic suspense (also e-book)

  Worlds Apart

  Old Money

  Rules of Engagement

  The Good Samaritan

  Class Reunion

  My Name is Martha Brown (also e-book)

  In Search of Martha Brown (non-fiction)

  A Friend of the Family

  Coppitts Green (also e-book)

  The Little Flowers (also e-book)

  Rose, Rose, Where are You? (also e-book)

  On a Day Like Today

  The Holly Tree

  The Pride of the School (e-book only)

  After the Rain (also e-book)

  The Askham Chronicles, 1898-1967:

  Never Such Innocence

  Yesterday’s Promises

  Bright Morning

  A Place in the Sun

  The People of this Parish series:

  The People of this Parish (also e-book)

  The Rector’s Daughter

  In This Quiet Earth

  Past Love

  A Time of Hope

  In Time of War

  The Broken Bough Saga:

  The Broken Bough (also e-book)

  The Blackbird’s Song (also e-book)

  The Water’s Edge (also e-book)

  Oh Happy Day! (also e-book)

  The Enchantress Saga

  The Enchantress (e -book only)

  Falcon Gold (e-book only)

  Lady of the Lakes (e-book only)

  Family Tree of the Woodville Family 1820-1898

  Family Tree of the Yetman Family 1800-1898

  Contents

  Prologue in Papua, New Guinea, 1907

  Part I Return of the Widow

  Part II Coals of Fire

  Part III The Power of Money

  Epilogue The Window, August 1913

  Prologue

  Papua, New Guinea, December 1907.

  From the shoreline there was no sign of the boat, no sign of George, and Sophie walked slowly over the soft golden sands, across the coral shingle and back to the house.

  He had said he would be away ten days and now it was three weeks; a long, lonely time to be on one’s own with two young children and only natives for company.

  Gumbago was a small station on the north-east coast of New Guinea, fifty miles from Drogura where the main centre of the Anglican mission had been established.

  Drogura had a church, a mission house and a hospital. There were white missionaries as well as black, nurses, a doctor, and frequent visits from the bishop. There Sophie and George Woodville had lived when they first arrived in New Guinea. Sophie was pregnant with Deborah, and Ruth was considered too young to be allowed to go with her parents up country, where natives addicted to cannibalistic rites still inhabited the hinterland.

  Eighteen months ago George had been sent to open a solitary station at Gumbago in Collingwood Bay, and six months later Sophie, with the infant Deborah and three-year-old Ruth, had followed him. She had set up the school where she taught with native helpers, and a small clinic which a mission doctor visited once a month, or even less frequently in the rainy season, which was approaching now: December 1907.

  Sawo, Ruth’s nursemaid, stood at the entrance of the mission house, the baby slung in her arms native-style.

  ‘No sign of the master yet, ma’am?’ she asked in the halting mixture of native dialect and pidgin English she had learned since the Woodvilles had arrived.

  Sophie shook her head and gently unclasped the hands of one of the small charges she had just been teaching, who had accompanied her to the beach. She patted the child on the head as she ran off to where her mother sat outside her hut, cooking something on the fire.

  ‘Mr Barker said they’d be ten days. It’s three weeks.’ Sophie didn’t try to hide her anxiety as she sank into a chair, wiping her brow. Her cotton dress stuck to her skin and the tendrils of her hair clung to her hot sticky forehead. She was a Christian soul full of the confidence of her faith, yet, at times, she was close to despair, far from home, in an alien land, without parents or friends. If she
should lose George, what would happen to her then?

  The Gumbago mission complex consisted of a native village of houses built on stilts to keep out the mud and water, the wild animals and, above all, the evil spirits. The New Guinea natives were primitive, Stone Age people who lived in tribes which, between them, spoke 700 languages, none of them written down. The first missionaries had come to the island in the late nineteenth century and found a deeply superstitious people to whom cannibalism was endemic. Even now, those who had been evangelised by the missionaries, or ‘protected’ by the British government, had tasted human flesh.

  Three weeks away. It was too long.

  The following day at about noon there was a commotion in the village, and Sophie, who was teaching in the school, where the recitation of the Ten Commandments in the native dialect was proceeding slowly, held up her hand. The chorus of voices obediently stopped. She went to the door of the school hut and, drawing back the curtain made of croton leaves, was unable to restrain a cry as she saw a white man, accompanied by a party of natives, cross from the beach to the shingle that covered the village street.

  For a moment the face of the white man was obscured by the drooping branches of the palm trees, but when he began to walk towards the mission compound she saw it was the Reverend Septimus Barker, priest in charge of the area, whom George had accompanied on his mission to the interior.

  Without a word to her charges, Sophie flew down the steps and across the compound, arriving at the stout wooden fence at the same time as the missionary priest, who raised his helmet when he saw her.

  ‘Good day, Mrs Woodville.’

  ‘Is George with you?’ she asked anxiously, without responding to his greeting.

  ‘George will follow in a day or two.’ Mr Barker’s voice was that of a man not at his ease.

  ‘How do you mean, “follow in a day or two”?’ Sophie demanded, knowing somehow that her worst fears were being fulfilled. ‘You haven’t left George alone in the interior, surely?’

  ‘Not alone, Mrs Woodville,’ Mr Barker expostulated nervously wiping his face with a large white handkerchief. ‘George has been unwell, and I have to hurry back to see the bishop. I assure you,’ he added hastily, seeing the expression on Sophie’s face, ‘nothing more than a touch of fever. You can be sure that I have left him safe with Kirikeu and William, and half a dozen of the strongest native boys.’

  Kirikeu was George’s personal servant, and William one of the lay preachers from the South Sea Islands who had run the station by himself before the Woodvilles came.

  However, it was not good enough for Sophie who, through pent-up rage and frustration, stamped her foot on the ground.

  ‘How could you leave George by himself, Mr Barker? How could you be so irresponsible?’

  Mr Barker took a step back and, removing his helmet, wiped his heavily perspiring forehead.

  ‘I irresponsible, Mrs Woodville? I would have you know I am the most responsible man alive. I nursed George for five days through a raging fever, and it was only when I was sure in my own mind that he was well, and at his insistence, that I took the remaining fellows we had brought with us and came back. George is as safe as houses in an abandoned native hut, and well looked after. He is to come on a little more slowly, and I promise you that will be in not more than a day or two.’

  The apprehension that had been uppermost in Sophie’s breast now seemed more than justified, and the emollient words of the missionary did nothing to soothe her.

  ‘Mr Barker, you have already been away three weeks, when you said ten days ...’

  ‘Had George not been ill ...’

  ‘You now say he was very ill, when a moment ago it was a touch of fever ... You then leave him in a country full of savages, with a handful of natives, to find his own way back. Is that what you call being responsible, Mr Barker?’

  ‘Mrs Woodville. I ...’

  He looked at her face and knew it was useless. She had an awesome reputation not only among the missionary wives but the missionaries themselves. She was a strong-minded, powerful woman some years older than her husband. Even the bishop was slightly afraid of her.

  ‘The boat is waiting for me, Mrs Woodville,’ Mr Barker said after putting on his helmet, and clutching his stick firmly in his hand. ‘I wanted you to hear personally from me, and not from one of the natives, what had happened.’

  ‘How good of you, Mr Barker.’

  The scorn in her voice was its own rebuke. There was no more he could say.

  ‘We have to trust in God, Mrs Woodville ...’

  She did not reply, but watched him, rage and contempt mingling in her heart, as he stumbled across the shingle towards the shore.

  George sat on the steps of the deserted native hut and looked across the valley which, with its acres of fir trees, its lush vegetation, its masses of buttercups peering through the thick, high grass, could have been a valley in Switzerland, where he and Sophie had once spent a holiday. He sighed, and tapped the contents of his cold pipe into his hand. Useless to reflect on that time of bliss which now seemed so long ago; besides, very soon now he would see her again.

  Beyond the high mountain peaks were the lower slopes of the Owen Stanley Range. The sun was beginning to set and George was aware of Kirikeu hovering behind him.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, turning to his servant, noting the anxious expression on his face.

  Kirikeu gestured towards the mountains.

  ‘The spirits,’ he said in a mixture of the native Wedanan language and the pidgin English he had painfully learned from Sophie ‘The spirits, the Dau, come down on the mountain at night, master.’

  With a fearful expression, he backed into the protective shelter of the hut.

  ‘There is no spirit, no Dau, but God,’ George said in a kindly tone as he got to his feet, resting a hand on the arm of his faithful servant, who bent his head as if he were a little ashamed of his fears. Dau was the native term for spirits, ghosts, hobgoblins, which were felt to be a potent, living force among the primitive people. Kirikeu was one of the most diligent attenders at the mission services, but he had not yet been baptised; for a long period as a catechumen was insisted upon before members of the native population were admitted to the sacrament of holy baptism.

  However, George was anxious. The rest of the party had set out at noon to try and catch a wild pig for dinner and had been expected back long before sunset. He knew that the fears about spirits were not the only ones preoccupying the mind of Kirikeu. There was the savage Doriri tribe as well, whose territory this was, and who George and his companions had set out to convert; a tribe known for its ferocity and savagery, which still embraced the practices of head-hunting and cannibalism.

  George and his servant made a desultory supper of yams and toro, a vegetable which looked rather like an arum lily, and whose roasted lumpy roots tasted like something between a chestnut and a floury potato. They also had left a few Huntley and Palmer biscuits which George had had pressed on him at the last minute by a thoughtful Sophie. George had been hoping for some succulent pig because he still felt very weak. To his weakness was added his nervousness about the fate of his men.

  By nightfall they had still not returned and, after Kirikeu had dowsed the fire in front of the hut, George spent some time on his knees in prayer before stretching himself out on the grass pallet that served him as a bed, and attempting to sleep. But the sleep was fitful, punctuated by the cries of the night birds, the furtive noises of small creatures scurrying across the floor of the hut or among the sago leaves that made the roof. Thousands of cockroaches and spiders would have made their home there over the years, but George had long ago come to terms with the insect life that was part of living in New Guinea.

  Except, that is, for the mosquitoes, the cause of so much ill-health and his recent bout of fever. They proliferated in the swampy marshes near the coast, harbingers of disease and, too often among the white man, death.

  Across the doorway Kirikeu sle
pt or, perhaps, tried like his master, undoubtedly listening for the footsteps which would herald the welcome return of the men who had set out earlier with their spears, hoping to ensnare a fat pig.

  As soon as the faintest blush of dawn appeared in the sky, both men were up, moving purposefully about with the intention of striking camp. They still lived in hopes that their fellows, perhaps having moved too far from the camp, had decided to shelter for the night; but as the daylight grew strong their hopes began to diminish. Finally Kirikeu faced his master and threw out his arms.

  ‘Shall I go and look for them, master?’

  ‘What is the use?’ George replied. ‘If something has happened to them you will be in danger too.’

  ‘At least we will have news. I shall go very carefully, master, taking care not to show myself.’

  ‘Well ...’ George sat on his packed knapsack and thought hard and long. Finally he shook his head.

  ‘I’m afraid that my fever will resume if we don’t get home. Already my dear wife will be worried sick about me. As soon as we get back to Gumbago we shall contact the resident magistrate and ask him to find out what has happened to our friends and, if harm has befallen them, you can be sure he will punish the wrong-doers severely.’

  Not long before, twenty-four Doriri had been killed and their dubus, or tribal huts, put to the flames in retaliation for the murder of a white rubber trader.

  Putting the belongings of the rest of the expedition into a neat pile at the back of the hut, George and Kirikeu then broke camp, and just before noon headed into the forest, making for the sea.

  George had made many mission journeys into the interior and was adept at finding his way with the help of the compass and the position of the sun. However, that night they had to shelter again, but this time they were attacked by hordes of mosquitoes because of the swampy nature of the land near the sea. They slept fitfully, ill protected by the mosquito nets they had erected over makeshift beds, and before dawn they were thankful to begin their trek again, reaching, by late afternoon, the narrow creek that led to the sea where they had hidden the two whaleboats, one of which had been taken by the returning party. The other, under a mound of pandaurus leaves, jutted out from the embrasure in the creek.