If he’d said it a few less times, Mal might even have believed it.
He squinted along the cliff and could make out the big house up on the high point at the other end of the bay from where he was standing. He’d visited yesterday, basically cos he was a nosy sod but also cos he liked a bit of history. Always had. He’d been the one member of the family who’d actually enjoyed it when Mum dragged them round to yet another ancient pile when him and Morgan were little. Later, when Morgs was old enough to put her foot down, it’d just been him and Mum. Well, fair dues, his dad’s shifts hadn’t always allowed him to come along.
Mum would like this place, he’d thought as he traipsed round the place with a load of other tourists, keeping an eye out in vain for anyone who looked vaguely like the old ancestral portraits. The family must keep out of the way on days when it was open to the public. Mum had offered to come down here with him, but Mal was a big boy. He didn’t need his hand held, and more to the point, Morgan was the size of the bloody Gherkin and about ready to pop her first sprog. She needed Mum with her.
It’d given him an idea, anyway, visiting Roscarrock House. Something to do while he was here. Take his mind off things. Mal had overheard one of the volunteer guides talking about Mary Roscarrock, and it’d rung a bell, so he’d stayed to earwig. It was when the old bloke mentioned she’d been a bit of a goer that he twigged—Kyle had said something a while back about her being his great-great-whatever-grandma or -aunt or whatever. Allegedly. And okay, Roscarrock might be a four-letter word round him and Dev’s, but Mal still reckoned Dev would probably be glad to find out more about her.
Maybe it’d even help him. Show him the family weren’t all straitlaced snobs, that kind of thing.
And Mal owed Dev and Kyle. They’d been fucking great to him since . . . since he’d had to take time off work, and hadn’t been coping too well on his own. They’d let him camp out at theirs as long as he wanted, no problem, despite how it must’ve cockblocked them something chronic, and then Dev had set it all up so Mal could come down and stay here with Tasha.
It’d be good to have something to tell them when they got here.
So he’d stayed to listen while the old bloke went on about Mary Roscarrock from the early sixteen hundreds.
“She was a very spirited young lady,” the guide had said. “It’s said she was disowned by the family for some misdeed, the details of which have been lost to time.”
That alone made Mal glad he’d stayed. After the crap that family had given Dev . . . Yeah, anyone disowned by them was definitely worth knowing about.
“Was she up the duff?” he butted in.
The guide glared at him over the tops of his glasses, which were the wire-rimmed sort and made him look like a pissed-off professor. “The details of which have been lost to time,” he repeated pointedly.
Mal wondered where the naughty step was, and if he should go and sit on it now or wait to be told.
“Didn’t she become a pirate?” The woman who’d spoken was a wiry old girl with grey hair and pale but sharp blue eyes. She reminded Mal of the husky one of his neighbours had owned when he was a kid.
His ears pricked right up. A pirate in the family? Dev’d be well chuffed to hear about that.
The guide nodded. “Oh, yes. You might say she learned the trade at her father’s knee—Sir John, who built this house in which we now stand, sailed with Sir Francis Drake on the Golden Hind. Came home with a fortune in Spanish gold.”
Mal frowned and tried to remember his history books. “Wasn’t he supposed to be a hero? Drake, I mean. Saved us from the Spanish Armada, and all that.”
“To the English he was a hero, yes.” The prof gave him a slightly more approving look. “To the Spanish, whose ships Drake captured and stripped of all their treasures, he was nothing but a pirate, for all he was sponsored by the crown. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the constant attacks by English privateers, King Philip might never have sent the Armada to invade England.”
“Huh. So what about Mary Roscarrock?”
“She became captain of her own ship, crewed by men—and women too, or so they say—from down in the village.”
“What, so Lady Mary from the manor goes down to the village and is all ‘I say, you chaps, one is going to become a pirate, what larks, who’s with me?’ and they all go ‘Yeah, why not, we ain’t got nothing on today’?”
The husky lady laughed, and so did a few other people who’d stopped to listen in. The prof seemed to thaw a bit—Mal reckoned it’d made the old boy’s day to get this big an audience. Now he had them, it’d probably take one of those cannons they had out on the lawn to get him to stop talking. “Ah, but you forget how close-knit communities were in those days—and with no welfare state, the poor relied on the kindness of their landlords. Plenty of those villagers would have had very recent memories of Mary Roscarrock herself helping their families or friends out in times of need. And, of course, attitudes to the laws of the realm were, ah, we’ll call it pragmatic, shall we? There’s many a family kept food on the table by a
