The Enemy's Mistake

Salt and rot and the wet slap of fish against wood: that is morning in St. Ives, and Eddie Trevelyan has it ground into his clothes, his hair, and the creases of his palms where rope burn healed white. Fifty-three pounds of crab and crawfish on the fishmonger's slab. A decent haul for a man working alone. Bartle Jenkyn offers twelve shillings and will not move, and Eddie counts the hours it would take to sail west and takes the twelve. There is a bank notice tacked to the door of his cottage. Fourteen pounds by Michaelmas, or the place is gone. Thomas Penrose picks that morning to shout across the market that one of Eddie's pots was sitting inside Ashworth water at dawn, right on the boundary line. Penrose has been circling the co-op committee for months, offering to take on the debt and consolidate the permits and run things his way. The Molly Mavis has been part of that co-op for forty years, and Eddie's father helped found it. So Eddie goes up to Ashworth House to answer for a lobster pot, and the man who opens the door is the son. Julian Ashworth offers him two shillings a day rebuilding a dry-stone boundary wall. He works beside him with his jacket on a branch and his sleeves rolled. He has been sent to complete a boundary survey, and his father keeps wiring from London to ask when it will be done, and Julian does not particularly care what his father wants to hear. *"Because the cove belongs to the village. It always has. My grandfather stole it, my father held it, and I'm giving it back."* Sir Frederick Ashworth owns the harbour, the ice house, the net-mending shed and half the cottages on the hill. He knows exactly how much the Trevelyans owe and how long they have. He also knows about Eddie's sister, and says out loud what he will do to her dressmaking, and to the boat, and to the cottage, if his son does not come to heel. Rosalind Trevelyan is keeping her own secret at the kitchen table with a needle in her hand, and it is not the one Eddie thinks it is. A historical romance between two men on a Cornish fishing harbour, told in Eddie's chapters and Julian's: a rigged card game a generation back, a wall that has to be rebuilt stone by stone, a village that keeps its accounts in grudges, and a boat that goes out under two names on the papers. The romance is closed-door.