Paths Of Destiny

by E.V. Thompson

Genres: War & Military; Military Romance

Synopsis

Cornwall, 1854 - Alice Rowe owes everything to Reverend Alfred Markham who rescued her from a workhouse, employing her in his parsonage as a housemaid. So when he dies suddenly of a heart attack, Alice faces a fearful and uncertain future. But as one chapter in Alice's life ends, another begins. For as she discovers the Reverend's body in the woods near their house, she meets Gideon Davey - a 'ganger' who is laying a nearby stretch of railway line. Not only does Gideon help recover the body, but he returns to Trelaggan for the funeral - and also to see Alice again.

Gideon's behaviour does not go unnoticed in Trelaggan - especially from those critical of Alice and her past. Though he is threatened, Gideon is man enough to stand up to the village bullies. Then, just as Alice and Gideon's friendship hints at something more serious, Gideon is given an offer he can't refuse: to travel to the Crimea and build a railway to help the British troops.

Gideon, however, is not the only person about to leave Cornwall. For the arrival of the new rector finds Alice moving on too - and starting a remarkable chain of events that follow Gideon's journey across the world . . .

Release date: July 5, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 400

Sample

Descending the servants’ stairs from her attic room in Treleggan rectory at 7 a.m. on a warm August morning, Alice Rowe made
her way along the passageway to the kitchen with an uneasy premonition that all was not as it should be.


She could not account for the feeling. At least, not immediately. Everything seemed exactly as it had been when she finished
work the previous evening and went upstairs to her room.


Looking about her when she reached the kitchen, she suddenly realised it was this very fact that was troubling her. Everything
was too tidy. Nothing had been disturbed during her absence from the main living quarters of the large house.


When she checked the front door, she discovered it was still unbolted. She had left it like that last night because Parson
Markham had not returned from his daily round of visiting parishioners.


Finding it unlocked did not worry her unduly. The parson was well into his seventies and increasingly forgetful. Besides, Treleggan was one of the most remote villages on Bodmin
Moor and unlikely to attract the attention of casual burglars.


She decided she would go about her work for a while and stop worrying, but she did not find it easy. Her concern was for the
kindly old parson, but she was also aware that if anything happened to prevent him continuing his duties at Treleggan, it
was unlikely she would be able to remain in the village.


An illegitimate child, Alice had spent the first six months of her life in Bodmin gaol because of her mother’s refusal to
give the name of Alice’s father to the magistrate.


There had been a reason for Grace Rowe’s silence, but it was not one she would disclose to the court. Her lover was a miner
who, three months before Alice’s birth, had been seriously injured in an accident at work. She would not add to his problems
by having a bastardy order served upon him.


Not until the miner died did Alice’s mother name him and so secure her release from prison. But her troubles were far from
being at an end. Treleggan was a tight-knit farming community, in constant and bitter dispute with the moorland tin miners.


Grace Rowe’s moral lapse would eventually have been accepted had it occurred with a village man. The fact that her lover was
a miner was unforgivable. The village shunned her and she was forced away.


For a number of years mother and daughter suffered a precarious and nomadic existence in Cornwall until the life they were
leading led to a serious deterioration in Grace’s health. Unable to work, she was committed to a workhouse, the law decreeing
it should be in the area in which she was born. Mother and daughter were sent to Liskeard, a town no more than five miles from Treleggan.


Here they were discovered by the Reverend Arnold Markham, during one of the visits he was in the habit of making to the workhouse.

As Grace Rowe’s health deteriorated still further she realised she was dying and begged the Treleggan parson to help her daughter
find work and so escape from life as a pauper.


When Alice’s mother died, the parson made good his promise, taking Alice into the parsonage as a housemaid to help out his
ageing housekeeper.


The Treleggan villagers were outraged. Not only had he taken a thirteen-year-old girl into his bachelor establishment – but
she was the bastard daughter of a miner!


For a time the villagers shunned the parson, his church and Alice. Although most eventually returned to the fold, they never
accepted Alice as one of their own.


Now twenty years of age, Alice had been unable to make friends in the village. Had it not been for the extreme kindness of
her employer, she would have led an unhappy and lonely life. As it was, she had come to look upon Parson Markham as a father
figure and she adored him.


He, in his turn, looked upon her as a daughter and had delighted in giving her the schooling she would never have received
had she been brought up as a normal village girl.


In recent years, realisation had come to Alice that such a life could not last for ever. Parson Markham was an old man and
increasingly frail. Should he be forced to retire, a new rector would be appointed to Treleggan. The new incumbent would gain immediate favour with his parishioners by dismissing her.


These were the thoughts that passed through Alice’s mind as she went about her work that August morning. Eventually, unable
to concentrate on anything for very long, she knew she had to check on the well-being of her employer.


There was an additional reason for her unease. She had heard no sound from Digger, the Jack Russell terrier which slept in
a basket in Parson Markham’s bedroom.


Twelve years old, the small dog was not always aware of Alice descending the rear staircase, yet, no matter how silent she
tried to be, it would hear her when she began moving about in the kitchen. Whining and scratching at the bedroom door, it
would not rest until the elderly rector rose from his bed to put out his pet, grumbling about having his routine dictated
by a diminutive dog.


Once the bedroom door was opened, Digger would scoot at speed along the passageway to the stairs. By the time Parson Markham
had climbed back into bed, still grumbling, Digger would be in the kitchen. Dancing excitedly around Alice, his short stump
of a tail twitching with metronomic frenzy, the lively little dog knew that only a brief visit to the rectory garden stood
in the way of the first meal of the day.


But today there had been no sound from the bedroom and Digger had not put in an appearance.

Climbing the stairs slowly, Alice hoped in vain that Digger might appear before she reached the first floor.

At the door of the parson’s bedroom she paused for a moment, listening for a sound from within. Hearing nothing, she knocked
at the door, nervously at first, but louder when there was no response.


Apprehensively, Alice opened the door, fearful of what she might find inside. It came as a momentary relief to discover the
bedroom was empty.


At first, she thought Parson Markham might have been called out unexpectedly earlier that morning, perhaps to pray with a
dying parishioner. She would not have heard the doorbell from her attic room. However, when she saw his bed had not been slept
in her misgivings returned, and now she was seriously concerned. On the rare occasions when the parson intended being absent
from the rectory overnight he would tell her in advance, so she could bolt the door when her work was done.


Alone in the house until Ivy Deeble, the rector’s housekeeper, arrived from the home she shared with her sister in the village,
Alice was momentarily at a loss about what she should do. Then she remembered the diary in which the parson kept details of
his appointments and the visits he proposed making to his parishioners. They were always scrupulously recorded. The Reverend
Markham was fully aware his memory was not as accurate as it had once been.


The leather-bound diary was kept on the desk in the rectory study. Opening it, Alice riffled through the pages until she found
the one for Thursday, 10 August, 1854.


There were only two entries for the day. Both were visits to parishioners who lived outside the village. The first was to
Tor Farm, a lonely moorland holding worked by an eccentric bachelor.


The second was to the cottage of the redoubtable Widow Tabitha Hodge. Now ninety years of age, Widow Hodge still ran the disreputable
‘kiddleywink’ – drinking-house – she had opened in the cottage built by her miner husband in the year of their marriage, seventy years before.


Always well stocked with smuggled spirits, the kiddleywink was popular with the tough and often unruly miners who worked the
tin mines on the high moor. Attempts by the rector and others to persuade the nonagenarian widow to move to a less remote
dwelling were met with the determined proclamation that she would remain in her matrimonial home ‘until the Lord took her
to join her late husband’.


Alice decided she would make a visit to the widow her first call.

Stopping at the cottage that Ivy Deeble shared with her sister, Alice left a message to be passed on to the almost totally
deaf housekeeper, who was still in bed. Then, leaving the village behind, she struck out across the open moor, heading for
the isolated kiddleywink.


She found Widow Hodge standing in a small, grassless yard between cottage and barn, scattering corn for a couple of dozen
chickens, a few ducks and two enormous turkeys.


Born into a Church of England family, Tabitha Hodge might have been forgiven had she converted to Wesleyism. As a small girl,
she had been held on the lap of John Wesley, who praised her as ‘the prettiest little girl he had met with on his tours of
the West Country’. Instead, she had shown indifference to all religious movements. She had set foot inside a church only once since her wedding day – and that was on the occasion of her husband’s burial.


In spite of this and whatever the weather, Parson Markham made the journey to her cottage at least once a week to check on
her well-being. He had even been known to spend an hour or so on his knees, weeding her vegetable patch.


If the old woman appreciated the rector’s concern for her, she was at pains not to show such feelings to anyone. In response
to Alice’s question, she replied, ‘Parson Markham? I haven’t seen him for a week or more, and if he’s got any sense he’ll
stay away. I’ve told him more than once that he’s getting too old to come tramping around the moor in all weathers.’


Although Arnold Markham had been rector of Treleggan for more than thirty years, he had arrived there from an urban parish.
Alluding to this, Widow Hodge opined, ‘It don’t do for them as don’t know the moor to wander too far from home.’ Mischievously,
she added, ‘Perhaps the same fox that made off with two of my ducks in the night has taken him off too.’


The little joke amused the old woman and she was still chuckling as Alice walked away. However, Alice had not gone far before
Widow Hodge called after her.


‘It might be worth your while taking a look in the woods around Treveddoe. One of the miners from that way came in last night
with a face white as a corpse. Said he’d heard such a howling up there he’d run most of the way here. He swore it was the
ghost of old Caleb Bolitho, him who murdered his wife some fifty or more years ago, then hanged himself from a tree in the
wood.’


Nimbly kicking away a cockerel that was intent upon attacking a buckle on one of her shoes, she continued, ‘Some of the others
in here were going up to Treveddoe to have a look, but by the time they’d drunk enough to give ’em the courage they were hardly capable of walking
home, let alone chasing after a ghost.’ Disinterestedly, she added, ‘Anyway, it was probably no more than some old dog. One
like that snappy little animal the rector was in the habit of taking about with him.’


Alice was appalled by the widow’s apparent indifference to the possibility that Rector Markham might have been lying all night
injured in the Treveddoe woods, and something of her thoughts must have showed in her expression. Proving the years had not
dimmed her perception, Widow Hodge said, ‘You think I should be more concerned about the parson, dearie? If there’s one thing
I’ve learned from running a kiddleywink for so many years it’s that it don’t do to get involved in the affairs of anyone you’re
not especially close to – and I’ve outlived all those I cared for by a great many years. I told the parson so often enough,
but it never seemed to make no difference to him. He would still keep coming around here, poking his nose into my business
and pushing the teachings of his church down my throat.’


Had she not been so anxious about the well-being of Parson Markham, Alice would have taken issue with the widow about her
ingratitude for the concern he had always shown towards her. However, finding the rector was far more important than arguing
with someone who was too old to change her ways.


The place where the miner had heard howling could hardly be described as a wood any longer. The trees that had once existed
here had been cut down for fuel when miners first came to the area. All that remained were a number of stunted, wind-deformed
bushes covering both slopes of the valley, through which ran a fast-moving stream.


Unfortunately, although this might have been a quiet spot the previous evening when the frightened miner was making his way
to Widow Hodge’s kiddleywink, this morning the silence was shattered by the noise emanating from the Wheal Endeavour, a tin
mine at the far end of the valley. Any other sound would have been drowned out by the clatter of the mine’s tin stamp, accompanied
as it was by the dull rhythm of a pumping engine and the intermittent screeching of pulley cables.


Alice found the din created by the mine agonisingly frustrating. She was convinced the sound heard by the miner had been the
howling of Digger. Expecting the valley to be more peaceful, she had intended calling Digger, hoping to receive a response
from him. Now she would have to search for the dog and his master – and she would need to take great care. Mining had been
carried on in this valley for centuries. A great many shafts and deep depressions were hidden beneath lush ferns and other
undergrowth.


Her search would also be hampered by the fact that the wooded hillside was traversed not by a single path but by a great many,
all criss-crossing each other. None appeared to be in more regular use than another.


In spite of the noise from the mine, Alice did walk along calling Digger’s name. It was as much to reassure herself that she
was doing something as in expectation of receiving a response.


As she approached a fork in the path along which she was walking, she saw a man coming towards her down one of the two branches
into which the path divided. He was not known to her and, assuming he was a miner, she chose the other way.


She had taken no more than thirty or forty paces when she saw something white at the edge of the path some distance ahead.
A moment later she realised it was Digger.


Excitedly, Alice called the dog’s name and broke into a run. Inexplicably, the dog began running away from her, at the same
time barking wildly.


Calling him more urgently, Alice increased her speed. As she did so, Digger came to a sudden halt. When Alice drew nearer
she was horrified to see that the small dog was standing beside a black-clad figure lying among the tall ferns growing beside
the path.


She had found Parson Arnold Markham.

He lay where he must have fallen. Deeply distressed, Alice dropped to her knees beside him and took his hand. It was cold
and stiff. She knew even before she felt for a pulse that her employer was dead.


Remaining on her knees, she felt tears spring to her eyes and overflow down her cheeks as Digger began whining and jumping
up in a bid to lick her face. It was almost as though the small dog expected her to perform a miracle for his late master.


‘Is he dead?’

The unexpected voice startled Alice. Looking up through her tears, she saw the man who had been walking towards her along
the other path. Probably only a few years older than herself, he was dressed in working clothes, but, despite her distress,
she realised he was not a miner.


When she nodded, not trusting herself to reply, he said gently, ‘I saw you suddenly start running along the path and came
after you to see if something was wrong.’ Inclining his head to where the dead cleric was sprawled, he added, ‘I can see something is very wrong. Are you related to him?’


Gathering Digger in her arms, and trying hard to regain control of her voice, Alice rose to her feet. ‘I work for him, in
Treleggan. When I started work this morning I realised he hadn’t been home since yesterday, so I came looking for him. I was
told a miner had heard howling up this way last night. I guessed it must have been Digger.’


Reaching out with the intention of fondling Digger as she spoke, the stranger drew his hand back hurriedly when the dog snapped
at it. ‘Well, at least the parson had a caring companion with him when he died – even if it was only a bad-tempered dog.’
Aware that Alice was deeply upset, he said, more kindly, ‘My name’s Gideon Davey. I’m a ganger, helping to lay a new length
of railway a couple of miles from here. I’ve just been up to the Wheal Endeavour to discuss the possibility of hiring men
to set explosives for us. I’ll go back there now and find help to carry the parson home. You get on back to the village and
tell whoever needs to know what’s happened. You’d better take the dog with you. I doubt if he’d take kindly to what we’ll
be doing.’




Gideon was an unlikely navvy. The term was an abbreviation for ‘navigator’, the name given to the men who traversed the countryside
building railways. Despite the fact that Gideon had been so employed since he was fourteen, eleven years before, he did not
have the same background as the vast bulk of his fellows.


Gideon’s mother had run a small school in the west of Cornwall. His father, a naval officer, was rarely home, but his mother
ensured that Gideon received a good education at her hands. Unfortunately, his father had died at sea when Gideon was still
young and his mother moved to Somerset. Soon afterwards, she was married again, this time to a country parson.


Then, when Gideon was only fourteen, his mother also died. Within months his stepfather had married another widow, this time
one with a family of three young girls. Gideon did not get along with his new stepmother and no longer felt welcome in what
had been his family home. With everyone ranged against him, he ran away.


After trying his hand at a wide variety of temporary work, he began working on the railways that were beginning to spread across Britain. The rapidly expanding mode of transport was linking major cities and bringing town and
country closer to one another. To Gideon it seemed an exciting thing to be doing.


At first, he worked for less money than the other navvies on his gang because he was too young and inexperienced to earn a
man’s wage. However, by the time he was seventeen he was on full pay, earning three times as much as a farm labourer could
expect to take home.


An independent and itinerant breed, the navvies went wherever they were needed, boring tunnels through hills too steep for
a railway to be laid over them, blasting cuttings through solid rock and laying track that would survive them, the children
born to them, and their grandchildren too.


It was a hard way of life and their high rate of pay reflected the danger and lack of comfort that was an everyday part of
a navvy’s existence.


The rapid advance of a railway line meant that a navvy’s ‘home’ needed to move with it. Cobbled together out of any material
that came to hand, such a place was of a patently temporary nature. Only where there was a particularly long cutting or tunnel
to be worked on would a brief community come into being. Anything from a few hundred to a thousand or more workers would take
up residence in variously constructed shelters, each containing as many men – and women – as could be crammed into them.


In most of the larger shacks a crone was employed to wash, clean and cook for the temporary residents. Usually she would be
a woman who had followed the navvies in their travels, living as the ‘wife’ of a series of men until whatever charm she had
once possessed had been erased by drink, dissipation and the rigours of a comfortless and nomadic lifestyle.


Gideon lived in such shanties until his schooling began to pay off. Men turned to him to work out problems with their wages
and protect them against dishonest ‘Tommy-men’ – the traders who followed the railways as they were being constructed, offering
credit and charging high prices and swingeing rates of interest for shoddy goods.


He earned a reputation for honesty, in addition to having had an education. On more than one occasion he also demonstrated
that he was well able to defend his decisions physically when those who benefited from the ignorance of the average navvy
sought to dissuade him from giving advice that would affect their profits.


Soon, gangers too began to ask his help in working out the rate they should charge a contractor for completing a particular
section of the railroad. When he came to realise how much money could be made by the leader of a hard-working gang who was
able to offer a competitive rate for a particular piece of work, Gideon decided to form his own gang.


He was now in charge of fifty first-class navvies and never short of work. He could also afford to have a hut of his own,
kept tidy by one of the tiny number of respectable wives who followed the railway builders. Occasionally, if the railway work
was in or close to a town or village he might take lodgings, to remind himself how he had once lived.


He and his gang were currently working on the line that would extend from Penzance to a bridge being built across the River
Tamar. When it was completed, Cornwall would be linked to the English railway network.


* * *

A week after the discovery of the rector’s body, and not far from the workhouse where Alice had spent one of the unhappiest
periods of her life, Gideon was speaking to a huge navvy who was leaning his bulk on a pickaxe. They were at the site of a
cutting, being dug out of solid rock to allow a second railway line to be laid alongside the existing single track.


‘Keep the men at it while I’m away, Sailor. I should have extra gunpowder and miners here in readiness for us to begin blasting
first thing tomorrow morning.’


The powerfully built navvy to whom Gideon spoke had gained his nickname as a result of service in the Royal Navy. The option
to serve his country had been offered to him as an alternative to prison when he had been caught smuggling, some years before.


‘Since when have you needed to dress up like a tailor’s dummy to go and buy gunpowder?’ Sailor Smith wiped the back of a hand
across his grimy and sweating forehead, at the same time grinning good-naturedly at the man who kept him and the other members
of the gang in full employment.


‘I’ll probably be stopping off at a funeral on the way to the mine,’ Gideon explained. ‘I can’t go into church looking as
though I’ve come straight from work.’


‘Would this be the funeral of that parson you helped carry back to Treleggan?’ Sailor asked.

‘That’s right. He’s being buried this morning. If I don’t get a move on I’m going to be late.’

‘I doubt if the parson is likely to take offence if you’re not there on time,’ Sailor commented drily. ‘But I suppose that
young girl who worked for him might.’ More seriously, he added, ‘Be careful not to upset anyone up there, Gideon. Moorland
men are a peculiar lot. Anyone from much more than a mile away is looked upon as a foreigner – and they’re particularly jealous of their young women. Many a would-be suitor from off the moor
has suffered a painful loss of ardour when he’s tried to court a moorland girl.’


‘I’m merely going to the funeral to pay my respects,’ Gideon retorted. ‘I’ve only ever met this girl the once – and it was
hardly a romantic meeting.’


Sailor grinned again. ‘You could have said the same thing about the pretty little French girl I first met in a fish market
in Brittany, but … All right, I know you’re in a hurry. I’ll tell you the story some other time – but remember my warning.’




By the time Gideon reached Treleggan a damp grey mist had closed in upon Bodmin Moor, bringing with it an unseasonable chill.


The funeral service had already commenced when he entered the crowded church and found a place at the end of a pew. The slight
disturbance he caused was sufficient to make Alice turn round in the pew in front of him. She gave a start of surprise when
she saw Gideon.


The service was being conducted by the rural dean, the Reverend Harold Brimble, who gave a eulogy on the many years of service
Arnold Markham had dedicated to the parish of Treleggan.


If proof were needed that the late Parson Markham had indeed been an exceptional man, it was provided by the presence in the
small moorland church of Tabitha Hodge. Despite the deprecating comments she had made to Alice about the parson, the old woman
had tramped more than a mile across the moor to pay her respects to him.


Following the funeral service, the interment in the sloping churchyard was a brief affair, a niggling drizzle adding pace to the graveside ceremony.


The religious rites satisfactorily concluded, the mourners made their way the short distance from the church to the rectory,
where, with the aid of the housekeeper, Alice had set out a variety of foodstuffs, much of it donated by the late parson’s
parishioners.


When Gideon fell in beside Alice on the path, she asked, ‘Why have you come to the funeral? You never knew the parson.’

‘True,’ Gideon agreed. ‘But having helped carry him back here I felt somehow involved and wanted to pay my respects. I also
found myself worrying about you. When we parted company I could see how upset you were – and I’d left you with that fierce
animal that had been guarding the parson all night … where is the dog, by the way?’


Alice was not at all certain about his motives for expressing concern for her. Although she had not had a great deal to do
with men, she had learned enough to realise that those who knew of her illegitimacy were apt to assume her moral standards
were lower than those of other young women.


‘Digger’s shut in Parson Markham’s bedroom,’ she replied. ‘He’s missing his master, but he’s with me for most of the day,
though I don’t know how long I’ll be here to look after him. Reverend Brimble has asked me to stay at the rectory until a
new parson comes to Treleggan. When one does …’ She shrugged unhappily.


‘What about your parents? Won’t you be able to go and live with them?’

Alice looked at Gideon quickly and realised he had asked the question in all innocence. ‘I have no father or mother,’ she
replied, offering no explanation of her statement. ‘But I must go and help in the rectory now. Are you coming in?’


Gideon shook his head. ‘I have business at the Wheal Endeavour.’ After only the slightest hesitation, he added, ‘I have to
come to the mine occasionally. Would anyone object if I called in at the rectory … just to say hello to you?’


No man had ever asked Alice whether he might call on her, either formally or informally. For a few moments she felt ridiculously
flustered. Observing this, Gideon said, ‘I’m sorry, Alice, I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I shouldn’t have asked at such
a time as this.’


‘It isn’t that.’ As she spoke, Alice looked at Gideon – really looked at him – for the first time. He was a good-looking young man, with strong features and eyes that were a deeper blue
than any she had ever seen. ‘It’s just … I hardly know you!’


She did not add that she would probably be alone in the rectory if he called.

‘That’s quite true,’ he conceded. ‘But meeting in such unusual circumstances seemed to do away with the need for formal introductions.
You know my name, Gideon Davey. I was born in Cornwall and I have no parents, either. I’ve had to make my own way in the world
and now I’m a ganger, working on the railways with about fifty men in my gang. I negotiate the price for clearing the route
for a particular section of line, then me and my men carry