THE PRICE OF SUCH OFFENCES
PROLOGUE Through the driving mists across Mount’s Bay, You discern the granite walls of St Michael’s standing shallows, And just fleetingly the winding-sheets of seamen’s ghosts Or sanded bodies walking the rocks of Megliggar. Run with the hares the ancient trackways across the moors, Where you stumble to paw the granite tombs of West Penrith That stud gorse and scrub, furze and bracken, And cromlechs in barrows beneath a tilted capstone. Magic, those moorstones and madness of Mid-summer Eve In Penzance under torch-light and blazing tar-barrels Where you arched arms with a lass in an eye For wild-fired dancers to jig through. You crame through the ring stone, the Men-An-Tol, Nine times against the sun to backen disease. Idle summer eves, you would lie on your back, Hand behind head on the smooth-bellied dolmen, Harking to the quick cry of sea-pies swooping The mud banks in flashes of black and white, And gaze upon the trimmed tors and lichened lozenges Looming, lurching in a circle, nineteen slabs, Maidens dressed in stone for dancing on the Sabbath, Forbidden passage to the netherworld. And you, where did you tread the shoe awry? Sir Rose Price’s ball at Trengwainton? An ivory curve of shoulder . . . a pink, satin gown décolleté … Your spoffish father interposing and stronged it. What prospects? The fourth son of a dissolute baronet, You were not brought up in the stirrup. S’truth, I’ll not stream for tin, Nor be clayman, quarrier or copper-seeker! Nay, I’ll not be rock-bound till doomsday! Perhaps gentleman farmer, settler . . . Causeway to a new world. HENRY BERESFORD GARRET, CONVICT Towered above us runty wraiths, the new Commandant. Dandy flash and fly; a striking looker As mebbe but a bull-necked brute even so. With this mass of carroty hair silvering at the parting. He sported a shooting-jacket bursting hefty shoulders And a black silk kerchief tied jack tar at his throat.