Trevanen Manor was a happy home, with it's corridors and rooms ringing with laughter, until the Smallpox epidemic arrived. In the summer of #### Penzance was visited by the plague and over two hundred people died. The numbers seem cold and impersonal, but nothing was as cold as Lord August Trevanen's heart. In just a few months, many of the house's staff had been killed, including Lord Trevanen's wife and his five year old daughter Emily.
It was more than he could bear and with the loss of his immediate family and all the much loved staff of the Manor, Lord Trevanen had gone from being an outgoing happy young man, with his inherited estate, his lovely wife and daughter, into a lonely haunted recluse. He also took to drinking to numb his pain and withdrew from society to live a life of unremitted misery.
The only surviving staff were his faithful man Tom Skerry and his wife Susan, as most of the house was shut up they used a few rooms in the East wing. Lord Trevanen had his rooms in the middle wing. Tom's wife only lived two years after the disaster of the plague, so the house became even quieter as the two men merely existed. Tom Skerry loved the young master and determined to shield him from any further harm, although what more could be done to him? It seemed that life had thrown all it could at the young master August Derleth Trevanen.
But life had more in store for Lord Trevanen.
Tom Skerry was old and began to struggle to cope, it got harder every year to look after his master. Tom was no fool and knew that help was needed. The manor house was getting filthy and the work was piling up. Lord Trevanen did not notice, nor did he care. All he did was wake up, wash, eat, then sit in his library and drink wine. For him the days passed by like walking through a dark fog. He kept his brain numb, trying to avoid thinking of his lost wife and child.
Lord Trevanen owned copper and tin mines and had a thriving business that was run by trusted managers. The only input he had these days, was to host an annual general meeting, which met in the Great Hall of the Manor House. His managers were at a loss for what they could do to pull Lord Trevanen out of his melancholy. Lord Trevanen and his wife and daughter were much loved by his employees who hated to see him this way.
One young man stood out, handsome and intelligent, with a great drive in him. He was the son of a ploughman and a milkmaid, he wanted to better himself, not in any way to distance himself from his humble beginnings, but out of pride. Both his father and mother did their work with dignity and wanted nothing more than for young Toby Moon to do more, see more and aspire to bigger things than they had.
Toby was the youngest mine manager in Cornwall. He had learned to read and write and to do mathematics as a child, he was something of a prodigy. He had started in the mines as a general miner, working on the face with a pick and shovel, then doing shoring (pit props to support the tunnel ceiling) and then working with the ponies and bogies that carried the ore out of the mine. His intelligence and work ethic got noticed by the then manager of the pit, who saw in Toby great potential.
Because of the plague, manpower was scarce, and good managers even rarer. He was recommended to Lord Trevanen and was promoted to manager of one of the newest pits. Lord Trevanen started to come out of his life of gloom.
There was something about Toby Moon that lifted your spirit. With his promotion, Toby felt the time was right and proposed to his girlfriend Annabell Lycett. She accepted and they were married in the old chapel in Penzance. Annabell soon fell pregnant and had a girl, they called her Polly Moon after her mother's great grandmother.
Tom Skerry had taken on a cook and a handyman, a husband and wife team who came with excellent references. They had been servants of the elderly Lord Carlyle who had died just the previous year. Their appointment was propitious, they were looking for employment with accommodation and Tom desperately needed a cook as his arthritic hands made cooking a painful chore, he was not much of a cook anyway. The handyman had experience with stonework and plastering so some long needed repairs could be made to the Manor.
Tom also took on a younger man to be a footman, the sixteen year old was the grandson of an old friend of Tom's. He had decided to train up the lad so he would progress from footman to valet and then an under-butler. In time, if the boy was of good character and worked hard, he could possibly take over from Tom.
The household was growing again, Lord Trevanen had stopped drinking to excess and took to walking around his gardens. The Manor was coming back to life.
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