Shapes #2
As I got to the pump, Mrs. Budge—our nearest neighbor down, who had a son at Wheal Enys—was just leaving it.
We exchanged a pleasant greeting, though her face was etched with the same worry I’d seen on the faces of The Magpie’s customers.
I still shrank from the idea of my neighbors knowing I’d been the one to find Mr. Roscoe, and I hoped she wouldn’t stop to gossip.
I let out a breath as she moved away, full bucket sloshing.
When I got back with my own bucket, I washed up from the morning’s baking.
As I was putting away the dishes, I caught a golden glint through the window.
A crooked seam had opened in the belly of cloud, and a beautiful light streamed across the downs that sloped away from the cottage.
Out beyond our garden was Tregarrick land.
The wall here was no more than a low line of rubble, but enough to mark the boundary.
I grabbed a bowl and went out to the garden to feel sun on my face while I picked more of the rosy apples, which I thought to cook up with onions and a mutton chop meant for last night’s supper in a dish Mum had called squab pie (though there was nary a squab inside it).
It was Jack’s favorite, and I was keen to stay on his good side as long as possible.
Because eventually he was going to find out from someone—Mr. Hilliard, most likely—that I was still working at The Magpie.
I felt guilty about my dishonesty, but I wasn’t going to give up my job for Jack or anyone.
Finding Mr. Roscoe like that—and realizing how easily it could have been me—had left me with a feeling that life was too uncertain to spend our days alone and unhappy.
But I didn’t end up having to face Jack that night, because he came home so late I left out his supper and went to bed.
Not that I actually slept. Jack was often late coming home in the evenings, but from The Wolf’s Head, he had to walk the same road I did.
So in spite of what Mr. Hilliard had told me, I lay awake worrying until I heard Jack come in, stumbling and muttering oaths.
Shortly after that, everything went quiet, and I knew he’d fallen straight into bed.
No, I wouldn’t be giving up The Magpie, because The Magpie was all I had left.
Jack rose late the next morning, bleary eyed and cross. He gobbled down the cold supper I’d left out for him and took his lunch from my hand without more than a mumbled goodbye.
I finished my baking, packed my basket, and started for work, rain drumming steadily against my bonnet.
As I walked along the hedgerow, I couldn’t help eyeing the tangle of thorny growth, looking for a hole someone might peep through.
Had Mr. Tregarrick noticed me on the road?
It gave me a strange feeling, knowing he might have been aware of me long before I’d been aware of him.
Mrs. Moyle was her cheerful self this morning, and I let myself get caught up in her stream of chatter.
She had her days of low spirits like anyone else, but they were few and far between, and never lasted long.
With her company, I was able to forget, for a while, the dark clouds that gathered heavy over my cottage.
The tearoom was much quieter today, and I thought it wouldn’t be long before the village had forgotten about poor Mr. Roscoe—though I was likely to remember him for the rest of my days.
I couldn’t help wondering whether Mr. Tregarrick was truly touched by his death, or whether it had merely been an inconvenience.
Throughout the day, every time the front door opened, I looked up, wondering whether Mr. Tregarrick would again appear.
It didn’t seem very likely he would, and he didn’t.
Thinking again over the previous day’s visit, it struck me that he hadn’t asked me a single question about Mr. Roscoe once he knew I was the one who’d found him.
At closing, I mentioned this to Mrs. Moyle.
“Did it occur to you,” she said, “that he might have been curious about you? And might have been truly concerned about you?”
I frowned. “No.”
She chuckled and went back to the washing, and my cheeks flamed.
Mrs. Moyle liked to remind me from time to time that I was “very pretty.” I thought I looked well enough when my dress was clean and my hair wasn’t a weedy tangle, but neither I nor anyone else had ever used the word “pretty” in connection with me.
Mum’s curls had been dark, her skin smooth and flawless even as the creases in her face had deepened.
My red hair and freckles—as well as Jack’s—had come from Nanna, Mum’s Irish mother.
As soon as the kitchen was put back in order, I started home, Mrs. Moyle urging me to be careful a little longer in case the lawmen had gotten it wrong.
Another change in the weather had come, great, woolly white clouds moving in the breeze like ships across a sky-blue sea.
As I drew near the place where Mr. Roscoe had fallen, I found my footsteps slowing, and then I was drifting off the road toward it, a weight like one of the dark granite blocks pressing on my chest.
The weeds had begun to spring back, and you could no longer see that a body had lain there.
With the rain and cooler weather, the grass was greening again, and water droplets beaded the blades, sparkling like jewels in the sunlight.
A few spikes of faded goldenrod nodded heavily against the stone wall in the breeze.
I had noticed this morning that Mrs. Moyle’s basket was gone, maybe taken by the wind.
Or by someone unaware of why it had been abandoned there.
I glanced up the hill toward Roche Rock, studying the chapel’s gap-toothed battlements and the upper floor’s arched window, sunlight winking in the stained glass.
Might he have seen me from there? It was too far, I should have thought, for him to see me very well.
I wouldn’t have been able to make out his features at this distance.
Now I turned my gaze south, letting it skim over the rocky heath and across the surface of a dark pool, finally landing on a thick cluster of silver birch on the other side.
I caught the glint of something in the trees, and I squinted, trying to make it out.
Likely just sunlight bouncing off water droplets, but I had met poachers in that wood.
I believed the boys were at it regularly, and I thought if anyone had ever seen the master of the estate before yesterday, it would’ve been them.
Squinting again over the ground that sloped toward the black outcrop, I considered. The afternoon was still bright, with a couple of hours remaining before the sun set. Did I dare? Especially knowing now that Mr. Tregarrick might be watching me?
Let him. Let him come out and speak to me—shoo me off his land, even—instead of hiding up in those rocks like some great spider.
I glanced down at my basket, which contained the day’s uneaten scones, and thought of leaving it behind until my return; the kitchen towel over the top would keep the birds out.
Then I recalled the paring knife resting underneath and changed my mind.
The blade was small enough for a pocket but would likely work mischief there.
After picking my way over a tumbledown section of wall, I stepped onto a deer path.
The day had turned very fine, and it lifted my spirits.
Less than a month ago, this ground had been covered with heather flowers—tiny and bell shaped, in white, pink, and purple—mixed in with bracken and sunny yellow furze.
Some of the furze bushes still bloomed, and a few butter-yellow spearwort flowers nodded in the breeze around the edges of the pool.
The path I now trod ran beyond the heath and all the way down to Coldvreath, where Mum and I used to visit the holy well on days when we hadn’t many chores to do.
It was a secret between us, for Da never would have agreed to us crossing Tregarrick’s heath.
The road would have taken us there, too, but the walk was longer and not as pleasant, especially when the carts were kicking up either dust or mud.
I paused when I reached the birch trees, which looked like a thicket of long, white matchsticks with flaming-yellow tips under the October sunshine.
I noticed the trickle of water that ran from the wood down to the pool.
The sun glinted brightly on the water where it flowed over some smooth stones—which was probably what I’d seen from the road.
As I stepped slowly between the slender trunks on either side of the path, I caught the murmuring of voices and stopped.
“Who’s there?” I called softly, and the murmuring ceased.
A twig snapped and a breeze rattled the dry leaves, but no reply came.
My heart thumped, and I wondered whether it might be better to turn back. The boys were harmless enough, but it could be someone else. Someone rougher.
Finally, a mop of straw-colored hair popped out of the trees a few yards ahead. “Passing through, miss?”
My breath moved freely again as I recognized the lad.
“I thought I saw something from the road and came to see what it was,” I replied. “I’m not here to give you any trouble, though.”
The boy stepped fully out of the trees. In one hand he held a snare with a brown hare in it. “Seen you before, miss,” he said.
“I remember. Jeremy, is it?”
His head dipped. Another boy peeped out of the trees farther along the path, but he kept back.
“I’ve worried about you boys in here poaching in the full light of day. Aren’t you afraid you’ll get caught?”
“Nah,” Jeremy replied with a grin. Jerking his head toward the chapel, he said, “The master hardly comes out.”
“You’ve seen him, though?”
He shrugged. “Now and then from a distance. We always scurry off quick.”
“So you’ve never spoken to him.”
The boy shook his head.
“Well,” I said with a glance over my shoulder, “you know a man was killed near here a couple days ago.”
One corner of his lips twisted down. “They say a mad dog got hold of him. But they never caught it.”
“No, so you boys should be careful.”
“Always are, miss. And same to you, miss.”
I couldn’t help smiling. Eyeing his snare, I said, “If you ever have more than you need, I’m in that first white cottage on the right side of the road to Carbis. Come around to the back, and I’ll give you threepence.”
The lad grinned. “Sixpence.”
I scoffed. “Those old hares are mostly hide and bones! Now, if you had a nice, fat rabbit . . .”
He ducked his head. “I’ll bring you one, miss.”
I bade him good day and turned toward home. On a whim, I took a fork in the path that ran alongside the stream to the pool. There was a wide, flat stone next to it that Mum and I had sat on to eat our lunch sometimes on days like this. I raised my skirt and stepped up onto it.
The slab was pleasantly warm, and the breeze fresh.
I reached into my basket for a scone to nibble.
I thought about what Jack would say if he could see me now—or Mrs. Moyle, for that matter—and I did feel a pang of guilt.
But this spot was a secret I had shared with Mum, and it was my first time coming here since she died.
She would have called it a sad shame to remain indoors on an afternoon like this.
For soon enough we’d have rain every day.
With this thought, the light dimmed, and I glanced up and saw masses of darker clouds moving to crowd out the woolly ones.
The air was already cooling, and I even heard a rumble of distant thunder.
Across the surface of the pool, which wasn’t much wider than our cottage, I saw little circles forming before I ever felt a droplet on my skin.
It was a gentle rain, without the bite of winter yet. I took off my bonnet.
As the first raindrops kissed my forehead, I realized I was crying. It had come on me quietly, one slow tear at a time. Next thing I knew, I was sobbing.
I think I’d been too scared to cry before then.
Scared of whatever had come for Mr. Roscoe.
Scared Jack would finally manage to take Mrs. Moyle and The Magpie away from me.
Scared of what was becoming of my twin and me without our parents.
Was it that the tearoom—with its books and newspapers and people from other places—had shown me how small my life was, and that it didn’t have to be that way?
Would I have been better off without that lesson?
It should have been me. I realized this dark thought had been lurking ever since that night on the road. Death should have come for me, not a man with a family and some kind of purpose in life.
But here I was being morbid again, and foolish, too.
I had no idea what that man’s life was like.
And I had no real wish to die. Especially not in autumn, when there were fiery leaves and tart red apples.
When slanting golden light visited the downs at the end of the day.
When mist drifted in off the moor at twilight.
I heard the whisper of wings and turned my head. A magpie fluttered down near the edge of the stone slab. It pecked at a bit of silvery-green lichen, occasionally tilting its head to eye me. I broke off a piece of my scone and slowly held it out toward the visitor.
“Good day to you,” I murmured. “I’ve got something I think you’ll like better.”
The magpie danced closer and eyed me again. I held very still as it stretched toward the crumb, finally nipping it out of my hand.
Laughing, I said, “I thought so.”
The bird suddenly let out a stream of coarse chatter, startling me, and flitted away.
“Heavens,” I said. “You’re welcome.”
I rose to my feet, careful not to slip on the wet granite. As I bent for my basket and bonnet, I heard a noise behind me—a rustling in the heather around the base of the slab. I turned, but before I could look closer, someone shouted my name.
I glanced up toward the sound and discovered fog was rising quickly. Roche Rock was no more than a deep shadow in the distance. The birchwood had disappeared altogether.
Who had called for me? It was a man’s voice, so not my poaching friends. I hoped they’d moved on, because it might very well be that “the master” was somewhere on the heath.
“Hello?” I called back.
Then something struck me from behind.