Chapter Bait
Bait
“Hear what I have to say,” I quickly continued. “You said yourself that Goosevar comes to me, not to you. You can see for miles in every direction from the chapel, yet you’ve glimpsed no more than his shadow. I’m only wondering if—”
“I am Not going to use you as bait.”
His voice boomed like thunder in the stillness. Before I could compose myself enough to answer, another angry voice sounded.
“Devil take me, Mina!”
I jumped to my feet. It was a sign of just how badly I’d upset Harker that he hadn’t sensed Jack coming.
“Why did I know I’d find you here?” he demanded. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”
I could almost see smoke coming out of him, he was that hot. Harker, who was closer to Jack, stood with his back to me now. Yet I felt him tensing. His anger is the cold kind.
“Calm down, Jack,” I pleaded. “I only—”
“No more of your excuses!” he barked before I could spin out another lie. I had no new ones to tell him anyway. I had defied him, plain and simple.
I’m a grown woman, and I shouldn’t have to answer to him.
But that wasn’t how the world worked.
“Do I have to set a guard on you?” he continued. His eyes jerked to Harker, his tone threatening violence as he said, “I want you to keep away from my sister, you devil. You have no business with her, hear me?”
“I think—” Harker began, but now I was smoking.
“You leave him be, Jack! This isn’t his fault. I came bothering him, not the other way round. What are you doing here, anyway? Have they let you go at the mine?”
His eyes bored into me, and he moved closer, edging around Harker.
“If they do, it’ll be on your head! Mr. Hilliard told me you left home this morning, and I asked for leave to come after you.
” His hand struck like a snake, catching hold of my wrist and leaving me stunned.
He tugged me toward him. “I’ll have no more of this. You can’t—”
“That’s enough,” rumbled Harker. In a blink, my wrist was free—and Jack was splayed on the ground.
Now Jack was stunned silent, and Harker turned to me with a stricken look. He took my wrist gently in his hand, his fingers cool against the smarting flesh.
“Are you safe at home, Mina?”
Trembling, I frowned at him, unsure what he meant. Then it came to me—safe from Jack. It broke my heart, him seeing Jack this way, suspecting him of something that had never been true. I felt ashamed, too, at him seeing Jack and me at our worst.
“It’s not like him,” I managed, though my voice shook. “He’ll calm down.”
Harker nodded, eyes still searching mine. “It’s best you go home, then. But if something like this happens again, you go to Mrs. Moyle. Promise me.”
Tears threatened to choke me, and I could only manage a nod. I turned to go, leaving Jack to clamber up from the mound of dry bracken he’d been tossed into.
I let him trail behind me as I walked down the slope of the heath toward the cottage, and he had sense enough not to try to talk to me before we got inside.
As the door swung closed behind him, I said, “Don’t you ever do that again.”
“I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that,” he admitted.
He’d simmered down some, but now there was an edge of panic to his frustration.
“You’ve got me at my wits’ end. You defy me at every turn, and every day coming home I’m worried I’ll find you dead out on the heath.
It already almost happened once! How would I bear it, Mina? ”
My throat felt thick and hot, and I continued to fight tears. “If I matter so much to you, why don’t you come home instead of drinking half the night? My worth doesn’t add up to the price of a pint.”
His eyes closed, and his hand went to his forehead as he turned his back to me.
“You know it’s true,” I muttered, starting toward the loft ladder. I was bone tired and starting to see black around the edges.
“Why did you go to him?” Jack called after me. “Are you trying to get yourself killed? Because it sure seems that way to me.”
I turned. “I can’t do this anymore.” My voice came out weak as the rest of me. “So here’s the truth of it. I went to warn him that people in the village are out of their heads with fear, and they’re gossiping about the estate. I told him that he could be in danger.”
Jack’s eyes went wide, disbelieving. “How could you do something so foolish?”
“Because he’s been kind to me. Because I like him, and I don’t want to see him hurt. Because you’re the ones acting like fools.”
“Did you see what happened on the heath? No man moves that fast, Mina.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have made him think you were dangerous!”
“Do you even hear yourself? You know they’re searching all around his estate. Even Hilliard is finally coming to his senses.”
My heart turned over, and some of the heat left my voice. “They mean to arrest him?”
Jack grunted. “Hilliard says there’s no evidence showing he’s done anything. By the time there is, somebody else will be dead. If you know something—if you’ve remembered something—you best not be keeping it to yourself. That would make you an accessory to the crime.”
“Those are some fancy words, Jack. Are you sure you know what they mean?”
It was an ugly thing to say, but his talk was scaring me.
He knew—or at least sensed—more than I liked.
He and the other fools were meddling in a way that could risk not just Harker, but all of us.
And like Mr. Hilliard, there was nothing I could say to set him straight that he would actually believe or understand.
Jack’s jaw set, and his whole face shut down. “You win, Mina. You’ve broken me. You go on and do what you like, because I’m done trying to protect you.”
He made straight for the front door and walked out of it.
I win. It sure didn’t feel like it.
Still recovering, and worn out by the emotion of the day, I didn’t wake the next morning until Jack had left for work.
I couldn’t even have said for sure that he’d come home, except that he’d burned up my best pot while trying to cook porridge.
Part of me thought it served him right, and part of me felt sorry he’d gone off to the mine hungry.
Having missed supper last night, I woke with a complaining belly and went out to gather eggs.
They hadn’t been collected in several days, and I found nearly a dozen in the straw of the nest boxes.
Then I made eggs-on-foam, which required whipping the whites and spreading them as a bed for the yolks before baking—a recipe I’d learned from Mrs. Moyle.
Once I’d eaten, I started on In the Leaves again, but after the last reading, I found I had no patience for it.
The candle for “finding your way in the dark,” which I was certainly doing, and not very well, and the cross for “trouble on its way,” delivered as promised, and with a vengeance.
I wasn’t sure what the point of the readings was if they only told you things you’d look back on the next day and say, “It all makes sense now.”
Yet by the time I’d boiled water and brewed the leaves, I found myself pouring my tea unstrained. Maybe eventually you got better at making sense of things before they happened?
This time when I performed the little ritual, I didn’t have to look very hard—a large and clear circle appeared inside the rim to one side of the handle. Mrs. Rochester listed several meanings for circles but only one for a ring, which was how I had read the pattern when I first looked at it.
Marriage. And by the position in the cup, one that would come soon.
Which would have to mean it was someone else’s marriage, but whose?
Jack’s? I had always assumed he would marry one day, but to my knowledge he’d never even had a sweetheart.
How could he, when he spent all his time at the mine or the tavern?
Mrs. Moyle? That seemed more likely, yet I couldn’t believe she’d hide a courtship from me.
Sighing, I plunked the cup down and gathered up some stale scones, left from when Mrs. Moyle was here, to carry out to the hens. As I was crumbling them on the ground, I heard someone coming around the side of the cottage.
“Miss?”
Jeremy, the young poacher, appeared. He grinned and held up a fat rabbit. “Got one.”
I smiled. “So I see. You gave me a bit of a jump.”
He ducked his head. “Sorry, miss. Only you told me to come to the back door.”
“I did indeed. Sixpence, I think we agreed?”
He ducked again.
“I’ll be right back.”
I went inside for his coin, plucking it from an old chemist’s tin that I kept in a drawer in my worktable.
Going back out, I said to him, “I agreed to buy this one from you, but I won’t buy another until they catch whatever is attacking people on the heath.
You boys have no business being out there until then, you hear? ”
Looking down, he said, “Mr. Tregarrick—he already told us to keep off.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You spoke to him?”
“Aye.”
“Good.” I held back a smile. “Gave you a fright, did he?”
Now a shrug. “The other fellows maybe, on account of him creeping up on us, and those funny spectacles. But not me.”
I couldn’t keep the corners of my lips down, but luckily Jeremy was still staring at the ground. “I see. What did Mr. Tregarrick say to you?”
“That it was too dangerous, and if we didn’t clear off, he’d fetch the constable.” Finally he looked up. “But he said we could come back when it was safe.”
“That was very kind of him.” If memory served, Jeremy’s father was Abel Martin, who’d died about a year ago.
I imagined the boy poached because his family needed the meat.
“I tell you what—you take the sixpence, but keep the rabbit, since you won’t get one for a while.
Then you bring me one when it’s safe again. All right?”
He gave me an eager nod. “Thank ’ee, miss.” Then he frowned. “Some folks are saying it’s Mr. Tregarrick going after people on the heath, but I don’t see how it could be.”
I studied him more closely. “Why do you say so?”
“Well, we hardly ever see him outside that black chapel of his. I suppose he could get up to murdering at night, when no one’s looking.” His eyes dipped to the bandage around my neck. “Do you think he is?”
“I don’t, Jeremy. Mr. Tregarrick is going to try to find who is, though. Have you ever seen anything strange out there? On the heath, or in that wood where you set your snares?”
“Nay, miss. But my granfer used to say some kind of devil lived there.”
“You didn’t let that frighten you, either?”
He reached up to touch his chest—a cross was just visible between two buttons of his shirt. It looked like it had been made from a couple of small nails bound together with string. “Nay, miss.”
“Well, here you go.” I handed him the coin, and he slung the rabbit over his shoulder. “You mind Mr. Tregarrick and run on home, now.”
“I will, miss.”
I watched him walk back around the corner of the house. I’d noticed a limp the first time I met him, and he had it still.
Planting my hands on my hips, I gazed up toward the chapel. Was Harker out searching for Goosevar this morning? It didn’t seem that the creature was a threat to Harker—likely he could have killed Harker a hundred times over—but still I worried what would happen if they did finally meet.
And what if they don’t? Then Harker was going to have to think again about letting me help him.
I was about to go inside when I noticed a low, woolly cloud creeping past the pool and slowly down toward the cottage. The animals began to fuss and fret again, and soon they had left me alone in the garden.
In spite of yesterday’s brave talk by the pool, I stepped to the back door—but stopped with my fingers gripping the handle as an unexpected sound reached my ears. A strange kind of music that seemed to drift on the breeze.
I’d heard music at church from the organ, and though Da had told me it was the same as the angels played in heaven, it had always sounded more like a foretelling of doom.
I’d heard music on the green outside the village during fairs and markets, when there was always dancing—lively music, far more pleasing to a child’s ear.
And I’d heard music right here in our cottage, when Da fiddled or Mum sang Irish airs.
This was different from all of these, and I wasn’t sure it could even properly be called music.
If anything, it was like a blending of out-of-tune fiddle music and Ma’s saddest ballad, but also with sounds like birdsong, rustling barley, grasshoppers clicking, and water over stones.
It could not be followed or made sense of, yet I stood there trying.
Fairy tricks. These words came to me in Mum’s brogue.
I squeezed my eyes shut and covered my ears, but it didn’t stop the music.
And when again I opened my eyes, I found that I’d wandered out onto the heath.
My heart took off like a hare, yet the rest of me stood frozen.
The low cloud drifted over and around me.
Cold, damp air kissed my cheeks and hands.
Run!
But as a crown of tree branches floated toward me through the fog, I felt both my mind and body loosening, like my hair falling over my shoulders when I unpinned it at night.