Chapter 2
The call is a mistake—he grasps that right away—but he makes it anyway. William Thatcher clings to the telephone in the narrow booth, starving for the sound of Helen’s voice on the other end as soon as the operator puts him through. Any moment now.
Ring.
He’s lasted only a fortnight this time.
Ring—
“Hello,” she says, bright and full of warm sunshine, then a pause. “Hello?”
He claps a hand over his mouth, barely daring to breathe as he drinks in the familiar notes of Helen’s voice. Instantly he’s home. He presses the earpiece close, hunched against the wall of the booth. Say more. More words. More of you.
“Hello, is someone there?”
He drinks it up. The familiar lilt. The cadence of bright red poppies. Tell me how you’re doing. Just a glimpse.
“Hello? Operator, are you there?”
“On the line,” chirps a female voice.
“And the call is connected?”
“Yes, ma’am. Would you like to disconnect?”
No. No, don’t disconnect. Please stay. The earpiece begins to slip through his clammy fingers. Just keep talking. He never used to perspire this much. Not even when they had courted.
“Who placed the call, please?” Helen’s voice is bright, because that’s who she is. It takes work to annoy her. She’s a diamond among women, really. The sort that could only be discovered rather than manufactured.
“Can’t say, ma’am. Unregistered number.”
“You mean, a public telephone booth? Who on earth—”
He coughs.
There’s a pause. A palpable silence slices the delight.
“Hello.” Helen’s voice is soft, speaking directly to him now. “Won’t you speak to me?”
Panicked, he slams the receiver down, as if she could see through the wires to his cramped telephone booth all the way in Cornwall.
He lets out a breath and runs a hand over the dangling receiver, now silent.
What an odd technology the telephone is, bridging the two hundred and twenty-three miles between this minuscule booth and Tewkesbury.
So far away, yet he can lift this handle anytime, give the number, and be connected immediately to his wife.
He wallows in that booth until a firm rap sounds on the glass and he jumps, striking his head on the roof of the red tin can. He’s shaking. The man glares from beneath his bowler hat and William hurries out, a hand lifted in apology.
War has shredded human kindness. They’ve come back from the battlefield, these men who fought, but the battles aren’t over. Simply different.
William shoves through the bifold doors and grabs the large, flat package he leaned against the booth before going in and inhales, drawing courage from the memory of Helen’s voice.
That’s why he gave in this time, isn’t it?
For the courage to take the next step. Because it’s all for her. She is his reason.
Yes, I can do this. He can march into that gallery and unwrap the painting like any respectable gentleman and request cold, hard pound notes in exchange.
I’ll do it. I’ll do anything for you. Shoring up his strength, breathing in the scent of saltwater and fish, he makes his way down toward the cluster of shops.
Pain shoots up his left hip with each step, aching from his run into town.
His heart thrums when he reaches the fashionable storefront on High Street and forces himself to enter, triggering a brass bell overhead. Paintings in gold frames under well-positioned spotlights line the walls, and easels support many others.
The owner looks up, blinks from under his visor, and raises his eyebrows.
William doesn’t belong here. He feels it hotly as he stands in the center of that polished space in his tattered fisherman’s tunic, long, matted beard, and sea-slicked rain boots.
He smooths his gnarled hair back, cringing at the wild, greasy feel.
And he smells of fish. Suddenly hunched and self-conscious, he forces himself forward and places the painting on the counter.
“I’d like…uhmm…I’m s-s-s-selling, that is… it’s—a Rupert Covington piece.”
The man’s shrewd eyes blink behind his spectacles. “Is it, now?”
A jolt in his chest. How much will the man offer?
Two hundred pounds? Three? He tugs the paper off, his fingers suddenly in each other’s way, and presses it back to reveal the starkly beautiful face that has haunted him for months.
It moves him again just seeing her uncovered—the long, dark hair curling down a straight back, snapping eyes, and a perfect birthmark highlighting a delicate jaw…
and a look as lost as his own. The only label on the piece is Merryn.
“Where did you get this?” Oddly enough, this man doesn’t belong here, either. His smooth dialect and expertly tailored suit label him a London opportunist newly settled in the Cornish holiday town of Penzance.
“I-i-in the cottage. The one—m-m-mine. I found it b-b-between the walls.” Why has his childhood stutter chosen this moment to reappear and tangle him up?
The man’s eyebrows rise. “You’ve a cottage in Newlyn, then? One of the artists’ places?”
“I-I-I no. It was g-g-given to me. By…” A stranger. Along with the house in which he found it. Yet he doesn’t wish to sound even more foolish, so he keeps this detail to himself.
The man’s eyebrows fly up, and William suddenly feels the wrongness of his mysterious inheritance. The oddness. “It’s only a cottage. In St. Ives.”
“St. Ives,” he mumbles. “That place is crawling with artists. Any one of them might have—” He sniffs, wiping his nose with a wrinkled handkerchief then stuffing the linen into his pocket. “It’s not likely a Covington. Why don’t you take it on back, then, and hang it somewhere nice?”
William frowns. Contrary to his gnarled beard and dirty hair, William was a man of substance once. “See here, it was s-s-signed. By him.” His words trip over themselves as badly as his fingers. How did he ever manage to do anything before?
The man places an eyepiece on the corner, leaning over the painting. “It does seem to be his signature,” the man admits. “But this cannot possibly be his work.”
Everything in William’s chest freezes. “What do you mean?” He hadn’t counted on this. For months he’d debated whether or not to part with the mysterious woman in white. But never did he think they wouldn’t believe him.
“Covington never painted portraits, Mr…ehhh.”
“W-W-W-William.”
“Mr. Williams.”
“Just William.” He straightens, his back strong.
Which earns the man’s pitying gaze. “Covington was known for capturing the Cornish coasts and equestrienne scenery. Not people. And never women.” He shoves it toward William. “I’m afraid it cannot be a Covington.”
“But what if it is?”
“If it were, it’d likely go for upward of twelve hundred—”
“Pounds?” He coughs.
“Collectors would go mad for it because it would be one of a kind. Covington never—never—painted women.”
“So it might bring in even more than twel-twel—”
“Auctioned at Sotheby’s, it might go for upward of thirty thousand, if it was well-advertised.
It’s impossible to say, because such a painting does not exist. It would be that rare.
” He folds the paper back over Merryn’s arresting face and shoves it across the counter.
“So rare it’s virtually impossible. I’m sorry, lad, but I cannot purchase this on speculation.
Someone has forged his signature, I’m afraid. ”
At three and forty, it has been years since anyone called him lad.
“It’s his. I know it.” His chest tightens.
His legs ache to carry him out of here, but he thinks of Helen, her voice laced with cheer…
and weariness. No one else would hear it, but he can.
She’s struggling, and only he can alleviate it.
“Well, then, Mr. William. Have it authenticated, and we’ll have a conversation.”
He trembles, twisting dirty fingers in his shirt hem. “How much? For the au-au-au—”
“One hundred pounds, perhaps. Or more. You’ll have to go to Truro or even London.”
And what if it’s a fraud after all?
William exhales all his hopes and bundles the paper around the painting. Fishmongers do not possess one hundred pounds.
Tucking the piece beneath his arm, William ducks out, shoulders hunched against the thick sea breeze.
All the way back to the station, heart skittering, William tries not to see remnants of the war.
But then he spots a gaunt man still in his tattered uniform, with the empty sleeve pinned to his back.
The image stamps itself upon his mind and William’s muscles twitch and jerk.
As the train roars into the station ahead, he turns and sets off at a run, into the wind coming off the sea.
I cannot. Cannot bear to be trapped in that fool train.
His left leg screams with pain, but he accepts it. Pain is healthy. Mile after mile, his frantic energy eats up hills and sheep fields, rocky crevices and narrow streets, until he reaches the end of the world.
And there, perched on the edge of reality, is Dunn Cottage, tucked into the side of the cliff.
It isn’t lonely, this ancient cottage. It’s only hidden away, reserved for those who’d dare to trek down the treacherously rocky cliffs to reach it.
But once you approach, once you climb those ten stone steps and endure the sea spray and part the ivy hanging over the door, Dunn Cottage welcomes you as a quiet sanctuary, an accepting embrace of stone and timber.
He pauses just inside and allows peace to wrap around him, dulling the roar of waves.
He smiles at the leaky slate roof and low-slung ceilings, the rough-hewn mantel framed in oak as thick as his torso, with childish carvings gentling the left side.
The rough, ancient craftsmanship of the place is sufficiently crude that he feels at home here.
But a quick flash of the man’s expression concerning the inherited cottage jolts his calm. He didn’t know any Anwen Dunn, nor had he ever heard of the cottage before receiving the solicitor’s letter.