iii. In which Arthur is a hopeless romantic, emphasis on “hopeless”
The last day of August dawned like any other Sunday. Charlotte shook Arthur awake far too early so the family could wash,
dress, and traipse the half mile downhill into Seacliff for Mass. A narrow path was worn into the heather from four decades
of the Throckmorton-Prentices going back and forth between the cottage and the village. George Throckmorton had built rough
wooden stairs into the steepest bits decades ago, with lumber taken from Shiftleaf back when the forest was friendlier. Now,
salt and sea breezes had worn the steps smooth.
Arthur shuddered his way through a yawn. The morning was cool, but he sweated through his shirt. By the time they made it
home after Mass, between the late-August warmth and the walk uphill, he’d be soaked. Behind him, Sasha straggled along, hand
in hand with Jonas and even more exhausted than Arthur. She stumbled; her uncle hoisted her onto his back, and they went onward.
The grass grew longer and more golden, undulating around them.
Farther downhill, the first hovels appeared: half-ruined old fishing shacks abandoned for their proximity to the cliff and the forest thereon.
With the wood as dangerous as it was now, the villagers refused to live in its shadow.
One of many superstitions, but one of the few not aimed at the sea.
Never whistle into the wind or you’ll whistle up a storm. Don’t wish an angler good luck or you’ll doom him to bad.
(The wishing of good luck on the part of one fisherman to another he was known to harbor some grudge against had been the
start of more than one fight in Seacliff.)
No black bags on the boats. No women on the boats. Always throw back the day’s first catch. Baptize new gear with whiskey
before using it.
So on and so forth, superstitions passed down through generations. Those who’d been out with Charlotte’s husband the morning
he’d drowned, not long after Sasha’s birth, were convinced it was because he’d failed to throw back his first catch.
So important, these rituals. Each one was believed with perfect sincerity and observed with perfect precision (or, not having
been observed, counteracted with a different ritual that existed for just such a purpose). Yet none was believed so sincerely
or observed so perfectly as Don’t name the wood.
The shacks gave way to hard-packed dirt paths, then narrow cobbled streets and stone cottages. Charlotte lagged, but when
Arthur suggested they rest, she declared they would be late.
Except for roaming chickens, the village square was deserted. Mist twisted over the cobbles. Back up the hill, the Throckmorton-Prentices’
whitewashed cottage looked like it was perched in the clouds. Behind it, the tips of treetops jutted darkly into the sky.
The family joined the thin stream of villagers heading toward the spindly stone church spearing upward like a dagger at the village’s southern end.
The convent abutted it like a fortress. Headstones studding the churchyard looked ethereal in the mist, until Arthur smacked into one and received painful confirmation of its corporeality.
He shifted Sasha on his back. His shin throbbed.
The churchgoers were hard and gray like the buildings, with pinched, dour faces and leathery, salt-beaten skin, but they were
turned out in their Sunday best. Gaggles of them stopped around the church steps, or just inside, or clustered at the ends
of pews for a few minutes of gossip before the service began.
“. . . wants to go to school in Port Lorne if you can believe it. I told her proper young girls study at the convent, not
university, and anyway how would we come up with the money, and there’s the wood to think of besides. But she’s—”
“. . . see that city friend of Bess’s finally left. Her parents are relieved Bess didn’t go back with her, but I think—”
“. . . worried about this pregnancy. If it’s anything like the last I’m afraid what will—”
“. . . eldest Tierney girl was finally heard from. Did you know, she’s eloped with that no-account Cameron boy—”
At the latter comment, Arthur nearly dropped Sasha. She grumbled, rubbing her eyes as he set her down.
“Sorry, dearest,” Arthur said. “We’re here.”
He hurried after his sister and older nibling, clutching Sasha’s hand and willing no one to notice him. It was easy, at first;
as a matter of course, people tended to ignore him. But as the Throckmorton-Prentices reached their pew . . .
“Mr. Throckmorton,” said a voice he had hoped not to hear.
Arthur squeezed Sasha’s hand.
“Mrs. Tierney,” he said with reluctance. “How do you do this morning?”
“You look at me when I’m talking to you, young man.”
With even greater reluctance, Arthur dragged his gaze from the floor to Mrs. Tierney’s forehead. Looking at a person’s forehead
made them believe he was making the required eye contact without him actually having to do so.
Mrs. Tierney glowered up at him. Shriveled and bent, she leaned heavily on a cane while three of her five daughters towered around her. They were pink cheeked and neat but uncomfortable as their mother prodded him with her cane.
“I’ll tell you how I’m doing,” she growled. “My Mary finally wrote. She’s settled in Glenwhistle, did you know? She eloped
with the Cameron boy.”
“Congratulations to her,” Charlotte said dismissively. Arthur flinched. “Please excuse us, Mrs. Tierney. You’re blocking our
seats.”
“Congratulations indeed!” Mrs. Tierney’s nostrils flared. She stood firmly in their way. “Married to the bastard son of a
drunk. He’s not even employed! You were no catch,” she said to Arthur, which might’ve stung if he hadn’t been well aware,
“but at least you work for your living, even if it is to tinker with rich people’s baubles instead of doing something useful.
And lucky for you that doctor stepfather of yours legitimized you when he married your mother, God knows why he did it.”
“Ma,” one of her daughters said in embarrassment, but Charlotte intervened.
“Forgive me, Mrs. Tierney, but I don’t see how it’s any of our business whom Miss Tierney has married, unless you mean to
apologize for her breaking off her courtship with my brother without a word.”
“I assure you that’s not necessary,” Arthur said hastily.
Mrs. Tierney let out a bark of laughter. The nearest villagers turned, more interested in this conversation than their own.
“Apologize to him? Do you know, Mrs. Prentice, who funded her elopement? Your brother himself! Oh yes,” she said, and leered at Arthur, who
wished he had stayed in bed, “she wrote and told me everything. Asked me to thank you, if you can believe it. Thank you! For allowing her to—”
“With what money?”
Turning to Arthur, Charlotte didn’t look angry, just exasperated—an expression not unfamiliar to him, but he quailed.
“I had a little saved up.”
His sister sighed. “Arthur . . .”
“She gave him some sob story,” Mrs. Tierney continued, “about already being courted, by someone her cruel old mother wouldn’t
let her marry. Did she even tell you who it was? Or did you give her the money without considering what such a match might
do to her?”
Arthur wanted to sink into the floor. “She told me, yes.”
“You see!” Mrs. Tierney sounded triumphant, though she had clearly expected him not to know. “Good God, what a fool you are.
Giving a silly young girl the money to run away and elope with a boy with no family, no money, no standing! She’ll be ruined
thanks to you.”
She might have sounded upset about the ruination of her eldest daughter, which would surely reflect poorly on her four younger
daughters—or would have, before Seacliff had suffered the loss of so many eligible young people to far-off cities—but her
voice was filled with savage delight.
“And now,” she said, “my youngest has run off, too, and I want to know what you know about it.”
“Nothing.”
“A likely story!”
It was true, however. During their courtship—such as it was—Arthur had struck up a sort of friendship with Mary. It had culminated
in her tearful confession that her mother was less afraid of her becoming a spinster and more afraid of her marrying Alasdair
Cameron. But he knew the missing girl, her sister Brigid, only by sight.
Mrs. Tierney’s ire might’ve made him regret giving her oldest daughter his savings, but Mary’s tale had been dreadfully romantic.
The chance meeting between the girl from a good family and the boy from a bad one.
The discovery of unlikely similarities in their hopes and dreams. The love letters.
The anguished confession. It had been so like something from one of Arthur’s books that he’d immediately retrieved the cash from the sock at the bottom of his dresser and pressed it into Mary’s hands, urging her to elope with Alasdair like she’d hoped to.
Only afterward did Arthur realize he’d have to start saving all over. But he’d been strangely relieved. He had the uncomfortable
feeling that, as much as he hoped to relocate to Port Lorne one day, he was afraid of doing so, too.
In the choir loft, the organ started up. The villagers closest, who had ceased all gossip to better listen to Mrs. Tierney’s
accusations, settled into their pews. Cormac Young, his wife, and three of their children slipped into the pew behind the
Throckmorton-Prentices. Rosie, his youngest, coughed intermittently, but she hummed along with the organ. Arthur flushed,
not wanting Cormac to witness the ridiculousness taking place in front of him.
“If you please, Mrs. Tierney,” Charlotte said coolly, “Mass is about to start. You had better find your seat.”
The old woman wasn’t done with Arthur, but one of her daughters said, “Heaven’s sakes, Ma,” and headed for the Tierneys’ pew
without waiting for her.
Mrs. Tierney cast a final, withering glance at Arthur and said to Charlotte, “If your brother has spurred another of my children
into an ill-fated love match, Mrs. Prentice, you best believe I’ll do something about it.”
Charlotte sighed, but Mrs. Tierney had moved off.
Usually, Arthur sat on the far end of the pew, with Sasha and Jonas between him and their mother so he could keep Sasha (more or less) quiet during the service.
This morning, however, Charlotte nudged the children into their seats first, sat beside them, leaned her cane against the back of the next pew, and gestured Arthur in after her.
Sasha slumped against her older sibling, on the verge of falling asleep.
Arthur’s skin prickled. He was very aware of the Youngs behind him, and Mrs. Tierney glaring at him from her pew farther up.
Her daughters kept trying to make her turn around but gave up as the processional started.
When the priest had passed, Charlotte leaned close and murmured, “You really don’t know anything about Brigid Tierney?”
Arthur shook his head.
She straightened, tucking a stray hairpin back into her chignon. “Well, that’s something.”
He flinched. She hadn’t known about the money; he’d hoped, when he gave it to Mary, that she’d never find out. Trust Mrs.
Tierney to ruin that.
Sure enough, Charlotte leaned back over as the priest gave a short welcome. “We could’ve used the money.”
“It wasn’t much.”
“All the more reason to have kept it,” Charlotte said, but she focused back on the service rather than her brother’s romantic
whims.
As Mass went on, she stumbled over responses and hymns she’d known her entire life. The fog that had enveloped her brain on
and off since her illness had that effect; she’d forget a word, why she’d entered a room, or what she’d meant to add to her
medical kit before visiting a patient. Gripping her hand, Arthur responded and sang louder so she could follow along, but
her eyes brimmed with angry tears. She kept one hand on the wedding ring at her neck, rubbing it for comfort.
At long last, Mass was over. The sun guttered weakly in the uneasy sky.
Long tendrils of mist lifted and burned away; the late-August air had grown clammy rather than warm.
Villagers spilled from the church. Their gossip washed around the Throckmorton-Prentices, but Arthur tuned it out.
He didn’t want to hear delight over the scandal of Mary Tierney’s elopement or speculations about the disappearance of her sister.
He couldn’t help speculating himself, however. “Where has Miss Brigid gone, do you suppose?”
Charlotte glanced at him wearily but offered no answer. She’d managed the end of the liturgy without stumbling over the words,
but concentrating so hard to remember something she’d known for thirty-six years had exhausted her.
“She was seen heading uphill the other night,” one of the other Tierney girls said, drifting toward them. “Then she was gone.
Ma’s convinced she’s eloped like Mary did, but—” the girl’s voice lowered “—we’re afraid she’s gone into the wood.”
“Kitty!” Mrs. Tierney snapped from somewhere in the throng of people. The girl jumped. “Where have you got to? Are all my
daughters to run off on me now?”
“Tell us if you see her, won’t you?” Kitty whispered, then called, “Coming, Ma!” and rabbited away.