Chapter 2
There was a stranger in town.
One did not live in a small community without everyone knowing everything within minutes of its occurrence. News ran here faster than the tide turned, and with as little regard for who might wish to stop it.
Locals still liked to say that Belair’s dining room had once been a Council of War.
Elphinstone’s nephew, so the tale went, had stood at the doorway with dagger drawn when Lord Keith opened the Admiralty dispatch ordaining Bonaparte’s exile to the island of St. Helena.
It was a story the baker’s boy repeated with relish, and the older folk nodded over with the sombre satisfaction of those who had lived through great events, even from a safe distance.
Now the house belonged to a widow and her flock of girls. It was perhaps natural that the locals should watch it keenly.
Elise, the Widow Larkin, first heard of the stranger from Mrs. Prowse, who kept the bakery, and who had had it from her cousin’s husband, Mr. Tully, who drove the carrier’s cart and had seen the gentleman dismount at the George with a valise of good leather and a manner that suggested he was accustomed to better inns.
“A ’andsome gent, Mrs. Larkin,” Mrs. Prowse had declared, her eyes alight as she handed over the week’s order. “Staying at the posting-house, no less. Mr. Tully says he speaks like a London swell and looks like he’s been somewhere far off, what with that coat and the cut of his jaw.”
This, in turn, had been embroidered by the time it had passed through Betsy, the scullery maid, who had gone to fetch flour and returned wide-eyed.
“He be a writer, ma’am,” Betsy reported breathlessly in the school kitchen, flour on her nose and importance in every syllable. “Come to put our place in a book, so Mrs. Prowse says. Tall as the church steeple and twice as grand, with boots you could see your face in.”
There was very little, Elise thought, that she could care less about than some gentleman lodged at the George.
Sailors and men—she had quite enough to do with arithmetic, mending, and twenty girls whose tempers and tears kept the house very well supplied with theatre.
She had dismissed the notion of the stranger with a lift of the brow and a murmur of, “I daresay he will be gone by the week’s end. ”
No one of consequence stayed here for long. He was dismissed as quickly as he’d been mentioned.
At least, so she thought until she saw him walking about her property.
“Jane, we are out of ink again,” Elise observed, looking up from the accounts. “Did the last shipment prove deficient, or are my young ladies composing novels in secret?”
Jane Archer, seated opposite her at the long table with a basket of stockings in her lap, laughed and set down her darning egg.
She was a little younger than Elise, with brown hair that refused to lie flat and a pair of green eyes that had not yet lost the trick of amusement, despite all the Navy had done to her.
“I shall interrogate them individually, if you wish,” she said.
“I suspect Miss Forbes. She writes to her mama every day, I am quite persuaded, whether she owns it or not. As for the ink, the last pot arrived half-dried, and the rest has gone to sums and French verbs. I will ask Tom Headley to bring another cask from the town.”
“Do so,” Elise said, making a note in the margin. “And tell Mr. Headley that if they insist on sending us more lumps than liquid, I shall take my trade elsewhere, even if ‘elsewhere’ happens to be forty miles off.”
Jane nodded, then tilted her head. “Speaking of Mr. Headley, he brought back news from town when he fetched the coal. There is a stranger at the George.”
“So I understand,” Elise replied drily. “Mrs. Prowse told me and Betsy, then Betsy told the entire kitchen. I expect Cook is convinced he is a highwayman in disguise, and Betsy has dreams of marrying him before the week is out.”
Jane’s mouth twitched. “Cook hopes he is a gentleman fallen on hard times, that she may rescue him by the excellence of her pies. Betsy is certain he is a poet. Mr. Headley maintains he is a writer, which, I confess, might come to the same thing.”
“Or to nothing at all,” Elise said. “Writers must write about something. Stonehouse will not bear the weight of an epic, but perhaps a poem or two, Lord save us.” The last thing Elise needed was a handsome poet filling her girls’ heads with dramatic nonsense.
“I do not know,” Jane said thoughtfully. “The sea is epic enough for me. Mrs. Prowse says he carries a notebook and looks at the cliffs as if he means to measure them. That sounds very like serious intention.”
Elise shook her head and returned her attention to the figures marching down the page.
Coal, paper and ink; there was very little poetry in a school’s accounts.
“He will be gone soon, however poetic,” she said.
“He will grow tired of the wind and the sea and the bread and the gossip, and seek out a fashionable town where the stories have more feathers.”
“Possibly,” Jane allowed. “Still, it is something new, and one must be grateful for novelty where one can find it. You do not even wish to wonder who he is?”
“No.” Elise dipped her pen with more force than was strictly necessary. “We have quite enough gentlemen to think of at a distance—the fathers, the uncles, the brothers who send their daughters, nieces and sisters here. I have no leisure to add some holiday visitor to the list.”
Jane’s eyes softened at that, in the way they did when she thought Elise did not see. “Perhaps you are right, but—”
She broke off as the study door opened and a small figure appeared in the doorway, hesitating on the threshold.
“Mrs. Larkin?”
The voice belonged to Alice Grenfell, twelve years old, narrow-shouldered and earnest, with a plait too tight for comfort and a smudge of ink upon her chin. Elise put her pen aside at once.
“Yes, Alice? Come in, child. What is it?”
Alice stepped forward and clasped her hands together as if they were the only thing keeping her from flying apart.
“It is only—if you please—the French exercise is due today, but I—I have mislaid my grammar. I think I left it in the chapel when we practised hymns, but I cannot be certain, and Lucy Sims says perhaps the stranger took it, and—”
“The stranger?” Elise repeated, fighting a smile. “Does Miss Sims suppose that any gentleman who comes to Belair must at once acquire a schoolgirl’s French grammar?”
Alice coloured. “She only said that gentlemen take things that are not theirs. Miss Sims says a gentleman once stole a lady’s heart, and a heart is much more important than a French grammar, so perhaps—”
“I think,” Elise interrupted gently, “that we shall not consult Miss Sims’s philosophy on this matter.
” She rose from the table. “Come, Alice. We will look in the chapel together. If your grammar is not there, it will be somewhere else, and I promise you the stranger shall not have it. I daresay his own French is quite bad enough without adding to it.”
Jane sprang up as well, setting her basket aside. “I will see to the linen while you are gone,” she said, “and speak to Cook about the soup.”
“You are goodness itself,” Elise said over her shoulder.
“We cannot both be goodness itself, or the universe will collapse,” Jane called after her. “You must allow me my share.”
The chapel, such as it was, formed a small wing at the back of the house.
It was panelled in plain wood and warmed by a modest stove.
The sea’s voice could be heard there more distinctly, as if the stone walls conducted its murmur.
Sometimes, when she knelt at the narrow rail, Elise fancied she could still hear echoes of a very different congregation—men in uniforms, admirals and captains, gathered in the dining room across the passage whilst Lord Keith weighed Bonaparte’s fate.
That felt like a lifetime ago, but the house remembered.
She found the missing grammar on the third pew, exactly where Alice had left it.
“You see,” she said, placing it into Alice’s eager hands, “no marauding gentleman has seized it. You may tell Lucy Sims that in this house I shall permit nothing of the sort.”
Alice gave a small giggle, then sobered. “Yes, Mrs. Larkin. Thank you, Mrs. Larkin.” She hesitated. “Mrs. Larkin… it is true there is a stranger?”
“I am afraid so,” Elise said gravely. “He has been sighted at The George, eating Mrs. Grey’s pies. I expect he is in more danger from those than from any other hazard in all of Plymouth.”
Alice laughed outright at that and, reassured, darted away with her precious grammar clutched to her chest.
Alone for a moment, Elise turned to the narrow window. From here she could see a slant of grey sky and, between the chapel and the garden wall, a glimpse of the cliff path. Motion on that path caught her eye—a dark figure moving at an easy, deliberate pace.
He wore a plain dark coat and carried a notebook in his hand.
His hat was pushed back a little, and the wind ruffled hair that might, in kinder circumstances, have been called chestnut.
Yet it was not these particulars that struck her.
It was the way he moved—not with the languid saunter of a fashionable gentleman, nor the shuffling gait of a country tradesman, but with the measured stride of a man who walked with purpose.
A soldier’s walk, for all his current occupation as a writer.
He paused at the bend in the path and looked up. For one instant, she fancied their eyes met. The distance was considerable; it was more likely fancy than fact. Yet she felt something—an odd, disconcerting jolt, as if the world had shifted slightly on its axis.
The stranger lifted his gaze to the house, surveyed its lines with that same intent scrutiny, then turned away and continued down towards the harbour.
Elise released the breath she had not known she held.
“A writer,” she murmured, “or something that wears the shape of one.”