Chapter 15
Carrie
Over that winter, Sylba snuck out whenever she could, leaving only her footprints in the snow to mark her absence and where she had gone. She brushed them away each morning, eager to keep him a secret for a little longer. Not that anyone ever saw him, or heard a whisper of his name.
—Tabitha Morgan, July 19, 1929
I wake to a world turned white overnight. Rubbing my sleeve over the caravan window, I laugh softly as a snowflake catches on the other side of the glass. It shivers there in the corner, waiting. Waiting as more and more join it, icing the glass until there is nothing but frost. It’s Halloween. The world should be full of crunchy russet leaves and pumpkins and toffee apples, yet it’s white and cold. Full of frost.
The air is sharp as I trudge to the cottage, and I burrow deeper into my coat, pulling the hood low over my forehead. A set of boot prints is already leading to Ivy’s cottage, all the way from the mountain path. I bristle, checking the time on my phone. It’s just after nine, and I’m sure that, on our call, Matthieu said he’d be here at ten. I want a bit of time to myself, to prepare, but now I feel wrong-footed, flustered. My breath catches at the thought of him there in Ivy’s cottage. He’s gorgeous and rugged and has a soulful tilt to his mouth and eyes that my mind keeps straying to . . . I give myself a shake. This is absolutely not the time to be thinking about anything other than this renovation. I knock the snow off my boots and close the door against the crisp tug of all that white outside.
“Hello? Matthieu?”
“In here.”
I follow his voice through to the kitchen, where he has already set up a makeshift tea station: two cups, a heap of teaspoons, a jar of instant coffee far nicer than the stuff I have been drinking, and a tin caddy stuffed with tea bags. It’s quite an improvement on my scattered box of tea bags, used teaspoons, and small bottle of milk I decant each time I walk over from the caravan. The electricity is working now, thanks to Cora and the electrician, but there’s no fridge yet. Only my small travel kettle, which is already on, rattling away on its tiny stand.
“I didn’t expect you . . .”
A blush flares across my cheeks as I picture the disarray he must have walked into.
Matthieu runs a hand over the back of his neck. “Sorry. I’m early, aren’t I?”
He glances at the tea station, then back at me as the kettle clicks off the boil. “And I’m meddling. You only wanted a quote, and I just let myself in—”
“It’s all right,”
I say, moving toward the kettle. I swallow, avoiding looking at him directly. Now that I’m standing close to him in Ivy’s old kitchen, I can smell woodsmoke. Citrus and loam and the sharp scent of snow. He smells like the mountains and I want to breathe it in. I give myself another mental shake. “Tea? Coffee?”
I ask, my words coming out a little strangled.
“Coffee would be great, thanks.”
He darts me a look, and I’m sure I catch a suppressed smile, like he can see I’m flustered and finds it . . . amusing? I will my cheeks to cool as I fuss with the teaspoons and straighten the solitary tea towel on the oven rail.
“I should set it up properly, shouldn’t I? Get a microwave, a few essentials . . . should we start in here first?”
I turn to survey the kitchen and glance up at him. His head is slightly bowed, and I notice a slight blush tingeing his cheeks, the twin to my own. Is he . . . nervous? Surely I can’t be making him nervous? I thaw slightly, checking myself. Perhaps I’m not the only one who feels anxious this morning, who wants this to go well. “I don’t know when Ivy installed the kitchen, but I’m fairly sure it’s considered retro now.”
The cabinets are so old that they’re yellowing on the inside. The worktops are chipped Formica, stained black around the sink. Ivy may have kept the kitchen ruthlessly clean to prolong its life span, but now, if I’m honest, it’s aged past the point of retro. There’s nothing to salvage here.
“We need to rip it all out, Carrie,”
he says quietly. I glance up at him. He’s got a watchful look, as though testing what he should say. How far am I willing to go with this renovation? He’s being careful around me, I realize. Considerate.
“You’re worried I’m attached to all this, aren’t you? That I won’t throw it all out because it was Ivy’s?”
He shrugs, burying his hands in his pockets. “She wouldn’t throw away anything. Makes sense you’d feel the same way. And—and this place isn’t mine. I don’t have any memories attached to it.”
I take a deep breath and frown down at the worktop. There’s an old mug stain there, a perfect ring where the tea or coffee left an indelible mark. I rub my index finger over it absently. It’s appeared since I left. I knew every quirk of this cottage a decade ago, just as you do with family homes. The doors that squeak on their hinges, the places where the wallpaper curls slightly, where you can dig a finger in and peel away another centimeter.
He’s right, in a way. If it were possible, I would keep it all. Everything Ivy touched, everything she used. The ceramic pot with the collection of wooden spoons and spatulas still sits beside the range, coated in dust. I remember her using them, humming as she stirred pots of soup, flipped griddle cakes on the stovetop. I remember the scent of scones, the blackberry jam she made every autumn. I remember her sitting, glasses perched on the end of her nose, to scrawl on each label before sticking it carefully on another jar full of the sticky sweetness. I remember it all, and I swallow it all down. Because the memories are laced with bitter guilt that I left all this behind.
“I’ll phone for a dumpster,”
I say, not meeting his eyes. “I agree, it all has to go.”
He nods and makes for the lounge. I sniff, blinking back a fog of memories, and busy myself with the kettle and the mugs. I rattle the teaspoons around, my thoughts elsewhere—on Cora, on the dumpster I need to order, on the conversation I never had with Jess. On Tom’s face, gaunt and aged compared to the one I hold in my head. On the little girl standing beside him, a perfect replica of them both, like the ghost of winters to come.
Then I gather it all inside and hook my fingers around the mugs.
Matthieu is tapping the wall that divides the kitchen and lounge, frowning as a clot of plaster crumbles away to the floor.
“Thanks.”
He accepts the mug, wraps his fingers around it. “This is just a partition wall. It’s not holding anything up. How far do you want to go with this renovation?”
I sweep my eyes across the lounge, then step back to look through the doorway to the kitchen. “I guess we could take it down? Open this space up?”
“It could do with more light,”
Matthieu says, sipping his coffee. “And if we’re ripping out carpet, wallpaper, stripping it all back . . . that is, if you want to—”
“Makes sense.”
“All right,”
he says, reaching out to tap his knuckles against the wall again. “All right. Shall we start with an hourly rate? Or would you rather I quote for the whole job?”
“Do you want to see upstairs first?”
He smiles into his coffee. “I know what I’ll find—more of the same.”
“Okay. Well, I guess the whole job, then.”
He gives me a figure, and I quickly calculate what that leaves in my savings, how much I’ll have left to live on until the spring. It’s just enough to buy some furniture to stage the cottage for selling, buy building materials we’ll need, and pay for any specialist tradespeople. “Done.”
We shake on it, awkwardly, avoiding each other’s eyes, then hurry through the rest of the downstairs. Matthieu goes upstairs and taps his way through the chipboard walls of the bedrooms. To his credit, he says nothing as he eyes the discarded steam wallpaper stripper, and that simple kindness thaws me out even more.
By midday we’re working our way through the bedrooms upstairs, carrying furniture down the crooked staircase. My lower back sends out a steady pulse of pain, and I rub it, kneading away the ache, before moving to the opposite side of a small chest of drawers as Matthieu reaches for the other side. We lift it, moving slowly toward the staircase, and I puff out a breath, a strand of hair falling across my eyes. Matthieu smiles at me and shifts his hands to take the bulk of the weight on the stairs.
“So you grew up here?”
he asks, steadying the old set of drawers as we reach the hallway. I rub my hands together, stalling for time as I work out how to answer.
“Yes . . . I was born here.”
“And you left?”
“A while back. But I wouldn’t call this a return.”
“No?”
I shake my head, moving back to the staircase. “No. How about you?”
“I grew up all over. Lots of moving around. Mum didn’t like the people in this place, or my dad couldn’t get enough work in the next town . . .”
He sucks in a breath. “Anyway, I’m just here for the winter, like I said. Just until the season changes.”
“And you were here all of last winter?”
“Yeah. Before—”
“Before?”
I turn to catch his frown, quickly erased as he smiles at me. “Before I had to leave for a while.”
“And you like the mountains?”
I ask as I reach the main bedroom. The one with the view out to the looming mountains, the ever-present giants.
“I do,”
he says quietly. “My brother and I . . . we used to come hiking here, years ago. The stories are interesting. You know, the old ones. Ivy started telling me some of them before I had to leave.”
I nod, then move to the front bedroom, with the floral wallpaper. It was mine when I stayed here sometimes, the room where Ivy tucked me in with bedtime stories and silver tea. “Some of them you have to take with a pinch of salt.”
“And the rest?”
I pretend I don’t hear him. The last thing I want to do is talk about being a Morgan, about the book. About still heeding the warnings, though none of us will admit it. “We’ll have to strip all this back next, I guess?”
“All of it,”
he says, leaning against the doorframe. “The bathroom suite as well, and I’ll check the plumbing. It looks ancient.”
“All right,”
I say, mentally calculating whether I have enough saved to cover the cost of a new bathroom suite as well. Ivy left me a bit in her will, along with her bequest, but it wasn’t enough to hand the problem off by paying someone else to do the work. She knew full well that renovating the cottage would compel me to return, and also that I couldn’t shirk her request. But I wanted to come home. Maybe she knew somehow, in that Ivy way of hers, that I just needed a good enough excuse.
Movement plays at the corner of my vision, and I glance up to the window. It holds the view over the fields, all the way to Woodsmoke. I can just see the tops of a few houses over the bump of the land as it slopes away. And there, shoulders hunched, cap pulled low over his ears, is someone crossing through the gate. He’s shuffling more than he used to, dragging his feet through the thickening snow. He looks up, only once, and I raise my hand, in case he can see me standing here. But he just carries on, steadily trudging toward the cottage.
Matthieu comes up behind me, eyeing the man, who is nearly halfway across the field. “Best get going. I’ll be back in a couple of days, you can manage until then?”
I nod, not taking my eyes off the man. “Sure, thanks. I’ll be fine.”
Matthieu mutters a farewell, swings down the stairs, and slips out the back door, leaving only that scent of citrus and frost and loam lingering in his wake. By the time the knock of knuckles cracks against the front door, he’s gone. I tidy my hair up, smoothing it back as best I can, and stretch out the ache in my back before opening the front door.
“Flower, it’s time,”
Howard says, mouth all twisted up like he’s eaten something sour. “We need to talk.”