22. Chapter 22
Istand alone in the family cemetery on the bluff, wrapped in the old patched frock coat that’s all I have left of him. It does little to shield me from the wind slicing across the open landscape.
My father’s headstone sits on the steepest rise. I crouch before it, steadying myself with one hand on the frozen earth, and fight back the images of him dying alone in a prison cell. All because of a mistake. A horrible, senseless misunderstanding.
Etched in the stone are the words I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
I touch the moss-softened stone and release the words that have pressurized in me for years.
“You, dearest father, are the most valuable of all men. Worth more than all the fortunes in any man’s pocket, and I am left utterly poor without you.
” My voice fractures. “I love you exactly as you are.” The moss chills my forehead as I bow against it. “And I want you back.”
Loss rolls over me, dangerously hot.
The week before he vanished, he traded coats with me…
He traded coats with me…
“Why did you let him?” I fist my hand on the stone as shards of anger slice through me. I cling to that marker, curled upon the hard mound of earth, and I fix my gaze upon those words.
Lift your eyes.
But I cannot. There’s nothing left now—no hope, no mission… only the image of Simon’s face every time I close my eyes.
I touch Papa’s name on the stone. “You never should have died.”
When at last I rise to go, the wind has fallen still.
The sun is rising upon a new day—it’s Epiphany, January the fifth.
I linger in the dawn-drenched hillside among the vine-covered stones and crooked gate, and again it comes—lift your eyes.
I force myself to take my gaze off Papa’s grave, inch by inch, and that promised help trickles through my soul, giving it borrowed strength far greater than my own.
I keep lifting my eyes, above the stone.
Then, another stone just beyond catches my eye.
Elias Samuel Dunn
My breath shudders. How jarring to read a man’s epitaph before he’s yet resting beneath the stone. But the adjoining half of the marker takes my breath away.
Marguerite Louise Twethaway Dunn
1820—1857
A wife. Uncle Elias once had a wife.
A series of smaller stones line either side of the large shared marker, each with various images carved into the age-worn stones.
Louise. Charles. Bryok. Samuel. Tregar. Sennen.
All born to Marguerite and Elias Dunn between 1841 and 1853.
All gone by 1857.
A small cry escapes as I kneel and touch each precious name.
Marguerite Louise, it can be supposed, died of a shattered heart.
Not one of her children remained. Yet Elias Dunn had, somehow, gone on and survived the worst torment a human might endure.
Then a wayward niece had been dropped at his door—one stubborn, difficult child demanding softness from a man whose torn heart was merely trying to survive.
It’s so easy to think that what’s at eye level is all there is, because it consumes our vision. We cannot see past it. Or we don't allow ourselves to.
As I walk the coastal path back toward the remains of Dunn House, the rising sun blinds me, yet I can make out Uncle Elias in the distance, a stoop-shouldered, aging soul, standing very small against the charred ruins of what he’d built. As if a decent gust might blow him away.
He was not, and never would be, my jolly father.
And for that I had daily condemned him.
When I reach Uncle, he does not seem to hear me approach. I touch his shoulder. “I have something to show you, Uncle.”
He turns, a gray pallor over his face. Tragedy has settled into the lines carved into his face over many years, knowing the contours of his aged face all too well.
“A place we can stay. For a few nights, at least.”
He bristles. “What sort of—”
“It’ll cost you nothing, and no one will know. Come.” I tug his arm as the wind whips my tangled hair.
He frowns his suspicion but follows me along the footpath, shielding his face from the icy air.
Weakness overtakes me quickly, and when I begin to shake, lightheaded and winded, Uncle holds me up.
We wind along the cliff face, down toward the sea until we reach the narrow ledge on which my cottage sits.
The tower comes into view and he slows. “It cannot be.”
Then we slip around the tangled vines and stand before the forgotten cottage with its lone tower clinging to rock, waiting to welcome us into its protection.
I leave him standing at the bottom and climb the broken steps, eager to fold my bent and broken soul into its warmth.
I step inside the ancient stone dwelling, bracing for a sense of Simon Balfour’s presence, but silence wraps around me as muffled waves whomp and hiss against the rocks below.
He’s gone.
Of course he is.
Striking match to flint, I light a candle on the table and turn up the wick.
I breathe slowly, allowing the atmosphere to soak into my skin.
Yet a hard knot tightens inside as I take in the whitewashed walls glowing with Simon’s effort.
With our shared time together. The house remembers… even though Simon is gone.
Almost.
I turn and spot it at the exact moment Simon’s words come rushing back: “I’ve a gift for you,” he said. “A proper one. It’s in the cottage.”
Two faces on canvas, watching me. Oh! I stumble back, look again. It’s a vibrant pastel rendering of my mother and father. Young, in love, alive.
The sight of them as they were, as I’d never known them, thrills me so much it aches.
I’d known my father so many years ago, and the only trace I ever had of my mother was the portrait of a lovely, smiling woman hanging in the gallery.
Yet here they are, immortalized as a pair, leaning on one another—her with that sweetly porcelain face looking up into his eyes that sparkle with his natural good humor.
What a love match.
I touch the unframed portrait, tracing their dear faces.
I turn at the shuffle behind me and Uncle is here, transfixed by the sketch. His face contorts into an expression I cannot decipher. I cannot tell if he’s angry or impressed.
“It’s Mr. Balfour’s work.”
“He stayed here, at the cottage?”
“It seemed the most sensible solution.”
He looks around. “I cannot believe it still stands.”
“What is this place, Uncle?”
He lowers himself into a chair at the great refractory table, running a hand over its surface. “This is Dunn Cottage. You were born here.”
Shock pulses through me, then this news settles into rightness. Certainty. “They lived here—my mother and father.”
“Silas Snow invested all he had in the mines. He bought this cottage from my estate with plans to have a home built when he earned enough.”
But he never did. “So it belongs to my father.”
“To you, I suppose,” he says with a grimace. “You are his heir.” He glances around with a bone-weary expression.
I turn in a slow circle, taking in the cottage anew. It belongs to me. All its hauntingly silent corners, the crumbling ancient tower… and the gems. Those sparkling stones from long ago that mean hope—even now.
Uncle places both veined hands on the table, and they tremble. His shoulders fold inward as if his body can no longer hold them upright. I long to wrap my arms around him, cracks and all. Not because he's whole, but because I'm becoming whole.
I step closer, yet his muscles tense, sensing my nearness. Instead, I turn. “Wait here. I’ve something to show you.”
I hurry to the high tower room and return with the box where I’d put the gems, nudging it across the table to him as an offering. “Here.” Another shove. “These might help you rebuild.”
He opens the velvet-lined box and frowns. “You still have those?”
I look—my letters. I shut the lid on them, heat rolling up my face. “They’re old. Sentimental rubbish. But they’re from—”
“No, they’re not.” He sighs, propping his head on his fingertips and kneading his forehead. “I never imagined you’d become this attached or keep them for a blessed eternity.”
I draw the box close, heart thrumming. “What do you mean? You don’t even know—”
“Of course I do, you fool girl. I wrote them.”
I grip the box as my world reorients itself. “You… but why?”
“Because you were so insufferably lonely, that’s why!
” He shoves his fingers through his thinning hair.
“Stuck here with only a bitter old man for company. You needed something to give you hope, something extraordinary and delightful and right in a life gone terribly wrong. I merely wanted to plug the holes and fill that oversized heart of yours with something good so it wouldn’t completely dry up. ”
Like his.
“You must be terribly disappointed.” He stares at his hands, now folded in front of him on the table. He’s never seemed older.
I run my finger over the box of letters where I’d found intelligence, wit, and warmth for my parched heart. I’d sorely needed a father, and I had found one. Yet not in the way I’d always thought.
I had looked.
But I had not seen.
“Not terribly.” I lay my palms flat on the table. “I’ve never been able to sit across the table from Dickens.”
He lifts red-rimmed eyes to me in the bouncing light, then his gaze darts away, focused on the table. The cracks. His fingers bounce against the wood, tapping out a nervous rhythm. Beneath his dry and cracked veneer lays a well of warm, liquid vulnerability.
“Actually,” I say, “that isn’t what I meant to show you.
” I open the box again and scoop out the little gems tucked beneath the letters, placing them on the table between his hands.
They glitter and sparkle in the lamplight.
“I don’t believe you’ll be able to dig the others out of the rubble, so this is to help you start again. To keep designing.”
He gasps. Draws them close, inspecting them with one eye squinted, then holds them at a distance again. He turns on me. “Where on earth did you get these? Who have you robbed?”
“They were here, in the cottage.” I drop my hands to my lap. “And if it’s mine…”
His hands are still. He stares up at me, then back down at the gems, where his gaze stays fixed.
“For all I’ve cost you over the years,” I say, “at last I’m able to repay something.”
When my soul has stretched into a softer, more patient version of itself in the days after the fire, peace creeps into the cracks of our existence.
Uncle and I scrape and save, talk and sometimes disagree, rattling about in that odd cottage on the cliff’s edge, but never draw close.
Never share an embrace. I feel myself shriveling up, yet mildly content.
We have lost our servants, our social standing, and the glittering estate—which is surprisingly liberating.
Yet Uncle has also lost himself.
We remain at the cottage for two and a half weeks.
Its atmosphere seeps in and untangles so much, even though Uncle Elias stomps around like a poked bear.
He is restless, agitated—a man running about in a field when he needs a road.
He sketches new designs and toys with the gems, but without tools or orders, he remains aimless.
I often wrap myself in Papa’s coat and walk the coastal path to let my soul breathe. And in those moments, my thoughts turn with a painful twist to Simon. A single question echoes hard against my tender soul: Why? I stare over the sea. Why did you let him trade with you?
He didn’t know. Neither of them did, but that doesn’t ease the regret twisting me up. Or the sense that I’d been robbed.
Whenever I step into St. Ives, the gossip often revolves around the Duke of Ashbourne and the younger man who looks exactly like him—who no one can seem to locate.
The people of St. Ives are sensational storytellers, and all manner of explanations are bandied about in pubs and on sidewalks.
Some claim he’s a distant relation, come to claim the dukedom in his son’s absence.
Most, however, guess what is actually true about their connection.
And that story circulates faster than fire on dry grass.
Which is why it should not have surprised me to receive a visitor a few weeks after the fire.
Though Uncle is often about, I am at the cottage alone when a confident knock sounds on the door.
It takes me a moment of blinking in the open doorway to greet the stranger who has come to call upon us. “May I help you?”
“Begging your pardon, Miss Snow. I’m Randall Endicott of Belgrave Square, here on behalf of His Grace, the Duke of Ashbourne. Might I come in?”