Chapter Fifteen The Old Ways #2
For the next hour, Kensa was bid to listen for the Old Ways.
Her father’s voice returned, with gruelling visions: his wide-knuckled hands, their clawing progress.
Each time, she convinced herself it did not mean anything – it was her own thoughts troubling themselves – until bile rose up her throat and she emptied her stomach onto her shoes.
‘I think that’s enough for today,’ said Isolde slowly.
And yet, the wise woman took Kensa back to the clearing the next day and the next, had her sit and strain her ears and listen with her centre, whatever that meant.
Perhaps this place, too, had been tampered with?
Or, alternatively, Kensa was unable to hear what she was not permitted to hear.
Nothing reached over Alexander Rowe’s entreaties, demands and promises.
She remembered the night he was taken. He’d come in late, roaring about betrayal and how the woods around Trewense were crawling with militia.
The hand not carrying a blade had come to rip Kensa from her cot-bed in the kitchen.
Derwa got there first. She’d been faster, as though she’d been waiting, as though she’d known.
‘Get yourself here, woman; we have to leave,’ snarled Alex.
Derwa recoiled from him. ‘I knew this would happen, I warned you—’
In the following argument, the patrol came: a newly appointed Coast Guard with utmost authority on the shore. Kensa blamed her mother. If she’d done what she’d been told, the three would be together now. And yet, had that been the case, she wouldn’t have a sister.
If she had to choose, well, there was no one like a father to a little girl.
A pistol fired outside, a window shattered.
Alex shouted behind him, ‘I have a wife and child in here.’ His eyes – the same eyes Kensa bore – sparked with a thought. He went towards Kensa, extending a hand to her.
Derwa snatched her back, keeping them apart. ‘Oh, don’t you dare.’
There were boots on the lane, heavy and numerous. Mr Skewes was heard pleading with someone well above his rank. ‘Please, hold your fire, hold!’
It was hard to remember what happened next.
Her mother accidentally knocked the kitchen table over, blocking the back way out.
Then she’d grabbed a chopping knife for protection, though she’d kept it levelled on her husband and not on the men who came for him, barging down the front door to the cob-walled cottage and wrestling Alex to the floor.
Kensa had cried and struggled against her mother’s arms. ‘Da!’
‘I’ll come back for you, Kenny,’ he’d promised. He’d always been filled with promises.
Cruel memories hounded her. Whenever she reached for the Old Ways, she found her past instead, shown to her for a reason she could not fathom.
On the morning he died, in the moments afterwards, she could have sworn his hand had moved.
When she had reached for the hagstone, his fingers twitched ever so slightly.
As though he would have given it to her, if he could.
And when she turned around, it was into Sir George Trevanion’s face she looked.
The baronet – younger then – had stared at her with a hard expression, his eyes a flat, cool brown.
Being young, she had not considered that others knew what she did not.
That secrets could be strung from one mouth to the next, and many were strung between him and her father.
Kenny, her father called her. She would’ve done anything, given anything, to hear his voice again. When he was there, she’d been wanted. Her hagstone was a reminder of that: once, she had been precious to someone.
Eventually, she convinced Isolde to let her visit the clearing at Polingey Creek by herself.
Of course, she did not. When she set off in the coracle, she diverted.
It was easy to lie, it was in her nature.
One that took Kensa to the bend in the river, where she beached her craft and curled up on a dry rock, to stare out at the place her father died.
It was a sea-swept curve in the lane to St Mawes, a meeting place for traders and travellers where a scaffold could be set: a warning to those who’d flout the King’s law, which Alexander Rowe certainly had.
What did he want? Did the dead want anything? Was it even him or was it her own doubts gnawing at her or the Old Ways acting up? Besides, she had nothing to give.
By this time, Mr Aldridge’s replacement had been found.
None knew his face and no one had seen him, though the curate’s cottage showed lamplight in the evenings and once, when Kensa caught sight of it, she felt anxiety claw at her stomach.
Feared this stranger would know, somehow, what she had done.
It was on such a morning, with thoughts as anxious as these, that she returned to the wise woman’s cottage and found a lanky man making his own fast pace to Bohortha. He was an individual – familiar and unwelcome – who had never once set foot in Isolde’s nettled domain.
Kensa’s mouth grew slack and dry. ‘Mr Skewes?’