Chapter Twenty-six There by the Grace of God #2
Mr Delavaud’s eyes met hers at last. She could not read them.
A ready sweat began to rise across her chest. He reached for the powder horn Sir George had left on his bed, marked with a family crest and a century’s thumbprints.
He had shot one wise woman tonight. Would he shoot another?
Kensa shied away and towards the window.
She did not know whether to leap from it or close it. In the end, she chose the latter.
‘How do we kill it?’
The question flew at Kensa as though it were a hungry bird. Sharp-beaked and demanding. She knew she had to destroy Isolde and had come to that realisation when she last spoke to Jack. To hear it, though, the word – kill – was hard to swallow.
‘If that were me, if I was no longer myself,’ continued the curate, ‘I would want to be blasted from here to kingdom come. So how do we kill it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Kensa.
Isolde had seemed to fear the bone-handled knife, though Kensa doubted she could ever get close enough to the hag to make a mark. Even if she did, could she do it? Push the blade through flesh and bone and honeycomb, and whatever else had made a home in that putrid body?
Yes, she thought, and Jack would never forgive me.
Because whenever he looked at her, he’d see a woman as monstrous as what she’d created. And wasn’t she? Strange, to break one’s own heart having never even risked it.
‘When I was a child, I was told stories about the West Country and my uncle’s odd relations,’ said Mr Delavaud, flicking a glance to Sir George.
Uncle? ‘About the Cornish and their wilder strokes, about the sea with a man’s face.
I had assumed it a children’s fable, yet now I know it to be my history.
’ She’d been wrong, then, about no salt in his blood.
Instead, he had too much for her liking.
‘There’s truth enough in nursery rhymes, sir,’ said Kensa warily.
There, on his oval face, a smile. He was not like any holy man she had ever met.
‘You’re enjoying this,’ she accused.
Mr Delavaud pulled on his coat, gave one glance to the snoring magistrate, and turned on his heel. ‘I thought I’d be bored when I was carted off to this dull backwater village with its fishwives and farmers,’ he said brightly, ‘and I am exceptionally glad to be wrong.’
Kensa was quick to follow. ‘You were sent here as a punishment?’
The curate looked over his shoulder and grinned at her boyishly. Surprisingly, she found herself missing the blundering and oafish Mr Aldridge. At least he had been predictable.
A heavy BANG, BANG, BANG reverberated around Trewense Manor.
As dark as it had been in the day, it was darker now.
There was no light, only an impenetrable expanse.
Fearing a hag around every corner, Kensa had run back to Sir George’s room and stolen the one candle burning, its flame shielded from loss by her cupped hand.
Ahead, the curate had already groped his way down the staircase and to the main hall.
Under the uneasy light, the chequered floor bounced and heaved.
Kensa had gone to walk past it, towards the servants’ entrance, until her newfound companion corrected her.
He went to stride out the way he’d come in, through the expansive front door.
He paused, however, when the BANG, BANG, BANG rang anew from the other side.
‘Mr Delavaud—’
‘Call me Pious,’ he corrected. ‘I think we can lose the formalities.’
Kensa raised her eyebrows. ‘Your parents called you Pious?’
‘I am the third son,’ he said, ‘intended for the Church since birth and given a name to suit.’
‘Kensa means “first” if that helps?’
‘You know, it actually does.’ The racket beyond continued, as though an unyielding force was slamming itself again and again into the wood, eager to reach inside. ‘Get behind me,’ he said, ‘and keep the flame high.’
She did as he told her. Pious handled the pistol as an old friend, over-confident and with one ear cocked for his game bird. The curate took hold of the large key in the large lock of the large door. With his free hand, he turned it, leapt back and aimed.
Jack came spilling through the entrance, shoulder first. Kensa’s body acted before her brain, as she threw the candle forwards, hurling it at Pious at the same moment in which he fired.
There was a dull noise as the shot went wide, while hot wax spilled across Kensa’s knuckles and the curate’s skull.
Both cried out as Jack barrelled straight into the other man.
Their tussle was brief, though dramatic, with neither one relenting till they had their adversary by the scruff.
Only then did the pair stop, staring at one another in the wild-eyed night.
When one went to move, the other tightened his grip, bravado forcing neither to let go first.
Kensa was shocked to find Jack on his back, weakened as he was from Isolde’s earlier attack and her own blade. He had never been known to lose a fight, rare though they were. Even he seemed surprised, jerking away from Kensa when she put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Jack, it’s me,’ she said, prompting the curate to let go.
Kensa pulled the miner up and found him solid, unmoving.
‘Did he get you?’ She ran her hands down his torso, searching for a shot-shaped hole and finding nothing.
Only hard muscle, his ribs expanding and contracting, the rough shirt he wore and the stains it had gathered that day.
He was close and closer still, forehead briefly against her temple. ‘No, I … ’ He trailed off, squeezing her hand quickly, then releasing it. With that same action, he stepped back and it could have been across the county, for the distance he gave her.
She was more glad to see him than she realised.
Had they been alone, she would have told him as such.
Apologised and begged forgiveness. Been humble, revealed what feelings she knew to be unspoken between them, ones neither would dare utter.
But, they were not alone and Kensa could not bring her voice to line up with her heart and she wondered if ever she would.
Slowly, the men regarded one another. Neither quite turning their back, as alert as two cockerels in a fighting ring.
‘We lost Isolde’s tracks in the woods and heard a ruckus from the house, saw her climb out of the window,’ said Jack, glancing back to where Elowen stood on the wide stone steps.
The fair-haired girl held the sole surviving chicken under one arm. ‘Where is she now?’
‘Gone,’ said the curate unhelpfully.
In the dull light, the sisters gravitated towards one another.
‘Are you all right?’ Elowen held the bird tightly. Its small eyes glinted as two wet jewels. ‘What happened?’
‘Isolde attacked us,’ a deep breath, ‘and then the curate chased her off,’ another inhale, ‘and Sir George’s alive and I think he’ll be fine,’ she puffed out her cheeks, ‘and I saw a man’s parts from the waist down,’ finished Kensa, in a hurry to loosen the last confession, for it seemed important to speak it now, lest she forget.
‘Oh,’ said Elowen, who frowned towards Pious.
‘I am not certain about them,’ said Kensa, waving her hands and grazing a beak. ‘It’s only, it seems a little—’
‘I have never been interested,’ agreed Elowen.
‘It’s not that, I don’t know!’
Cluck, said the chicken.
A lengthy silence found the hall, which seemed to be concentrated in Jack’s corner. Pious cleared his throat loudly and each person – and chicken – tried to speak at once.
It was Kensa’s voice which won out.
‘I think it’s time we warned the village,’ she said, conceding at last, worn down to the bone and marrow and further than that. ‘I cannot risk anyone else.’
A high, wailing sound cut her off: a beast in distress.
‘It’s found the stables,’ said Pious.
He did not tarry. Neither did Jack. It took Kensa and her sister a few extra steps to catch up with the men and, when they did, the hag was already gone. In one pen was a large horse with a bloodied dent in its rear. Jack went straight for it, doing what he could to soothe it.
Behind them, marked by a warning owl’s shriek, fled a shape. It burst from the treeline and ran out along the narrow path which led from Trewense Manor. Though it moved with a dog’s lolloping gait, it held a woman’s form. One that was on its way to Portscatho.