Chapter 2 #2
Minerva shook her head. “I have made no—”
“Decisions yet,” Mrs. Barlow finished for her.
Kitty glanced at the pendant Minerva yet held. “Here, Min. Let me help you with that.” She fastened the chain around Minerva’s neck and gave a nod of satisfaction. “Pretty,” she said.
As they left the small office and followed Mrs. Barlow through the sewing room, Minerva was greeted by the curious expressions of the other girls. Mrs. Barlow made shooing motions, and they stepped back to let Minerva and Kitty pass.
Lightning flashed and the storm rattled the windows. All heads turned as the front door flew open and cracked against the wall. The wind whipped through the shop and into the sewing room, churning up bits of material, jerking them about in swirling eddies.
The girls hurried to collect the displaced goods, and one of them rushed forward to valiantly battle the wind, trying to force the front door closed. She succeeded, but not before Minerva caught sight of movement outside, a shift in the rain-blurred street. Something about it felt unnatural…wrong.
Breath catching, she turned her head, trying to bring it into focus.
The pendant gave a single pulse of warmth and an uncomfortable prickling crawled across the back of her neck. The sensation grew, like tiny pins pressing into her flesh, the burning itch spreading down her back to the base of her spine and along her arms to her fingertips.
The sounds in the room jumbled together, noise without meaning as Minerva walked to the window and pressed her palm to the cold glass. The storm had emptied the street. No one was about.
Still, something shifted at the edge of her vision, a dark smear hovering over the wet cobbles. She squinted through the glass. Lightning flashed. The shape coalesced into a woman draped in black, the silhouette wispy, as though made of smoke.
The instant she focused on it, truly looked, the shape sharpened, as though her attention had summoned it.
Pulse racing, she leaned forward until her breath fogged the glass.
But there was nothing there, only the rain, pouring down in slanted sheets.
The moment slipped away, leaving her uncertain if she had truly seen anything at all.
“Min, is something wrong?” Kitty asked softly.
Minerva stared out the window. Across from the shop, a man stood in the rain, collar of his black coat turned high, hat pulled low. She wondered that she had not noticed him before.
“No,” Minerva said, turning away. “I thought I saw—” She shook her head. “Nothing. It was nothing.”
She offered what she hoped was a reassuring smile as cold tunneled beneath her skin, raising gooseflesh along her arms and making her shiver.
The rain came down in cold, driving sheets, turning the street to black glass. Dashiell Penrose stood perfectly still, hat low, collar turned against the wind.
He had followed Granger to the dress shop because he wanted to see her before she saw him.
Catherine’s heir. He wanted to see her, assess her, determine whether she was the sort of woman who could be persuaded to take a handsome offer for a house she had never seen and return to her life none the wiser.
He had been trying to buy Cliff Cottage for years. Catherine had refused him each time, calmly and without explanation. And now there was a new owner, one who had never seen the place, who had no attachment to it, who had no possible reason to want a haunted cottage on a Cornish cliff.
Minerva Ashworth.
She had stood at the glass with her palm laid flat against it. He had been unable to clearly see her face through the rain and the distance and the fog of her breath on the glass, but he had seen the direction of her gaze.
The precise angle of her attention had told him all he needed to know.
Most people would see nothing. They moved through the world as if the places at their sides were empty.
But Miss Ashworth had not been looking at nothing.
She had been looking directly at the smudge of darkness hanging above the wet cobbles, wispy and amorphous, neither fully present nor fully absent.
He suspected she had not been certain if she should trust her own eyes.
He knew well that moment where the mind rejected what the eyes had seen and offered a more comfortable explanation.
Something cold settled in his chest that had nothing to do with the wind.
She had seen it.
He had been hoping she would not. A woman who could not see the darkness above the cobbles was one who might sell the cottage and continue her life unaltered. A woman who could not see it might be safe.
The wind drove the rain against his coat as the darkness hovering above the cobbles thinned and dissipated. Inside the shop, Miss Ashworth had already lowered her hand from the glass and turned away.
He tarried a moment longer. Catherine had believed her heir must face the legacy, the house, and the knowledge that came with it. He was not certain Catherine had been right. He had watched the legacy consume a woman he cared for and had no appetite to watch it happen again.
He would do what he must.
He found it darkly amusing that his thoughts cast him in the role of protector. He was anything but that.
He was but a man who would honor a debt of gratitude to a dead woman.
If Minerva Ashworth never set foot in Cornwall the nightmare might stop here. It had to stop here. He would pay her for the damn cottage, sever the chain.
She would take his offer. He would make certain of it.