Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
The following day, Minerva emerged from a hired hack and studied the building that housed Mr. Granger’s offices, red brick with a black door and a bow window. She was here to learn the scope of her inheritance and sign whatever documents were required.
She had awoken early, her sheets tangled, her hair knotted and wild.
Her dreams had been uneasy, disturbing. Insistent.
The pendant had been part of it and an older woman she thought might have been Catherine and two men she did not know in the shadows, their forms unclear.
She had felt their anger, their rage. Her dreams had turned to mist at the first streak of dawn, leaving only the nagging impression that she had been on the verge of understanding something important.
Kitty linked her arm with Minerva’s and tipped her head toward the door as they approached. “Are you nervous?”
Minerva rested her palm against her fluttering belly. “Very,” she said with a laugh.
At that moment, the door swung open from within. A man filled the doorway, the cut of his black wool coat emphasizing his height and the breadth of his shoulders. Both women fell back.
“I beg your pardon,” the man said, his voice smooth and low. His hat was in his hand, revealing thick, dark brown hair, impeccably cut. His fingers tightened on the brim. Long fingers, neatly trimmed nails.
He moved to the side with lithe grace, creating a polite space between them.
“No harm done,” Minerva said.
His gaze found hers. His eyes were an unusual shade—copper, rimmed in dark amber—too bright, too sharp, missing nothing.
He seemed to take her in all at once, his attention going first to the curls at her temples before dipping to the hollow of her throat and lingering there, then dropping to the gloved hands she clasped at her waist. His perusal was slow and deliberate, as though he committed her to memory.
An unfamiliar sensation fluttered in her belly, warm, unwelcome, entirely out of her control. For a moment she was frozen, breathless beneath the weight of his regard.
He watched as she blinked. He watched as she drew a shallow breath. Her tongue darted out to wet her lip, and he watched that, too, before lifting his gaze to hers once more, his expression focused and intent.
Something in his expression unsettled her, too intent, too knowing.
She gasped. Never in her life had she felt such a sudden, cutting fascination.
As the moment stretched, silent and suspended, Minerva registered the narrow space that separated them, the faint scents of wool and bergamot and light citrus that clung to him, the quiet strength in the way he held himself so still.
She had the peculiar impression that if she made the smallest move, the air between them might shatter like glass.
A curved scar slashed across his temple, stark against his skin. She wondered how he had come by it. The sudden and wholly inappropriate urge to reach out and trace the line of it with her fingertips struck her.
Her breath came too quick, too shallow.
“Ladies,” he said, the sound of his voice severing the invisible thread between them. He stepped fully aside.
Minerva moved past him. Her sleeve brushed the black wool of his coat. The contact was no more than a whisper of fabric, but she felt it unfurl inside her like a spark along dry tinder.
With her pulse tripping, she went inside. She did not look back but she thought that if she did, she would find him watching her still.
The urge to turn was strong indeed.
“Butterflies in the belly?” Kitty whispered with a giggle.
“What?” Minerva asked.
“First time feeling them? Can’t say I blame you. That was a man.” Kitty let out an exaggerated sigh. “I’d be happy for him to almost knock me off my feet any day. I only wish he’d caught us in his arms to make certain we were steady.”
“Both of us at once?” Minerva laced the words with a lightness she did not feel.
Kitty grinned. “One in each arm.”
Minerva pressed her lips together. Yes, he had been handsome, but there had been something else.
An intensity to his regard, as if he had taken her apart and put her back together in the brief instant their eyes had met.
His attention had felt not like flattery but something deliberate and unnerving.
“Although—” Kitty broke off, tapping her lower lip with her index finger.
“Although?” Minerva prompted.
“Well, I think he might have fancied you, Min, the way he looked at you and all. I’ve never been looked at like that in all my life. But there was something a little frightening about him, don’t you think? Something…dangerous.”
Intimidating. Unsettling. But frightening? Minerva recalled the look in his eyes and shivered.
“Oh, hush, Kitty,” she said, and Kitty laughed.
The door closed behind the two women as Dashiell continued to the street, the sound solid and final. Wind swept in from the northwest, carrying a chill and the promise of rain.
When he had prodded Granger, the man’s replies had been polite, precise, empty. He knew only that Miss Ashworth was a penniless orphan and Catherine’s heir, bits of information Dashiell had already been privy to.
Had Granger known more, Dashiell would have taken it from him.
He did not look back. There was no need.
She had fixed herself in his thoughts—the hitch in her breath, the way her gaze had caught on him and held, the parting of her lips.
He had stood aside, which was courtesy, but a flicker of interest had stirred inside him, rare and unexpected, unwelcome in its timing if not precisely in itself.
As a rule, he was careful in his interactions.
He measured his words, guarded his expressions, revealed little of the man behind the facade he chose to present.
It rarely mattered. People were invariably wary around him, casting sidelong glances or offering an excess of bluff good cheer, as if they sensed the darkness that lurked beneath his stillness.
Or the otherness that sometimes lingered in the empty spaces at his side.
Most people were inclined to look away from him. It seemed Miss Ashworth was not most people.
She had watched him, steady and unflinching with those glass-green eyes, bright beneath the fan of dark lashes.
He reached his carriage and paused.
The pendant. He had seen it the instant the door opened—amethyst, gold filigree, the teardrop shape. The sight of it at her throat had seized him like a fist. He allowed himself an instant to recall the sensation, then closed the thought like closing a box.
Catherine had never removed it. Not when her mind betrayed her. Not when she mistrusted herself and those around her. Not when she swore the wind carried voices from the cliff.
Once, years ago, she had touched the stone and said, “When the Lady Jane walks the mist and calls to you, you must not let her lure you.”
Village tales claimed the ship appeared in the fog, always distant, always silent, a harbinger of doom.
Catherine had not spoken of such things lightly, but Dashiell had been a young fool who had yet to see the Lady Jane for the first time, stubborn enough to force a laugh and say, “A ship cannot walk or call out from the mist.”
“No,” she had agreed calmly. “But the dead who sail her can.”
Before his death, Jory had sworn he saw the ship riding the fog beyond the headland, dark against the water. Dashiell remembered that but what followed lay in shattered fragments that refused to coalesce into a clear memory no matter how hard he tried to make them fit.
Jory’s challenge. The climb. The wind. Voices.
Jory’s body dragged broken from the sea.
He pressed two fingers against his temple and held them there.
He did not remember all the details of that day, if the sun had been bright or the clouds heavy, if the sea had been calm or harsh.
But he remembered the smell of the cliff face, turned earth and minerals, and the salt carrying up from the sea below.
He remembered the way his forearms had ached from the climb.
He remembered the sound of Jory’s voice, not the words but the tone, higher than usual, though he could not say if it was with excitement or fear.
Dashiell did not remember what he had done that day.
That was the truth of it. Not that he knew himself to be innocent. Not that he knew himself to be guilty. Only that there was a void where the knowledge should have been, and he had lived inside that void for eighteen years.
There had been questions in the weeks that followed, enough to satisfy the village’s appetite for blame.
But there had been no witnesses, no clear account.
Only one boy fallen from a cliff, his body floating shattered in the sea, and a second boy, alive, with blood in his hair and grooves gouged in his wrists.
Dashiell’s father had buried the questions and rumors with quiet words to the magistrate, with favors granted, with money that changed hands. The village had not forgotten, but they had learned to speak of it more softly.
After that, Cliff Cottage was the only place that welcomed him, opening its doors without first demanding a confession.
Closing his eyes, Dashiell saw the house as it had been, the steady warmth of the kitchen, a savory pasty to fill his belly, Catherine’s sharp wit.
She had never asked him what had happened that day, never asked if he was the reason Jory Tregian was dead.
She had never asked him to swear his innocence.
And he had never offered because he could not swear it. Not then. Not now. Truth was not a clean thing. It was jagged and sharp like the rocks at the base of the cliff.
Memories of that day burst into disjointed fragments when he poked at them, then stopped abruptly, as they always did, as if he stood at the edge of an obsidian gully that he could not cross. He had stopped pressing years ago. It served no purpose.
The ghosts had not taken Dashiell the day Jory died, but the darkness had not stayed behind on that cliff. It had followed him. It had claimed him. And in the intervening years, he had learned that ghosts did nothing in haste.
Which meant there was still time to keep Miss Ashworth from walking blindly into the same nightmare that had consumed her cousin.
The plan was simple: Buy the cottage, sever the chain, never let her leave London for Cornwall. Catherine had not allowed him to save her, but he could save her heir.
The memory of Minerva Ashworth’s steady gaze surfaced, unbidden.
He saw her in his mind’s eye. Dark hair, thick and sleek, drawn back with practical restraint, the image belied by the curls that escaped at her temples.
Her mouth, lips soft and full. Bottle-green eyes, sparkling with intelligence.
She had the look of someone who watched the world carefully, as though experience had taught her it would turn on her the moment she faltered.
She was beautiful, though he did not allow himself to linger on that. Not in the fragile way many men preferred. She was interesting, both strong and soft, wearing her composure like a shield, constructed and purposeful.
He had the impression she had survived much.
As had he.
Perhaps that was why she had not looked away.
She had seen the darkness outside the shop yesterday. And she had not fled from it.
For the first time in many years, Dashiell had the uneasy sense that the control he had carefully cultivated was about to be challenged. That Minerva Ashworth had already begun to alter events.