Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
The following afternoon, Minerva and Kitty walked the curved footpath along the ridge, packed earth edged with coarse grass and low scrub. The wind blew hard off the water, tugging at Minerva’s bonnet ribbons and snapping Kitty’s shawl behind her like a pennant.
Minerva drew a deep breath through her nose and slowed. “Do you smell it?” she asked.
“I smell wind and damp.” Kitty wrinkled her nose. “And perhaps something not entirely wholesome.”
“Salt. Brine. Mud,” Minerva said. “And something sharp… Iron?”
“Rotten egg,” Kitty said with a grimace.
“It isn’t a bad smell, not when it’s mixed in with the others.” Minerva smiled. “It’s really quite lovely.”
“I suppose it is better than the Thames,” Kitty said, her tone grudging.
“Scant praise.” Minerva laughed. “Better than rotting waste and sulfurous mud?”
“Much better,” Kitty said.
They rounded the bend and the ocean opened before them, not the gentle, sparkling blue Minerva had imagined as a child listening to her father’s tales but a churning mass of slate waves and boiling white foam.
Angry. Aggressive. Walls of water rose high, then dropped to crash against the shore.
Beyond the massive waves was an undulating stretch of dark water and whitecaps that blended into mist at the horizon.
Kitty paused, drawing Minerva to a halt, and the two women turned and stood, arm in arm.
“I don’t like it,” Kitty said with a shiver.
Minerva did. She liked it very much, this wild, untamed ocean. She could not explain why, but a knot in her chest loosened at the sight of it. She held herself under such tight control, ever aware that if she relaxed the reins even a little, all her terrors would come roaring free of their tethers.
But the ocean was not controlled or leashed. It was immense, uncontained, unapologetic. Alive and free in a way she missed.
A wheezing laugh sounded behind them.
They turned to see an elderly woman leaning heavily on a walking stick. Her bonnet had slipped crooked over her thin gray hair, and two front teeth were missing when she smiled.
“You’re not seeing it on a pretty day, are you?” the woman asked. “Wait until you come with a picnic when the sun shines and the waves are meek as lambs. You’ll think different then.”
Kitty offered a dubious look but made no argument.
The woman peered at them both, her gaze lingering on Minerva. “Are you the girl who’s come for Cliff Cottage?”
“Yes,” Minerva said. “We’re only recently arrived.”
“You look like her when she was young.” The old woman pursed her lips.
“Your cousin walked this cliff most evenings. Many a time, I saw her out here, clutching that pendant tight, muttering under her breath. Don’t know if she heard things or only thought she did.
” She shifted her stick and squinted toward the water. “Walking to town, are you?”
“Not today,” Kitty said. “We’re only taking the air.”
“But we do intend to visit Fowey soon,” Minerva added.
The woman cackled. “Not Foh-wee. Fowey.” She pronounced it the second time Foy, to rhyme with toy.
“I was born here. And I’ll be buried here, too.
” She took a step closer and lowered her voice though there was no one about to overhear.
“It’s an old town. Been here since the Normans came. Plenty of stories in those alleyways.”
She gave a decisive nod. “Weren’t so long ago that Mr. Bennet, Mayor of Fowey, was accused of smuggling.
I remember it well, like yesterday, though it must be, oh, thirty years.
Or more.” She frowned. “Or maybe less. They say the Customs officers found him in his home, breaking open bottles of French brandy and pouring them out the window.” She paused.
“Privateers. Pirates. Smugglers. You watch yourselves.”
“Not all ships carry pirates or smugglers,” Minerva said blandly.
The woman gave another wheezing laugh then tipped her chin toward the sea, her expression growing solemn. “And not all ships that sail these waters carry the living.”
Kitty stiffened. “What do you mean?” she asked, voice low.
Minerva felt the wind change, colder and sharper now, as though it had travelled through ice before touching her skin. The fine hairs along her forearms rose. Reflexively, she hugged herself, seeking warmth, her fingers straying to the pendant at her throat as her gaze slid to the water.
The sound of the old woman’s reply faded, her voice a low hum, sound without words or meaning. Minerva’s ears buzzed, then roared.
Far out, beyond the churning waves, a dark shape gathered on the horizon.
At first only a smudge, a trick of the light.
She took a step closer to the cliff’s edge, narrowing her eyes.
The smudge lengthened and took shape. A hull.
Masts. Three of them. The sails hung heavy and square, though no wind filled them.
The ship did not pitch with the swell of the waves. Instead, it cut through the water like a blade, neither rising nor falling as it moved toward her.
Ice sluiced through her veins as she stood, frozen.
Min… Min…
From somewhere far away came the sound of her name.
“Min, what are you looking at?” Kitty asked, and Minerva could tell from her tone that she had asked the question more than once.
“What…?” Minerva shivered, then pointed. “There. Do you see it?”
“I don’t—” Kitty faltered.
“What do you see, girl?” the old woman asked, her tone sharp.
“A ship,” Minerva said, unable to tear her gaze away. The hull looked wrong, as though it had been torn open on one side. At the prow, a pale shape rose above the water. A figurehead. A woman carved of wood, her face turned toward the shore. Toward Minerva, sightless eyes fixed on her alone.
The old woman grunted. “Not many see the Lady Jane. Your cousin did, of course.”
“The Lady Jane?” Kitty echoed. She drew her St. Christopher medal free of her bodice, pinching the talisman between her thumb and forefinger.
“A barque she was. Three masts. Square-rigged. Ran aground here before my grandmother’s time.
Wrecked in a storm the same night the Trevelyan brothers died, broken on the rocks.
Their ship, she was. Some say they were smugglers.
Others say worse.” The woman’s tone grew hushed.
“Those who’ve seen her say there’s a hole in her hull, and at the bow, a carving of the Lady Jane herself.
Those who see her, they—” She stopped and shook her head slowly.
Kitty swallowed. “What happens to them?”
The woman stared at her a long moment. “Terrible things follow,” she said. “Terrible things.”
The wind pushed hard against Minerva’s back, as though urging her toward the cliff’s edge. The ship drew closer, moving with dreadful purpose.
Minerva’s grip tightened on the pendant, the gold grown hot in her grasp. She tore her gaze away, determined to hold her growing dismay in check. She would not let her secret terrors free of their leash, would not allow her fears to rule her mind.
Her hand dropped to her thigh, and she tapped a slow rhythm, once, twice, thrice.
Deliberately, she turned her back to the ocean and faced the old woman once more. Her eyes felt heavy, her body tired to her soul. It was a sensation she was coming to recognize, one she felt each time the pendant stirred.
“Years ago,” the woman said, “a lad claimed he saw her. Two weeks later, he was dead. Fell from the cliff.” She tapped her stick on the ground. “Most say he was pushed.”
Kitty gasped.
The woman leaned in. “He’d told his sister he’d seen the ship.”
“His sister?” Kitty asked.
“Tamsyn Tregian. Fierce girl, that one. Sharp as broken glass.” The old woman shook her head.
“After Jory fell, she told anyone who would listen that he imagined the Lady Jane. That it was no ghost ship but a boy of flesh and blood who had done him in, pushing Jory to his death.” Again, she tapped her cane on the ground, harder this time. “Most folk believed her.”
“And those who did not?” Minerva asked.
“Well, they thought she just needed someone to blame.”
“And the other boy? The one they say pushed Jory Tregian? Who was he?” Minerva asked, but she knew. She already knew.
“Dashiell Penrose,” the old woman said, spitting his name like it was bitter on her tongue.
The name settled into her like a stone into a still pond, cold and heavy.
She felt no shock, no surprise, only recognition. And the troubling instinct to defend him to a woman she had known for less than an hour.
She did not care to examine that instinct too closely.
She thought of the knight, alone on the hill, and of the pencil marks beneath the final stanza of the poem.
She thought of his touch and the way he had looked at her and the way he had made her feel.
Those were not reasons to defend him. The instinct was not rational.
Still, it sat in her chest alongside the cold weight of his name.
Swallowing, she looked away. Her gaze drifted to the rise beyond the cliff road where, half-hidden by the treeline, a massive stone house sat against the ashen sky, stark and solitary.
The old woman followed her gaze and gave a short nod.
“Carrek,” she said. “Been there since long before my grandfather’s grandfather.
Penrose has it now.” She paused. “There are those who say the darkness on that cliff followed him home. That it’s been at Carrek ever since.
Others say it was there, with him, all along. ”
Minerva said nothing. She stood with the wind at her back and the ship on the water, and she thought about darkness that followed a person home, darkness that had been there all along, and about a man living in its shadow, alone and palely loitering.