Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The track from the cliff road to Carrek ran inland between two low stone walls, the grass on either side cropped close by the wind off the water. Dashiell rode it at a canter, Cato moving easily beneath him. The gray had learned his rider's habits and adapted to them without being asked.
As he did most mornings when the weather allowed, and some when it did not, Dashiell had ridden the cliff path for the better part of an hour.
The way was too narrow and too close to the edge for anything but attention, which was why he rode it.
An hour on the cliff path left no room in his thoughts for anything but the ground directly ahead, the horse beneath him, the wind off the water.
It was the closest thing to peace he had found.
But the ride had failed to do its job this morning. The events of the previous day had followed him, keeping pace with Cato’s hooves, refusing to be outrun.
The fragment of memory had given him a presence on the cliff, but nothing else. No face. No voice. Nothing to identify the third person.
His mind had gone first, and immediately, to Jago.
It was the obvious direction. A boy who idolized his sister, who watched his brother abuse her, unable to do anything to stop it.
He could not help but wonder if the man who had approached him in the village had once been a boy who stood on a cliff as his brother clung to its face.
Conjecture without certainty. So many questions remained, as they had for nearly two decades, but now they had taken on a new shape.
A puzzle to be solved, but likely not today.
The house rose at the end of the track as it had for centuries.
Three stories of dark Cornish stone, pressing itself into the earth, as fixed and eternal as the granite it was built from.
The walls were stained black in places by salt air and rain, the windows narrow and deeply set.
No ivy softened the facade; the wind made certain nothing grew against those walls.
Dashiell had been born here, grown up here.
He had never viewed it as a stranger would.
To him, it was simply Carrek, cold in the mornings, moaning with the wind at night, an ancient place indifferent to its inhabitants and the passage of time.
Upon its acquisition, his father had renamed it Penrose Hall and had hung purchased portraits on the walls, imagining himself master.
The house had outlasted him with no apparent effort, and the name Penrose Hall had died with him.
To the folk hereabout—and to Dashiell—the place was Carrek, as it had been for hundreds of years.
He dismounted and stood a moment, his palm flat against Cato’s flank. The horse’s warmth seeped through his glove, steady and solid.
Somewhere in the yard, the well chain shifted in a gust, one clear note ringing in the quiet.
It came to him then—her laugh. The real one, not the polite sound she made when courtesy required it, but the one that had escaped her when Kitty said something he hadn’t caught.
Brief, unguarded, entirely unintended. He had been twenty feet away and it had tunneled clear through to the inside of his chest and made him want to drink the sound from her lips.
He handed the reins to Pascoe, who took them with comfortable efficiency, having done so a thousand times, only nodding, saying nothing.
Dashiell appreciated that about the groom.
He appreciated it about most of his staff.
He had, over the years, assembled a household that functioned on competence and minimal discourse, and he considered this one of his more successful achievements.
"Mr. Rowe is in the study," Pascoe said.
Dashiell nodded and went inside.
Rowe was waiting by the desk when Dashiell reached the study.
He was a compact man in his fifties, unhurried in his manner, with a face that had settled early into permanent neutrality.
As a young man, he had served Dashiell's father without apparent enthusiasm and transferred to the son without apparent reluctance.
His primary quality, and the one Dashiell valued most, was that he reported facts without editorializing them.
"The Nancarrow fence on the north pasture," Rowe said, by way of greeting. "Third post is gone. Nancarrow says it was the storm last week."
"Have it replaced."
"And the matter of the fishing rights on the lower cove. Trevithick is asking again."
"Tell him what I told him last time."
Rowe nodded once. He had almost certainly known both answers before he asked.
He asked anyway because that was how he confirmed that the estate was still being attended to by its owner.
Dashiell had understood this about Rowe for years and found it, on balance, reasonable.
They dealt with three further matters—drainage on the south field, a tenant in arrears, another who had recently lost his wife—the business of the estate proceeding as it always did.
"One more thing," Rowe said. "Thom Gloyn is here. He asked to speak with you directly."
“Send him in,” Dashiell said.
After Rowe withdrew, Thom came in with his hat in his hands, turning it again and again. He was a steady young man, reliable and uncomplicated. But today, he was not steady. He was clearly unsettled.
Dashiell waited.
“You said to come to you if anything seemed wrong, sir.” Thom looked down at his feet, then lifted his gaze to meet Dashiell’s.
“I was walking Miss Dorsey home from the village yesterday. The wind grew fierce and…strange. Not blowing in off the water like it does. Swirling like, round and round. And then it stopped.”
“Stopped?”
“All at once. Like a door slammed shut.” His jaw clenched.
“Miss Dorsey and I stopped too. Then something made her look back. When we turned—” He paused, frowning.
He opened his mouth, closed it. Finally, he said, “Miss Ashworth was standing in the middle of the path. Then she moved toward the edge.”
“Go on,” Dashiell said, wariness uncurling in his gut.
“The way she was walking… It wasn’t right.
As if she was taking one step then another, but not by choice,” Thom said, the words coming faster now.
“It was more like her feet were moving while she told them to be still. Like she was being pulled.” He shook his head.
“She knew it. I could see she knew it. She was arching her whole body away from the edge even as her feet kept moving.” His voice dropped.
“I saw a man drown once, though we tried to save him. He was fighting a deep current, fighting something he couldn’t get a hold of, and in the end, it pulled him under and took him far out to sea.
Miss Ashworth… she was fighting like that. ”
For an instant, Dashiell felt as if he himself were drowning, a cold sweat breaking on his skin. He knew what Thom described. Had seen it before…
The smell of turned earth was heavy in his nostrils, a fragment of memory. Someone moving, jerky and odd, as if they were a puppet manipulated by another’s will. He pressed two fingers to his temple and held them there until the memory receded.
He clenched his teeth, then forced himself to relax.
“Miss Dorsey went to her,” Thom continued. “Put her arm around her. And then—” He made a sharp exhale. “And then it was done. The wind came back like normal and the two walked on.”
Something had tried to take her from him, take Minerva.
In that instant, he understood that it had taken Catherine. She had removed the pendant, the only protection she had, and something had come for her. He had long suspected it but now he felt no doubt in that regard.
He would not allow it to take Minerva, too.
Which meant he must make her leave this place. His plan had always been simple. Buy the cottage, remove her from the inheritance before it could harm her.
But somehow, he, who always acted decisively, had let the plan meander away from him.
Thom’s account made it clear he had waited too long. He should have pushed harder, made the offer before she ever arrived here, certainly before she ever settled in.
He would go to her today. He would make the offer today, though the thought of her accepting it and returning to London did not elicit relief.
He had been telling himself for weeks that buying the cottage would solve the problem, that removing her from the inheritance would remove the danger.
And yet, there was a flaw in the reassurances he offered himself.
She had seen the darkness above the cobbles in London before she ever came to Cornwall, before she ever set foot in Cliff Cottage.
The sight had woken in her when Catherine died.
The inheritance had found her in a dress shop in the rain.
Buying the cottage was not likely to free her.
He understood this.
But he would make the offer anyway because it was the only plan he had and a flawed plan was better than standing with his hand on Cato’s flank thinking about the sound of her laugh.
“How close to the edge?” Dashiell asked, forcing a neutral tone while a storm raged inside him.
Thom turned his face to the window, his gaze distant and unfocused. Finally, he said, “It would have been a close thing.” Then, more quietly, “Very close.”
In the days after the events on the cliff path, Minerva refused to avoid it.
She walked it early each morning, refusing to let her secret terrors rule her decisions.
She filled her time writing a letter to Mrs. Barlow and another to Mr. Granger, working in the kitchen garden, which had gone to seed under Catherine’s last years and needed attention.
She ate her meals and slept—poorly—and she did not speak to Kitty about what had happened on the path.
Not because she was attempting to pretend it had not happened. She was well past pretending. She simply had no wish to speak of it yet.