Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The cottage was quiet when they entered. Dashiell slipped his hand into his pocket, touching the smooth leather of the box he carried.
“Kitty has gone walking with Thom,” Minerva said. “Nessa has gone to the village. She refused to do so before now.”
“I believe we both know the reason for that,” Dashiell said.
“The same reason she was happy to go this morning. She said she was eager to see friends.”
“Without the shadow of her father looming over her.”
“Yes,” Minerva said, reaching up to remove her bonnet. She set it aside and glanced back at him over her shoulder. “Do we… go down now?” she asked, hesitant.
She had told him of her previous encounter with the Occupant. He did not begrudge her hesitancy to repeat it. But repeat it they must. Only, not quite yet.
“In a moment,” Dashiell said. “There is something I wish to give you first.”
“Give me?” She looked confused and a little surprised.
“Shall we?” He gestured toward the parlor then followed as she led the way.
He had been in this room many times over the years. Catherine had kept a small fire here in the evenings, and they had sat in these chairs and talked. Even without the fire, the room would have been warm in a way his home was not. Catherine had made it so.
Minerva made it so.
The day he had listened to her play had been the first time he had returned here since Catherine’s death.
He had heard the music before he even left the path; it had caught him and held him and he had entered the house without thought or invitation, called, summoned.
When her fingers had stilled on the keys, he had found the silence to be unbearably loud.
In this room, he had kissed her for the first time, feeling the pain her notes had revealed, the melancholy and sadness. The strength at her core. He, who prided himself on his control, had been unable to resist.
In his father’s house, control had meant survival, control of his facial expressions, his tone when he spoke, the words he chose, the way he moved.
The ability to read a situation and manage the outcome had stood him in good stead both at school and when he had returned to live in Fowey amongst people who believed him to be a killer.
Control kept him intact when everything was designed to break him.
What he was about to do would leave him with no control.
He could not determine the outcome, could not manage Minerva’s response.
She could refuse the ring. She could accept it and mean something different by that acceptance than he meant by the offer.
She could receive his declaration with the gentle kindness of a woman who did not return his sentiments.
He could not prevent any of these outcomes.
He took the box from his pocket and moved to stand before her. He took her hand, placing her palm flat against his chest, over his heart. Then he placed his own palm over her heart. With his free hand, he offered her the box.
Her eyes widened. Her lips parted. She shook her head as if to forestall his actions, trying to stop him before he began. Perhaps she meant to protect herself. Perhaps she meant to protect him. He only knew she tried to stop him saying what she was not certain she could receive on his terms.
He was going to say it anyway.
“I am not going to ask you to marry me.”
She made a soft exhalation.
“You have told me you will never marry, and I believe you.” He paused. “But I find I have something that can only be worn by you. Can only belong to you.”
He caught her wrist and lifted her hand and kissed her palm. Then he opened the lid of the box and offered it to her.
The amethyst glittered in the light that filtered in through the window.
She gasped and her gaze lifted to his.
“This belonged to my mother. The only thing of hers my father did not sell or destroy,” he said. “And now, it belongs to you.”
Her eyes filled, shimmering with unshed tears. She cupped his cheeks with both her hands, staring into his eyes.
“I will never be a wife in the legal sense,” she said. “You understand that.”
“I do.”
She eased closer to him, chest to chest, and rested her cheek against his shoulder. “I am not certain what this is,” she whispered.
He was not certain either. He had no framework for it. Love was foreign to him. He had cared for Catherine in the way a boy cared for the one person who had been kind to him. That was the sum total of his experience in that arena of emotion.
Until Minerva.
He had not understood what he felt until he had seen Teague’s hands around her throat and found that he could not accept a world that did not have her in it. Only then had he understood what he felt was love.
“It is a promise,” he said. “My promise to love no other but you.” He crooked his index finger and gently lifted her chin so he could look in her eyes. “I love you, Minerva, exactly as you are.”
“Dashiell,” she whispered and came up on her toes to press her mouth to his, her hands cupping his face. “Dashiell,” she whispered again. “I love you so.”
Joy. Hope. Love. Relief. A maelstrom of emotions that escaped the confines of his control.
He smiled. “I know.”
He slipped the ring onto the third finger of her right hand. It fit as though it had always been hers.
Minerva looked at the ring on her right hand.
Dashiell had not asked her to marry him.
He had not offered her a proposal she would have to refuse, or a future built on terms she could not accept.
He had looked at her—at the woman who counted and managed and worked to hold her secret terrors at bay, a woman who would not put her fate in the hands of another—and he had said exactly as you are.
He had not asked her to be someone she was not.
He loved her without conditions, without asking her to be other than she was.
Dashiell’s copper eyes gleamed as he watched her, missing nothing.
Tell me something true. They had shared so many truths. The largest she had shared was how much she loved him, the feeling too large to contain. So she did not try.
She reached up and kissed him, her hands on his face, her lips pressed to his. He made a low sound, and his hands came to her waist, pulling her close as he deepened the kiss, holding her to him. She knew not where her breath stopped and his began or whose heartbeat pounded between them.
When he drew back, she let her cheek fall against his chest until her breathing settled. Finally, she looked up at him to find him watching her, his expression stripped of all his walls.
“We go down now,” she said.
“Now,” he agreed.
He took her hand, their fingers entwined, and together they walked to the kitchen.
The stairs were narrow, the walls close, and Minerva stayed tight at Dashiell’s back. He carried a candle that threw shadows against the stone, and with his free hand, he reached back to twine his fingers with hers.
Frigid air surrounded them, coming up from below and leeching from the walls themselves. Her breath plumed white. Her fingers and toes prickled from the chill, but the pendant was warm against her skin.
Dashiell stopped at the bottom, raising the candle.
The cellar was as she remembered, dark and dank, smelling of mineral and cold and rot.
She reached out to touch the stone and found the wall rough and damp.
It was too dark to see beyond the circle of candlelight, but as she had that first time, she had the impression of a large space with a low ceiling.
Then the pendant burned, immediate and fierce, like a brand.
Something moved behind her, a rush of air.
Heart racing, she turned but saw nothing behind her other than the stairs they had descended. And darkness and shadow.
She turned back to find Dashiell had not moved. He stood with the candle raised, his gaze moving slowly around the edges of the circle of light it cast.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“Nothing I can name,” he said.
She understood what he meant. He saw nothing, so he did not name it. But he felt it as she felt it. The Occupant was here, not in one place, but everywhere simultaneously, in the frigid air and the slick stone and the darkness that carried neither sound nor silence.
Fear gnawed at her, growing sharper as the pendant grew hotter, so hot she could barely stand the feel of it against her skin.
And then the fear was hammered down, stifled by a wave of grief so strong her knees nearly gave way. Pain. Loss. Heartache.
Mama. Papa.
She could not bear it. Gone. They were gone.
Images flashed before her. Bodies broken and bloody. Sightless eyes staring at the sky.
Battling the crushing weight of her sorrow, she tapped her fingers against her thigh, once, twice, thrice. Again. Again.
Tears traced her cheeks and she tasted their salt on her lips.
Wrong. The texture of her grief was wrong despite the familiarity.
The pendant burned hotter still. She grabbed it and closed it in her fist, letting the burn ground her and chase the thing out. Chase the Occupant from the gap it had found and used to its advantage.
Her grief receded, not gone, never gone, but blunted by the life she had built that had filled the spaces of her loss in the intervening years. Her grief, not an emotion manufactured and managed by an entity formed of malice and hate.
She exhaled.
Dashiell studied her face, lifting his hand to wipe away the remnants of her tears with the backs of his fingers.
“What did it find?” he asked, the candlelight dancing across his features.
“My parents,” she said. “My grief.”
His jaw tightened.
“And you?” she asked. “What did it find?”
“Jory,” he said. “The cliff.”
She shook her head. “It lies. You did not kill him.”
“I do not know that with certainty, so how can you?” Dashiell asked.
“Because I know you,” she said.
He made a slow exhalation. “This is not the time for that debate.” He lifted the candle and turned slowly, illuminating the space around them in its paltry light.
The pendant had eased from a brazier’s burn to a sustained heat that was far less uncomfortable. She grasped it as she walked toward the far wall.
North. The north corner. The old ones knew.
The words from Catherine’s journal came to her.
Again, the pendant heated. It took her a moment to realize the ring had grown warm as well.
It was not merely that she held the pendant with that hand.
It was the stone itself that had grown warm.
She froze, releasing the pendant and lowering her hand.
Both stones retained their heat, but there was something different…
The Occupant was still here, still reaching for her, but distant somehow. She shook her head, trying to understand.
She grasped the pendant once more and felt the heat rise, felt the swell of attraction as the stones… She had not the words for it. It was as if the stones reached for each other.
“We need to go,” she said, turning to Dashiell.
She did not know if she expected him to hesitate, to argue.
He did neither. He only caught her hand and strode toward the stairs, matching his pace to hers, candle held before them.
Halfway up, the cold began to recede. By the time she reached the top step, both pendant and ring were cool and inert.
They cleared the top step and Dashiell turned to close the door and drop the latch. Then he drew her into his arms and only held her close. She rested her cheek on his chest and listened to the steady thud of his heart, letting her breathing slow and deepen as her own pulse settled.
After a long moment, she stepped back.
“Come with me,” she said and led the way to the reading room where Catherine’s journal sat on the small table. She picked it up and flipped through the pages until she found the lines she sought, then she held the journal so they could both see and read the words aloud.
“Trap it. Trap it. Trap it in the stone. Pull it in but not alone. Need another who can see.” She shook her head. “I thought these mindless scribblings, but they are not. They are instructions.”
She looked up at Dashiell. He was reading the lines a second time, his expression controlled and still.
“Pull it in,” he said. “Not push it out.”
Minerva considered that a moment. “Pull it in,” she repeated. “Not drive it away.” She flipped the page, finding the entry she sought. “North. The north corner. The old ones knew. Bind it. Bind the darkness, the cold. Foundation stones in the corner. It must be the corner. Bury it deep.”
Dashiell was quiet, a frown marking his brow. “She is talking about different stones,” he said slowly. “The stone in the pendant and the foundation stones in the north corner of the cellar where it must be buried.”
“Yes,” Minerva said, nodding. “Yes. But the ring’s stone has a role as well. I felt it. It was as if…” She paused, searching for the right way to describe what she had felt. “The ring…the pendant…both grew hot, but not in isolation. They worked together.”
“Protecting you,” Dashiell said.
“Yes.” She chewed her lower lip, her thoughts churning. Dashiell only waited, silent, patient, until she sorted out what she wanted to say. In the end, she sighed and shook her head. “I must think on it.”