Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
In the days that followed, Dashiell met Minerva on the cliff path each afternoon and they walked together, falling into their long-established rhythm. He accepted these moments as the best part of his day.
They talked about everything except the cellar: the estate, the stars, the way Cato ate the treat Dashiell supplied him and then went foraging in Dashiell’s pocket looking for another.
Small things. Easy things. He did not touch on the cellar or the Occupant or the brothers because Minerva had told him that she needed time to think.
She would come to him when she was ready.
He was at his desk when Mrs. Chegwidden came to tell him there was a visitor.
He masked his surprise when Jago Tregian followed her in, looking as he had in the village, young and guarded and uncomfortable.
Dashiell did not offer him a chair. He only waited.
“I do not know where else to go,” Jago said, spreading his hands.
“I do not know who would understand.” There were dark circles beneath his eyes.
His cheeks were gaunt, his skin pale. And for a moment, Dashiell saw the boy who had followed him and Jory about like a shadow, hoping for a moment of his brother’s attention, more often than not being sent away with a harsh word.
“Sit,” Dashiell said.
Jago looked to the window for a moment, then he sat.
“Tamsyn is not well,” he said. “Not ill. Not in a way a physician could treat. But…she is not herself. Has not been herself for some weeks now.”
“And you bring this to me why?” Dashiell asked.
A muscle in Jago’s jaw flexed. “You were honest with me about the Lady Jane.”
“I was.”
“So be honest with me again. Is Tamsyn in danger?”
“Not from me,” Dashiell said.
Jago made a sound of frustration. “I know that. I want to know if there is someone else…something else…”
Dashiell considered him for a moment. The boy who had grown up first in Jory’s shadow and then in the shadow of Jory’s death.
And Dashiell could remember neither the death itself nor his part in it.
He had made peace, over the years, with not knowing.
Or rather, he had built a life around the not knowing.
But always, the void waited in the shadows.
It had its own place and weight and shape in the architecture of his psyche.
He had long ago given up on the expectation that the void would resolve.
And now Jago Tregian was here, poking at the void.
“What is it you think I might know?” Dashiell asked.
Jago was quiet for a time, head bowed, shoulders slumped forward, hands dangling between his spread thighs. Then he straightened and met Dashiell’s gaze.
“The morning Jory died, I woke before dawn. I don’t know what woke me.
A sound, perhaps. Or nothing.” He paused.
“I opened my door. Tamsyn was in the passage, dressed for outside.
I assumed she was going to walk as she often did in the mornings.
It was a habit she had then and one she has maintained to this day.
“She did not see me and I said nothing. I went back to sleep. I don’t know how long she was gone. Her return woke me. I heard her on the stairs.”
Again, he looked to the window, staring out for a time. Dashiell said nothing, only waited for him to continue.
“Her expression was wrong.” He frowned. “No… her face was wrong.”
“Wrong how?” Dashiell asked.
“I did not have the words for it then and I am not certain I have them now. I only know I did not want to look at it, the face that was my sister’s but not—” He broke off and shook his head. “Jory left perhaps two hours after she returned. By evening, he was dead.”
Dashiell drummed his fingers on the desktop. Only once.
When Jago had approached him in the village, he had made Dashiell wonder if there had been a third person on the cliff the day Jory died. In fact, Dashiell was now convinced there had been, that the fragments of his memories included another.
The question was whether that other was the man sitting across from him. Jago, who loved his sister. Jago, who both loved and hated the brother who tormented her.
A man with secrets to hide might do exactly this, come forward with partial information, establish himself as a witness before he could be established as a suspect.
A man with nothing to hide might do exactly this.
And why now, eighteen years after Jory’s death?
He studied Jago carefully, the dark circles, the gaunt cheeks, the pale eyes that scanned the room and flitted to the window and looked anywhere but directly at Dashiell.
“Where were you when Jory died?” Dashiell asked, his voice gentle.
Jago’s eyes flashed to his. “I was a child. I was afraid of heights.”
“Where were you when Jory died?” Dashiell repeated.
“I don’t recall exactly. It was eighteen years ago.
I know I was with Tamsyn when they found Jory’s body.
But how am I to know precisely when he died in order to say exactly where I was?
” Jago pushed to his feet and pacing to the window where he stood with his arms crossed over his chest, his back to Dashiell.
“I was not on that cliff.” He paused, then blurted, “I was not.”
After a moment, Dashiell said, “I ask again, why do you bring your concerns about your sister to me?”
Jago looked at his hands. With his back still to Dashiell, he said, “Who else am I to ask? Who will not think me mad or addled? I have been seeing a ghost ship, one you see as well. I have been watching my sister act in a manner more and more erratic and at times, her face…” He shook his head. “At times, I cannot look at her.”
Dashiell rose and walked to stand beside Jago at the window.
“Were you on the cliff?” he asked.
Beside him, Jago tensed but did not turn. “No,” he said.
But Dashiell was not certain he could believe him.
The floorboards overhead began creaking during supper, as though someone were not merely walking the empty third room but rather pacing it in agitation.
Minerva finished her meal, thinking she had not heard the floor creak this consistently before.
Most evenings, it came once or twice then stilled.
The only other time she had heard the rhythm so insistent was the evening she had returned to the house after she had encountered the brothers on the cliff path.
Kitty finished the last of her bread then said, “I believe Mr. Todd is trying to tell us something.”
“He is always trying to tell us something,” Nessa said, rising to clear away the plates.
She had stopped flinching at the sound weeks ago.
Now, she treated it the way she treated the ever-present wind, as unremarkable and requiring no response.
And only rarely did she glance warily at the door to the cellar.
“Tonight he seems rather more urgent about it,” Kitty said. “Perhaps you’d best go up.”
“You don’t wish to join me?” Minerva asked with a laugh.
Kitty shook her head, blond curls bouncing. “I’ve come to accept the oddities of this house,” she said with a sniff. “But I have no interest in seeking them out.” Her expression grew serious. “Unless you wish me to accompany you.”
Minerva laid a hand on her shoulder. “I can manage one benign spirit on my own,” she said.
Nessa sighed. “I am not certain I will ever be so easy with this.”
“But you no longer even glance up when the floor creaks,” Kitty said.
Nessa seemed to consider that for a moment, then with a nod, she continued clearing the table.
“Go ahead,” Kitty said to Minerva.
A moment later, Minerva paused on the landing. The door to the third room was closed as it always was. She paused a moment, the flame of her candle steady in the still air. Then she opened the door and said, “I am here.”
The cold was immediate as she stepped inside, swirling around her ankles, climbing beneath her skirts and along her calves. Across from her was the narrow bed. And there, in the corner, the writing desk with its inkwell and quill, as if someone had only just stepped away.
She stood for a moment in the center of the room, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness beyond the candle’s reach. The pendant was warm at her throat. Acknowledgement, she thought. She was here and he was here, but she felt no threat.
The day of her arrival she had come to this room, seen a shape standing behind her in the warped mirror.
She had spun to find no one there, but she had felt afraid.
New to this place, she had not yet learned to distinguish between a benign presence and one that wished her harm.
Now she knew that more than one type of presence inhabited this house, this cliff, this village, and the pendant spoke differently to each.
“You called me and I am here,” she said. But she thought he already knew it, that he had been waiting for her to come.
As if in answer, the candle flame bent, slowly, deliberately, inclining toward the writing desk.
Her heart beat a little faster.
She crossed to the desk and sat before it, setting down her candle and running her hand over the smooth, polished oak. The desk was small, feminine, curved in the shape of a kidney bean, two drawers on either side and a single shallow drawer in the middle, all bearing curved brass handles.
The cold swirled around her, almost an embrace. Behind her, a floorboard creaked.
She opened first the central drawer. It was empty. She opened each of the others in turn, finding them empty as well. Frustration nipped at her. She knew not what she had expected to find, but she had expected to find something.
Pressing her palms flat on the writing surface, she sighed.
The leather was cool and a little rough, the center worn from years of use.
And then she felt it, a faint give beneath her left palm.
She looked more closely at the surface, running her finger along the edge where leather met wood.
There was a seam there she had taken for decoration.
She worked her fingers beneath it and lifted.
The writing surface came up on a hinge, revealing a shallow compartment beneath.
Inside lay a letter, folded and sealed, her name written on the outside in a hand she had come to recognize as Catherine’s.
Minerva.
A chill crawled across her skin as she stared at her name written in a dead woman’s hand.
She opened the letter and read.
My dear Minerva,
My mind is not reliable, and I do not know how long clarity will last, so I will be brief and I will be plain.
By now you will know that the pendant offers protection. But it also draws the Occupant toward the amethyst by increments too small to feel. You must open the stone to it. Invite it in. This will go against every instinct you have. I am sorry for it.
You, Minerva, will do what none of your predecessors have been able to do before you. Because you have another with you who sees but does not draw. You will have noticed he elicits no heat from the stone. He is the anchor. His ring is the magnet. You will understand this when the time comes.
Here, Catherine’s neat hand loosened, the letters growing larger and less defined.
Oh, William. My William. You have delivered my letter. Go now my love. You stayed far longer than you should.
And then came lines similar to those Minerva had already read in Catherine’s journal.
The north corner. The old ones knew. Bind it. Bury it. Foundation stones in the corner. You must…
Minerva sat for a time after she finished reading, the letter in her hands. The cold of the room pricked her skin like a thousand tiny pins. Finally, she rose and lifted the candle. She went to the door and paused there. Then she turned to the warped mirror, certain she saw a shape in the glass.
“You can go, William,” she said. “If you want to. She is not here anymore. But I think you know that.” She paused as the shape in the glass shifted and the cold receded. “I will take care of the house. I promise you that.”
And then she left the room, closing the door behind her.