“I will, miss.”
I watched him walk back around the corner of the house. I’d noticed a limp the first time I met him, and he had it still.
Planting my hands on my hips, I gazed up toward the chapel. Was Harker out searching for Goosevar this morning? It didn’t seem that the creature was a threat to Harker—likely he could have killed Harker a hundred times over—but still I worried what would happen if they did finally meet.
And what if they don’t?Then Harker was going to have to think again about letting me help him.
I was about to go inside when I noticed a low, woolly cloud creeping past the pool and slowly down toward the cottage. The animals began to fuss and fret again, and soon they had left me alone in the garden.
In spite of yesterday’s brave talk by the pool, I stepped to the back door—but stopped with my fingers gripping the handle as an unexpected sound reached my ears. A strange kind of music that seemed to drift on the breeze.
I’d heard music at church from the organ, and though Da had told me it was the same as the angels played in heaven, it had always sounded more like a foretelling of doom. I’d heard music on the green outside the village during fairs and markets, when there was always dancing—lively music, far more pleasing to a child’s ear. And I’d heard music right here in our cottage, when Da fiddled or Mum sang Irish airs. This was different from all of these, and I wasn’t sure it could even properly be called music. If anything, it was like a blending of out-of-tune fiddle music and Ma’s saddest ballad, but also with sounds like birdsong, rustling barley, grasshoppers clicking, and water over stones. It could not be followed or made sense of, yet I stood there trying.
Fairy tricks.These words came to me in Mum’s brogue. I squeezed my eyes shut and covered my ears, but it didn’t stop the music. And when again I opened my eyes, I found that I’dwandered out onto the heath. My heart took off like a hare, yet the rest of me stood frozen. The low cloud drifted over and around me. Cold, damp air kissed my cheeks and hands.
Run!
But as a crown of tree branches floated toward me through the fog, I felt both my mind and body loosening, like my hair falling over my shoulders when I unpinned it at night.
“What Have You Done to Her?”
Harker
I emerged from the chapel onto the battlements under a silver-sulfide sky that seemed not to care the day was young yet. Which was just as well, since my vision was better on dark days.
Atop the tower, I could indeed see miles in every direction. To the south, the heath sloped away toward Pentivale, where springs hidden by willows, reeds, and bracken formed the headwaters of the River Fal. The Fal Valley, which had been mined for tin since medieval times, was also prime farming and grazing land. Lined by willow scrub and slender birch, the river snaked across Goss Moor on its journey toward Falmouth and the English Channel.
The moor spread to the west of my family’s estate, and overlooking it from the north was Castle Down with its ancient hillfort, Castle an Dinas. Like many sites in Cornwall, it had associations with Arthurian legend. It was also a ceremonial site of pre-Christian peoples.
In the nearer distance to the northwest was St. Gomonda, the parish church, and across from that The Magpie and the whole village of Roche.
Around the margins of the parish, imposing themselves on the view, were the white conical hills of quartz and mica waste from the china clay operations, the area’s most important industry. They were stark and alien interruptions in the pastoral landscape, but without the money from china clay—essentially a decomposed version of the same rock that had built this chapel—a village tearoom in rural Cornwall would be a risky venture indeed.
Mining—whether for tin, copper, or clay—was an integral part of Cornwall’s history. Miners worked six days a week in all seasons, and I imagined it wore a man down. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to excuse Jack Penrose’s behavior toward his sister.
I wasn’t sorry for what I’d done, yet it had probably only made things worse between them, and he was all she had left. It also likely reinforced what Jack already believed about me.You devil.
If I could put a stop to this creature menacing the parish, Mina could at least go back to her job at The Magpie. Of course the return to her old routine would also mean a return to the daily temptations of her walking back and forth—which would be greater now that I’d given in to the bloodlust.
I will need more vital essence.The process was involved, and the Walachian vintage very difficult to acquire, so I’d kept to small batches up to now. But the outer world was encroaching on my sanctuary, and I could no longer afford to scrimp.
My thoughts were drifting from my intended purpose in climbing up here. Over the quiet decades, my mind had learned a habit of running to extremes. When I studied or worked in my laboratory, I was capable of an intense focus that sometimes kept me going for days without rest. When I was idle, I found my thoughts traveling down strange, forking paths, waking from these mental ambles only to discover I wasn’t sure whether minutes or hours (or days) had passed.
Moving slowly along the battlements, I studied the moorstone that littered the ground at the base of this black granite ridge. From the southwest-facing wall, my gaze picked over the ruins of a pre-Christian villageand barrow, from which stone for the chapel had been foraged. Due west, almost to the border that the estate shared with parish church property, lay the family cemetery where I’d buried my father and he’d buried my mother. Finally, the oak wood spread north toward the village almost to the road, like a great shawl flung from the battlements. Until undertaking this search, I couldn’t have said when last I’d walked among those trees, though I’d played there almost daily as a boy.
Roche Rock was a horrible place for a child, growing up with no one for company save my father and old Mr. Pritchard, who’d served as both my tutor and my father’s steward. Before I came of age, I’d sometimes been allowed to accompany my father’s agent—one of a long line of Carews—on errands and even trips to Bodmin, and in that way learned something of the wider world that didn’t come from books.
Once we went as far as St. Austell, and I saw the sea. The relentless assault of the waves on the strand, the still darkness of the Atlantic, beyond the channel, that seemed to stretch for centuries ... I had felt a kinship with it that I’d been too young to understand.
These excursions had felt like a game, as I’d been required to pretend I was Mr. Carew’s nephew to avoid drawing attention to the estate. How many times had I wished that I was, and that we’d never return to this desolate place?
You were lonely even then.My gaze found the pool on the heath, beetle black under the heavy sky. I closed my eyes, but it didn’t prevent her from manifesting in my mind. Yesterday I had studied her profile long enough to paint her, had I the talent for it. The tiniest detail—the outward curve of the Cupid’s bow of her lip—was enough to make even the blood of a cold creature like me run hot.
I should have discouraged her pity. I should have discouraged her concern. Most of all, I should have discouraged her presence. Yet Mina Penrose was the only light to have flickered in my far too long shadow of a life.
Glancing down toward her cottage, I noticed a low cloud moving over the ground. My eyes couldn’t penetrate the thick vapor. Suddenmists and fogs, lonely clouds like this one—they had occurred on the estate for as long as I could remember. My father once remarked on it, saying my mother had found them unsettling.
My sluggish heart made what passed for a sudden movement. Had I discovered the reason we’d never seen Goosevar?
