“But you’re giving Summerbourne to Danny. You’re scared of what Laura might tell me.”
The flame dips farther. Vera’s tone is almost reasonable, almost convincing.
“I’m giving Summerbourne to Danny,” she says, “because I want him to settle down. You know I don’t like him being away, overseas all the time. I told you I’ll buy you your own house, Seraphine. Somewhere nearby. I never knew which of you...” She glances at Danny and back to me, starts again. “This way you’ll both be here. Close. Safe.”
I stare at her. “But—” I don’t know which aspect frustrates me the most: that she doesn’t care that my attachment to Summerbourne is so much stronger than Danny’s; that she thinks she has the right to manipulate Danny’s life choices; that she didn’t foresee that Danny would hand the house over to me anyway. She’s devoted so much of her life to keeping ussafe, and yet so little to actually understanding us.
I grasp at the sentence she failed to finish.
“What do you mean, you never knew which of us...?” I ask her. “You mean you doubted both of us?”
Vera flinches but holds my gaze.
“It’s not important,” she says. “I’ve never known anything, not for sure.Sheknew something”—she shoots a look at Laura—“but it’s none of her business, or anyone else’s. You’re both my grandchildren. And even if you’re not—” She swings the torch back up, back toward Laura’s chest, but when she turns her face to me, her expression slides into something close to pleading. “I just didn’t know, Seraphine. Ruth told me—I mean, she was ill, of course, confused, but she told me—that she’d done something terrible.”
“What?” Edwin lurches toward her. “When? Gran? When did she say that?”
Vera grimaces. “When I was trying to talk her away from the cliff edge. She was talking nonsense, about someone coming to take her baby. I thought she’d become obsessed with the village tales—you know, those awful things they used to whisper. That twins never survived at Summerbourne—one or the other, yes, but never both.”
“No,” Edwin says, his voice hoarse.
“It wasn’t that,” I say, but I think only Danny hears me. He grips my arm tighter.
“She was confused,” Vera says. “Hysterical. I tried to persuade her, I tried to pull her away from the edge, but every time I reached out, she—” She shudders. “And she had a moment. Her foot, at the edge. She shoved me away. She said, ‘I’ve done something terrible, Mother.’ I couldn’t—I didn’t ask her. It was too late. She stepped back.”
Edwin groans and curls over. Danny’s grip on my arm is tighter than ever.
The torch sways, and for a moment I think she’s going to turn it off, that it’s all over. But when she speaks again, her voice is harsh.
“It didn’t matter after that, whether one of you had come from somewhere else. And it doesn’t matter now. We’re fine as we are. That’s why I have to get rid of this woman.” Vera raises the torch and swings it at Laura, and the flame roars louder. “She wants to break our family apart, and I won’t let her.”
Laura screams as the flame singes the fabric of her cardigan.
“Gran!” Edwin grabs for Vera’s arm, but Vera swings the torch toward him and he stumbles back. Laura lifts a flap of smoking fabric away from her body with trembling fingers.
A car door slams in the lane behind us.
Vera jabs the torch at Edwin to keep him back, and then swings it in a wild arc toward Laura’s face. As Laura raises her arm, a deep voice calls out from the lane behind us.
“Vera Blackwood.”
The torch sways, inches from Laura’s bandage and her hair. Vera’s focus jumps to a spot behind us. Danny and I hold on to each other, and I keep my gaze fixed on the flame.
“Martin?” Vera says.
The steady crunch of gravel comes closer, and Martin Larch brushes past me, stopping in front of Vera.
“Ah, Mrs. Blackwood,” he says. He looks around at the scene as if he has all the time in the world. “This is a funny old thing, eh?”
Vera lowers the torch slowly, and finally, I feel I can breathe again.
Martin beams at Vera benignly. “Well now. This reminds me a bit of that day you caught me and Billy Bradshaw fighting, out by the boat sheds, all those years ago, d’you remember?”
Vera’s pupils are enormous. She nods slowly.
“Sixteen, we were, me and Billy. Remember what you said to me?‘Violence never solves anything, Martin Larch,’you said.”
Vera stares at him. The flame droops to the gravel where the stones shimmer and crackle.
