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Alex took the opportunity to fill Magnús in on what exactly a pasty was, opening the bag to show him the fat half-moon pastry cases, telling him how they were designed for the dirty hands of Cornish miners to hold the crimped crust and keep the beef, potato and swede pie clean and safe to eat. Magnús had raised his fine brows when she told him there was even a version of the pasty that had a divide down the middle and one side was filled with meat and the other filled with sweet dessert.
‘What did they do with the crust?’ Magnús wanted to know.
‘Hmm?’
‘The miners?’
‘Oh, I’ve no idea? Feed it to the canary?’
‘Huh?’ Now Magnús was lost.
‘Never mind,’ she said, waving a dismissive hand and laughing before glancing back at theDagaliennow a good distance away and looking far less forlorn and battered from here. Alex liked being unseen out here on the empty beach and, from the set of Magnús’s shoulders, he too seemed to be relaxing more the farther they wandered from Clove Lore’s prying eyes.
After a moment’s silence when they both took in the wide view of the clouds far out on the water, the pale blue overhead, and the dark, dripping cliffs to their right, Alex found herself wanting to get back to the way they’d been when it was just the two of them talking on the boat, or in the bookshop’s café. Could she re-establish that easy connection now there was nobody around spying on them or interrupting?
‘You said you’re not much of a boat person?’ she tried. ‘Your ancestors are Vikings, aren’t they? Sailing’s in your blood.’
Magnús frowned at the word. ‘Nei, coffee and books are in my blood. I like dry land.’
‘Me too, actually. The dry land thing.’
Magnús nodded, apparently accepting that a person could arrive in a port in a storm wearing a great, waxed ferryman’s coat and still not think of themselves as a sailor at all. ‘OK,’ he said.
‘You like books about Vikings, at least?’ she asked.
‘Já, of course. I was raised on Icelandic saga and Norse mythology.’ Now he was getting enthusiastic. ‘Everyone I know was.’
‘Makes you proud?’ Alex asked, thinking of the Cornish myths her dad had told her: Tristan and Iseult, Merlin and Arthur, Cormoran the giant, and the mermaid of Zennor. She’d been so deeply steeped in those legends they’d become a part of her identity as much as any lessons learned at school.
‘Sure,’ Magnús said, ‘but being brought up on tales of legendary men doing brave things and killing monsters doesn’t do much for your ego. Those guys are remembered for a reason.’
Alex broke into a smile. ‘I’m not going to feel sorry for you because you’re not Thor.’
‘Let me feel sorry for myself then. I don’t even sail. My ancestors are ashamed of me.’ Magnús was smiling, flashing straight white teeth and unwittingly drawing Alex’s eyes briefly to his lips before she realised she was in danger of staring. ‘Boats in books? I know those,’ he said, apparently not noticing the fight within Alex to avert her gaze.
His voice was so light and laughing, Alex knew they had stumbled into his comfort zone. This man was soothed by storytelling and escaping in books in ways she recognised in herself.
‘Do you know about Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir?’ he asked. ‘Ah, look, over there,’ he said, pointing to the white water falling down the vertical black rocks; the waterfall was just becoming visible now they were rounding a shallow promontory. Their boots carried them towards it over increasingly large, smooth rocks.
‘Goodrid-tor-barn-otter?’ Alex echoed.
He repeated the name and Alex attempted it again. Magnús’s level look told her she’d garbled it.
‘Close enough,’ he let her off the hook. ‘Gudrid was from Iceland.’
‘I figured that much.’
‘And she sailed all the way to America five hundred years before Christopher Columbus had even seen his first bath tub.’
‘What? You’re making it up.’
‘Nei, it’s all in theVinland Sagas. She had the good sense to come straight back home and forget to tell anyone about the place.’
‘Really?’ Alex stopped, a few feet before the waterfall, wanting to look at Magnús even more than the natural wonder of the waterfall.
Magnús stopped too. ‘Gudrid was brave and pioneering and, as you proved, almost totally forgotten.’ The heavy pattering music of the waterfall seeped into their conversation and they broke their fixed gaze and turned to face it, but Magnús talked on. ‘She died an old lady on her farm. Every time I read the old tales I wonder how she lived with the memories of doing something like that, so amazing and unexpected, sailing right off the edge of the map, and then just going back to her old way of life as if she hadn’t seen a whole new world.’
Both of them thought hard, lifting their faces to where the water cascaded over the cliff. The water had worn the rock precipice into a deep bite high above them.
