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Tynan, with some assistance from Cad, scrambled down to her. Drawing her tenderly to her feet, he held her close. At first, it seemed she was too shocked to speak. Eventually, gesturing toward the churning darkness of the Atlantic fury below her, she said simply, “He is gone.” Covering her face with her hands, sobs wracked her slender body. “Oh, Tynan, my love. Eddie is gone.”
I rose to my feet, but my knees trembled and began to give way. Cad caught me up in his arms, and I subsided gratefully against him. “He is at peace at last, bouche,” he murmured into my hair.
I shook my head sadly. “I hope you may be right, but Eddie told me once that his soul would never know peace. I think he feared that they—Uther, Arwen, even Demelza who saw him as Uther returned to her—would not let him rest, even in death.”
The next morning, daylight added the final sorry details to the story. Deep gouges in the grassy slope that led to the cliff edge told their own tale. Eddie’s black greatcoat had been flung down on the rocky shelf where, it seemed, Lucy had tried to restrain him. Farther down the steep precipice, my scarf, which he had flaunted in place of a cravat, was caught on the branches of a single scrubby tree that clung obstinately to the rocks. The churning ocean below us sounded out its victorious serenade.
* * *
The Jago crypt sat directly behind St Petroc church. Guarded by statues of angels, the imposing wooden doors bore the Athal coat of arms. Lucent in tenebris. Shine in darkness. The words at once so poignant and yet so sinister. Cad and I lingered awhile after the other mourners had returned to the house.
“He was my friend,” I said quietly, pressing my hand against the crypt door in a final gesture of farewell. “Yet I couldn’t help him.”
“The damage was done long before you met him, bouche. In truth, it was done long before he was born. But Eddie loved you, you know. In the end, he couldn’t kill you, and given the torture his mind was going through, that speaks volumes about the power of his feelings for you.”
“Did you know it was him all along? Some of the things you said implied it.” We had not really spoken of it. In the period between Eddie’s death and his funeral, we had tried to focus on loving each other. That had been what helped us heal, if “healing” was the right word.
“No. If I had known for sure, or even had anything concrete to take to Miller, I would have spoken, of course. He was my brother, but I could not have allowed another girl to lose her life to him. All I had were suspicions, nothing more. The fact that the girls all looked alike and looked like our mother, for one thing. But I could never quite believe it was him, that my brother Eddie was the murderer.”
“Why did he hate you so?”
“I think perhaps it was because I knew him so well. I could see behind the facade he showed the world, and it was that he hated more than me, the person. I still saw the scared, scarred little boy and it didn’t fit the image he wanted to present.”
We had been in Paris, on our honeymoon, when the letter came from Lucy informing us that a body had been washed up several miles south of Athal. Tynan had suffered a relapse of his illness and was too unwell to go and identify the body. Although it was highly unusual for a woman to undertake such a task, Lucy had gone in his stead. Given the condition of the body, it was impossible to say for certain that it was Eddie, but she was able to confirm Inspector Miller’s belief that it seemed highly likely it was him. Leaving our elegant hotel on the Champs-Élysées, Cad and I had returned to say this final farewell to Eddie.
“Will we be able to have children, Cad?” I asked as we made our way slowly up the cliff path toward the house. It had been an unspoken question between us since our subdued wedding day two weeks after Eddie’s death. I thought of him and of Eleanor, who was beginning to show more signs of life, although she had not yet spoken or stirred from her bed. I tried not to think of Uther and Demelza. “Could we ever be sure they would not be tainted by the Jago legacy?”
He stopped and drew me into his arms. On one side the ocean roared an angry rebuke to the cliffs and on the other, Athal House slumbered in the early spring sunlight. I still had that overwhelming sense that I belonged here. Perhaps that feeling was more powerful than the words Cad spoke.
