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He half-heard the landlord wittering on about admission fees for various local attractions, while his mind was turning his whole life, since the day at the duck pond, upside down.
‘You can drink from the source,’ he suddenly heard the landlord saying, very clearly, ‘for only a ha’penny a cup. The waters are, if I do say so, as beneficial to the health as anything you could procure from any of the more fashionable resorts.’
He grimaced. What the man meant, of course, was that they tasted as foul.
Though the landlord must have noticed his lack of interest, he would not stop.
‘Another very good reason for making the climb is the ice house whose entrance lies there. You can descend via man-made steps into a series of caves which stay at a constant temperature all year round. Round these parts, many such caves are used to mature cheese…’
Cheese! Good God, what did he care for cheese? He’d just discovered Clare hadn’t rebuffed him. That she had never believed the proposal had been made in earnest. It explained so clearly why, after that, she behaved as though he’d been guilty of insulting her. Because she’d thought he’d been mocking her.
‘…but due to a unique combination of factors, our caves keep at a very low temperature and are therefore used to store snow, which is brought down from the moorlands in winter and naturally compacts into ice.’
Just as his heart had compacted into ice once he’d sworn he didn’t need Clare, nor the comfort and warmth she represented.
‘It sounds like an extremely unpleasant experience,’ he said when the landlord paused to draw breath. ‘Grubbing about in some dark and dingy caves.’
And he should know. All his encounters with women, after Clare’s rejection, had become grubby, sordid little affairs. His expectations of the entire female sex sinking to such depths he’d even treated Lady Harriet, on their first meeting, with such disdain she’d lashed out at him with her riding crop.
‘Well, since it is such a splendid day you might naturally prefer to visit the beach to the far side of the cliff gardens. It contains what I am told by experts is a most fascinating selection of shells and fossils. You may descend to the beach by means of steps, provided by our town council—’
‘On payment of a fee?’
‘The price is included in your ticket to the gravel walk,’ said the landlord, oblivious to his sarcasm. Though Clare darted him a reproachful look.
‘There is no sea bathing, unfortunately, because the beach shelves so steeply. And the large pebbles would hinder the progress of bathing machines. Besides which there are strong currents close in to the shore which make swimming inadvisable—’
Rawcliffe flinched. Mentioning those currents only brought his reason for coming here to the forefront of his mind. Archie’s drowning. And the need to discover what the hell he’d been doing in the water when he couldn’t swim. At all.
‘If we had been interested in sea bathing,’ put in Clare hastily, ‘we would have gone to one of the resorts where it is advertised. Isn’t that so, my lord?’
She was my lording him now? When before he’d rebuked her for hugging him she’d at least ventured as far as using his title.
‘Well, then, you might like to know that you can obtain a spectacular view, over both ours and the neighbouring bay, from the cliffs which you can reach by walking across a short stretch of moorland which you can easily access from a track that runs behind the cottages you are renting. It is the kind of view any artist would wish to capture on canvas.’
‘Should one happen to be staying nearby,’ he said curtly, hoping that the fellow would understand his total lack of interest in art from the tone of his voice and cease pestering them.
‘It sounds lovely,’ said Clare, shooting him a dagger glance from behind the landlord’s back. ‘Thank you so much for telling us. A walk up to the cliff tops sounds just the thing.’
The landlord turned and bowed to her.
‘And thank you so much for the lovely plate of cakes,’ she continued, waving her hand in the direction of the table upon which the waiter had deposited them. ‘And the tea.’ She smiled. ‘Just what I was wanting.’
