The dry voice came from the bedroom. Sarah jerked around in alarm.
Her father stood there, supporting himself on his silver-topped cane. His face was mottled, and the black-and-gold silk dressing gown that had once been expensive fell loose around his thin body. He breathed heavily.
“You shouldn’t be up!” Martha hissed. She gave the baby to Sarah and brought a chair quickly to the fire. Then she tried to take his arm.
“Don’t fuss me, woman!” He lowered himself stiffly, chest heaving. It took him a painful minute to catch his breath; then he glared at Sarah. “So. You seriously expect me to go back to Darkwater Hall.”
“I thought . . .”
“You didn’t think!” His hands shook on the stained silver knob. “Not if you imagined that I would even cross the threshold with that . . . upstart living there. See my daughter a skivvy in her own house! Stay cooped in some attic and watch him . . . sitting in my chairs . . . eating from my table . . . taking the very food from our mouths!” His breath rattled; he spat into the fire. “What sort of Trevelyan have I bred? I’d starve here first.”
Azrael had been right, she thought grimly. This whole mess had come from pride, and it was still crippling their lives. Well, she’d be the one to end it.
“I’m going,” she said, firmly but quietly. “We need the money and he wants to make amends. If you don’t approve, Papa, then stay here. We can afford the rent.”
Martha had taken the baby into the tiny scullery. They heard him wail in dismay as he was washed.
Her father looked at her. He was so shrunken, every breath an effort. The silver cane and silk gown she had known all her life looked pathetic now, soiled bits of the past that he clung to stubbornly. His weakness frightened her. She came and crouched by the chair.
“Don’t forbid me. Because I’d have to go anyway. I know it’s hard. But would you rather me be some fishwife, stinking of herring, or go cap in hand to the workhouse? At least this is a job, something respectable.” She waited, but he didn’t answer.
They both knew she had to go, but he would never admit to it.
She stood up wearily. “I’ll get my things together. I’ll be home on my day off.”
It wasn’t until she reached the trundle bed that he put his head in his hands.
“How in God’s name did we sink to this?” he muttered.
There was little to pack—a few clothes, her mother’s cameo brooch, an old notebook, all stuffed into one of Jack’s sacks. He had come in from the fishing and was watching, uneasy. “Any trouble, Sarah,” he muttered, “and you come back. Just come back.”
“Thanks, Jack,” she said, tying the sack up. Her father had gone back to his room. She glanced at the closed curtain. “Look after him, won’t you?”
“Don’t you worry. We will.”
Outside, she walked to the stile, climbed it, and looked back at the cottage. On the doorstep, Martha was waving the baby’s tiny fist.
In the deep lane the wind died away. Between the stone walls a flock of bramblings scattered into the bare thorns of gorse. She walked quickly. There was no point looking back. And there was something inside her, she knew, that was glad, that wanted those warm, comfortable rooms, the soft carpets, the sense of being someone.
She took the shortcut over the fields and into Darkwater woods. Usually she would have avoided this track, but she felt reckless and free, and it was quicker than walking up the drive. Most of the Darkwater estate was farmland, with small wooded ravines and combes in the folds of the cliffs. Every bay and cove along this coast belonged to it, every shipwreck, all the rents of the tenantry in the tiny hamlets, Cooper’s Cross, Durrow, Mamble, even the tollgate on the road to Truro. And these woods around Darkwater Hall, an ancient wildwood hardly thinned or managed, threaded with mysterious paths.
She knew the way. But the drizzle thickened, a gray soaking mist moving in from the sea as the short afternoon waned. It hung around her like a fog. She stopped, one hand on a damp oak trunk, listening.
The wood was silent. No birds. No gulls. Only the sea mist, closing quietly.
For a moment, doubt about the whole thing overtook her. She weighed the sack, uneasy. Maybe she should go back. Maybe Martha was right. Then, just ahead, in the grayness, something loomed, and she groped toward it through the brambles and felt its cold hollows with her fingers.
Stone.
It was one of the Quoits.
She jerked her fingers back instantly. The Devil’s Quoits, everyone called them. The story was that the devil had thrown them from the cliffs, aiming at the tower of the church, but they’d fallen here, a line of three leaning stones. That was another superstition. It might suit Jack and Martha, but not her. In one of the books in the school, she’d read that stones like these were put up by people thousands of years ago. Still, she didn’t like them.
They leaned in the fog. Faint lichen grew on them, green splotches of spores, and they were scored with long grooves, as if by great claws. They barred her way. She’d go home.
Not far behind, a dog growled.
The sound made her flesh crawl. She turned and looked back.
A padding of paws rustled and pattered in the thick drifts of invisible leaves. And then, far back in the smothers of drizzle, a great black shape was running toward her, muscled and lean, tongue lolling out, eyes like tiny red coals.
She turned and fled. Breathless and gasping she struggled frantically through branches that whipped into her face, thickets of conifer and holly. All the fog seemed to be panting at her heels; behind her it thudded as if a pack of spectral hounds, dark as mist, was hunting her down, running with her, and as she ducked under a yew into darkness she stifled a scream, feeling a hot wet tongue on her neck, teeth catching her shawl. The fabric tore; yelling, she struck out at nothing with the sack, stumbling back out of branches into sudden space, a clipped hedge, a gravel walk.
At once she turned and raced along it, under the dark fog-wreathed mass of the house toward the slot of light that was opening. Yellow lamp light streamed out; it sent her shadow out behind her, stretched and flitting, and she had a sudden horror that the shadow-hound would grab it and gnaw it, but even as she turned to look the door was pulled wide and the terrace walk above the sunken garden was empty but for drifts of fog through the light.
“For Gawd’s sake,” a voice said irritably. “I’m not standing ’ere all night!”
Scrab held the lantern up, eyeing her bedraggled breathless panic. Between his feet the cat slithered in, its fur soaked.
She slid in and slammed the door. It felt solid at her back.
Scrab turned. For a moment she thought he was grinning. “Welcome ’ome” was all he said.
seven
The dress was dark blue, with an ivory lace collar. It lay spread on the bed and she stared at it in silent wonder. Scrab dumped the candle on the fireside table. “’Imself says you might not want to get yer breakfast with the workers. So . . .”
“Yes.” She nodded decisively. “I will.”
He shrugged, scattering dandruff. “Please yerself. Servants’ ’all. Seven. Now can a man get to ’is bed?”
She summoned as much dignity as she could. “Yes. Thank you.”
When he had closed the door she dumped the sack on the floor and collapsed onto the bed’s edge, running both hands through her soaked hair. What a way to come home! Because it was home. Or should have been. The thought gave her a sort of courage. Smelling toast, she raised her head and saw on a tiny round table by the fire a tray laid with the same porcelain cup and teapot that she had seen downstairs. Unlacing her boots she kicked them off, washed face and hands in the basin on the washstand, pulled her old nightdress on, and curled luxuriously in the velvet chair, enjoying the small clear flames and eating the toast slowly, its warm golden butter dripping onto her fingers.