He paused, thrown off-balance by a ridiculous jolt of unease. Her eyes were bloodshot, the irises a peculiar marbled blue like flawed bottle-glass, and there was a vivid crimson splotch in one eye, as though a capillary had burst. It made it seem as though she looked at him sideways, even though she was staring at him straight on.
“You’re on the London train!” She nodded in excitement. “I need to get back.”
“I’m sorry.” He spun and walked off as quickly as he could without breaking into a run. Behind him he heard footsteps, and again the same wrenching cry.
“Have you seen him?”
He did run then, as the woman screamed expletives and a shower of gravel pelted his back.
He reached his rental car, his heart pounding. He looked over his shoulder, jumped inside and locked the doors before pulling out into the street. As he drove off, he caught a flash in the rear-view mirror of the woman sidling in the other direction, unlit cigarette still twitching between her fingers.
When he arrived back at the cottage, he found Thomsa and Harry sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by the remains of lunch, sandwich crusts and apple cores.
“Oh, hello.” Thomsa looked up, smiling, and patted the chair beside her. “Did you go to The Tinners for lunch?”
“Penzance.” Jeffrey sat and dropped his map onto the table. “I think I’ll head out again, then maybe have dinner at the pub.”
“He wants to see the fogou,” said Thomsa. “He went earlier but couldn’t find it. There is a fogou, isn’t there, Harry? Out by Zennor Hill?”
Jeffrey hesitated, then said, “A friend of mine told me about it—she and my wife saw it when they were girls.”
“Yes,” said Harry after a moment. “Where the children’s writer lived. Some sort of ruins there, anyway.”
Jeffrey kept his tone casual. “A writer?”
“I believe so,” said Thomsa. “We didn’t know him. Someone who stayed here once went looking for him, but he wasn’t home—this was years ago. The old Golovenna Farm.”
Jeffrey pointed to the seemingly random network of lines that covered the map, like crazing on a piece of old pottery. “What’s all this mean?”
Harry pulled his chair closer and traced the boundaries of Cardu with a dirt-stained finger. “Those are the field systems—the stone walls.”
“You’re kidding.” Jeffrey laughed. “That must’ve driven someone nuts, getting all that down.”
“Oh, it’s all GPS and satellite photos now,” said Thomsa. “I’m sorry I didn’t have this map earlier, before you went for your walk.”
“It’ll be on this survey.” Harry angled the map so the sunlight illuminated the area surrounding Cardu. “This is our cove, here…”
They pored over the ordnance survey. Jeffrey pointed at markers for hut circles and cairns, standing stones and tumuli, all within a hand’s-span of Cardu, as Harry continued to shake his head.
“It’s this one, I think,” Harry said at last, and glanced at his sister. He scored a square half-inch of the page with a blackened fingernail, minute Gothic letters trapped within the web of field systems.
CHAMBERED CAIRN
“That looks right,” said Thomsa. “But it’s a ways off the road. I’m not certain where the house is—the woman who went looking for it said she roamed the moor for hours before she came on it.”
Jeffrey ran his finger along the line marking the main road. “It looks like I can drive to here. If there’s a place to park, I can just hike in. It doesn’t look that far. As long as I don’t get towed.”
“You shouldn’t get towed,” said Thomsa. “All that land’s part of Golovenna, and no one’s there. He never farmed it, just let it all go back to the moor. You’d only be a mile or so from Zennor if you left your car. They have musicians on Thursday nights, some of the locals come in and play after dinner.”
Jeffrey refolded the map. When he looked up, Harry was gone. Thomsa handed him an apple.
“Watch for the bogs,” she said. “Marsh grass, it looks sturdy but when you put your foot down it gives way and you can sink under. Like quicksand. They found a girl’s body ten years back. Horses and sheep, too.” Jeffrey grimaced and she laughed. “You’ll be all right—just stay on the footpaths.”
He thanked her, went upstairs to exchange his overcoat for a windbreaker, and returned to his car. The clouds were gone: the sun shone high in a sky the summer blue of gentians. He felt the same surge of exultation he’d experienced that morning, the sea-fresh wind tangling the stems of daffodils and iris, white gulls crying overhead. He kept the window down as he drove up the twisting way to Cardu, and the honeyed scent of gorse filled the car.
The road to Zennor coiled between hedgerows misted green with new growth and emerald fields where brown-and-white cattle grazed. In the distance a single tractor moved so slowly across a black furrow that Jeffrey could track its progress only by the skein of crows that followed it, the birds dipping then rising like a black thread drawn through blue cloth.
Twice he pulled over to consult the map. His phone didn’t work here—he couldn’t even get the time, let alone directions. The car’s clock read 14:21. He saw no other roads, only deeply rutted tracks protected by stiles, some metal, most of weathered wood. He tried counting stone walls to determine which marked the fields Harry had said belonged to Golovenna Farm, and stopped a third time before deciding the map was all but useless. He drove another hundred feet, until he found a swathe of gravel between two tumbledown stone walls, a rusted gate sagging between them. Beyond it stretched an overgrown field bisected by a stone-strewn path.
He was less than a mile from Zennor. He folded the map and jammed it into his windbreaker pocket along with the apple, and stepped out of the car.
The dark height before him would be Zennor Hill. Golovenna Farm was somewhere between there and where he stood. He turned slowly, scanning everything around him to fix it in his memory: the winding road, intermittently visible between walls and hedgerows; the ridge of cliffs falling down to the sea, book-ended by the dark bulk of Gurnards Head in the southwest and Zennor Head to the northeast. On the horizon were scattered outcroppings that might have been tors or ruins or even buildings. He locked the car, checked that he had his phone, climbed over the metal gate and began to walk.
The afternoon sun beat down fiercely. He wished he’d brought a hat, or sunglasses. He crossed the first field in a few minutes, and was relieved to find a break in the next wall, an opening formed by a pair of tall, broad stones. The path narrowed here, but was still clearly discernible where it bore straight in front of him, an arrow of new green grass flashing through ankle-high turf overgrown with daisies and fronds of young bracken.
The ground felt springy beneath his feet. He remembered Thomsa’s warning about the bogs, and glanced around for something he might use as a walking stick. There were no trees in sight, only wicked-looking thickets of blackthorn clustered along the perimeter of the field.
He found another gap in the next wall, guarded like the first by two broad stones nearly as tall as he was. He clambered onto the wall, fighting to open his map in the brisk wind, and examined the survey, trying to find some affinity between the fields around him and the crazed pattern on the page. At last he shoved the map back into his pocket, set his back to the wind and shaded his eyes with his hand.
It was hard to see—he was staring due west, into the sun—but he thought he glimpsed a black bulge some three or four fields off, a dark blister within the haze of green and yellow. It might be a ruin, or just as likely a farm or outbuildings. He clambered down into the next field, crushing dead bracken and shoots of heather; picked his way through a breach where stones had fallen and hurried until he reached yet another wall.