“Gwyneth!” she exclaimed, as though the gloom had cast some doubt upon the matter.
“Daria. How lovely,” Gwyneth exclaimed back, trying to remember exactly when the Sproules had somehow become a fixture around the tea table. “And Raven. What a surprise. How are you?”
“Much better now,” he said meaningfully, having worked his bite into a less obtrusive position. Like his sister, he was fair and stocky, with a beak like a jungle bird and practically no chin. It was an odd combination, she thought. But what would he care what anybody thought? His father was Sir Weldon Sproule; his family had lived at Sproule Manor for two hundred years, and owned most of the pastures and small farms in the protected river valley east of Sealey Head. Raven was heir to the lot. Except for Aislinn House, which had begun crumbling while Sproule Manor was only a wish in an ambitious farmer’s heart, nothing in Sealey Head was more stately than Raven’s pedigree.
“Now,” he added, in case Gwyneth hadn’t quite understood him, “that you’re here. Your aunt said you must have been upstairs writing your stories for the children.”
“Bad, bad for the complexion.” Daria waggled a finger chidingly, then bit into a tart with the other hand. Her eyes widened again; she looked reproachfully at Aunt Phoebe, who had pulled Dulcie onto her knee and was being charmed by her. Rhubarb, Gwyneth guessed. She plucked the tart from Daria’s fingers before Daria dropped it into the umbrella stand made from some unfortunate pachyderm’s foot.
“Never mind that. Have a seed cake instead.”
“What are your stories about?” Raven asked. “I hope there are horses in them.”
“Or pirates,” Daria added with enthusiasm. “Great, hairy pirates with gold in their ears who are tamed and civilized by love. I read one like that just last week.”
“Oh, novels,” Raven said restively, glancing under the lid of an oddly hairy wooden box. “I can’t bear to read novels. Why sit still in a chair reading about somebody else’s life when you could be living your own?”
“Good question,” Gwyneth said, licking jam off her finger. Her aunt swiveled an eye at her; she lowered her hand hastily. “I think—”
“I mean, I’d rather ride,” Raven went on, encouraged. “Or you could sit around a good fire with your companions and talk. Why do something so solitary?”
“How else could I meet a pirate?” Daria demanded.
“Why would you want to? I’m sure they never bathe, and they wouldn’t know what to do with a cup of tea. Pour rum into the teapot and drink through the spout, no doubt.”
“Not my pirates,” Daria said firmly. “Mine would be the well-brought up, sensitive types, who were driven to the sea through no fault of their own, and welcome any chance to escape from their debauchery.”
“Bauchery,” Dulcie echoed happily from her aunt’s knee, and Phoebe’s spine straightened abruptly against the wicker.
“However did we get on such a subject?” she wondered to Gwyneth, as though her niece was the one who had invited pirates into their tea party.
“Not a clue,” Gwyneth murmured, and groped for a subject. “How are your horses?” she asked Raven, and he was off into knees and hocks and hoof infections. Daria put her hand to her mouth, yawned delicately, and shifted closer to Gwyneth, while Raven, beamed at by both Phoebe and Dulcie, wandered toward the warmth.
“We came to ask you to ride with us tomorrow,” Daria said softly. “We must pay a visit to Aislinn House. My mother is sending Lady Eglantyne some novels to read in bed, and an herbal pillow. She finds them very comforting when she can’t sleep.” She lowered her voice even further. “Dr. Grantham says Lady Eglantyne may not live much longer. She’s old and very frail.”
“But what—” Gwyneth said incoherently, thinking of the huge, quiet, melancholy house, the few servants left in it, most of them as old as Lady Eglantyne.
“The doctor advised her to summon her heir from Landringham.” Daria gave Gwyneth the full force of her round, green stare. “It is immeasurably exciting.”
Gwyneth opened her mouth again, was distracted by Dulcie’s laughter. The sight of Raven on his hands and knees, his hair in his eyes like a pony’s, arms and legs pumping rhythmically up and down, rendered her speechless.
“Raven, whatever are you doing?” his sister cried.
“I’m being a perfect trotter.”
Dulcie crowed again; even Phoebe had begun to laugh. Gwyneth closed her mouth. No, she told herself adamantly. I can’t like him just because he makes the baby laugh.
“What a girl it is,” Daria sighed fondly. “Your tiny sister is already turning heads. So, tomorrow. Will you come with us?”
“Of course she will,” Aunt Phoebe said briskly, keeping one eye firmly on priorities, even in the midst of revelry, and that, the speechless Gwyneth thought, was that.
Later that evening, after Dulcie had been put to bed, she read the beginning of her new story to the twins.
“ ‘The Bell at Sealey Head.’ ”
“Not the bell again,” Crispin groaned, and Pandora clouted him lightly with her knuckles.
“Be quiet. Go on,” she encouraged her sister. “I’m sure it will be wonderful.”
They were both thirteen. A spiky age, Gwyneth remembered. Crispin was growing gawky, and Pandora moody, inclined to bursting into a temper or tears for no articulated reason. For the first time in his life, Crispin was taller than his twin, and already talking of following their older brother, Rufus, to sea. They had their father’s chestnut hair and their mother’s purple-blue eyes, a striking combination of wood-land colors that Gwyneth suspected would survive the season of gracelessness, the fits and starts of temperament, the readjustments of the bones, and bloom overnight into beauty.
“Thank you,” she said gravely.
They were in the spacious library, the most comfortable room in the house, with its thick layers of carpets, the broad, ample chairs and sofas, the wide fireplace, the potted palms behind which their father had screened himself to pore over some papers. Gwyneth sat on a peculiar hourglass-shaped leather seat with arched wooden legs that her father said was a yak saddle, or some such. The twins sprawled on the green velvet sofa, Pandora hugging an embroidered pillow in her arms in anticipation.
Gwyneth cleared her throat and began.
Suppose.
Suppose one day long ago the little fishing town of Sealey Head had come to very dire straits. Great storms all winter kept the boats in the harbor, and in the spring, the fish, driven southward down the coast, or far out to sea, forgot to come back to be caught and eaten. Suppose, in spring, the boats went out and came back with nothing, and the rain, having fallen with all its might all winter, had simply grown depleted in the clouds. It was renewing itself busily within the floating vapors above, but could not yet fall. So the seedlings in the fields of Sir Magnus Sproule’s magnificent farm were drooped and wilting.
Suppose the disasters did not end there.
Suppose the Inn at Sealey Head, exposed on its bluff facing the tumultuous waves, had begun, over the winter, to melt away. Its walls, battered by briny spindrift and rain, grew swollen and soft; its stones cracked under the lash of water and salt. Rooms leaked; travelers left in high dudgeon, complaining of water dripping into their beds as they slept. The stable roof fell in; all the feed moldered in the wet. To make matters much, much worse, a portion of the coast road just south of Sealey Head had been buried under boulders when the towering cliff it passed under collapsed in all the rain. The boulders had torn a portion of the road away, so there was nothing but a long, dangerous ravine from the top of the cliff to the great rocks in the sea below. Those traveling along the coast were advised to make a wide circle around Sealey Head. The town suffered from the lack of business, as did, very keenly, the innkeeper, Anscom Cauley, and his family. He was forced to let his stableman go, then his housekeeper, then, unfortunate man, his cook; Mrs. Cauley had to do all the work herself.