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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Cornish Mysteries
- Sprache: Englisch
Cornwall, 1845. Shilly has always felt a connection to happenings that are not of this world, a talent that has proved invaluable when investigating dark deeds with master of disguise, Anna Drake. The women opened a detective agency with help from their newest member and investor, Mathilda, but six long months have passed without a single case to solve and tensions are growing. It is almost a relief when a man is found dead along the Morwenstow coast and the agency is sought out to investigate. There are suspicions that wreckers plague the coast, luring ships to their ruin with false lights - though nothing has ever been proved. Yet with the local talk of sirens calling victims to the sea to meet their end, could something other-worldly be responsible for the man's death?
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Seitenzahl: 439
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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3
THE MERMAID’S CALL
KATHERINE STANSFIELD
5
For Beth and Rose
6
CONTENTS
ONE
The girl’s scream woke me.
I was used to such starts by then, so I didn’t reach for the candlestick ready to brain a stranger come to harm us. I did what I had done so often since the girl had come into my life. I pushed off the blankets and gathered the sweating weight of her into my arms, sat her up but held her down, against me. That was the best way. I had learnt that over many nights of screams and sobs and words in a way of talking I still didn’t know. She had given up her German words when she was awake, but when she was asleep it was German that was her scream tongue. Only in sleep did she make any noise about what had happened to her.
‘There now,’ I said, and rocked her, though she was no small creature for that, and she was strong, too. Her sleeping body fought me, but I held on, rode it out with her. As I did too often.
She smelt of the harbour, where she had been all day amongst the crab pots. Salt and fish and something else. The ham hock we’d had for our supper. There was her day in her red, clammy skin, in her thick hair brown as the caulk of the boats she loved to watch. This poor girl in my arms. I pressed my cheek against hers. 8I told her it was done now. She was safe, my girl. My poor girl.
Mathilda.
To speak true, we owed the girl debts, we being Anna Drake and me, and I wanted to repay her, truly I did.
Mathilda thrashed and I held tighter, but it was no good. I could feel the muscles in her neck tighten and then her head was shaking. I tried to prise open her lips. On my fingers, a warm wet. Even without the light I knew what it was. Tonight’s dreams were bad.
‘Anna!’ I shouted. She’d have heard the screams already, her room being next to ours, and put the pillow over her head. ‘Anna, please!’
I fought Mathilda’s wild arms and with a thump we tumbled to the floor. My hip was dull with pain but at least now I could get her on her side so she wouldn’t choke on her blood, and then the door opened and there was light.
‘There’s only so much of this Mrs Yeo will put up with,’ Anna said, setting down her candle.
‘Never mind that – Mathilda’s going to bite her tongue clean off!’
‘Where’s the bar?’
‘On the window ledge,’ I said. ‘No – the other side.’
The whites of Mathilda’s eyes rolled, there was sweat above her lip, and I thought of the pony I had seen drown in the marsh. A long time ago. Another life.
‘Quick! Hold her arms.’
Anna scrambled onto the bed next to me and her robe grazed my hand – a slink of cool, fine silk. She pinned Mathilda’s arms behind her back and I got two fingers into the corner of the girl’s mouth, as my father had done to horses to make them take the bit. The clamp of Mathilda’s jaw eased for a heartbeat and I slipped the small bar of much-chewed wood we kept for such purpose between her teeth. All at once she ceased her jerks and thrashes 9and went limp as if dead in my lap. The bar of wood rolled free of her mouth and landed on the floorboard with a wet tap. It left a smear of blood.
For a moment neither Anna nor I spoke, just watched the still-sleeping girl and let the work of our own panic ease from us. It was Anna who broke the silence. It often was.
‘To see what Mathilda saw,’ she said, and tucked a strand of Mathilda’s hair behind her ear. ‘And she’s so young. It’s been more than six months now. Will she ever be free of it?’
I thought of my own terrors. They’d been with me far longer than Mathilda had had hers. I knew she wouldn’t be free for a fair time to come, if at all, but what use was it to say? Anna didn’t like me to speak of my losses. There was nothing to be done but to keep eating bread and breathing and going to sleep.
‘Let’s get her back in bed before she catches a chill,’ Anna said.
Together we hauled the sleeping Mathilda to her feet and then onto the bed. She was shivering now as her sweat cooled, so Anna fetched her blanket and added it to the one I shared with Mathilda.
‘Is it too early to get up or too late to go back to sleep?’ Anna said.
I pushed aside the curtain. The harbour of Boscastle was still dark save for a lamp burning here and there on the boats with night business.
‘Neither,’ I said. ‘Mathilda has woken us in the true middle of the night.’
Anna gave a little smile. ‘That must be some kind of talent. How to sleep after that? You go back to bed, Shilly. I’ll see—’
‘We’ll light the fire, will we?’
‘I suppose we—’
‘And I’ll get the paper.’ I was making for the door before she had a chance to say no, Shilly, it’s too late, no, Shilly, you’ll never learn. No, Shilly, I don’t love you.10
‘Shilly, wait.’
‘You promised you’d teach me, Anna, and it’s been months and I’m still so slow. I’ll light the fire and make the tea, and there’s some of Mrs Yeo’s cake. Not much left, but you can have my—’
‘Your hands, Shilly. Look.’
I looked. My palms were bloodied.
‘Let me fetch a cloth,’ Anna said. ‘I doubt our landlord will welcome blood upstairs as well as down.’
She was speaking of the butcher’s shop. Our rooms were above it.
Anna took the candle and I followed her into the little room she liked to call a parlour but that was more than it earned. Two rickety chairs and a stool. A table that sagged. A patch of damp by the window, shaped like a swan. Still, it was ours, for now at least. I held up my palms to keep the blood from touching anything.
‘You look like a martyr in a painting,’ Anna said.
‘A what?’
‘Someone who dies for others.’ She set to cleaning my hands with a wet cloth. The fire was glowing embers and all the room was kind to me in that moment. Anna, holding my hands.
‘Murdered?’ I said, but soft as embers turning over. Like murdered was a good word.
‘I suppose you could say that. But not the kind of murders we concern ourselves with.’
‘We haven’t concerned ourselves with many of late,’ I said.
It was a poor thing to say. Her hands stilled.
‘There’s only a bit left,’ she said. ‘There – your thumb. You can do the rest. I’ll stir up the fire.’
And she let go of my hands and turned away, only for the poker, only bending low to the grate but I felt the loss of her keenly. It was between us always. What had been once – me and Anna had 11lain together. What might be again? When we had first come to Boscastle I said to myself, Shilly, if you wait. If you wait and let her see you’re not doing the bad things any more. That you are good and work hard at your reading. If you just wait. My God but it was hard not to touch her, to tell her. Some days I wanted to claw my skin from my face it was so hard.
‘What about this cake, then?’ she said, and I nodded and that was that. Our life together.
For now.
TWO
I went to the little room next to the parlour where we kept our few plates and cups and the teapot. Mrs Yeo, our landlady, had brought us the seed cake the day before. Anna had said we should keep some for another day, make it last, and that I couldn’t fathom, for we had money now, plenty of it. We could eat fresh cakes every day, eat them until we were sick and still have money for more.
Our riches were thanks to Mathilda. She had in hair i tance. That was the money of the dead, gifted to Mathilda because she’d been a lady before she met us, in a place called ger man ee. Anna said that was far from here, so far that people spoke a different tongue. It was across the sea. I liked the song of that. Ger man ee, a cross the sea. Mathilda had come to Cornwall for a sad purpose, and found only more sadness here, for in the woods where she’d made her home there was darkness waiting for her – people who wished to do her harm, and she the sweetest creature I had ever known, who wanted only to be loved.
It was a bad business, and Anna and I had saved her from this. Afterwards, when it was over, Anna said Mathilda should give us her money, that it wouldn’t be spending but saving, for 13Anna and I were detectives. We were to start the agency and Anna said Mathilda was an in ves tor and she would get returns. I didn’t know what that meant but Mathilda did, and she’d agreed to Anna’s plan. I had many new words all to do with money since meeting Mathilda. One thing I did know, I wasn’t poor now. I didn’t have to go back to milking cows, which was my work previous and hateful.
But now I asked myself if my thinking was wrong, for even with Mathilda’s money, Anna was all for being careful with our spending. Too careful. I poked the leftover seed cake. It was dry. Some things were better enjoyed at once. There was too much went stale in life.
I took what was left of the cake to the parlour, which was now a room of light for Anna had gathered our candle ends and set them round the table we used for lessons. My heart turned over with joy at the sight of the papers. My papers. For writing and for reading.
Life had changed much since I had first met Anna Drake. That meeting was close on a year before this though I was not wise about the keeping of time so it was her that told me of dates and such. She had come to the moor, where I was living then. It was a bad reason that had brought her – the death of someone I had loved. But goodness had come from it. She had taken me from that place where I had no one, nothing, and given me a new life. Had we done the same for Mathilda? Anna Drake was a great collector of women.
‘I’ll leave the door open,’ I said, ‘to hear Mathilda’s screams.’
‘How restful,’ Anna said. ‘Reading first, then cake. Where did we get to?’
I sat at the table and looked over the pages I had written. That I had written! I had taken to reading easier than writing, truth be told. My writing was not careful, and the ink was devious 14in getting places it had no business being, where there were no words. But on this page now before me there were words in the middle of the whiteness, and I had made them with my own hand. And Anna’s help, of course. That was the bargain we had struck. If I could keep from the drink, she would help me learn reading and writing.
I put my finger under the first word at the top. ‘To day.’ I stopped and looked at her.
‘Keep going.’ She wrapped herself tighter in her silk robe and settled back in her chair.
‘To day ma tild da and shi lie saw three boats.’ My finger plodded along the page as Anna had told me to do when reading, and she was my teacher so I did everything she said. ‘The su san. The me rry ma … ma …’ My mouth was hardening tallow.
‘Merry Maiden,’ Anna said.
‘Me rry may den.’
‘Good. And the next—’
We both stiffened at a noise from the room where Mathilda lay. A moan. The bed creaking beneath her. I waited for the scream, but nothing more came. As if we were one body, Anna and I let our shoulders slump.
‘Would that we were merrier ourselves,’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t want to be the Merry Maidens proper,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘Well, they’re girls turned to stone. For dancing on the Sabbath. You can’t be very merry if you’ve moor stone for a body.’
‘A fair point,’ Anna said.
This pleased me for it meant I was being useful. Anna was a detective and she had asked me to join her in this, to be a detective alongside her. It was a word I hadn’t got to spelling yet. It was tricksy enough to say, and I was still finding my way with the 15work. Some days it was better than milking cows, but others it was worse. Much worse.
‘Shilly?’ She was staring at me, her thin features made narrower still with worry. ‘You were muttering again.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘Are you feeling it, the need to—’
‘No! No, Anna, I promise.’
She put her hand on mine. I took it, but too quick, too eager to press it against my lips. She pulled away. She had loved me once. I had made her cry out with the goodness of my hands and of my mouth.
‘I know you’re trying,’ she said, ‘and I know the effort it must be.’
‘Then why can’t we—’
‘You didn’t tell me the third boat.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘The third boat you saw today. You’re keeping your end of the bargain, Shilly, so I must keep mine.’
‘Yes,’ I managed to whisper, and tried to send from my thoughts the memory of her sharp hip bones and the taut skin between them. My finger sought the last words in the line I had written. ‘The per ince of Way uls.’
‘Very good,’ she said.
‘Very slow, you mean.’ I helped myself to cake.
‘You’re too hard on yourself, Shilly. These things take time.’
‘How long did it take you to learn writing?’ I said.
That set her thinking. Her long thin nose, her thin bloodless lips, were tight with considering. I heard the sound I knew to be her thinking sound, just soft, on the edge of hearing. The tap tap of her false teeth knocking about. You had to know it to hear it, and I did know it for we spent much time together thinking, Anna Drake and I. That was our work. There were other things I’d rather be doing with her. Wait, Shilly. Wait.16
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember learning.’
‘That’s because you were young,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember learning the things I learnt then.’
‘Such as?’
‘How much water pigs drink in summer. Where the blackberries grew best.’
And how to slip free my father’s fists I thought but didn’t say.
What I did say was, ‘Who taught you to write?’
Anna picked up the poker and stirred the fire though it was burning fine enough. She didn’t like questions about herself but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t ask them. Working together meant knowing each other. That was hard going with Anna Drake. Harder than writing. She was easier being her other selves, the ones fashioned from wigs and paints, and clothes with padding sewn inside to give her new bodies. When she was stripped back like this, her own cropped yellow hair showing, she was more a stranger. And a little-seen one at that, for Anna Drake was only like this first thing in the morning or late at night for that was when others wouldn’t see her. These were the best times to turn detective on her, when she had no one to hide behind.
‘The butcher and his wife who took you in,’ I said, to help her, ‘when you were left on their doorstep. The first butcher’s shop you lived in, not this one. It was them that taught you writing?’
She nodded.
‘And then you went to school,’ I said.
Her breath had shortened. Her cheeks were pink. ‘My mother – my adoptive mother, she … Well, she didn’t enjoy good health. She liked to have me with her, so there was no mention of school. You and I have that in common, Shilly.’
‘What was the matter with her?’
‘This cake is rather dry. Some tea, I think.’17
And that was the end of that in ves tig ay shun.
She stood up. ‘I’ll make the tea. You write a new line.’
‘What about?’
‘Whatever takes your fancy,’ she said. ‘What happened after you saw the boats. The weather. Remember what we talked about – say the words aloud before you write them down. Your mouth must make each sound separately.’
She hung the kettle over the fire and went to fetch the teapot. I thought about what to put. There were so many things I wanted to write down, words to own there on the page in my own poor hand, but I wrote so slow and badly that none of them ever got there. I decided to write a line I had been practising – my name is Shilly Williams. I am nineteen years of age.
The first part wasn’t true but that didn’t matter. Anna was all for false names. I wasn’t even sure she was really called Anna Drake but I’d stopped asking her about that for it made no difference and I had to call her something. The second part, about my age, was as true as I could know, not having any family left to ask and being none too certain of the truth when my father had signed me into service at the farm the year before.
That was where I had met Anna, and then together we escaped. We met Mathilda after that, in the woods, and we had a terrible time, Mathilda the worst of it, for people had tried to kill her – a stranger, it was, that first tried to take Mathilda’s life, and then someone who shouldn’t have been a stranger to my poor, sweet girl. And the birds there, in the woods … I shook such thinking away. If I let myself remember that time, then I’d be as wretched as poor Mathilda, biting off my tongue. Anna would have two of us to care for and wouldn’t have any time for detecting, if a case should come to the door. We had got away from the woods and the birds and all the hatred at last. We had escaped, the three of us, 18and now we were in Boscastle which was a good place and we had no need of escaping.
But we did need some work. Anna said we did, to live on, even though we had five hundred pounds from Mathilda. That was hard to fathom. Five hundred sounded plenty to me.
‘The notice is still in the newspaper?’ I asked Anna while we waited for the kettle to boil.
She nodded.
‘And it’s the same one as before, that you showed me?’ I said.
‘It is. Mathilda did a fine job of it.’
‘You mean her drawing?’
‘It’s more draughtsmanship, Shilly. It means—Never mind.’
The notice was placed when we had first come to Boscastle, before I had started my reading proper, so I hadn’t been able to tell the letters then, but I had seen the smart lines Mathilda had put around Anna’s words.
‘Much good the advertisement is doing us, though,’ Anna said. ‘Not a case to speak of.’
‘That’s not true. There was the woman up Trequite Farm.’
Anna made a noise of scorn. ‘That? You can hardly call that a case, Shilly. A farmer with shocking breath and a lazy eye thinks his much younger wife is possessed by a demon that makes her walk in her sleep. The only devil tempting that woman was lust for the cowhand in the barn.’
‘Her husband did pay us for finding that out, though,’ I said, remembering his tears as he handed me the coins. Were they from relief there were no devils on his land, or sadness at his wife betraying him? Either way, it was hard to see him weep.
‘Well yes, all right,’ Anna said. ‘Ten shillings for a night’s observation and a few traps. Not bad as a rate, but I suspect we wouldn’t even have had that work if it weren’t for Mrs Yeo taking 19pity on us and telling the delusional farmer we could help.’
‘Mrs Yeo is very kindly.’
The kettle whistled so I lifted it from the fire with the cloth we kept close by for such a purpose. It was a scrap from Anna’s travelling case and I knew it to be the pattern of one of Mrs Williams’ dresses. My dresses when I was that lovely creature, for Anna wasn’t the only one who wore disguises. I was often in them myself.
‘Do you think it’s because of who we are?’ I said. ‘Not being men.’
‘Hmm?’
‘That it’s because we’re women we haven’t had many cases, and so we can’t move to a better place with a sign over the door like you said we would have. A sign painted by Mathilda.’
Anna stirred the tea with some viciousness, then clamped the lid on the pot.
‘I think it must be the same trouble you had before,’ I said. ‘In Scotland, when the men wouldn’t have you.’
‘It was Scotland Yard, Shilly. That’s where the new detective force is housed. And you might be right. I hold out no hope that north Cornwall will be any more enlightened than the streets of London, but still …’
I patted her hand. ‘Still, we must try. It’s what we’re good at, and it’s better work than milking cows.’
Anna smiled. ‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘And after all,’ I said, and looked at her askance, ‘we’re not always women, are we?’
And now she blushed. ‘Quite so, Shilly.’
‘Pass me your cup, then. We’ll drink to better times, shall we?’
‘We shall. Or at least the continuing kindness of landladies.’
‘To Mrs Yeo,’ I said, and raised my cup.
Anna clanked me and we sipped.20
‘Mrs Yeo might not be so kindly when we can no longer pay for a roof over our heads,’ Anna muttered, taking her pipe from the shelf above the fire.
‘We’ll have to go and work in the shop downstairs, then,’ I said. ‘You must know your way around a meat hook, Anna, you growing up in a butcher’s.’ I grinned, for I was playing the game along with her. Such talk of no rent could only be foolishness. We had all the money in the world since meeting Mathilda.
I cleared my throat. ‘I know you say we must save the money Mathilda has given us—’
‘That she has invested, Shilly.’
‘All right, invested, for the agency.’ The smell of her tobacco made my nose prickle. ‘But we can use it to live on, can’t we? And it’s more than enough.’
But Anna wouldn’t meet my eye and I saw she hadn’t been making a game of our rent. And that made my stomach drop to a cold, dark place, because we had been so careful with money, saving, that we should have most of it left. Shouldn’t we?
‘These seeds …’ Anna took out her little row of false teeth and poked at them with the stem of her pipe.
I said nothing. She had shown me again that she was still the one who had the business of our earning and our spending, though she had said we were to be partners in the business of detection.
A piece of wood dropped against the fire’s grate. From the harbour, a faraway shout and then a man’s laugh. And still I waited.
‘It’s fine, Shilly,’ she said at last. ‘I’m just looking to the future, that’s all. Mathilda won’t get much for her investment if we only have unfaithful farmers’ wives to deal with.’ A black speck flew from her false teeth and shot across the room. ‘There! Got it. That would have kept me awake all night. Speaking of which.’ She got up and stretched. ‘I’m going to try to get some sleep.’21
She put her hand on my shoulder. No squeeze, no stroke. But her hand there, for two breaths. Then she was gone.
I stayed in the parlour for the fire to burn out for I was uneasy. The patch of damp on the wall looked to have grown, the swan shape fattened to a goose. I’d become so used to the damp being there I had stopped thinking of it as a bad thing, that we were living poor. But now, with Anna saying we’d have no money for rent, I saw the damp anew. And I asked myself, Shilly, why are you three living this way when you have Mathilda’s five hundred pounds?
Because Anna says we must. And why is that?
Surely the money was all right? It had only been six months since we’d come to Boscastle and we’d been so careful. I was used to thrift – my life before Anna had meant I’d had to be. But Anna herself … Who knew how she was with money? If she could be trusted. I still knew so little about Anna Drake.
Apart from that I loved her.
THREE
Mrs Yeo woke me, banging the door at the bottom of our stairs.
‘Only me, my dears!’ she called out.
She said that every morning when she brought the breakfasts, as if we might think someone else had come to visit. But no one had called on us in Boscastle, even with the advert in the paper.
The door to the parlour was flung open by Mrs Yeo’s ample hip and she carried in the plates of bread and bacon.
‘Going to be a dirty one today,’ she said. ‘Weather’s turned. Miss Mathilda will need to take care on the harbour wall, what with the wind.’ She set the plates down.
She was tall, unlike her stooped husband the butcher, and strong, too, for she worked in the shop, hauling the joints and using the cleaver. Her arms were thick as the hams she cured.
‘I think spring’s given up on us this year,’ I said. I was cold and stiff having slept in the chair and my bones went click click click as I stood.
‘I fear you might be right, but here’s something to warm you, Mrs Williams.’
‘Hm?’23
Mrs Yeo was holding something out to me. A letter. She was all eagerness, her face lit with excitement.
‘It must surely be about a crime! I said to my husband, it’ll be a murder. Mark my words. A dreadful one. And our ladies will find the truth of it! A letter for them can only mean one thing.’
She pressed it into my hands, but I as soon wanted to push it away for it stung me. There was no other word for it. The letter was prickly in my hands. Mrs Yeo had seemed to feel nothing like this. To her it was just paper. But I could feel the words inside and they were sharp. The writing on the outside was not so curly as to be hard to read. It said Mrs Williams. This was the name I had taken but so few people knew me by it that the letter had to be for Anna, not for me.
‘You’re not going to open it?’ Mrs Yeo said, unable to hide her disappointment.
‘I—’
Anna herself came in then. She yawned good morning to Mrs Yeo, and that gave me the chance to drop the letter onto Anna’s chair. It was for her. But I would know what stung.
Mrs Yeo had realised there would be no news of murder for the moment, so she took her leave, disappointed. She was back to the weather’s likely course as she went down the stairs. We were in for a bad day to come.
Anna saw the letter on the chair and snatched it up. She tore it open and began to read but she didn’t need to read out loud to understand it, as I did, so I couldn’t hear the words. I looked at the paper over her shoulder, but the writing was too close together. If I could put my finger beneath the words and go slow—
Anna saw me and folded the pages.
I waited for her to speak, to say something of this letter that was an uncommon thing in our lives, but she didn’t. The only sound was 24the clack of her false teeth, which I knew to be her thinking sound. It had been the strange song of all our detecting so far.
Mathilda came in then, her face pale and her hair tangled as a furze bush. She looked younger than her sixteen years. She looked a child.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked her.
‘Tired, a little.’
She never spoke of her terrors after bad nights, and we never asked her. What good would it do? I told her to have some bacon before it went cold.
‘Mrs Yeo, she say the weather will be bad?’ Mathilda asked. ‘We cannot go to the harbour?’ In her way of speaking there was some echo of her German voice. The way she put her words together, and the gaps sometimes. The words that weren’t there. I had the same when writing, reaching for a word I knew but how to catch it, get it down in ink?
‘There might be work for us to do today instead,’ I said, and then to Anna, ‘Have we got a case?’
‘A case …’ Anna looked at the fire. Her fingers closed over the letter, made the pages crumple.
‘Yes, Anna. That’s what we do, isn’t it? Have cases and do the solving of them. Or have you forgot yourself since going to bed? Have some little folk been and changed you, like they do with babes?’
That made Mathilda laugh, at least, but Anna … She still stared at the fire.
‘Here, Shilly. You pass this.’ Mathilda handed me a laden plate and I placed it in Anna’s lap.
But when I tried to take the pages from her so that she could eat, she snatched them back and was all at once herself again.
‘You don’t want me to see it?’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘It’s nothing, Shilly. Have we some butter left from yesterday?’25
Mathilda said she would fetch it.
‘I should have let Mrs Yeo give me the letter as she’d wished,’ I muttered. ‘I am Mrs Williams, after all.’
‘Only in name,’ Anna said, which hurt me.
Mathilda came back with the butter and we fell to eating, the only sound the shifting of the fire, the clinking of our knives. But there wasn’t the peace that was custom between us most mornings. This morning was different.
It was true what Anna said. Mrs Williams was a name that Anna had given me, for of the two of us, Anna had been Mrs Williams first. Now I used that name and the story of that woman, who was a fic shun – that was the word Anna used. It meant lying.
I had Mrs Williams’ long red curls to wear, and her little black hat. She had a dress of purple mourning too, for Mrs Williams had lost a husband. But only sometimes was he lost. Sometimes he appeared too – another of Anna’s selves.
I had met Mr Williams. That was Anna too, of course, though I hadn’t learnt that until later, to my great surprise, and then I had wondered, as I still wondered, if there had ever been a real Mr Williams, in London, where Anna had lived before. The letter come that morning wasn’t thick, which meant there could only be a little paper inside the packet. But the way it had stung me – that was because the letter had to have come from her other life. Her life before me. London. It was calling her back. I wondered who had loved her there. Who she had loved.
But my wonder was bad and made me think bad thoughts of drowning such people in the Thames, which was a river Anna spoke of sometimes, of the bodies thrown in its waters and found by men in boats with hooks. I told myself, hadn’t Anna stayed with me here in Cornwall? She hadn’t gone back to London. There could be no one there for her now.26
A touch on my hand made me jump.
‘You are not hungry?’ Mathilda said, her eyes wide with concern, the lovely girl.
I saw I hadn’t eaten a scrap, though my fork held meat.
I forced myself to eat. Mathilda had enough worries. She didn’t need me to add to them. But I’d made up my mind. My name was Mrs Williams now, so it was only right I should read the letter. It might take me a good length of time, but I was getting better, and Anna kept saying I had to practise and so I stretched out my fingers, along the arm of the chair, a little further, reached in. The dryness of the paper, a slick of bacon fat thinning it.
Quick as a blink Anna threw the letter on the fire, then turned to me with a smile on her face I didn’t know. A smile brittle as the first ice of autumn. If I touched it, it would shatter.
‘Honestly, Shilly, it was nothing. Nothing at all!’
And she laughed, a high strange laugh, and then I knew something terrible had happened. But what it was, she wouldn’t tell me.
FOUR
My thoughts at the letter coming were bad so I said I would go out. Mathilda said she would come too, that we would go to the harbour together. But I wasn’t good company, I could feel it. Could feel the sting of the letter, still, in my hands that had touched it. Mathilda’s face was all sorrow at being left behind. Anna didn’t even turn round when I said I was going.
The wind was a fierce creature today, fiercer than I had known it since we had come to Boscastle. The street with the butcher’s shop sloped down to the water, and the houses flanking my path sloped likewise. The wind blew the cloying smell of meat away and coated me with fish instead. That was a much better smell. When I had first come to Boscastle, the air had tasted so much of fish I couldn’t think how it would be to live here and swallow it every day. And now I was doing it, and I found I liked it. It was the same with the sea, this change in me.
The harbour came in sight. It was two walls that made it, and they didn’t quite meet, one set a little back from the other. Almost touching, as if reaching, but that gap between. Like Anna and me. How to bring us closer to one another when we seemed as 28unyielding as these moor stone walls built into the sea? I turned away from them. Walked on alone.
Anna had asked me to work with her for I could see the parts of the world she couldn’t. The parts that were hard to see for they had to be looked at askance. They were dark and strange, rooted deep in the earth where by rights they should remain. They were long ago deaths and deaths still to come. They were devils and unquiet souls. Where Anna saw the cuts a knife made in a young girl’s throat, could tell the kind of knife it was, I felt the dead girl’s anger like a hot brand on my own breast. When Anna saw things that could be touched and smelt, I saw beneath them.
This talent had been gifted me by my first love, though there were days it felt more like a curse, for the things I saw were frightening and hard to fathom, and there was nothing I could do about them by myself. Only see, only weep. I needed Anna to help me understand, and Anna needed me to help her put all the pieces together. Then we could have things like suspects and motives and all of that detecting business.
But Anna couldn’t help with my worst fears, for if I could see the darkness in other people, and in the places where they lived, did that not mean I was a dark creature likewise? Some beast, like the ones the chapel preachers said should be cast out? This thinking left me jittery.
I found I had stopped and was at the inn by the bridge, the Wellington, where I tried so hard not to be. Every day I tried. I hadn’t touched a drop since we had come to Boscastle, and it was all for Anna. She was right to keep me from it, I knew, for it did me no good, but my hands were ashake all the same.
I scrambled up the cliff path. I would not be again as I had been before.
The wind grew fiercer the higher I climbed but I pushed into 29it to drive out the devil that plagued me. Up up up, walking into the clouds. My hair got free of its knot and streamed around me so I could not see where to put my feet, but the path guided me.
A crash, a boom, and I saw that I’d come to the top of the cliff and the sea was a way away below, surging a white fury that was like the inside of my head. I scraped my hair from my eyes and forced it back into a knot. Some order here, Shilly. Take some care of your poor self.
And then I saw her.
A woman in the water right below me, in all that mess of waves and drag-about. She must have fallen from the very spot where I now stood. How could I fetch help before she went under? I was cursed to watch her die, and watch her I had to, for what unkindness it was to leave a person to die alone when you could be with them and see their final breath, see them go to wherever it was we went. I couldn’t look away. And it was so watching I saw that she didn’t go under and drown. Her head and her arms stayed clear above, and she moved with the waves rather than fight them.
She was swimming.
I could tell she was a woman from that distance by her long yellow hair that trailed behind her, and by her breasts, which were bare. What would the fishermen make of such a catch if they should pull up their nets and find her inside? They would be lucky souls, that I did know, for she was a fine creature.
Now that I didn’t fear she was drowning I could watch her in peace, admire the way she spread her hands and carved the water, how her skin gleamed, how her legs pushed her forward, as if they were one bit of body. I wondered if she was something for Anna and I. If this was our next case, finding us, and me glimpsing it early, as sometimes happened.
Anna had told me I might see such things as this now that I’d 30given up the drink. A strange long word she said, hal oo sin a chuns. Seeing things that weren’t there. I said, Anna, you told me that happened when I had a drink. Now you’re saying it’ll happen when I don’t. You can’t have it both ways. I might as well have a drink if I’m to see such things anyway. Where’s the difference? And she had lifted her eyes to heaven and wondered if there was any hope for me.
But I knew there was hope for me as I stood on the cliff above Boscastle harbour and stared at that fine creature in the water below me, for who wouldn’t want to see such a thing? I had all the hope in the world.
The wind gusted and I stumbled forward, leaving the path to go closer to the edge of the cliff, and as I righted myself there was a voice, a call. But the wind drowned it. Or snatched the words away. Or the wind was the call and the call was in the sea, with the woman. A burst of it again, and I wanted to hear more so I stepped forward, into the wind and the words that spun around me. I closed my eyes and tried to listen. It was just there, and not there, and there again. Another step, then one more.
My feet slid out from under me and I fell heavily against one of the rocks that lay between the path and the cliff edge, and all at once I came to my senses and thought of Anna’s long word, and Anna herself. I hadn’t gone without a drop for six months just so I could fall into the sea and drown, even if there was a beautiful thing down there.
I crawled to the safety of the path. I didn’t look back. The rain helped quieten the woman’s noise.
It rained all night, and the wind—
The wind was a woman’s voice that called me to the cliff edge.
FIVE
My sleep was dark, churned like the rough sea I had spied from the cliff top. And in those waves a woman, swimming. She was ahead of me. I reached for her, tried to catch her feet but she got away. And then I saw that her feet had somehow raked my fingers, torn the flesh in lines, as if her feet were barbed, or set with teeth. My hands were little rivers of blood. It was because Mathilda had been dreaming again and we’d had to use the bar to keep her from biting off her tongue, but that couldn’t be right because I could hear Mathilda, and how could she shout with the bar between her teeth? Perhaps the bar was in my mouth, and it was my tongue’s blood on my hands. Mathilda’s voice clanged through the waters of my sleep. But she didn’t seek to comfort me, as I comforted her when her night terrors came.
‘You have no right—’
The waves surged, the water bubbled past my ears, and there was another voice. Lower, seeking to make peace. Anna.
I couldn’t hear what Anna said but it seemed to do no good for Mathilda’s voice was getting louder.
‘… mine, Anna. You take this decision with no thought for me or for Shilly.’32
My name brought me to the surface. The swimmer was gone. There was only shouting.
They were in the parlour, each as far from the other as was possible in that small room – Anna in her chair by the fire, Mathilda at the window where the rain was still loud against the glass.
Anna looked small, crumpled in the chair as if chilled to the bone, though the fire crackled merrily enough. She was about to speak, but then she saw me in the doorway and her thin lips clamped shut.
‘You two could wake the pigs hanging in the cold room,’ I said, but neither of them saw the mirth there. ‘What’s the matter? Mathilda?’
Mathilda whirled round. ‘Tell her, Anna. Tell her what has happened. Is not too late.’ There was anger in her voice but pleading too. I could hear her desire for all to be well, for there to be no breach between us. We who were all she had in the world now.
Anna looked at me and shrugged. ‘It’s nothing, Shilly. A misunderstanding.’
‘Is really that?’ Mathilda asked her. ‘You swear, Anna?’
‘Of course!’ Anna said. ‘You mustn’t worry.’
Mathilda gave a great sigh, as if she’d been holding her breath. ‘You will write to them, yes? At once, to tell them is not possible what is asked, because—’
‘Of course, of course.’ Anna reached for the poker, and as she leant forward I saw a scrap of something on her chair, something cream. A folded sheet of paper, busy with writing. Before I could reach for it her backside had returned to the chair and the letter was lost. When had another one come? And who did Mathilda want Anna to write to?33
Anna had told Mathilda not to worry but I was awash with it as I stood in the dimly lit parlour, the day’s light only just beginning to reach us and made thin by the rain. The room was the same as it always was – the two chairs, the stool, the patch of damp – but it was made strange.
I tried to speak but my mouth was dry. ‘Anna …’
Did she hear me? I put my hand on her shoulder. She waited too long to turn and look at me, and when she did—
A bang made us all jump. It was the door at the bottom of the stairs, then there were feet rushing up and Mrs Yeo’s voice.
‘’Tis only me, my dears.’
Mathilda was all at once busy. She grabbed a shawl from where it hung over the door and set to raking her hair with her fingers.
‘Let me brush it for you,’ I said. ‘It’s tangled, look, from sleeping.’
But she slipped from me like the swimming woman had slipped free in my dreams, and then Mrs Yeo was there, all a smile.
‘You’re here! My husband said you would be, what with the weather, but you never know, and how unfortunate if you had decided to go visiting today, just as someone came asking for you!’
Anna had stood up at Mrs Yeo’s arrival but now she went trembly and dropped back into her chair.
‘Who is it that’s come, Mrs Yeo?’ Her voice was barely a whisper, but Mrs Yeo didn’t seem to notice the fear which was writ large to me.
‘Oh, he’s in a state, Miss Drake. Chilled to the bone. I’ve put him next to our fire and told my girls to mind their manners, for he is a sea captain, after all.’
‘A sea captain?’ Anna’s shoulders softened. ‘Thank heavens … To see us? Whatever for?’
‘About the body,’ Mrs Yeo said. ‘A man’s been found dead.’34
Mathilda left the room.
I called for her to stop, to wait, but she wouldn’t, and that was not the usual way of things between us, for we were great friends, Mathilda and I. When I reached the landing, she was already down the stairs and near out the door to the courtyard.
I called her again and she stopped, at last.
‘You can’t be going out in all this rain!’ I said.
‘I must. I must go to think. With no one. Is outrage, what Anna does.’ She closed her eyes for a moment and gave a short huff, then put her shawl over her head.
‘Tell me what happened. What were you and Anna rowing about?’
‘It is not her fault. I see that. But she has problem, Shilly. Bad problem. And it will be our problem too.’ Mathilda’s hand was on the door.
‘What are you talking about? What problem?’
‘Anna must be strong. If she is strong then we—’
Anna herself called then, called me from the parlour. I looked over to see her frantic waving in the doorway. Telling me I must come that instant to hear what Mrs Yeo was saying. I was caught between them, the pair of women in my life – Anna and Mathilda. Some dark thing had passed between them. Which of them to go to, which of them to choose in that instant on the landing?
When I looked back at the stairs, Mathilda had gone. In my shilly-shallying I’d made my choice. With a heavy heart I turned and went back to the parlour. Mathilda was worried, and now so was I. But in another way we were different, for Mathilda was angry too.
In the parlour, Mrs Yeo bubbled like a stream.
‘He says he must see you now, and it was all I could do to make him wait in my cottage while I came over here. I thought I should do that, to be proper, given that you party are professionals.’35
With this last word Mrs Yeo beamed and I wondered if our rent was low as it was because she liked having detectives living close by. Even those without many cases.
‘Quite right, Mrs Yeo,’ Anna said. ‘I appreciate your thoughtfulness. Please let the captain know we’d be pleased to receive him. Oh – his name?’
At this Mrs Yeo bit her lip. ‘You know, he did tell me, but I couldn’t catch it, funny sound that it was, and I didn’t like to ask again and him think me rude.’
Anna patted her arm. ‘No matter.’
Mrs Yeo left us then, joy in her step as she went to fetch this captain who had come to us about death. That was the lot of a detective, I had learnt in my few months of the work. We were in the business of loss.
‘Now, how does our visitor find us?’ Anna glanced round the parlour.
With her caught before me like that, I asked the question that had been taking shape inside me.
‘When Mrs Yeo said a man had come to see us, who were you thinking had come?’
‘I don’t know what you mean. I know no one here, Shilly.’
‘And yet you were afraid.’
‘You’re mistaken.’
‘I could see it on your face, Anna! You don’t have to lie to me. Is it something to do with the letters?’
‘That again. I told you, it was nothing.’ She twisted from my hands and looked harsh at the furniture. ‘This isn’t quite the impression I would wish to make, but there we are. It won’t be this way forever.’
‘And why is it this way now? Why do you make us so mean with spending, Anna?’36
‘We haven’t time for this now, Shilly.’ She set one of the chairs so it stood before the damp patch. ‘You’ll take the stool.’
‘I thought as much.’
‘Why do you sound so low? We have a case, at last!’ She looked me over as she had looked over the furniture, then smoothed my hair neater and rubbed something from my cheek. ‘This is what we’ve been waiting for.’
‘I suppose,’ I said. ‘But Mathilda. What were you two arguing about?’
‘Arguing? You’re mistaken, Shilly. We were discussing our plans for setting up the agency. As an investor, Mathilda has a right to be party to our decisions.’
‘Our decisions? I didn’t know we’d made any.’
‘Not that we’ve been in much of a position to move forward. But now!’
