High Tide At Midnight

Biddy’s eyes were alight with interest. ‘Morwenna? But that’s a Cornish name. I didn’t realise you were from this part of the world.’

‘I’m not. But my mother spent most of her childhood here, and I suppose it seemed a natural choice for her.’

Biddy shrugged slightly. ‘I suppose so—if you have a taste for tragic legends. Oh, here’s the bus at last.’

She clambered up the steps of the single-decker while Morwenna followed. ‘You want the stop after mine,’ she directed as Morwenna paid for her ticket. ‘Turn left at the Cross and follow the road until it brings you out at the house. You can’t miss it,’ she added. ‘It doesn’t lead anywhere else.’

Morwenna would have liked to have questioned Biddy further about Trevennon, but the bus was fairly crowded and she was aware of all the potential listening ears, so she confined her questions to general ones about the area itself. Biddy was cheerful company, and Morwenna felt oddly desolate when she announced eventually that they were coming to her stop.

‘You want the next one, don’t forget,’ she said as she got to her feet. ‘Good luck.’ She paused. ‘If you—do decide to stay for a while, look us up at the pottery.’

‘I’d like that,’ Morwenna smiled up at her. As the bus lurched away again she took a deep breath to steady herself and began to retrieve her belongings. In less than five minutes she found herself standing in the darkness, the wind whipping at her hair and tangling across her face. She shivered, huddling her sheepskin jacket round her for warmth and wishing that she was just about anywhere but the chill of this unknown country road.

She began to walk towards the faint glimmer of the signpost at the crossroads, glad of the shelter of the hedge. It was raining still and the drops stung her face. When she licked her lips she could taste salt on them, and in the distance above the howl of the wind, she could hear the sea roaring.

‘Good night for wrecks,’ she murmured aloud, and grimaced at the thought. At the crossroads she turned left as Biddy had indicated and found herself in a narrow lane, bordered on either side by high hedges. It was really dark now, the faint moonlight almost totally obliterated by the mass of rushing clouds chased by the gale.

She had walked perhaps two hundred yards, practically feeling her way along the hedge, when she stopped and said flatly and aloud, ‘This is silly.’

She set down her case and the rucksack and began to unfasten the buckles. Among the oddments she had thrown in at the last moment, she thought, was a torch, although she wasn’t sure if it worked or if there were even any batteries in it. Naturally the missing article had slipped right to the bottom of the rucksack and she was obliged to repack it almost completely before she could fasten it again. Grimly she stood up at last and tentatively switched on the torch. The faintness of the glimmer of light that fell on the road in front of her indicated there was not much life left in the batteries, but it was better than nothing, and it was a heavy, comforting object to have in her hand anyway on this evening when the whole world seemed full of movement and menace and unidentifiable sounds. She shone the torch ahead of her, and her heart almost leaped into her mouth when it picked out something large and white in the hedge, something which bent and swayed in the wind. A large notice board, she realised, with hysterical relief, and what an utter fool she was making of herself. She had spent the greater part of her life living in the country, so why was she behaving like a townie, leaping at every shadow, letting her imagination play tricks. It was nonsense to think that this dark, unfamiliar landscape was rejecting her. She was letting Biddy’s warnings really get to her.

Or was she? she wondered drily a moment later as she allowed her torch to play over the lettering on the board. ‘Private Road to Trevennon Only’, it stated unequivocally. No sign of the welcome mat there, she thought philosophically, and walked on.

She had been walking for about ten minutes and wishing that the notice board had given some idea of the distance involved when it happened. The shriek of the wind had been rising steadily, and now in a sudden boiling crescendo of sound there was a loud crack just ahead of her, and with a slithering rumble a tree fell right across the road in her path.

She stood very still for a moment, then put her case down, and began to shake. She wasn’t hurt. For God’s sake, it hadn’t even touched her, but it had been close, and at this rate her nerves were going to be shot to pieces and she was going to arrive on Dominic Trevennon’s doorstep a gibbering lunatic.

What was more, although the tree on closer examination did not turn out to be particularly large, nevertheless it had blocked the road. She could climb over it, but that was not the problem. Private road it might be, but presumably people at the house had vehicles and visitors with other vehicles, and the tree had fallen awkwardly between two bends in the lane. A driver would be on top of it almost before he realised.

She caught hold of one of the sturdier branches and tugged, but to no avail. It might not be large, but it was heavier than it looked. She supposed her most sensible course of action would be to hurry on to the house wherever it was, and warn someone, trusting to luck that no one drove along the lane in the meantime.

Ironically, the wind now seemed to be lessening, as if aware it had done its worst and could now be satisfied. And behind her, in the distance, she could just hear the sound of a car engine, coming fast. Morwenna swung round, her eyes searching the darkness. She was not all that far from the main road, she told herself. There was no reason to think that the traveller would not go straight on. But even as she watched, she saw the glare of a pair of powerful headlights and knew that against all the odds the car had turned off towards Trevennon. And the driver knew the road. He was covering the narrow twisting road without a check, and any moment now he would be here, unaware of the waiting danger.

Morwenna almost hurled her case and rucksack into the shelter of the hedge and ran, stumbling, back to the bend. She stood in the middle of the lane, swinging her torch from side to side in a desperate attempt to attract attention, but wouldn’t the pitiful light it afforded be swallowed up in the darkness?

The car lights seemed to slice across the evening sky, and then with a snarl of the engine the car was upon her. She gave the torch one last wave, then dived towards the hedge, but not quite soon enough. Something grazed her—perhaps a wing—and she fell, not hard but sufficiently to wind her. The car stopped with a squeal of brakes, a door slammed and Morwenna found herself being hauled to her feet with considerably more force than she felt was necessary.

He was tall, and his hands were hard and bruising. That was the first, the most immediate impression, and more than enough, Morwenna thought feelingly, as she was dumped unceremoniously back on to her feet. He seemed to be very dark, or was that just the suggestion of the darkness around him, and he was, she realised radiating an anger that was almost tangible.

‘You bloody little idiot.’ He wasn’t shouting; he didn’t have to. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? You could have been killed!’

His grip on her upper arms was really hurting, and furiously she pulled herself free. ‘You call me an idiot!’ she blazed back at him, fright and stress making her voice younger and more breathless than she would have liked. ‘And what about you—driving like a maniac on a rotten night like this? If I had been killed, it would have been all your fault!’

Even as she spoke, she knew she was not being totally fair. He had seen her pitiful attempt to cause a diversion and had managed to stop, in spite of the speed he was driving at, almost within the car’s length. But this had been the final straw in a pretty abysmal day, and now reaction was taking its toll of her.

‘Your logic fascinates me,’ he said with a cool contempt that seared its way across her skin. ‘May I point out to you that this is in fact a private road, and under those circumstances one expects to be preserved from the antics of lunatic hitch-hikers. And might I also suggest you make your way back to the main road, and ply your trade there.’

‘I was not hitch-hiking!’ She was furious to find that she was shaking like a leaf. ‘What I was doing was trying to save your life, or at least trying to prevent you from being injured. That, of course, was before I met you.’

There was a long electric silence.

‘You’d better explain,’ he said grimly. ‘Oh, not your last remark. I’ve managed to work the implications of that out for myself.’

‘There’s a tree down,’ she said tonelessly. ‘Just round that bend. I was going to warn someone at the house, then I heard you coming, and thought I’d better stay and warn you instead. Only all I had was that damned torch, and the batteries aren’t too good—and now they’ve gone all together.’ She began unavailingly to push the switch on the torch backwards and forwards as if her very insistence could make it work again.

There was another silence, then he said abruptly, ‘Wait here.’

He walked across to the car, climbed in and started the engine. He drove the few feet to the bend, then stopped. Another pause, then she heard his footsteps returning.

He said without emotion, ‘It seems I owe you an apology.’

‘Well, don’t let it ruin your life.’ She tried to sound flip, but the quiver in her voice betrayed her, and she heard him sigh, swiftly and sharply.

‘But that still doesn’t explain precisely what you were doing on this road in the first place,’ he said. ‘What happened? Did you miss the main road in the dark? This lane only leads to….’

‘To Trevennon,’ she finished for him wearily. ‘I know. I can read, actually, if the print is big enough. And I haven’t missed my way, though God knows it would have been easy enough. I’m going to Trevennon. I have to see Mr Dominic Trevennon.’

She heard his startled intake of breath and wondered resignedly if she was to be the recipient of another Awful Warning about Mr Trevennon’s intolerance of casual callers and general irascibility, but when he spoke his voice sounded cool and disinterested.

‘Indeed, and has Mr Trevennon the pleasure of expecting you?’

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘And I’ve already been warned that he’s arrogant and awkward and imagines that he’s some uncrowned king of Cornwall, but all the same, I’m going to see him.’

‘I can’t imagine why,’ he remarked. ‘Judging by the description you’ve received of him, I would have thought it would have been infinitely preferable to keep your distance.’

‘I have to see him, she said abruptly. ‘I want to ask him a favour.’

‘Do you think he sounds the kind of man likely to provide favours for chance-met strangers?’

‘On the face of it, no.’ Morwenna shook her head. ‘On the other hand, he’s obviously a supreme egotist, and he might just be flattered to think someone has travelled half way across England to ask him to do something for them. Besides, I’m not wholly a stranger to him.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t count on it,’ he said bitingly. ‘And what do you mean—you’re not “wholly a stranger"?’

But Morwenna was already regretting that she had said so much.

‘I’m sorry, but I think that’s my business,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘And I don’t doubt you’re a lifelong friend of his and that you can’t wait to get down to Trevennon and tell him what I’ve said. Well, go ahead. I don’t suppose that in the long run it will make much difference anyway.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said slowly, ‘at this precise moment, I’m wondering whether I’ve ever known him at all. As for proceeding with all haste to Trevennon to drop you in it, may I remind you that the road is blocked by a tree. Besides, I’m going to make a detour round to the farm to get Jacky Herrick to bring his tractor down to shift it, so if you hurry you should arrive at Trevennon with your version first.’

‘A tractor?’ Morwenna let her voice register exaggerated surprise. ‘You mean you’re not going to pick it up with one hand, and toss it lightly into the hedge?’

She was sorry as soon as she had said it. There was something about him that got under her skin, but that was no excuse for behaving with gratuitous rudeness.

When he spoke, his voice was cold with anger. ‘If I was in the mood for tossing anything into a hedge, believe me, young woman, you’d get priority over any tree.’

‘I think we’ve already established that,’ she said ruefully, wincing a little as she moved forward.

‘Are you hurt? The car hardly touched you….’

‘Oh, please don’t bother about me.’ She felt as if one side of her was one terrific bruise. ‘I still might manage to finish fourth.’

‘Stand still,’ he ordered abruptly. ‘You might have broken something.’

She stood, teeth clenched more with anger than with pain as he completed a swift but comprehensive examination of her moving parts.

‘Thank you,’ she said with awful politeness when he had finished. ‘You should have been a vet.’

‘I won’t complete the analogy,’ he returned with equal courtesy. ‘Although several members of the animal kingdom do suggest themselves. Which reminds me—when you get down to Trevennon, watch out for the dogs. They’re not trained to encourage strangers.’

‘Oh God!’ Morwenna, retrieving her case and rucksack from the hedge, swung round to look at him. It was maddening that it was too dark to see his face properly, let alone the expression on it, and she could hardly ask him to stand in the car headlights for a moment so that she could judge whether he was joking. He hadn’t done a great deal of joking up to that point, certainly, and there was no reason for him to start now, so the dogs probably existed. She moistened her lips uncertainly. ‘Do—do they bite?’

‘It has been known,’ he said laconically. ‘The thing to do is stand your ground. Don’t try to outrun them—that’s fatal.’

‘I can imagine it would be.’ Morwenna knew an overwhelming desire to sit down on the wet lane and scream and drum her heels. ‘But you don’t have to worry. I doubt very much whether I could outrun a tortoise at the moment. Would it help if I knew the dogs’ names?’

‘It might. They’re called Whisky and Max. Do you think you can remember that?’

‘Oh, I think so,’ she said grimly. ‘I imagine I shall have great difficulty in remembering anything else.’ Wincing slightly, she settled her rucksack on her shoulder then picked up her case.

‘Dear God!’ He was still standing in the shadows well out of range of the headlights. ‘Not just a casual call, I see. Just how long were you planning to stay at Trevennon?’

It was on the tip of her tongue to confess that she would be satisfied with a roof over her head for the night, but she suppressed it. After all, it was none of his business.

She sent him a smiling glance over her shoulder as she prepared to negotiate the tree. It was one of her best, slightly teasing, deliberately provocative, aimed at leaving him with something to think about.

‘We’ll just have to see how things work out,’ she said lightly. ‘Maybe the king of Cornwall will take a fancy to me.’

But if she had counted on having the last word, she was to be disappointed.

‘I’m sure he’ll take something to you.’ His voice was bland. ‘Preferably a riding crop. Au revoir, my pretty way-farer.’

She held her head high, and wouldn’t allow herself to limp until she was round the next bend and out of the range of those too-revealing headlights.

The force of the wind seemed to have spent itself, and now the air was full of the sound of the sea, a sullen booming roar as the breakers hurled themselves against the granite cliffs. Nor was it rain on her face any longer, but spray.

As she trudged on wearily, Morwenna found herself wondering how easy it would be to miss the house entirely and walk straight over the cliff into the sea. She grinned wanly at the thought, and then stiffened, peering almost incredulously into the gloom. Somewhere just to the left she could see a light, a steady, purposeful light like a lamp set in the windows of an uncurtained room. And at that moment the moon emerged from behind the flying clouds, and Morwenna saw the dark mass of the house, its chimneys and roofs clearly outlined against the sky.

Under the circumstances, it was madness to feel such a sense of relief, of homecoming even, but the familiarity of the building’s shape, imprinted on her mind by her mother’s painting, caught at her heart, and she felt childish tears prick at the back of her eyelids.

Somewhere close at hand a dog began to bark, deep and full-throated, and then another took it up, and in the house another light went on, as if the occupants were responding to the animals’ warning. Of course, she thought, they would be expecting a visitor—the man she had met on the road.

Summoning all her courage, she walked up to the front door. The notice she had seen had been perfectly correct, she thought wryly. The road indeed led to nowhere but Trevennon—straight to its door in fact. And what kind of arrogance had decided to build a house in this very spot anyway—out on a headland, exposed four-square to the elements? ‘A barn’, Biddy had called it, she thought, and wished that her first view of it had been in daylight.

There was an old-fashioned bell pull at the side of the front door, and Morwenna tugged at it half-heartedly, not really expecting any results. But to her surprise, a bell did start jangling somewhere inside the house, and the dogs began barking again tumultuously. They seemed to be penned up somewhere in the outbuildings which rambled away from the side of the house, and as Morwenna waited, she heard the barking rise almost to a frenzy and the sound of heavy bodies banging against some kind of wooden barricade. It was altogether too close for comfort and Morwenna hoped devoutly that it would hold.

‘Whisky!’ she called out, trying to sound firm. ‘Max! Quiet, good dogs.’

The good dogs were clearly puzzled by this personal appeal from an unfamiliar voice, but they stopped barking. There was a lot of subdued whining, and convulsive sniffing, and paws scrabbling on a hard surface, but that, Morwenna felt, was a far more acceptable alternative.

And someone was actually coming to answer the door. Morwenna felt her stomach flutter with nervousness, and clenched her hands into fists deep in the pockets of her coat as the heavy door swung open with an appropriate creak of hinges.

She was confronted by a small stocky man, almost enveloped in a large and disreputable butcher’s apron. His face was wrinkled like a walnut into lines of real malevolence, and bright eyes under grey shaggy eyebrows glared suspiciously up at her.

‘Wrong ’ouse,’ he snorted, and attempted to close the door.

Morwenna stepped forward quickly to circumvent the move. She smiled beguilingly at him, ignoring the scowl she received in return. Her thoughts were seething. Was this—could this be Dominic Trevennon? He would be about the right age, she reasoned, and he seemed to fit the portrait of unlovable eccentric which she had begun to build in her mind.

‘Mr Trevennon?’ she asked, trying to speak confidently.

‘Not ’ere,’ was the discouraging reply. ‘So you may’s well take yourself off.’

‘Do you mean he’s away?’ Morwenna’s heart sank within her. ‘Or is he just out?’

‘Tedn’t none of your business,’ the gnome remarked with satisfaction. ‘Now go ‘long with you. I want to get this door shut.’ Somewhere in the house a telephone began to ring, and his face assumed an expression of even deeper malice. ‘ ’Ear that?’ he snarled. ‘I should be answering that, not stood ’ere, argy-bargying with you.’

‘Oh, please,’ Morwenna said desperately, seeing that he was about to slam the door on her. ‘I—I’ve come a long way today. If Mr Trevennon isn’t here at the moment, couldn’t I come in and wait?’

‘No, you couldn’t.’ He looked outraged at the thought. ‘If Mr Trevennon’d wanted to see you, he’d have left word you were expected. You phone up tomorrow in a decent manner and make an appointment. Now, go on. I’m letting all this old draught in.’

The door was already closing in Morwenna’s face when a woman’s voice called, ‘Hold on there, you, Zack. You’re to let her in.’

‘ ’Oo says?’ Zack swung round aggressively.

The woman approaching jerked a thumb over her shoulder. ‘ ’E does. Good enough for you?’

Apparently it was, because Zack held the door open—not wide, it was true, but sufficiently to allow Morwenna to squeeze herself through it into the hall. She put her case down and eased the rucksack from her aching shoulder, ignoring Zack’s mutter of, ‘Seems mazed t’me.’

‘You keep your opinion until you’m asked, Zack Hubbard.’ The woman gave Morwenna a searching but not unfriendly look. ‘You can wait in the study for the master, miss. There’s a nice fire in there.’ She paused doubtfully, taking in Morwenna’s chilled and generally bedraggled appearance. ‘Would you fancy a cup of something hot, while you’m waiting?’

Morwenna accepted gratefully and followed her rescuer across the wide hall. She was too bemused by the suddenness of her access to the house, just when she had almost given up all hope, to take much account of her surroundings, but the paramount impression was one of all-pervading shabbiness.

And this was confirmed by the room in which she found herself. A big shabby desk, littered with papers and crowned by an ancient typewriter, dominated the room. A sagging sofa covered in faded chintz was drawn up in front of the fireplace, and these with the addition of a small table just behind the sofa constituted the entire furniture of the room. The square of dark red carpet was threadbare in places, and the once-patterned wallpaper seemed to have faded to a dull universal beige, with lighter, brighter square patches seeming to indicate depressingly that pictures had once hung there.

Morwenna sank down on to the sofa and held out her hands to the blazing logs. What she had seen so far gave her no encouragement at all. The Trevennons, it seemed, had fallen on hard times since her mother had last visited the house. And it could furnish an explanation as to why Laura Kerslake had never returned there. Perhaps the Trevennons themselves had discouraged any reunions, preferring her to remember things as they had been. To remember people as they had been.

She glanced at the rucksack which she had placed on the sofa beside her and began to fumble with the buckles. She took out the parcel of paintings, and after a moment’s hesitation walked across and laid it on the desk. Her own equivalent, she thought wryly, of putting all her cards on the table.

There were some newspapers and magazines piled rather untidily at one end of the sofa and she riffled through them casually when she sat down again. They were an odd mixture, she thought, giving little clue as to the tastes and personality of the subscriber.

There were some local newspapers as well and Morwenna unfolded one of these and began to glance casually through the news items on the front page, but the newsprint had a disturbing way of dancing up and down in front of her eyes, and at length she gave up the effort, acknowledging that she was more tired than even she had guessed.

The door opened and the women came in carrying a tray, which she placed down on the sofa table. Again Morwenna was the recipient of one of those searching looks.

‘Is—is something wrong?’ she asked.

‘You have a look of someone I know. Can’t bring to mind who it is, but I daresay it’ll come to me.’

Morwenna’s heart skipped a beat. Was it her mother that this woman recognised in her? She was quite aware that there was a resemblance, but before she could ask further, a door banged nearby and Zack’s voice shouted pettishly, ‘Inez!’

The woman tutted and moved towards the door. ‘Dear life, doesn’t he go on,’ she remarked placidly, and went out closing the door behind her.