‘Where are they taking her?’
‘Jowan’s cottage, the old B&B. Doctor Morrison will arrive soon, sort her out.’
The old woman was struggling in her wellies over the rocks, and Magnús slowed his stride to match her pace until they were at the top of the concrete lifeboat launch. ‘You’re shaking as much as she was,’ she told him, looking up into his face. ‘Come along, Finan can help you.’
Even though every muscle and nerve told him to follow after the mermaid, he let Mrs Crocombe tug his arm, leading him along the wide sea wall and into the pub.
Only once inside the deserted bar room with the door shoved shut did he realise how roaringly loud the wind had been and how cold his body was. He slumped into a chair by the crackling fire. All the while Mrs Crocombe shuffled about, finding Finan and ordering him to make a full English and a pot of sweet tea, and making Magnús take off his jacket and move even closer to the fire.
Magnús couldn’t see anything other than that pair of blue eyes, wide and entreating, and the way the woman from the sea had looked down at him as he lay on his back on the shore likehewas the one who had been shipwrecked and then dramatically, miraculously saved.
‘I’ll be off then,’ Mrs Crocombe announced.
‘Shouldn’t you stay and have a hot drink, too? You were blown about just as much as everybody else,’ Magnús asked with a croaky voice. Had he really been shouting that loudly over the winds?
Mrs Crocombe was already on her way out the door.
Bella appeared, placing Magnús’s mug on his table, watching the woman leave.
‘She’ll have fourteen houses to call in at Up-along, spreading the gossip about the girl in the boat. She’s better than the local paper, and usually more accurate.’ She smiled, but not with her eyes, and walked back behind the bar, telling him his breakfast wouldn’t be a minute.
A couple of holidaymakers with a grumbling, teething baby arrived and sat at the furthest table by the window, asking Bella for coffee as they passed. There was no one else around this morning, it seemed.
Magnús had the presence of mind to eavesdrop as Finan returned and informed Bella that the doctor had arrived and Monty was back in the kitchen to finish the breakfast service.
‘Is she OK?’ Magnús enquired weakly, but Finan and Bella had fallen deep in conversation, standing by the espresso machine.
‘That’s the last of our Christmas guests gone, except the Austens.’ Finan raised a hand to the young couple by the window but they were too busy trying to get baby Serena in her highchair to notice. ‘They’ve come too far to leave now, not with a little one and a ten-hour drive to get home,’ Finan told his wife.
‘All of them refunded?’ Bella said.
Finan nodded. ‘All but one room empty and our Christmas visitor takings wiped out by an amber weather warning.’
To Magnús, Bella looked a cheerful, robust sort; her voice now told a different story. ‘Only the three breakfasts then,’ Bella called through to Monty, close to tears as she turned back to her husband. ‘There’s eleven six-kilogram turkeys in the freezer. What am I supposed to do with them now?’
As Finan shrugged, Monty swept through from the kitchen carrying a plate. ‘Did anyone recognise the boat?’ he asked.
For a moment Bella and Finan only paused, looking at him.
‘The woman’s boat? Wasn’t local. I never saw it before,’ Monty added.
‘What was it called?’ Finan managed to ask, though he couldn’t summon much interest. His eyes were now fixed on the till.
‘Its name plate was off,’ Monty replied, approaching Magnús by the fire. ‘Along with half the starboard gunwale where she hit the harbour wall. Lucky for her she didn’t go under a few feet farther out.’
He presented Magnús with his breakfast.
‘You and your brother hauled her boat in?’ Magnús asked him.
‘Yep. We were on the shore. We’d just that minute decided it was too rough for Tom to take the boat out when we heard the crack. She was trying to put in by the harbour steps and was blown right onto the wall. Luckily, she threw out her rope and Tom waded in to get it. By then, her cruiser was filling badly. It’ll be a long repair job, that. Hope for her sake it’s properly insured.’
Magnús took in the information in silence and within minutes Monty, Bella and Finan had left him to his thoughts. After smiling politely across the room at the exhausted parents and their grizzling baby, he lifted his knife and fork and listened to the weather warnings on the radio, interspersed with incongruously merry Christmas hits.
For a man used to porridge, strong coffee andskyrfor breakfast, the Siren’s Tail’s herby sausages, streaky smoked bacon, hash browns, huge field mushrooms cooked in butter, fluffy scrambled eggs and endless doorstop toast was a revelation. Monty’s speciality spicy baked beans were the biggest surprise. Odd, he thought, but so good. He ate every bite and enjoyed it with the appetite of a shipwrecked man realising he was still alive and put ashore on a bounteous island.
Every time he found himself asking why on earth he’d come to this curious place, Clove Lore seemed to provide answers in abundance. Sure, the weather was terrible, but he could add mermaids and amazing breakfasts to the best ice cream he’d ever tasted and access to his own book browser’s paradise as reasons to want to stay in England this Christmas.
Chapter Six
