I’ve found it, and I am home.
I am Merryn, girl of the sea. I’ve left my sea, but it has pulled me back. Images sweep over me and at last I let them come.
Hearty porridge with butter.
Happy, smiling faces and voices lilting with song.
A harmony of lovely aromas and sounds, beckoning me into the kitchen.
Warm summer days, birds singing, and welcome rains beating on the roof.
Goats nudging their faces into the window, bleating you awake in the morning.
Bread rising on the sill and songs and music drift with the rhythm of recurrent waves, washing over and over the warm sand.
They are drowning me now, these memories. But I let them. They aren’t the enemy. They aren’t terrifying.
They are home.
Why did I fight coming to this place for so long?
Chapter 17
William, 1947
Heavenknowswhyhefought coming to this place for so long. The months spent here so far have done more healing work than years in a hospital might have.
Perhaps it’s the name that put him off it when he was younger—Dunn Cottage, as if a body is done with life, just as the owners have been done with this house for many decades.
But now Williamisdone, so it’s the perfect place. A shell of a man living in a shell of a home. The tip of its ancient tower appears farther down the coastline, tucked against the cliffside, and he breathes another prayer of gratitude for the refuge he never knew he needed.
Often, surrender is a last resort, the thing we avoid for so long, yet it eventually gives us exactly what we were searchingfor. Peace, protection…and because of a painting left there, the pound notes he needs more than anything.
He shifts and ensures the kitten is still nestled happily in its satchel. Just one more rise—he can see the slate roof through the long grass. His left hip aches so much he nearly collapses as he crosses Clodgy Point and descends the nearly-hidden steps into his own private corner of the world, desperate for the cascading peace that always comes.
But just up the path from the cottage, precisely where his tension normally melts away, hair on his arm prickles. He’s anything but alone, and something dark mars the stony entrance. He blinks, rain misting his face. She’s there on the broken-down steps, huddled beneath a cloak that’s beating against the rocks in the wind. His Helen. She’s almost close enough to touch.
Shaking, breathless, he limps closer, all but dragging his left foot.
The figure rises, her overly red lips a shock against white skin. “I found your note,” she says simply.
His shoulders hunch, caving around the hollow of his chest. Ofcourseit’s not Helen. Helen is moving. She will soon have a new address—one he won’t know. “Right.”
It was cowardly, slipping his apology to the artist under the studio door after closing. A feeble attempt to free himself of the weight wrapped around his soul after that encounter.
“You’re not an easy man to find,” she says above the wind, hovering between him and his sanctuary. “Had to ask about all over western Cornwall, and even now this place was only a guess. Do you know they think you a ghost?”
He shoves past her and through his door, but then he pauses. She’s come all this way. She’s cold and wet, and standing on an exposed cliff face. He sighs at the inevitability of it. “Come in if you wish.”
Of course, she does, closing the door behind her, instantly cutting off the wind.
Only then does he realize she has a reason for making the effort to find him. She’s found something vital.
She scrunches her nose. “Rather dark in here, isn’t it?”
Without a word he lights four tallow candles, placing them throughout the low-ceilinged room, and looks about his humble sanctuary with critical eyes. It’s rather austere and ancient, one giant room with an oversized fireplace and heavy furniture that’s a blend of abandoned medieval castle and bear’s cave. “It’s cozy.”
“That tower certainly catches the eye, doesn’t it? I suppose that’s where all the mysteries of this wonderful place are hidden.”
