He lets out his breath. “It’s complicated,” he tells his visitor.
Florence eyes him. “Marriage is not a gradient,” she says, like a true artist. “You either are or you aren’t.”
“Am.” He clears his throat. “Iamm-m-married.”
Helen was angry with him. He acted foolishly. But he still belongs to her in a way he won’t to anyone else.
“Then why are you here and she’s not?”
He stares down into his cup at the floating tea leaves. It’s uncomfortable in a way he never was with Helen, even when they quarreled.
William can feel Florence’s stare. She’s analyzing him. Pitying him. Reading the story he isn’t sharing and filling in what he isn’t saying.
“Very well, a proposal for you,” she says quietly. “I’ll dig about for this Merryn person—I know exactly who to ask—that way youhaveto come back to the studio.”
“Look, there’s no chance for anything between—”
“I know.” She slides her teacup away. “But it’ll keep you from becoming the hermit everyone believes you are. And it’ll give me something to do.”
He studies her face, and there’s an earnestness to it. Perhaps that’s why he thought her young before.
“I’ll ask something of you in return. What do you say?”
He steals another glance at the portrait. “Very well.” A favor, he cannot accept. But an exchange seems perfectly safe. “One week, then.” He should ask what favor she wants in return.
But before he can, she rises with a bright smile. Life has not calcified her soul yet. She hasn’t seen war. Hasn’t lived a lifetime of highs and lows with another person, with reality wearing the bond threadbare in spots.
“One week. I’ll make it worth the trip. Now, tell me everything you know about Merryn.”
He sighs. “She likely knew Rupert Covington. But she was married—at one time, at least—to a man named Ansel something.”
She pulls out a small notebook and jots these things down.
“She journeyed through Cornwall, likely many years ago now, and she seems to have some connection with Dunn Cottage.” He pauses, picturing Merryn’s neat handwriting in that notebook of hers. “Perhaps she lived here. She called herself Merryn Dunn once. A relation of Anwen Dunn, I suppose.”
“And who’s Anwen Dunn?”
He shrugs. “The person who left me this cottage. I haven’t any idea who she is, though.”
She blinks. “A stranger willed you ahouse—You’ve never been a bit curious why?”
Another shrug. “Not enough to do anything about it. Distant relation, perhaps.” He glances up at Merryn, again struck with the tingling sense that he knows her. Knows her voice. “Or…perhaps sheisAnwen Dunn. Could that be?”
Chapter 18
Merryn, 1913
“It’sAnwenDunn,”comesthe whisper. An aged woman stands on the narrow footpath, a basket of silvery fish on her back held up by a burlap strip looped around the front of her straw hat. “By me word, it’syou.”
I blink, mentally examining the one piece of myself I’d always held with certainty—my name. “Who are you?” I ask. And who is Anwen?
She squints one eye. “You’ve gone mad, ’ave you? Forgotten Morveth Smythe?”
She sets down her burden and straightens. An old wool shawl tucked into her belt provides ample protection against the wind. She shuffles forward, gnarled and crooked with age, and her eyes dart back and forth. “By ’eaven, itisyou. What do ’eemean, coming back ’ere, after all this time? Don’t ’ee know what troubles you’ve stirred?”
“I’m afraid I’ve forgotten a great many things. But I’m not—”
“In the house ’ee go, missy. Have a cuppa, warm those hands. You always were so chilled.” There’s the look of a cloudy day on her face, a hazy wandering expression that flits from my face to the hills beyond.
