High Tide At Midnight. Sara Craven
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