High Tide At Midnight. Sara Craven
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.
Morwenna studied the tea tray with slight amusement. It had been laid with a tea towel, and bore in addition to a fat brown earthenware teapot, a cup and saucer, neither of which matched, and a small plate holding two buttered cream crackers. But the tea itself was strong and fragrant, and by some miracle not made with teabags. She sipped it as if it was nectar.
When she had finished, she leaned back against the shabby, comfortable cushions and closed her eyes. She felt warmed through, and oddly at peace in spite of her inner uncertainties. All kinds of curious images began to dance behind her shuttered eyes, and it was pleasant to lie back and contemplate them while the warmth of the fire began to dissolve away some of the ache from her tired limbs.
Trees danced in the wind, and dogs with eyes as big and golden as the headlamps on a car went bounding through the night, baying at the moon. And somehow Biddy was there too, the wind filling her black cape. ‘Private road,’ she seemed to be saying over and over again. ‘Private road. Keep out.’
Morwenna had no idea how long she had been asleep or what had disturbed her, but she was wide awake in an instant and sitting up startled. It was much lighter in the room and she realised that someone had switched on the powerful lamp which stood on the desk.
It was a man, and she knew as soon as she saw him that it was the man she had encountered in the lane. Her instinct, she saw, had not misled her. He was dark, as dark as the stormy night outside the windows, tall and lean. His face was thin and as hard as if it had been hewn from the granite cliffs—a high-bridged nose, a jutting chin, firm lips and dark, hooded eyes that stared down at her mother’s paintings spread on the desk in front of him.
Men who looked like that, she thought dazedly, had once sailed ships bringing contraband from Brittany into the coves along this coast under the noses of the Excisemen. And men who looked like that could even have hung lanterns on lonely rocks to lure unsuspecting shipping to a terrible doom.
He must have sensed her eyes on him because he looked up, and Morwenna found herself shrinking from the mixture of angry disbelief mingled with contempt that she saw in his face.
She tried to tell herself that she was still asleep and that her dreams had crossed the frontier into nightmare, but then he spoke and she knew that it was all only too