Page 40 of Hold Me Fast
It was still early, but that was all to the good. Thatcher, who had pretensions as a gentleman, might still be asleep. Penrose wrote his note and sent an inn servant to the earl’s house, then Jowan and Penrose settled down in the snug with a glass of ale. They instructed the innkeeper to send Lord Trentwood in when he arrived, but to keep Thatcher out of the snug if he turned up.
They waited over an hour. Jowan filled in the time by asking Penrose for a report on the mine for the past few weeks. Bran arrived to join them, reporting that the Inneford servants had seen no sign of strangers and that bedchambers had been prepared for the two lady visitors after Jowan’s message from Ealing. Bran, too, had an ale.
Eventually, the earl arrived and was shown through to the snug. He stopped in the doorway. “Trethewey. I didn’t know you were back. Hughes, too. I’ve a guest who is stirring trouble for you. Thought I’d keep him here till I could find out what was going on. Sent a letter to you in London a week ago, but I thought you’d write, not come back.”
“I left London nearly three weeks ago. I was in London when Thatcher was arrested for stealing from me and others. I got a letter where I was staying out of London to tell me he had been let out on bail and had disappeared. I’m not surprised to hear he’s in St Tetha causing trouble.”
As Bran told Tamsyn and Evangeline when they rejoined them, that was that for Thatcher. “Lord Trentwood took our sworn testimony and went home to turn his guest into his prisoner. I don’t suppose we’ll be able to recover any of the money he stole, but at least most of the investors had not made good on their commitments before we put a stop to his tricks. Lord Trentwood thinks he will refer the man back to London for trial since most of his crimes were committed there and his accomplice is there.”
Since they’d made sure no other strangers were around, there was no reason not to take Tamsyn and Evangeline home, and so they did.
*
It felt strangeto be back in Cornwall—back in Inneford House, especially. Good, but strange. Things were familiar but different. Everything around Tammie was what she had grown up with, but as she’d expected, it was not the same.
The people had grown older. Some had retired, or even died, and others—often their children—had taken over. Even those who seemed much the same had memories from the seven years Tammie had been gone that she didn’t share. They would refer to “the year Sir Jowan caught the smugglers” or “that winter when vicar be snowed in on the downs for two days with t’earl’s daughter”, and she would want to hear the rest of the story, which everyone else clearly knew and took for granted.
The people who owned the village shop when she was a girl were gone, retired to live with a daughter in Truro, and the family who owned it now were newcomers, though Cornish born and bred, and related to the family who owned the inn.
Houses had been repainted or bits had been built on or taken down. The church roof, which the parish had been saving through Tammie’s entire childhood, had now been replaced. A whole line of trees was missing behind the village green—blown down, apparently, in a dreadful storm that was another of the events referenced when people wanted to date something. “The year the elms be blown clear down over by green.”
Up on the moors, the ground had been cleared and building begun for the new mine about which she had heard so much. They were going to build a new and better smelter there, too, which would process the ore from all three mines.
In Inneford House itself, Jowan’s hand marked every room. The old, dull, dark interior had been brightened with paint and furnishings. And Sir Carlyon’s study was one place that had changed beyond recognition. It had been a place of fear where Sir Carlyon sat in state behind the desk while miscreants, or those he regarded as miscreants, were called to be berated and punished.
Now Jowan had made of it a library and business room combined, with bookshelves lining the walls, two desks in well-lit positions by the windows, and comfortable chairs near the fire.
The upstairs bedrooms, too, had all been refreshed with paint, even to the servants’ rooms in the attic. The housekeeper’s little domain belowstairs—the two rooms that Tammie remembered most clearly—had changed almost beyond recognition, with new paint, new furniture and curtains, and completely different paintings on the walls.
And a new coal range in the kitchen made meal preparation much easier for the cook who had taken over from the tyrant who used to rule there—a grumpy woman who lived in a state of perpetual feud with Tammie’s mother.
It was disorienting. Close enough to Tammie’s memories that the dissimilarities always caused a moment of shock. “Even with all the changes,” she told Jowan a few days after their arrival, “I keep expecting to turn a corner and see Mama bustling by with the keys clinking at her waist.”
Jowan and Bran had been busy since their return. Out around the estate, or at Wheal Trethewey, Trethewey Two, or the new mine site, or visiting the local gentlemen to catch up on all that had been happening in their absence. They had twice ridden over to the coast, where Jowan had shares in a couple of boats and owned a fish cellar, where the pilchard catch was processed.
They had been home for dinner every evening but had then retreated to the library to work for another hour or two. “We’ll soon be over the hump of the work and coasting down the other side,” Bran assured Evangeline, “and then I will show you the countryside.”
He and Jowan had asked both ladies to stay in the house and garden unless one of them was available as an escort. Just until they knew that Guy had been, as Jowan put it,defanged. Tammie wanted to show Evangeline the places of her childhood, but she settled for those at Inneford House, for she certainly did not want to fall into Guy’s hands again.
Bran was continuing his courtship of Evangeline with small presents and posies, frequent touches, and occasional ardent embraces when they thought themselves unobserved. Jowan had settled into a cheerful but slightly distant friendliness, though occasionally Tamsyn caught an expression in his eyes or a color in his aura that hinted at more passionate thoughts and that eased the empty ache she felt in her heart for the man she’d once loved and probably never had stopped loving.
One lovely discovery in the house was a new pianoforte in the music room. The old harpsichord on which Tammie had first composed music had also been restored, and both instruments were in tune.
How long had it been since she last wrote her own music? Or even heard fragments of melody or a beat that she would weave into the fabric of a piece?
In the early days with Guy, he had discouraged her from, as he put it, “wasting your time fiddling around with little tunes. No one wants to hear music written by a woman. You should be developing your voice, Tammie. Your great gift.”
She had continued in private, unable to avoid documenting what she felt and experienced through the medium of music. At some point, under the dulling influence of the poppy and the oppression of the purely evil elf king, the music had died. But as they drove away from the abduction attempt at the inn east of Exeter, the hoof beats and wheel noise, the fear and the relief had begun to resonate in her mind, gelling into fragments of sound that, over the next few days, began to form a coherent piece.
Not a full symphony. Not yet. But one movement of a symphony. She sat at the piano and experimented with the motif and its variations. She was not too rusty. Fortunately, some people had been willing to pay for the Devon Songbird to sing while accompanying herself on the piano or another instrument, so Guy had been willing to allow her to spend time practicing.
She lost herself following where her fingers led her, not even distracted from the growing orchestration with the need to score what she was playing, what she was hearing. She only surfaced from the music when she heard herself vaguely thanking someone for placing a candelabra on the little side table she had been using to hold her paper, pen, and ink.
She blinked a couple of times and looked up. Jowan was smiling at her, and dusk filled the room.
“Good gracious, Jowan. It cannot be nightfall already!”
He did not bother to comment on something so obviously false, but nodded towards her stack of musical notations, now much easier to read thanks to the candles. She had not even realized she had been squinting in the poor light.
