Page 70 of The Curse of Penryth Hall
He was deep in the woods behind his cottage gathering bits of bark with a wickedly dark blade in his hand. The sun barely broke through the thick canopy overhead, and all manner of birds and small animals seemed to have made a home here in this heavily shadowed sanctuary.
“You’re not going to use that on me, are you?” I said lightly as I reached his side, glancing at the knife in his hand. The blade itself was nearly eight inches long and slightly curved, more suited to gutting an animal than gathering herbs—yetthat appeared to be precisely what he was doing with it. The edge was honed shaving-razor-sharp.
He startled at the sound of my voice, knife skittering across the bark of the tree. “Woman, are you trying to get me to cut my finger off?” He turned around, his expression hovering between frustration and exasperation. The dappled sunlight came through the canopy overhead, catching on the hints of silver in his hair.
“I’m sorry. I thought you could hear me.”
He grunted, pulling a bit of the bark off and dropping it into a cloth in the basket beside him. “It doesn’t work that way… I apologize, I’m a bit distracted. Murderers in the village and all.”
And a woman claiming I would destroy him.
He shot me a dangerous look. It seemed he heardthatat least. “No one is going to harm me. Least of all you.” He sounded oddly disappointed in the notion.
I cleared my throat, changing the subject. “Did you find her then? The woman?”
Another grunt as he struggled with a particularly stubborn bit of bark. He drove the knife a bit harder beneath the trunk. “Gone without a trace. I was up half the night trying to track her down. No one saw hide nor hair of her. You’d think she was a ghost.”
I furrowed my brow. “Could she have been?”
“At the crossroads?” He shrugged as if this were an ordinary conversation. “I don’t think so. She was flesh and bone. But as for what her motives are, and where she’s from…” His voice trailed off.
“What do you make of her?”
He let out an exasperated sigh and gestured at me with the knife. “The inn is full up on the curious sort. Take your pick of what she could be. With the papers and the stories… shecould be any sort of fraud, coming to stir up trouble. A charlatan.” That was the same word Mr. Owen had used, and yet I could tell that Ruan didn’t believe his own words. He was lying. And I needed to know why.
“Ruan—”
“Say your piece and leave me be.”
Shifting on my feet, I took another step closer to him. Who was this uncertain creature I’d become? He was to blame for all of it—him with his unusual eyes and mercurial temper and ability to see straight through me. I was adrift at sea, with no mooring. No anchor. “I—”
He whipped around to face me. “You what?” A bloom of red dropped from his finger.
“You’re bleeding…”
He glanced down at his hand, then shoved his finger into his mouth, sucking on it. “So I am,” he mumbled, the edge falling from his voice. “What did you come for, Ruby?”
“A clue.” I beamed, reaching into my pocket and withdrawing the blackmail note. I shook it at him. Paper rustling. “Someone was blackmailing Edward before he died.”
Ruan steadied my hand, his eyes quickly darting across the letters there. The witch temporarily forgotten. “It’s not signed.”
“Of course it’s not signed. But I also have this!” I whipped out the vicar’s letter from my pocket and put it on top. I tapped the paper, unable to contain my excitement. “Look at it, Ruan! Look at it! It’s the vicar! It has to be!”
He glanced from the pages in his hands to me, back and forth until he finally stopped altogether and settled upon my face.
My breath caught in my chest, hanging there desperate for his approval. AGood work, Ruby, would have satisfied me for days. Anything at all. The perils of being a fatherless child, I’m sure Mr. Freud would have claimed. At least that’s what Iblamed this tightness in my chest on. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I was utterly fascinated by the man before me. The same one who was staring at me as if he’d discovered fire. A look somewhere between admiration and something else I couldn’t countenance. My mouth was dry. “Say something.”
He swallowed hard, finally looking away and shoving the letters back to me, his fingers brushing my own. “You did well.” He turned back around and moved on to another tree deeper into the shadows.
That was it? I huffed out a breath.
You did well?
I traipsed off after him deeper into the wood as he continued whatever it was he was doing with that plant.
“Yes, that’s it.”
Infuriating man. “Well, we need to go call on the vicar. See what he has to say for himself.”
