Home From The Sea (12 page)

“Do I?” Toby had shifted the hammer into his left hand and was counting hoops and nails. “I’ll be done in a few hours. We have that long.”

He had dodged the issue neatly, leaving Jim with a rueful curse as he returned his attention to the wood.

They ate cheese, onions and yesterday’s bread a little after noon, when Mrs. Clitheroe
arrived
late, full of apologies and explanations. Her grandson had come to her cottage with warnings of bad weather. She lived near the bottom of a slope, and often flooded in heavy rains. “Now ’e wants to cart me off to Exmouth,” she grumbled, thumping onions and potatoes onto the table.

“Kind of him to offer,” Toby observed.

“’Sept I don’t want to go,” she said tartly. “I does nothin’ but fight
wi
’ yon stupid little cow of a wife of ’is. It’s like they always
sez
– two women under the same roof, an’ one of ’em a fool!”

“So stay here.” Jim gestured at the ceiling with his mug. “There’s only Toby and me in the house, and bedchambers going begging.”

“Oh, I’ll sleep in me own kitchen, down ’ere,” the old woman began.

“You’ll have a proper bedchamber,” Jim corrected. “If the rains come for days, we’ll be flooded as well. You remember two years ago, and the year before? Take a room upstairs, and be dry.”

“Up them stairs,
wi
’ these legs?”
She gave him a mocking look. “Aye, when the rain gets up to yon doorstep, thee can carry me up.”

“We can indeed,” Toby told her. He lifted a teasing brow at Jim. “
A pair of strong, healthy lads like
us? No problem.
Eh, Jim?”

“No problem,” Jim said, deadpan. “But if we don’t want to be setting out every pot and pan we own to catch the rain, we’d best get busy.
Eh, Toby?”
 

With a flourish, Toby set aside his mug and plate. “Your pardon, madam,” he told Mrs. Clitheroe with exaggerated gallantry, “I regret, I have to go and nail a roof.”

She was still cackling when he had shinned up the ladder and returned to the thatch. Jim grabbed a tankard of ale and headed back to the task of carrying the split wood into the coach house, where it was stacked against the wall, furthest from the door. He could not step into the building without thinking of the Gypsy girl – Spanish girl, he reminded himself.
Margie
Fergo
, lately of Corunna.

He stood in the place where she had ended her life, and sighed.
How delicate and temporary life was; and how uncertain.
From the coach house he could see the roof, catch a glimpse of Toby, and the future seemed to dance ahead of him like the will-
o’the
-wisp, half-seen, elusive,
filled
with promise and danger in equal measure.

The hoarse cries of gulls destroyed his reverie and he shook himself hard. The birds were heading for land, which boded ill. A glance at the horizon showed great slashes of rain, purple clouds against an indigo sky, and as he frowned at them a gust of oddly warm, wet air fell in his face. It would soon be stingingly cold, and rain was not far behind.

He set to work with a will and was filling the water casks from a pair of pails when Toby stepped into the kitchen. “I put the ladders back where I found them, tied down behind the stable.” He plunged his hands into the washing water and dried them on the yard of sackcloth by the big brass dish. “What now, Jim? There’s at least one shutter I
do
know of that needs fixing.”

It was the shutter in Jim’s bedroom, and mention of it brought a rush of heat to his face. Mrs. Clitheroe was oblivious, but he felt the flush in his cheeks and covered it by giving Toby a wink. “Check them all, while you’re at it, and make sure they’re locked down tight. Then, if you can manage it, you could run up to the market in Budleigh – you know it? –
and
get us half a gallon of milk and a pound or two of salt butter. God knows when we’ll get any more.” He nodded toward the bar. “Take sixpence out of the coin box and fetch some apples and cheese as well, if you can find any. I’d go myself, but –” He slapped the leg that infuriated him more today than usual. “I’ll be far too slow, and unless I miss my guess, you’ll be coming home in the rain even if you run!”

It was only later when he realized what he had said.
Coming home
.
As if Toby Trelane belonged here now. Part of Jim ached to believe it was true, but he mocked himself for the whimsy. Toby was still a stranger. One tumble on the sheets did not make him a lifelong mate, though Jim knew he could feel himself falling hard.

“Fool,” he told himself mercilessly as he hurried back to work. “You’re a bloody halfwit, Jim Fairley, and if you’re not careful you’ll be learning it the hard way!”

Load by load, he brought the flotsam and jetsam of the spring season inside and stacked it beside the big wooden trapdoor to the cellar. The mountain of oddments had become daunting by the time the smell of stewing beef and onions issued from the cauldron on the hob, and Toby materialized at his side.

“We’re all secure upstairs,” he reported. “I begged a bag of rags from Mrs. Clitheroe and hammered them into a couple of casement frames, like caulking. I think we’ll survive.” He was looking at the trapdoor. “Can you manage here? I mean … damn, you
know
what I mean.”

He meant
,
could Jim make it up and down steps that were as steep as ship stairs, twenty times, or thirty, to get this pile of gear stowed, and do it by the light of a single lantern.

“I’ll manage,” Jim muttered, furious with himself for the frailty of the limb – and for the vulnerability of his emotions, which was worse.

Toby’s hand was light on his shoulder. “You’ll sit down by the kitchen hearth and have a mug of something, and wait for me to get back from market. Sixpence from the coin box, you said?” Jim nodded. Toby hesitated. “With the weather like this, you’ll get no business for the next day or three.”

“All the more reason to get in some milk and butter.”
Jim gave him a push. “We’ve got plenty of lamp oil, and Edith says we can make do with what salt and flour and sugar we have. Go on, Toby, while you can. They’ll be closing down the stalls and running for home in another half hour.”

“Then I’ll be quick.” Toby drank a cup of water to the bottom and shrugged into the coat he had left on the chair in the corner.
“Bess?
Come on, girl, you fancy a run? What about you, Boxer? Come on!” He gave Jim a crooked grin and left the tavern via the bar, where he stooped to pull out the coin box and count out an assortment of farthings and ha’pennies.

The door had banged behind him and the dogs when Mrs. Clitheroe looked up from the pastry she was abusing with a rolling pin so old, the wood was nearer black than brown. “Now, ’
e’s
a right good lad, is that
un
.”

“Yes.” Jim poured himself a mug of tea. “Yes, he is. And he’s so full of
secrets,
you don’t know what to make of him half the time!”

“Master Trelane?” She cackled again, like a broody hen. “I’d say ’
e’s
been ’round the block a few times, is all.
Thee’s
never been the places Toby Trelane’s been, nor done the things ’
e’s
done. None o’ that makes the lad wicked, mind.”

“Just makes me sheltered as a hapless little virgin girl,” Jim observed with dry
humor
, and held up a hand to forestall her apologies. “No, don’t say a word. You’re far from wrong. Fred Bailey was saying the same thing – I need to get out, he said. Get out and do things, before I’m too old.”

“An’ old
Fred’d
be right,” she said shrewdly. “Stuck in ’ere all day with the likes of Fred an’ me…? Make thee old before thy time, it will.
Still, Master Trelane’s ’ere now.”

“To stay?”
Jim had sat on the stool at the hearth, and looked up at the old woman quizzically.

“To stay for long enough.”
She threw her considerable weight against the dough, rolling it out for the usual pies and pasties, though Jim doubted there would be any drinkers in the house tonight.

“Long enough for what?”
He chuckled.

Mrs. Clitheroe looked at him cannily. “I dunno,” she said at last. “But yon lad’s good
fer
thee – ’
e’s
a breath of fresh salt air in this musty old place. What, you didn’t smell it?”

In fact Jim did, but he said nothing and finished his tea in silence, content to watch as she cut out the rounds for the pies, stacked them, and threw raisins into the leftover pastry pieces. His leg ached, if he bothered to notice it. He preferred to ignore it until it pained him too badly, and then reach for the rum in preference to the Dutch laudanum, since the rum did not knock him flat on his back and leave him dizzy.

The backdoor into the tavern yard was open, and he heard the rain begin. The sound of big, fat drops falling onto wet flagstones was exactly like the crackle of bacon sizzling in a skillet, and his nostrils flared as he smelt the rain too. It was sharp with the tang of the beach, and when a swirl of cold air wafted into the kitchen, he smelt the ocean there also – the scent of ships and
harbors
, ports that were the starting points for places unknown, and the mysterious lands known only as points on maps, with names like Barbados and Hispaniola, Java and Borneo.

With a shiver he went to the door, about to close it against the cold, rising wind and the steel-gray daylight, when he saw Toby come loping back into the yard with the dogs at his heels. His hair was plastered flat to his head; over his shoulder was a sack, tied down tight to his back, and he ran with his hands thrust deep into coat pockets, the collar pulled up about his ears.

The easy loping gait made Jim as envious as admiring. Toby was in fine condition – not even breathing hard as he came to a halt in the shelter of the eaves, where he slipped the sack off his shoulder. “Everything you
wanted,
and a couple of treats. They were almost giving away the milk and butter, to get rid of it before the storm. They don’t know when they’ll have a chance to sell it again – and sure to God, the cow won’t stop making the stuff!”

They were inside as he spoke, and Jim secured the door behind him. The kitchen was dim, lit only by a half dozen lanterns. Toby took off coat and boots, and set them close to the fire to dry as Jim opened up the sack. Milk, in brown glass jars with the corks waxed into place; butter and cheese wrapped up in scraps of oilskin and tied with string; eight big red apples; and a bag that might have been a tobacco poke, but was stuffed with mint humbugs the size of a child’s thumb.

Surprised, delighted, Jim chuckled. “We’ll reward ourselves for hard work, will we?” He gave the mountain of gear a look of resignation.
“Maybe after we’ve shifted
that
.”

 
“Into the cellar.”
Toby was intent on the trapdoor, which was nestled into the back corner of the kitchen between the back door and the hearth. His brows knitted into a faint frown. “Well, now.”

“Well …?” Jim prompted.

But Toby shrugged away the question and grabbed a spare lantern from the shelf at left of the door. “Soonest started, soonest done, and I’ve worked up an appetite today.” He stooped to light a taper at the hearth and took a deep breath over the cauldron of simmering beef and onions. “I won’t be singing and storytelling tonight, but I’d say I’ve already earned my supper. Yes?”

“Supper, and a lot more,” Jim decided, mindful of Mrs. Clitheroe.

The remark brought a sparkle to Toby’s eyes as he lit the lantern. “Then, let’s get this lot shifted, and we’ll settle down and watch the storm come in. There were fishermen at the market – did you want fish? I don’t care for it, myself, except for kippers – and they were saying the
storm’ll
land on these shores around dusk. They were seeing lightning over the horizon before noon, and decided to head in early.”

The lantern was burning brightly, and Jim beckoned him to the trapdoor. “Give me a hand with this. It’s heavy.”

The timbers were old, salvaged from a ship sunk on the coast about the time The Raven was built, a hundred years before. Two strong backs lifted it easily enough. Jim looked up into Toby’s face, about to say he would go down first with the light, since he knew the steps, which were steep and inclined to be slick with moss. The look in Toby’s eyes banished the words, and Jim hesitated. Toby had the lantern in his left hand, the better to balance his weight against the wall with his right, and he was already going down.

He
knew
these stairs – it was obvious he knew the cellar as well as he knew the rest of the tavern. But as a guest in the house of Charlie Chegwidden’s old mother, who had owned The Raven outright since she was widowed, he should never have been shown this part of the building, and Jim was surprised.
Disquieted.

Without comment he followed Toby down, watched him light a second lantern at the bottom of the steps. There, he took a lamp in each hand and turned around, peering into the coagulated, tar-thick shadows as if –

As if he was searching for something. Jim came down to the bottom stair and hovered there, intent on him for some moments before he found his voice. He said quietly,

“If you tell me what you’re hunting for, I’ll help you look.”