I told her that I hadn’t.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘one of the piskies called out, “I’m for Seaton Beach!” and the boy thought, Well, why not? So he said, “I’m for Seaton Beach,” and there he was, with the piskies again. And they went on like that all night, all the way to the King of France’s cellar, where they drank his wine and danced, and when the piskies brought the boy home in the morning to Porthallow Green, he still had his wine glass to prove it.’ She smiled. ‘Wouldn’t happen today, of course. Think of the airfare I’d save if I could go and stand in a meadow and simply call, “I’m for Ibiza,” and land on the beach.’
‘But you’d have to rely on the piskies to bring you back home again,’ I pointed out. ‘They don’t, always.’
‘True enough.’
I asked casually, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of anybody disappearing from Trelowarth?’
As it turned out, she had never heard the story of the Grey Lady. ‘When was that, do you know?’
I did the maths. ‘Claire said she heard it when she first came here to live, which would be nearly thirty years ago, and the man she heard it from was maybe ninety, so assume that he was twenty-five or thirty when it happened … ninety years ago?’ I estimated. ‘Give or take.’
‘I’ll have to ask around,’ she said, ‘but nothing would surprise me. You know Trelowarth’s built right on a ley line?’
‘A what?’
‘Ley line. Sort of a geomagnetic conduit, if you like. A lot of ancient monuments and holy sites were built on top of ley lines. There’s a line that runs clear under St Non’s well and through the Beacon and Trelowarth to Cresselly Pool.’ She laughed at my expression. ‘I’m not making it up, honestly. Dowsers can find them, they’re actually there. They’ve a powerful energy. All sorts of strange things can happen on ley lines.’
I certainly wasn’t in any position to argue that, I thought. As I set my pisky back among his dancing brethren on the shelf, Felicity asked brightly, ‘So, what are you doing down here in Polgelly?’
I turned and told her, ‘Taking you to lunch.’
The tide was in, the wind was fair, and many of the fishing boats had gone to take advantage of the day, to ride the sea beneath a sun that warmed my shoulders even through the fabric of my shirt and felt like summer’s kiss upon my upturned face.
I felt another happy moment of nostalgia, sitting on the whitewashed harbour wall enjoying fish and chips that had been wrapped in newspaper, the old way I remembered it. The rest was well-remembered, too: the biting tang of vinegar, the sharpness of the salt, the sound of seagulls wheeling greedily above me while the water lapped the wall below and, further off, the waves that crashed in rhythm at the entrance to the harbour and cast up a spray that carried on the breeze to cool my skin.
Felicity, beside me, smiled. ‘You look as though you’ve eaten the canary.’
Mark said, ‘That’ll be next, at the rate she’s going. Where are you putting it all, Eva?’
‘I’m hungry.’
‘You can chase that with a pound of fudge,’ suggested Oliver, who in this group had fallen very naturally back into his old childhood pattern, teasing me to focus my attention where he wanted it – on him.
Not that he had seemed at all put out that I’d brought Mark, nor that Felicity had joined us. Oliver, as I recalled, was nothing if not sociable, and with his easy-going ways he could adapt without complaint to any change of plan. But he was not about to let that steer him off his course, or change his purpose.
It was clear he had his eye on me. I noticed it today more than I had at our last lunch together, noticed how he looked at me and how his smiles lingered. And a month ago I might have even welcomed the attention. After all, he was a nice guy, and looked absolutely gorgeous in his plain white shirt and jeans, his blond hair golden in the midday sun and tousled by the harbour breeze. I knew most women would have thought him wonderful if they’d been in my place.
But when I looked at him today my only thought was that his face, though handsome, didn’t have the same appeal as Daniel Butler’s, and that Daniel’s eyes in that same light would have been even greener than the sea beyond the shore.
I shrugged off Oliver’s remark, and smiled. ‘I doubt that I’ll have room for fudge when I’m done with this.’
‘If I take you for a walk, you will.’
Mark said, ‘I thought you called her down to see a book.’
‘I did. Only found it this morning. It came in a box with some others I bought at a sale last year, and it’s been gathering dust at the back of my bookshelves.’
Felicity glanced over, curious. ‘What sort of book?’
‘A field guide of sorts to this area – natural history with small bits of colour thrown in – but it mentions some people that Eva’s been after. She’s trying to find Susan somebody famous who lived at Trelowarth,’ he said, ‘and these brothers, the Butlers, were smugglers. Infamous, not famous, but the local people loved them, so the book says. They were heroes here.’
Mark said, ‘Like the Carter brothers up at Prussia Cove?’
‘Exactly. But the Carters weren’t in business till years afterward. They weren’t even born when the Butlers were free-trading out of Polgelly.’ He’d finished the last of his chips and he crumpled the wrapping of newspaper into a ball. ‘I have to thank Eva for putting me on to them. I’d never heard of the Butlers, myself.’