‘No, I’m fine,’ he reassured her. ‘It was just that blasted tree. You know, the one beside the greenhouse.’
‘Susan’s hawthorn tree.’ I pulled my mind deliberately away from Daniel’s dagger and my speculations, all unpleasant, as to how it might have ended up there in the cave below the Cripplehorn. ‘She’s just had all the shrubs around it cleared away.’
‘Well, thanks for that,’ he said to Susan, who replied, ‘It’s Cornish culture, idiot. We’re making it a cloutie tree, just like the one at St Non’s well. It’s great for tourists – let them tie a little strip of fabric on a branch and make a wish, like people did back in the old days. For luck.’
‘Ah.’ Oliver rubbed his sore shoulder. ‘You’re off to a grand start, then.’
As he helped himself to salad, something made me think to ask him, ‘Oliver?’
‘Yes?’
‘Have you ever heard tell of a tree called the Trelowarth Oak? A big old oak tree that once grew at that really sharp bend in the road?’
‘The Trelowarth Oak? Sure.’ With a wicked grin he said, ‘I actually do have an etching of that one, if you ever want to come look at it. Up in my sitting room.’
I let that pass. ‘What happened to the tree itself?’
He speared his salad. ‘Methodists.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Well, the local people thought the tree was magical, or something, and the Methodist minister wasn’t having any of it, so he had the tree chopped down.’
‘When was this?’
‘1800s sometime. I can look it up for you.’
Across the table Susan shook her head and said, ‘What silliness. They cut the whole tree down?’
‘They did. And burnt the stump and dug that out as well.’
But not the roots, I nearly said. They couldn’t have destroyed the roots.
The roots that, in the Celtic legends, bound two worlds together, so the tree became a doorway …
The sound of far-off laughter caught my ear – a man’s laugh – and I raised my head to look, and in that shadowed instant I could see the room begin dissolving into something else, and saw a shape like Fergal’s cross to where the open hearth had been … but then I blinked and everything was back the way it had been.
‘You all right?’ Beside me Oliver was frowning faintly with concern. ‘Got a headache, or something?’
‘Or something.’ I picked up my own fork and gave a tight smile. ‘But I’m sure it will pass.’
Another shadow swept across the window as the figure of a man went by, his footsteps falling hard along the path to the back door. A man dressed all in black.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A cold hand clenched my chest and made it difficult to breathe until I reassured myself that I was firmly in the present, with my friends still sitting round me, and the constable had not in fact crossed into my own time. The man who’d passed by was a stranger to me, taller than the constable and broader through the shoulders.
Oliver had seen him, too, and as the first knock sounded at the back door he pushed back his chair and rose. ‘I’ll get it.’
From the brief exchange of voices in the corridor I gathered both men knew each other, but when Oliver came through into the kitchen he looked straight at Susan first, then stepped aside. The man who followed him was ruggedly attractive in a way that made it difficult to judge his age. The only thing I could have said with certainty was that he wasn’t young – his well-cut auburn hair had turned to silver at his temples and his jawline had begun to lose the chiselled definition that it would have had when he was in his thirties.
He seemed to hesitate a moment, like the rest of them. Until Claire broke the tension with a smile of welcome. ‘Nigel. Good to see you.’
‘Claire. Mark.’ He greeted them both, gave a brief nod at me, and looked over my head. ‘Susan.’
Susan didn’t answer him, and when I saw her face and saw the way that she was looking at him, and the way that Mark and Claire and Oliver were watching her, I finally figured out who this must be: the man she’d been with up in Bristol. Her ex-boyfriend.
Nigel’s gaze stayed fixed on Susan till she found her voice.
‘Hello, Nigel. What brings you to Cornwall?’
‘I’m celebrating, actually.’ His smile was lopsided, disarming, and I watched as she responded to it with the instant understanding of someone who’d shared a longtime intimacy with this man and knew his moods and his expressions.
With a slowly spreading smile herself she guessed, ‘You got the promotion.’
‘I did.’
‘Well, that’s wonderful. Really it is. You deserve it.’
He said, ‘It means moving to London, of course. Thought I’d take a run up at the weekend and start looking round for a flat. I was hoping,’ he added, ‘that I might persuade you to come.’
She had to steel herself. I saw her do it, saw the silent effort that it cost her to resist him as she said, ‘Look, we’ve been through all this. And anyway, you don’t need me to help you choose a flat.’
‘Don’t I?’
‘Nigel,’ Susan began, but he wouldn’t be put off.
‘It comes to this,’ he said. ‘I love you. And I’m miserable without you.’
‘Nigel,’ Susan tried again.
‘Please, hear me out. I know you think we haven’t got a future, but I think you’re wrong. I want to prove it to you, if you’ll let me.’