High Tide At Midnight. Sara Craven

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СКАЧАТЬ I think so,’ she said grimly. ‘I imagine I shall have great difficulty in remembering anything else.’ Wincing slightly, she settled her rucksack on her shoulder then picked up her case.

      ‘Dear God!’ He was still standing in the shadows well out of range of the headlights. ‘Not just a casual call, I see. Just how long were you planning to stay at Trevennon?’

      It was on the tip of her tongue to confess that she would be satisfied with a roof over her head for the night, but she suppressed it. After all, it was none of his business.

      She sent him a smiling glance over her shoulder as she prepared to negotiate the tree. It was one of her best, slightly teasing, deliberately provocative, aimed at leaving him with something to think about.

      ‘We’ll just have to see how things work out,’ she said lightly. ‘Maybe the king of Cornwall will take a fancy to me.’

      But if she had counted on having the last word, she was to be disappointed.

      ‘I’m sure he’ll take something to you.’ His voice was bland. ‘Preferably a riding crop. Au revoir, my pretty way-farer.’

      She held her head high, and wouldn’t allow herself to limp until she was round the next bend and out of the range of those too-revealing headlights.

      The force of the wind seemed to have spent itself, and now the air was full of the sound of the sea, a sullen booming roar as the breakers hurled themselves against the granite cliffs. Nor was it rain on her face any longer, but spray.

      As she trudged on wearily, Morwenna found herself wondering how easy it would be to miss the house entirely and walk straight over the cliff into the sea. She grinned wanly at the thought, and then stiffened, peering almost incredulously into the gloom. Somewhere just to the left she could see a light, a steady, purposeful light like a lamp set in the windows of an uncurtained room. And at that moment the moon emerged from behind the flying clouds, and Morwenna saw the dark mass of the house, its chimneys and roofs clearly outlined against the sky.

      Under the circumstances, it was madness to feel such a sense of relief, of homecoming even, but the familiarity of the building’s shape, imprinted on her mind by her mother’s painting, caught at her heart, and she felt childish tears prick at the back of her eyelids.

      Somewhere close at hand a dog began to bark, deep and full-throated, and then another took it up, and in the house another light went on, as if the occupants were responding to the animals’ warning. Of course, she thought, they would be expecting a visitor—the man she had met on the road.

      Summoning all her courage, she walked up to the front door. The notice she had seen had been perfectly correct, she thought wryly. The road indeed led to nowhere but Trevennon—straight to its door in fact. And what kind of arrogance had decided to build a house in this very spot anyway—out on a headland, exposed four-square to the elements? ‘A barn’, Biddy had called it, she thought, and wished that her first view of it had been in daylight.

      There was an old-fashioned bell pull at the side of the front door, and Morwenna tugged at it half-heartedly, not really expecting any results. But to her surprise, a bell did start jangling somewhere inside the house, and the dogs began barking again tumultuously. They seemed to be penned up somewhere in the outbuildings which rambled away from the side of the house, and as Morwenna waited, she heard the barking rise almost to a frenzy and the sound of heavy bodies banging against some kind of wooden barricade. It was altogether too close for comfort and Morwenna hoped devoutly that it would hold.

      ‘Whisky!’ she called out, trying to sound firm. ‘Max! Quiet, good dogs.’

      The good dogs were clearly puzzled by this personal appeal from an unfamiliar voice, but they stopped barking. There was a lot of subdued whining, and convulsive sniffing, and paws scrabbling on a hard surface, but that, Morwenna felt, was a far more acceptable alternative.

      And someone was actually coming to answer the door. Morwenna felt her stomach flutter with nervousness, and clenched her hands into fists deep in the pockets of her coat as the heavy door swung open with an appropriate creak of hinges.

      She was confronted by a small stocky man, almost enveloped in a large and disreputable butcher’s apron. His face was wrinkled like a walnut into lines of real malevolence, and bright eyes under grey shaggy eyebrows glared suspiciously up at her.

      ‘Wrong ’ouse,’ he snorted, and attempted to close the door.

      Morwenna stepped forward quickly to circumvent the move. She smiled beguilingly at him, ignoring the scowl she received in return. Her thoughts were seething. Was this—could this be Dominic Trevennon? He would be about the right age, she reasoned, and he seemed to fit the portrait of unlovable eccentric which she had begun to build in her mind.

      ‘Mr Trevennon?’ she asked, trying to speak confidently.

      ‘Not ’ere,’ was the discouraging reply. ‘So you may’s well take yourself off.’

      ‘Do you mean he’s away?’ Morwenna’s heart sank within her. ‘Or is he just out?’

      ‘Tedn’t none of your business,’ the gnome remarked with satisfaction. ‘Now go ‘long with you. I want to get this door shut.’ Somewhere in the house a telephone began to ring, and his face assumed an expression of even deeper malice. ‘ ’Ear that?’ he snarled. ‘I should be answering that, not stood ’ere, argy-bargying with you.’

      ‘Oh, please,’ Morwenna said desperately, seeing that he was about to slam the door on her. ‘I—I’ve come a long way today. If Mr Trevennon isn’t here at the moment, couldn’t I come in and wait?’

      ‘No, you couldn’t.’ He looked outraged at the thought. ‘If Mr Trevennon’d wanted to see you, he’d have left word you were expected. You phone up tomorrow in a decent manner and make an appointment. Now, go on. I’m letting all this old draught in.’

      The door was already closing in Morwenna’s face when a woman’s voice called, ‘Hold on there, you, Zack. You’re to let her in.’

      ‘ ’Oo says?’ Zack swung round aggressively.

      The woman approaching jerked a thumb over her shoulder. ‘ ’E does. Good enough for you?’

      Apparently it was, because Zack held the door open—not wide, it was true, but sufficiently to allow Morwenna to squeeze herself through it into the hall. She put her case down and eased the rucksack from her aching shoulder, ignoring Zack’s mutter of, ‘Seems mazed t’me.’

      ‘You keep your opinion until you’m asked, Zack Hubbard.’ The woman gave Morwenna a searching but not unfriendly look. ‘You can wait in the study for the master, miss. There’s a nice fire in there.’ She paused doubtfully, taking in Morwenna’s chilled and generally bedraggled appearance. ‘Would you fancy a cup of something hot, while you’m waiting?’

      Morwenna accepted gratefully and followed her rescuer across the wide hall. She was too bemused by the suddenness of her access to the house, just when she had almost given up all hope, to take much account of her surroundings, but the paramount impression was one of all-pervading shabbiness.

      And this was confirmed by the room in which she found herself. A big shabby desk, littered with papers and crowned by an ancient typewriter, dominated the room. A sagging sofa covered in faded chintz was drawn up in front of the fireplace, and these with the addition СКАЧАТЬ