“And what brings the good vicar down here twelve hours before his next sermon?” Enyon grinned at him, wiping a hand over his face to rid it of the mist.
Oliver lifted his brows. “I’ll have you know I’ve finished my sermon. Mostly.”
His friend chuckled, then nodded toward his gig. “Help me carry it up?”
Rather than waste words on an answer, Oliver grabbed an end. The larger craft were kept anchored in the quay, but the locals tended to store their smaller boats well above the waterline overnight.
At Enyon’s grunt, they lifted it in tandem. “What does bring you here though? You’re usually not to be peeled away from your desk on a Saturday evening.”
Sermons were not his favorite part of his job and required by far the most effort, perhaps because he spent far more time visiting parishioners and contemplating what truths he might work into a sermon someday than crafting one for that week. But after the last few days, he wasn’t all that concerned with whether he bored the congregation to tears. “I’ve been trying to catch you up since Wednesday.”
“Ah. Sorry. You knew I had to make that overnight trip to the mainland on Thursday, didn’t you?”
Oliver blinked against the mist and moved for the boathouse used by half a dozen families. “I’d forgot, honestly. I’ve been a bit distracted, worrying over Beth.” He wouldn’t confess it to just anyone. But this was Enyon.
They slid the gig into its spot in the boathouse. When Oliver turned, he found his friend’s face lined with a concern to match his own. “About what? Is she still plotting how to go to London for the Season?”
“No, nothing like that.” He’d already decided when he sought Enyon out that he’d tell him everything he knew. But even so, he couldn’t quite put into words what he felt in his heart. “Did you hear Benna’s back?”
“Aye, Mam mentioned that she saw her at her parents’ the other day, trussed up like a Christmas goose—her words, not mine. Does that have something to do with Beth?”
Though he shrugged, he couldn’t shake the feeling that it did, despite the fact that Mabena hadn’t admitted as much. Why else, though, would she appear out of the blue? “She says that her employer just wanted a holiday. But . . .” He dragged in a deep breath, trying to keep thoughts of Benna and Lady Elizabeth from crowding out what really needed to be said. “But Beth . . . she’s not on St. Mary’s, En. Mrs. Pepper said she thought she’d come home. But obviously she hasn’t. She’s just gone. Has been for over two weeks now.”
“What?” Enyon took his hat off and ran a hand over his hair in one practiced motion, putting the cap back on with the next. “What do you mean, gone?”
Oliver made a poof motion with his fingers. “Gone. Vanished. No one’s seen her, nor the Naiad.” And though he could well imagine her hiding herself for weeks on end, how and where was she hiding her sloop?
“And you’re not banging on the constable’s door? Organizing a search?”
He’d considered it. But . . . “She left me a letter, indicating she was vanishing on purpose. Told me not to worry.”
“Likely.”
“Right?” He shook his head and buried his hands in his trouser pockets to keep them from mirroring Enyon’s hat-swipe motion. “I don’t know what I’m to do. She’s my baby sister. She isn’t supposed to do this sort of thing.”
Enyon’s snort at least had a bit of amusement in it this time. He motioned Oliver to follow him, though surprisingly, he didn’t head for the cozy, dry cottage he’d let for himself last year, after his second sister and her brood moved back into their parents’ house when her husband took a job on the mainland. He turned instead toward the beach.
Talk about a true friend. Oliver breathed in the damp air, relishing the mist on his face and the shift of sand and pebbles under his feet. It soothed him as nothing else could.
“Sisters,” Enyon drawled after a long moment, “apparently think they’re supposed to do whatever will cause us the most disquiet. If you ask me, the Lord ought to have made us humans to be capable of only producing one gender of offspring each. Boys could have brothers, girls could have sisters. Nice and tidy.”
Laughter stole its way from Oliver’s throat. “I suppose He didn’t mean for our lives to be so tidy. Even so, a bit tidier just now wouldn’t go awry. I can’t . . .” Lose her. But he couldn’t say it. Putting words to the fear lent it credence. Gave it weight.
He wouldn’t give that fear any more weight than he already had, just by thinking of it.
Enyon didn’t ask him to finish his sentence. “Do you think she took the ferry? There’s a world of possibilities as to where she is if she did.”
He couldn’t discount the possibility. She could have sailed toward Tresco just to make sure no one was watching, stowed the boat somewhere, and then secreted her way back to Hugh Town. “I spoke with the captain, and he didn’t remember seeing her. But you know Beth. When she doesn’t want to be noticed, she isn’t.”
Enyon chuckled. “Oh yes, I’m well aware.”
Oliver let the tug of a smile have its way with his lips. “Do you remember the time we all decided we’d brave a night in King Charles’s Castle? And she—”
“Aye, I remember.” Enyon gave his shoulder a shove. “And I don’t need you imitating yet again my shriek when she jumped out at me, thank you very much.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Though his lips nearly pulled back to disobey his claim. He settled for another laugh instead, and then a few paces of quiet.
Over and again he’d taken this band about his chest to the Lord. Begged Him to watch over Beth as Oliver couldn’t do. Begged Him to touch Mamm-wynn and keep her healthy. Begged Him to somehow put to rights whatever had gone wrong.
He closed his eyes for a moment, just to be. Here. Now. With his best friend at one side and the ocean at the other. The beach beneath his feet. Home stretching up above him. To feel the rhythms that hadn’t changed, despite all that had.
Oliver. He could imagine his name in the breeze—and he always heard it in Mamm-wynn’s voice, in that way she’d whispered it when he was just a boy, standing on the bluff overlooking the shore. He’d gone out in a huff, angry that his parents hadn’t taken him with them to the mainland when they went to check on Truro Hall. And his grandmother had come out to soothe him.
“You don’t belong there,” she’d murmured, taking his slight shoulders in her still-strong hands and meeting his gaze, holding it. “It’s here you belong, Oliver Tremayne, as surely as your father and his father and his before him. Listen—listen to the wind. Do you hear that? It knows you, lad. The islands know your name, as they know all of us who love them. Be content.”
He had been. Him and Morgan both. It had been enough for them, to know the islands and be known in turn. But Beth . . .
Maybe Mamm-wynn hadn’t ever had that talk with her. Maybe she hadn’t taught her how to hear her name on the wind.
“So . . . Benna, eh? Did she look as tight-laced as Mam said?”
Oliver opened his eyes again. Pushed thoughts of Beth aside in favor of the picture of Mabena that surfaced. “I scarcely knew her. You’d have laughed for a century. Her hair, Enyon—it was tidy. Straight as a pin, sleek, all tucked in properly.”