She could understand his fascination with that in general, and may have even been intrigued, if it weren’t Sheridan poking at it. When they were supposed to be hunting pirate treasure. “We’re not here for the cairns or the menhir. He just points the way, remember?”
No reaction.
“The line from the letter?” Beth continued. “This is our starting point, not our destination.”
“Just give me a moment.”
That was what he’d said five minutes ago.
She growled. The sun was making earnest progress now, and they didn’t have that much time. “You know what? Take your time. You’ll be able to find me easily enough. The island’s not big enough to get lost on.”
“Right behind you.”
She’d probably have to pry him away in an hour when she was ready to set off for Tresco again.
Well, that was fine by her. She didn’t need the company of Lord Know-It-All anyway, even if he did have fascinating knowledge about Prince Rupert of the Rhine.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the copy of the letter she’d made last night. There it was, the line that had brought them here.
I meant to tell you before I left, Lizza, but I found a good weaver for you on St. Agnes. Stumbled upon her cottage and her wares that evening I was there. The old man at the crest of the hill can tell you the way.
Evening. Which meant that the sun would be in the western sky, and the Old Man’s shadow would be pointing east.
Away from St. Agnes. Certainly not toward any weaver’s cottage. There were no cottages on Gugh, nor ruins of them, had there been some in Mucknell’s day. The only evidence of civilization here was what Sheridan was still poking through.
So then, to the east. She set out across the heather, blazing her own path since there weren’t any to speak of otherwise. Most of the tourists were only interested in the Druid sites, or they’d wander the coast. Few struck out through the heath and bracken.
Within a few minutes, she was down the opposite side of the hill, out of sight of Sheridan and St. Agnes even without the help of the fog. She could have tended toward the southeast, back toward where the Naiad bobbed, but she let her feet veer northeast instead, following the natural slope of the land.
Perhaps Mucknell had done the same. Let granite and gravity decide his path.
Though where he could have buried anything on this side of the island she wasn’t certain. Bedrock was just below the surface, under the thin layer of soil and ground cover that flourished here as it did on the other isles. Ample cover for shrews and feral cats—not prime for burying anything of significant size.
But there were cairns on the western side of the isle. What if there was another over here, unrecorded? It could happen. New cairns were being unearthed in the Scillies all the time.
Well, not all the time. But occasionally. It had happened in her lifetime, anyway. So it was at least possible that the archaeologists who had explored Gugh before had missed some sign of one, buried under the flora that Libby would find more interesting than what it hid.
And if the Druids could dig a cairn here, surely a pirate could dig a hole of his own. Perhaps even at a cairn.
That sent a shiver up her spine. She had been the one to lead that little foray into Obadiah’s Barrow six years ago, but it hadn’t seemed quite as fun when she was crawling inside with her beads and dinner scraps and realized there were human bones in there. People. People who had lived and loved and died right there on the islands, before they sank into the sea. Before Christianity ever took root. Before there was a proper England to claim the islands as her own.
A cairn wouldn’t be her choice if she were burying something new. But then, she wasn’t a pirate. Mucknell didn’t strike her as the sort of man to get squeamish over the idea of a few skeletons, given his propensity for making more of them whenever someone crossed him.
A gust of wind blew fog into her face and then whipped past her. She let her feet drift to a halt and closed her eyes.
Oliver felt closest to God in a garden, he said, where tending the flowers reminded him of how God tended His children.
Beth felt closest to Him out here. Where the wind could tear across the hillocks without anything man-made in its way, where there was nothing but heather and seagrass and sand and water before her. Where she was keenly aware of how big He was. How untamed. How humanity was just a scratch in the earth, their marks so quickly covered over by His nature.
And yet He loved them with a ferocity as wild as that wind. As deep as that sea.
She’d had a lot of time with no one but the Lord for company in the last little while, and before she found that note Ollie left her, telling her Mamm-wynn could well be dying, she’d fancied herself closer to Him than she’d ever been.
It hadn’t taken her long to slip right back into old habits, though, had it? Bickering with Oliver, throwing books to the floor in anger. Snapping at Sheridan.
He deserved it. But pointing it out constantly probably wasn’t the best example of the grace of Christ.
“I’ll do better, Lord,” she whispered into the wind. “Though you’ll have to help me. Because that man . . .”
A shearwater cried from somewhere overhead, and it sounded like heavenly laughter to her ears. “Yes, I know. I falter even as I ask for help. It’s a good thing you’re more patient than I am, Father.”
She opened her eyes again, adding a silent plea that He show her where she ought to look. And frowned at a shape playing hide-and-seek with the fog to the north. A mast? That was certainly what it looked like, but she didn’t know who else would be fool enough to be out in this.
Curiosity pulled her that direction, though another cloudbank drifted in a minute later, thicker than any she’d sailed them through that morning. Had there been a trail, she’d likely have lost it, given that she couldn’t see more than a foot in front of her. She certainly had no hope of seeing if the boat out there had an owner nearby. She could run right into someone and not know it until—
“Oh!” She hadn’t expected to actually run into someone the moment she thought of it, but she very nearly stumbled directly into an immobile figure blocking her way. “Excuse me. I couldn’t see you.”
And how ridiculous was it to run headlong into someone when she wasn’t even on a path, and when there were acres of emptiness all about her?
It was a man, she realized, when vague impressions clarified into a well-made cardigan and trousers and a head topped by the flat cap favored by any fellow who spent more than a day fighting the wind for his fedora.
A young man, she saw when he pivoted, hands lifting, ready to steady her.
Not that she’d fallen, nor had any intention to. She took a step back, tilting her head a bit to allow a view of his face.
It was quite a face. Well-chiseled cheekbones, snapping green eyes, a patrician nose. Handsome. The sort of handsome that she’d always imagined for the prince in Mother’s story. She could almost imagine him in buccaneer’s garb, his hair long and tied at the nape, a sword and a blunderbuss both strapped to his side.
His eyes met hers, and her stomach went tight. It was the story, or the fog, or the arrangement of his features. She knew that.
Still, the question she’d asked Sheridan last night flitted through her mind. Do you believe in love at first sight?