“Hm?” Tremayne had been looking up at the stars but lowered his head at the question. “What duty is that?”
“Trying to scare him away from your sister. Making certain his intentions are honorable.”
Sheridan’s ears grew hot, but at least the darkness concealed any accompanying redness.
Besides, Tremayne chuckled, sounding utterly unconcerned. That was a relief. Or was it a bad sign? Did he think Sheridan’s chances with Beth so slim that they needn’t even be addressed?
“I believe our friend’s intentions have been made quite clear, given that proposal the other week.”
Sheridan lifted a hand to rub at the back of his neck. Just to pat out any flames that had sprung up. “It was a retraction of a proposal, thank you very much.”
“And I don’t have any reason to think him after her dowry.” This Oliver delivered dryly, with a pointed look at Telford that arrowed even through the darkness.
Of course, Telly just batted it away. “Even so. Shouldn’t you be sounding out his faith? That ought to be rather important to a vicar, I’d think.”
Sheridan blew out a breath. It was one thing to insist to his valet that he was neither heathen nor heretic. He wasn’t certain his musings on the ancient Christian mystics would hold up so well with a vicar, though. “Whose side are you on, Bram?”
“He’s just punishing you for not making a protest over my stealing Libby from you.”
No doubt Oliver was right about that. But how was Sheridan supposed to have insisted Libby marry him when it was clear that she was in love with Oliver Tremayne? And when Sheridan didn’t really want to marry her? And when Beth collided with him and knocked all thoughts of any other woman from his head? “Blame the love potion.”
His old friend blinked at him. Puzzled it out. “You were reading the Tristan and Isolde story, I suppose.”
Sheridan grinned and leaned back to study the stars again. “And for the record, Tremayne, I’m not a heathen.”
“I should think not.”
“Nor a heretic, as I was just explaining to Ainsley before you joined us.”
“Mm-hmm.”
And really, Telford had a point. Tremayne really should be giving him a harder time, and the fact that he wasn’t was downright cruel. Now he’d be worrying endlessly about whether even a century would be enough to convince Beth to convince him to give her another chance. “And it’s not that real Christianity is boring. It’s just that people have made it so.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
Sheridan huffed. “Well, stop it, will you? It’s a mean trick.”
Tremayne’s laughter just rolled up into the night.
14
Beth slid a lovely blue-and-grey feather into her pocket for Mamm-wynn and turned her face into the wind. No one else had been awake yet when she padded down the stairs at home—even Mrs. Dawe had only just slipped into the kitchen. Usually, unless she had secrets to recover from Samson, Beth preferred a more leisurely start to her day. But something was nagging at her. Something that propelled her outside into the soft morning light, toward the coast. Something that kept her walking until she stood here looking over at the shapes of Teän and St. Martin’s playing hide-and-seek in the mist.
She’d explored them both countless times, including this summer. She’d dug for what she thought could be a clue on Teän only to come up empty—except that that was where she’d run into Johnnie Rosedew, who was following the same old clue to the same empty ground. They’d realized, then, that they’d both been hired to find the same thing. That was when they’d compared notes—after she pushed aside her irritation that someone, presumably the Scofields, had invited others into her search. They’d tried to make a plan.
A week later, he’d been dead. Poor Johnnie. Her chest still went tight when she thought about it, thought about him. He deserved better than this. And how many hours had she lain in her abandoned cottage on Samson and wondered what they could have done differently? How many times had she wept, crying out to God to somehow respool the thread of time and erase it? So many things she wished she could undo. Johnnie, of course. And she’d have warned her parents against trying to sail to the mainland that day. She still wasn’t sure what they could have done to make Morgan healthy and well, but had she known he was so near the end of his life, she might have chosen not to leave the Scillies for finishing school.
Although then she’d never have met Emily.
How strange were regrets. So many things she hated, yet without them, things she loved would never have been.
She took another step onto the wet sand, into the damp wind. It wasn’t regrets that had woken her up at the first scarlet breath of dawn, though. No, it was the question of why Nigel Scofield had been on Gugh. A question they’d all asked countless times already, and nothing had seemed a satisfactory answer.
But he’d been there. So, an answer there must be. And she’d woken up thinking, feeling, remembering something. Something that had propelled her out of bed and out the door, where perhaps the fresh air could tease it to the fore of her mind.
Another billow of morning mist rolled between Tresco and the nearest uninhabited islands, making them nothing but hulking shapes for a moment, before they turned into rock again. She’d tried to sketch them, though art had never been her strong suit. Beth could never quite perfect the way they rose out of the water just so.
Who was she kidding? She’d never even been able to draw their outlines correctly when they had to make maps at school. Her lips tugged up as she remembered stomping a foot when she was all of eight, arguing with the teacher that maps were stupid. That the islands were so much more than an outline, flat and . . .
She sucked in a breath and spun around, darting back up the path. An outline. Last night, as she left the library, she’d glanced at the papers still strewn over the table. Noticed the water stain on one.
Or what she’d thought was a water stain. But the shape. The shape.
It took her only a few minutes to dash back to the house. It was still quiet in there, aside from humming coming from the kitchen, along with some lovely scents. But she aimed for the library, barely even smiling as she recalled her exchange there with Sheridan just a few hours before.
No, she moved directly to the table and then stopped, breath balled up in her chest. There, right on top. One of the letters from Mucknell to his wife that she’d sent a copy of to London. She’d been meticulous in her copying, tracing both Mucknell’s script and every oddity on the page—including the water stain.
But what if it wasn’t a stain put there by the centuries in Tas-gwyn’s foundation? What if it was something Mucknell himself had traced?
Perhaps that explained why it bore the strangest resemblance to St. Agnes and Gugh.
She’d never noticed it before, in all the times she’d looked at it. But now, seeing it upside down—it was unmistakable. Wasn’t it? Pulling out a map of the islands to check it against, she was all but certain.
That could be no coincidence. No quirk of water over time. Mucknell must have put it there on purpose. And the portion that was Gugh . . . only one word crossed into it. The word again—did that mean something? Or was it more about location? Because unless she was mistaken, the portion of the island that the word crossed was the very spot where she’d literally run headlong into Nigel Scofield.