Remembering she had seen a pile tied up with string in a cupboard, she retrieved a stash of them and carried them through to the parlor room along with a pail to make up the cleaning solution of half vinegar and half water. Mina untied the bundle and started separating the pages out. It wasn’t long before she started noticing that the headlines were a lot more sensational than the ones that had graced her father’s favored broadsheet.
Half-naked Somnambulist Finds Herself in Deadly Peril she noticed had a rather salacious drawing of a scantily clad female dangling from a rooftop, her underwear having fortuitously caught on a chimney pot and spared her from plummeting to her death below. She scrunched that page up for use with her lips pursed. She was of course glad that Miss Fanny Jones had been spared a nasty fall but failed to see why she needed to be depicted in a state of undress for all to see.
The next page contained the highlights of a case against a wicked poisoner who preyed on rich widows, a scandalous divorce case with accusations of infidelity on both sides and an improbable haunting. Mina’s eye had just fallen on an article about a twenty-four-year-old female thief who had masqueraded as a fifteen-year-old errand boy for four years when a footfall startled her and she looked up to find Will Nye frowning down at her.
“What are you doing with those?” he growled accusingly, snatching the pages out of her hand.
Mina bridled, both affronted by his rudeness and uncomfortably aware that she had been caught out reading scandal rags. “I was about to clean the windows with them,” she answered, flushing hotly.
This seemed to take the wind out of his sails. “Oh,” he said, swallowing back whatever he had been about to say next. “With newspaper?” He gave her a hard stare and Mina wished she weren’t so smudgy with dirt. “Won’t the print smear the glass?”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you,” she admitted, touching her headscarf to make sure it was still firmly in place. “But no, it actually has the opposite effect.” What was he staring at? She glanced down to check she wasn’t disarrayed in some way, but everything seemed to be in place, if a little worse for wear.
He breathed out heavily. “These are set aside,” he said shortly. “For clippings.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize—”
“Why should you?” he interrupted her rudely.
Mina’s eyes stung. To distract herself, she reached for the pages she had detached. “I’ll just parcel these back up,” she said stiffly, but again, he rejected her help.
“Don’t touch them” he said, reaching past her and scooping them up. Mina drew back her hand as if he had slapped it. She stood mutely by as he gathered all the newspapers up into a bundle and walked them to the door. He halted in the doorway and turned back. “It’s not me putting you to skivvy,” he said ungraciously. “I neither asked for a wife nor needed one.”
Mina felt her color drain away. She stood entirely still as he exited the room and continued to stand there for a good few minutes after. Reaching for her apron strings, she untied them with trembling fingers, cast the apron down on a chair and then reached for the headscarf which she also tore off her head. Then she was out of the parlor bar, striding down the passageway and out in the yard. She was halfway across it before she broke into a run. When she reached the road, she did not turn right, down toward the village, but instead swung to the left, her legs flying despite her long skirts and the uphill climb.
Her arms worked, her legs pumped, and she flew just like the carrion crow, Jeremy Vance had said she resembled. She felt good, she felt free. Her blood which had felt so sluggish since Papa died, coursed through her body in a wild, fizzing rush. The brisk air whipped against her cheeks, but she did not feel cold despite the fact she lacked both cloak and hat. Her hair streamed out behind her as she burst through a hole in the hedge and made for sound of the sea like an arrow from a bow.
She could see it, she realized. The ocean. She had never seen it before, except in books. She felt a sort of frenzied joy fill her at the sight and her face was suddenly wet. It was tears, she realized with surprise. Then she heard shouting behind her. They would not stop her, she vowed. She was going to feel the sea spray on her face, the sensation of sand between her toes. Suddenly she was desperate to stand on that beach. If she could only get on that beach, everything would be alright. Nothing else would matter.
Coming upon the edge of the cliff was a shock. For one horribly thrilling moment, she thought her momentum would carry her right over the edge. Instead, she swerved and came up short, a shower of small stones falling instead on to the rocks below. Again, she heard voices carried on the wind behind her but refused to look back. Almost she felt as though she were pursued by furies or her own overwhelming misery which she had managed for an instant to outrun. But she would not let it catch her. They would not prevent her from her aim.
Instead she crouched a moment, panting to catch her breath and steady her wildly beating heart before lurching unsteadily to her feet in search of a path down the cliffs toward the beach. The fates for once were with her, as almost straight away she hit on a rough-hewn path. Slipping and stumbling, she made the steep descent, her heels dislodging clods of earth, her hands clutching at tufts of grass to stop herself from losing her footing and sliding the whole way down on her backside.
By the time she reached the bottom of the cliff she was out of breath and aching all over from where she’d scraped and bumped herself on the way down. She didn’t care. Clambering over the rocks, she headed for the patches of golden sand. When she reached the wet sand, she collapsed onto it, whimpering and tearing at her ankle boots, throwing them one after the other over her shoulder. She didn’t bother stripping off her ripped and torn stockings. She could already feel the sand through them in any case. She had reached the sea and was wading out into its cold waves when she felt hands close onto her upper arms, whirling her round.
Will Nye’s face was livid. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, you crazy woman?” he bellowed. “I thought you went over the edge! I thought—”
Mina’s balled fists rose up and struck against his chest as she struggled wildly against him. “I don’t want you either!” she screamed in his face. “I don’t want you! I hate you! Do you hear me? I hate you!” He didn’t react, just stood there solid and stoic as she pummeled and yelled, she knew not what, until her lungs burned and her voice broke. Then her legs went from underneath her, and the next thing she knew, her cheek was pressed to his chest and he was holding her up and she was being carried back up the beach, sobbing as if her heart would break.
*
Mina kept her eyes tightly shut during their ascent. She was humiliated beyond belief. Her face felt sore from all the tears. Straggles of her hair kept blowing across her face. The gulls screeched and the waves crashed as they broke on the rocks below. She was sure that any minute now, he would set her down and either tell her to climb the cliff path for herself or simply dump her there and leave her. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Yet, for some reason, he did neither of those things. At one point, he did set her down on a rocky ledge and Mina was just struggling to sit up, when she felt herself seized once again and slung over his shoulder, like a sack of potatoes. She had no fight left in her by this point and just hung there limply as he started, sure-footed as a goat, up the steep track.