I light an oil lamp, and the sudden brightness offers me a better view of him. Burst capillaries thread the whites of his eyes, the circles beneath them dark as bruises. I pull off his cap, gently, his hair looking unkempt in the hall light.
“Oh, Jude.”
He smiles, uncertain. “Yes?”
But there are no words, I think, for what I want to say. “Nothing,” I murmur. “Come, let’s get you to bed.”
“Tired,” Jude agrees with a nod.
We take the stairs up to his bedroom. I push open the door, settling him on the narrow bed against the far wall. The space is plainly furnished and has a vacant feel to it. Jude probably falls asleep in the watch room more often than here. I slip off his coat and boots and pull the blankets over him.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
“You’re welcome.”
Just as I move away, he catches at my wrist. “Stay.”
“Jude…”
“Please,” he says, his voice heavy with sleep. “Moira, please stay.” His eyes are already beginning to close.
I kneel, the hem of my dress brushing the floorboards. Jude’s hold on my wrist turns slack as sleep takes him. I comb my fingers through his hair, and he sighs, pressing his face into the pillow.
“Good night, Jude.”
When I leave, I close the door behind me, starting on the pathway home.
I sneak into my house as quietly as possible, but my mother waits in the drawing room. She sets her knitting down, and I come to a standstill, unable to meet her eye.
“Moira,” she says. It’s a great deal different from the way Jude said my name not a half hour ago.
“Mother,” I say, imitating her tone.
Moonlight seeps through a slit in the curtains, and the room is made colorless, somber, and drab. I take off my coat and hang it on the rack.
My mother says, “Where have you been all day?”
“Visiting the Sheahans,” I reply, thinking it’s the safest answer.
She picks up her knitting again. “With Mr. Osric in tow, no doubt. I heard you were by the harbor when the alarms went off.”
My hands curl into fists, but my voice comes out as nothing more than a whisper. “Russell killed two of them.” I take a breath, trying not to remember the shape of his grin. “Someone gave him siren poison.”
“Yes, I heard that, too.”
I rest a palm against the doorway. “The police took him away.”
“Well, that’s something, isn’t it?”
I don’t have an answer for her, and the soft click of her needles fills the silence. I think back on Jude Osric, asleep in the lighthouse, how he clutched my wrist and asked me to stay.
I need my violin. I want the certainty of my grip on the bow, to play until my fingers are raw. I need the sound of the sea at night, its white-capped waves like a string of pearls in the blackness. As I head down the hall, all I can see in my mind’s eye is the lantern light out on the moors. The haunting sway of it—and the moment it went dark.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IN THE EARLY-MORNING HOURS, Dunmore is a pocket of inertia. I walk through backstreets even more worn down than the main ones, finding comfort in the stillness. Pale sunlight shines over the terraced houses, lace curtains still drawn and shutters closed up.
Tucked away among the winding streets lies Dunmore’s abandoned church. It’s a small structure, lonely and forgotten, both very dark and very old.
The stone exterior has weathered over the years. I suppose it had once been beautiful, when its painted murals—now colorless and cracked—gleamed in the light, and its tower bell rung the hour. The bell tower still stands, but the bell itself was removed a long while ago, to its new home in St. Cecilia’s.
This church has no name, or if it did no one can remember it.
I stare up at the tympanum above the arched doorway. Carved into the rough stone are a pair of angels, drowning in the sea, faces eroded by time. Their wings are bent in odd ways, spread wide across the arch.
I open the door.
Brendan’s promise to meet me is one I clung to last night. As I enter the nave of the church, I find him there already, sitting in the front pew opposite the altar. Light spills into the building through broken windows and cracks in the stone. It makes the shadows darker somehow, and I shiver walking up the aisle.
Brendan Sheahan inclines his head in greeting as I sit down beside him. “Morning, Moira.”
“Hello.”
He looks at the dusty pulpit, and I follow his gaze to a large wood carving set into the wall. Two engraved sirens stare back at us. They stand on the shoreline, their eyes wide and teeth bared, as a ship sails unsuspecting in their direction. It makes me wonder just how long sirens have dwelt in Twillengyle waters and how abandoned places always seem to hold more magic than others.
Brendan says, “Bit cloak-and-dagger, meeting like this.” And despite us being inside a church, he begins to smoke, striking a match and slouching back against the wooden pew. The tip of his cigarette is the brightest thing in the room.
“Thank you, though,” I say. “For coming.”
He breathes out a cloud of smoke into the already stale air. He wears a cable-knit sweater, like Jude’s, yet instead of his cuffs being frayed, they are covered in dark stains. Oil or ash. Also like Jude, Brendan is nineteen, but I remember him from back when he played his frame drum at the summer dances, before he gave it up for fishing, smoking, and the sea.
“What do you want, Moira?” he asks.
“To talk about Connor.”
“Ah.” He smiles, too sharp to be taken as kind. “Of course.”
“I am sorry. Everything you’re going through…”
Brendan waves away my apology. “Don’t be,” he says. “It wasn’t you that killed him.”
I look down at my hands, folded together in my lap. “Please, Brendan. I just want to understand what happened.”
The old pew creaks as Brendan leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Cigarette smoke drifts toward the crumbled altar. In a soft voice, he asks, “Did you see him? On the beach. Were you there?”
I don’t have the heart to lie, not about that. He glances back at me. I nod.
“I saw him afterward. When they—in his coffin.” He swallows. With the back of one hand, he scrubs at his eyes. “What did he look like on the sand?”
I press my lips together. The sea takes what it wants, and some say that those who are taken by sirens are those who are wanted by the sea. Connor was left to bleed out in the shadow of the cliff. His blood had soaked his shirt, colored the surf, stained the foam red.
It wasn’t sirens who took Connor from us.
Brendan makes a small, choked sound and tosses his still-burning cigarette to the ground. He crushes it with the toe of his boot, immediately lighting another. “What do you want to know?”
I let out a shaky sigh. “Why was Connor down on the beach?”
“Haven’t the faintest,” he says. “Might’ve been heading back to the docks for some reason and got turned around in the rain.”
“But you don’t believe that.”
Brendan exhales a breath of smoke. “No. Our Connor knew the way from the harbor like the back of his hand. He could’ve made it in the dark.”