In the Blood (30 page)

“No problem, big guy.”

“And you’d better take a flashlight with you,” Tayte added.
 
“It gets dark over here about then.”

When the call ended, Tayte had something else to think about.
 
What had Schofield turned up?
 
What was he so wired about?
 
As he relaxed into his seat, he knew the answer would have to wait.
 
The writing box had raised new and more pressing questions.
 
He felt its hard edges through the rucksack on his lap, wondering what
dark discovery
Lowenna had made, and why the box was so important to her.

It was their security,
he thought.
 
But how could it protect them?
 
Protect them from what?
 
He shook his head and laughed to himself.
 
One question gets answered - another replaces it.

He began to chew over what he knew about the box.
 
He now had a good idea of where and when it was made.
 
The initials suggested it had been in the Fairborne family a long time, handed down from one generation to the next until it passed to Lowenna.
 
Lowenna’s letter told him she’d planned to run away with her lover and their child, believing that something about the box would protect them.
 
If that was true - if the box really did have that kind of power - then it was clear to Tayte that it had more to say.
 
He cocked an eyebrow.
 
Something dark,
he supposed.

Tayte scratched at his cheek, considering that Gerald had already found the secret compartment and there was nothing in there that Lowenna could have used against anyone in the way her letter suggested.
 
He wanted to get the box out right there on the train and take another look, sure that Gerald must have overlooked something, but he resisted.
 
He owed it to Amy to keep the box safe and for all he knew, whoever wanted it now might have followed him onto the train, just as someone had followed him to Bodmin.
 
He looked around.
 
There were no obvious candidates.
 
Everyone seemed wrapped up in their books, their laptops or their dreams.

Tayte pushed his head into the headrest and closed his eyes, pulling the rucksack protectively close, linking his arms around it like he was cradling a child.
 
His thoughts wandered back inside the box, to Lowenna’s secret letter to Mawgan Hendry, pondering what it all meant.
 
It was certainly conclusive proof that Mathew Parfitt was her son and that Mawgan Hendry was his father, raised by Lowenna’s aunt and uncle, Jane and Lavender Parfitt.
 
But clearly Lowenna had made other plans for her child.

Drifting to the rhythm of the train, he understood that the most promising thing about the box was that it must have come to England with Eleanor and her children when they left America.
 
He opened an eye and fixed it on the rucksack, knowing that the answers he was looking for had to be right there in front of him.

Chapter Thirty-Six

I
n 1803, two weeks before Mawgan Hendry was murdered; before James Fairborne knew that his daughter was in love with a farmer from Helford or that she carried his child, Lowenna chanced upon something that both confused and disturbed her so deeply that she refused to believe it, blocking it from her mind as best she could for several days.
 
She’d convinced herself that it could not possibly be true.
 
What she had discovered, however disturbing, made no sense.
 
And yet her discovery left her with a recurring question that haunted her sleep.

It concerned the box her father had given her on her fifth birthday and the revelation that it concealed not one, but two secret compartments.
 
She remembered little of the day, but she recalled that her father had told her the box was very special.
 
It followed then that he would be the best person to answer the question she knew she must ask - then her ghosts would be silenced.
 
But she did not want to ask it, fearful that the answer might somehow confirm those dreadful words she’d read.
 
Then her ghosts would become all too real.

Lowenna had suffocated her question for eleven days, and she might have buried it forever had her father not come to hear of Mawgan Hendry from that wretched brute of a man who was always drifting about the estate.
 
She supposed he was the one.
 
When James Fairborne forbade his daughter to see Mawgan Hendry and subsequently learnt of her condition - when he made clear his plans to deny her the love of her own child - only then was she resolved to ask that question of him.
 

They had been riding beneath a hazy sky all morning.
 
Lowenna wore tan breeches and a green silk tunic, and she rode like a man as her father had taught her; side-saddle in a pretty dress was purely for show when riding in company.
 
This was a daily ritual; time shared together, father and daughter.
 
But this morning’s ride was no longer the same happy time for Lowenna.
 
She saw her father now in a different light, and his plans to give her child away, even if it was to her aunt Jane, were as unthinkable to her as the dark discovery she’d made -
 
more abhorrent even than those terrible words she had read.

The seed of Lowenna’s plan to run away with Mawgan and have their child together had already begun to grow.
 
Until she was fully ready, she would pretend to go along with her father’s wishes and today she would keep up appearances.
 
They rode out seemingly in good company, talking idle talk about anything other than Mawgan Hendry or Lowenna’s condition.
 
She could see from his usual bright demeanour that this was still a happy time for him regardless of what had passed between them.
 

“See the buzzards,” her father said, pointing across the neighbouring farmland towards a small copse of trees.
 
“They’ll have rabbit for lunch.”

Lowenna simply nodded, willing the rabbits to make it safely back to the cover of their burrows.

“Speaking of which,” her father added.
 
“I’ve a hearty appetite myself.”

The morning ride always ended in a race back to the stable block, and it always began with a look from her father to ask if she was ready for the off.
 
And there it was, just as on any other day, like nothing so bitter had passed between them.
 
James Fairborne dug his heels in and his horse reared up.

“Come on!” he yelled.

Lowenna seldom won the race, and not once before she had turned fourteen.
 
In those two years since that first victory, she could count her triumphs on one hand.
 
But today Lowenna’s resolve to beat her father could not have been stronger.
 
Today she would not falter at the stream as she had so often in the past.
 
She would jump it clean to spite him.

The head start her father always gave himself was closing.
 
Beneath her, Lowenna could hear her old friend, Gwinear, panting over the thud and rumble of his hooves, and by the time they reached the stream they were level.
 
Lowenna was out of her seat like a derby racer going for the finish line and she did not falter.
 
Gwinear’s front hooves thumped down first on the other side and now the stables were in sight.
 
She pushed on, not looking back.
 
Then as the stables grew in her vision her thoughts distracted her.
 
She knew that when this race was over, she would ask her father the question that tormented her.

Katherine’s name was suddenly spinning in her head.
 
She grew uneasy and Gwinear must have sensed the change.
 
The horse slowed not two hundred yards from the stables and her father passed her like an unstoppable locomotive, gaining ground with every stride, lashing his whip and yelping for more speed.

When Lowenna reached the stables, she arrived to see her father handing his bridle to the stable boy.
 
“Maybe tomorrow?” he called to her as she arrived.

Tomorrow...
 
Lowenna knew there would be no more races between them.
 
As she approached, she did not dismount, but remained tall on her horse as her father took Gwinear’s reins and held her steady.
 
Her unease must have been all too apparent.
 
Win or lose, this was always a happy moment between them: a cuddle and a kiss on his cheek by way of a prize for his win.
 
But not today.
 
She watched his head sink to the ground then slowly he looked up again, trying to make eye contact - failing.

“I cannot expect you to understand my decision,” he said.
 
“You are too young to know what is for the best.
 
But one day you will thank me for seeming so hard on you now.”

Lowenna did not want the argument over again.
 
Where was the sense in arguing over something she knew she could not win?
 
The question she had to ask dominated all else.
 
“There is something I must ask you father,” she said.
 
The words formed in her mind, but still she could not speak them.

“Pray, what is it, child?
 
You know you can ask anything of me.
 
Anything at all.”

Lowenna looked away, wondering how he could be the caring father she had loved so well, while inside him breathed the monster she had come to detest.
 
When she turned back to him, her jaw had tightened, ready to force the question out, but she skirted.
 
“I have found something, father.”

“Yes...”

“I am sure it is absurd.
 
It really makes no sense.”

“Go on...”

Lowenna hesitated, dry-mouthed.
 
She wanted to ride away even now, but she had to ask her question.
 
She had to make sense of it all.
 
She swallowed hard.
 
“Do you know who Katherine is?”

Her father stepped away, but he could not hide the dour expression that washed over him.
 
“Why do you ask?”

A column of silence rose between them.
 
Knowing what she knew - what she had discovered - her father’s sudden mood swing warned her to be cautious.

He came close to her again.
 
“Where have you heard that name?” he insisted.
 
“I must know.”
 
His tone was sharp now.
 
He gripped her boot until Lowenna could feel his fingers tight around her ankle, like her leather riding boots were made from nothing more than rice-paper.

“Do you know the name, then?” Lowenna asked, her small voice wavering.

James Fairborne stared at his own boots and Lowenna heard him sigh.
 
“I do,” he said.
 
“I know it well indeed.”
 
They were solemn words.

“And may I ask
how
you come to know of her?”

The awkward pause returned.
 
Her father shook his head as though denying his own thoughts, but his words betrayed him, though he could not yet know their significance to Lowenna.
 
“She was my daughter,” he said.
 
“By my first marriage.”

Lowenna felt light-headed.
 
She looked pale despite the midday sun.
 
It was an answer she could not have prepared herself for.
 
It was the very last answer she wanted to hear and until now she had not contemplated it or understood what it meant in light of what she had read.
 
She swayed in her saddle.
 
Her eyes fluttered.
 
Then as her father reached out for her she fell.

Unconsciousness lasted only briefly.
 
When Lowenna’s eyes opened again, she was in her father’s arms being carried towards the house.
 
She looked up at him, recognising his features, yet the eyes that looked down at hers were the eyes of a man she no longer knew.
 
Katherine was real.
 
The contents of Katherine’s journal pages were real.
 
Her father’s answer had confirmed everything - and so much more.

Lowenna felt sick.

She struggled to be free, kicking her legs until her father let her go.
 
Then she ran from him, away into the house and up to her room where she crashed onto her bed, sobbing.
 
Her whole world was crumbling around her.
 
She knew she must leave Rosemullion Hall; knew she had to take control of what remained to her if there was to be any salvation.
 
And she now knew that Katherine Fairborne’s words, her few journal pages, could be used to protect her and her child if her father tried to stop her.