In the Blood (55 page)

Since hearing my father breathe the lie that would have me believe that Katherine Fairborne was his daughter - after reading in Katherine’s own hand that she had witnessed the murder of her real father - I had determined to make my own plans to protect my future and that of my as yet unborn child.
 
Success would lie in simplicity.
 
I would again become congenial and conform to my father’s wishes.
 
I would go about my routine as though the episode that passed between us after yesterday’s morning ride had been nothing more than childish folly.

The following morning I returned to the stables in search of my father.
 
In place of my usual riding breeches and tunic, I wore my brightest yellow gown and an even brighter smile for his benefit.
 
But I was late - or rather he appeared to have gone out early.
 
His mare was away and although not to my devise, I was happy to see Gwinear standing alone, happy that I had been spared the morning ride.
 
I had at least made my appearance at the expected time and I would be there feigning disappointment when he returned.

But the scene today was not quite correct, and it was not until I first began to hear those heavy hooves returning that I realised why.
 
The stable boy was nowhere to be seen.
 
My father would have taken the skin off his back had he not been there to take his reins.
 
Where was he?
 
The answer came to me as unannounced and as unwelcome as the onset of a fever.
 
It came in the brutish form of the man in my father’s pay as he appeared beside the stable, striding out to meet my father in the stable-boy’s stead.

Why I could not stand my ground against him I do not know.
 
I knew him then as nothing more than a servant of my father’s, though his duties were never known to me and were rarely seen.
 
We have never been introduced and we have never spoken.
 
And yet I know very well why I fled, tumbling into the cover of hay at the back of the stable.
 
To look upon that man at such close quarter is to become irrational with fear.
 
As it transpired, this was to be to my advantage.

I lay there, hidden in the confusion of hay and the folds of my yellow dress, praying that he had neither seen nor heard me.
 
Then as I looked out to see the brute greet my father’s return I knew that my prayer had been answered.
 
I watched my father dismount and walk with his mare as it was led towards me and I dared not stir in my cover for fear of my life if I were discovered.
 
From that place of hiding I came to discover my father’s true identity and the reason my father kept this disagreeable brute of a servant so close at hand.”

That morning in the May of 1803, as Lowenna lay tangled in hay and still as death itself, her senses sharpened.
 
She watched and she listened as the larger of the two men spoke first, their voices hushed beneath the morning birdsong.
 
He was clearly agitated.

“I tell you, if she knows anything of Katherine Fairborne then she already knows too much!”

“She knows nothing!”

The brute scoffed.
 
“Good living has softened your head, Ervan.”

Lowenna saw the rage flare in her father’s cheeks.
 
“Do not speak that name here,” he said.
 
“Do not speak it anywhere!”

“And Why not?
 
Are you so ashamed of it already?”

“It is a past best forgotten, that is all.”

The brute’s head sank to his chest, slowly shaking as though denying his own ears.
 
“What happened to us?
 
Men once feared our name.”
 
His head shot up again and their eyes locked.
 
“Look at us now,” he said.
 
“You, a respectable
gentleman,
and me...
 
What am I Ervan?
 
Tell me, brother.
 
What have
I
become?”

Lowenna’s father fell silent and she sensed the temper welling inside him; she knew it well enough.

“I am nothing,” the brute continued, heaving himself closer.
 
“I am a shadow, more now than I was when I could proudly call myself Breward Kinsey.”

Lowenna startled in her cover then as she watched her father let loose his rage.

“You go too far!” he said, his voice no longer hushed as he charged the brute with his fists and pinned him to a support beam.
 
Lowenna was surprised to see no retaliation.
 
The brute appeared suddenly submissive, like a child, though he had every advantage in size and strength.

“Did I not look after you?” her father said.
 
“Have I not told you that your time will come?”

The brute shifted against the beam as though to shake himself free of the situation.
 
“It already comes too late!” he said.

Lowenna saw her father push himself away then.
 
His muscles relaxed and his hands reached up to the brute’s rough face, cupping his jaw.
 
“Have I not always looked after you?” he said.
 
“Or have you forgotten how it was with our own father?”

Breward Kinsey began to shake his head.

“Has your mind locked away those vile times since our mother died, perhaps to spare your pain?” Ervan added.

“I remember them too well.”
 

“As do I.”
 
Ervan Kinsey brought his face close to his brother’s so there could be no distraction between them.
 
“I killed him for you, Breward.
 
I killed him with these very hands to end your suffering at his.
 
And I’ve been there for you ever since that day.
 
Since we fled into hiding.”

Breward nodded.

“Well I was sick of hiding,” Ervan said.

The brute was quick to return.
 
“And how do you think I felt all these years?
 
How do you think I
still
feel?”

“The plan was laid out and agreed,” Ervan said.
 
“And you must continue to wait for your time.
 
Do not forget why we have done this, Breward.
 
It was never about us.
 
It was all for our children.
 
So they might have everything in their lives that we did not.
 
You will be provided for and your children will reap the rewards along with mine after we are but bones in the ground and the legend of our former lives is nothing more than a whisper in the dark or a puff of smoke from the pipes of men too afraid to speak of it.”

“You preach so proudly of your plans, Ervan,” Breward said.
 
He threw his weight off the beam at last, forcing his brother back.
 
“But your plans are for nothing if the truth is uncovered.
 
How do you suppose your daughter has come to know of Katherine?”

Ervan was silent.
 
Then he said, “I have not spoken Katherine’s name to a living soul.”

“And what of the crypt?” Breward asked.
 
“Have you been careless with the key?
 
Has she uncovered their headstones perhaps?”

Ervan denied the possibility with a firm shake of his head.
 
“The place remains sealed.”

“Then how?
 
What has she discovered to put that accursed name on her lips?”
 
Breward looked suddenly wary.
 
“Tell me everything from that ship went down with her.
 
I remember your own words well enough.
 
Nothing leaves the beach
,
you said.
 
Tell me nothing did.”

Ervan Kinsey fell silent, his head bowed.
 
“The box,” he said.
 
“I kept the box for myself and I gave it to Lowenna on her fifth birthday.
 
I should have listened better to my instincts.”

Breward turned away, pacing towards the back of the stable, to the pile of hay where Lowenna was hiding.
 
He stopped at the edge, staring into space.
 
A moment later he turned on his heels.
 
“Then she knows,” he said.

“We cannot be sure of
what
she knows.”

“Then you must ask her.
 
Force her to tell you what she has learnt from that box.”

“And if she knew nothing before, she will surely know plenty after I have questioned her.”

“She must be silenced,” Breward said.
 
“I cannot live like this another day unless I can be sure of my reward at the end of it.”

Lowenna watched her father come at Breward again with a raised finger stabbing like a dagger at his heart.
 
“If any harm comes to my daughter you will get nothing!” Ervan said.
 
“And your children will get nothing!” he added.
 
“Do you understand?
 
Lowenna will not be harmed!”

Lowenna watched her father turn away then, anger forcing his pace as he made towards the house.
 
The Brute’s nod acquiesced agreement, but as soon as her father was beyond earshot his features darkened to contradict.

“You are not the brother I once knew,” Lowenna heard him say.
 
“You have grown as soft as the bed linen you have become accustomed to.”

She watched him take a steel horseshoe in his hands, twisting it until it snapped in two.
 
“My blood will prevail, brother,” he said.
 
“Not yours.”

Chapter Sixty-Eight

T
he nurse at the door reminded Tayte that Tom Laity was still under the hospital’s close care.
 
“Your consultant’s on his rounds,” she said to Laity.
 
Then to Tayte and Amy she wrinkled her nose and said, “You’ve got a few minutes.”

“Thank you,” Amy said.

Tayte was still bowed over the story that had waited over two hundred years to be told.
 
Now lie with them in death,
he thought, recalling the inscription on the sarcophagus that was hidden inside the Fairborne mausoleum.
 
It made perfect sense to him now.
 
Ervan Kinsey had lived James Fairborne’s life, and his brother, as some final act of retribution, had made sure he would remain with them in death.

“So these Kinsey brothers,” Laity said.
 
“Surely they had to know the ship was coming?”

Tayte looked up from the letters.
 
“Falmouth was a busy port back then.” he said.
 
“Plenty of traffic coming and going, and it wouldn’t have been difficult to access the registers - they were clearly very persuasive people.”

“But how could they have known who these people were in the first place?”

 
“That would have been easier still.
 
News of a wealthy family fleeing war-torn America and arriving to take up residence on such a valuable estate in Cornwall would have been hard to keep a lid on.
 
And he arrived to a baronetcy, don’t forget.
 
That would have been widely discussed in a tight knit place like this.”

“But surely they were leaving a lot to chance,” Amy said.
 
Lady Luck would have had to play her part.”

Tayte thought about it.
 
“Maybe luck did play its part.
 
You never hear about the ones that get away,” he said.
 
“They might have tried before, and they might have kept trying if this hadn’t come good for them.”
 
It occurred to him then that the year the
Betsy Ross
came to England was familiar to him for other reasons.
 
“1783,” he mused.
 
Then it registered.
 
“That was also the year of the Laki eruption in Iceland.”

Blank faces told him he would have to elaborate.
 
“You’d be surprised how many of my British assignment trails turn up a death record for that year.
 
They reckon when Mount Laki erupted, it killed twenty three thousand people in Britain alone from airborne sulphur dioxide poisoning.
 
It had a crazy effect on the weather here too.
 
Raging thunder storms and a lingering haze that reports say made the sun look blood-red.
 
I don’t know how long the haze lasted, but I read the hailstones that year were big enough to kill cattle.
 
Taking a gamble that an arriving ship would hit a bad storm in the latter half of 1783 was a pretty safe bet.”

“And the rest was easy for them,” Laity said.

Tayte agreed.
 
“I’m sure they knew a thing or two about the wrecking business, and you’ve sure got the rocks for it around this coastline.”

The nurse appeared at the door again.
 
This time an entourage of white coats accompanied her.