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  Hannah frowned.

  “I hope you left him in no doubt that you were unlikely to change your mind?”

  “I did.”

  “And if he comes here pestering you again I’ll help you deal with him.” Nothing further was said that night about turning Tremarth into a convalescent home, but before they went to bed Hannah put an arm somewhat clumsily about Charlotte’s shoulders and squeezed affectionately.

  “When in doubt, do nothing,” she advocated. “Get your bearings… and leave it to your Aunt Hannah to think out some escape from your difficulties if the problem really arises! And now I feel so tired, as a result of all this good sea air that is filling the house, that I expect to sleep like a log in my four-poster bed, and I hope you’ll do so in yours!”

  The two girls parted outside Charlotte’s door, and while Hannah went to test the temperature of the bath water in their adjoining bathroom Charlotte walked across to her window and stood looking out across the open expanse of cliff on to which the rambling gardens of Tremarth abutted, and straight out to sea.

  It was rather a cloudy night, and there was no moon at this hour. She remembered that on the previous night Richard Tremarth had said he was waiting for the moonrise to discover some of the old familiar places he had known when he was a boy.

  She had actually seen him walking on the sands below the inn, and had wondered whether he would have the audacity to peer into darkened caves in which he had once pretended he was a smuggler, or venture into the silent woods that crept down with the creek to the murmuring seas’ edge. She was absolutely certain those woods had figured very largely in his activities when he was a boy, and as this was a nostalgic pilgrimage he was making

  – apart from his intention of acquiring Tremarth – he would not overlook one tiny comer that could be revisited, especially once a cold round moon stole up out of the sea.

  Charlotte was about to draw her curtains over her window when her eye was caught by something on the cliff top, and she went closer to the glass to concentrate her full attention upon whatever it was. In the end she decided that it was a stationary beam of a pair of dipped car lights, and the vehicle itself was quite indistinguishable in the gloom. She stood listening to the booming voice of the sea breaking on the rocks at the foot of the cliffs, and while she did so the car lights moved slowly forward until they disappeared like pale sword- thrusts into the night.

  The last thing she was able to make out before the car finally disappeared was a twinkling rear light that reminded her of the twinkling eye of a ruby under the slow-moving pall of thick white cloud.

  The mass of cloud moved out to sea, and the stars shone forth and the motionless surface of the sea became irradiated by a diffusion of moonlight that appeared to be made up of glittering diamond points and mellow primrose light. Impulsively she thrust open her window and leaned out, and the moonlight poured across her hair and gilded the coppery curls.

  Below her the gardens were tranquil and sweet, with night. There was a smell of roses floating in the cool night air, and the short sweet turf almost immediately below her window exuded a kind of incense. She felt slightly bemused by the beauty of it all, and she leaned there far longer than might have been wise considering the slight nip from the sea and the feeling of prevailing moisture gathered beneath the centuries-old trees.

  Tremarth, she thought…A lovely home that the members of the Tremarth family who had once had the pleasure of living in it must have cherished in the same way that some people – particularly women – cherish jewellery and lovely clothes. She herself had never possessed any valuable jewellery, and most of her clothes were fairly simple because she was unable to afford couture models. But if she had to choose between a Paris wardrobe and the opportunity to go on living in this graceful house that was now hers by right…

  “I’d choose Tremarth,” she thought, running her hand lovingly over the sill of the window. “I wish somehow it would become possible for me to go on living here at Tremarth!”

  CHAPTER III

  THE next day the two girls acquired some pots of paint from the village store and started to touch up the woodwork in the kitchen and other neglected comers of the house. As if by mutual consent they said nothing about the reasons why they were thus attempting to disguise the various weaknesses of the house, behaving as if they had just moved in and were intending to settle down there indefinitely.

  Charlotte removed all the cushion covers from the cushions in the drawing-room and washed and ironed and replaced them, attacked the carpets with carpet cleaner and polished the furniture. Mrs. Ricks, the daily woman from the village, put in a somewhat belated appearance, and began an assault on the bedrooms; and Hannah painted away steadily in the kitchen, covering herself and anyone who unwisely approached too near to her with paint, but satisfying herself and Charlotte that the job was worthwhile long before the second day of intensive operations was over.

  Mrs. Ricks was a useful cook, and she prepared the girls’ meals; but after so much labour they felt the need of something slightly more tempting than a cold Cornish pasty when they desisted from their efforts and took a bath and changed into fresh un-paint-stained and undust-streaked clothes. They made do with the pasty on the first evening, but the second evening seemed to issue them with a challenge. Charlotte decided that as hostess she must do better for her guest who was already working her passage in a most ungrudging manner, and said they would go down to the Three Sailors and have dinner in a slightly more civilised setting than the kitchen at Tremarth.

  Hannah was nothing loath, and put on a smart little black number for the occasion that was rather over-dressy for the Three Sailors, and would have become her even more if she had taken pains with her make-up and adopted a hair-style that was more in keeping with her youth and did not make her look like a severe governess in search of unfamiliar entertainment. Charlotte – following upon the intrusive thought that Richard Tremarth might still be staying at the inn – decided to wear her latest acquisition for a quiet evening away from home, and that was a lemon yellow silk dress over which she draped a black lace mantilla that she had bought on a trip to Spain the previous summer.

  The two girls set off in Charlotte’s car, and the landlord of the Three Sailors welcomed them with effusive smiles and assured them he could fit them up with a table in the dining room. Luckily they had chosen one of the occasions when his menu, was quite exceptional, and that meant a bottle – or rather, a half bottle, since they were neither of them heavy drinkers – of wine to accompany the meal, and perhaps a liqueur apiece afterwards.

  When they arrived at the liqueur stage, however, Charlotte said she would skip it, remembering that she had to drive them both back to Tremarth; but as the half-bottle of wine in the dining-room was still very nearly half full the landlord did not seem to think there would be much danger of her infringing the laws of driving. He had carried coffee to them in the lounge, and was beaming because of the flattering comments on the meal he had just served to them, when Charlotte asked him whether Mr. Tremarth was still a guest at the inn.

  The landlord looked slightly intrigued when she asked the question, and then admitted that Richard Tremarth was still staying with him.

  “But he’s a gentleman who likes to come and go when he pleases,” he explained. “He may be in to dinner to-night, and he may not. At the moment he’s out. I think he’s doing what he calls’ ‘rediscovering Cornwall’,” he added, lowering his voice as if to him that was a novel occupation.

  Charlotte nodded, and then addressed a remark that had nothing whatsoever to do with Richard Tremarth to Hannah, just in case the landlord might have received the wrong impression. He no doubt remembered that she and Richard had sat at that same table on the night of her arrival in Tremarth, and although it must have struck him that their relationship was not particularly good one could never tell.

  On the way back to Tremarth Hannah voiced the thought that Charlotte herself was thinking as she drove over the clif
f top in a swirl of cold, white unfriendly mist that had encroached upon them from the sea.

  “Your friend Tremarth must either have made up his mind that he’s not going to remove himself until you’ve changed your mind about selling him your house, or else the countryside has really gone to his head and he can’t have enough of it.”

  She peered through the swirling white vapour ahead of them, and warned:

  “Look out! You were very nearly off the road…”

  “Sorry!” Charlotte jammed on her brakes, and then proceeded more cautiously. It was eerie driving through the mist, and she felt as if ghostly fingers were tapping at the windows on either side of her, and behind them the blackness they had left behind seemed intense. “We would pick upon a night like this to go out junketing, wouldn’t we? Not that a dinner commencing with grapefruit and taking in local lobster and apple flan before its grand climax of coffee and no liqueur could honestly be described as junketing! But I’m not really used to this part of the world, and – ”

  Headlights pierced the mist and bathed them in a flood of uncanny yellow light, and Charlotte practically gasped as the oncoming car swept past them. It was travelling far too fast for such a night and such a spot, and Hannah, too, gasped:

  “The man must be out of his mind! Or else he’s in a tremendous hurry to get somewhere -” “It was Richard Tremarth!” Charlotte had glimpsed him only for a moment, and she had also recognised his gleaming, expensive car. “He’s probably hungry and hoping they’ve kept some dinner for him at the Three Sailors.”

  “He’ll never reach the Three Sailors if he continues on his way like that!” Hannah was peering backwards through the rear window at the disappearing tail light of Tremarth’s car, caught up in a pocket of mist. “He’ll go over the cliff! ”

  “Oh, don’t!” And Charlotte shuddered so much that she decided it was her own fear of going over the cliff that was affecting her. They were very close to the edge here, and in fact the wall of Tremarth rose up like a bastion on the other side of them and provided her with the uncomfortable feeling that it was literally thrusting them into the sea. The road was quite wide, but allowing for the various indentations in the cliff it was not so wide, and her heart had been in her mouth when Tremarth swept past them.

  She sighed with relief when she recognised the tall piers of a pair of gates ahead of them, and knew that once inside the drive they would be comparatively safe. And if they wanted to avoid crashing into a tree-trunk they could always walk up the drive.

  The next moment vexation rolled over her, for the car had stalled as a result of the crawling speed at which they were proceeding. They had come to rest in a comparatively clear stretch of the road, with the red brick wall of her own house on their right hand and the sea making mystical splashing noises on the beach at the foot of the cliff on their left. The noise of the sea seemed strange in the otherwise clammy stillness, and she was about to remark that it was a most inconsiderate moment for an engine to go out of action when that same curious stillness was shattered by a sound like a violent explosion.

  Hannah blenched visibly and stared at Charlotte.

  “What… do you suppose that was?”

  “It sounded as if something blew up! ”

  “What could blow up in a place like this? On a lonely stretch of coast like this?”

  “A car accident?”

  Their eyes met and held for a moment, and then each was scrambling out of the car and on to the wet grass of the cliff top.

  “It’s no use my attempting to turn the car,” Charlotte panted. “I couldn’t do it in a place like this, with so little visibility!”

  “Then don’t try.” Two years of hospital training, and with memories crowding back on her of some testing experiences she was unlikely ever to forget, undoubtedly affected Hannah’s thinking just then, and without considering it necessary to explain her intentions she started to run back along the road they had crawled over only a minute or so before. Long before Charlotte had started to break into a trot after her she had disappeared into the darkness and the mist, and Charlotte called frenziedly in fear lest she too should become the victim of an accident that would mean that her body would be found the following day at the foot of the cliffs, if it had not already been carried out to sea by the tide.

  “Keep away from the cliff edge! It’s dangerous and crumbling in places -! ”

  Her voice came back to her like an empty echo on the moistureladen air, and she realised that the only thing she could do was follow Hannah and hope that, by some miracle, disaster refrained from claiming them both, and that when they finally caught up with one another again the shock would not be so great that it would pulverise their wits.

  If an accident had happened they would need their wits. Not that she had any doubt at all that Hannah would keep hers. Hannah might think she was an artist, but she should have stuck to nursing.

  Her instincts were quite obviously the right ones, and it was Charlotte who allowed her feet to drag became she was horrified of what awaited her at the end of a fairly peaceful and reasonably convivial evening. And the knowledge she had that, unlike Hannah, she was never at her best in a crisis made her feel slightly sick.

  Ahead of her the blanket of mist was pierced by an angry light. It was like the damped-down glow of a bonfire, and as far as she could judge it was on the cliff top, and most certainly not on the beach.

  So, if the car that had speeded past them had overturned, it had done so without rolling over and over down into the inky blackness of the sea.

  But if that really was a conflagration…”

  Hannah’s voice came back thinly to her through the mist.

  “Stay where you are! There’s nothing we can do… and the heat’s too great to get really near.”

  Charlotte came to a standstill within a foot or so of her friend. She put both hands to her face to protect it from the intense heat, and in her ears an angry roar like the howling of a gale in an old-fashioned chimney, and a continuous crackling that was even more horrifying than the hollow roar.

  “Is it – is it the car that passed us?” she barely whispered to Hannah.

  The latter nodded.

  “It must be. As far as I can make it out it hit a projection of your wall, but it didn’t go over into the sea although it must have turned somersault several times.” She was tinning her glance in all directions, seeking with a very faint hope in her heart for some evidence that the driver – Richard Tremarth – had been thrown clear, and was in need of some attention from her and reasonably close at hand. But every time her fascinated gaze was drawn back to the glowing wreck of the car the hope died, and she knew that what she was feeling was a forlorn hope, and that no one could live who had been involved in such a catastrophe.

  Charlotte said as much as she stood there with her hands pressed against her face, her gaze equally fascinated.

  “Why, oh, why was he travelling at such a speed?” she demanded of the bleak unfriendly night.

  But Hannah didn’t answer.

  “We must make absolutely certain,” she said, a minute later. “I’ll grope my way along this end of the verge, and you retrace your steps. If he was anywhere on the road we’d have stumbled over him before this.”

  Charlotte turned mechanically to return by the way she had come, and then out of the strange and ghostly night a voice spoke to her

  – a little plaintively, but quite strongly:

  “You don’t have to search! I’m here! Luckily, for once, I didn’t fasten my seat belt… I was thrown clear! I’ve just climbed up several feet from somewhere down the re… He indicated the rocks below them, and then folded up on the grass and lay almost touching Charlotte’s feet. “Sorry!” he apologised, before he became unconscious.

  Hannah took charge in a way that proved her to be a considerable loss to the nursing profession. First she ascertained that the victim was breathing, and had not passed out altogether, and then she ordered Charlotte to stay with hi
m while she returned for their car and drove it back along the road to the spot where Tremarth was stretched out silently on the soaking wet grass of the cliff top.

  “But wouldn’t it be better if we left him undisturbed until we can get an ambulance?” she protested, with memories of the one or two lessons she had received in first-aid rushing up over her.

  Hannah answered immediately: “If we do he’ll die of pneumonia. So far as I can judge he’s not badly hurt, but he is concussed. If we can get him into the car he’ll be all right, provided we’ve enough strength to get him into Tremarth!”

  “Thankfully we’re on the telephone,” Charlotte breathed with relief. “The Emergency Service will get you a doctor.”

  Hannah did not wait to discuss the matter, but darted back along the road to the spot where they had parked the car. By some strange irony of fate the mist had started to clear, and by the time she reached the car a patch of starlit sky was visible above her head, and wan fingers of moonlight straggled across the cliff top. Hannah decided to risk going over the cliff herself and backed the car, and Charlotte saw the tail light moving towards her with more relief in her heart than she was sure she had ever experienced before.

  She had made one or two attempts to penetrate Richard’s unconsciousness and establish beyond doubt that he was not badly injured, but following upon that single “Sorry!”, and his collapse at her feet, he had made neither movement nor sound.

  The moonlight showed her his unconscious face, and she lifted it and his sleek dark head gingerly on to her lap. Moisture was sparkling on his hair, and she found that she had a handkerchief tightly clenched in her hand and dabbed at it with a comer of the cambric that was impregnated with the perfume she had used before going out that night.

  Fresh horror seized her as she recollected the kind of evening they had enjoyed while Richard was approaching his doom… and despite Hannah’s optimism she found the fact that not so much as one of his eyelids quivered horribly alarming. She had been talking of him as if he was a kind of public nuisance, and now here he was at her feet, his cheeks slightly hollow, his thick eyelashes very dark, his mouth very shapely and curved a little upwards at the corners as if in his state of unconsciousness he was not entirely unhappy.