The Bell at Sealey Head (6 page)
Read The Bell at Sealey Head Online
Authors: Patricia McKillip
“Maybe,” Judd said dubiously. “Makes me want to sneeze. Mrs. Quinn—”
“I was at my wit’s end as to which to serve him, sir, breakfast or what—I hope it was satisfactory.”
“As what it was adequate.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said, looking pleased. “I do try.”
“But I think next time—” He paused, gave up. “I’ll have him talk to you about his erratic hours.”
“His what, sir?”
“His—his meals.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, nodding. “Best to begin as we intend to continue, that way we don’t forget what we’re doing, do we?”
“Yes. No. Mrs. Quinn—”
“Now, sir, about supper—”
“I’m going into town to see to it,” he said, seizing the bookcase bodily with his other hand and staggering off with his loot. “I promise you’ll be the first to know.”
He looked in on his father after adding the shelves to the clutter in Ridley’s room. Dugold was napping peacefully in his rocker, a shaft of light along with one of the old stable cats warming his knees. Judd found Ridley outside, talking to Mr. Quinn about his horses. The boisterous and capricious weather had blown itself inland; the sea wallowed lazily against the cliffs, glittered in the distance, where the fishing boats clustered around whatever in the deep was flinging themselves at their bait.
“Mr. Quinn tells me there’s a path down to the sand,” Ridley said, as Mr. Quinn turned away. “He’ll exercise the horses there on days I don’t ride. Today, for instance. Do you mind a walk into town?”
“Not at all,” Judd said, watching a coin above Mr. Quinn’s head spark silver in the light before it fell back into his hand. Ridley had left his cloak behind, but even in sedate black he struck the eye, something sleek and unexpected in the familiar world of Sealey Head, like a red-winged blackbird among a flock of sparrows.
They walked the pleasant mile down the headland, across the steep channel bridge where they watched a ship follow the ebbing tide through the stony narrows safely out to open sea.
“One of Blair’s,” Judd said, recognizing the figurehead, a dolphin leaping upward out of the wood. “Wonder where it’s going . . .”
“Blair?”
“Toland Blair. His family sent the first merchant ship out of Sealey Head harbor. It was gone for three years, during which some fantastic bets were laid. Fortunes were lost when it finally returned. So the tales say. Like fish, the size of a fortune grows in the telling. The Blairs made a genuine fortune from the wares that came in—spices, fabrics, exotic wood, glassware, painted porcelain, jewelry.”
“Even then the bell was ringing.”
“The bell.” Judd paused to pick up that mislaid thread in his head. “Yes,” he said slowly. “It must have been. Two hundred years, it has rung, I’ve heard. Or three hundred. Or a thousand. Every tale changes as it gets passed down. So how are you supposed to know what’s true?”
“Ah. That’s the question,” Ridley said with a great deal of enthusiasm and no answer whatsoever.
Judd pointed out the stationer’s shop along Water Street, which curved around the harbor and held all the best shops, the grocers, the bakeries, Blair’s Exotica and Other Fine Goods. Ridley went into the expansive shop with its gull-colored walls and its front glass panes neatly framed in black. Judd turned past it and onto the docks.
There on a wooden slab under an awning, he found Stiven Dale’s catch of the day before, under the eye of his wife Hazel and their four-year-old daughter, who was dropping a crab net over the dockside. The slosh of water against the pilings, the smell of fish, barnacles in brine, guano, the barking of harbor seals and cries of the gulls diving at the dead fish, filled Judd like words did, left him always wanting more, though these smells, these sounds, he had known all his life.
He chose a stout salmon to smoke, half a dozen perch for supper, some crab and eel for pie, which Mrs. Quinn usually managed without making a total disaster of it. Hazel set them aside for her older son to run up to the inn. That done, he stopped at the grocer’s to order a delivery of cheese and coffee, then at the window of Blair’s Exotica, hoping for a glimpse of Gwyneth Blair.
He didn’t see her. A certain shyness kept him hovering outside. Growing up, they had talked easily and eagerly about everything, above all about books. He would duck into the shop on his way home from school, find her deep in some ornate chair covered with animal skins, stroking the head of a huge, snarling, glass-eyed beast while she ignored the books her governess gave her and devoured the latest novel from the stationer’s instead.
Then she went away for a few years to get educated in Landringham. Judd nursed his dying grandfather, then his mother, while his father’s sight began to fail and the inn grew quieter and emptier. When Gwyneth finally came home to stay, after her own mother died, she had grown into a tall, fair, willowy young lady whose spectacles hid her expressions. She was suddenly the eligible daughter of a very prosperous merchant. Judd had become the proprietor of the failing inn up the hill who couldn’t afford to replace his own lamentable cook.
They rarely met.
He crossed the street, went into the stationer’s to find Ridley. And there she was, bracketed by the Sproule siblings, talking to Osric Trent, whose plump face with silky chestnut sideburns framing his intelligent expression Judd could see over Gwyneth’s shoulder. Ridley, a book open in his hands, completed the congenial little circle.
Judd almost backed out, closed the door on the elegant company. But Ridley saw him, waved him eagerly over; he was obliged to sidle, redolent with the fish market, through the smartly dressed browsers around the book tables. Seeing him, Gwyneth smiled, but Judd couldn’t tell if her eyes, behind the lenses, had added to the welcome.
“Judd!” the bookseller exclaimed. “We see so little of you these days. How is your father?”
“He’s well. Happiest when I’m reading to him in the evenings.” He paused, nodding diffidently to the others. “Raven, Miss Sproule. Miss Blair. I see you’ve met my guest.”
“So fascinating,” Daria breathed. She gripped Gwyneth’s wrist in a tremor of emotion. “He’s been explaining what brought him here, riding alone all the way across Rurex from his cozy house in Landringham.”
“That bell,” Raven said, his brows pinched in perplexity. “I haven’t really heard it since I was a child. It’s fairly meaningless, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” Ridley queried encouragingly, his own lenses glinting, full of light.
“I mean, isn’t it?” He appealed to Judd. “Do you hear it? Surely you’ve got more important matters on your mind up at that inn than the ghostly bell on a ship that sank centuries ago.” Judd opened his mouth to answer; Raven didn’t listen to that, either. He appealed again to Ridley. “Unless it marks a sunken treasure or something, why bother with it?”
“A pirate ship,” Daria guessed, blinking with rapture at Ridley. “Is that what you think it is? Weighted with gold and stolen jewels, foundering just off Sealey Head—Oh, Gwyneth, you must write that story! Promise me you will.”
“Pirates,” Gwyneth answered dubiously, as Judd’s voice bumped against hers.
“You write?”
She colored a little as they all gazed at her. “Silly things,” she said finally, touching her spectacles. “Scribbles.”
“Not all of them,” Osric Trent said firmly. “Some of your pieces have a great deal of energy and wonderful detail. Especially,” he added with a chuckle, “when you set your tales in Sealey Head.”
Daria drew breath audibly. “You write about us?”
“Well, those mostly go under my bed.” Her eyes met Judd’s, with an odd, wordless appeal.
He foundered a moment, heard himself say, “Yes, I do remember. You talked about writing when we were children. You were so in love with reading that you imagined going that step farther—writing your own story—must be the pinnacle of bliss.”
“Did I?” She had flushed again, deeply, but her smile was quick and generous, warming her face. “I suppose I did think of it that way, then.”
“And now?” he said, feeling his own smile suddenly.
“Bliss,” Daria interjected firmly. “I think it must be.”
“Now, it’s a hundred fits and starts, sputtering ink nibs, stray ends going nowhere—like being a spider, most likely, on a windy day, tendrils always sailing off. Mr. Trent is kind enough to make suggestions. I only bring him what I think is my best. And you—”
“Like riding horses,” Raven interrupted, illumined. “I see. When you dream about riding, you never fall off. But you can’t really learn to ride without actually clambering up a horse’s back, which is a completely different kettle of stew.”
Gwyneth clung to her question stubbornly. “Do you still read?” she asked Judd. “Or is Raven right? You have more important things to do?”
“Every chance I get,” he assured her, and saw again the smile she gave him when they were young: a bit secretive, a bit mischievous, eager to be amused by the world.
He felt his own heart, which he hadn’t, he realized then, for some time. It crested to froth like a wave, rode the wind into spindrift. And then fell abruptly, scattering into nothing as Raven, talking again about horses, about continuing their ride back to Sproule Manor, gave a proprietary touch to Gwyneth’s arm. Daria still had hold of the other; together they turned her, gracefully and imperceptibly, toward the door. As Judd watched wordlessly, she continued the circling without them, slipping free to look back at him, the little wry smile still on her face, while they stepped forward without her, then stopped, surprised.
“Come to tea,” she suggested. “You can tell me what you’re reading. And you, Mr. Dow. I still hear that bell at every sunset, and I’m eager to know what you make of it.”
“Yes,” Judd stammered. “Yes, of course. Thank you.”
She turned again, as the Sproules spun back to fetch her, and made her own way to the door.
Judd felt himself under the bright, momentary scrutiny of Ridley’s spectacles. Then they flashed elsewhere. The door closed behind the Sproules; they hurried a step or two to catch up with Gwyneth as she moved past the window, breasting the wind as gracefully as a figurehead above the waves.
Then she was gone. Judd blinked, heard voices again.
“Everything,” Ridley said passionately. “Everything you have on the history of Sealey Head.”
The bookseller scratched the tide line on his balding head. “I can give you a couple now. One is mostly anecdotal, local history; the other is a rather imaginative history of the Sproule family. Written by a Sproule, of course, who tried to link the family to a defunct line of nobility, rather than to the hardworking and very shrewd farmers who made their fortune and achieved their title by turning the rough, rocky Sealey River valley into a large, very fine farm.”
“I’ll take them,” Ridley said promptly.
“I’ll have to search my storage room for older works consigned there for lack of interest.” He paused, meditatively scratching an eyebrow now. “Except,” he pronounced finally, “for Hesper Wood.”
“Hesper,” Ridley repeated blankly, but with enthusiasm.
“Known locally as a wood witch. She’s an herbalist; people come to her with random problems. Even Dr. Grantham consults her sometimes. She lives in a sort of tree house near Aislinn House. For some reason, she collects any kind of family history, memoir, journal, even old letters that have to do with Sealey Head. She takes them in trade, or buys them outright, if she has to. I’ve been putting such works aside for her for years.”
“Interesting,” Ridley murmured. His eyes had grown very dark behind his lenses. “Does she say why?”
“Why such an obsession with a rather commonplace coastal town?”
“Yes.”
“No. I pressed her about it once; she only looked vague and talked about ancient herbal remedies passed down through generations.” Mr. Trent shrugged. “Maybe that’s her interest. But I think there’s something else . . .” He gestured toward the window, where a line of wooded hills rose above warehouses, shops, dwellings, and the back lanes of Sealey Head. “She lives up there. She might talk to you about Sealey Head. If you can’t find the tree house, ask the young maid at Aislinn House; that’s her daughter, Emma.”
“Do you know this wood witch?” Ridley asked Judd, after he had paid for the books and they had returned again to the street.
“Of course,” Judd said, amused. “I know everyone.”
“What’s she like? Would she talk to me?”
“She’s very kind . . . I went to her about my father’s failing eyes. She tried everything she knew and wouldn’t take any form of payment when nothing worked.”
“Why did she take to living in a tree?”
“No one knows. She was the stillroom maid at Aislinn House for many years.”
“Was she,” Ridley breathed. “Was she now.”
Judd looked at him, hearing mysteries in his voice, secrets. He knew something about that sad, ancient house that Judd didn’t. Something about the bell?
“It was on a ship,” he heard himself protest incoherently, he thought, but somehow Ridley knew exactly what he meant.
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