The Splendour Falls (53 page)

The water heater, thank heavens, worked just fine. I sank my aching body into the scalding water and felt every scratch, scrape and bruise sting and protest. I lay in the water, thinking, until it was cool enough to give Gigi a quick rinse. She seemed to have no lingering effects from her adventures, but I didn't let her paddle or play.

I was startled by how much I didn't regret my tradeoff. My leg would continue to heal, at its own rate, and if simply working in the garden helped it along, I would take that. But the help I'd gotten tonight – running through the woods, rescuing Gigi, facing Shawn – had been extraordinary. I mean extra-extraordinary, and I didn't regret giving up that step towards temptation.

Besides soaking my aching body, there was another motive behind my leisurely bath. When I came out, the house was quiet and dark – no flicker of candlelight
from downstairs or the professor's room. Holding Gigi's tags to keep them quiet, I snuck down the hall to Rhys's door, but he didn't answer my quiet tap. Returning to my own room, I wasn't at all surprised to find him waiting for me.

He sprawled on the bed, looking cleaner than when I'd left him in the kitchen. ‘You took long enough,' he said, checking out my latest borrowed sleepwear – a set of plaid flannel pyjamas. I practically swam in them, but I was still chilled, and they were perfect and warm. Not to mention modest.

‘I needed the soak.' I set Gigi on the floor, and she immediately jumped on the bed to greet our visitor.

‘
I
had to make do with a cold splash in my room,' said Rhys, bringing all kinds of pictures to mind. He'd left a candle burning on the nightstand, and it cast appealing shadows on his sculpted face.

‘It's a good thing it's so dark in the house,' I said. ‘Or your dad would have wondered about your newest bruises.'

‘Oh, he asked me. I told him I got in a fight over a lady's honour.'

I pulled the towel from my head and combed through my hair with my fingers. ‘Are we going to talk about what really happened?'

Rhys paused in petting Gigi. ‘We were both there.'

‘Let's compare notes.' I sat on the very edge of the bed, unaccountably shy now that we weren't in the middle of life-and-death crises. ‘Tell me about Prince Madoc.'

He sat up and took a length of my hair between his fingers, toying with it idly as he spun the tale. ‘Once
upon a time, there was a Welsh nobleman named Madoc. He had a brother, and both of them were in contention for their father's throne. Rather than risk a civil war, Madoc went exploring and found new lands to conquer, with no one to contest him. He sailed back to Wales, and gathered up a group of men and women to return with him to this New World.'

‘Simple enough.'

‘You would think so.' He kept playing with my hair, winding it around his finger. ‘But there was a princess involved.'

‘Of course there was.' Women always complicate things. That was what made stories, and life, interesting.

‘She was meant to marry the brother, but Madoc persuaded her to come away with him to this undiscovered country. Some say he kidnapped her; others say they were truly in love.'

‘But it's the same pattern as Hannah and her suitors.' At his blank look, I had to explain the whole thing from the diary. Then, more reluctantly, I pointed out,

‘And there's you, and me, and Shawn. Even though you're not brothers. Is it coincidence? Or were we cast in these roles when we got here? Did we never have a choice in how we felt?'

He caught my anxious gaze with his own steady one. ‘We always have choices, Sylvie. And patterns can be broken.'

‘But' – I wasn't done yet – ‘what if we leave here, and I don't feel this way any more? About you.'

He didn't look worried. ‘Do you think that's going to happen?'

I studied his face, which wasn't impassive at all. With the smallest flickers of expression, I could read his calm confidence in the future. That was different than when we'd met. I'd gotten better at reading him, but he'd also let me in. Maybe not by choice at first. But here we were, sitting on my bed in the middle of the night.

‘No,' I said, answering his question, then turning it around. ‘Do you?'

Taking two handfuls of my hair, like pigtails, he pulled me close, laying his forehead against mine. ‘I think I loved you before I ever got here. So no, I don't think that will change when we leave.'

Wetting my lips, I could feel his breath kissing them, from just inches away. ‘So,' I whispered, ‘what are we going to do now?'

‘I suggest we stop asking questions,' he said, and shut me up very effectively.

After a few minutes – by which I mean a blissful, long, unhurried span of undetermined time – we lay on top of the covers of my lumpy bed and exhaustion took over. I fell asleep between kisses, but not so deeply that I didn't grab Rhys when he tried to leave. He gave in, curled around me and flipped the quilt up over us both.

I woke, freezing cold, despite my flannel pj's, and being sandwiched between Rhys and Gigi, who'd managed to take her usual place behind my knees. The icy
air seemed to creep in under the door and through the keyhole.

The Colonel did not approve. I closed my eyes again against a wave of guilt. I'd forgotten something important. I still didn't know why Jacob had left Hannah or what had happened to her baby.

The next morning when I woke, Rhys was gone, back in his own room before his lousy chaperone of a father was awake, and before all the excitement began.

When the flood took out the summerhouse, it revealed something else. A ring of standing stones, bluestone, like the one in the garden, each about two feet high. They'd been under the summerhouse. Which, in retrospect, made great sense.

Rhys, once he got over beating himself up for scouring half the county for something right under his nose, was giddy with excitement. Not because of the magical implications, but because Paula gave him permission to take a sample and compare all the rocks to the ones native to Wales, so he could find out if they really had come from there, like the Stonehenge stones.

It wouldn't mean anything to his father's research unless he could prove how long they'd been at the Hill, but it was interesting to find out that Rhys was a complete nerd about rocks, for no other reason than that he thought they were cool.

The resolution to Hannah's story wasn't so quick or dramatic as the destruction of the summerhouse. It took me getting up the nerve for a thorough search of the Colonel's office for the missing pages of Reverend Holzphaffel's diary. I came up empty, but it gave me the idea to go into Rhys's room and check the desk there – the twin to the one in mine.

In the matching secret compartment, I found the missing pages, read them, then carried them back to my room and put them in Hannah's desk, along with her diary. I knew what Hannah was searching for in the woods, and she wasn't looking for death.

And Dad must have known too. Who else could have secreted those pages there? It was only speculation – the way my connection with Hannah was only speculation – but I imagined Dad going through a journey similar to mine his last summer here. Paired up with Rainbow by the town, discovering the potential in the earth here, rousing the ghosts.

I didn't know where he'd found the pages from the reverend's journal. They were the originals, so someone must have torn them out and hidden them long before Holzphaffel's relative ever got hold of the books. I was guessing Dad discovered them in the Colonel's office, where I expected to find them. He'd read what Holzphaffel had suspected happened at Bluestone Hill, the story that I'd just read. Dad had seen what the manipulation of power could lead to, the kind of thing our family was capable of, and he had walked away to start his own life.

But I wasn't my dad, and I wasn't really about sticking
secrets in drawers. So I read the reverend's pages again, and made a plan for how to reveal the secrets written in them.

On the day the river receded from the woods, I took Gigi and Rhys with me and went searching.

‘What are we looking for?' Rhys asked, helping me over a spot where the water had left the ground crumpled like the front of a wrecked car.

‘I think Gigi was on the trail of it the night of the flood,' I said, watching her plumed tail like a beacon as she trotted ahead of us. ‘Before she got turned round by too many ghosts.'

For this, my new senses came in handy. I knew when we were close, and hurried after Gigi when she started running. My limp was back – not always, but definitely on long, uneven treks like this one.

Rhys and I found Gigi quickly, sitting under a bedraggled lilac tree. I dropped to my knees and dug in the soft mud with my fingers. Even if I'd thought about bringing any of my gardening tools, I wouldn't use them for this.

Surprisingly close to the surface, I touched something hard yet porous. By this time, Rhys had put my actions together with the story I'd told him, and leaned over my shoulder to see. ‘Is that it?'

‘Yes.' All that was left of the tiny skeleton was the skull and a few of the bigger bones. I left them all where they were.

Rhys took out his phone. ‘Dr Young will know what to do. What do you want me to tell him?'

‘That the flood uncovered these, and Gigi found them on our walk.' I paused. ‘Let's leave the fact that my great-great-grandfather was a murderer out of the story.'

‘It could have been Ethan Maddox,' he offered, as if that would make me feel better.

I shook my head. ‘I think he may be responsible for his brother disappearing. But it's not Ethan who watches Hannah search for her baby.'

Reverend Watkins agreed to let the bones be interred next to Hannah Davis's exiled grave, even though they were never really identified. There's not much left of a newborn to test for a DNA match.

I was content. Hannah could stop looking for the child her father had left out in the woods to die, and the baby could finally rest with the mother it barely knew.