The thing is, I wonder if Wyn might be up on the roof of Burleigh House, numbering the stars and waiting for me. So I sit on the damp sand and wait until all the sky is a wide, night-blue vault above me, spangled with the light of innumerable, immeasurably distant suns. I count them until I get lost in the dark places between, and then turn inward, to the dark places there, and manage my fears instead. But they are oh so many, and I lose myself among them as well.
By the time I return, the inn’s public room is nearly empty. Only Alfred still sits up in a corner near the hearth, bent over his ever-present books and papers. As I cross the room, he glances up.
‘Violet Sterling, are you all right?’ he asks kindly. ‘I mean, not all right, but coping? How can we help?’
I shake my head. ‘I’ve no idea. I’m just – what if we don’t find the deed? What if we do, and Burleigh kills me, like the Sixth House did to Marian Ingilby? What if I can’t find Burleigh’s heart to complete the unbinding – they say only a Caretaker can do that. Or what if I free the House and it doesn’t fix Burleigh the way we thought it would, but lets all that magic out into the countryside? What if everything goes well but the king decides to burn Burleigh anyway? What if Wyn—’
I stop, because I can’t bring myself to speak that particular what-if into being.
Alfred leans back in his chair. ‘Just do the next thing. Don’t focus on anything else. That’s how I cope with all this.’ He waves a hand vaguely at our surroundings. ‘The living in inns, the bribery, the underhanded dealings. I just make do, because Espie wants to see the Great Houses freed in her lifetime, and if she wants something, she brings it about. If I hadn’t met her, I’d either be alone, poking through ruins in Europe on some abandoned hillside, or home at Weston Hall, buried among my books. Instead I am as you see me. A reluctant traitor to the crown.’
‘You do know when she’s queen, you’ll be prince consort?’ I point out. ‘You’ll never really be settled then, or alone.’
‘I know,’ he says. ‘But the thing is, Violet, some people are worth it. They’re worth giving up everything you thought you wanted. And Espie’s not just the Princess of Wales to me, or even the girl I love. She’s home.’
Blood and mortar, how can he be so certain when I’m so muddled? I love Burleigh and I loved the fens, and I’m not entirely sure yet what sort of love I have for Wyn; I only know I sleep better when he’s in earshot and I burn like a torch when he touches me.
A good Caretaker puts her House first. Papa’s voice echoes in my head as I climb the stairs to the rented room Espie and I are sharing. Before king. Before country. Before her own life. Before her heart.
I believed him once, with all my heart. But now I’m not sure I can live that way any more.
‘You should have slept later,’ Esperanza chides when I appear in the inn’s public room before sunrise. ‘The sea cave will still be there.’
‘I couldn’t.’ I sit down across from her at a small side table and she clears a pile of correspondence away to make room. A serving girl appears next to us with a bob of her head.
‘Just a muffin and some tea,’ I say, and the girl disappears. ‘Where’s Alfred?’
‘Still sleeping, like you should be,’ Espie answers, never one to let a chance at driving home her point pass her by. ‘He’s always late to bed and late to rise when he has his choice.’
‘Why aren’t you still sleeping, then?’ I ask.
Esperanza cuts a sausage into dainty slices and pops one in her mouth, chewing meditatively. ‘I suppose I never feel as if I should have the luxury. If I’m to be queen someday, I ought to rise when my subjects do, and the fishermen set out to sea an hour ago. The farmers have already milked their cattle. The tin miners are at their pitches. Who am I to lie abed?’
I rest my chin on one hand and gaze at her, so full of life and so certain of herself. ‘Espie, do you ever think we want too much? Me wanting to save Burleigh, you wanting to take the throne, all of us wanting a new fate for the Great Houses? Maybe . . . maybe it’s just more than we’re meant to have.’
Esperanza wipes her mouth on a napkin, sets it down and wags a finger at me. ‘Don’t be a fatalist. It’s too early, and it doesn’t become you. Who’s ever said we should have less?’
‘Your father, for one,’ I point out.
‘My father, and all of my forefathers back to William the Deedwinner, sat on the throne of this country because they wanted something that didn’t belong to them. The world is full of men who want things, and never question their right to go after them.’ Esperanza’s eyes spark, and she leans forward in her chair. ‘Why should we feel any less worthy than they do, so long as what we want does no harm?’
For the first time, I’m struck by the thought that my friend, with whom circumstances have thrown me together, will make an excellent queen.
‘Are you talking about the Deedwinner?’ Alfred says, appearing beside us and drawing another chair up to the table. ‘I’ve nearly got to his chapter in my monograph.’
He’s impeccably tidy as always, and Espie favours him with an approving smile. ‘You’re up early.’
‘Turning over a new leaf. I can’t let you feel smug about greeting the dawn all the time, can I? And I had a feeling Violet would want to make an early start. So I’ll go talk to the staff about packing us a lunch, because whether we find the deed or not we’ll likely be hungry after clambering around in a cave.’
‘Why don’t you pace or something?’ Espie tells me when he’s gone. ‘You look like a caged bear.’
I push out of my seat. It’s true – nervous energy is coursing through me, now we’re so close to our goal. ‘What if I walk to the harbour? Can we meet there?’
‘Of course. Go gaze at your sea.’
There’s an unseasonably cold wind coming in from offshore, but at least the sky is clear. Small clouds scud across it, like a mirror image of the whitecapped Atlantic. I walk and walk, from one end of the sandy harbour beach to another, and though the fishermen have taken the boats from their slips, a few people linger at the harbour’s edge, mending nets or crab pots. But for the most part, St Ives is shockingly empty. When I was last here, holidaymakers lined the sand, children laughed on the carousel, and little carts stood out on the beach, from which hawkers sold lemonade and ice creams. Even a hundred miles from Burleigh House, the proof of its decay is everywhere I look.
Alfred and Esperanza join me, and we hike through town and out on to the rugged green cliffs of the Cornish coast. The wind is even stronger up here, away from the protection of the harbour. We walk in silence. I take the lead, travelling westwards, remembering Burleigh’s vision of a setting sun. The tang of the salt air and the boom, hush of the surf and the knowledge that I am about to reach the end I’ve been working towards have my head spinning.
At last we reach a jutting piece of headland that looks eerily familiar. The beach here is no longer sand – it’s stony shingle, and the cliffs have jagged edges. The water below is inky blue where vegetation grows from the ocean floor, and lighter in the sandy spots where sea plants cannot thrive. It’s all just as Burleigh showed me.
‘Over here!’ Esperanza shouts, beckoning to Alfred and me. She points to a worn trail, hidden behind a clump of gorse, and the three of us slip and scramble down it to the shingle below. Once we’re at sea level, it’s easy to see the thing we’ve come for – a yawning cave mouth, halfway up the cliff, safe beyond the high-water mark.
Espie clasps my hand in her own and squeezes. ‘We’re nearly there, Violet. Look what you and Burleigh have managed.’
I bite my lip and nod. The ascent to the cave looks daunting. There’s been an attempt made at hewing a stairway into the rock, but it’s a rudimentary effort, somewhere between stone steps and rough handholds.
Without a word, I begin the climb, not needing to look back to know Alfred and Espie are following. Halfway up, I’m forced to stop a minute, clinging to the rock face like a barnacle or a bit of cliff gras
s as my head spins.
‘All right, Vi?’ Alfred asks from beneath and behind.
There’s something strange about this place – something deeply right and wrong all at once. It feels like Burleigh, though my House is miles and miles away. By the time I pull myself up into the cave, my legs won’t stop shaking.
‘It’s got to be here,’ I tell Esperanza breathlessly as she pulls herself up into the cavern. ‘I can feel it.’
The cave isn’t very large. Perhaps the size of my bedroom at home, its interior is almost entirely bare. A few stalactites cling to the ceiling, and loose stones rest in the sunken areas of the uneven cave floor. I don’t know what I expected, to be honest – perhaps something with an entrance submerged at high tide, boring deep into the cliffs, full of passageways and twists and turns, rife with places to hide a chest containing one of the things I most desire in this world.
This is little more than a hollow in the hillside. A place for a handful of bats to take refuge and for swifts to nest. It is not a place for hidden treasure – indeed, there’s nowhere to hide it.
‘It doesn’t look like much, does it?’ Esperanza says uncertainly. I stand at the cave mouth and peer out. There’s no mistaking this bit of headland, the small rocky island just off the coast that’s barely large enough for three people to stand on. I am where Burleigh wanted me to be.
And there’s the spinning of my head, the trembling of my legs, the sense that Burleigh is very near, to confirm the House’s directions.
‘Let’s spread out,’ I tell Alfred and Espie. ‘I want every inch of this cavern combed over.’
They take the walls, running their fingers carefully over the damp stone, searching for any cracks or seams that might hold an oilskin-wrapped package containing the deed. I get down on my hands and knees and travel foot by slow foot across the cave floor, feeling for patches of soil or indentations in the rock, and turning over the loose stones.
We go over the cave once, and by the time we’ve finished the sun is high overhead, casting much of the cavern into shadow.
‘Again,’ I say.
Alfred and Esperanza are pale with worry, but they don’t protest. We search every nook and cranny a second time, and then a third. By the end my stomach is an empty pit and I’m as weak as water.
‘Vi.’ Espie rests a hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s not here.’
‘How can that be?’ I protest. ‘Burleigh House showed me this spot. And I can feel it here. We’re in the right place.’
‘Your father thought he’d discovered the deed’s whereabouts,’ Alfred says. ‘And yet never found the deed itself. Perhaps it’s a mistake.’
‘I don’t understand where we keep going wrong.’ I bury my face in my hands. ‘This can’t be happening. Not again.’
‘You should eat a sandwich,’ Esperanza says. ‘It’ll make you feel better.’
‘Espie, I can’t.’
We climb back down the cliff face, and twice I nearly fall, overwhelmed by Burleigh, by regret and sorrow and magic pulsing through the earth. By the time we get off the beach and to the top of the trail, we’re losing daylight. I have to stop for quite some time beside the gorse bush, legs trembling beneath me. But by far the worst is my heart. I can’t feel it at all – it’s as if someone’s cut it out of my chest with surgical precision, leaving me no more than a shell of the girl I was.
I have failed in my purpose. I have failed my House. I’ve failed Wyn.
How can I go back and let Burleigh have its way? How can I do what I’ve been raised for, be the Caretaker I was brought up to be, when it means watching the friend of my childhood, who is much more than that to me now, give his life to save my House?
24
No sooner do we get to the inn in St Ives than the sky opens up and pours. Rain lashes at the windows, the fire backs up and smokes, and there’s no possibility of us starting for home until tomorrow at the earliest.
I chafe at the enforced confinement, and feel as if at any moment I might fly apart.
‘Do you want to talk about anything, Vi?’ Espie offers.
‘No,’ I answer sharply. ‘No, I don’t want to talk at all.’
Alfred buries himself in his books, receding so far into a stack of them that only the top of his head remains visible. Esperanza sits at the counter and strikes up a rather desperate conversation with the barmaid, about St Ives and Cornwall and fisheries and what could be done to ease the burdens of local tin miners.
I don’t have a bent for reading to distract me, or the good of England to bother with, so I stand at a window and brood, staring out into the dark of the storm. In all my life, I have never felt so low. And with nothing to occupy me, all I can do is wait for ungovernable fear to rise up, for heartbreak to blossom in my chest like a physical pain.
While I wait, I think of Burleigh House, marking me as a child. Of Mama’s insistence that Papa find a way to undo what had been done. Of my father bringing a foundling boy home not a week later, when he’d never shown much of a bent for charity before.
I think of Mama’s refusal to welcome Wyn into the family, to make him one of us. Of Wyn’s unease throughout our childhood – his furtive requests for the two of us to run away together. Of Papa taking him, a blameless boy, into the living prison of House arrest. And I think of Wyn at home, steeling himself to do something that should not be required of him.
Suddenly I find I am not fearful, or heartbroken. I’m furious.
Before either Alfred or Esperanza can protest, I burst back out into the storm, grabbing a lantern that hangs by the inn door as I go. I don’t care that the cliffs are slippery and treacherous, or that in the darkness the boom and crash of the surf is near overwhelming. I don’t care that the rain has me soaked through in a moment, either. All I care about is getting back to that sea cave, because I can no longer tolerate failure. Perhaps I will die for Burleigh yet. But I will not go home and watch Wyn do it in my stead. I’m not just Violet Sterling, Caretaker of a failing House. I am the sum of everywhere and everything I’ve been. And I am still, in my deepest parts, Vi of the Fens, who never goes home empty-handed.
In the dark and the rain, I nearly pass the gorse bush that marks the head of the trail down to the little beach below the cave, where I felt Burleigh’s presence so strongly. But my skirt snags on its reaching branches and I start down the rain-slick path.
The climb up to the cave is a nightmare, with unseen water frothing below as I grasp for purchase on the wet rocks, forced to leave my lantern behind. But at last I haul myself up into the cavern’s scant shelter and draw a breath.
Well done, Violet, I think to myself. You’ve really thought this through. Sitting in a cave during a rainstorm when you can’t see your hand in front of your face will absolutely save Wyn and Burleigh.
But do I need to see? We searched this whole place over with our eyes in broad daylight, and not a sign of the deed turned up. Perhaps it isn’t sight I’m wanting. With sight, I saw nothing worth noticing. But even now, that part of me that recognizes Burleigh, that’s always recognized Burleigh, can feel magic and the familiar presence of my own House.
So in the darkness, racked with shivers, I get down on my hands and knees and reach, with the piece of me that is always reaching for either Burleigh or Wyn: the bit of Violet Sterling who sees them as family, and home.
As I do, thoughts of Wyn being bound to Burleigh rise up, and are soon met by grim imaginings of the House being put to the torch by His Majesty, and of Burleigh overtaking Wyn entirely in order to survive. I force those bleak visions down ruthlessly, all my practice at holding things in check coming to good use as I creep along the cavern floor. I don’t want to live in a world where either Wyn or Burleigh does not exist – I want them both, and refuse to trade one for the other, whatever my father was willing to do.
I move inch by slow inch through the cave, feeling for my House. Towards the back of the cavern my awareness of Burleigh grows ever so slightly stronger. And then again a
s I shift a few paces to the left. And again. Then a little weaker, so I hastily backtrack. At the place where I can feel Burleigh most strongly, I meticulously run my hands across the cave floor, touching every bit of rock, and then up along the wall. Little by little I go, all of me bent on sensing my House.
When my searching fingers slide over a slight lip of rock just higher than my head and brush against a small stone, I’m shoved three steps back by the force of what I feel.
Despair, darkness, calamity. Brokenness, heartbreak, agony.
And once that subsides, I realize cold mortar is dripping from my hand. It hasn’t gone into me – there was no sense of magic crawling under my skin: no, this is leftover mortar – the last vestiges of it that remain in my blood from the times Burleigh couldn’t hold its power back. Whatever I’ve just touched, it’s pulling the lingering bits of poison from me like a magnet draws metal. I’ve never seen the like, and never known such a thing to be possible. As the mortar goes, I feel suddenly flush with health, like waking up from a long illness you’ve grown used to, only to find yourself well again. Bending, I tear a wide strip off the bottom of my already ragged fen skirt. Folding it double and wrapping it around my hand, I reach up once more and grasp at the stone resting on the rock ledge overhead. I can’t see it in the darkness, but even through layers of fabric I can still feel that wild anguish, that sense of brokenness, of unbelonging and of separation.
No wonder my father stood in this cave and never found what he was looking for. It’s not deeds that bind the Great Houses – it’s missing pieces of their own selves, a piece of the House itself. How devilishly clever of the king and all his predecessors never to speak a word of this truth. To ensure for eight hundred years that anyone who sought to free the Houses would always be searching for the wrong thing.
I carefully wrap up this lost bit of Burleigh and tuck it into one of my deep pockets, where its constant thrumming of loneliness and desolation immediately sets an ache in my thigh. Fear uncurls in my belly at the thought of the journey back down the cliff face, but when I turn to the cavern’s mouth, the clouds have parted. A sickle moon gleams overhead, casting diamonds across the restless sea, and its light seems all the brighter for the night having been so dark.
A Treason of Thorns Page 20