CHAPTER 44

* * *

Returning to Trepassen felt strange, like putting on the heavy pack that you’d downed a few hours earlier, the blisters from the straps still raw. Or sliding your feet back into wet shoes that were once soggily clammy, and had become in the interim downright unpleasant.

The gate onto the road was still ajar, but as they turned up the drive, Hal saw that the long stretch of whiteness was unmarked. No car had passed this way for many hours. Either Abel and Harding had thought better of leaving, or they had left soon after Hal and Ezra, and had not returned.

“There’s no lights on,” Ezra said beneath his breath as they wound round the last bend of the drive. The white marker rocks were hard to see, except in the places beneath the trees where the canopy had protected the road from the snowfall, and he had to slow to a crawl to ensure he didn’t slide off the path. “Mrs. Warren must be in bed.”

Good, was all Hal could think, though she did not say it.

They parked in front of the porch, and Ezra turned off the engine, and they both sat for a moment. Hal had an image of two athletes before a fight, strapping up knuckles, snapping mouth guards into place. Except it was not Ezra she was fighting.

“Ready?” he said, with a short laugh. Hal didn’t smile in return. She only nodded, and they stepped out into the falling snow.

The door was locked, but Ezra lifted one of the flat stones that formed the sheltered seating of the porch, and beneath it Hal saw a huge, blackened key—a thing from another era, at least six inches long. He fitted it into the lock and turned it cautiously, and they stepped inside, into the dark, breathing house.

“Mrs. Warren?” Ezra called softly, and then when there was no answer, a little more loudly, “Mrs. Warren? It’s just me, Ezra.”

“Do you think Harding and Abel have gone?” Hal whispered. Ezra nodded.

“Harding texted while you were asleep. They made it across Bodmin Moor before the road closed and holed up at a travel lodge near Exeter.”

“I’m so sorry,” Hal said. She felt a stab of guilt. “It’s my fault—if you hadn’t gone via Penzance . . .”

“No use crying over spilt milk,” Ezra said shortly, but the suppressed rage Hal had seen earlier seemed to have vanished, and there was only resignation in his tone. “Look, Hal, it’s very late, and I don’t know about you, but I’m shattered. Are you okay for me to head up?”

“Of course,” Hal said. “I’ll go to bed too.”

There was a short, awkward silence, and then Ezra pulled her into a clumsy hug, almost too hard, that scraped her face on his jacket, and left her bones bruised.

“Good night, Hal. And tomorrow . . .”

He stopped.

“Tomorrow?” Hal echoed.

“Let’s just get going as early as possible, okay?”

“Okay,” she agreed. They climbed the first flight of stairs together, and then at the landing, they went their separate ways.

• • •

WHEN HAL OPENED THE DOOR to the attic chamber, the little room was just as she had left it—curtains pulled back, so that the pale snowy light filtered through the barred windows, covers thrown back, even down to the blown bulb on the landing.

There were a few pieces of coal left in the scuttle, and with the comforting knowledge that she would not be around for very long in the morning to face Mrs. Warren’s censure, Hal screwed up a page of newspaper, placed the coals in the grate, and put a match to the fire.

As it flared up, she sat, hunched in front of it, thinking about her mother crouching here so long ago, tearing the pages from her diary, and everything Hal had learned since finding it.

Edward. Could it really be true?

It must be—but when she thought of him, of his smooth blond hair, carefully coiffed mustache—she felt nothing. No sense of connection. Just a faint loathing for the man who had impregnated her mother and then left her, ignored her letters, leaving her to the mercy of a woman like Mrs. Westaway.

Part of her wanted to push the knowledge aside and move on, into the future, as Ezra had suggested. But the questions still niggled. Why had Abel lied so transparently? Had he banked on her not asking the same questions of Ezra?

If only her mother hadn’t scrubbed all the mentions of Hal’s father from the diary.

Hal sat, staring into the flames, too tired to rouse herself sufficiently to go to bed. She was almost beyond thought now—and she had the strangest feeling that history had looped around, putting her here, in her mother’s place, where Maggie herself had crouched so long ago, watching the flames burn the name of her lover to ashes, so that she, Hal, could discover a truth that had been buried long ago. But what was that truth?

Not just the name of her father.

There had been something else . . . something Ezra had said that was bothering her, but she could not pinpoint what it was. Was it during their conversation in the service station? She cast her mind back, running through everything he had said, but whatever it was, it kept slipping through her fingertips, a truth too insubstantial to catch hold of.

At last she stood, stretching her stiff limbs, the air of the room cool on her cheeks after the heat of the fire. Her case lay at the foot of the bed. In the pocket was the old tobacco tin, and she opened it and drew out her cards. Shivering a little, she cut the deck.

The card that stared up at her was the Moon, inverted.

Hal frowned. The Moon meant intuition, and trusting your intuition. It was a guiding light, but one that could be unreliable—for it was not always there, and sometimes when you needed it most, the night would be impenetrably dark.

Inverted, it meant deception, and especially self-deception. It meant the intuition that could lead you astray, down a false path.

Don’t fall into the trap of believing your own lies . . . Her mother’s voice in her ear, warning, always warning. You want to believe as much as they do.

And she did. She did want to believe. After her mother’s death, she had found herself dealing out the cards night after night, trying to make sense of it all, trying to find answers where there were none. She had spent hours poring over her mother’s cards, running her hands over them, looking for meaning.

But always that voice of skepticism in her ear, her mother’s voice: There is no meaning, apart from what you want to see, and what you are afraid of turning up.

She put her hands over her ears, as if she could shut out that voice of whispered sense and logic.

When had her mother become so cynical?

The girl in the diary, with her superstition and her obsessive reading of the cards, she was like a different person from the woman who had taken herself to the pier every day to read for fools and strangers. Tarot had been a job for Hal’s mother—nothing more. It had been something she was good at, but she had never believed, however convincing her patter was to strangers, and she had never hidden that skepticism from Hal. How had she turned from this questing, openhearted young girl into the disillusioned, weary woman Hal remembered?

They’re not magic, sweetheart, she had said to Hal once, in answer to her question. Hal could not have been more than four or five. You can play with them all you like. They’re just pretty pictures. But people like to pretend that life has . . . meaning, I suppose. It makes them feel happy, to think that they’re part of a bigger story.

Then why, Hal had asked, confused, did people come to see her every day? Why did they pay money if none of it was true? It’s like going to see a play, she had explained. People want to believe it’s true. My job is to pretend it is.

The girl in the diary had not been pretending. She had been in love—with the power of the cards, and the power of fate. She had believed. What had that changed? What had happened to make her stop believing in that power?

There is something I’m not seeing, Hal thought, and she picked up the Moon card and stared down at it, at the shadowy face in the bright orb. Something I’m missing.

But whatever it was, it lay just out of reach, and at last she put the cards away, and slid between the sheets, fully clothed, to try to sleep.

She was almost asleep, drifting in the strange no-man’s-land between waking and dreaming, the firelight making patterns on the insides of her lids, when an image came to her.