by Harper Fox
Irritation came to Gideon’s rescue. “God’s sake, Zeke. You always have to be the ghost at the feast, don’t you? What would you know about lots of women?”
“That’s rich, coming from you.”
Gideon’s mouth fell open. Ezekiel never took the low road. Before he could think up a retort, Eleanor appeared behind the glass doors. She came in quietly, and went to kiss Ma Frayne before turning to greet Gideon, but the message for her fiancé was written all over her face. Did you ask him?
Gideon sighed. She was a nice, kind, straightforward woman who took a very plain view of the world. “Hello, Eleanor,” he said, wiping the annoyance from his tone. “How are you?”
“Fine, but never mind me. I just went down the corridor to get a cup of tea, and here you are. Where’s Lee?”
“He’s with his sister. Did you put Ezekiel up to this?”
“Up to what?”
“Asking if we’d had Tamsyn formally adopted.”
She was too honest for a sidestep. He’d stung her, though, and she flushed in anger as well as embarrassment. “I didn’t put him up to anything. I just know that I couldn’t let my baby go, not once I’d seen her. No matter what I’d promised before.”
A shriek cut across their confrontation. A door at the far end of the delivery suite flew open, and Lee and Michel Duroy came backing out into the corridor. Lee was white as a cod, Michel’s hands up in a gesture of surrender. A plastic water bottle shot through the air, narrowly missing Michel’s head, and impacted off the far wall. Another scream split the air, and then a groan like a soul in perdition. “Fuck off, both of you! Fuck the fuck off out of here!”
“Good God,” Ezekiel said. “Is that...”
“Our sweet, nicely spoken sister-in-law, doctor of archaeology. Yes.” Like his brother, Gideon had risen to his feet on instinct, ready for battle, the pair of them archetypal males despite their differences, and just as useless here. They both turned gratefully to the old lady, who had set aside her magazine and come to join them. “Now, boys,” she said soothingly. “Your father called me a foul-mouthed hellion when I was having you. They encourage the girls to scream and shout these days, and it does them good. It’s not as dreadful as it sounds.”
“God, I hope not.” Gideon swallowed dryly. He wasn’t too worried about Elowen. He’d done the classic local-hero cop thing of delivering one woman’s baby in the back seat of her car on the verge of the A30, and the Herald had made much of the new mum’s wish to name her infant after her saviour, only to change her mind in horror when she’d heard what he was called. Michel too could look after himself, even if his six-foot Gallic gorgeousness wasn’t doing him much good now. He shook off his paralysis and ran to Lee. “Right, you. Away from the door.”
“I can’t. Feels like she’s dying.”
“Well, she’s not.” Gideon detached him from the wall he’d backed up against, force-marched him a few yards down the corridor. “She’s just having our girl.”
“We’re never having another one.”
“I thought you mentioned wanting six of ’em. Plus the dog you already have, and a goldfish.”
“I’ll settle for the bloody dog!”
Gideon turned him so that the tides of Elowen’s pain could break against his own broad back. Lee hung on to him for a moment, then pushed away. “I'm all right. Go to her.”
“The midwife’s with her. I'm not sure there's anything I can do.”
“You always make everybody feel better. Please.”
Cautiously Gideon returned to the doorway. The midwife glanced up. She knew Gideon from his pre-natal visits to the hospital with Elowen, and she spared him a brief smile. “Your turn to get your head cracked open with a bedpan, is it? Normally I only have one anxious dad to cope with, not three.”
Two! Gideon kept the jealous thought to himself. Michel had just come here on a visit, and if he was now pacing the corridor with every appearance of a worried father-to-be, that was only natural. Such concerns were trivial anyway, compared to Elowen’s struggle. “How is she doing?” He hadn’t meant to speak as though she wasn't there, but she had turned her face away from him and was clutching the sheet round her chin. “Does she have much longer to go?”
“We thought things were happening a few minutes ago, didn’t we, chick? But our contractions have subsided. Could be a few hours yet.”
A few hours... Poor little bugger. Gideon’s head spun a bit at the prospect and he asked, only halfway meaning to voice the question aloud, “What time is solstice?”
“Solstice?” The midwife gave Elowen a reassuring pat and straightened the blanket. “You’re not into all that astrological stuff, are you? My son’s just as bad. Three minutes after eleven this year, he says it is. I don’t know what he expects is going to happen.”
Elowen shifted in the bed. Her face contorted. Gideon had promised to help her—had taken turns with Lee to breathe with her in half a dozen ante-natal groups—and he took a step forward, but she waved him frantically back. “I don’t want you, Gid,” she rasped. “Or Lee, or Michel, or bloody Ezekiel, or any other bloody man, for that matter! How have I ended up here, flat on my back... surrounded by bloody men?” She began to sob in sheer weariness and fright. “I want my mum.”
Gideon’s heart shifted in his chest with pity. Her mother had died twenty years ago. “I know. Will mine do?”
Her face crumpled. “Yes. I want Ma Frayne.”
Gideon didn’t have to call her. She’d risen at the prompting of some instinct beyond family ties or reason, and was making her way down the corridor without stopping to think about her stick, her walking frame or the need for an arm to lean on. She pushed past Gideon into the room, her hands outstretched. “Oh, poor girl. My poor sweetheart. I’m here now.”
Chapter One
July 2015
The clifftop garden was awash with colour and light, merry as a fairground in the sunshine. Gideon made his way with difficulty up the slope, balancing two cardboard cups of cider. He subsided gratefully into a deckchair beside Sarah Kemp, who was watching her daughter and the other kids tear around the lawn with Isolde, a sheepdog who nominally lived with Gideon and Lee but spent her time guarding the kitchens and offspring of half the other villagers of Dark. Gideon handed Sarah one of the cups. “There you go, your ladyship. Everything all right?”
“Heavenly.” She waved in the direction of the romping children. “Would you look at that? That dog of yours is herding the brats away from the cliff edge.”
“Whoever would’ve thought she’d have the brains, eh?” Gideon stretched and hid a yawn behind his hand. Even the smell of the cider was making the garden flutter and dance. “You should see her at home. Bites me on the bum if I’m late taking Tamsie for her bath.”
Sarah chuckled. “Nanny dog.” She leaned forward and pitched a Bodmin mother’s moor-crossing yell at her two younger offspring. “Shaun and Jenny Kemp! You climb that bloody apple tree, I’ll come and string you up from it! God,” she continued to Gideon, smiling, “they love it here. It was nice of Jago to ask us.”
“He knows how much help you were when we first brought Tamsyn home.”
“Well, when you’ve had three of ’em, you either know what to do in most emergencies or you’ve stopped caring. He’s a nice bloke, your Lee’s Jago, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, he is.” When Gideon had first met him, he’d been certifiably insane. Now he was married to Mrs Ivey, his housekeeper, and had moved back into the beautiful old family farmhouse here at Drift, every inch the hospitable lord of the manor, his madness reduced to colourful eccentricity. “Think he might’ve bitten off a bit more than he can chew here. All he wanted to do was throw a quiet farewell party for his niece...”
“And half Cornwall smelled free food and came clambering over the walls. Where is Elowen, anyway? I haven’t seen her since I got here.”
“She’s taking her turn to walk Tamsyn.” Gideon suppressed another yawn. He’d been up half the night, wea
ring a track in the living-room carpet at Dark, gently jiggling his howling daughter against his shoulder. “No, wait. There she is with Michel. Lee must still have the baby, poor sod.” He frowned. Elowen and Michel were in close conference, her hand clasped tight round his arm. She led him off towards the orchard, and they disappeared among the shadows of the trees.
Then a high-pitched wail carried over the voice of the breeze, and Gideon forgot everything at the sight of his husband emerging from the porch, Tamsyn cradled against his hip. Zeke had been wrong, back in that darkest night of December. Eleanor had been wrong. Michel Duroy had vanished like the morning mist as Elowen had surged into the final stage of her labour, and at three minutes past eleven precisely had opened the gates of the world to her daughter, clutching Lee with one hand, Mrs Frayne with the other, Gideon down at the business end to make the catch. She’d delivered Tamsyn right into his hands, head-first, two separate little eyebrows drawn with the delicate perfection of butterfly’s antennae. Two day later, Lee and Gideon had taken their baby home. “Bloody hell,” he said, setting his cider cup down, deciding that sleeplessness and worry were more than enough to make him feel three sheets to the wind. “Still blowing up a storm, isn’t she?”
“Did you try clapping your hands behind her head?”
“Yep. Tried putting her in the car and driving her around like you said used to work with Lorna. Normally all we’ve got to do is walk her up and down the kitchen a few times and she goes out like a light.”
“Well, if you don’t mind my saying so, it serves you bloody right,” Sarah said comfortably, propping her feet. “No natural baby was ever as good as that one. First everybody in the village loves your dog, and then they’re falling all over themselves to get at your baby. No-one ever volunteered to baby-sit my brats, I can tell you that. What’s your secret?”
Gideon had given this thought. He’d come to a conclusion, too. Sarah Kemp was one of the few people with whom he’d have shared it. He and she had walked through the valley of the shadow of death where kids were concerned. He noticed that she never took her eyes off Lorna, even in the sunny garden with Isolde romping by her side. “Most babies cry because they want something, don’t they? A feed, or a clean nappy, or a cuddle to take their minds off this tricky business of being alive. And they can’t communicate whatever it is, so they cry.”
“That’s about right.” She leaned forward, watching Lee, who was now showing Tamsyn the dance of the wisteria blossom around the front porch, still to no avail. “Oh, I see. And Tamsie doesn’t have that problem—because of Lee.”
“Not usually, no.”
“Aren’t you afraid for her, Gid? If she’s like him, I mean. He’s a grand lad, and I owe him everything, but... it’s been hard on him, hasn’t it? Terrible, at times.”
Gideon frowned. So far the bond between Lee and his girl had only been a blessing, a wonderful means of knowing what the puce-faced scrap in his arms required before she knew it herself. He’d been too busy, too besotted, to consider further implications. To think about why his child might be crying when all her obvious needs had been met. “Yes, it has,” he said, taking the edge off his words with a quick smile. “I tell you what, Sarah—I’d better go relieve the guard. Lee looks knackered. You’re right—we’re not used to much of this.”
“Well, you’re gonna be on your own with it from now on.” Gideon tried to look serious at the prospect, but Sarah grinned. “When is Elowen off, then?”
“Later today. She and Michel are taking the ferry to Roscoff so they can start their big project in Carnac.”
“Don’t you pull that face. You’re thrilled silly, aren’t you?”
Gideon turned away to avoid having to answer. The last few months of his life had been extraordinary in ways he hadn’t anticipated. Something had happened to delay the start of the Carnac dig. With time on her hands, Elowen had decided she wanted to breastfeed, and everything Lee and Gideon had read or learned backed her up on the benefits of that. So from December till May, four people had been living in the one-bedroom flat in Dark, Elowen sleeping on a single bed in the nursery.
Gideon hadn’t minded. She was funny and sweet, disconcertingly like her brother. Her studies for her new job had kept her working long hours in the Bodmin library, Lee taking care of Tamsyn at home, and they’d all come together peaceably in the evenings. Gideon had persuaded himself that her presence was just like an extra dose of Lee’s. Still, he’d drawn a huge breath of relief when Tamsyn started showing a vigorous preference for formula, and Elowen had moved back to Drift. She still visited twice a week, and Gideon and Lee had brought the baby down to the farmhouse for a day each weekend, just like a normal, close-knit family, except...
Except that having Elowen around had weighed on him constantly, a lonely fear he could neither define nor share with Lee. He’d put it in a box so that his perceptive lover—who would never pry, but couldn’t help seeing obvious troubles—wouldn’t stumble over it in his frequent trips around Gideon’s mind. He could put it aside today. Zeke, Eleanor, his own paranoid self—they’d all been wrong. Michel had come to collect Elowen and accompany her back to France, and all would be well. Gideon thought he might try and spirit away his little two-person family early from this party, pleading weariness and the ear-splitting nuisance of his daughter, who for once in her life wouldn’t stop crying, as if shadows only she could see were lurking in the bright blue Penwith skies. “Lee?” he called softly, pushing through the wisteria and up the steps of the porch. “Fancy putting our infant child to bed and having the noisy kind of sex we used to have before your sister moved into the room next door?”
“Gideon Frayne!”
He stopped dead. “Oh, crap. Hi, Zeke. We’re just doomed, aren’t we?”
“We wouldn’t be, if you had an ounce of decency in you. I take it you’re looking for your other half.”
Well, I’m not looking for you, crow-face. Gideon kept it to himself. Even Ezekiel couldn’t quite pull off the ministerial look, emerging from the house with a pint of cider in his hand and a T-shirt that could almost stand accused of being pink in the right light. He was proving to be a good uncle, too, taking Tamsyn out on solemn nature walks, telling her the Latin names of all the wild flowers, and failing to combust when Gideon and Lee had chosen a Pagan priest from St Just to conduct the child’s naming ceremony. “I am. Have you seen him?”
“I think he set off on the path towards the church. Tamsyn is still crying, Gideon. Does she have a fever? Another tooth coming through?”
“No. Believe me, we’ve checked her from head to foot about forty times. She’s just really upset about something.”
“Lee didn’t look happy either. You’d better go and see to them.”
Gideon didn’t need telling twice. The cliff path was steep and he wouldn’t have thought Lee would tackle it with Tamsyn in his arms, although she’d joyously yelled her way along many a treacherous track in her papoose across Gideon’s shoulders, Lee following watchfully two steps behind. He set off, shielding his eyes against the sun. As far as he could see, the narrow ribbon of stone and dried mud was empty all the way to the churchyard in the fields below. The vacancy—its worst implication—struck him like a glancing blow, but his mind couldn’t process it. Instead he started to run, giving thanks at every stride for his recovered health. He was back on full active duty once more, the classroom left behind in favour of the streets and the wide world where he belonged.
He made short work of the path, blind for once to its blaze of red campions and gold-green alexanders. The little grey church was dreaming in the sun. Built in a time when magic still swept this outpost of England along with the wild west wind, it held within its granite walls a concentration of the peace that reigned outside it, and maybe Lee had taken his squalling brat to see the wildwood faces carved into the pews. The door stood open a few inches to permit the ingress and swooping egress of juvenile swallows.
No. Gideon stopped on the steps. Lee wasn�
��t in the church. He didn’t know where the conviction came from and didn’t care to analyse it, but he would have sworn in court that he was alone here. The growing instinct was handy, telling him where he could track Lee down to offer him a cuppa or a kiss when they were at home, but other than this domestic function, Gideon had no interest in developing gifts beyond his own good senses. That way madness could lie, even for an experienced voyager between the worlds like Lee. Dodging the dive-bombing efforts of the swallows, he retreated. He would just take a turn around the outside, check the rest of the churchyard and meadow.
Relief and chagrin swept through him. So much for that treacherous sixth sense—Lee was right there, carrying Tamsyn down the long straight path that edged the field on the landward side of the church. Gideon called to him and waved. He felt weary all of a sudden, a rare ache passing through his leg, reminding him that he’d almost bled to death on the cobbles of Bodmin last February. That was a dark thought for a summer’s day, and he climbed the gravel path to the north-side gateway, a traditional Cornish cattle-grid made of huge granite spars set lengthwise between two stone benches. He sat down, rubbing his thigh. Movement caught his attention down among the graves. There was Jago, head lowered, hands in his pockets.
Not everyone was filled with sunshine on this festive day. Elowen and Michel seemed troubled, and Jago had chosen what should be the height of his party to visit his brother’s grave. Gideon got up, determined not to disturb him if he could avoid it. He glanced up the field path to find Lee, to lose his crawling sense of unease in his lover’s bright answering smile.
The field was empty. Gideon scanned its grassy expanse, but only the wind was moving there, pressing the blades into a tumult like a silky sea. The unease blossomed into downright fear: as far as he knew, there were no gaps in the hedgerow where Lee could have stepped through, even if for some reason he’d wanted to return a different way.
