Home From The Sea Read online

  With a soft curse he came around the bar, strong on his right leg, weak on the left, which gave him a limp which had dogged him since he was not much more than a child. But he was lucky to be alive, and quite intelligent enough to know it. His gloves were stuffed into the pockets of the coat that hung with his hat on the peg by the window. He fetched them out, pulled them on and opened the door to the teasing, tormenting sea wind.

  Chapter Two

  The storm went through before dawn, leaving torn thatch, broken windows, a few trees down and a lot of seaweed dumped on the beach. The mountains of wrack would be stinking in a few days, if local farmers did not gather it up and dig it into the potato fields. Along with cow and horse dung it grew fine vegetables, and since learning how potatoes were grown, Jim had always found it easier to eat them when he knew they were raised on seaweed.

  The Raven suffered no more damage than a shutter that came loose in the wind, and he was hammering up fresh timber, with a mouth still full of nails, when he heard footsteps behind him. They were coming up the path which stretched back to Plymouth in the west and wound on, following the line of the shore, till it reached Portsmouth in the east.

  The footsteps stopped behind him and he said, muffled around the nails, “Just wait there, friend, I’ll be done in a minute.”

  “Take your time, I’m in no hurry.”

  The voice was tenor and soft, the accent rich with the sounds of far off places. Jim felt a shiver race the length of his spine and hesitated in the act of striking the last half dozen nails. He twisted his head to look over his shoulder, but he was squinting directly into the morning sun and caught only an impression of a tall, rangy figure in a dark coat, a man with long hair, a hump on his shoulder and some kind of beast at his left side.

  With an impatient grunt, he finished with the nails and threw down the hammer. “Done, thank God,” he muttered as the stranger came on around to the door, beside which the shutter had broken lose near the end of the storm. The light was in his face now, and Jim found himself looking up a hand’s span into wide, clear eyes, some shade between blue and violet and silver. They were framed by long hair the color of a hayfield in August, just before the last cut of the season was made; and the hump on the man’s back turned into the round shape of the belly of the mandolin he carried on a strap across his chest. He was thirty at least, perhaps a few years more, if Jim was any judge – not so very much older than Jim himself – and when he smiled, he showed a full set of nice, white teeth.

  The beast at his left side was a black spaniel who looked up at Jim as if she expected something of him. Jim dusted off his hands and offered the right to the stranger. “Now, you’re not from these parts. I’ve never seen you on this path, and I’ve been here years. You … I’d remember.”

  “Would you?” The man’s shake was firm, dry. “And you’re right, it has to be ten years since I was here, and you weren’t at The Raven when I slept here for a night or three. I’m Toby Trelane.” His eyes were almost mauve as he looked down at Jim across the little difference in their height.

  And for just a moment Jim was so sure he saw the flicker of recognition, he caught his breath. Like usually knew like. Not always, but almost, and often enough for Jim’s heart to skip in his chest and then race. He cleared his throat and held onto Toby Trelane’s hand several seconds too long.

  “Jim Fairley. What can I do for you?”

  “You can tell me where to find the owner,” Toby began.

  Jim tapped his chest with one thumb. “You’re looking at him.”

  “No, it’s Charlie Chegwidden I need to see.” Then Toby checked as he saw some shadow pass across Jim’s face. “What?”

  “The most you’re going to see of Charlie is a headstone,” Jim told him with a nod in the direction of the churchyard. “They planted him not much under six years ago. Goddamnit, did he owe you money?”

  “Money?” Toby backed off a pace. His shoulders seemed to slump for a moment before he unslung the mandolin and leaned against the wall under the thatched eaves. “Not exactly. Not money, anyway, but … well, damn. I’m not just too late, I’m too late by years.”

  And it was dire news, Jim saw. “He did owe you money, didn’t he?” he guessed. “Or something as good as. You came here depending on what he had to give you?”

  The remarkable eyes narrowed in the morning sun, and Toby breathed a long sigh. “Let’s just say, life would have been a bloody sight easier if old Charlie’d been sitting on the bench there, smoking that poisonous pipe of his, like he always swore he’d be when we … when I got back here.”

  “You took too long,” Jim said thoughtfully. “Going by the stories he told, he arrived here about eight years ago, just in time to watch them bury his mother, and he ran The Raven till my father bought it from him.”

  Toby’s brows rose, creasing his forehead. “He sold the tavern? You mean he – he sold it and walked away?” He seemed astonished, even appalled.

  “Sold it,” Jim affirmed, “but he didn’t walk. He stayed right here till the day he died, which was about two weeks after me and my father took over.” He frowned up at Toby. “You want to walk over to the churchyard? They buried him properly, with his name on a stone, and the parson said all the right words. Damn, he wasn’t your kith and kin was he?”

  But Toby made negative gestures. “No, he wasn’t my uncle, if that’s what you’re thinking. But we were on the same vessel, and…”

  And if anything Fred Bailey said had a grain of truth in it, shipmates were even closer than kin. Jim stooped for the hammer and leftover nails, and beckoned Toby toward the door. “Come and have a jar. You’ll feel better with a rum inside you.” It was close enough to luncheon for his own belly to be hoping for food, and as Toby and the spaniel stepped inside he asked, “You hungry? There’s pie and pudding left from last night.”

  “Starving,” Toby admitted as he retrieved the mandolin and set it down again carefully, just inside the door, where it would neither be sat on nor fallen over. “I’ve walked over from Exmouth, and I didn’t get any breakfast! Can Bess have a dish of water?”

  The spaniel wagged her tail as she heard her name, and Jim was seduced in an instant. “She can have a dish of ale, if she likes it.”

  “She likes it, but she gets drunk. Water’ll do,” Toby decided.

  “And a slice of rabbit pie,” Jim added. “And yourself –?”

  “Pie sounds grand.” Toby was swinging off his gray coat, and threw it onto a nearby chair. He glanced once around the tavern, and then back at Jim. “You haven’t changed anything.”

  “What would I change, and why would I bother?” Jim stepped behind the bar and poured two mugs of brown ale before he went on into the kitchen to rummage for plates, bowls, spoons. He raised his voice so Toby would hear as he said, “My father changed nothing after Charlie departed, and the place reminds me of my old dad, so I keep it as it is.”

  “Then, your father’s …?” Toby was at the door, looking into the kitchen, which Mrs. Clitheroe had left clean and tiny enough to pass muster at a butler’s inspection.

  “My father’s also in the churchyard, with Charlie and his ma.” Jim thrust platters and dishes at Toby, and gestured at the tall pitcher of water.

  He watched as Toby brimmed a dish for the spaniel. The man had fine, long-fingered hands and they were not battered, like those of a seaman, nor scarred like a soldier’s hands, nor blue with gunpowder embedded under the skin, like the hands of a naval gunner. They were the hands of a musician, and Jim could easily imagine them playing another kind of music on his own skin.

  The thought inspired a shiver and he stepped back out of the way as Toby set down the bowl. Bess lapped noisily, messily, and Toby scratched behind her ears. Jim felt a rush of heat in his cheeks, and covered the moment of vulnerability with activity. He pushed rabbit pie and plum pudding at Toby, and fetched his own, and Bess’s.

  The man had not been joking when he said he was starving. For some time To
by Trelane was so intent on the food, he did not even notice Jim’s scrutiny, though Jim took him apart bone by bone, missing nothing from the windblown tangle of the hay-colored hair to the dull, scuffed leather of boots that had seen many a mile.

  The dog was little less hungry, and Jim guessed Toby made sure Bess ate even when he was down on his luck himself. Without any doubt, he had arrived here expecting Charlie Chegwidden to have something for him, and Jim felt a pang of regret. Toby was almost certainly down to the last tuppence in his pockets, and he did not have the look of a seaman or a farmer, so work was not going to be so easy to find – at least, not in this area.

  The thoughts preoccupied him and he did not notice the wide blue eyes on him until Toby demanded, “Did I sprout a wart on my nose?”

  “No!” Jim chuckled and ate a little. “You said you’ve just come over from Exmouth. From a ship?”

  “Yes.” Toby took a drink. “It’s the first time I’ve been back in the country for a long time.”

  “But you’re not a sailor,” Jim observed.

  “I’m not?” The edge was off Toby’s hunger now, and he divided his attention between Jim and the food. “Who says I’m not?”

  “Your hands do.” Jim gestured at them. “They’re not the hands of a seaman – nor a fisherman, nor a farmer!”

  “You’re sharp.” Toby gave him a rueful smile.

  The kind of smile that filled a man’s belly with butterflies. Jim was trying hard to see the signs, but this Toby Trelane was not so easy to read and for the moment he bided his time. Better to say nothing than to say the wrong thing. If Toby were the God bothering kind, he would march away in a righteous temper; and if he were furious enough, insulted enough, he might march right to the lieutenant at the local garrison, and Jim Fairley could be looking at the inside of a prison cell.

  “So you’re … a scholar?” he guessed.

  “Balladsinger.” Toby gestured at the mandolin. “I can play a madrigal, sing a hundred shanties and love songs from France, Spain, Italy, and tell the brand of stories that’ll earn me dinner. And a bed,” he added with a note of wry humor. “You, uh, don’t have a use for a balladsinger?”

  “To entertain the kind of rummies who get falling-down drunk in here?” Jim was about to say his customers would not have known a sonnet from a psalm and Toby was wasting his time, but the morning light was just then gilding the man’s face, shining on the big brass ring he wore in the lobe of his right ear, and he bit off the words. “You can try your luck, if you like,” he offered. “I can’t promise you a round of applause for your efforts, much less a shower of coins at your feet, but …” He gestured at the corner between hearth and windows. “Pull up a stool, tell my old rummies a lively tale tonight, see what happens next.”

  What should happen next, he thought, was a rousing cheer for the traveling storyteller, a great deal of ale swilling, and then the customers would go reeling home while the proprietor and the balladsinger would climb the steep, creaking stairs up to the little room over the kitchen where Jim had a goose feather mattress, and –

  “I’ll do that,” Toby was saying. “The worst I can do is get them so bored they shout at me to shut up!” He sopped up the last gravy with a wedge of pie crust. “So Charlie stayed here till he died?”

  “He was sick when my dad and me got here,” Jim told him. “Too sick to keep the tavern for his own, but smart enough to write his room and board into the bill of sale. He had a bedchamber upstairs, and he’d sit at the table there, by the window, and he’d … watch.”

  “Watch what?” Toby wondered.

  Jim’s shoulders lifted in an eloquent shrug. “I used to wonder. I thought, maybe he was watching the sea. Or the path. Like he was waiting for something.” Or someone. He lifted a brow at Toby. “You knew him well?”

  “As well as a young man could get to know an old man, when they were on the same ship,” Toby said doubtfully.

  “But you’re not a seaman,” Jim protested.

  “Not now.” Toby made dismissive gestures. “I was only at sea for one voyage and it was … quite a short one, as voyages go.” He pinned on a smile and answered Jim’s frown with a shrug. “It came to nothing. I might still have been at sea, but Dame Fortune had her own plans for me. So Charlie was sick?”

  “Sick as a dog. Something to do with his guts, or maybe his heart, or perhaps both. We never knew. One day he just fell on his face, right there on the floor. I sent a boy to run, fast as he could, for John Hardesty, the doctor, but Charlie was stone-cold dead before the man got here and they buried him the next day.”

  “Ah.” Toby had switched his attention to the figgy duff and the dollop of cold custard and was chewing slowly, thoughtfully, now his hunger was mostly appeased. He looked up at Jim with a speculative expression. “He, um, he had … things?”

  “You mean, possessions?” Jim’s brows rose. “Everyone’s got things.”

  “Then, if his old ma was already passed over,” Toby mused, “what became of his possessions?”

  It was an extremely good question, and Jim had no idea of the answer. “My father took care of all that. I never saw what happened to Charlie’s stuff, but I don’t remember it being sold and nobody ever beat down the door, demanding anything to settle debts. My father would have tossed out his things, if they were trash, or we could still be using them around the place, if they were any good.” He sat back with the mug of rum and cocked his head curiously at Toby. “Charlie had something belonging to you.” Not a question.

  “You could say that.”

  “Something very valuable?”

  But Toby only shrugged and looked away, which was as evasive a gesture as Jim had ever seen.

  “Something secret, then?” he guessed.

  “Something, at any rate.” Toby spooned a large chunk of pudding into his mouth, and seemed to use it as an excuse not to talk.

  “Well, I hate to disappoint you,” Jim said honestly as he pushed up to his feet, “but if Charlie’s stuff is still here, I have no idea what it’d be, or where. Would you recognize it, if you saw it?”

  “Oh, yes.” Toby’s voice was dark, heavy. “Look, I’m sorry, Jim, it was just a bit of business between Charlie and me, and I daresay it died with him. I didn’t mean to bring bad news to your door.”

  “You haven’t.” Jim had reached for the poker, which stood in the corner of the hearth with the set of fire irons, and was raking over the coals. They were smoldering low, in need of attention. “It’s not your fault Charlie was sick. And I wish I could tell you I had a tavern crowd that liked a song and a story, but they’re a boozy lot in here.”

  “But then again,” Toby argued, “you’ve probably never had a proper balladsinger, have you?”

  “Never had one of any description.” Jim’s eyes drifted over Toby’s slender, rangy limbs. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “Then … I’ll try my luck tonight.” Toby finished the pudding in one bite and gathered up the dishes, and Bess’s. “I’ll wash these up, and I’ll chop you some fresh firewood, and I can polish those windows.”

  “You don’t have to,” Jim began.

  “Let me pay for luncheon before I do something honest to earn dinner,” Toby said slowly.

  And Jim could have sworn he was looking over the proprietor of The Raven from the buckle shoes to the brown britches and the pale green shirt which was open at Jim’s throat, showing a generous expanse of his chest. Jim could not recall having been stripped naked by a man’s eyes quite so comprehensively, and his throat squeezed.

  But then Toby was moving, before Jim could make anything of the moment, and for the fifth time he smothered a curse. Toby Trelane was damnably difficult to read, and the price of making a mistake was dangerously high. It was one thing to daydream about a big, good-looking Dutchman, but quite another to breathe a word about such fancies to any man, unless you knew him better than you knew your own brother. Jim had a healthy fear of the magistrate – the bastinado, shackles and stocks a
nd prison walls.

  So he clenched his teeth and retreated behind the bar for the afternoon’s ritual of polishing tankards while he waited for Mrs. Clitheroe to arrive and start the evening’s pies and puddings. And he settled himself to watch Toby closely before he said a word or lifted a brow at him.

  The woman arrived an hour later, already singing tunelessly as she bustled in from the tavern yard in the back. She thumped down a basket of meat and vegetables and shouted through in a voice made hoarse by thirty years of smoking tobacco and sipping gin. “’Tis only me, Master Jim!” And without waiting for an answer she began to murder an old Irish tune as she slammed salt pork and potatoes into the roasting pans and raked out the hearth.

  The sound of an axe took Jim to the windows in the corner of the taproom. From there he could watch Toby work, and he whistled softly. The woodpile stood in the lee of the tavern, where the building kept out the wind and rain. It was a suntrap, and at eleven in the morning already warm enough for a man to work up an honest sweat. Toby had taken off the waistcoat and the patched cream linen shirt, and he knew how to swing an axe. He was facing Jim as he worked, keeping up a steady rhythm, and Jim watched for the pleasure of it until Mrs. Clitheroe bawled his name.

  “Master Jim, these onions is all gone black-rotten in the sack ’ere. Will I go to market for fresh uns, or will thee?”

  “I’ll go,” Jim offered, grateful for the opportunity to get out for a while. He made a grab for coat and hat, which hung on a peg to the right of the door, searched the pockets for coins, and found three pennies and a few assorted ha’pennies and farthings. More than enough for a sack of onions. “I’ll be back in an hour, Mrs. Clitheroe.”

  “Take thy time,” she shouted, “I’s got plenty to do afore I gets to onions. Give old Joe me best.”