Page 26 of The Nature of a Lady
Oliver let the tug of a smile have its way with his lips. “Do you remember the time we all decided we’d brave a night in King Charles’s Castle? And she—”
“Aye, I remember.” Enyon gave his shoulder a shove. “And I don’t need you imitating yet again my shriek when she jumped out at me, thank you very much.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Though his lips nearly pulled back to disobey his claim. He settled for another laugh instead, and then a few paces of quiet.
Over and again he’d taken this band about his chest to the Lord. Begged Him to watch over Beth as Oliver couldn’t do. Begged Him to touch Mamm-wynn and keep her healthy. Begged Him to somehow put to rights whatever had gone wrong.
He closed his eyes for a moment, just to be. Here. Now. With his best friend at one side and the ocean at the other. The beach beneath his feet. Home stretching up above him. To feel the rhythms thathadn’tchanged, despite all that had.
Oliver. He could imagine his name in the breeze—and he always heard it in Mamm-wynn’s voice, in that way she’d whispered it when he was just a boy, standing on the bluff overlooking the shore. He’d gone out in a huff, angry that his parents hadn’t taken him with themto the mainland when they went to check on Truro Hall. And his grandmother had come out to soothe him.
“You don’t belong there,”she’d murmured, taking his slight shoulders in her still-strong hands and meeting his gaze, holding it.“It’s here you belong, Oliver Tremayne, as surely as your father and his father and his before him. Listen—listen tothe wind. Do you hear that? It knows you, lad. The islands know your name, as they know all of us who love them. Be content.”
He had been. Him and Morgan both. It had been enough for them, to know the islands and be known in turn. But Beth...
Maybe Mamm-wynn hadn’t ever had that talk with her. Maybe she hadn’t taught her how to hear her name on the wind.
“So ... Benna, eh? Did she look as tight-laced as Mam said?”
Oliver opened his eyes again. Pushed thoughts of Beth aside in favor of the picture of Mabena that surfaced. “I scarcely knew her. You’d have laughed for a century. Her hair, Enyon—it wastidy. Straight as a pin, sleek, all tucked in properly.”
Enyon laughed now at the mere imagining. “Blast, but I’m sorry I missed it. I’ll be sure and catch her soon, before the isles get back into her. It’s a sight I need to see before it vanishes. And the lady she’s serving now? She’s here too?”
A nod did little to sum up that surprise. “Lady Elizabeth.”
“What’s she like? Pretty?”
Oliver rolled his eyes. “Always your first question.”
“Come on, Ollie.” A sharp elbow found his ribs. “Help a chap out.”
“She’s...” He sighed. She wasn’t the sort of pretty people expected of a young lady. That was for certain. No carefully styled hair or dress or posture. No colors chosen to bring out eyes or lips or complexion. She didn’t have the bold bone structure of Enyon’s oldest sister or the wild allure that had made half the lads on Tresco fall for Mabena. Her features weren’t unpleasant, but they also weren’t the sort to draw the eye. Yet she had the sweetest smile he’d ever seen, and her eyes had been as boundless as the sea. One couldn’t discountthat. “I’ll let you be the judge when you meet her. I liked her too well to think of such things.”
Enyon barked another laugh, gave him another shove. “Only you, Ollie.”
He wasn’t sure if it was a compliment he should thank him for or an indictment he should defend against. So he shrugged and narrowed his eyes. “Do you see that? On Samson?”
They both paused, Enyon lifting a hand to add an extra shield to his eyes as he gazed toward the uninhabited island. “I seesomething. Not sure what. Movement though. A bird?”
“Looks too big.” Squint as he might, Oliver couldn’t bring it into any better focus. “A deer?”
“It’s white.”
“Could be an albino.”
“None of those over there that I’ve ever heard of,” Enyon said.
“Anomalies could be born at any time.” But there weren’t that many deer left on Samson. The Lord Proprietor had tried to build a park there for them after he moved the last of the residents off it fifty years before, but even the deer hadn’t wanted to live on the inhospitable scrap of land. They’d tried to wade to Tresco during low tide, and some of them had succeeded.
Enyon pursed his lips. “Definitely doesn’t move like a bird. Or a deer.”
“No. It doesn’t.” But it wasn’t moving like a person, either, to be a tourist or a local strolling about—not to mention that dusk was falling and no one would be over there at this time of day. Probably. “I saw a scrap of something white fluttering in nearly the same spot the other day. Rubbish, I assumed. Could be that, tangled on driftwood.”
“I’d have thought someone would have cleaned it up by now.” Enyon shifted, darted a glance at him. “You know what itlookslike....”
A ghost—something Enyon had claimed countless times over the years when they spotted something on a distant island shore that they couldn’t identify. And countless times over the years, the other lads had teased him about his rich imagination.
This time, Oliver just hummed and kept watching the slip of white. As he’d visited his parishioners over the last two days, more than one of the old-timers had been muttering about “Gibson’s tales coming to life.” And the tales his mother’s father favored were always the ones with specters. Or pirates. Or, better still, both.
