Rufus caught up with Lee on the high-street kerb. He grabbed Lee’s elbow one second before he could step out into the traffic with his child. He wasn’t suicidal, Rufus understood after a sick, heart-stopped moment: just lost, blind with tears. Tamsyn was leaning over his shoulder, attention focussed on the car that would have knocked them down. She turned away, and the driver got his suddenly-stalled engine into gear and moved on. “Come with me,” Rufus said gently. “I’ll take you home.”
He hadn’t meant to be disingenuous. He knew that Lee, getting into the back seat of the Toyota parked in a side street nearby, would assume he had meant Dark—Lee’s home, the House of Joy, where he lived with his husband and his little girl. Where Rufus had tried and failed not to imagine him every day.
Nosing the Toyota cautiously out of Kerdrolla through tangles of diverted traffic, Rufus had to pull over twice for ambulances: one tearing into the town centre, the second heading west towards Truro, lights ablaze. The second almost tapped his wing mirror, and its siren must have upset Tamsyn, who had sat quietly in Lee’s lap until now. She issued a short, unhappy wail of her own, but fell silent immediately afterwards. She was an absurdly good kid, Rufus knew. Even Lee’s rush to the scene, the chaos and tears of the town hall, didn’t seem to have upset her, as if she had knowledge unavailable to most mortals that everything would somehow, somewhere, turn out to be all right.
Rufus didn’t think it would for Lee. Not after today. He drove with great care, wondering why Lee hadn’t got into the front seat beside him. Most probably he didn’t want to talk, or perhaps he was aware of the law—as Rufus was, painfully—that babies under three couldn’t travel in a car without a child seat. There were exceptions, of course, for unexpected, necessary journeys. Rufus hoped this qualified. He knew he was a pedant, and with any other man on earth he’d have insisted on stopping at the Halfords outside of Truro to buy the right equipment. As it was, he just wanted to get his passengers away.
He and Daisy shared a sensible semi-detached villa on the outskirts of Liskeard. Most of the route there was the same as the route to Dark. The ways diverged at the Bodmin Bypass. Picking up the A38 from the roundabout, he glanced into his rearview mirror, but Lee didn’t alter his blank gaze out of the window. Didn’t move or speak, even when Rufus was pulling up onto the drive.
The front door flew open. Daisy was a sweet woman, inspiring in Rufus’s heart a nearer approach to love than he’d thought he could achieve after the death of Amber. He climbed out of the car, put his arms out and conscientiously returned her greeting. “Hello, love. Everything’s all right. You shouldn’t have come home early.”
“I couldn’t do anything else when I heard what had happened. Even after you texted me, I wanted to be here and waiting for you. I know it’s stupid, but I wanted to tidy the place up and get started on some dinner, and... Oh.”
He followed the direction of her stare. “It’s Lee. He just... It’s not convenient for him to go home just now. Can we stretch dinner to three?”
“Yes, of course. But... he’s got the little girl with him.”
“I don’t think she’ll eat much.” Rufus shook his head, comprehension dawning. He lowered his voice. “She’s not doing anything weird. Please, Daisy—they just need somewhere to be.”
She pulled herself together. Leaning in through the open driver’s door, she tucked her hair behind her ears and tried for a hospitable smile. “Lee, it’s so nice to see you. Would you like to come in?”
His attention fastened on her slowly, from a million miles out. He blinked as if startled awake. “Daisy? Er, yes, if you don’t mind.”
Rufus darted round to lift Tamsyn out of his arms. Lee emerged from the car slowly. How strange his eyes were! So much silver in them that he looked blinded by it, scarcely human. “There,” Rufus said too brightly, jouncing the little girl. “You and your dad can come in for a cup of tea, and then he’ll feel better, won’t he?”
She looked at him compassionately. “Dada’s in Two Row.”
“Two Row?”
“She means Gideon,” Lee said tiredly. “He’s Dada, not me, and Two Row is Truro. Why would you think he’s there, honey?”
“Two Row.”
“Okay.” Lee took her back, making a wry face at Rufus. The silver had faded back to weary, ordinary green. “She’s usually right. Starts clucking like a barnyard chicken ten minutes before he gets home. Rufus, do you and Daisy have a spare bedroom or something where I could go and sort her out?”
“Oh! Right, of course. She’ll need her nappy changing, won’t she, or...”
“Nonsense, Rufus,” Daisy cut in nervously. “She’s much too big for that, isn’t she? Probably potty-trained already.”
“What, at two and a half?”
“I’d like to know how you know so much about it.”
“From Bill’s kids, of course. None of them are—”
“You’re both right,” Lee interrupted, a scratch of desperation in his tone. “It’s a work in progress. If I could just grab her rucksack and... Oh, hell.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I think I left it at Trebah. Probably being safely detonated as we speak.”
A last-ditch effort at humour. Rufus could feel the end of Lee’s rope as if he were holding it in his own hands. “Bill’s my brother,” he said. “He only lives down the street. One of us can run down and borrow some kit.”
“I’ll do it.” Daisy sounded relieved at the prospect of escape. “Sorry. I’m hopeless around kids.”
“Well, it’s on-the-job training. So were Gid and I when we started.” Lee lost another unlikely shade of colour. “Rufus, if it really isn’t too much trouble...”
“Of course not! Come in, come in.” He preceded Lee down the garden path, then in the little porch got behind him to usher him inside. His heart was beating too fast, his mouth dry, his limbs adolescent-awkward as he pushed open the hall door. He was grateful to Daisy that the place smelled clean and warm. “Go through into the kitchen and sit down. I’ll not be a minute.”
He shot up the stairs. There was a little vase of flowers on a table on the landing: he grabbed them and strode into the guest bedroom.
It was very nice. Daisy kept it that way despite a conspicuous absence of guests. She and Rufus had both been lonely souls, finding each other in the wake of sadness. There was no need for him to push the window wider open, to set his flowers on the dressing table or fuss with the curtains, and turning back one corner of the quilt was definitely a bridge too far. Nevertheless he performed these actions, then spent an anxious minute in front of the book case in the main bedroom, wondering what on earth the most handsome, sweet-natured and generally mesmerising man in Cornwall would like to read. Not Analytical Place-Name Etymology, that was for sure, nor any other volumes from Rufus’s collection of academic folklore texts. He knew his colleagues thought he was weird, and he barely understood his obsession himself. He was just deeply certain that one day it would come in handy.
Daisy had a nice Faber collection of twentieth-century poetry. He picked out Heaney, Tony Harrison, Marianne Moore. Went to his wardrobe and stood with the books clutched to his chest, wondering if a change of clothes—a set of pyjamas—might be another bridge, this one left burning behind him. Well, if so, too bad. He could leave the things folded on the bed, and Lee could ignore them if he wished.
He went back downstairs. Lee was sitting by the kitchen table, Tamsyn serene on his lap. He was hanging up his mobile phone, and Rufus braced to hear that the flowers, the books and the pyjamas were all unnecessary. “Is everything all right?”
“Yep. Will you believe I forgot to call Ma Frayne? She was frantic.”
“Oh. I’m sure.” Rufus tried to add something nice, like Gideon’s such a good son to her, or Well, everyone loves Gid. The words lodged like stones in his throat and wouldn’t come out. “Daisy will be back soon with Tamsyn’s things. Would you like a cup of tea? We’ve got some nice cake in, or scones, or... or biscuits.”
“Nothing at the moment, thanks. Could Tamsyn have some juice?”
“Juice! Of course.” Rufus dived for the fridge so hard that he overturned a shelf unit en route. He crouched in confusion amongst the newspapers, notepads and bric-a-brac. “Sorry! I’m not much better than Daisy, when it comes to kids.” He righted the shelf, scooped up the bulk of the spillage and tried for the fridge again. Pouring a glass of orange, he dared a look at his guest. “Isn’t this the part where you say it’ll be different with our own, then tell me how many we’re gonna have?”
Lee just barely flinched. “Not today. Reckon I’ll try and steer clear of predictions for a while.”
Rufus could gladly have beaten himself to death with Daisy’s rolling pin. He ducked his head in misery and returned to the table with Tamsyn’s glass. Should he hand it to Lee? Was she big enough to manage for herself? He didn’t even know that much about kids, for all his little nieces down the road. He was now so mortified that he couldn’t bring himself to speak at all.
Tamsyn reached out both hands and took the glass from him. “Fank you, Ofus,” she said, with tremendous dignity, and began to drink.
At least he could respond to that. “You’re welcome. It’s, um... It’s nice that she has her own little name for me.”
Lee nodded absently. “She likes you.”
“Well, er—everything’s ready for you upstairs. It’s the second door on the right, and the bathroom’s just opposite. Help yourself to anything you want.”
Lee waited until Tamsyn had finished drinking, then gathered her up and got to his feet. Courtesy would be the last thing to die in him, Rufus thought, even though it was coming at him now from galactic distances, crackling like a radio message from a lost star. “Thank you,” he said, and walked past Rufus as if he’d been wallpaper, or the shadow of an echo of a ghost.
***
Rufus and Daisy ate dinner alone. They’d become good friends, and the silence that followed their stilted efforts at conversation was painful and confusing to them both. He had given her as clear an account of his day as his duties allowed, and explained Lee’s presence in the house more briefly still. Gideon and Lee had a fight. He wished he hadn’t even told her that much. First he’d had to tackle her disbelief, and then a new trouble had creased her brow.
Lee was the least obtrusive of house guests. Daisy had tapped shyly on the guest room door, and when he hadn’t answered, had left her formidable haul of nappies, changing mat, baby wipes and talcum in a pile on the landing. Rufus had been up a couple of times since to check for signs of life. He’d received quiet reassurances from behind the closed door that all was well, and returned downstairs in a state of scared disbelief, throat aching.
Daisy set her knife and fork aside. She’d barely touched her food. “You shouldn’t get between them, Rufus.”
“What? How am I... How is my bringing him home for dinner getting between them?”
She didn’t reply. After a moment she dumped her napkin into her plate, a gesture so unlike her that Rufus blinked. She pushed back her chair. “I’ve got to study. You can do the dishes. See you later.”
Alone in the quiet kitchen, the three other occupants of the house sealed away from him behind closed doors, Rufus gathered up the plates. He ran hot water into the sink, staring out into the yard with its pots of geraniums, wondering how immortally beautiful the sunset looked from the windows of Chy Lowen. Two things bothered him more deeply than the other anxieties waiting their turn in his mind—or perhaps more immediately, because he’d sent the deep things far off to the back of the queue. Firstly, he couldn’t understand why Gideon Frayne hadn’t already knocked down his front door. Second, he didn’t think Chy Lowen meant the house of joy at all.
Rufus decided that he was in shock. He couldn’t focus on or react to Jem Poldue, the dying boy he’d held in his arms that afternoon. He’d told poor Daisy about it so dryly that she, who would normally have huddled on his lap and wept with him and for him, had simply sat and stared. He was way more concerned about the chain that had finally finished forging link to link in his mind. Chy Lowen, Chy Lowen...
The dishes would have to wait. He dried his hands and dashed upstairs. Analytical Place-Name Etymology, that was what he needed. Volume six, and probably nobody but he had slogged their way through the other five. He flipped the book off the shelf and bore it away, too hot on the scent to bother with a comfortable seat in the kitchen or living room. Settling on the bottom stair, he began to read. When, after an interval whose length he couldn’t judge, his mobile rang, he answered it dreamily, and listened without lifting his gaze from the book in his lap.
***
“Rufus? I need to ask you a favour.”
“Anything,” Rufus said dazedly. Whatever sorrows had quenched Lee’s fires, something had burned them away. He didn’t look quite real, poised halfway up the stairs in Rufus’s ordinary house. He was absolutely vivid. The shadows behind him conspired to give him vast wings. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. I’ve got to go home, though, and I’d like to leave Tamsyn with you.”
“You’re going home?”
“I’ve got a taxi booked. I know you’d have taken me, but I’ve given you enough trouble for one day. I’ll come back and get Tamsie in the morning.”
Rufus closed up his book. “Lee,” he said roughly, not hiding pain. “Why would you go back to someone who talks to you that way?”
Lee padded down the rest of the stairs. He squeezed past Rufus and came to stand in front of him. “He’s walked with me through hell and back. He hasn’t said an unkind word to me in four years.”
“Until today.”
“Until today. The thing is, Rufus—even if he kicked my arse and called me names every day, it wouldn’t make any difference.”
“That’s ridiculous. That’s the sort of talk we hear from battered wives before we get the 999 call to say they’re in hospital. Or worse.”
“I don’t know how to explain this. It’s a balance, a kind of equation that can’t ever be solved. I know he’d never hurt me, and—”
“Oh, Lee, he has hurt you! If you’d seen your face after he said that... Aren’t you going to make the usual excuses? He was stressed. He’d had a bad day at the office, he wasn’t well. I’ve heard them all a hundred times before.”
A shade of a smile touched Lee’s mouth. “It was a hell of a bad day at the office. But none of that matters, not when it comes to him. He’s just Gideon. My Gid.”
Rufus let go of a frustrated breath. He’d seen angels in medieval paintings, holy virgins in the spotlight of annunciation, who looked less devoted and inspired. “Oh, cancel your damn cab.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve told you a bloody great lie. Gideon’s not at home. He’s in hospital in Truro.”
“What?!”
“DI Lawrence called me about an hour ago. So it wasn’t so much a lie as a sin of omission—I didn’t come up and tell you.”
“Dear God, Rufus.”
“He’s all right. Lawrence said he went and passed out cold in the town-hall doorway just after we left. It’s this flu or whatever he has. They took him in, and he was running a hell of a temperature for a while, but it came down. He’s stable.” Rufus gave a shuddery chuckle. “The stupid thing is, I somehow thought you’d know.”
Lee crouched in front of him. “For fuck’s sake,” he rasped. “I should get this printed on a T-shirt, or a sodding card I can hand out to everyone. I can’t control what I see. It’s bastard well random. I didn’t know about Kerdrolla, and I didn’t know that the love of my life was sick enough to be dashed to hospital. It’s not a blessing, and it’s not a curse, and most of the time I need to be told stuff when it happens, just like anybody else.”
“All right, all right. Cancel your cab, though. The least I can do is take you over to Truro.”
Lee took hold of the banister and pushed upright. Daisy had left a cardigan draped over the newel post: absently he closed his fingers in the fabric. “No. You’ve got to stay here.”
“Is it because of the baby? Daisy will take care of her.” Rufus folded his arms. “I know I said it’s ridiculous, but... I used to feel about Amber the way you do about Gid. Like—you know they’d never hurt you, so if they ever did, you’d give them an endlessly long rope.”
“Does sound like bollocks, now I hear it from you.”
“Thanks.”
“Rufus, do yourself a favour and try and get that feeling about Daisy, too.”
“It doesn’t just bloody well switch on and off.”
“No, but lives can. Switch off, I mean. You do have to stay here because of the baby, but I don’t mean mine.”
He was still holding Daisy’s cardigan. Rufus gaped. “No. We’ve been taking precautions. She can’t be.”
“She can. Whether she’s happy and secure enough to want to stay that way depends entirely on you.”
He was halfway down the drive before Rufus broke paralysis enough to run after him. He stumbled out barefoot, book still clutched in his hand. “Lee, wait. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”
“Not now. Please.”
“It’s important. I’ve been studying the origins of some place names in and around Dark. Your house... I don’t think it’s called Chy Lowen.”
Lee stared at him. A moment of perfect incredulity passed between them: that Rufus would choose this moment, that his priorities could possibly be this skewed. He glanced at the taxi waiting on the kerb, then back at Rufus, spreading his hands. “What, then?”
“The word’s louven, I think.”
“Louven? That’s not even Cornish.”
“The Bowe family isn’t Cornish. They’re from Brittany, though they’ve owned land on Bodmin for centuries. The name’s from an ancient subset of Breton, and it means beast, or... not quite that, exactly. More like lupo or loup. A wolf.”
Lee began to back away. “Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because something’s not right. I want you to be careful.”
“I know to be careful. Why do you think I’m leaving my kid with you?”
“I’ll take care of her, Lee. I mean... Daisy and I. We will.”
“Thank you.” Lee paused beyond the gate. “The House of the Wolf, Rufus? Jesus. Way to put the cherry on my day.”