“Thank you. Will you have time to take me there?”
“To—”
“O. Trent Stationers. I would like to peruse his books.”
Judd gave the matter half a thought, then nodded. “I was going to send Mrs. Quinn to see what the fishers brought in yesterday, but I can go myself instead.”
“Good!” Ridley said, with his quick, engaging smile. “We might have half a chance of knowing what we’re eating.”
“I’ll just get my father settled first. I told him about you this morning. He was very pleased and would like to meet you at your convenience.”
Ridley nodded. “Of course. And I him. He must have some odd tales tucked away of life in Sealey Head.”
“He does,” Judd said, surprised. “And he loves to tell them, so be warned. He stays pretty close to his rocker now. He can hear the sea from his window, and it comforts him since he lost his sight.”
“Ah,” Ridley said with sympathy. “An accident?”
“No. Just a slow passing. An ebb tide, he said, that never turned, just faded into black. He enjoys company.” He glanced at a pile of books threatened by Ridley’s elbow and a pot of coffee. “I’ll see what I can find for bookshelves and bring them up. I believe there is one gathering dust in the kitchen.”
In the kitchen, he found the wiry, angular Lily taking a scrub brush to the wooden table where Mrs. Quinn had been kneading bread. Judd could smell it baking. He longed to rescue it before it turned into something that could double as a doorknocker. But the damage had been done long before it reached the oven, he suspected, though the nature of the violence eluded him. Lily bobbed her head at him, an intense, serious girl who was growing much like her mother.
“Lily,” he said, inspired. “Has your mother begun to teach you to cook?”
She came very close to screwing up her pretty, freckled face, then remembered her dignity. “No, sir. I don’t take to cooking at all. Too many things to think about. Pots boiling, how long this, how many that, water or oil, how to chop, what goes in what—You made one bed, you know how to make them all. Or mop one floor. Or clean the ashes out of one fireplace—”
“Yes. I see.”
“You don’t have to fret about it, just do it. But bread. Well. It never seems to rise the same way twice, does it? Or take an egg. You never know what it’s going to come out looking like, and that’s even before you start cooking it.”
“Yes.”
“But cleaning a pot, or beating a carpet—you do, it’s done. There. You see, sir?”
“With absolute clarity. Do you think your mother would miss this shelf if I take it away and put the cookbook over here instead?”
“Oh, no, sir. She never uses that old thing. She says the recipes are all out of fashion. And it’s filthy with stains.”
“With good reason,” Judd breathed, putting his mother’s cookbook safely on top of a cupboard. He unhooked the shelf from the wall, tucked it under his arm, and continued his ruthless pursuit. He found two more hanging shelves in the taproom, moved the beer mugs off them, and pushed them under his elbow. He came across an entire empty bookcase in the quiet sitting room. He gazed at it, perplexed, then realized what must have happened to the books: he had taken them all upstairs to his room.
Mrs. Quinn came at him talking as she walked down the hallway into the sitting room. Her freckled face was leaner, more lined than Lily’s, but their neat attire, severe buns, and their expressions were amazingly similar.
“I’ll have Lily mop these flagstones regularly now that we have guests, sir. And he might want to sit in here in the evenings among the cushions and the seashells.”
“Maybe,” Judd said dubiously. “Makes me want to sneeze. Mrs. Quinn—”
“I was at my wit’s end as to which to serve him, sir, breakfast or what—I hope it was satisfactory.”
“As what it was adequate.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said, looking pleased. “I do try.”
“But I think next time—” He paused, gave up. “I’ll have him talk to you about his erratic hours.”
“His what, sir?”
“His—his meals.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, nodding. “Best to begin as we intend to continue, that way we don’t forget what we’re doing, do we?”
“Yes. No. Mrs. Quinn—”
“Now, sir, about supper—”
“I’m going into town to see to it,” he said, seizing the bookcase bodily with his other hand and staggering off with his loot. “I promise you’ll be the first to know.”
He looked in on his father after adding the shelves to the clutter in Ridley’s room. Dugold was napping peacefully in his rocker, a shaft of light along with one of the old stable cats warming his knees. Judd found Ridley outside, talking to Mr. Quinn about his horses. The boisterous and capricious weather had blown itself inland; the sea wallowed lazily against the cliffs, glittered in the distance, where the fishing boats clustered around whatever in the deep was flinging themselves at their bait.
“Mr. Quinn tells me there’s a path down to the sand,” Ridley said, as Mr. Quinn turned away. “He’ll exercise the horses there on days I don’t ride. Today, for instance. Do you mind a walk into town?”
“Not at all,” Judd said, watching a coin above Mr. Quinn’s head spark silver in the light before it fell back into his hand. Ridley had left his cloak behind, but even in sedate black he struck the eye, something sleek and unexpected in the familiar world of Sealey Head, like a red-winged blackbird among a flock of sparrows.
They walked the pleasant mile down the headland, across the steep channel bridge where they watched a ship follow the ebbing tide through the stony narrows safely out to open sea.
“One of Blair’s,” Judd said, recognizing the figurehead, a dolphin leaping upward out of the wood. “Wonder where it’s going . . .”
“Blair?”
“Toland Blair. His family sent the first merchant ship out of Sealey Head harbor. It was gone for three years, during which some fantastic bets were laid. Fortunes were lost when it finally returned. So the tales say. Like fish, the size of a fortune grows in the telling. The Blairs made a genuine fortune from the wares that came in—spices, fabrics, exotic wood, glassware, painted porcelain, jewelry.”
“Even then the bell was ringing.”
“The bell.” Judd paused to pick up that mislaid thread in his head. “Yes,” he said slowly. “It must have been. Two hundred years, it has rung, I’ve heard. Or three hundred. Or a thousand. Every tale changes as it gets passed down. So how are you supposed to know what’s true?”
“Ah. That’s the question,” Ridley said with a great deal of enthusiasm and no answer whatsoever.
Judd pointed out the stationer’s shop along Water Street, which curved around the harbor and held all the best shops, the grocers, the bakeries, Blair’s Exotica and Other Fine Goods. Ridley went into the expansive shop with its gull-colored walls and its front glass panes neatly framed in black. Judd turned past it and onto the docks.
There on a wooden slab under an awning, he found Stiven Dale’s catch of the day before, under the eye of his wife Hazel and their four-year-old daughter, who was dropping a crab net over the dockside. The slosh of water against the pilings, the smell of fish, barnacles in brine, guano, the barking of harbor seals and cries of the gulls diving at the dead fish, filled Judd like words did, left him always wanting more, though these smells, these sounds, he had known all his life.
He chose a stout salmon to smoke, half a dozen perch for supper, some crab and eel for pie, which Mrs. Quinn usually managed without making a total disaster of it. Hazel set them aside for her older son to run up to the inn. That done, he stopped at the grocer’s to order a delivery of cheese and coffee, then at the window of Blair’s Exotica, hoping for a glimpse of Gwyneth Blair.
He didn’t see her. A certain shyness kept him hovering outside. Growing up, they had talked easily and eagerly about everything, above all about books. He would duck into the shop on his way home from school, find her deep in some ornate chair covered with animal skins, stroking the head of a huge, snarling, glass-eyed beast while she ignored the books her governess gave her and devoured the latest novel from the stationer’s instead.
