Jory felt as wretched as if he had. “Oh God, Bea, I’m sorry—”
Bran was gathering Bea up from the chair like a child, and she was letting him. “Christ alone knows why you even bother to live here with us,” he snapped, his tone clipped and vicious. “You’ve got no sense of family, of obligation . . .”
Jory couldn’t look at his sister as he stumbled from the room. He needed to get out of the house—he couldn’t breathe in this place. Almost without conscious decision, he found himself outside the back door, staring over the old kitchen garden, where he could dimly remember his mother tending her fresh herbs.
Bran had had it grassed over years ago. Jory had been vaguely surprised he hadn’t just poured on concrete; after all, even lawns required a bare minimum of nurture.
The path behind the house was an old friend, leading up to the pinnacle of Big Guns Cove, where the cliffs jutted proud into the sea, jagged rocks guarding their base like merciless sentinels. The clifftops calmed him, as they always did. Perhaps it was because Bea and Bran never came this way. How many Roscarrocks had stood here before him, maybe watching for a light or a glimpse of sail that told them their ships were coming home, laden with spoils?
Jory stood for a long moment right on the edge, staring down at the waves far, far below as they crashed on the rocks, sending up bursts of spray. He crouched down, wanting to feel the scrubby grass, softer than it looked beneath his fingertips, the crumbling of the cliff edge as he ran his hand over and down onto the stone. Gulls shrieked around him. The souls of dead fishermen, he’d been told, but just as likely, those of long-gone smugglers and pirates, or hapless sailors, their ships lured onto the rocks by a falsely smiling lantern.
He’d often thought of getting his climbing gear out of the old stables and abseiling down these cliffs . . . but he could picture Bea’s and Bran’s faces, and knew he’d never do it.
Up here, he felt far closer to his father than he ever had when the old man had been alive. Perhaps he’d been more of a family man when the twins were small, but to Jory he’d always been a distant figure, stern and, if not quite disapproving, always seeming on the verge of it. So different from his friend Patrick’s father, who’d played cricket with them on the beach, flown kites, and let the smaller children ride on his shoulders.
Perhaps bad parenting was in the blood. Or perhaps the Roscarrocks had simply never learned how it should be done.
Jory turned to look back at the house, solid and unchanging for centuries.
No. He wasn’t going to do this Bea and Bran’s way.
He was going to seek out this Devan Thompson, and . . . be an uncle to him.
Whatever that might mean.
Mal still wasn’t sure about it all when he got up next day, had a stretch and a scratch, and wandered over to the bedroom window to see what the weather was doing. It was midmorning, cos he’d had a rough night. Bad dreams. Really bad dreams, but he wasn’t going to think about them, and he didn’t need to anyhow, cos he had to sort out what he was going to do about Jory sodding Roscarrock.
On the one hand, he was a bit pissed off about being made a fool of, but on the other, the bloke had had a point about nobody ever bringing up surnames. And on the other other hand, Mal hadn’t finished all he’d wanted to do at the museum, cos of being interrupted by Mum’s phone call, which he also wasn’t going to think about, so he could do with going back there. And on the other other other hand—seriously, people should have more hands, it’d make all this a lot simpler— Sod it, he’d forgotten what he was thinking about now.
But anyhow. The bloke had seemed pretty decent, up until Dev’s name had been mentioned, when he’d denied all knowledge. Mal wasn’t sure what he thought about that. He’d assumed the bloke was telling porkies, because how could he not know about Dev? But if he had been lying, he’d been doing a bloody good job of it. Mal could have sworn that look of total bewilderment had been genuine, which meant Jory was blameless, didn’t it? Course, there was the Roscarrock thing, but it wasn’t like he could help that any more than Mal could help his name, and—
—and Jory was right there, over the road and leaning on the wall, which Mal could see from the window, and shit, he probably ought to put some clothes on cos if Jory looked up now, he was going to get a proper eyefull. Mal yanked the curtain back into place, stumbled across the room, and pulled on his jeans from yesterday. T-shirt, T-shirt . . . did he have any clean T-shirts? Oh yeah, there. Pile on the dresser. Ironed and everything. Tasha was still being nice to him, bless her. Mal pulled one over his head, grabbed a couple of socks at random from the heap next to the shirts, and put them on too.
Then he jammed his feet into his trainers and was down the back stairs and halfway across the lane before his brain caught up and asked him what the bloody hell he thought he was doing.
Jory gave him a nervous smile as he approached. “Hi.”
“What are you doing back here?” Mal asked. “Uh, don’t mean to be rude, but, yeah. ’Sup, bruv?”
“I didn’t know,” Jory said earnestly.
“What, that Dev’s me mate? Yeah, I kinda got that.”
“No, I mean . . . I’m aware this is going to sound incredible, but I honestly didn’t know about . . . Dev, you called him? Not Devan? They never told me.”
Mal gave him a sidelong look.
