The House of the Wicked

The Jacobite Bolt





Death was hovering near. His every breath rattled in his leathered throat and became weaker with each exhalation, his life gradually being squeezed out. Soon it would all be gone. He knew this. In his long life Yardarm Pellow had seen many people die.

“It is my turn to lead the line,” he said to Tunny.

The young man’s sad eyes spoke his feelings. He tugged the blanket up close under Yardarm’s chin. The air inside the old cottage was chilled and damp, despite the small fire smouldering in the grate.

“Yet still I would have liked to have seen one more spring and summer,” he wheezed. “One last full seine net.” His scratch-thin voice was difficult to catch.

“Rest, Yardarm,” urged Tunny. “Save your strength.”

He managed a croaking laugh. “There is so little to save.” A stick of an arm slid itself from under the cover and his faltering hand reached out to rest on Tunny’s forearm. “Tunny, you know it is time for you to take my place.”

“No, I can’t. I have told you.”

Fingers squeezed Tunny’s arm. “It has always been so. They know it. They are ready to come to you. I have seen it.” He paused, sucking in cold air. “I have passed on all I know to you, Tunny. Secrets that few people share. You have been a good pupil but now it is time to be the master. You knew this time must come. When I am finally gone they will look to you as they once looked to me.” He coughed violently and Tunny put a cloth to the man’s colourless lips. It came away bearing a bright scarlet moon of blood. He lay exhausted, his mouth fish-wide.

“Please, do not exert yourself, Yardarm,” he said.

“You have to protect them from Baccan. You have to fight him at every turn. Search for his evil work in all things.”

“I can’t…”

“You will. The choice was never yours to make. It was made for you at the moment of your birth. You have been granted the Gift.”

“I do not feel ready.”

“It’s not what you feel but who you are.” His fingertips pinched. He beckoned him come closer to his ear. “You have to mistrust every Connoch, for they are bad to the core and in league still with Baccan. There are those still that must be flushed from the village. You must hate them all with your very heart and not rest till they are gone forever. Promise me this, Tunny.”

He shook his head. “You ask too much of me, Yardarm. I cannot find it within me to hate them.”

“Then Baccan will feed off their evil and one day he will destroy Porthgarrow. It will be on your head and you will have proved yourself a coward, Tunny. Do not flinch from your duty and your destiny.”

It cut deep to hear him speak so. “I am not a coward.” Though inside fear reminded him that he was young, inexperienced in things, an outsider even amongst his own people. Alone, save for the man whose life was even now draining away.

“Then promise me.”

His head bowed and he clasped in his own the hand that clung desperately to him, beseeched him. “I promise, Yardarm.”

At this Yardarm released his grip. He closed his flickering eyelids, muttering the last words he would ever say. “I am pleased…”

He lay silently, his death-still form struck into periodic ragged motion by weakening convulsions of coughing. Tunny sat down beside the crude straw-packed bed, the light fading into dusk. He lit a candle and continued his lonely vigil. Outside the door there were the sounds of people mumbling, shuffling, but Yardarm had forbidden anyone from entering save Tunny.

Two hours later the candle guttered and was snuffed out. In the dark Tunny heard the final rattle of death in the man’s throat and knew Yardarm had passed on. Tunny solemnly opened the window and the door to let his spirit out and all in the room was peaceful and still.

“Is Yardarm dead?” said one of the men, holding aloft a lantern which lit the murky forms of around fifteen people looming out of the night.

Tunny’s breath unfurled into light clouds in the crisp air. The tiny crowd gathered round him, their faces anxious, even fearful.

Tunny nodded gravely. “Yes, he is dead.”

“Poor Yardarm,” a woman croaked under her breath. “I half-expected him to go on forever, he has been so long with us. Can we see him now?”

He noticed how their behaviour towards him was different. No longer did they regard him as the strange young man whom Yardarm had demanded should accompany his final moments. They now asked his permission. They held him in some respect. And something inside the young man liked this sudden importance, being thrust to the centre of meaning and not forever on the outside. For up till now he had been someone they could not quite understand, someone who had lived on the fringes of village life, never quite accepted, a deep, fathomless being that people had suspected long ago saw and felt more than was normal.

Tunny had made no close friends as others in the cove had made them. The ones from his boyhood had long since abandoned him, even encouraged to do so by their mothers. They believed he carried bad luck around with him. He had no friends other than Yardarm. In him he had found common understanding and acceptance. The old man had encouraged the youth to sit and talk, and over the years he would delve deep inside the tangled workings of this troubled soul. Though unspoken, each knew they were the mirror of the other; each destined to live lives alone, even when in company. Separated from the others by their very thoughts, their inexplicable insights. In Yardarm Tunny had found a kindred spirit, and in Tunny Yardarm had found his unknowing successor.

The people began to file into the cottage, each patiently awaiting their turn to pay their respects to Yardarm, mumbling prayers as they did so. Tunny stood at the doorway and each offered him a respectful nod or acknowledged him with their sad eyes. The same reverence they once paid to Yardarm he knew was now being transferred to him. It was a new feeling. It warmed him. They were looking to him to fill the great void left by Yardarm, he could read it in their faces, and he found he grew strong on it as Baccan grew strong on the evil of others.

For the first time in his life Tunny did not despise his loneliness, the pressing weight of difference. The sense of separation was no longer alienating but empowering. He basked in it. He finally understood its purpose.



* * * *



In the same cottage, on the same stool that Tunny had kept his lonely watch on Yardarm’s fading life all those long years ago, the woman sat with her hands clasped in her lap like the tight bud of an unopened flower. Dust motes circled her young face.

He had never been married, and now he never would, but he imagined that if ever he had then it would have been to someone like Keziah Polsue. He’d known her since the hour of her birth. She was a good woman. He had known her husband too, also since birth, and he too had been a good man. He had drowned four months ago, hit by a spar and knocked overboard, sinking under the waves like a lead weight never to be seen again. There was no shortage of men in the cove who vied for her recently-widowed hand but she had eyes for none of them. She had become a hollowed-out shell since her husband had died, a husk of a woman, grief-scraped and bitter.

“Is he safe, Tunny?” she begged.

He sat opposite her, even now seeing Yardarm in his posture, in the way he spoke to her. He took her hand. “I am certain that he is.”

“But is he warm, is he happy?”

Her fingers were long, elegant, did not belong to a woman of the cove. They would soon be calloused and scarred. “I know in my heart he is both warm and happy.”

Tears filmed her eyes. “Why did Baccan take him from me, Tunny?”

“It was God’s will, Keziah.”

“Then he is in league with Baccan!” she cried angrily. “Between them they have taken him from me! I want him back, Tunny. Bring him back to me!”

The Church was Keziah’s life, thought Tunny, yet as with so many in the cove she felt it did not cater for all her spiritual needs. They came to him to provide answers or solutions to the deeper mysteries that the Revered Biddle with all his rehearsed assurances could not.

He squeezed her hand. “You know I cannot do that,” he said quietly.

“But you have the Gift, Tunny. Please…” The flat of her hand wiped her wet cheek. “I ache inside. It hurts. It hurts so much.”

He reached across, put a hand on her stomach, held it there and closed his eyes. Her breathing was rapid.

He couldn’t see anything. No sign came to him. “It will subside soon,” he said reassuringly. Rising he opened one of the crude wooden cupboards that Yardarm had made from the timbers of an old boat. “Here, take this,” he said, handing her a small dark green glass bottle. “Tonight, at one after midnight, go to the site of St Michael’s holy shrine in the grounds of the monastery. Pour out the contents onto the stone slab, smear it with your hand and then put your forefinger to your tongue. Sit, close your eyes and wait.”

“Will I see him?” she said, clasping the bottle eagerly to her chest.

“There have been instances when people have said they were visited by their loved ones, but it does not work for everyone, you must understand this. Sometimes it is more a feeling than a vision. It is all I can offer. But in time the pain will dull, Keziah. In time all things dull.”

She did not get chance to respond as the door was flung wildly open. There was no mistaking the figure framed in the doorway. Or the ragged form of the black dog at his heel.

“Baccan’s Hound!” gasped Keziah.

“What are you doing here, Connoch?” Tunny growled.

Keziah jumped from her chair, backing away from the man who strode slowly towards her, the dog loping after him, as if she were faced with a childhood ogre, a demon from tales past.

“Go away,” said Jowan to the woman. “Leave us alone.” She stood as if mesmerised. He withdrew a knife from its leather scabbard. “I said leave.”

She turned to Tunny, her face ashen. He spoke calmly. “It would be best, Keziah. Remember what I told you with the bottle and you will be alright.” She hesitated but he nodded emphatically for her to go. Jowan slammed the door closed behind her. The two men faced each other.

He was unprepared for Jowan’s sudden rush towards him, his shirt grabbed at the throat. He was bundled backwards till he smashed against the cottage wall and he groaned with the sharpness of it. Jowan held him there, the knife but a few inches from Tunny’s throat.

He was not cowed. “So, you can frighten young women and you can manhandle old men. As true a Connoch as ever there was.” At this the young man pressed harder, his balled fist boring painfully. “What is it you want here, Connoch?”

“I think you know why I am here. I am come back to find out the truth.” Jowan snarled. “If I have to cut it from your very throat in order to do so! I have thought on this moment many times, Tunny. Driving this knife into this withered old neck of yours and stilling these vile, poisonous lips for good.”

“You will do as your kind always has. There is no escape for you.”

He pressed the tip of the knife into Tunny’s exposed neck, drawing a speck of blood. “For too long you have had people in your thrall, your superstitious ramblings, your pretences of second sight, hiding your malicious intent behind ancient tales. You destroyed lives. You destroyed my family. I mean to have answers. I mean to have my vengeance. Did you really think sending those thugs to warn me off last night would alter my course? Frighten me away? You do not know the depths of my passion to believe so.”

“You are full of wild imaginings. I did not send anyone.”

Jowan let go of the old man’s shirt, lifted his own, his side and chest a mass of dark angry bruises. “I imagined this, then, as I now imagine the ache?”

Tunny put a finger to his neck, smearing blood. He stared at the bruising, eyes narrowing. “I sent no one,” he said again. “There is nothing for you in Porthgarrow; nothing except hatred and mistrust.”

“The evidence for that is plain to see,” spat Jowan, letting his shirt fall to cover his marks. He glared at Tunny. “I seek the truth about what happened to my father, thirteen years ago.”

“The truth?” he grunted. “He murdered his wife - your mother. He paid for his sins with his own miserable life. What more is there to tell?”

With the knife Jowan pointed to the stool for Tunny to sit. He did so reluctantly. He sheathed the knife and folded his arms, hating this man as much as he knew the man hated him in return. Their eyes were locked in a searing, sulphurous gaze. How the Connochs are still reviled, he thought. Even by strangers on a cliff top. And again he felt the pain of his very name being spat upon. As he had when he was a boy. The pain of seeing his mother and father having to endure the cold whispers and cold shoulders of a cove united against them in loathing and fear.

At the very heart of it the rancid, insidious influence of this venerated old man.

Jowan’s father, and his father before him, had operated a small drifter, an old boat trawling out a meagre existence miles offshore, prevented by law from entering the rich fishing grounds of the seiners closer inshore. It was a law, he heard his father complain loudly many times, that had for hundreds of years favoured the seine owners and one they were keen to impose. The drifters were forced into living a perilous, hand to mouth existence, under constant threat not only of starvation but of having to suffer severe penalties should they extend beyond the proscribed limits and trespass on the more lucrative grounds of the seiners.

And the reason, Jowan knew, why for generations his family had been drifters was because the name of Connoch was abhorrent, mistrusted and feared. Over time no one would take a Connoch on as a seiner. The owners turned their backs on any Connoch seeking work, perhaps themselves half believing in the old tales of their ancient alliance with Baccan, wary always of poor catches, bad weather and dented profits. They gave ear to the superstitions of their crews, for an unhappy crew meant smaller fish, everyone knew that, and the Connochs were left to ply their own trade in the hope that restrictions or starvation would eventually drive them out for good.

But they would not leave the place of their birth, pride and hard headedness would not let them, so they stayed and scraped out a miserable living. The sense of injustice ran like an iced river through their lives, but they decreed they would not be forced from their home. They would not be so unjustly cast away, thrown into exile.

Eventually the Porthgarrow Connochs numbered only four: his father and mother – a woman from outside the cove as none inside would marry a Connoch – himself and a baby sister but a few months old. Yes, he heard the cruel whispering that stirred in the air like a malodorous cloud when she was born, that she was a demon child, a seed of Baccan that would summon up the wind and the waves. And true to their predictions the season did grow worse, the catches thin, and people talked of starvation. Their volley of blame lay square upon the Connochs.

His father took ever more to drink, washing what little money they had down his embittered throat, and Jowan recalled how he would transform into a snarling, pacing beast, hammering his chest with a meaty fist and cursing for all time the simple-minded and foolish people of the cove, the seine owners and their children. At such times Jowan would shrink into a dark corner and watch in terror, his father, lips spittle-flecked and pale, wailing long into the night, his mother failing to pacify the pain-wracked animal that his father had become. Yet not once did he lay a hand upon his mother or himself. Not once. The only man he beat blue in his despair was himself.

It was Jowan’s bane that he carried this with him still. As the last of the Porthgarrow Connochs he bore the weight of generations of hurt and grievance and now it was concentrated into an intense, hateful beam like sunlight through a lens onto the man sat before him.

“Are you to keep me here all day, in silence, Connoch?” said Tunny.

“For years I believed what had been said about my father. I cursed him for what he did. I was ashamed of my very name. Then I happened by chance upon a sailor in Liverpool, a man of the cove. He was here on that night thirteen years ago. And what he told me caused me to look upon the events in a different light.”

“A Different light? What rot is this? The man had evil in his heart. He murdered your mother.”

“And what motivated him to do such a thing? Have you thought upon that? A man that had not once raised a hand to his wife and child suddenly takes leave of his senses and murders his only true friend and love?”

“You know what drove him to his final act.”

“I know that you got what you all wanted.” Jowan pulled up a chair, sat down opposite the old man, his elbows resting on his thighs. He saw a trickle of dark blood trace a ragged path over the creases of Tunny’s sunburned neck. “I know the tale well, Tunny. How the Connochs were in league with Baccan. How you used every possible means to rid Porthgarrow of us. How the people believed you when you told them the storms and low catches were down to my father and his kind. How everyone conspired against him to try to drive him from the village, and how you all succeeded in your vile ambitions – my mother and father dead and both their despised children farmed out to families many miles away, to be forgotten, treated as animals. Did any of you ever think on what became of us? What hardships we had to endure? I never saw her again, did you know that, Tunny? I have not seen my sister in thirteen years and for all I know she is dead, as I might have been had I not taken to the first ship that would have me. When I look for motive, I do not see it in my father, but I see it in many dark eyes around me. It chokes the very air.”

“He was driven to it by his own foolishness and a disregard for all the laws decent people abide by!” retorted Tunny. “You come here looking to absolve him of blame?” He laughed. “You did not know him like others. You see him only as a son sees a father. You build him up into something he is not and are blind to the facts, egged on by a drunken sailor’s fanciful tale. Your father had twice been brought before the law for trespassing and shooting his line beyond the limits. And twice he put his mark against a declaration that he would refrain from doing so or suffer the full consequences of the law. Anyone else would have been cowed. But he had no regard for such things. One night he was caught lifting baskets of fish out of one of Mr Hendra’s seine nets.”

“Hunger can drive a man to many such acts,” said Jowan.

“We’ve all suffered hunger, Connoch,” Tunny returned. “The night of your mother’s death he was summoned to attend a meeting of all the seine owners, called at Mr Hendra’s house, for him to give account of himself and his actions, before they decided whether or not to throw the full weight of the law against him.”

“Judge, jury and executioners all,” said Jowan sourly.

“Their intentions were to demonstrate understanding and fairness. To hear him out. It would have meant the ruin of him, the confiscation of all his nets and three months imprisonment at the very least. It was a decision they did not want to take lightly.

But he had taken to the ale, and was as drunk as a lord by the time he got there. He would not listen to them. He hailed down abuse on the party and they concluded that they had no choice but to have him arrested. At this he took one of Mr Hendra’s vases and smashed it against a wall, saying that he would rather be hung for a flock than a single sheep. He stormed out of the house in a wicked temper declaring that if anyone were to follow him or try to arrest him he would kill them.”

Jowan imagined the scene. The black-frocked gentlemen of Porthgarrow, sitting behind one of Mr Hendra’s large mahogany tables, his father helpless before them knowing in his heart they had him where they wanted him, offering a pretence of mercy but to a man gloating in their small moment of victory.

“Three hours later,” Tunny continued, “I was summoned before Mr Hendra. He wished me to carry a message to your father, saying that if he agreed to leave Porthgarrow for good Mr Hendra would show leniency and not press charges.”

Here he paused, looked down at his feet, watery eyes looking upon a scene long past. Jowan could not help but notice how he struggled with the recollection. “By this time it was late, quite dark, the streets deserted. As I approached your father’s house with my message I saw that the door was open by a foot or more. A lamp burned within and I perceived a shadow moving in the light. I approached with caution, for I had heard about your father’s actions at Mr Hendra’s house. I put my hand to the door…”

His hand, blue veins running like threads of wool between his knuckles, reached up in front of him as he said this, stretched out as if he were performing the action all over again. His lower lip was wet like a slug. Concentration forced tears into the old man’s widening eyes.

“Yes?” prompted Jowan.

The door was old, heavy, stout timbers bearing ancient scars left by a carpenter’s blunt tools. Above it was carved in stone the name Connoch, at which sight his chest tightened. Tunny’s fingers grasped the door edge and warily swung it open. He could feel a little heat from a fire creeping out into the night, smelled the mixture of sea coal and damp wood, but all was silent.

He stepped into the cottage and his mind reeled with the sight before him. His stomach retched and he put a hand to his mouth the stem the scorching bile. He had been hardened to many sights but none had prepared him for what horror he beheld in the centre of the small room.

Jowan’s wife was sprawled out on the hard stone slabs before the fire, arms by her side, her legs slightly parted. Her skin was as pale and translucent as marble, her face in the lamplight appeared as if carved by a master sculptor. Delicate lips mouthed a tiny o as if she’d just that moment breathed a sigh; her eyes were open but they had a vacant, sleep walking film on them. Yet all this apparent calm was at odds with the animal savagery with which her dress had been ripped apart and her body sliced in one long drag of a sharp blade, her blood-shiny intestines and other organs bubbling out and cascading over her body. Her white neck was split open and caked with drying blood.

Crouched on one knee over the body of his wife, Jowan Connoch moaned. His craggy head turned slowly and looked up at him. Beside him sat his black dog, tongue lolling, smelling the corpse’s bloodstained clothes. In Jowan’s wet hand was a long knife, a blink of light from the lamp bouncing off its matted surface. Teeth bared, crazed flaming eyes, Jowan had the desperate look of a madman about him. And beyond him, in a crib, Tunny saw their baby begin to stir beneath its blanket.

He felt his legs go weak and he fell back against the wall to steady himself. “My God, Jowan! What have you done?”

The dog growled.

Jowan looked at the knife as if the object had magically appeared there. Dropped it with a loud clatter to the stone. A whine built up in his throat that exploded as a devilish scream. “You swine!” he wailed.

“What have you done?” was all Tunny could say. He turned aside and choked back the vomit.

Jowan bound to his feet and in an instant struck Tunny across the face with his massive fist, felling him at once. He hit the floor and lay stunned for a moment, his nose but an inch or two away from the dead woman. He could smell death.

The dog barked and bound over him. He flinched at the sight of its gums drawn back over its teeth. Horrified he scrambled as best as he could to his feet, arm across his face to defend himself from the animal, but it turned and followed close on the heel of Jowan as he dashed out into the street. “He has done for me!” he was screaming. “I’ll kill him! I’ll kill you all!”

By the time Tunny had found his footing and reached the door the man was running off into the night, bounding uncertainly down the hill towards the cove. Breathless, Tunny leant against the wall, the metallic smell of blood and his own bile causing his stomach to heave again. He didn’t know how long he stood there, his mind a screaming, raging sea of dark images.

Three men came unexpectedly to his side out of the gloom.

“Where has the murderer gone?” one of them said.

Tunny, still gathering his thoughts, heard it as if in a dream. He pointed weakly. “The cove. Quick, you may catch him. I think he means to do Mr Hendra harm.”

And then they were off, their nailed boots clattering on the cobbles. He was left alone with the dead woman. He closed the door on her poor corpse and ran after the group of men.

A woman, disturbed by the shouting, came out onto the street as Tunny ran past. “Tunny! What is wrong?”

He shouted back. “Connoch has murdered his wife! Watch the house. Let no one enter.” Then he stopped, catching his breath. “Find Reverend Biddle!”

He ran down to the beach. There was no sign of the men.

Voices, muffled by distance. Up on the headland.

He took himself off again, the pain of breathlessness stabbing at his ageing chest as he took the steep road upwards, eventually stumbling upon the scattered stones of the monastery, brushing aside the scraping briars and tangled brush of the wood.

In the dark, set against the slightly lighter hue of the sky, he saw the small knot of men, poised untidily on the cliffs above Baccan’s Maw. He was gasping for breath as he came up to them.

“Where is he? Where is Jowan?” he wheezed, his legs feeling as if they would buckle beneath him at any moment.

The wind howled and grabbed at their flapping coats. The sea moaned.

One of the men, his face in complete shadow, raised a hand and pointed over the cliff. “There,” he said.

Tunny did not recognise this man or his accent. An outsider. A Clifftopper. Here for the work. “He jumped?”

Another answered. Again a stranger to the cove, but he recognised the voice as belonging to the same man that spoke to him outside the Connoch house. “He ran to the edge and shouted ‘I am guilty’ and threw himself over the cliff. We could not prevent him.”

Tunny watched Jowan’s face intently for a reaction to the tale, the slightest change in his countenance. He did not trust this young man. He was his father made real again. He could sense vile clouds of anger, of rage and hurt, steaming from him.

“We found his body two days later,” Tunny continued, “so dashed upon the rocks that he was scarce recognisable.”

Jowan remained silent, his face blank, as if he wore an expressionless mask. Tunny flinched slightly as Jowan got to his feet, walked to the window and stared out. The dog remained lying on the floor, panting, its pulsing tongue dripping scummy saliva between yellowed teeth, its bead-like eyes fastened upon the old man.

Had he but known that was the last time he’d ever see her, Jowan would have paid more attention to how she looked, so he could remember her. He could not recall his mother’s face. Not the detail. It frustrated him, and guilt tore at his insides because of it. All that was left was a moon-shaped blur floating in the dark heavens of his memory.

“Did you not once suspect where I was on that night?” he said, his breath fogging the chilled window.

“What?” said Tunny.

Jowan turned. “A mere ten year old boy. An inconsequence. Forgettable. Where was he?”

He thought back to the night, eyes squeezed into gashes. “You were with my sister. Your mother had instructed her to come and get you. For your own safety, she said.”

“You see, I recall the argument between my mother and father that evening. I shrank into a corner, fearful, as if I could hide from it all. And through their shouting I made out the trouble my father was in. Tears. I remember tears,” he said, his finger going to his cheek. “My mother crying, in rage, in sadness, stepping over to the crib, taking my sister in her arms, holding her tight to her breast. Then father storming out, to his meeting at the Hendra house.”

He remembered the door crashing into its frame but not closing properly, swinging back open and letting in a cold dash of air. His mother, a sobbing baby clasped to her shoulder, strode quickly to the doorway, stood out on the street staring after her husband. Someone spoke to her, a woman, and she screamed in return, “None of your bloody business!” and came back inside, shutting the cold night out.

They sat in silence at the table picking at a meagre supper, a candle in a candlestick guttering between them. She soothed the child but he sensed it was impossible for her to do the same for herself. Incalculable slabs of time passed, and he felt her rising agitation as she put the sleeping baby back into its crib, a number of times going over to the door, looking down the street. Eventually, with a heartfelt sigh, she rose, grabbed a shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders, told him to watch the child. She did not say where she was going. She did not smile, scarce looked him in the eye. The door closing after her was the last he would ever see of his mother.

He checked on his sister, picked up a piece of coal and put it on the fire, conscious that they could not afford to burn too much but wanting the house to be warm for his parent’s return. He lay on his bed on the floor, looking at the candlestick on the table and the tiny, comforting sun-like flame.

The door opening caused him to wake from his sleep. At first he thought they had returned and in his small mind all was mended and well. The unfamiliar form ghosted over to him and spoke.

“Young Jowan, come with me.”

“Widow Carbis?” he said, mauling the sleep from his eyes.

“Come with me, at once.”

“I am waiting for my mother,” he said, resisting her hand which folded around his wrist. “I am taking care of my sister.”

“It is your mother that sends for you,” she said. “Please come at once. Your sister will be well. It is for your own good, young man.”

He allowed himself to be led away from the house, away from a life to which he would never return, and down the hill to Mrs Carbis’ cottage. He was given a warm drink, something to eat, which he devoured quickly as they had so little food at home, and afterwards he sat in a chair by the fire, defending himself against encroaching sleep as Mrs Carbis watched him, her round and gentle face curiously sad.

“When next I woke it was morning and both my mother and father were dead,” said Jowan. “How convenient that I was out of the way when it happened.”

“You were spared seeing something terrible happen, Jowan,” said Tunny. “Your mother knew what your father was like. But even she was not fully aware of what his temper could do.”

“Except, as I lay in your sister’s house that night, a man came. It must have been early in the morning. She called him John. I knew this man. It was her brother-in-law. He asked if I had come peacefully enough and she said yes. He said that something terrible had happened and that on no account must she speak of him coming on Mr Hendra’s behalf.”

“You lie. You drag Mr Hendra’s name into this now? What reason had he to remove you from the cottage? It was your mother’s instruction, not his.”

“You need only ask your sister,” he returned. Jowan turned back to stare out of the window. Beyond, headed down the path towards the cottage, was a group of four men and a woman. He knew they were coming for him. “Why were you sent to my father as a messenger from Hendra? He knew you two despised each other with a vengeance. Did you not think it a strange choice?”

Tunny frowned. He remembered relishing the opportunity to lay down the ultimatum at Connoch’s feet, Hendra’s message like a sweet bullet he’d fire from the gun of his hatred. But he had never once considered why he was tasked with it.

“It is but talk, Connoch. It cannot bring back your mother or undo the harm your father did,” he said, but inside he felt the squirming of a worm of doubt.

The men were all but upon them. “What is the Jacobite Bolt, Tunny?”

“What fresh nonsense do you speak of?”

He turned to face the old man again. Took a step towards him. “What is the Jacobite Bolt?”

“You babble. I have never heard of such a thing!”

Jowan lifted a chair and Tunny flinched. Taking it over to the door he lodged it firmly under the latch.

“The sailor I spoke of, the one in Liverpool. He left me a letter. In it he insisted that my father was innocent. He also told me that he was the one who had been sent to urge your sister to remove me from the house on the night of the murder. That the secret to my father’s innocence was tied up with something called the Jacobite Bolt. And everything is centred on the house of Hendra.”

Tunny rose from his chair, enraged. “You accuse Mr Hendra of being involved in murder? Are you mad? Where is this letter? Who is this man?”

“The thugs you sent against me, in doling out their beating last night, knocked my bag containing the letter over the edge of Baccan’s Maw.”

He laughed hollowly. “How convenient! So, I would say a creature more of your imagination than anything in the real world, Connoch!”

The young man put a hand to his neck and revealed a long black key suspended on a piece of string. “Fortunately I still have this as evidence that the man was no ghost. The key to the Jacobite Bolt. As for his name, he said he had assumed many different names since leaving Porthgarrow, looking to escape – to forget – his part in the affairs of thirteen years ago. He is already lost in another ship’s company, bound for some unknown place in the world, under yet another false identity. But, before he adopted this life of nameless nomad, he was, he said, known as John Carbis. Your sister’s brother-in-law.”

There was a loud commotion outside and the door lurched as shoulders were planted squarely against it, but the chair held for now. Clamouring voices, raised in concern, shouted after Tunny’s safety. The dog jumped to its feet and barked furiously.

“You lie, Connoch,” Tunny said, but it lacked conviction.

At that moment the door crashed open and sent the broken chair rattling across the room. The men burst in and were on Jowan in an instant. The old dog lunged for one of them but it was kicked yelping to the floor and two men set about it until it ran, tail between its legs, from the cottage.

“Watch his knife!” shouted Keziah from the doorway. “He threatened to kill me with it!”

The men pinned Jowan’s arms.

“Are you alright, Tunny?” one of the men said. “What has he done to you?”

“More thugs, Tunny?” Jowan said as he lost his footing and was dragged to the door, boots scraping on the floor. “Twice in as many days. My father was right about you.” He was hit in the stomach and doubled up in pain.

“Don’t harm him!” Tunny said. “Just get him away from here. Get him away!”

Keziah closed the door after them. There were sounds of scuffling, angry voices, from outside.

“Your neck, Tunny. It’s bleeding,” Keziah said.

But he paid her no heed. He was recalling something that had remained submerged and all but forgotten until Jowan had forced him to recount the story of that terrible night.

It was the moment he stepped out onto the street after discovering Connoch’s dead wife, rubbing his pained face where Jowan had struck it. The moment those three men emerged from the shadows and asked of him where the murderer was, and he had sent them scuttling after Jowan.

He had never really thought about it before, because he had never had cause to doubt what had happened.

“Where has the murderer gone?” one of them had said.

But how did they know there had been a murder?

How could they have known that?



* * * *