“No, ma’am,” Day said meekly. “I beg your pardon.”
“Right.” Dora folded her arms meaningfully. Day glanced up at Crane, who moved smoothly over to speak to her. Day tapped Ben’s arm and nodded over at the fence, indicating that Ben should follow as he walked a few steps away from the others.
Day propped himself against a fencepost and leaned back, watching Agnes in silence for a moment. Something relaxed in his face as the child shrieked with joy, the rigid, implacable, professional expression dissolving into an oddly endearing lopsided smile. This was what Day looked like when he wasn’t a justiciar, Ben thought, and a tiny, painful hope grew.
“I’m dancing!” Agnes whirled around.
“Keep moving!” Jonah yelled, grinning, and Mrs. Merrick sprang into the air with a whoop that made her husband laugh aloud.
“Incorrigible,” Day said to himself. “I’m surrounded by incorrigibles.”
“Mr. Day?”
Day glanced over at him, back at Jonah and over at Dora. To Ben’s incredulity, she actually seemed to be dimpling under the relentless pressure of Crane’s charm. Day caught his expression and gave a little exhalation of amusement. “She’ll be putty in his hands, fear not.”
“She’s nobody’s fool,” Ben said defensively.
“I’m not suggesting she is. Well, nor am I, come to that.” Day shrugged. “I’ve had occasion to remark, charm’s a dangerous thing.”
“There should be a law.”
Day looked up at him with a quick grin. “There really should. ‘Impeding the rational action of others by the use of charm, good looks and irresistibility—’”
“‘A sentence not less than six months’,” Ben completed. “With hard.”
“It’s the only hope for we lesser mortals.” Day let out a long sigh and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Oh Lord, Spenser. I used to have morals.”
Ben knew exactly how that felt. He wondered if Lord Crane might be almost as disruptive as Jonah to a plain man’s quiet life. “So did I.”
“Don’t underrate yourself. You seem to be doing rather a good job bringing Pastern up to your level. Whereas my standards are eroding by the day.” The foxlike smile twitched at Day’s lips. “Look, I can’t clear his record. If he gets picked up by the justiciary, he’ll have to take the consequences. But, God help me, I will send a note to London to say that it was a false trail and there’s no sign of him in Cornwall. If you make me regret this, I will take it very personally indeed.”
Ben swallowed, hard. “We won’t. I swear it. Thank you.”
“Good luck, Mr. Spenser.” Day shot him a quick, shrewd glance. “If I may say so, Pastern is a great deal more fortunate in you than he deserves.”
Ben felt himself redden. “No, he isn’t.”
“He really is. But he knows it, and that’s something. Right. I’d say we’ll leave you to it but…” Day looked up, in time to see Agnes take a flying leap into Mrs. Merrick’s arms, accompanied by a chorus of shrieks from air and ground, and the clear, joyous peal of Jonah’s laughter. “Just now, I don’t think we’ll get Jenny out of here at gunpoint.”
“She can’t read, you know,” Jonah said that night.
“Who, Mrs. Merrick?”
“Mmm. Same as me. The letters dance, she says. Day thinks it’s to do with the windwalking somehow.”
“Really?”
“So she says. I like her.” Jonah lay on his back. He looked half-asleep. Ben wasn’t surprised. The two windwalkers had spent the rest of the morning in a clifftop race of astounding recklessness, returning breathless, windswept and on first-name terms. It clearly hadn’t crossed Jonah’s mind that Merrick might not want his youthful wife swept off by a handsome young man.
It hadn’t seemed to concern Merrick in the slightest. He and Crane had propped up the bar for a couple of hours, swapping increasingly unlikely stories of foreign travels amid a growing crowd of fascinated locals, until the windwalkers had returned and the group departed. Ben had given Day his letter to post in Plymouth. He thought he could trust the man to understand its importance.
The night in the Green Man had been riotous, partly with relief and gratitude at Jonah and Ben’s escape, partly because Crane had asked that they should buy every man a round on him as what he called, meaninglessly but effectively, “an apology for the misunderstanding”, and left enough money to keep half the village drunk for a week. Dora was rationing that, but it had still been something of a party, with Jonah presiding, giddy with release.
At last they had collapsed, exhausted, into bed, where the iron shackle still hung from the hasp behind them.
“Did you apologise for us throwing her off the roof?” Ben asked. “I meant to, but—”