Read Online The House Between Tides by Sarah Maine - Free Book Online Page B

he went these early mornings. She had seen him once returning across the strand and had chastised him for not waking her to join him. “I often rise early up here,” he had said, and given her his wistful smile as he bent to kiss her. “But that’s no reason to rob you of sleep.”
    She threw back the covers and went across the room to the little turret which gave her views in three directions, resting her hand on the wall. Theo was a perplexing man. Here, where they were thrown back on each other’s company, and without the structure of city life, she realised how little she knew him. He had seemed elated upon arrival, delighted to be here, and she had watched him walk down to the foreshore and then linger, talking to the factor’s son.
    But she had become aware of his moods here. His silences.
    Yesterday they had strolled along the shoreline, hand in hand at first, then walking side by side, stepping between clumps of pink sea thrift and hummocks of coarse grass. “Earnshaw wants us to go across and have dinner with them, but I put him off. Do you mind?”
    â€œNot if you don’t care to go.”
    â€œI don’t, not at the moment— It’s a bit of a trek, and we’d have to stay one night at least, although they’d expect us for longer, and it’ll all get immured in politics.”
    â€œPolitics! Up here?”
    He had groaned, giving her a hand over the slippery rocks. “You’ve no idea. Century-old disputes over land, and I didn’t come up here to get dragged back into the debate.”
    â€œNo indeed! You came to paint. Did you tell him so?”
    â€œI imagine he’d think I’d other reasons for declining.” He had given her a dry smile and led her towards the tumbled stones of an old ruin. “Come and have a look at St. Ultan’s chapel, my dear, beforeit erodes away completely.” He pointed out the old gravestones clustered about the ruins, one inscribed with a sword, another with a simple ship. “My father started cataloguing them all once, scraping the lichens away to see the inscriptions. He had this uncontrollable urge to list things—birds, tombstones, or profits and losses.” There was always an edge to Theo’s voice when he spoke of his father, who had remained indifferent to his talent. This much she had learned in Edinburgh from Theo’s sister, Emily, and had observed the coldness between Theo and his stepmother for herself. “The lichen’s beginning to grow back, thank God. Just look at that colour, quite luminous.”
    She agreed that it was lovely, and had watched him as he examined the overlapping pads of moss and lichen on the fallen cross. “Who was St. Ultan?” she asked.
    â€œAn Irishman. He gave succour to infants, I’m told, especially orphans.” He had come and sat beside her, leaning his back against the wall of the ruin, and she felt the warmth of his shoulder next to hers. “My mother wanted to bury her stillborn daughter here, but my father wouldn’t have it, said the babe wasn’t an orphan. He had a plot made on the ridge behind the house, and then two more joined the first, poor wights. Mother hated them being there, exposed to every gale, all alone.”
    Theo rarely spoke of his mother, except to say that she used to draw pictures with him when he was a child. And he, so young when she died, must have felt her loss keenly. “But she’s with them there now,” she said carefully.
    â€œShe’d rather be here, nevertheless.” He got abruptly to his feet. “Come on, I felt spots of rain,” he said, and he had set off, leaving her to follow.
    So far he had shown no inclination to paint, but had been boyishly enthusiastic about his new camera, prowling around the house experimenting, startling housemaids whom he commandedto remain motionless, and self-conscious, in his compositions. He had surprised her too as