Death in the West Wind by Deryn Lake

Author:Deryn Lake [Lake, Deryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General
ISBN: 9780749005887
Google: gjWmAAAACAAJ
Amazon: 0749005882
Barnesnoble: 0749005882
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2001-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

11

During the night a mist had rolled in off the sea, obscuring the Devon landscape beneath a cloud of vapour. The hills had vanished, as had the great expanse of river, while nothing could be seen of the sky, veiled as it was by a dense grey shroud behind which the sun was attempting to rise. Riding over that wild heathland where so many strange things had happened recently, John Rawlings knew that he was hopelessly and rather alarmingly lost. In front of him, hidden somewhere in the swirls of fog, lay Wildtor Grange, to his right the town of Topsham, struggling to wakefulness when he had clattered out of it atop a hired horse from the livery stables. To the Apothecary’s left was the hamlet of Sid- mouth, from which the fishermen had presumably sailed into the mist-wreathed water. Yet to find his way to any of these places would have been an impossibility, in fact John was beginning to think that his only course of action was to dismount and wait until the mist had cleared before proceeding a step further. But the thought of Emilia kept him going slowly forward.

He had left her asleep with a note on the pillow beside her saying that he would be back by mid-morning and would then go with her to Exeter, and he had no wish to break his word. With every day that passed John realised that he was falling more and more in love with his wife, though the glimpse he had had of Coralie Clive had unsettled him, he couldn’t deny that. She still had a strange effect on him, an effect of which he was deeply ashamed, for it made his heart speed up and his breath shorten, just as if he were an adolescent apprentice staring at a girl for the first time. Further, he had bitterly resented the fact that she had accepted Gerald Fitz’s invitation to supper even though John no longer had any claim on her.

“I’m a fool,” he said into the fog, and his horse, a reliable old plodder with an easy-going temperament, moved its ears backwards to listen to him.

It was about seven o’clock in the morning, the journey having taken far longer than it should have done because of the vaporous conditions. Yet much as he wanted to stop and wait for the sun tc burn the mist off, John continued to trudge onwards in the somewhat folorn hope that he would find Wildtor Grange by some lucky chance. Yet nothing loomed out of the mist, no great shape reared on a fogbound hill. Indeed it almost seemed as if he were going in the wrong direction entirely and might, for all he knew, be heading towards the cliffs and the sea.

When he had hired the horse, the Apothecary had been informed that its name was Hicks, a strange title to say the least. Now, John spoke to it again.

“Hicks, you’re a local. For Heaven’s sake get me out of here.

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