Miracle (7 page)

The ancient wood groaned. The building swayed. Tears of seawater crept through the ever widening crevices between the lichen-covered stones and formed glassy little pools on the rotting plank floor.

Miracle Cavendish was the only daughter of Lord Dexter Cavendish, deceased eight years. She had lived her entire life in the once spectacular but now ruined Cavisbrooke Castle, never having left the isle even briefly. Her father was little more than a vague memory—a stranger who had come and gone in her life so infrequently she would not have known him had she met him away from Cavisbrooke. Her mother had always assured her that he loved her devotedly, and it was that thought that had comforted her those years after her mother had tired of her secluded and solitary life and run away to Paris, leaving Miracle in the care of Jonathan Hoyt, a devoted servant and groom. The island folk referred to her as "that peculiar lass who haunts Saint Catherine's Lighthouse on the Chapel." Johnny called her simply . . .
Mira.

Frankly, Miracle didn't care what the island folk called her. They were odd in their own ways, strict to their routines, their humdrum little existences. They awoke in the mornings to their daily drudgeries like everyone else in the world, except herself.

Oh yes, she was strange, very strange, and she relished it. Long ago she had decided that she would rather die than find herself shackled to the mediocrity of sameness and routine. Besides, her destiny had been planned long ago—twenty years ago, to be precise—the moment that turbulent Christmas morning when she was born during the most terrifying and destructive storm to hit the isle in centuries. According to her mother and Johnny, the winds had died, the clouds had parted, and the sun had shone brightly the very instant she took her first breath. Therefore, her mother had christened her Miracle and vowed she was destined to accomplish much greatness in the world.

Well, she wasn't so certain about accomplishing greatness, but with a name such as Miracle, she had long since reckoned that she was preordained to achieve
something
marvelous; the opportunity just hadn't presented itself to her yet. It would, though. She was certain of it!

Carefully, she finished piercing the last of nine acorns and placed it aside, next to the long cotton string she had earlier pulled from her leather pouch of
medicináis
— herbs, stones, feathers, chalk, and ash—then laid the twig of a hawthorn next to it. Positioned on her knees, her hands resting lightly on her thighs, she closed her eyes and rehearsed her chant:

May love and marriage be the theme

To visit me in this night's dream:

Fire and moon and sacred oak

Your threefold power we thus invoke;

Be all three my faithful friend

The image of my lover send;

Let me see his form and face

And his occupation trace

By a symbol or a sign;

Cupid, forward my design.

The wind slammed again, harder this time, causing the acorns to roll like marbles to every wall within the lighthouse. Miracle spilled onto her backside, and out of frustration, muttered a mild curse and dove to save her collection of spell-casters before they disappeared through the cracks in the floors. That is when she heard the voice—or thought she did.

Frozen, her eyes wide, her senses attuned to the thunderous song of the wind and tides that slid closer and closer to the base of Saint Catherine's Chapel beneath her, she tried her best to still the loud beating of her heart long enough to think rationally. The hag of a wise woman who had given her the bag of charms years ago had warned her against casting spells during the time of the Morrigan, the Nights of Morgana when no moon was visible in the heavens. Especially love charms!

"Nought but woe will come to the maiden who chants in darkness!" the mysterious old Ceridwen had proclaimed.

Biting her lip, stuffing the acorns and strings back into her leather pouch, Miracle convinced herself that the incantations and charms had never worked for her during the light of the moon, so why should they work against her now? Besides, the love spells were nothing more than folklore and superstition—a way to pass the dreary hours during her watch of Rocken End Race. If she truly allowed herself to believe in such silly—

A sound again. A voice.

Miracle leapt to her feet and peered through the sea- sprayed glass. Like some vanishing ghost on the horizon, the sails of a ship slipped into the fog and disappeared. For a long moment, Miracle forgot to breathe; her eyes burned from searching the swirling water and clouds, dread creeping through her breast like a hot ember. If some hapless seafarer had blundered his way onto the rocks while she was dallying with the supernatural, she would never forgive herself.

At first she thought the movement on the rock-strewn shore was nothing more than the occasionally eerie formations of wind-whipped rain and fog—the same formations that inspired tales of ghosts and goblins. Then the figure moved, if only slightly, emerging through the dense fog from the end of the Race that faced the sea. It stumbled over stones and mire until falling against the outcropping, skeletal ruins of an old ship that had washed ashore more than a half century before.

There, the figure became still. The wind billowed its black clothes like the sails of the retreating ship, and only then was Miracle assured that the figure was human. A man, by the looks of it, who stared out to sea, unmoving. Lost and wretched. Sea drenched. Cold. Possibly in need of help.
Certainly
in need of help. No one in his right mind would attempt landing at Rocken End Race during weather like this.

Forcing open the door, she carefully eased out onto the precarious perch that, in erstwhile times, had functioned as a crow's landing, a place for the lighthouse keeper to monitor the watery horizon with his spyglass. Now, however, the entire landing sagged dangerously, shook and groaned with the slightest weight, and swung from side to side with the simplest gust of wind.

With a cry, she grabbed the crumbling bannister for support, and finding little but the splintered, rotted handrail that virtually disintegrated in her hands, she flung herself back against the stone wall of the lighthouse and held her breath until the wind subsided. Only then did she cautiously ease to the edge again, and finding the figure still slightly slumped against the deteriorating, upthrusting rib of the old ship, she called, "Hello! Have you been flung overboard? Should I rescue you?"

Almost wearily, the figure turned and searched the shore as if he expected some banshee to come sailing at him from behind the outcropping of towering boulders and heaps of seaweed-littered sand. Miracle noticed then that aside from the sea spray, his clothes were not sodden, which brought her some relief. If, perchance, she had been expected to rescue this particular fellow, she would be hard-pressed to clamor down from her perch without first breaking her neck in the process.

"Up here!" she cried, waving her arms over her head and making the wobbly old walk moan again.

Finally, the figure looked up, and up. He stood with his cloak clutched around him, gloved hands gripping it fiercely. He staggered toward the building, stride lengthening as the tide rushed around his boots and frothed around his pants legs. He might have cursed. She couldn't be certain. The wind did odd things to the sounds of people's voices, especially from this distance.

Stopping at the base of the lighthouse, he stared at the open door of the old chapel, then looked back out to sea.

"You're welcome to come up!" she called.

She thought he responded.

"I cannot hear you—" she began, just as he turned up his face and rolled back the collar of his cloak. The wind caught his mass of dark hair and whipped it about his familiar features.

"Bloody hell," she cried, "Not you again!"

Clayton blinked the salty spray from his eyes and did his best to focus on the siren far above him—for siren the wench certainly must be, looking as she did, flaming hair flying like brassy webs away from her head, the bodice of her brown gown molded to her body as snugly as a pair of well-fitted gloves. Clayton had anticipated a great many greetings: swoons of surprise, giddy pleasure—all the typical female reactions women employed when the man of their dreams suddenly appeared to sweep them off their feet. After all, the duke had insinuated that the chit would be more than happy to receive his attentions. He had also prepared him for her with terms like "exceptional,
outra
geously
beautiful—beautiful enough to make a grown man weep with desire," were the man cursed with a taste for the socially or economically inferior classes, which Clayton obviously was, the duke had reminded him. Therefore, the last thing Clayton had anticipated was the look of outraged exasperation as she recognized him just before she flung herself back into the questionable security of the horrifyingly hazardous old lighthouse and slammed the door behind her.

The last thing he had anticipated was to be greeted by a she-devil wench with the appearance of some drab from a child's fairy story.

The idea that he had somehow misunderstood his brother simply wasn't plausible. No doubt about it, the duke of Salterdon had pledged on the dowager duchess's health that the "fascinating creature" would be ecstatic over the prospect of his courting her—and that she was more than passably attractive.

That should have been the clue, of course. Trey Hawthorne didn't give a flying frog about the dowager's health.

"My lord!" came the breathless cry behind him, and slowly Clayton turned to regard his valet, Benjamin, struggling out of the fog, hefting carpet bags the best he could over the rocks and rising water. Joining Clayton at last, breathing hard, the gray-haired, slightly paunchy manservant dropped the valises at his feet and stiffly straightened. He did not speak, but stared, as did Clayton, at the collapsing structure that had once been a chapel erected by Walter
de
Godyton
, now a mere relic of the hermitage that had housed priests centuries before.

"By Jove," Benjamin breathed, his words forming vapor puffs in the chilly air. "I wager the old place is rather of a wild nature, my lord. Are you certain we've come to the correct venue? I cannot imagine anyone or anything aside from specters who might dwell in such a ghastly looking domicile."

"Concurred, Ben. However, the only goblin to haunt this old place is the one I've come here to see, I'm afraid. I fear I just saw her standing there, on that precarious little perch. She had flaming red hair that stretched straight out from her head."

"Specters," the valet grumbled under his breath, then shuddered. "You know how I feel about ghouls, my lord. Best to keep them at a favorable distance. Until you've witnessed yourself the havoc such a soul can play on a man's sanity, you simply cannot understand. I saw a man's hair turn white overnight because he came face to face with a wraith."

Clayton frowned. Benjamin Hughes had big, dark, drooping eyes that reminded Clayton of a hunting hound's, giving the old servant the perpetual look of being in the doldrums. His face was long, his jowls hanging. His nose was red—due to cold, the old man vowed, but everyone knew it was caused by his particular cravings for a "tot o' medicament," necessary to keep away the influenza that would surely strike him the moment he forgot to swallow his hourly spot. His tot was brandy, of course, and no doubt his ghouls were brought on by too many tots.

Ben had served Clayton's family for forty years, and for forty years he had jumped at every bump in the night and reported to his employers numerous sightings of ghosts, ghouls, and goblins. The dowager duchess or Clayton had found themselves occupied for hours in an attempt to convince him that no such things existed, that the apparitions the servant witnessed were nothing more than drying sheets on the line or the occasional shimmering gases that spewed from the mucky ground during certain times of the year.

On that particular afternoon, however, Clayton found himself wishing he believed in ghosts, that the image who had shrieked at him from the lighthouse had been some phantom from the afterlife and not the "fascinating angel" his brother had sent him here to seduce into marriage.

The sudden surge of icy water around his ankles slammed him back to reality. Bowing his head against the wind, he made for the sheer ledge that rose up from the beach to climb toward the misty clouds. When reaching the summit, he would contemplate his next move, whether to approach the lighthouse again or search out Cavisbrooke Castle and pray that the girl on the ledge had been a figment of his imagination.