The Penwyth Bride (The Witch's Daughter Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

they found out?
    Quickly I followed Roger Penwyth out of the silent inn, noticing that the other patrons carefully kept their attention on their mugs or pipe bowls. As I stepped out into the bright sunshine, a bee-like murmur rose in my wake.
    I stole a glance at him. Had he seen me cursed as a witch by those who lived closest to the land and the twilight edge of death? They always knew, of course.
    Roger’s adam’s apple bobbed once up over his neckcloth as if his throat hurt.
    “It’s this way,” he muttered without meeting my eye, striding away and leaving me to struggle with my birdcage, my carpetbag, and a prayer that I would be allowed to slip away unmolested.
    ###
    Roger ungraciously settled me into the front seat of an open waggon laden with burlap bags filled to splitting. Then he leaped lightly into the seat next to me. I clamped my hands under the board to keep from edging away from him. The black-splashed white horse had been tied to the back end, left to trot behind us.
    I looked over my shoulder. Hazel was standing in the middle of the yard, staring at me with an expression of sour relief. Behind her, Coachman Bobbet spat into the dust.
    I lifted my hand to her in assurance. I hoped that she would give my stepmother a favorable account of my mature comportment during the journey. Roger clucked to the horses; we rattled away and like that the door to the past shut.
    My muscles immediately protested the renewed jarring. I bit my lip and clutched Pretty Peter’s cage more firmly on my lap. “How long until we reach the Hermitage?” I asked tentatively after a few silent minutes. I knew better than to ask about his ride on the cliffs overlooking St. Ives.
    No reply. My companion stared moodily over the horses’ ears out to the browned scrub lining the lane, twisted by the wind and poor soil to form tiny lumps on the scoured dirt.
    I cleared my throat, ignored the thin cries of struggling vegetation, and repeated the question. He turned his odd light eyes on me, and I immediately regretted it.
    “Not long,” he replied after an interminable moment. “Two hours or so.”
    “Two hours,” I echoed faintly, and we fell into silence once more, broken only by the clop of the horses and the squeaking wheels.
    Eventually Roger said, “The horses cannot go faster than a walk with this load. Coffee and cocoa are not as heavy as corn, but not so light either.”
    “I see.” I did not know what to do with this sudden gush of information.
    He slanted a look down at me through a thicket of gold lash. “You were perhaps expecting a red curricle drawn by a set of matched ponies? Damon Penwyth riding up like an Italian prince out of a horrid novel?”
    “I wasn’t expecting anything,” I murmured.
    The wound must have bled through my voice for an expression of something like regret flitted across his features; he turned back to his morose absorption of the road.
    After a long while he said, “Sir Grover, my uncle, would have come to fetch you himself, but I offered since I was going to St. Ives anyhow upon business. The road to Lyhalis goes by the Hermitage, and it was of little inconvenience for me to do so.”
    And would have been of much inconvenience to Sir Grover, I finished the sentence.
    “Lyhalis? What is that?”
    “My home.”
    “That is a picturesque name for it. Is it Cornish?”
    “Yes.”
    The monosyllable crushed any attempt on my part to draw him into further conversation, and so I settled myself into another silent journey.
    Pretty Peter drooped in his cage; I began to grow sick from the constant swaying of the waggon. At one point the horses strained forward in their collars as they climbed an incline. The scream of a gull split the creaking silence and a salty tang, carried to me on a gust of humid air, hit my nose. Suddenly we were at the edge of a cliff, the sea flying wide before us.
    I could not help exclaiming. The sight filled me with excited pleasure. Water crashed over the cliffs