A Bride for the Prizefighter - Alice Coldbreath Page 0,38

you, Mrs. Nye,” he said affably. “Very nice indeed.” She gestured to him to take an armchair, though after gazing at its upholstery and then down at his dark brown breeches he shook his head. “I’ll take a wooden chair, Mrs. Nye,” he said firmly and retrieved one of the few that had remained from a dark corner.

“Do you mind if I return to my curtains?” Mina asked after pouring the tea. “Only Nye insists they are to be finished today and—”

“To be sure, Mrs. Nye,” he said comfortably, forestalling her. “I’ll not hold you back from your woman’s work.” Mina sat back up to the dining table and once more started pinning up hems. So unpalatable was the idea of wasting any of the fabric, that she had determined to make two sets of curtains from the original pair. The second pair she would give to Edna, whose window also faced the courtyard, though she had never mentioned being troubled by strange sounds in the night.

“How be you finding life at The Harlot, Mrs. Nye?” Gus asked before taking a noisy slurp of his tea.

“Oh, I’m finding my way,” Mina answered lightly.

“Heard you found your way down to the beach the other day,” he commented, and Mina cast him a sharp look. His round blue eyes met hers with a twinkle in their depths.

“Yes,” she agreed after a pause that was a little too long. “I’m afraid the route I took was somewhat precipitous. Nye was forced to come to my rescue. But I’m sure I will find a more sedate path at some point.”

“You’re fond of the sea, then?”

“That was the first time I’ve ever seen it,” Mina admitted.

Gus looked shocked. “Well fancy that!” he exclaimed roundly, setting down his cup in its saucer with a clatter. “Never seen the sea before! I can scarcely credit it.”

“You were born and bred here I take it?”

“That I was not,” he admitted. “I hail from Norfolk parts by rights, but I been here some ten years or so.”

“Oh, I see.”

“I’ve always been a seafaring man, me and my father before me.”

“You are a fisherman, Mr. Hopkirk?”

“I am now,” he agreed. “But when I were in my prime, I was in the merchant navy.”

“Indeed? You must have seen a good deal of the world?” Mina spoke around her mouthful of pins in a way she knew would make her mother quite shocked. Somehow, she did not think Gus Hopkirk would care at her lack of etiquette. Her fingers flew as she pinned and tacked the curtains into their new incarnation.

“That I have.” He beamed. “That I have, though if its sights and wonders you’re after, then this part of the world is the right one to come to.” He lowered his voice. “There’s sights and sounds along this coastline would curdle the blood in your veins,” he said. “More to petrify any man who’d traveled the breadth and depth of the world! This coastline,” he said ominously. “Has more mysteries and terrors to rival any other in the civilized world, or the uncivilized, if you takes my meaning.” When she looked up, she found him tapping his rather broad nose.

“Well,” Mina said cautiously. “It rather sounds as though you are speaking of ghost stories, Mr. Hopkirk.”

“Ghost stories! I should think I am!” he agreed with a chuckle. “Are you partial to a yarn or two, Mrs. Nye, on a cold, rainy day in spring?”

Mina thought of the thrilling short stories in her periodicals that her father had frowned at. “I confess, I do enjoy them,” she admitted. “Though I tend to associate them more with Christmas time.”

“Then, perhaps…?” He withdrew a flask from his waistcoat and tipped the contents into his tea, holding up the bottle quizzically.

Mina shook her head. “No, thank you, not if I want these curtains to be fit for purpose.”

Gus chuckled and settled back in his chair. He told her tales of spectral hounds and restless grey ladies, of hand-wringing wraiths and ghostly hunts who pursued lost souls along the cliffs on a stormy night. He told her of the malevolent monks who had once lived in a medieval monastery on this very spot who had been disbanded and punished by the bishop for their wickedness and sin. If you saw them, you were surely cursed to an unhappy fate. Some travelers, he added ominously had been known to drop dead at the sight of their sinister habits, their empty cowls creeping up to them on a