moved off with the dog. Andrew, in his certainty, missed the signal, and drove home his point, instead.
“Okay, okay; let's forget the matter of tools. This rock is shale. Shale is sedimentary and relatively soft. It erodes when exposed to water, and it fractures and crumbles when it freezes. Hell, that's how this valley was created; with enough time, water cuts through this stuff as if it were butter. Anything carved in this rock thirty-five hundred years ago would have disappeared altogether in just a few centuries of rain, flooding, freezing, and thawing. And that's not even counting the way the roots of plants, like all this ivy, would break up the rock face.”
“Um … guys?” Lee was back. Nicola ignored her. Randi barked twice—his warning.
“Listen, Mr. Know-it-all,” Nicola said, her voice rising, “this has been a holy place for centuries; just ask anyone around here! Who the hell are you to say it's not?! A week of stone-wall building and now you're a rock expert, too? Give me a break!”
This time, Andrew could hear the shrill edge to her voice. He softened his. “Look, Nicola; I'm not trying to insult you. It's just that, well, I don't think these labyrinths are any older than that tumbled-down mill behind you. I think they both date back about a hundred and fifty years. Tops.”
“Nicki? Drew?” It was Lee, more insistent this time. “The wind's changed, and look at the sky back that way.”
She pointed toward the ocean, and the two adults followed her finger. The girl had sensed what neither of them had: The sky over the cove was as black as the slate cliffs surrounding it, and the wind had picked up and was sharp with the tang of ozone. At that moment, there was a single crack of lightning, close by. Even as they stood there, drops of rain the size of marbles began hammering the ground around them, raising little puffs of dust in the dirt and splattering the stones of the old mill like gunshots. The argument instantly forgotten, the three of them ran up the path. Randi led the way.
By the time they climbed into the Land Rover, the squall had passed, but they were soaked to the skin. Skinny Lee looked like a drowned rat. Nicola's white cotton blouse had turned transparent, and Andrew realized she was braless. His own shirt was much the same and clung to him like skin. It should have been a moment of hilarity, a sort of impromptu wet T-shirt event. Instead, apart from the damp panting of the dog in the back, no one spoke, and the atmosphere in the car was electric as they drove back to Bottreaux Farm. Even Lee, who had romped through the downpour gleefully, was quiet, her clear blue eyes panning back and forth between the two rigid people in the front seats, trying to parse the body language of silent adults.
They lurched to a stop in front of Shepherd's Cottage and Andrew got out. He stood with the door open, leaned in, and said quietly, “I'm sorry I spoiled things.”
Without turning away from the windscreen, Nicola said, “Not everything in creation is amenable to rational analysis.”
Andrew nodded and closed the door. The car sped away down the track toward the farm.
After she dropped off Lee, after she chatted amiably for several minutes with Roger (Anne was still in bed, still under the weather), after she got home, changed into dry clothes, brewed a pot of tea, and climbed up to her studio, Nicola was still fuming. Who the hell did he think he was—Sherlock bloody Holmes? What right did he have to question what everyone with any sensitivity at all had always understood intuitively—that Rocky Valley was a place of magic? Why had he been so insistent, so dogmatic? Even if the stone carvings weren't Bronze Age—and, in truth, she had to admit his arguments made sense—why was it so terribly important for him to be right? What did he win by winning? For that matter, what did she, if she prevailed?
Nicola sipped her tea and stared out the tall window beside the chaise. The sun beat down on the quayside, and tourists wandered below licking melting ice-cream cones. If it had rained in Boscastle earlier, as it had in Rocky Valley, the sun had burned away any trace. On the other side of the river, the witchcraft museum was doing a brisk trade. Why was she drawn to these beliefs and practices?