HIGH TIDE AT MIDNIGHT by Sara Craven, Mineko Yamada Page B

to meet
    the side of his face in a stinging slap with all the weight of her arm behind it.
    As soon as she had done it, she stood stricken, half expecting that he would
    retaliate. Oh, why had she let his taunts get to her? When her mother's
    memory was vindicated, she could have made him eat every one of them
    instead of losing her temper like a silly schoolgirl.
    The marks of her fingers were already reddening on his cheek, she noticed.
    Wretchedly, she made her eyes meet his.
    'I'm sorry,' she said, aware how inadequate the words sounded.
    'You will be,' he said very softly, in a way that was somehow more alarming
    than plain anger would have been. 'Oh, yes, Morwenna, you'll pay dearly for
    that, and for everything else. And that's a promise.'
    He turned on his heel and walked away down the hall. The front door
    slammed behind him, and after a minute t>r two Morwenna heard the sound
    of a car engine being revved and then fading in the distance as he drove
    away.
    She expelled a long trembling breath, then sank down on the bottom stair,
    resting her cheek against the carved newel post. And again a voice inside her
    asked, 'My God, what have I done?'

CHAPTER FIVE
    THE next few days passed in such a fever of activity that Morwenna was left
    little time for introspection, and for this she was grateful.
    Nick Trevennon had not been exaggerating when he had described himself
    as a hard taskmaster. After the solitary lunch that Inez had served to her in
    the dining room that first day, she had plunged willy-nilly into the past of the
    Trevennon family, a subject which she found much easier to contemplate
    than the immediate present. She was amazed at the amount of background
    research that Nick had managed to carry out prior to his stroke. Photographs
    of ancient church records, reference books and original documents from
    various periods jostled for attention on the big littered desk and Morwenna
    decided that priority must be given to getting this mass of material into some
    sort of order. Nick, she discovered quite early on, had a habit of demanding a
    particular book or document and reacting sourly if it did not immediately
    come to hand.
    Much of the earliest family history—and there had been Trevennons in that
    part of Cornwall, she learned, since early Tudor times—had already been
    chronicled by succeeding generations and many of these records still existed
    in crumbling leather-bound books with fading and almost indecipherable
    brown writing. But many of the best known legends, Nick informed her, had
    been handed down by word of mouth, and had lost nothing in the retelling.
    And among these, apparently, was the story of her namesake Morwenna, but
    when she asked Nick, intrigued, to tell her more, he merely looked
    mysterious and murmured that she would hear it 'all in good time'.
    In many ways, she found, life at Trevennon seemed to revolve round two
    different households, the only link between them being Inez and to a smaller
    extent her husband Zack. Morwenna had frankly dreaded the idea of having
    to meet Dominic Trevennon at mealtimes, and was thankful that this proved
    unnecessary. The Trevennon brothers seemed to breakfast at a very early
    hour. At any rate they were always finished and gone by the time she came
    downstairs. Generally she lunched with Nick, and had her supper on a tray in
    her room. Inez had made no demur about this when Morwenna had
    tentatively asked if it could be so. Indeed, she rather embarrassingly seemed
    to enter into the spirit behind the request, telling Morwenna confidentially
    that she was 'not to worry her head. Mr Dom would come round in time.'
    Morwenna had toyed with trying to assure her that she had no desire for 'Mr
    Dom' to be reconciled to her presence in any way, but it seemed more
    dignified to pretend that she did not understand what Inez meant.
    Each evening, when she was sure that Nick did not require her any more, she
    went down to the big shabby sitting room at the