Seacliff

Seacliff by Felicia Andrews Page B

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Authors: Felicia Andrews
Tags: romance european
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after we left, my dear, it seems your father took a turn for the worse. According to the good reverend, Evans insisted on his afternoon walks along the cliffs, and though he was always accompanied by a member of the staff, on this particular afternoon he wanted to go alone, to see some tree or other. I don’t understand the significance of that, but it’s what the reverend reported.”
    “My mother,” she said weakly, feeling a slow burning in her eyes. “There’s a great pine near the end of the wall, the only one there. When I was seven, she died during the winter and though she’s buried in the churchyard, Father always went to the tree when he wanted to… to talk to her. He proposed to her there, you see; I suppose he’d be considered a sentimental old fool.”
    Oliver went on, his voice droning. But because there was a roaring in her ears, Caitlin caught only a few words and phrases. They were sufficient for her to know her father had obviously guessed he would not last out the year and was making his peace with himself the best way he knew how. When a sudden squall swept in from the Irish Sea across Cardigan Bay, the staff raced out to bring him back. They didn’t find him until just before sunset, lying at the base of the cliffs. The wind, it seemed, had overpowered him.
    There was a long silence punctuated only by her attempts to catch her breath before she broke into sobs. Tears coursed down her cheeks, and she made no move to brush them away. And when she opened her eyes, Oliver was staring at her intently.
    “We have to go,” she said.
    Oliver nodded without hesitation. “We have to go now.”

PART TWO
    Wife
    Seacliff, Wales, 1775

8
    I t was early afternoon when Caitlin stood impatiently by the first of two polished black coaches, drawing her pale gold shawl more snugly around her shoulders. Her hair had been spun into a loose knot at the nape of her neck. But the haste with which she had performed the task now permitted the silken strands to free themselves in the softly cool west wind coasting down the slopes of the low mountains on the horizon. A vast armada of storm clouds swept grandly overhead, alternately blocking and releasing the sun. Their shadows rippled eerily over the rolling landscape. Caitlin shuddered involuntarily as one passed over her, but she did not move to climb inside the coach and take her seat. Instead, she let her gaze drift over the country she’d been traveling through for the last several days.
    Despite the storm that had hounded the solemn, fast-moving procession for nearly a week, the land was a brilliant, gem-encrusted green. Hocks of black-and white-faced sheep roamed the low hills; Welsh ponies with hardy shoulders and thick manes trotted down the cobblestone road, effortlessly pulling flimsy carts and heavy wagons loaded with produce. The villages she had encountered since leaving England were, for the most part, small, their cottages carved from native stone. They hugged the sides of the narrow roads behind waist-high walls constructed long before the time of the Romans. There were lush orchards and verdant forests, white-running streams and shallow rivers, pastureland and tilled land that strongly evoked Eden.
    Whenever they approached a cluster of homes it seemed to be a signal for work and play to halt. Young children lined the road laughing and whistling, their round faces ruddy, their traditional dark clothes billowing behind them in the wind. Older men fresh from the mines that scarred the slopes glanced up at the commotion, coal dust streaking their pallid foreheads and cheeks. They doffed floppy wool caps when they realized the status of the travelers. Women curtsied halfheartedly; their hair was bound in scarves and their skirts were hidden behind aprons. The Welsh emphasis on education was marked by the large numbers of schoolhouses set on well-kept plots of their own. The steeples of a number of churches loomed above each community like sentinels, the

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