The Lighthouse Witches(68)

“I have a games room,” he told Luna and Clover, who both immediately started pleading with me to let them go there. I relented, and Patrick took us to a room decked out with arcade games, a pool table, and an air-hockey table.

“The best views are from the cockpit,” he told me. There, two white leather seats looked over a digital console toward the front of the boat. In a moment we had pulled out of the dock and were headed back toward the bay. The sky had turned to a navy velvet glittered with stars and the boat rocked slightly against the waves that seemed to paw at us as we made our way into deep water.

“Would you like something to drink?” he asked. “Wine? Tea?”

“A tea would be lovely, thanks.”

He headed to the kitchen at the other end of the room while I stood, still feeling too out of place to sit down. I noticed some intriguing keepsakes in a wall-mounted cabinet—a huge conch shell with a raw pink center, a dried sea urchin prickly as a hedgehog, a set of moss-green skeleton keys, and some bits of wood.

“I see you’ve discovered my Viking ship,” he said, returning with two wineglasses and a bottle of expensive-looking wine under his arm.

“A Viking ship?”

“I had no tea, so I brought wine,” he said. “Shall I pour you a small one?”

I nodded. “A very small one.”

He handed me a glass and popped the cork. “I used to go deep sea diving. I did a dive in the Shetlands. Found a wreck on the seafloor.” He nodded at the splinters of wood in my hand. “I spotted the snake helm and figured it was a Viking ship,” he said, marking the curved shape of the helm in the air with his hand. “I contacted the National Library in Edinburgh and they sent some divers down to explore. Cheers.” He held up his glass, and I toasted him.

He stepped closer, slipping a hand in his trouser pocket.

“They were able to carbon date it. Have a guess how old?”

“A . . . thousand years old?”

“Close,” he said, weighing one of the fragments in his hand like gold. “700 AD.”

I watched him carefully. He was a bit of chameleon, his moods shifting so ferociously that it was like watching him perform different personalities. The shy boy in the bothy had gone, as had the sinister, brooding man I’d encountered in the Longing. Even his form seemed different—when we’d first met I’d thought him thin and finely built, but his short-sleeved T-shirt revealed strong, muscular arms riddled with scars. The air was clammy with tension, and I figured that keeping the small talk going was the best way of maintaining that mood. “What about the Viking ship?” I asked, my voice light. “Did they hoist it out of the ocean?”

“No, too dangerous,” he said. “Max, my diving partner, said we missed a trick.” He set the Viking ship remnants carefully back in place. “He said we should have dredged an oar up or something, charged tourists to come and touch it.”

I cocked my head. “You’re . . . not keen on tourists?”

He gave me a look that said definitely not keen.

From a window I could see the silhouette of the Longing shrink against a purple sky, the gold lights of houses shimmering on the other side. We were moving steadily away from the shore. A flash of the writing in the lantern room came to my mind, and my stomach twisted.

Why did I agree to this?

“So . . . the mural,” I said, guiding the conversation to safe ground, keeping my tone light. “Have you thought any more about how we could develop it?”

“Actually, it would help if you talk me through your work as an artist,” he said, turning the wheel to the right, shifting the long white glare of the moon across the helm. “Do you just do murals or do you do traditional art? Paintings and so on?”

I told him that when I’d gone to art school, I was in love with Degas and Balthus, and my dream was to have an exhibition of my paintings in some upscale gallery in London, or even the Tate Modern. Until I realized how na?ve that idea was and radically scaled down my goals. Back then I was obsessed with wolves, mostly because I had a second cousin who was in the newspapers for her attempts to reintroduce wolves to England. I’m not a natural realist painter—I didn’t really try to paint wolves, but large abstract canvases full of color and anarchy.

He lifted an eyebrow. “You still paint wolves?”

I shook my head. “No, no. And it wasn’t so much the wolves that had my interest but the idea of . . . wildness.”

“Shame,” he said. “Scotland used to be full of wolves. Even Lòn Haven.”

“I could add them,” I said brightly. “It would be good to incorporate some of the older natural elements. Good idea.”

The lights of the island were growing steadily smaller, the line of the horizon drawing closer. “Perhaps you could show me a little of the coastline of Lòn Haven,” I said carefully. “It would be useful to see the Longing from the ocean.”

He thought about that, and for a long moment I held my breath.

“Of course,” he said.

But instead of turning the boat back to shore, he flipped a switch, and I felt the boat shudder to a stop.

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

His head was bowed, and the mood had shifted again. “To be honest, I just thought you might remember,” he said.