Free Cottage by the Sea by Ciji Ware Page B

Luke's last remaining employees. Neither the kindly older woman nor the recuperating visitor referred to Blythe's continuing emotional crisis.
       For his part Lucas Teague kept his distance, to both Blythe's relief and her mortification. However, Mrs. Quiller brought a vase of fresh rhododendrons every morning, along with several novels by Daphne du Maurier—all set in Cornwall—that the housekeeper presented to her on her meal trays. The books, Mrs. Q informed her charge proudly, were courtesy of her employer's extensive library and delivered to the sick room as per his instructions.
       As if it were an assignment that would give Blythe a reason to keep breathing, she became determined to devour the author's novels in the order they had been written. The Loving Spirit, first published in 1931, was one she'd never read, and she plunged into the story that spanned three generations of a Cornish family whose fate was tied to the sea. Each day her sore throat improved and her respect for du Maurier's magical storytelling increased. And each day she rediscovered the deep pleasure she had once enjoyed indulging in the sheer act of losing herself in the world of fiction—an activity that Christopher had found utterly alien to his world of manufacturing visual images.
       However, in the hours before dawn on the fifth morning of her unscheduled stay at Barton Hall, she awoke with the oppressive sense that the four walls of her lonely bedchamber were closing in on her. Clad only in a sheer batiste nightgown that she assumed belonged to Lucas's deceased wife, she set out in search of another du Maurier novel to distract her.
       The long hallway leading to the landing was several degrees chillier than her room. Hurrying along the corridor, Blythe had a brief vision of herself as some updated version of Cathy in Wuthering Heights, flitting downstairs at Barton Hall in a filmy peignoir "on a dark and stormy night." Only the Cornish sky had remained remarkably cloudless all day, even at dusk.
        Will you cut it out? Where do you think you are, Gothic City?
       Nevertheless Blythe could not shake the eerie sense that she knew exactly where Lucas's library was located. Sure enough, at the bottom of the broad staircase she turned toward a door to the right of the lower landing.
       Silvery beams of moonlight were streaming into the room through two tall windows, flooding the wall behind Lucas's desk where an impressively framed parchment sheet, decorated with colorful family crests, hung against the mahogany paneling. The other walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with leather-bound volumes and tattered paperbacks.
       Flipping on the desk-lamp switch, Blythe noticed with some amusement that a worn, leather-bound edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets was piled on top of the latest edition of a publication put out by the United Kingdom's Inland Revenue Service.
       Turning away from Luke's desk, Blythe padded softly around the leather wing chair to have a closer look at the huge genealogy chart that loomed on the wall nearby. She stared up at the myriad branches of the Barton-TrevelyanTeague family tree. Filled with a clandestine curiosity about Lucas Teague, she began to trace her finger along the line that commenced with her landlord's name and date of birth.
       He was nearly thirty-seven and a widower, as he had disclosed to her, for the chart noted that Lindsay Wingate Teague had died as Luke had disclosed, eighteen months previously. Obviously the ornate document had been carefully kept up-to-date for hundreds of years.
       In the section chronicling a cluster of Luke's eighteenthcentury relatives, a line ended with the name Garrett Teague sketched in elegant calligraphy. From there the line veered to the left and led to the names of Garrett's first cousins, Ennis Trevelyan and his elder brother, Christopher "Kit" Trevelyan.
       Blythe's hand began to tremble as she realized