Free The Penwyth Bride (The Witch's Daughter Book 1) by Ani Bolton Page B

across her face as she noticed my reaction. “Roger is not like the rest of us, you may have noticed.”
    “Oh, no?” I looked as encouraging as I could. I remembered her incautious comments of the previous evening, and I burned with curiosity.
    “Mama would be unforgivably angry if she caught me gossiping . . . but it is such a monstrous horrid tale!”
    She shuddered with relish.
    “You may not know, but Papa’s line of the family is the degraded one. Roger holds the property from the Penwyth line direct. In fact, all this around us--” she swept her arm wide in the direction of the moor and the distant horizon where I knew the gulls screamed and the sea crashed against the rock “--this entire Hundred took its name from a long-ago prince of Penwyth.”
    Just as I suspected, I thought with satisfaction.
    “Roger calls Damon and me cousin, but the fact is we are very distantly related. Roger lives on the original property, Lyhalis. It overlooks the sea.”
    “Lyhalis overlooks the sea? How thrilling.”
    “I hate the salt air. Anyway, to the . . . murder.” She lowered her voice dramatically, and I leaned closer.
    “Heron Penwyth, Roger’s father, brought home a woman from the outer islands, a miserable place with stunted people, Mama says, but Heron had fallen madly in love with Morgreth, as she was called. They say she had a rope of golden hair as thick as a man’s arm, with green eyes like a cat’s.”
    “Green eyes,” I repeated.
    “They also say she bewitched Heron, for no one trusts the folk of the Isles. Well, she must have done so, for he married his lowborn lover, and none of the Polite ever visited him again. When Roger was born, there was no christening in the church, nor any At Home celebration, though they did throw coin before the vestry in Lyhalis village. No one had ever seen Roger publicly, and it seemed like they were hiding him. The gossips also say that my father had actually gone down to Lyhalis to see Roger, for my father had always remained on good terms with Heron . . . perhaps he was the only one to do so, for Roger’s father sounds like a nasty brute not unlike Roger himself. But Heron threw him out.”
    “How odd!”
    Susannah’s voice dropped to a whisper. “But the story grows odder. Lindy Tompkins, the woman who brings the fresh rushes, told me that Morgreth had put a spell on Heron to drive him to madness so that she could have Lyhalis all to herself. Heron had taken to marking his arms with a penknife, like he was drawing on his own flesh!”
    I gasped, and she shivered deliciously.
    “Yes, and he had begun to let his hair grow in, and to avoid wearing his wig. Lindy Tompkins confirms that my father visited Lyhalis as often as every day, he had grown so worried about Heron and his mad behavior. But Morgreth put such a strong spell on Heron that he was enslaved to her will and would hear nothing against his wife. Then, one night, Morgreth acted.”
    I clutched the neglected linen on my lap.
    “Morgreth bewitched Heron to drown himself in Lyhalis cove. Oh, it was raining cats and kittens, Lindy says, on a black night with a blood moon rising. But Morgreth had not bargained that her spell might take a turn. Heron brought Roger with him down to the cove . . . and there he tried to drown his own son.”
    A muffled moan escaped my lips.
    “Yes, horrible,” Susannah agreed with a smile of relish. “But Morgreth, seeing that her spell had gone awry, saved Roger. No one knows how, for Heron was a big man, they say, and in his prime quite strong, but she wrested her baby away from her husband as they floundered in the rising surf. Heron lost his balance and fell under the waves, but Morgreth managed to put Roger on the flat rock shelf that juts out from the cliff’s edge in Lyhalis cove. Somehow she lost her grip and fell back into the water where the current pulled her under.”
    “Oh no,” I whispered.
    “Oh yes. Heron and Morgreth both drowned. They never found their