The Fire Child by S. K. Tremayne

verdict of accidental death. Nina Kerthen was drunk, her judgement was marred, and she therefore drowned, after falling down the Jerusalem Shaft of Morvellan Mine. Her body had sunk in the freezing water and would probably never be retrieved: lost as it was in the unnumbered tunnels and adits of the undersea mine, shifted by unknowable tides and currents. Trapped beneath Carnhallow and Morvellan, for ever.
    I shiver, profoundly. The wind off the bay is cutting up, and venomed with hints of rain. I need to do my tasks, and get back to the house. Binning my empty cup, I go downstairs and do my shopping and the shopping is done in seventeen minutes. It is one advantage of my frugality, born of my impoverished upbringing. A relic of Rachel Daly, from south-east London. I rarely get distracted in supermarkets.
    Spinning the car on to the main road, I take a last look at St Michael’s Mount, where a shaft of September sun is shining on the subtropical garden of the St Levans, a family five hundred years
younger
than the Kerthens.
    Then the clouds open, and the sun shines on us all. And I realize what I need to do. I believe David’s answers, but Jamie still needs help. My own stepson unnerves me, and that has to be explained: I need to read him, to decipher him, to understand. Maybe David doesn’t need to know any more. But I do.

102 Days Before Christmas
    Afternoon
    It’s taken me a week to pluck up the courage to come in here. David’s study. Where I will maybe learn more about Jamie. My husband has come and gone from London, the days have come and gone, palpably shortening now, I’ve done the school runs and talked to the gardener and read my books on marquetry, carpentry, and masonry, and I have hesitated maybe twelve times in front of this imposing door.
    The house is deserted. Jamie is still at school; Cassie has gone shopping. Juliet is with friends for the day, in St Ives. I have an hour at least. So now I must do it. I know I am, arguably, going behind David’s back, but the grief in this house is too intense for me to keep asking questions, directly. That way is too painful for everyone. So I must be more subtle. Discreet.
    A fine but angled autumn sun makes a rich amber patch of light on the polished floorboards. These boards creak as I step forward, and open the door.
    I’ve only been in this spacious, cedar-scented room three or four times before, and always in David’s presence. Now I gaze about, in faint but definite awe. There are several ancient portraits on the wood-panelled walls. Clumsy, vernacular portraits of patriarchal Kerthens: portraits of rich men who could only commission very provincial painters.
    I know the biggest and darkest of these portraits shows Jago Kerthen, the man who sank the Jerusalem Shaft in the 1720s. He had a reputation, David says, for severity, if not brutality. Damning men to death down risky pits, urging them on through day and night, his troops of willing Cornishmen with their tallow candles glued on to their little hats. Jago Kerthen’s pale blue eyes glint with avarice in the gold-framed portrait: however clumsy the artist, he caught that look well enough. Yet it was Jago Kerthen’s appalling greed that turned the Kerthen thousands into millions in the early eighteenth century.
    David has positioned the portrait so that it stares out of the tall sash window, down the last of Carnhallow Valley to the just-visible blackness of Morvellan Mine. And then onwards, to the shimmering wastes of the sea. The greedy and violent Jago Kerthen is staring at the very same mine he sank into the granite.
    I’ve no doubt this positioning is deliberate.
    The rest of the room is also very David. A couple of fine abstract paintings, possibly even a Mondrian. The floor is softened by some of those Azeri rugs David likes, apparently superior to Turkish or Persian rugs. As I look down, I can hear him airily explaining, as is his wont, ‘Oh, them, yes, the rugs, I bought them in