is cold and tired. Granny Carne has been walking between Sadie and me, but now she steps aside. Sadie presses up to me, the way she always does. I stroke her warm golden back. Minute by minute, Sadie’s coming back to herself. Already her fur feels sleek and her eyes are brighter. She turns her head and looks at me as if to say, “It’s all right, I’m not going to leave you.” Why are dogs so forgiving? My eyes are prickly, but I‘m not going to cry. Sadie hates it when I cry.
Here’s the grey stone cottage that looks like part of the granite hill. Granny Carne pushes open the door and we go inside. There’s just one large room downstairs, painted white, with a stove to heat it and a few splashes of brilliant colour from the tablecloth and cushions. The room is very simple, but not bare. Everything looks worn smooth by years and years of use. I remember the last time I came here, with Conor, that hot summer day when Granny Carne first told us about our Mer inheritance. It was the day when Conor talked to the bees. That seems a long time ago.
“I’ll bring down an old blanket for Sadie,” says Granny Carne. “She’ll need to sleep the night here, to get her strength back.”
Granny Carne disappears upstairs before I can protest. Sadie can’t stay here overnight. We’ve got to get back before Mum realises I didn’t go to school today.
“You’ll be staying over too, Sapphire,” says Granny Carne, returning with a folded blanket. It doesn’t look like an old blanket. It’s made of thick, creamy wool and it looks as if it came off Granny Carne’s own bed. She lays it down by the stove for Sadie.
“I can‘t stay, Granny Carne. I’ve got to get back before it’s dark. Mum thinks I’m at school—”
“Sadie needs you here.”
“But Mum—”
“I’ll get a message to her. Soon as you’re settled, I’ll walk down to the churchtown and speak to Mary Thomas. She’s got a telephone.” Granny Carne says this as if telephones are something rare and undesirable. “Your mother will know you’re safe enough with me.”
Granny Carne has two bedrooms upstairs: a large one, and a smaller room which she calls the slip room. That’s where I’m going to sleep. I’m resigned to it now: I can’t leave Sadie. There’s a china washstand with a jug of water that Granny Carne has brought in from the trough where the spring rises. There’s no bathroom. When Granny Carne wants a bath, she heats water on the stove and fills an enamel bathtub, which hangs from a hook on the wall. It’s quite small with a shelf inside to sit on. Granny Carne calls it a hip bath. Try it yourself, my girl, she says, but I say that a wash will do me fine. There’s no toilet in the house either. The outside toilet, which Granny Carne calls the privy, is so cold that I hope I don’t have to go at night. She hasn’t even got any toilet paper, only cut-up squares of the Cornishman stuck on a nail.
It gets dark early. Sadie doesn’t want to eat, but she drinks some water. Granny Carne has gone down to the churchtown, so Sadie and I are alone in the cottage. I wonder what Mary Thomas will think when Granny Carne tells her we are staying here? As far as I know, nobody has ever stayed overnight at Granny Carne’s cottage. People respect Granny Carne, but they’re also afraid of her because of all that she knows. There are a lot of stories about the way she can see into the future, and heal wounds that ordinary medicine can’t cure. I don’t mean sicknesses like cancer; I mean sicknesses that are inside people’s minds. Granny Carne has a power with those.
I still don’t know whether or not I really believe that Granny Carne can see into the future. I’m sure that she can see and understand things which ordinary people can’t. She has gifts that come from the Earth. Years ago she might have been caught and burned as a witch, because she knows too much. That’s what Dad always said.
I follow Granny Carne in my mind as she goes down the path to the churchtown, and then as she takes the road round to the track which leads down to our cottage and Mary’s. Our cottage will have lights on in the windows by now. It gets darks early in November. Granny Carne knows her way in the dark. I’m glad that I don’t have to walk past there and see other people living in my home. I wonder if the curtains are the same? Those red checked curtains that Mum made when we were little. They always looked so welcoming with the light shining through them when we came home from school on winter afternoons.
I wonder if the people who are living in our cottage ever go down to our cove? I wonder if they will ever catch sight of Faro or Elvira sitting on the rocks by the mouth of the cove, where Conor and I first met them? I hope they don’t. I’m not just being selfish in hoping that. If they see the Mer, their lives won’t ever be the same again.
But Granny Carne’s cottage is at least two miles from the sea. I don’t know how far inland the power of Ingo can reach, but Granny Carne’s cottage definitely belongs to the Earth. Maybe that’s why Sadie is sleeping so peacefully by the stove. I don’t feel peaceful, though. I’m going to stay because of Sadie, but I wish I didn’t have to. I’m not at home here.
It takes a long time to get ready for the night at Granny Carne’s. I help her to carry in more wood from the stack in her woodshed, and fill the scuttle full of coal. The stove’s got to be kept going through the night. Before Granny Carne goes to bed, she riddles it out with an iron poker with a hook on its end. By the time Granny Carne finishes, the hook glows red. I help to shovel out the hot ash into the ash pan. Granny Carne says ash is good for the earth, and she’ll spread it on her vegetable patch tomorrow, when the ash is cold. She stokes up the stove with logs and a thick layer of fine coal, and closes the damper on the front.
Suddenly I remember something. “We had a stove like this when I was little, before Mum got storage heaters.”
“That was the way everywhere, before the electric came.” Granny Carne talks as if electricity has only just been invented. “They’ll never bring the electric all the way up here, but I don’t miss it,” Granny Carne continues. She has lit the paraffin lamps. I like the light they give. It’s soft and yellow and it gives warm colour to the white walls. She uses paraffin lamps downstairs and candles upstairs. “You don’t need a lot of light to sleep by,” she says.
The cottage smells of candles and wood smoke, paraffin and stone. There are big shadows in the corners of the room. It’s not a frightening place exactly, but it has too much power to be comfortable. I’m glad Sadie’s here. If I wake up in the night I’ll hear her breathing, and if I say her name she’ll wake up at once.
Granny Carne gets slowly to her feet from where she’s been kneeling by the stove. She mutters something, too quietly for me to hear.
“Now he’ll sleep through the night,” she says. “Praise fire and he’ll serve you well.”
“Does your fire ever go out?”
“He’s been alive as long as I have, my girl. Sometimes he’s burned low, but he’s never died.”
“Granny Carne? I ask hesitantly. “How long have you – I mean – how many years—”
She looks at me with her arms folded. Her fierce owl eyes are bright with amusement. She knows exactly what I want to know, because it’s what everybody in Senara has asked themselves, one time or another. How old is Granny Carne? How many years has she been living up there in her cottage, with people from the village coming up to see her privately when they have troubles to which they can’t find an answer? Years… decades… or even centuries?
“I’m as old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth, Sapphire,” she says. “Does that answer your question?”
“No,”
