The Fire Child: The 2017 gripping psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Ice Twins

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Read on for an exclusive extract from the chilling new psychological thriller from S. K. Tremayne (#litres_trial_promo)

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About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

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Author’s Note (#u3a7a5c6b-273f-5828-94a8-202012576fba)

Morvellan Mine is an invention. It is, however, clearly based on the spectacular and historic mines scattered along the rugged cliffs of West Penwith, Cornwall. The tin and copper mines of Botallack, Geevor and the Levant were particular inspirations.

Tin has been extracted from Cornwall for maybe four thousand years. At the age of ten my maternal grandmother Annie Jory worked as a ‘bal maiden’ – a girl employed to crush rocks with a hammer – in the rich mines of St Agnes, North Cornwall.

This book is, therefore, written in memory of my Cornish ancestors: farmers, fishermen, smugglers and miners.

Acknowledgements (#u3a7a5c6b-273f-5828-94a8-202012576fba)

I would like to thank, as ever, Eugenie Furniss, Jane Johnson, Sarah Hodgson, Kate Elton and Anne O’Brien for their wise advice and many editorial insights. My thanks also to Sophie Hannah.

The photos in the book, of historic Cornish mining scenes, were taken by the Cornish photographer, John Charles Burrow (1852–1914). The images date from the 1890s, when Burrow was commissioned by the owners of four of Cornwall’s deepest mines, Dolcoath, East Pool, Cook’s Kitchen and Blue Hills, to capture scenes of life underground.

The original photographs are now kept at the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, England.

178 Days Before Christmas (#u3a7a5c6b-273f-5828-94a8-202012576fba)

Morning

The tunnels go under the sea. It’s a thought I can’t easily dismiss. The tunnels go under the sea. For a mile, or more.

I’m standing in the Old Dining Room, where the windows of my enormous new home face north: towards the Atlantic, and the cliffs of Penwith, and a silhouetted blackness. This dark twinned shape is Morvellan Mine: the Shaft House, and the Engine House.

Even on a cloudless June day, like today, the ruins of Morvellan look obscurely sad, or oddly reproachful. It’s like they are trying to tell me something, yet they cannot and will not. They are eloquently muted. The rough-house Atlantic makes all the noise, the booming waves riding the tides above the tunnels.

‘Rachel?’

I turn. My new husband stands in the doorway. His shirt is blinding white, his suit is immaculate, nearly as dark as his hair, and the weekend’s stubble has gone.

‘Been looking for you everywhere, darling.’

‘Sorry. I’ve been wandering. Exploring. Your amazing house!’

‘Our house, darling. Ours.’

He smiles, comes close, and we kiss. It’s a morning kiss, a going-to-work-kiss, not meant to lead anywhere – but it still thrills me, still gives me that scary and delicious feeling: that someone can have such power over me, a power I am somehow keen to accept.

David takes my hand, ‘So. Your first weekend in Carnhallow …’

‘Mmm.’

‘So tell me – I want to know you’re all right! I know it must be challenging – the remoteness, all the work that needs doing. I’ll understand if you have misgivings.’

I lift his hand, and kiss it. ‘Misgivings? Don’t be daft. I love it. I love you and I love the house. I love it all, love the challenge, love Jamie, love the way we’re hidden away, love it love it love it.’ I look into his green-grey eyes, and I do not blink. ‘David, I’ve never been happier. Never in all my life. I feel like I have found the place I was meant to be, and the man I was meant to be with.’

I sound totally gushing. What happened to the feisty feminist Rachel Daly I used to be? Where has she gone? My friends would probably tut at me. Six months ago I would have tutted at me: at the girl who gave up her freedom and her job and her supposedly exciting London life to be the bride of an older, richer, taller widower. One of my best friends, Jessica, laughed with sly delight when I told her my sudden plans. My God, darling, you’re marrying a cliché!

That hurt for a second. But I soon realized it didn’t matter what my friends think, because they are still there, back in London, sardined into Tube trains, filing into dreary offices, barely making the mortgage every month. Clinging on to London life like mountaineers halfway up a rockface.

And I am not holding on for dear life any more. I’m far away, with my new husband and his son and his mother, down here at the very end of England, in far West Cornwall, a place where England, as I am discovering, becomes something stranger and stonier, a land of dreaming hard granite that glistens after rain, aland where rivers run through woods like deep secrets, where terrible cliffs conceal shyly exquisite coves, aland where moorland valleys cradle wonderful houses. Like Carnhallow.