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

My daydreaming – half anxious, half rapturous – leads me to the corner of the Drawing Room, and a small, polished wooden sidetable. Cassie the Thai housekeeper has set a silver vase here, replete with lilies and roses. Yet the vase doesn’t look right. So maybe I can begin here. With this. Just this. One step, then another.

Putting my phone down, I adjust the vase – centring the vessel carefully on the sidetable. Yet it’s still not correct. Perhaps it should be on the left, off centre? A good photographer never puts her subject smack-bang in the middle.

For ten minutes I try to find the best position for this vase. I imagine Nina Kerthen, behind me, shaking her head in polite dismay. And now the self-doubt returns. I am sure that Nina Kerthen would have got this right. She would have done it impeccably. With her blonde hair harping across her slanted, clever blue eyes, as she squinted, and concentrated.

Abandoning my job, I gaze down, sighing. The varnished yew wood of the table reflects my face in its darkness. A crack runs the length of the table, breaking the image in two. Which is appropriate.

People tell me I am attractive, and yet I never truly feel beautiful: not with my red hair and my peppering of freckles, and that white Celtic skin that never takes a tan. Instead I feel flawed, or broken. Cracked. And when I look very hard at myself I can’t see any beauty at all: only the deepening lines by my eyes, far too many for my age – only thirty.

A delicious breeze stirs me. It comes from the open window, carrying the scents of Carnhallow’s flower gardens, and it dispels my silliness, and reminds me of my prize. No. I am not broken, and this is enough self-doubt. I am Rachel Daly, and I have overcome greater challenges than sourcing the correct wallpaper, or working out what a tazza is.

The seventy-eight bedrooms can wait, likewise the West Wing. I need some fresh air. Pocketing my phone, I go to the East Door, push it open to the serenity of the sun, so gorgeous on my upturned face. And then the south lawns. The wondrous gardens.

The gardens at Carnhallow were the one thing, I am told, that David’s father Richard Kerthen kept going, even as he gambled away the last of the Kerthen fortune, en route to a heart attack. And Nina apparently never did much with the gardens. Therefore, out here, I can enjoy a purer possession: I can wholeheartedly admire the freshly cut green grass shaded by Cornish elms, the flowerbeds crowded with summer colours. And I can straightaway love, as my own, the deep and beautiful woods: guarding and encircling Carnhallow as if the house is a jewel-box hidden in a coil of thorns.

‘Hello.’

A little startled, I turn. It’s Juliet Kerthen: David’s mother. She lives, alone and defiant, in her own self-contained apartment converted from a corner of the otherwise crumbling and unrestored West Wing. Juliet has the first signs of Alzheimer’s, but is, as David phrases it, ‘in a state of noble denial’.

‘Lovely day,’ she says.

‘Gorgeous, isn’t it? Yes.’

I’ve met Juliet a couple of times. I like her a lot: she has a vivid spirit. I do not know if she likes me. I have been too timid to go further, to really make friends, to knock on her front door with blackberry-and-apple pie. Because Juliet Kerthen may be old and fragile, but she is also daunting. The suitably blue-eyed, properly cheekboned daughter of Lord Carlyon. Another ancient Cornish family. She makes me feel every inch the working-class girl from Plumstead. She’d probably find my pie a bit vulgar.

Yet she is perfectly friendly. The fault is mine.

Juliet shields her eyes from the glare of the sun with a visoring hand. ‘David always says that life is a perfect English summer day. Beautiful, precisely because it is so rare and transient.’

‘Yes, that sounds like David.’

‘So how are you settling yourself in, dear?’

‘Fine. Really, really well!’

‘Yes?’ Her narrowed eyes examine me, but in a companionable way. I assess her in return. She is dressed like an elderly person, yet very neatly. A frock that must be thirty years old, a maroon and cashmere cardigan, then sensible, expensive shoes, probably hand-made for her in Truro forty years ago, and now, I guess, polished by Cassie, who looks in every day to make sure the old lady is alive.

‘You don’t find it too imposing?’

‘God no, well, yes, a bit but …’

Juliet indulges me with a kind smile. ‘Don’t let it get to you. I remember when Richard first brought me home to Carnhallow. It was quite the ordeal. That last bit of the drive. Those ghastly little moorland roads from St Ives. I think Richard was rather proud of the remoteness. Added to the mythic quality. Would you like a cup of tea? I have excellent pu’er-cha. I get bored with drinking it alone. Or there is gin. I am in two minds.’

‘Yes. Tea would be brilliant. Thanks.’

I follow her around the West Wing, heading for the north side of the house. The sun is restless and silvery on the distant sea. The clifftop mines are coming into view. I am chattering away about the house, trying to reassure Juliet, and maybe myself, that I am entirely optimistic.

‘What amazes me is how hidden it is. Carnhallow, I mean. Tucked away in this sweet little valley, a total suntrap. But you’re only a couple of miles from the moors, from all that bleakness.’

She turns, and nods. ‘Indeed. Although the other side of the house is so completely different. It’s actually rather clever. Richard always said it proved that the legend was true.’

I frown. ‘Sorry?’

‘Because the other side of Carnhallow looks north, to the mines, on the cliffs.’

I shake my head, puzzled.

She asks, ‘David hasn’t told you the legend?’

‘No. I don’t think so. I mean, uhm, he told me lots of stories. The rowans. The evil Jago Kerthen …’ I don’t want to say: Maybe we got so drunk on champagne on the first date and then we had such dizzying sex, I forgot half of what he told me – which is totally possible.

Juliet turns towards the darkened shapes of the mines. ‘Well, this is the legend. The Kerthens, it is said, must have possessed a wicked gift, a sixth sense, or some kind of clairvoyance: because they kept hitting lodes of tin and copper, when other speculators went bust. There is a Cornish name for those with the gift: tus-tanyow. It means the people of fire, people with the light.’ She smiles, blithely. ‘You’ll hear locals telling the story in the Tinners – that’s a lovely pub, in Zennor. You must try it, but avoid the starry gazy pie. Anyway, Richard used to rather drone on about it, about the legend. Because the Kerthens built their house right here, on the bones of the old monastery, facing Morvellan, yet that was centuries before they discovered the tin at Morvellan. So if you are suggestible it rather implies that the legend is true. As if the Kerthens knew they were going to find tin. I know, let’s go and have some pu’er-cha and gin, perhaps they go together.’

She walks briskly around the north-west corner of Carnhallow. I follow, eager for the friendship, and the distraction. Because her story disquiets me in a way I can’t exactly explain.

It is, after all, just a silly little story about the historic family that made so much money, by sending those boys down those ancient mines. Where the tunnels run deep under the sea.

162 Days Before Christmas (#ulink_c42610db-64b6-508f-9ab6-fe729cfe9502)

Morning

David is drawing me. We’re sitting in the high summer sun on the south lawns, a jug of freshly squeezed peach-and-lemon juice on a silver tray set down on the scented grass. I’m wearing a wicker hat, at an angle. Carnhallow House – my great and beautiful house – is glowing in the sunlight. I have certainly never felt posher. I have possibly never felt happier.

‘Don’t move,’ he says. ‘Hold for a second, darling. Doing your pretty upturned nose. Noses are tricky. It’s all about the shading.’

He looks my way with a concentrated gaze then returns to the drawing paper, his pencil moving swiftly, shading and hatching. He is a very good artist, probably a much better artist – as I am realizing – than me. More naturally talented. I can draw a little but not as skilfully as this, and certainly not as fast.

Discovering David’s artistic side has been one of the unexpected pleasures of this summer. I’ve known all along he was interested in the arts: after all, I first met him at a private view in a Shoreditch gallery. And when we were in Venice he was able to show me all his favourite Venetian artworks: not just the obvious Titians, and Canelettos, but the Brancusis in the Guggenheim, the baroque ceiling of San Pantalon, or a ninth-century Madonna in Torcello, with its watchful eyes of haunted yet eternal love. A mother’s never-ending love. It was so lovely and sad it made me want to cry.

Yet I didn’t properly realize that he was good at making art until I moved here to Carnhallow. I’ve seen some of David’s youthful work on the Drawing Room wall, and in his study: semi-abstract paintings of Penwith’s carns and moors and beaches. They are so good I thought, at first, that they were expensive professional pieces, bought at a Penzance auction house by Nina. Part of her painstaking restoration, her dedication to this house.

‘There,’ he says. ‘Nose done. Now the mouth. Mouths are easy. Two seconds.’ He leans back and looks at the drawing. ‘Hah. Aced it.’

He sips some peach-and-lemon contentedly. The sun is warm on my bare and tanning shoulders. Birds are singing in Ladies Wood. I wouldn’t be surprised if they went into close harmony. This is it. The perfect moment of good luck. The man, the love, the sun, the beautiful house in a beautiful garden in a beautiful corner of England. I have an urge to say something nice, to repay the world.

‘You know you’re really good.’

‘Sorry, darling?’

He is sketching again. Deep in masculine concentration. I like the way he focuses. Frowning, but not angry. Man At Work. ‘Drawing. I know I’ve told you this before – but you’re seriously talented.’

‘Meh,’ he says, like a teenager, but smiling like an adult, his hand moving briskly across the page. ‘Perhaps.’

‘You never wanted to do it for a living?’

‘No. Yes. No.’

‘Sorry?’