Page 49 of Down to a Sunlit Sea
Aleksey held his thumb and forefinger up as if he was actually measuring something. Ben was watching him, massaging his hand, which was his new unconscious habit. It beat running his fingers around an old scar on his wrist. Ben didn’t need to do that now. For better or for worse, after all.
‘Run it by me again.’
Aleksey smiled at Ben’s mimicry of one of his sayings. ‘Apartments?’
Ben cast his eyes over to the building they were standing in the shadow of. ‘You have got to be kidding me. Who’d want to live in this hid—?’
‘Ack, you can be so boring sometimes, Benjamin. Come.’ He strode off towards the smaller courtyard of the asylum on Benhar—or at least he hoped he was heading in that direction. Who knew with this place?
Ben caught up to him. ‘What’s going on? I mean, I know you never tell me anything, but seeing as we’re here, and you’re walking around as if you own the place, I—’
‘I do—own it.’ He smirked.
‘Huh? I don’t believe you. He’dneversell it—and particularly not toyou.’
‘Yes, well, Benjamin, you do not understand the meaning of true power. Someone told me recently it was knowledge, which worried me for a while, as I’d always assumed it was money. So I put my theory to the test—and I was right.’ He did a bit more faux measuring-up of windows. ‘Eighty million pounds a year.’
‘What! You’re going to pay the fucking King of England eighty million bloody quid a year! Are you kidding me?’
Aleksey gave him a subtle glance. ‘I meant that wasallhe was offered to lease it—eighty million. I outbid them.’
‘You’re leasing Benhar asylum? What the fuck for?’
‘Stop swearing. No, not leasing. I offered him alotmore—I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse to buy it outright. I went…high. Phillipa will not want for anything ever again. So that’s an unfortunate downside, I suppose…’
‘You’veboughtBenhar Asylum?’
‘I have. The whole headland beyond the causeway.’
‘What the hell for?’
‘Huh, if you cannot imagine why, I wonder what you will make of my other purchase on the top of a Cornish cliff. Oh, good timing.’ He turned Ben’s head with a palm to his cheek, and they both watched Morwenna Eames coming over the rubble-strewn courtyard.
‘Hello, Ben? How’s the hand?’ She was laughing as she asked this. His lie of the minor propeller accident had not withstood Molly’s first visit to the bookshop afterDaddy’saccident. Unfortunately, the version she’d been told (he had no idea by whom), had seen her father’s fingers being bitten off by the great white shark with him,Papa, then having to thrust his entire arm into the shark’s mouth to pull them out again, whereupon he’d sewed them back on for Ben with some dental floss. So this was the version she’d told Morwenna. Her amusement told him she had come to a reasonable assumption herself as the cause of the injury which lay somewhere between these two extremes.
Ben held his hand out to her. Morwenna was gracious enough to lie, ‘Are you sure it was that one? Looks no different. So, why am I here?’ She glanced up at the forbidding granite façade and shuddered. ‘This place gives us all the creeps. Growing up on St Mary’s it was like the local bogyman, you know? Don’t do that or you’ll end up in the asylum overthere. They say it’s haunted.’
Aleksey smiled inwardly. ‘That’s a shame then.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’ve bought it for you.’ Once again, her mouth only opened a little. Her expression somewhat mirrored Ben’s, who was looking between them like a cat watching a ping-pong game. Did it make him a very, very bad man if he hoped Ben was jealous?
‘When I sayyou, I don’t mean personally, of course—no, I was thinking more along the lines of you as inFleghes Kernow: your little Cornish revolutionary army... Perhaps…oh, I don’t know, just a random thought…what about a study centre? We renovate it and turn it into a place where students interested in…oh, I don’t know, just a random thought…history, religion, astronomy, mathematics, genealogy, science…could come and ask questions. Here’s an idea…just a random thought…a centre dedicated to the study of Lyonesse? It would need a professor to run it, of course. Or an ex one of those, I suppose. Maybe a local historian who has to self-publish her lurid trash…?’ She had a good right hook when she used it, and it caught his arm just as hard as his other half’s chastisements always did. He flicked his gaze across to Ben as they watched the new director of the Randal Eames Centre for Kindred Studies make her way into its gloomy interior.
After a moment, he gently took hold of Ben’s hand, treating it like the truly precious object it was.
‘What’s wrong,min skat?’
Ben shook himself. ‘I was just wondering if we ought to go and find her.’
Aleksey turned his head to study the silent asylum. There was no need. Heownedit now. And with the help of this man, who had done no less than this forhislife, he would turn its dark history into a future filled with light and with promise. And as Morwenna had quoted of Lyonesse in one of her books, which he’d had a great deal of time in bed to actually read now given other circumstances…
Then might we live together as one life, and reigning with one will in everything, have power on this dark land to lighten it, and power on this dead world to make it live.
The End
