Chapter One

Morvoren: Cornish compound name meaning mermaid or sea-maiden

Morvoren n.f morvoronyon n.pl– mermaid

The Present Day

Why, oh, why had she agreed to accompany Josh on this tourist sea fishing trip out from Penzance? What's more, to do it on the very last day of their holiday, when she could have been topping up her tan in the tiny garden of their holiday cottage with a good book. Not only was she feeling seasick, thanks to the little fishing boat's diesel fumes and the strong stench of fish, but her poor heart kept doing a wild lurch every time the vessel bucked on the waves. And on top of that, she hadn't been able to locate any lifejackets.

She'd turned to Josh on the quayside as he held his hand out to help her on board. "Where are the lifejackets? I want to be wearing one. You know how I feel about water."

He'd laughed in his irritating way, as though she were an idiot for wanting to feel safe. "They'll be stored down below. This is a fishing trip, not the Titanic's maiden voyage—you're not going to need one." After a week of being laughed at, Morvoren was beginning to think their relationship doomed. Dumping him once they were safely home was something she was looking forward to.

Impervious to her suffering, the captain of the little fishing boat nodded his grizzled head towards the line of towering cliffs in the distance. The eyes of every shorts-clad tourist on the boat followed his pointing finger. "We'll head inland, now. You often get small shoals of mackerel near the cliffs. It'll be a bit rocky with this swell, but it'll be worth it."

Would it? Morvoren doubted it very much.

She'd only agreed to this trip because Josh had begrudgingly come on that pony trek with her. "I went riding with you, didn't I?" he'd wheedled. "I put up with getting a sore bum on that flipping horse, just so you could live your dream and ride on a beach. You owe me big time."

Backed into a corner, she'd said yes in a moment of foolhardy gratitude, when what she should have said wasn't repeatable.

Not content with her agreement, he'd rubbed in his victory. "You need to face your fears, Morvoren. You'll really love fishing and won't even notice the water." And his crowning argument. "Your mother named you after a mermaid, after all, and you kind of look like one, being so pretty and with all that long blonde hair." Something he'd repeated several times already this morning as though flattery would get him places.

Ha, bloody ha.

For the hundredth time, Morvoren scanned the deck and wheelhouse, searching for a locker she could fish a lifejacket out of in an emergency. Like right now. The way the little fishing boat was heaving on the considerable swell smacked her as worthy of emergency measures. Although the other half-dozen fishing tourists, who'd joined them on board an hour ago, seemed oblivious to the imminent danger of sinking. And Josh was totally ignoring her, chatting to a big bloke in a floral shirt about how to attach their smelly bait to the hooks.

What would happen if the boat capsized and sank? She, for one, would drown, because she couldn't swim. And the reason she couldn't swim was because water had always terrified her. So much so that she never went farther into the surf than ankle deep and suspected all waves of either harboring sharks or threatening to wash her out to sea.

Josh caught her looking at him, where he was busy unhooking a wriggling mackerel from his line, and gave her a condescending grin. "See. I told you it'd be fine. You just had to face your fear to get over it. Like those people did in that TV program. You're missing out on the fun just sitting there at the back on your own. Why don't you come over here with us, and I'll bait you a line? I told you it'd be easy to get over your silly little fears."

Really? She'd like to have seen him have to face up to a genuine phobia.

She forced a smile onto her face. "No, thank you. I'm fine here." Where she could hang on tight.

The engine note changed down to a gentle hum as the captain let it idle. With his sea-booted mate, he emerged from the small wheelhouse, ready to help everyone set up their lines again. They already had a good few iridescent, silvery-blue mackerel flip-flopping in the locker down the center of the boat.

"See this here cove." He raised his deep, gravelly voice above the mingled sounds of the engine, the crashing of the waves at the cliffs' feet, and the screech of greedy gulls overhead, eager to partake of the catch. "There's a story about this cove. It's been called Smuggler's Cove for a good two hundred years, but before that, it were just Nanpean Cove." He had everyone's attention, even Josh's. For a moment.

"'Tis said it's haunted by the ghosts of the smugglers who was caught by the soldiers and revenue men an' hanged in Bodmin jail back in 1811. Some of them was even killed right there on that beach." He pointed at the thin crescent of silver sand. "It were part of a county-wide clamp down on what were known back then as ‘free trade.' And this here were the biggest catch o' free traders the revenue men ever had around these parts, with a man from ev'ry family in Nanpean village involved. A man from ev'ry family hanged."

Only yesterday Morvoren had been in Penzance's little museum while Josh fished off the harbor wall, and seen a whole display about smuggling. Part of it had covered this particular story, so it was fresh in her mind. Hadn't it said twenty men had hanged and three or four were killed on the beach, with a copy of an old portrait of one of them? To take her mind off her fears, she concentrated on remembering the details.

Up close to the wheelhouse, Josh scowled in annoyance at the delay to his fishing. He hadn't been interested in going to the museum with her yesterday, and she'd realized early in their holiday that while he was near water, unless the talk was about fish, he had the attention span of one of their brethren—a goldfish.

The captain smacked his lips in relish at the tragedy of the story. "Local legend do say there were an informer amongst the smuggler's own ranks, and he were the only man not hanged. The local villagers rumbled him, though, and chucked him off that cliff up there on the right." He pointed a gnarled finger. "Folks around here have never forgot their dead, an' 'tis said the smugglers' ghosts do walk the path up from the beach onto the moor ev'ry moonless night, the sound of their ponies' muffled hooves an' their quiet whispers all you'll hear."

"Like anyone cares," Josh said, rather too audibly.

Ignoring his rudeness, Morvoren stared into the cove. How inviting that curve of sand looked, where it lay between the cliffs and the narrow valley up which those long-ago smugglers had been intending to lead their ponies. How quiet and peaceful. If only she were on that beach instead of here in this unstable fishing boat.

The story told, the captain and his mate turned their attention to their passengers, helping them bait their lines and cast. Not that Josh needed any help. He was busy showing off to the laughing tourists that he knew what he was doing.

Selfish git.

With everyone happily oblivious to her woes, and with their fishing rods poised to add more to the mackerel haul, all Morvoren could do was keep hanging onto the side. The only one not fishing and the only one sick and the only one who didn't like this one little bit.

As the idling fishing boat tossed on the swell, getting far too close to those threatening cliffs for comfort, a wave struck her sideways on, and a sheet of cold spray flew up, spattering one side of Morvoren's face. What a very bad idea this had been. The diesel stink of the engine fumes mingled unattractively with the strong stench of fish and seaweed. No wonder she was feeling so sick. Bloody Josh and his love of fishing.

An even bigger wave splashed up, as the boat, with no one at the helm, turned against the current. The seawater soaked the deck and all down one side of Morvoren's already damp T-shirt and jeans, wetting one foot and plastering her long hair to the side of her face. Some of it went in her mouth and eyes, so she screwed them shut and spat violently. Goodness knew where the local towns' sewage went—probably straight into the sea.

She was still wiping wet hair off her face and clinging onto the slippery wooden rail with only one hand, when a second, much larger wave hit the boat side-on.

A few excited squeals and some hysterical laughter exploded from the fishing tourists. The boat rose into the air on the increasing swell, and Morvoren's precarious, one-handed hold slipped. The deck reared under her, propelling her upwards as though she were on a trampoline, then dropped away and twisted beneath where her feet should have landed. When she came down, the boat wasn't there anymore. Instead, cold water rushed up to meet her and the bright blue of the sky vanished into a blur of green.

Water went up her nose as she sank like a stone, the sea swallowing her.

The shimmering sunlight at the surface vanished, the water enveloping her like a cold bath. The underside of the boat hung suspended above her, its bottom red-painted and fat as she plummeted away from it.

For a long moment, a curious calmness had her in its hold. This was it. The end. Every childhood nightmare had been a premonition of this moment.

No. What was she doing? She had to fight to save herself.

With a burst of energy born of terror, she thrashed out with arms and legs in a wild attempt to stop this sinking and battle back to the surface. People floated, didn't they? Or so every swimming instructor who'd ever tried to cure her of her fear had reassured her. You won't sink. You're safe. How wrong had they been?

But however hard she kicked out, she kept on sinking. Was a whirlpool sucking her into a vortex she'd never escape from? Was she caught in some deadly undercurrent that refused to let her back to the surface? Waves of pure terror surged through her body, icy in their tight hold, freezing her brain and numbing every thought process.

Her legs were losing strength, and something inexorable was pulling her down, dragging her to her death, determined to drown her. She peered through the murky gloom. Rope, or maybe an old fishing net, had snared her feet, perhaps snagged on a rock or a wreck, lurking below the water, waiting to catch itself a swimmer.

The urge to breathe, to open her mouth and let in that murderous seawater, was overwhelming. A dim awareness surfaced in her fuddled brain. The more she struggled, the faster she was using up what little oxygen remained in her lungs. No. She had to breathe. She just had to.

The world darkened, her vision blurred, and the urge to take that breath magnified. She couldn't keep her mouth and nose closed any longer or she'd explode, and then she'd be dead anyway. She had to breathe. If only she had gills like a fish…

She opened her mouth.

Water rushed in, not cold and wet but hot and burning. No life-giving oxygen to save her. For a brief moment that stretched into an eternity, she drifted. It must be true that when you were dying your life flashed before your eyes, because here it was, galloping past in a thousand brief flashes from her first day at nursery school and Mum explaining for the umpteenth time that, no, it wasn't Morwen or Morwenna, but Morvoren. Then, on to her first boyfriend and those furtive kisses behind the cricket pavilion on the school playing field, followed by university, the car crash that robbed her of her parents, and finally, meeting her best friend, Tina, and renting their little flat together.

But it was over in a moment that stretched on forever, and darkness descended, darkness and nothing. If this was death, then it wasn't as bad as she'd thought it would be.