The night had made good on its promise of frost. Gideon only realised this when he stood up from the rail and found the cotton of his pyjamas sticking to the wrought iron. His motives for following Zeke outside had been complex. There had been the element of seeing him off the premises, making sure every trace of him was gone. He shivered, rubbing his arms. The village was small this morning, the moor rising silent and vast as the sky beyond the furthermost rooftops. Sunlight on the ice-daubed crests only emphasised their loneliness. When Zeke’s tail lights had disappeared around the corner—and good riddance to him—loss had struck Gideon so sharply that he’d had to sit down.
He was freezing his butt to the rail. This was ridiculous. Carefully he detached himself and went inside. Tamsyn was crawling around in her playpen, chortling at things only she could see. The kettle was on again, and his kitchen and his morning were perfectly normal apart from the shattered crockery. Lee was sweeping up. Gideon grabbed a dustpan and brush and went to help him.
They worked in silence until every shard was gone. Gideon hoovered the sugar from around the table, Isolde snuffling at his heels. He set the toaster upright, checked that it was still working, and went to join Lee by the side of the pen. Together they stood and watched their daughter, who seemed to be putting on a display of ordinary babyhood for them, drooling and gnawing on a teething ring. After a moment she grinned and pointed at Gideon, as if assigning him to speak first. “You’re a troublemaker, you are,” he told her, resting his hands on the top bar of the pen.
“Oh, she’s a troublemaker?”
Reluctantly Gideon met Lee’s gaze. “I didn’t mean to throw him out of the house.” Lee’s eyebrows rose, and he reviewed his words and actions. “Okay. Yes, I did.”
“He’s lucky he doesn’t have the print of your size-ten on his backside.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Do you remember, a little while back—when I’d thought it was okay not to get our adoption papers formalised, and you disagreed?”
“Yeah. I remember that.”
“And I said afterwards that it was okay for you—nobody else, just you—to put your foot down with me?”
Gideon nodded miserably. He supposed it wasn’t okay all the time. That he could go too far, even for Lee. Despite their differences, Lee and Zeke had developed their own strong bond. “You heard what he said.”
“Yes. Sometimes you have to be boss. You were defending your family, and I’m grateful.”
Not as grateful as Gideon. He took a deep breath, oxygen and relief flaring. He put out an arm and Lee walked into it. “I see,” he said, holding him tight. “I can be boss, as long as it’s all right with you?”
“Something along those lines.”
“Do you see the irony of that?”
“Plainly. What are we going to do, Gid? He called her a demon. And that came from someone who loves her. Who loves us.”
“He’s a twat. He doesn’t love anybody.”
Lee led him back to the table. Neither of them quite wanted to sit down in the chair Zeke had knocked over in his wrath. Lee perched on the table edge, drawing Gideon to stand between his thighs. “That’s not true.”
“I know. But he was so terrified, or mind-blown, or whatever it was, that he forgot he loves her, and I was so pissed off with him that I never even found out why he came here in the first place.”
“He was worried about something.”
“Something to do with Eleanor. I thought he said Elowen and I nearly bloody died.” He rubbed his brow against Lee’s, feeling the rush and wash of his own fears reflected there, the margins of a storm-racked sea. “It’s going to be a problem, isn’t it—this new thing of Tamsyn’s?”
“Yes. I don’t think I’m being a fussy dad if I say that psychokinesis is not gonna help our kid integrate into society. We have to stop her.”
“How?”
“In so many ways she’s ordinary. And she’s just started doing this. Maybe we can stop her in the same way we would if she’d started doing anything else that was...” Lee’s voice roughened. “That was wrong.”
“You don’t think it’s wrong at all.”
“Nor do you, because she’s your baby and you can’t believe any harm of her. But she’s too little to control it, and even if she ever learns, she’ll terrify some people, and others—worst-case scenario—will want her strapped down in a military lab somewhere, being dissected for her weapons potential.”
“Fuck’s sake, love.”
“I said it was worst-case. Stop her, Gideon. Teach her not to, just like you taught her not to pull Isolde’s tail or crawl too near the fire. Don’t even think about it.”
Gideon straightened up. He let Lee go and went to crouch by the playpen. He had done those things, hadn’t he? They hadn’t been hard. He’d never questioned the necessity. The dog had a right to a peaceful life, and obviously his child, who was bright and cooperative, needed to learn not to burn herself. Tamsyn had taken these corrections in good part, as if she’d been able to look into her father’s mind and understand his intentions.
And that was a very good point. “Lee,” he said softly, not taking his eyes off the baby. “Why don’t you ever do the scoldings?”
“Scoldings?” Lee’s smile warmed his voice. “Is that what you call them?”
“Don’t avoid the question.”
“I was wondering when you’d notice. Which one of us gets called Dada around here?”
“Well—me, I suppose. But—”
“And she calls me Lee, as if she was my friend or my equal. In some ways that’s how she sees herself.”
Gideon fought back laughter. “I’d regret asking how she sees me, wouldn’t I?”
“No, you wouldn’t. She sees you as her dad. And part of that involves discipline.” Lee came and stood behind him, laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll never leave you alone with it, I promise, and things might change as she gets older. For now I’m more like a brother to her. We share too much of a wavelength for her to take me seriously.”
“All right. Telling her not to put food up her nose is one thing, though. How am I meant to stop her from levitating the furniture?”
“You know when she’s about to do it, don’t you?”
“Yes. I feel a kind of tugging in my head.”
“Well, your family’s as ancient and mixed up in old Cornish magic as mine. You’ve learned to see things and do things you never thought you could. If she tugs at you, can you... tug back, show her that this isn’t right?”
“I don’t know. I guess I could try.”
He stretched out a hand between the bars of the playpen. Tamsyn gave a gurgle of pleasure and crawled over. She grabbed his thumb in one fist and his little finger in the other. “Dada.”
“That’s right, sweet pie. Dada needs to tell you something.”
Words wouldn’t do it. He closed his eyes. Her clutch made it easy, opening up the channels between them he hadn’t dared acknowledge yet were there, because all he’d wanted to be was her father, the guy who went out to work and came back, who put a roof over her head and defended her from all the world’s ordinary badness. Fresh and bright in her memory he found the scene with Ezekiel. He saw the back of his brother’s skull, a lovely target, and there at last was the wondrous lost woollen ball. Disorientation swept him and he grabbed for the bars of the playpen with his free hand. He could lift the ball without touching it. His head throbbed with the knowledge of his power. He was one year old, practically everything he wanted hopelessly out of his reach, but now he could...
“No,” he said, right into the centre of her gift. He gathered it all up—the images, the temptation, the results, crushed them into nothing and made them go dark. “Tamsyn, no more. No.”
She let go of his hand. He surfaced from her strange waters, gasping. After a moment when he thought he might faint, he met and returned her wide, unblinking stare.
She burst into tears. Gideon jolted back—would have fallen if Lee hadn’t caught him. Shock rattled through him. Not his own: the grief of the small entity beginning to separate itself from the world, to individuate and think of itself as Tamsyn, most treasured focus of the giant loving god whose power could be summoned with the smallest smile or cry. “She feels as if I hit her with a thunderbolt,” Gideon choked out. “She doesn’t understand, any more than if I’d asked her to stop singing, or playing, or—or breathing.” A huge sob racked him, but he pushed away from Lee’s horrified embrace. “I’m all right. See to her.”
Lee scooped her out of the pen. He dropped to his knees beside Gideon, cradling her, handing her into his arms. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry!”
“Not your fault.” Gideon swiped a hand over his eyes—reached much more tenderly to brush the tears off Lee’s face. Awkwardly he took his husband and his wailing daughter into his arms. “But I tell you what—I’m done with this psychic-parenting lark. If I’ve got any kind of gift, I don’t want it, any more than we want her to have this.”
“God forgive me for asking you to do it.”
“You just wanted to keep her safe. Oh, don’t you cry, you daft sod!”
“Why not? Look what I did!”
“What we did. Please. I can’t cope with all three of us in floods.”
***
Calm restored, Lee made all of them a long-delayed breakfast. A post-earthquake hush reigned, pale sunlight finding its way over the flank of the hill and daubing the tiled kitchen walls. Gideon kept Tamsyn on his knee while they ate, gently correcting her aim as she dipped her toast soldiers into her egg. Every so often she would stop, lay down the bread and run her sticky fingers over his face, as if reassuring herself of a well-known landscape. Lee sat opposite, quiet but watchful, the newspaper in front of him no more than a prop. “You two all right over there?”
“Fine. Is that the property section?”
“Um... I’m not sure. Yeah.”
“That looks like the old Lowen place on Morgan’s Hill. Never thought I’d see that on the market.”
“It’s part of old man Bowe’s estate. Now that John and Bligh are gone, and Dev’s not capable of managing the land, they’re selling off some of the farm workers’ cottages.”
Gideon whistled softly. “Some cottage. That’s proper old Cornish Georgian, three hundred years old if it’s a day. Mellor-quarry granite, the one that goes rose pink in the sun because of the lichen that grows on it.”
“Sounds lovely.” Lee turned the page, paying attention this time. “Arched windows, two acres of land and an orchard. Standing derelict, looks like.”
“Yeah. It’s a shame.” Gideon squinted at the price tag. “Derelict or not, we’d have to sell a kidney. Zeke and I used to walk up there when we were kids, or he’d walk and give me a piggyback. We’d wander around and pretend we were lords of the manor. That was before he got too godly to scrump apples.”
“Oh, Gid. Did he text you yet?”
“Nope.”
“Do you think you ought to text him?”
“No. Let him steep for a while.” Absently Gideon wiped his daughter’s face clear of toast crumbs and egg yolk. “Tell you what—maybe we could all use an outing today after all. Still fancy a jaunt to Penzance?”
“I’d love it. She can wear that horrendous set of reindeer horns your ma bought her.. She might as well look like the spawn of Satan she is.”
“Can the pair of you stay out of trouble?”
“Yeah, we promise. I’ll keep her away from the main parades.”
“Hoorah! You hear that, Tamsie? You’re going to Montol after all.”
She threw her hands into the air and beamed. She had no clue what Montol was, but if her dad said it was good, she wanted it. Catching her mood and the outside edge of her power, the butter dish lifted gently into the air—then, just as carefully, went down. She twisted round on Gideon’s lap so she could see him, anxiety shadowing her silver-moss gaze.
“It’s all right.” He kissed the top of her head. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with you, but it really is all right, sweetheart.” He looked up wryly at Lee. “Don’t know why I bothered chucking poor Zeke out of the house. If he’d really been bothering her, she could’ve picked him up and thrown him out herself.”