He watched as she marched to the carriage, the familiar splash of the red cape spun away, each gust of wind driving like a cold knife into his heart, a defiant insignia against his will. The footman assisted her into the carriage and the door shut. He waited, waited for her to glance back, if only for a mere second, to see his heart tearing into pieces. The door shut with a jolt; the carriage lurched forward and sprang to the road, leaving him behind in a whirlwind of bitter salt rising from the ocean beyond the cliffs. He moved to the steps, ignoring the peel of thunder cracking over the leaping waves. Cormoore had descended into a mist of darkness; gloom replaced the summer. What he had shortly come to love had returned to the bitter pains of childhood misery. He was alone, unwanted, facing the storm brewing.

The story goes that the man, wrought with grief, had stood on the cliff’s edge for hours, contemplating the sheer drop below.

As lightning cracked the sky, the woman in her coach was jostled and harried by such forces. However, a particular crack of lightning, or thunderclap, or particularly large hailstone spooked the horse, throwing the coachman from his seat. He is not detailed in the stories, though some say he haunts the stables of Cormoore today.

The woman was seized by a fit of madness now she was not being overlooked by her coachman and her jailer. He had been sent by her father to break up the young lovers, to stop what he called her ‘errant impropriety’—but now she had taken the reins of her own carriage and rode bareback to the manor where her lover awaited her.

The horse was a magnificent creature, black as night save for where the storm had streaked his coat in silver-grey lashes, and the woman rode with her red cape flowing behind her as if a trail of blood.

Alas, when she arrived to find her lover, he had succumbed to the cold, chilled to the bone even as she held him in her warm arms, close to her loving bosom.

And, wracked with grief and pain, the red-cloaked woman threw herself from the cliffside in order to be with him in death. And so, she haunts the tides and coastline of Cormoore today.