Authors: Susanna Kearsley
Time blinked. And I was walking down the shaded road outside Trelowarth House, still in the lovely flowered dress whose thin and fraying hem now brushed the gravel of the drive where I stopped, my legs now trembling much too violently to carry me.
The small dog Samson bounded with his usual exuberance around the corner of the house, tail wagging, but a few feet off he paused and laid his ears back slightly.
‘It’s all right,’ I reassured him as I crouched and held my fingers out towards him. They were shaking, and I couldn’t make them stop, just as I couldn’t stop the coldness that had started creeping through my body, settling in my bones. I drew a breath and once again, but this time for myself and not the dog, I whispered, ‘It’s all right.’
The room beside my own was bright with midday sunshine, but I still felt cold. I’d started to think I might never feel warm again. Each time I started relaxing, the thought of how close I had come to disaster this morning would set off a new round of shivers.
A burst of hard wind from the sea set the windowpanes rattling as I moved farther in, stirring dust from the floorboards with each careful step. No one knew I was in here. The door to the passage was closed; I’d come through the connecting door from my own bedroom, with Ann Butler’s flowered gown bunched in my arms.
This was the second of her gowns that I had taken from the time where it belonged, and it seemed right somehow to bring it here to hide, inside this room that had been hers.
Against the far wall, in the space below the attic stairs, a sloping built-in cupboard held the out-of-season clothes that no one needed till the winter. Shoving the mass of woven sleeves and woolly things aside, I tugged a hanger free and slipped the flowered gown onto it carefully, then slid the hanger back in place behind the other clothing, where the faded blue gown and the banyan hung already, quietly concealed.
My fingers lightly brushed the silk of Daniel’s banyan, and I closed my eyes. I felt his presence here more strongly than I had before, so strongly that it almost seemed that if I were to close my eyes and wish with all my heart, then maybe… maybe…
‘So you’re back.’ Claire’s voice, approving. Coming through the open doorway from my bedroom she asked, ‘Did you have a nice walk?’
I closed the cupboard door as nonchalantly as I could and turned, my eardrums buzzing from the sudden surge of guilty blood pressure. I gave a nod and told Claire, ‘Yes, I went up to the church.’ It seemed an age ago to me. I cleared my throat and added, ‘Mr. Teague was there. He hasn’t changed.’
Claire smiled. ‘He never will, you know. I’ve no doubt when he finally passes over he’ll keep walking through that churchyard every day in spirit, keeping things in order. Was he pleased to see you? I expect he was. He likes a bit of company, does Mr. Teague.’ Her keen glance swept the little room. ‘God, look at all this dust. I must have words with Mark and Susan’s cleaner when she comes. I’m sure that cupboard wants a clearing out as well.’
I forced a shrug. ‘You’re better off to leave that till the winter, aren’t you? When you take the coats out and put all the summer things away.’
‘Well, I suppose.’ She turned her gaze on me instead. ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you with your hair up, Eva. What a lovely way to do it.’
I was taken by surprise. I had forgotten. In my hurry to get safely back inside the house before somebody saw me and to change into my proper clothes, I’d overlooked my hair. Reaching up to make certain, I fingered a hairpin and said, ‘It’s a little bit fussy…’
‘No, leave it up. You’ll want to look your best for lunch.’ She smiled. ‘You have a visitor.’
***
Following Claire through the door to the kitchen I heard a knife’s blade striking on the cutting board and thought at first,
Oh, Fergal’s cooking something
, and for that brief moment following, while my mind adjusted to the modern room instead, I felt a bit off-balance. Out of step.
Mark was sitting at the table writing idly in a notebook while Susan, standing near the sink, chopped vegetables for one of her trademark huge salads. Her attention, though, appeared to be on Oliver, who lounged against the worktop not too far from her, still in his biking shorts and fitted shirt that showed the muscles of his arms and chest in perfect definition. The wind had dried his hair so that only the bits near his temples were still slightly damp from the effort of cycling the hilly road back from St Non’s.
He grinned as I came in. ‘I’m back.’
‘Like a bad penny,’ Claire said with affection, giving him a once-over. ‘Does your mother know you’re dressed like that?’
‘My mother bought the outfit,’ he returned, his wit as quick as ever, but Susan didn’t let him get away with it.
She smiled her teasing smile and asked, ‘No, really. Are you on the pull or something? Trying to look all manly and athletic?’
Mark, from his seat at the table, dryly commented that wearing Lycra shorts was not the best way to look manly.
‘That, dear brother,’ Susan told him, ‘is a matter of opinion.’
Their brief exchange of banter had been all the time I’d needed to shake off my momentary sense of being in the wrong place, at the wrong time. In Oliver’s defence I said, ‘He’s cycled over to St Non’s and back this morning.’
Mark glanced up at his friend and asked, ‘Crisis with one of the cottages, was it?’
‘Burst pipe,’ said Oliver. ‘Oh, and it
was
Susan’s plumber,’ he told me.
She looked at him, reddening slightly. ‘
My
plumber?’
‘Paul, from Andrews and Son. Had the pipe fixed in no time,’ said Oliver. ‘So I thought I’d just drop round on my way back—’
‘Conveniently at lunchtime.’ Claire met the full charm of his boyish smile with motherly indulgence. She asked Susan, ‘I suppose we can feed him?’
Susan thought it possible.
Oliver tried to look indignant. ‘I
am
answering a summons, as it happens.’
Claire glanced at me. ‘Oh yes?’
‘I’m here to see Mark’s knife.’
Mark raised his head. ‘My what?’
‘Felicity said you had some old knife…’
‘Oh.’ The fog cleared. ‘That one. Hang on, I’ll get it.’
He rose and left us for a moment while Claire counted out the cutlery for five of us and started setting places at the table. ‘Oliver, what will you drink?’
‘Water, please.’
I heard Fergal’s voice speaking again in my mind.
Me now, I would rather meet my thirst with ale and cider, same as everyone.
It faded again, but when Claire set my own glass in front of me I was half-tempted to ask her for cider.
I didn’t, of course. But it seemed so much harder this time to fit back in the slot I belonged in. Especially here in the kitchen, where I spent so much of my time in the past, I found things didn’t feel right. I missed seeing Fergal’s black scowl and quick smile, and Jack rocking his chair on two legs with his back to the wall and his eyes full of mischief, and Daniel… I really missed Daniel.
‘Your hair looks amazing like that,’ Susan said to me, mixing her salad. ‘You ought to put it up more often.’
‘Thanks.’
Oliver confessed he hadn’t noticed. ‘You didn’t have it up this morning, did you, at the church?’
‘No. I…’ Lifting one hand, I self-consciously pushed in a hairpin more firmly. ‘I felt like a change.’
Susan teased us both, ‘Are you two having early morning trysts now in the church hay?’
‘Right,’ said Oliver. ‘With Mr. Teague about? Not likely. No, your PR wizard here was scouting out the final resting places of Trelowarth’s famous smuggling Butler brothers.’
Mark, returning with his treasure box in hand, said, ‘Them again?’
Susan said, ‘Well, it’s color that we’re after, Mark, and smugglers do provide it. That’s what brings the tourists in.’
Mark shrugged and set the box down and we all leaned in to take a look at his assorted treasures.
Oliver was taken with the musket balls, although he made a small correction. ‘If you found these in the cave, I’d think it much more likely that they came from a pistol than a musket. I can’t imagine someone having room to fire a musket in that space, they’d use a pistol at close range.’
I looked at the seven small metal balls lying so deadly and still on his palm.
‘Can’t you tell from the size of them what sort of gun they were fired from?’ I asked.
‘Well, not really. Both muskets and pistols were smooth-bored, they didn’t leave marks to identify, and because of how they worked, the balls and shot were smaller than the barrel of the gun. You had to leave a bit of room to wrap a bit of paper round them before loading. Standard navy issue muskets used a larger ball, but blunderbusses and some other muskets could use smaller shot, like these.’ He stirred the balls round with his finger. ‘But at a guess, I’d still say these came from a pistol, just because of where you found them.’
I was thinking of the pistol I’d seen Daniel tuck inside his belt last night when he’d gone down to keep an eye on Jack, down at the Spaniard. Just last night…
My eyes closed briefly on the memory as I tried to focus on what Oliver was telling us.
‘I’ve got a matchlock pistol down at the museum that takes shot about this size.’
‘A matchlock pistol?’ Susan asked. ‘What, do you use a match to fire it?’
‘Not a match as we would think of it. A match in those days was a sort of… well, a sort of…’
‘Fuse,’ I said.
‘Exactly.’ Oliver’s glance praised my research. ‘A slow-burning fuse, that’s right. You have been swotting up, haven’t you?’
Mark took the dagger with care from the box. ‘Right then, Einstein, how old would this be?’
‘Wow,’ said Oliver, rolling the metal balls back where they’d come from and taking the dagger with reverence. ‘That’s really beautiful.’
Only a man who loved history, I thought, could find beauty in something so ruined by time. He turned it so the sunlight from the window caught the small bit of the handle that remained. ‘That’s shell, I think.’
Score one for Oliver. I waited, frankly curious to see how close he’d come in his assessment to the truth.
He said, ‘Now
this
could be a smuggler’s knife.’
‘Why’s that?’ Mark asked.
‘Well, someone who spent time at sea. They all had knives this size, a multipurpose gadget, really, good for cutting rope or cutting food or eating with. You wouldn’t be without one on a ship. But this,’ he turned it to the light again, ‘is really lovely workmanship. You see here, if I hold it just like this,’ he said, and palmed the handle, ‘you would barely see the blade. Whoever made this knew what he was doing.’ Looking at it closely he considered Mark’s first question. ‘How old is it? Hard to say with this corrosion, but I’d hazard Restoration era maybe, from its shape. The 1660s, 1670s, somewhere in there.’
He’d impressed Mark. ‘That’s pretty precise.’
‘Yes, well. I have a thing for knives, actually. Care to sell this one?’ He knew what Mark’s answer would be, I could tell from the smile in his eyes.
‘Not much point,’ Mark said, taking the knife back and tucking it safe in the box with the rest of his treasures. ‘There wouldn’t be much value to it, not in that condition.’
If Oliver knew what the dagger’s true value was, he didn’t bother to share it. Instead he gave up with a shrug that made Claire give a cluck of her tongue and come over to study a tear in his sleeve.
‘You’ve a bad scratch under there,’ she told him. ‘Let me get something for it.’
‘No, I’m fine,’ he reassured her. ‘It was just that blasted tree. You know, the one beside the greenhouse.’
‘Susan’s hawthorn tree.’ I pulled my mind deliberately away from Daniel’s dagger and my speculations, all unpleasant, as to how it might have ended up there in the cave below the Cripplehorn. ‘She’s just had all the shrubs around it cleared away.’
‘Well, thanks for that,’ he said to Susan, who replied, ‘It’s Cornish culture, idiot. We’re making it a cloutie tree, just like the one at St Non’s well. It’s great for tourists—let them tie a little strip of fabric on a branch and make a wish, like people did back in the old days. For luck.’
‘Ah.’ Oliver rubbed his sore shoulder. ‘You’re off to a grand start then.’
As he helped himself to salad, something made me think to ask him, ‘Oliver?’
‘Yes?’
‘Have you ever heard tell of a tree called the Trelowarth Oak? A big old oak tree that once grew at that really sharp bend in the road?’
‘The Trelowarth Oak? Sure.’ With a wicked grin he said, ‘I actually
do
have an etching of that one if you ever want to come look at it. Up in my sitting room.’
I let that pass. ‘What happened to the tree itself?’
He speared his salad. ‘Methodists.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Well, the local people thought the tree was magical or something, and the Methodist minister wasn’t having any of it, so he had the tree chopped down.’
‘When was this?’
‘The 1800s, sometime. I can look it up for you.’
Across the table Susan shook her head and said, ‘What silliness. They cut the whole tree down?’
‘They did. And burnt the stump and dug that out as well.’
But not the roots, I nearly said. They couldn’t have destroyed the roots.
The roots that, in the Celtic legends, bound two worlds together, so the tree became a doorway…
The sound of far-off laughter caught my ear—a man’s laugh—and I raised my head to look, and in that shadowed instant I could see the room begin dissolving into something else, and saw a shape like Fergal’s cross to where the open hearth had been… but then I blinked and everything was back the way it had been.
‘You all right?’ Beside me Oliver was frowning faintly with concern. ‘Got a headache or something?’
‘Or something.’ I picked up my own fork and gave a tight smile. ‘But I’m sure it will pass.’
Another shadow swept across the window as the figure of a man went by, his footsteps falling hard along the path to the back door. A man dressed all in black.
A cold hand clenched my chest and made it difficult to breathe until I reassured myself that I was firmly in the present, with my friends still sitting round me, and the constable had not in fact crossed into my own time. The man who’d passed by was a stranger to me, taller than the constable and broader through the shoulders.
Oliver had seen him too, and as the first knock sounded at the back door he pushed back his chair and rose. ‘I’ll get it.’
From the brief exchange of voices in the corridor I gathered both men knew each other, but when Oliver came through into the kitchen he looked straight at Susan first then stepped aside. The man who followed him was ruggedly attractive in a way that made it difficult to judge his age. The only thing I could have said with certainty was that he wasn’t young—his well-cut auburn hair had turned to silver at his temples and his jawline had begun to lose the chiseled definition that it would have had when he was in his thirties.
He seemed to hesitate a moment, like the rest of them. Until Claire broke the tension with a smile of welcome. ‘Nigel. Good to see you.’
‘Claire. Mark.’ He greeted them both, gave a brief nod at me, and looked over my head. ‘Susan.’
Susan didn’t answer him, and when I saw her face and saw the way that she was looking at him, and the way that Mark and Claire and Oliver were watching
her
, I finally figured out who this must be: the man she’d been with up in Bristol. Her ex-boyfriend.
Nigel’s gaze stayed fixed on Susan till she found her voice.
‘Hello, Nigel. What brings you to Cornwall?’
‘I’m celebrating actually.’ His smile was lopsided, disarming, and I watched as she responded to it with the instant understanding of someone who’d shared a longtime intimacy with this man and knew his moods and his expressions.
With a slowly spreading smile herself she guessed, ‘You got the promotion.’
‘I did.’
‘Well, that’s wonderful. Really it is. You deserve it.’
He said, ‘It means moving to London, of course. Thought I’d take a run up at the weekend and start looking round for a flat. I was hoping,’ he added, ‘that I might persuade you to come.’
She had to steel herself. I saw her do it, saw the silent effort that it cost her to resist him as she said, ‘Look, we’ve been through all this. And anyway, you don’t need me to help you choose a flat.’
‘Don’t I?’
‘Nigel,’ Susan began, but he wouldn’t be put off.
‘It comes to this,’ he said. ‘I love you. And I’m miserable without you.’
‘Nigel,’ Susan tried again.
‘Please, hear me out. I know you think we haven’t got a future, but I think you’re wrong. I want to prove it to you if you’ll let me.’
Then in front of us, as though we had all disappeared and he and Susan were the only people in the room, he took a little velvet-covered ring box from his pocket.
‘Nigel.’ Susan’s voice had lost its force and faded to a level that was just above a whisper. She looked shaken by emotion as he crossed the room towards her.
‘Susan Hallett.’ Like the hero in a fairy tale, he got down on one knee and pried the lid up on the ring box as he asked her, ‘Will you marry me?’
***
‘It’s her decision.’ Mark reached a gloved hand among the thorned branches and with his shears snipped off an unwanted shoot that had sprung from the roots of a red-petaled rose. ‘No one else’s.’
Two hours had passed now since Nigel had turned up and made his proposal, and Susan and he had gone off for a drive to discuss things. Like Mark, I was filling the afternoon hours with work while we waited for them to come back, though I realized my efforts to photograph some of the lovely old roses now coming into bloom here in the Quiet Garden might all be for nothing if it turned out Susan answered yes and moved away to London.
‘She couldn’t run her tearoom then,’ I said, ‘and she’s put so much work into it.’
Mark shrugged and let the shoot fall with the other ones discarded at his feet. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time a project here had been abandoned. Dad did everything in stops and starts. That’s why we have a glasshouse,’ he reminded me, ‘and why it’s sitting empty.’
I’d forgotten about Uncle George’s unsuccessful foray into rose breeding. ‘Well, at least he tried,’ I said in his defence. ‘And now you have the greenhouse.’
‘So we do. And that, as well,’ he added, with a nod down at the sunburst colored rose beside the one that he was tending. ‘My dad’s one and only hybrid.’
‘Really?’ Lifting my camera, I snapped off a photograph. ‘What is its name? And if you tell me something Latin, Mark,’ I warned as he prepared to speak, ‘I swear I’ll have to hit you.’
‘It doesn’t have a Latin name. Or any name, officially.’
‘Why not?’
‘Dad never gave it one. It was still being field-tested when he died.’ He looked at me a moment and decided, ‘I suppose that we could name it if you like. It only takes a bit of paperwork.’
‘What would you call it?’
‘You choose.’
I touched a leaf with gentle fingers. ‘You can name them after people, can’t you, roses?’
He could see it coming. ‘Eva.’
‘Can’t you?’
‘Yes.’
I raised the camera for a second time to take another picture of the fragile-looking rose that held the colors of the setting sun. ‘Let’s name it for Katrina then.’
I heard his silent argument and answered it.
‘It’s not the same,’ I said, ‘as using her name for publicity. You know it’s not. She loved this place, she loved these gardens, and it’s just a way of seeing she’s remembered.’
Mark’s eyes told me just how likely he considered it she’d ever be forgotten, but he thought it over. ‘Right then,’ he said finally. ‘The Katrina Ward it is.’
The garden walls were built to block the wind and yet a dancing breeze brushed past my cheek as though Katrina were announcing her approval.
I’d been feeling her around me very strongly all this afternoon, as though she felt I needed my big sister. And I did. Above all, I needed to borrow a bit of her courage.
I still felt off-balance because of my run-in with Constable Creed in the stable yard only this morning. I knew I might not be so lucky the next time we met. Even if I managed not to disappear in front of him, he might make good his threat and come at me to get to Daniel. Odds were, if I left Trelowarth I’d remove that risk.
And yet, I’d risk another kind of pain by leaving.
If I’d wanted proof of that, I’d had it when I’d looked at Daniel last night, and he’d looked at me, and suddenly my choices had seemed more confused than ever.
Susan was facing that sort of a choice now, I thought. I’d seen the conflict in her face and heard it in her voice, and knew her heart was being pulled in two directions. And it occurred to me that there was someone else here who had faced that same choice long before myself or Susan, so I went off now in search of her advice.
I knew where I’d find Claire. I heard the lovely mellow tones of the piano long before I stepped inside the house and knew that she was in the big front room. I went in quietly. I’d always loved to watch Claire play. The music took her so completely, shaped her mood and flowed from her so easily it seemed to be her own invention, her own voice. I recognized the peaceful, almost wistful notes of Chopin, and they seemed to be so perfectly in tune with my own feelings at the moment that I didn’t interrupt. Instead I focused my attention on the bookshelves, searching out with idle fingertips the worn spines of the old books that my mother had once given Uncle George.
I paused at a thick book whose title intrigued me, and was lifting it down when Claire finished her prelude, the final note drifting to silence.
I told her, ‘Don’t stop, that was lovely.’
‘I wasn’t sure I would remember it all,’ she confessed with a faint smile. ‘I haven’t played that one in years. Not since I was your age, in fact.’
‘And when was that?’ I teased her. ‘Yesterday?’
Her smile grew warm at my flattery. ‘Seems like it sometimes.’ She looked to the window. ‘Is Susan not back yet?’
‘Not yet, no.’
‘Oh well. One can’t rush a decision like that.’
I decided that made a good opening for what I’d wanted to ask her. ‘Aunt Claire?’
‘Yes, darling?’
‘When you met Uncle George… I mean, it must have been a change for
you
to move here. And not only geographically. You were changing your whole way of life, taking on Mark and Susan and everything. How did you… that is, when someone is making that big a decision, how…?’
‘How do you know it’s the right one to make?’ She was watching me kindly. ‘Are you asking on Susan’s behalf or your own?’
Before I could answer, a door somewhere opened and closed and the sure tread of footsteps approached from the back of the hall, and we turned to the doorway as Oliver entered the front room.
On cue, from the small knowing smile on Claire’s face. She greeted him with, ‘Didn’t we get rid of you once today?’
He’d changed his clothes at least, although the jeans and T-shirt he now wore weren’t that much less revealing than the biking shorts. ‘I’ve just had a delivery that I thought might interest Eva,’ he explained, and held a small wrapped packet up to show us. ‘Mark said I should come right in.’ He looked around the room. ‘Is Susan not back yet?’
Claire answered as I had done, ‘Not yet, no.’
Oliver lifted an eyebrow. ‘You don’t think she’ll actually marry him, do you? I mean, he’s a nice enough bloke, Nigel, but he’s not right for her. I could have told her that first time I met him. They’re chalk and cheese, aren’t they?’ He sauntered across for a look at the book I was holding. ‘What’s that?’
I angled the cover to show him.
He read out the title: ‘
The Wife’s Guide for Keeping a Garden and House
?’
‘Newly revised in…’ I flipped to the title page, briefly consulting the date, ‘1692.’
‘That would explain why it’s falling to pieces then.’
‘Only the binding. The pages are fine.’
He looked at the page I’d been reading. ‘“For Making a Stirabout”? What’s that?’
‘A stew, sort of.’
‘Ah. And it doesn’t concern you at all that the next item down is “A Cure Against Vomiting”?’
I cast a dry look up over my shoulder. ‘It’s meant to be a full instruction book for housewives. Home remedies, recipes, how to do laundry and clean things.’ All useful, I thought, for a young woman setting up house at the end of the seventeenth century. Or for a woman who found herself thrust back in time to the start of the eighteenth.
Oliver said, ‘If you’re wanting to read something, try this instead.’ And he gave me the packet.
As I took it from his hands I felt the quick touch of excitement and I knew what it must be before I’d even got the wrapper off and seen the book inside, bound in smooth leather with faded gilt letters that spelt out the title:
A Life Before the Wind.
Jack Butler’s diary. ‘Oh, Oliver! Wherever did you find it?’
‘I have sources.’
And he must have had to pay them well. The book was an original edition from the look of it. ‘You’d really let me borrow this?’
‘I wouldn’t, no,’ he told me, and then smiled at my reaction. ‘You’re to keep it. It’s a gift.’
I shook my head. ‘I’ll buy it from you.’
‘Sorry, no. A gift’s a gift,’ he said. ‘You’re stuck with it.’
I would have argued further if I hadn’t been distracted by the sound of tires on gravel from the drive outside. All three of us fell silent while we listened, waiting.
One car door banged shut. And then the tires rolled off again.
When Susan came to join us, she was on her own.
‘I’ve told him no.’ She stood within the doorway, looking tired. ‘Our lives are just too different; it would never work.’ Her weariness seemed more pronounced as she glanced round the room. ‘Mark’s in the gardens, I expect? I’ll go and hunt him down and let him know, so he’ll stop worrying.’
Oliver stepped forwards, not the charmer anymore but the dependable old friend who could be leaned on in a crisis. ‘You don’t need to hunt him down. I know exactly where he is. Come on, I’ll take you to him.’
When they’d gone, I looked at Claire and noticed her expression, and I said, ‘You’re not surprised.’
‘No. Nigel wasn’t the right man for her.’
‘Because the gap between them was too great?’
She shook her head. ‘Because it wasn’t meant to be.’ Her eyes were wise. ‘Every relationship has its own obstacles, darling. And as you said, your Uncle George and I had our share of them. As would you, if you were to meet someone here.’ From her smile I assumed she meant Oliver. ‘There would be practical choices you’d have to make. Where you’d live, that sort of thing. Where you’d work. And there’d be differences in lifestyle that might take some getting used to. It’s one thing to spend a summer at Trelowarth or let a cottage for a while, and quite another to live all year in Polgelly,’ she said knowingly. ‘The social structure here is… well, you’d find it rather different from America, I’m sure. It’s never easy, changing how you live.’
I gave a nod of understanding, looking down.
‘But,’ Claire continued, ‘all of that amounts to nothing if you love him.’
As I raised my head, she met me with a smile.
‘Believe me, Eva dear, if
I
was able to adapt, there’s hope for anyone.’