An Orphan's Winter

by Sheila Jeffries

  Lottie was the one person Matt trusted.

  Inside the cabin he could still hear the singing. There was a pause between carols. Then something made him open the cabin door and listen with his whole mind and heart on fire. They were singing his favourite carol. He listened hard for the words he knew were coming.

  Lo! The Eastern sages rise

  At a signal from the skies

  Brighter than the brightest gem

  ’Tis the star of Bethlehem.

  Brighter than the brightest gem, he thought. That’s Lottie. My Lottie. It’s why I love her.

  *

  On 27th December, Jenny was alone at Hendravean. She’d managed to get up early, put the calliper on her leg and a clean apron over her dress. She’d brushed her hair until it shone, knowing she must look her best to say goodbye to Lottie and her father, John. She liked John more than she cared to admit. Flirting came naturally to Jenny and she found herself wanting to make John smile, something he didn’t do very often. He was such a serious man, but not gloomy, and she liked the way he was so respectful and fatherly with Lottie. Nan had regarded him with suspicion initially, but he soon won her over, more by what he didn’t say than what he did say. Nan looked forward to his visits too, relishing what she called ‘intelligent conversation’, usually about something far above Jenny’s head.

  John had hired a car to take them up to Plymouth. Nan and Tom wanted to watch them sailing off on the cruise liner, a big adventure for twelve-year-old Tom who had never been further afield than Truro.

  After they’d gone, Jenny got on with feeding the chickens, grooming Mufty and leading him out to the paddock. To be in the fresh air still seemed a wonderful treat to Jenny after her year in hospital, and since being at Hendravean she’d learned a lot about the wild birds and flowers, mostly from Nan, who had a vast store of knowledge.

  While she tackled the household chores, Jenny kept glancing outside, hoping Matt might come. She mulled over what Nan had said about Lottie looking strange after being with him. She had to admit, there had been an extraordinary radiance around her, but surely it couldn’t have come from Matt? Perhaps there was something Lottie wasn’t telling her.

  Jenny frowned. Lottie had always been honest with her – self-willed, but clear-minded and truthful. What on earth had she been up to?

  Jenny picked up Nan’s binoculars from the windowsill and studied the boats out in the bay, hoping to see The Jenny Wren. Would Matt still be there? And what exactly would he be doing in St Ives? She learned nothing through the binoculars. Disappointed, Jenny went out into the yard. She eyed the donkey cart and toyed with the idea of harnessing Mufty and going down to the bay herself. With her weak leg in its iron calliper, everything was twice as difficult, but the need to see Matt was overpowering and, in the end, she decided to brave the long walk down to the harbour.

  At mid-morning, Jenny set off, walking stick in one hand and a basket over her arm. She’d made lunch to share with Matt, her mind buzzing with the imagined conversation they would have.

  Be very, very careful, she thought.

  So many times she’d tried to discipline Matt and it had gone badly wrong, getting worse as he grew older. Matt had been eleven years old when his dad, Arnie, had died, leaving Jenny alone and in desperate poverty to bring up three children. The brooding resentment in Matt’s eyes had begun then. He openly blamed her for Arnie’s death and he’d never forgiven her. It wasn’t fair.

  Walking down the lane to St Ives, Jenny relived that terrible day. It had been Lottie’s birthday and she’d taken the three children to the Helston Flora Day, an event that was an inherent part of Jenny’s culture. Growing up in Helston, she’d always loved taking part in the prestigious midday dance. Arnie resented her dancing with her old partner, Troy, and that night he’d stormed out, got drunk and drowned in the harbour. It haunted Jenny. She glanced up at the cemetery on the steep hillside above Porthmeor Beach and picked out the granite cross marking Arnie’s grave, sad that she hadn’t the strength to go up there.

  She blew him a kiss and walked on – or tried to. A sudden movement up in the cemetery caught her eye. She stared. A man was sitting by Arnie’s grave. A man in blue, with a fisherman’s cap, sitting with his knees hunched, apparently staring at the grave. Jenny gasped. It had to be him.

  ‘Matt!’ She cupped her hands and called out.

  She saw him freeze as if he’d suddenly spotted her.

  They stared at each other across the cemetery, with its orderly rows of headstones and crosses.

  Jenny waved. She called out again. But Matt didn’t move. They were staring across a chasm of unresolved bitterness and it was only getting wider. So wide that Jenny could hardly see him as he left the cemetery, walking up the hill in long strides, away from her.

  And he didn’t look back.

  It hurt. Like a nail being driven into tenderness. Jenny felt it going in, deep into the sacred vessel of her womb. Where she had carried him. Her firstborn. But, no, that wasn’t true. Jenny doubled up and collapsed onto a bench against the wall. Her firstborn had been a little girl, perfect but stillborn. Born sleeping, the midwife had kindly said, and Jenny had begged to be allowed to hold her, with Arnie standing beside, both of them numb with grief. Never to see her daughter’s eyes was so cruel. ‘She’d have the eyes of an angel,’ Arnie had whispered, and the words hung between them like a garland carved on a tombstone.

  The eyes of an angel.

  Jenny had fallen pregnant again too soon; before she’d grieved enough. Matt was born and she hadn’t been ready. A boy with soulful eyes and a restless spirit, born rebellious.

  In the months of poverty after Arnie’s death, eleven-year-old Matt had silently tried to help, scavenging coal and wood to fuel the stove and scaling the roof to mend the storm damage. Jenny had been too exhausted to notice his efforts. Moments of empathy were lone sunbeams in an endless storm, times when she’d stared into Matt’s wounded eyes and glimpsed the person he would become. Too late – everything was snatched away when Jenny was rushed into hospital with polio and the three children were sent to an orphanage. The final blow came when the cottage in Downlong was repossessed and sold.

  At the time, Nan was alienated from the family by a feud, and lived a reclusive life in her isolated home, Hendravean. She and Jenny had never been friends, but when Nan discovered the unfolding tragedy, she swallowed her pride and offered them a home. Matt, at thirteen, refused to live with Nan, who he felt had always hated him. He ran away and made a life for himself as an artist.

  So why do I worry about Matt? Jenny asked herself. Why do I long to see him? Why am I breaking my heart, day in, day out?

  She loved him, despite everything.

  Jenny stared at the sea, trying to calm herself. She thought of John and Lottie boarding the ship, with Nan and Tom waving an emotional goodbye. The horizon was an icy blue, the surf building out west, the swell already rocking the boats in the harbour. A storm was brewing out there in the Atlantic.

  Jenny stood up, anxious to get home before the wind and rain started. But she couldn’t shake off the feeling that she simply must try to see Matt. They had to talk. She couldn’t let him sail off into a gathering storm and face those mighty waves. The Jenny Wren was old and small with only a tiny cabin. And Matt was so reckless.

  With a sense of urgency, Jenny headed through the cobblestone streets, ducking under the lines of washing strung between cottages. Breathing hard, she stumbled down to the harbour, her eyes searching for Matt and his boat.

  Lottie’s radiance shone in her mind. Lottie and Matt were close friends now. It was important to make peace. She’d make him talk to her, make him listen, make him care.

  In the bustle of a working day, it was obvious that boats were coming in, not going out, seeking a haven from the approaching storm. Jenny picked her way along Wharf Road, through the piles of freshly caught pilchards glistening as they were packed into barrels by small groups of energetic women working too fast
to look up at Jenny, or the sea or sky. The shipping forecast blared out from the open door of a cottage, a calm, impassive voice warning of the impending storm.

  Jenny had reached the slipway when an old familiar sound made her stop. The engine of a motorboat starting up. It had to be The Jenny Wren – she recognised the particular sound of its engine from happier days when Arnie would be arriving home, triumphant, from a fishing trip, a cloud of seagulls following.

  Startled, she watched with a sinking heart as The Jenny Wren roared across the harbour, going much too fast, carving a swathe of disruptive ripples. Matt was on board, his silhouette uncannily like Arnie’s, unruly hair flying as he steered the boat with astonishing skill.

  ‘Matt!’ Jenny screamed. ‘Matt – wait!’

  Even if he’d heard her, Matt didn’t turn around, but headed for the open sea in an arc of spray.

  Filled with anxiety and disappointment, Jenny watched until the boat became a diminishing dot bouncing over the waves towards Hayle.

  ‘Please God, keep him safe,’ she prayed, and headed home, limping painfully, the lunch she’d made untouched in her basket.

  Chapter 2

  New York

  Lottie gazed down at Nan and Tom who stood on the quayside. She wished she was close enough to see the love in Nan’s storm-coloured eyes, just once more, and to give Tom another hug.

  ‘I don’t want you to go, Lottie,’ he’d said, openly crying and clinging to her. ‘Promise me you’ll come back, Lottie.’

  ‘I promise, Tom – and I’ll bring you a present – from America,’ Lottie had said.

  ‘Stop that infernal blubbering,’ Nan had snapped at Tom. ‘You’re twelve years old, not two. Stand up straight and make Lottie proud of you.’

  Tom stopped instantly and stood rigid, hardly daring to breathe in case he was ambushed by one of the huge shuddering sobs that seemed to live inside his ribcage. If it had been his mother, Jenny, telling him to stop, he would have allowed himself a tantrum. To Tom, Nan had horns and an axe like one of the Viking warriors he’d learned about in school.

  The cruise ship let out an impressive noise from her siren and Lottie felt the deck rail buzz with the vibration. There was something poetic about the sound. A ship’s voice. A mighty voice, reaching out across the waiting ocean, echoing through the green valleys of the Tamar River.

  ‘America, here we come,’ said her father, John De Lumen, as he gave his daughter a hug.

  Lottie looked up at him and smiled. ‘I’m glad you’re with me, Daddy.’

  As the ship pulled away from the quay, Lottie fixed her eyes on her beloved Nan and Tom, gazing at them over the frothing white wake of the ship. Nan looked like a pyramid. Unmoving, she stood with her legs planted a long way apart, a voluminous navy-blue dress covering her bulk, a coil of silver-white hair, and her weather-tanned Cornish face set in stone. It comforted Lottie to know that Nan would be standing there until the ship was a mere smudge on the horizon.

  Lottie clung to the deck rail, holding on to the last glimpse of Nan, a small, dark dot of love and reliability in the fading colours of Plymouth Hoe. The ship carving through the waves was like a power source, dragging her away from everything she loved, drawing a blind of thick gauze where sea and sky blurred together, leaving nothing in between.

  What if Nan dies while I’m away? Lottie thought when she could no longer see her reassuring figure standing on the quay. I must be mad to go on this trip, to agree to meet a mother who abandoned me when I was four.

  ‘Lottie?’ John stood patiently beside his daughter, discreetly observing her intense grief at the parting. There would be anxiety too, he imagined, considering the way Lottie had arrived in Cornwall as a shipwrecked orphan. He wished she would cry for once and let him comfort her, but Lottie only knew how not to cry. If tears came, she’d quickly brush them away and stand up even straighter. She looked up at him now with those shiny, bright knowing eyes.

  ‘Are you okay, dear?’ he asked.

  ‘Okay? What does that mean?’

  John smiled. ‘It’s an American word; you’ll hear it a lot in New York – and in London. I guess it just hasn’t reached Cornwall yet.’

  ‘So how do I know if I’m okay when I don’t know what it means exactly?’

  ‘Okay really means you are surviving – not thriving, but surviving – something you’re good at, Lottie.’

  ‘Tell me again how you found me, Daddy – how did you know I lived in St Ives?’

  John’s eyes sparkled. It was something he loved to talk about. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘I was a weekend artist. I used to come down from London to paint in Cornwall and once I discovered St Ives, I couldn’t keep away. The light on the water is so special and the colours of the sea are breathtaking. One day, I was painting at the top of Porthmeor Beach when I saw two little girls playing in the sand. It was you and Morwenna.’

  ‘We were making a shell garden,’ Lottie said, ‘and Tom and Matt were building dams in the stream.’

  ‘I wanted to paint you so much.’ John looked dreamy. ‘You looked so beautiful and innocent, with your lovely blonde hair tumbling round your shoulders – but it was more than that. You reminded me of the little daughter I loved and lost – Charlotte – though I reasoned it couldn’t possibly be you. Then you turned and looked at me and my heart nearly stopped. I knew, I just knew you were Charlotte. But when I called your name you looked shocked and you ran away, all of you. I was devastated.’

  ‘I didn’t recognise you with your beard, Daddy. I only saw a photo of you when I was little – and Morwenna, well, you know what she’s like. She made me think you were a threat.’

  John’s eyes twinkled with amusement, then darkened with sadness. ‘I never saw you again on the beach. I was so upset, thinking I had frightened you. But I worked hard on the painting of you and it was the best I’d ever done. I called it Discovering Charlotte, and it got chosen for a big London exhibition, and two people who owned a gallery in New York bought it from me.’

  ‘Rex and Coraline?’

  ‘Yes – Rex and Coraline. That’s where we’ll be going – to see the painting and meet your mother there. It was wonderful how she walked into the gallery, saw the painting, and realised it was you. That’s when Coraline gave her my address and she got in touch.’

  John had told Lottie this story before, but she still relished hearing it again, and each time she listened attentively, hoping for some new detail she might have missed.

  ‘Well, the next time I saw you after that day on the beach . . .’ John lowered his voice and both of them looked serious, knowing the next bit was a painful memory, ‘it was Arnie’s funeral. I was on the quay painting when the procession passed by, and I was so shocked to see you three children walking so bravely behind the coffin. So tragic. My heart wept for you.’

  Lottie looked at him with empathy. ‘That’s like . . . like crying inside,’ she said intuitively.

  ‘Like crying inside your soul,’ John affirmed. Then the sparkle came back into his eyes. ‘And that’s when I first saw Nan. She looked majestic and powerful in her black velvet cloak. Like the Queen of St Ives.’

  They both smiled.

  ‘She’s a wonderful woman, your Nan,’ John said. ‘I wonder what she was in her youth.’

  ‘She never tells us,’ Lottie said. ‘And Nan isn’t her real name, no one seems to know what it is. Even people in St Ives call her Nan. But she’s very clever. She knows Latin and she loves poetry and folklore. I love her, but no one else seems to even like her. People are afraid of her.’

  ‘How old is she?’ John asked.

  ‘No one knows. But we do know she’s our great-grandmother and Arnie was her grandson. She brought him up.’

  ‘Is that so? She really is a remarkable woman. But full of secrets.’

  Warmed by the enthusiasm in her father’s dark blue eyes, Lottie made herself let go of the deck rail. She let go of watching the shimmering space where Plymouth had been.

 
A whirling flock of seagulls had followed the ship for the first few miles and now they turned in graceful loops and spirals and headed back, vanishing into the opalescent haze. ‘They’ve gone home,’ Lottie said. ‘Nan told me there’s a point about ten miles out where the seagulls always turn around.’

  ‘And is that true? Or is it Cornish folklore?’

  ‘A bit of both,’ Lottie said. ‘Nan says St Ia turns the seagulls round because she won’t let them get lost. But she also thinks the dolphins turn them round. She believes there’s a web of life in which all the creatures of the earth look out for each other.’

  ‘Your Nan has a rich store of knowledge,’ John said. ‘She hasn’t shared it with me yet.’

  ‘She won’t, Daddy. Nan only tells folklore to children now, because adults laugh at her and call her a crank.’ Lottie lowered her voice to a stage whisper. ‘Some people have even called her a witch.’

  ‘Is that so? Well, I wouldn’t,’ John said, ‘and you wouldn’t, would you?’

  Lottie shook her head. ‘Never.’

  She hesitated, aware again of the great ship carrying them effortlessly into the vast and lonely ocean. Away from home and family. But a new sense of freedom began to push its way into the ache of separation. Far from home on the shining water with just the two of them, Lottie realised she could tell her father of some of the darker sides of the Lanroska family, those she usually kept to herself. There was one she felt he ought to know. About Jenny.

  Lottie had noticed how much her father seemed to like Jenny. She hoped they weren’t going to fall in love. John was gentle and kind and Lottie wanted him all to herself. A deeper, more secret wish hung in Lottie’s heart like a tiny, fragile chrysalis: Could my real parents be reunited in America?

  ‘Until recently,’ she began, ‘Jenny and Nan hated each other. Jenny thinks folklore is rubbish and she banned Nan from seeing the boys when they were growing up. Then, when I turned up after Arnie rescued me from the shipwreck, Nan befriended me – she is really, truly my best friend, even though she’s old. I wasn’t going to let Jenny spoil our friendship, so I used to visit Nan on my own and we had a lovely time, looking after Mufty and the chickens and the cats. I’d never been allowed any pets in my life. My real mum didn’t like them, did she?’