Dr. Bones and the Lost Love Letter (Magic of Cornwall Book 2)

by Emma Jameson

  “She is. Came to see me about some local tradition. But never mind. I have asked you not to wear that.”

  “It repels dust,” she said, eyes back on the page.

  “It repels more than that.” Ben closed the gap between them, the better to frown over her usual attic uniform: a housedress, big as a mainsail, and a brown calico scarf tied over her hair. Propping his cane against a crate of bric-a-brac destined for the next church jumble, he said, “It’s one thing to sort rubbish. Quite another to drape yourself in it.”

  She didn’t look up. “If you dislike my appearance, Dr. Bones, I suggest looking away.”

  “Oh, so it’s ‘Dr. Bones’ now, is it?” Taking the book from her hands, he untied the calico scarf and let it flutter away. “That’s better. Now get rid of the sack.”

  “Hardly a sack.” She slipped out of the housedress, revealing the trousers and the smart red twinset underneath. It was a simple ensemble, one Ben probably wouldn’t have registered on another woman, but on Juliet it struck him as almost provocatively attractive. For one reason: it was worn by her.

  “Why are you still on that pouf? Stand up.”

  “You’re terribly dictatorial today. Suppose I resist?”

  “Then I’ll be charming.”

  She snorted. “You know my opinion of men with delusions of charm.” Instead of rising, she shifted onto her knees, reaching up to slide her arms around his neck. It made a nice change, her looking up at him for once. “You left the attic door open.”

  “It has a mind of its own. Maybe it’s welcoming us inside. Or maybe it’s trying to help Mrs. Cobblepot catch us out.”

  “I thought the same,” Juliet said. “Maybe Lucy has taken against me.”

  “Why would she do that?” Smiling, Ben spooled one of her blonde curls around his finger and tugged gently. Dinah, Juliet’s lady’s maid, strove to send her mistress into the world with flawlessly arranged hair. Unfortunately for her efforts, Ben preferred it a touch messy.

  “Maybe she thinks I’m not good enough for you. You and Lucy have some sort of channel between you. She comes to you in dreams.”

  “I’d rather it was you.” He kissed her. Her lips were warm and soft, her skin fragrant with a scent that was hers alone, not from a bottle. Before long, his hands were drifting.

  “Ben.” Juliet’s fingers closed over his, dragging his hands back up to her waist. “At least close the door.”

  “Bugger the door. Am I boring you?”

  She answered with a kiss so passionate, it left them both breathless. “This is dangerous.”

  “No, it’s not,” Ben said, not fooling her and certainly not fooling himself. There was a reason people played with fire. Human beings had been doing it since the dawn of time, despite laws, statistics, and the occasional smoking ruin.

  His lips found that magic spot beside her ear, the place where a kiss was as good as a key. Juliet made a soft sound, and just like that, his hands were free. When she pressed against him, that got the temperature up. Then he was kissing her with abandon, smoking ruins be damned.

  “Dr. Bones!”

  The attic stairs squeaked beneath Mrs. Cobblepot’s heavy tread. Although sixtyish and generously proportioned, as she liked to put it, the housekeeper could move at a fair clip when she wanted. Mere seconds after she called Ben’s name, her bulky shape filled the attic doorway. Juliet hurried forth to meet her; Ben turned his back.

  The trick was to look innocently preoccupied. Seizing the church jumble box, he peered into it as if fascinated. Mrs. Cobblepot had retired from the classroom many years ago, but she retained the bloodhound nose and all-seeing eye of an experienced primary school teacher. Little things rarely escaped her notice; the obvious never did. Therefore, Ben couldn’t allow her to see him until he was fit to be seen.

  “Oh, my. You’ve made some lovely progress, Lady Juliet,” Mrs. Cobblepot said doubtfully. Everything about the attic offended her. The dust, the dark corners, the metastasizing heaps and the swelling piles. Each time she entered the attic, her instincts cried out to attack. Ben knew she wanted to sweep, mop, scrub, wax, and finally bring out her ostrich feather duster on its telescoping pole and poke at the rafters till they knew who was boss.

  “Thank you,” Juliet said brightly. “I’m working as fast as I can, nose to the grindstone, no quarter asked and none given. I’ll have this place shipshape and Bristol fashion before you know it.”

  Ben suppressed a sigh. Since she’d been drawn into Ethan’s spy career and the unavoidable lies that went with it, Juliet had become better at dealing in falsehoods, but not by much. Typically, when she trotted out an untruth, she oversold it.

  “Yes. Well.” Mrs. Cobblepot indicated the pouf, stack of books, beat-up writing desk, and cracked vase full of dried flowers. “Tidy little reading nook you’ve made for yourself there, your ladyship. Looks a bit like you’re settling in.” She cleared her throat. “My offer to help still stands. I won’t rush you, I promise.”

  Now she was the one overselling a lie. Clearly, it flummoxed Mrs. Cobblepot to see the usually swift, decisive-bordering-on-dictatorial Juliet Linton-Bolivar progressing at the speed of a Galapagos tortoise. And not just any Galapagos tortoise, but one who felt ambivalent about the whole endeavor and kept trundling back to the prickly pears.

  “I’m ever so grateful,” Juliet said, “but I feel a responsibility to handle each and every item with care. They all belonged to Lucy or her parents, after all, and I have good reason to believe Lucy is watching my progress. Besides, who knows what treasures I might uncover? Last week I found a pound note tucked in a bundle of household receipts. Perhaps I’ll find a fortune if I go a little slower.”

  “Slower?” Mrs. Cobblepot sounded incredulous.

  “And I wouldn’t dream of shifting another burden onto your shoulders,” Juliet added, shooting a glance at Ben as if trying to ascertain how much longer he needed. “Not when you’re devoting so much of your spare time to the twins.”

  The twins were Caleb and Micah Archer, local scofflaws and budding anarchists. Recently, the boys had lost their father and very nearly lost their mother, prompting Mrs. Cobblepot and her brother, Chief Air Warden Gaston, to provide extra supervision whenever possible.

  “Keeping the lads properly occupied benefits us all,” Mrs. Cobblepot said modestly, looking pleased by the compliment. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop. They’re in the back garden right now, you know. Assembling Dr. Bones’s Anderson shelter at long last.”

  Nothing splashed ice water on Ben’s ardor like hearing that Caleb and Micah were on his property armed with hammers, screwdrivers, and heaven knew what else. He spun around.

  “You didn’t lend them my toolbox, did you? Only think what they could do with my ripsaw. Or my pipe wrench. It weighs ten pounds.”

  Mrs. Cobblepot laughed. “I wasn’t born yesterday, thank you very much, and neither was Clarence. He’s out there ordering them about. Rest assured he took an inventory before starting and they won’t nick a nail. But what’s happened to your mouth, Dr. Bones?” She squinted. “Are you bleeding?”

  “No, no,” Juliet volunteered before Ben could stop her. “It’s only my lipstick.” Producing a handkerchief, she wiped his mouth, transferring a deep red smear from his lips to the white cotton weave. “He was teasing me about it, so to teach him a lesson, I swiped a bit on his face. Then we forgot about it. Yes! Wasn’t that silly of us?”

  Ben forced himself to say nothing. Juliet needed to let him tell his own lies. He’d been on the verge of claiming a spontaneous nosebleed, which was reasonably masculine, at least.

  “It’s very bad of you to tease Lady Juliet until she snaps,” Mrs. Cobblepot said. “You shouldn’t pester a lady about her beauty secrets. Suppose she takes it to heart? Then when poor Mr. Bolivar comes home, he finds a wife who—”

  “What brings you up?” Ben interrupted.

  “Oh. Well. I’ve put the kettle on, that’s all. I only wanted to know which sa
ndwiches you’d like. Cucumber or Marmite?”

  “Forgive me for snapping.” Ben smiled apologetically. “Isn’t there any roast beef?”

  “All gone, I’m afraid. We won’t have meat again till Sunday.”

  “I can’t bear another slimy cucumber. I vote Marmite,” Juliet said.

  “Marmite it is,” Ben agreed. “Thank you, Mrs. Cobblepot. We’ll be down directly.”

  He waited until he heard the stairs creak, then pulled Juliet close and raised his chin for another kiss. It ended all too soon.

  “Don’t,” he murmured, as she pulled away.

  “We really must go downstairs, before suspicions are aroused. And don’t be vulgar.”

  “You enjoy tormenting me. And why not? Tonight you’ll go to bed with Bertie Wooster or Jay Gatsby,” he complained. “The best I’ll do is if Humphrey curls up at my feet. If you compare the two of us, he enjoys the more fulfilling life.”

  “Envious of a tomcat?” She tutted. “How typically male. My heart breaks for you.”

  “Prove it.”

  “I shall. I’ll lead you to a cup of revitalizing tea, a plate of nutritious sandwiches, and a quarter-hour of wholesome conversation. Since your moral character appears to be waning.” She laughed. “But you never told me what Mrs. Richwine wanted. A local custom, you said?”

  “Some rubbish about a hollow tree in Pate’s Field. The Fairy Post, she called it. Apparently, a letter from 1913 went missing. Now it’s turned up and she wants me to deliver it.”

  “How exciting!”

  “That’s what excites you?”

  She laughed again. “Safely exciting, I mean. Let’s go down to tea and discuss it.”

  3

  “Well,” Juliet said, eyes warm with excitement. “Let’s see it, then.”

  Ben’s kitchen wasn’t large enough for three people to comfortably sit down together, so they’d settled in the front room for tea.

  “I haven’t even read it yet,” he reminded her, passing over the letter. “Maybe Mrs. Richwine was pulling my leg about its age. That envelope may have taken a little rain, but I don’t believe it spent decades out-of-doors.”

  “It didn’t,” Mrs. Cobblepot said authoritatively.

  “Oh. So you agree with me?” Ben asked her. “That Mrs. Richwine has been gathering letters from the hollow tree, delivering some and keeping the rest?”

  “Ben!” Juliet cried. Although Mrs. Cobblepot looked equally dismayed, she only tutted.

  “Dr. Bones, I realize Mrs. Richwine is from Barking. Nevertheless, she is a very dear lady.”

  “Yes. Best of the Barkers. No question.” Juliet opened the envelope and withdrew two pages, deeply creased but in excellent condition. “Here’s the date. 10 February 1913. I don’t recognize the handwriting.”

  “Nor do I,” Mrs. Cobblepot said. “As for its state of preservation, there’s a perfectly logical explanation. It wasn’t lost in Cornwall. It was lost in Elfhame.”

  Ben let out one of those harassed noises, somewhere between a groan and a sigh, that he often failed to suppress.

  “Don’t scoff,” Mrs. Cobblepot replied. “Dozens of generations before us believed such things, and I for one won’t toss their collective wisdom on the rubbish heap. My grandmother, a very wise woman, told me the hollow tree was originally native to Elfhame. During a mystical convergence, the worlds shifted. Some of our land was lost, but we gained the tree in its place. Any child can explain it. Each time the veil thins, a slice of the mortal plane vanishes into Elfhame and something from the other realm comes through. That’s how Britain gained Avalon—and lost it again.”

  “It’s how we got the Loch Ness monster, too, I suppose,” Ben muttered. Picking up his half-eaten sandwich, he forced himself to take a bite, followed by a sip of vaguely dissatisfying tea. He didn’t particularly care for Marmite, which was no substitute for roast beef, nor had he fully accepted tea without sugar.

  “I’ve always wondered why the fairies put up with such business,” Juliet said. Having already demolished one Marmite sandwich, she reached for another. “Losing part of their magical realm for part of our decidedly un-magical one, I mean.”

  “In the case of the hollow tree,” Mrs. Cobblepot said, “they received an acre of barleycorn, or so the story goes. A small loss for us but a great gain for the fair folk, as they do not sow. However, they will reap, on occasion, if the result is liquor. And in Elfhame, a ripened field of good Cornish barleycorn never withers or depletes. That’s why the letter has hardly aged. In Elfhame, the light restores and the air preserves.

  “But getting back to the Fairy Post,” she said. “I can assure you, Dr. Bones, that Mrs. Richwine hasn’t interfered with its operation, nor has any mortal. The tree is defended by magic.”

  “The sort of magic that can repel, say, Caleb and Micah Archer?”

  Juliet laughed. “Yes, indeed. Last summer, Micah climbed into the hollow tree. On Caleb’s urging, no doubt. I wasn’t there to witness the attack, but Mr. Pate saw the aftermath. Dung beetles poured out of the tree’s roots and attacked Micah like one of the Plagues of Egypt. He required special bath salts and two jars of ointment to recover.”

  “Are Cornish dung beetles dangerous?” Ben asked.

  “Those are. Devil’s Coach Horses, they’re called. Like wee scorpions.” Mrs. Cobblepot shuddered. “When I was a girl, they used to say don’t muck about with the Fairy Post, or the fairies will muck about with you. After what befell Micah, a new generation believes it.”

  “It’s a worthwhile part of childhood, I think,” Juliet said. “I rather pity kiddies in London who grew up without it. There’s something rather wonderful about dropping a letter into the dark and hoping with all your heart that the fairies deliver it. The last time I used the Fairy Post, I was fourteen. I sent a letter to Roald Amundsen. I knew I was too old for such nonsense, but it made me feel better.”

  “Who’s Roald Amundsen? An unrequited love?” Ben asked.

  “Hardly.” Her tone was censorious. “Roald Amundsen was a noted explorer, as any educated person might be expected to know. First man to reach the South Pole, and first man to have reached both poles. I used to dream of accompanying him on a polar expedition. Intrepid girl explorer and all that.”

  “Why didn’t you use the Royal Mail?”

  “Because he was dead. Presumed dead, lost on a rescue expedition, never to return.”

  “And did you feel comforted after posting the letter?” Mrs. Cobblepot asked.

  “I did. There’s just something about taking one last stab. One final try, never mind the odds, before packing it in or crying uncle,” Juliet said. “I find it easier to accept defeat, or to give up and grieve properly, if I know I’ve exhausted every avenue. That’s why even adults turn to the Fairy Post from time to time, Dr. Bones. Not because we’re softheaded in the West Country, nor even particularly softhearted. There’s too much fight in us, and it dies hard.”

  “Why, Lady Juliet.” Mrs. Cobblepot’s teacup clattered against its saucer. “I’m surprised at you. A native Cornishwoman, discussing the Fairy Post as if it’s some sort of psychological thingummy. As if magic doesn’t exist at all. When only moments ago, you told us you were handling Lucy’s things carefully, as you knew she might be watching.”

  Ben expected Juliet to take offense, or at least embark on a lengthy discourse about Dr. Carl Jung and the enduring relevance of psychological thingummies. To his surprise, she looked a little abashed and shot him a sidelong glance.

  “You’re quite right, Mrs. Cobblepot. Only… Dr. Bones is from London. Even after six months, I sometimes catch myself speaking to him as an outsider.”

  “I understand,” Mrs. Cobblepot said. “But we’re working on him night and day, and he’s coming along beautifully, don’t you think?”

  Ben let out another harassed noise. Neither woman paid it the slightest mind.

  “Well, now. Shall I read the letter?” Juliet asked.

  “Yes, please,”
Mrs. Cobblepot said.

  “Why not?” Ben asked sarcastically. “It’s only some poor sod’s personal business. I’m sure he’d enjoy having it read aloud to strangers over tea.”

  “Aloud? What a capital idea. I’d intended to read it silently.” Juliet fluttered her lashes at him innocently. “Are we all agreed that the penmanship is masculine?”

  “Firm and decisive,” Mrs. Cobblepot agreed.

  “What about bossy? Presumptuous?” Ben asked. “No? Fine. Not feminine.”

  Mrs. Cobblepot tutted again. Juliet regarded him through slitted eyes.

  “There are some who would do well not to forget my powers of recollection, which are fearsome indeed.” Clearing her throat, she read:

  “‘10 February 1913. Ah, Love. I never thought to write such a letter to you, or indeed to anyone. Once, I rejected the very idea of love letters. Like love poems, I found them artificial and altogether self-serving. Thus prejudiced against such a vehicle, I resolved that momentous declarations must be spoken straight out. In other words, simply and directly, rather than delivered in a literary concoction intended to wear down the reader through its cleverness, artistry, sophistication, and conceit….’”

  “You wrote that,” Ben accused her, only half-joking.

  “He is an uncommonly erudite correspondent,” Juliet agreed. “If one among us has hidden this flair for written language, I look forward to discovering who.”

  “Don’t forget, people were a shade wordier in those days,” Mrs. Cobblepot said. “More formal in their communications, too.”

  Juliet continued:

  “‘In our first meeting, you entered my life like a sea breeze into a windowless room that has known only stale air. Only then did I suddenly perceive the deeper mysteries those poets sought to illuminate.