The Island Legacy

by Ruth Saberton

  Lucy glanced at her watch, relieved to see that it was only just coming up for noon. Jamie wasn’t due to arrive until mid-afternoon, which meant she should have plenty of time to rustle something up for supper as well as being able to air his room and stumble around in what was left of the cellar to see if there was anything he would deem good enough. Her brother had exacting tastes and would rather drink seawater than the cheap white Lucy bought now and again as a treat. Yes, she would be able to do all of this and be back before he turned up, thank heavens.

  If Jamie arrived at the castle before Lucy, today of all days, there’d be all kinds of awkward explanations. He’d never believe that she’d nipped into town solely to pick up milk and the papers. He’d stare at her suspiciously and make barbed comments until Lucy found herself confessing to anything he wanted just to break the mood. Then Jamie would berate her and Lucy would feel so guilty she’d do whatever she could to make up for supposedly upsetting him. It was the circle of guilt.

  “We’re family,” was his usual lament, blue eyes wide and hurt. “You’re supposed to be on my side! We’re Penwellyns. We’re meant to stick together!”

  Usually they did stick together – or at least, Lucy had always done her best in the circumstances. When they were younger, Jamie had been sent to public school and Lucy had stayed at home to look after their widower father, who’d become increasingly ill. When Maudsley had taken a turn for the worse some years later, she’d hoped her brother might be a little more supportive, but by then Jamie was far too busy being something important in the city. (Lucy never really understood quite what it was he did; it seemed to involve playing with vast numbers of imaginary money, as far as she could see.) By the time their father passed away she’d been lucky if Jamie visited once a month.

  It was too hard for him, he’d said. He couldn’t handle seeing their father deteriorate. Lucy often felt she couldn’t handle it either, but unfortunately she hadn’t been given a choice. When she’d asked Jamie for some help with their father’s care, tentatively suggesting she would like to go back to work, her brother had scoffed. In his opinion, baking cakes in a local café was hardly a proper job and she was far more use where she was. Lucy had supposed he was right. Baking wasn’t a high-flying city career. Nevertheless, she’d loved her job and had shed many quiet tears on the day she’d handed in her notice, knowing she’d miss chatting to the customers and bantering with the other staff. She’d also miss the wonderful alchemy of combining ingredients into a bowl, then transferring them into tins for the oven and watching them become buns, cakes, scones or loaves of bread, the crusts thick and golden. Maybe like Jamie said it wasn’t much of a talent, but it had meant a lot to Lucy.

  She’d felt desperately lonely watching her father slip away. Lonely and terrified. If it hadn’t been for friends like Annie Luckett and, latterly, Uncle Armand, Lucy wasn’t sure she would have made it through such a bleak time. It had pained her to see Maudsley, once such a sharp-witted intellectual, become a demanding yet tremulous ghost of his former self. Annie would sit with him and chat to him, not seeming to mind that he belligerently asked her the same questions over and over again, and responding with a patience and good humour that Lucy could only aspire to.

  “Years of being a teacher, my love,” was Annie’s explanation when, awed and a little intimidated, Lucy had asked what the secret was. “You don’t teach for as long as I did without getting used to repeating yourself on a daily basis. It must be second nature now.”

  Lucy had felt guilty whenever she’d left her father for a few hours, but without those afternoons of freedom to walk Biscuit on the beach or simply to sit in the café in St Pirran and chat to her friends she wouldn’t have clung on to her last few shreds of sanity. And without Uncle Armand she would have been totally lost. Even though he hadn’t spoken to his brother for decades, Uncle Armand had been adamant that once Maudsley’s funeral was over Lucy should come and set up a tea shop of her own in the castle. If it hadn’t been for him she’d have been homeless too, since Jamie had needed to sell the family home as soon as possible to raise funds for his latest investment. He was supposed to have given Lucy half of the profits but said the recession had wiped them out. This was, he’d pointed out, the risk you took when you played the markets. Lucy couldn’t recall ever telling Jamie she wanted to play the markets, or indeed him mentioning it either, but then she’d been in a very dark place and most events of that time were nothing but a blur.

  She sighed. Almost forty-two, unemployed and homeless. She would have been in huge trouble if it hadn’t been for her uncle. Grumpy and determined and difficult he might have been, but if it hadn’t been for him her future would have been very bleak indeed.

  Uncle Armand. Larger than life with his bright eyes, lined face and shock of white hair, he had terrified and delighted Lucy in turn. The castle had become her own private kingdom, and when she hadn’t been baking for the tea room or cleaning (which was easier said than done when half the place was falling down and the other half was smothered in black mould), Lucy had loved nothing more than to pluck a book from the library shelf, blow off the dust and read aloud to him by the fire. Afterwards, she would listen to his tales, about the smugglers and wreckers who’d once made the place theirs. Sometimes she’d played the violin or the piano for him. At first she’d been embarrassed by her stumbling attempts, but gradually she’d been encouraged by his stillness and the notes had become less hesitant. When he’d asked her to play his own compositions she’d thrilled with pride. They solved crosswords and the complicated music puzzles Armand loved, and slowly Lucy had stepped out from the shadows and back into the sunlight. Her uncle had helped her through her grief and given her a home; Lucy knew she’d be grateful to him for the rest of her life. Nursing Armand through his short illness had been an honour and a privilege and not, as Jamie had put it, “yet more arse-wiping”.

  If she died with half as much dignity as Armand she’d be proud, Lucy thought, recalling how he’d held her hand in his and stared out of the window, each second that passed taking him to a place where she knew she could no longer reach him. With his eyes fixed on the ceaseless waves and his breath becoming ever shallower, her uncle had never once complained or made any demands. Maybe he felt he’d already asked more than enough of her by asking her to—

  Although she was in the middle of Fore Street, Lucy stopped in her tracks and swallowed hard as a fresh knot of panic tightened in her throat. She wouldn’t think about that. Not now. Tourists flowed around her as she stood still and tried to fight the rising terror. What was it that Fern had said she should do? Chant something, wasn’t it? But what? Not that om sound that Fern, the castle’s latest waif and stray, liked to make when she was sitting cross-legged in the herb garden, that was for sure! Dr Russex would be running out of the surgery and sectioning her if she did that. The town’s GP had been worried about Lucy for months and was always gently suggesting some counselling or a mild anti-depressant. Lucy resisted all his offers; she didn’t need any of that. She just needed the next few weeks to be over with and for Jamie to have no idea she’d been instrumental in what he was bound to consider the ultimate betrayal.

  “Calmness in and stress out, wasn’t it?” Lucy asked Biscuit. The little spaniel wagged his plumy tail in agreement, as though saying that this was indeed the right mantra. If Biscuit concurred then that was good enough for Lucy. She took a few deep breaths of salty air, relieved to feel her heartbeat slow to its usual rate. I must tell Fern when she gets home, Lucy thought. She’ll be pleased to know I’ve listened to her about something, even if I draw the line at nose piercings and tattoos! Being in her early forties, Lucy considered herself far too old for such things – even if age was, as Fern insisted, just a number. When Lucy looked in the mirror and saw her pale face, dark-ringed eyes and limp mousy hair, she felt every one of her forty-something years – and a few more besides. Her reflection gazed back, a sad middle-aged spinster no matter what Fern told her to the contr
ary.

  Unlike Lucy, the free-spirited Fern with her long plaits and rainbow sweaters couldn’t be more than eighteen and had arrived only a year ago. A dark blue smudge on her cheekbone had spoken volumes and Armand, who was nowhere near as irascible as he liked to make out, had instantly given her a room and put her to work in the garden. Being as green-fingered as her name might suggest, Fern had soon produced the most glorious vegetables and had also proved to be a dab hand in the tea room. She was a blonde-haired sunbeam and Lucy could no more imagine Pirran Island without her than she could imagine it without Fred the gardener (who slept more than he gardened and cost them a fortune in broken ride-on mowers) or lovely Merryn, who camped at Grace Note Bay on the far side of the island and did all the heavy work around the place in return for his pitch. What a strange little family they’d been: the grumpy old landowner, his dowdy niece, an ancient Cornish gardener, a fairy child and the town heart-throb. The island had been home to all of them.

  What would happen now was anyone’s guess, although admittedly Lucy had a greater insight than most into the island’s possible future. Her part in the proceedings was making her more nervous with every mile that brought her brother closer. If Jamie assumed that she was up to something by being in the village on this Very Important Day, then he wouldn’t be so far off the mark – and if he discovered what Lucy had really been up to these last few months, he would flip.

  Her mouth dried at the very thought. She hoped Annie Luckett could resist the urge to gloat, or at the very least could manage not to mention her role in it all. Uncle Armand had taken the secret to the grave and David Brown, the affable family solicitor, certainly wouldn’t be breathing a word of it – so at least there she was safe. Lucy wasn’t scared of her brother but…

  OK. There was no point on denying it. She was scared of her brother. She was terrified of Jamie and his rages. Most people were. Fern probably had a mantra for standing up for yourself, but Lucy knew it was far too late now to break the habits of a lifetime. She ought to have stood up to Jamie years ago, before their patterns of behaviour had become so ingrained – rather like the years of dirt on the castle’s kitchen table. Life might have been very different if she’d told her demanding sibling when they were children that he couldn’t have her toys, or if she’d refused to take the blame for his various misdemeanours. The trouble was, Lucy’s brother was the kind of person you couldn’t easily say no to. From the moment his eyelids had opened he’d literally been the blue-eyed boy, and nothing much in the following years had changed this. Her mother had been besotted with the new baby, during a time when Maudsley had been suffering one of his many bouts of depression, and soon the word spoilt hadn’t come close to describing Jamie.

  I was besotted too, Lucy reminded herself – because sometimes, when Jamie was in one of his moods, it was easy to forget this. She was equally to blame for indulging him. The problem was, a tantrum in a six-year-old translated to a nasty temper in an adult. Vesuvius erupting had nothing on Jamie Penwellyn losing his cool. Peaceful and easy-going by nature, Lucy was petrified of conflict; the adults in her life had provided more than enough of that. Consequently she’d spent most of her life attempting to keep her brother calm. This task was proving harder and harder as time went on. It was a full-time job: some might even say that taking care of Jamie had been her life’s work. In view of all this, what she’d done recently had been very much against her usual instincts – and she lived in terror of Jamie ever finding out.

  Sometimes you had to do what was right. Maybe that should be her mantra?

  Heartened by this idea, Lucy continued down Fore Street towards the causeway. In another twenty minutes the waves would have danced away to reveal the glistening cobbles that led to home. Although she’d made the journey hundreds of times, Lucy still felt the excitement of seeing the secrets of the seabed laid bare, the deep pools and weed-strewn rocks that were home to all kinds of shy creatures and flickering fish. As a child she’d stared out at the island from her bedroom window, unable to believe that she had a mysterious composer uncle who lived there all alone, and imagined that she saw mermaids darting through the rolling waves and lolling on the distant shore. It was fanciful but even all these years on Lucy still shaded her eyes against the glare and looked out for them. Admittedly the only semi-naked girls to appear on the island nowadays were the ones who spent the night in Merryn Hellier’s caravan.

  Lucy felt a twist of longing although this wasn’t for Merryn who, with his salt-stiffened blond curls, crinkly-eyed smile and bronzed body, was as out of her reach as the moon. Instead it was a wistful pang for the possibility of passion and excitement and love. If a man ever noticed her it was definitely for her baking rather than her body. Lucy couldn’t think of anyone who’d be interested in that.

  Moving through the town on foot was certainly easier than driving during the tourist season, and as she traced the familiar route home Lucy took time to look around her and enjoy the beauty of St Pirran. There was The Castle Inn at the end of the road, where it overlooked its namesake. Outside the pub, a jaunty sign rocked gently in the breeze and the smell of stale beer floated onto the street. Lucy had spent some fun nights there as a teenager, listening to dodgy bands, ordering basket meals and sipping Malibu and pineapple (which had seemed the height of sophistication then). She hadn’t been into the pub for years now. Judging by the immaculate sage paint on the woodwork and the window boxes filled with blooms rather than the dried earth and fag butts she remembered, fried food and cocktails were as far in the past as her hopes of romance.

  Closer to the quay and the causeway were the gift shops, art galleries and designer clothes outlets filled with flowery fabrics and espadrilles. Slowing her pace, Lucy dawdled by Frock Box, admiring a pretty fifties-style prom dress in red cotton embroidered with white spots. It had been teamed with a pair of strappy shoes and a floaty white scarf, and the mannequin was also clutching a gorgeous matching purse. For a split second Lucy imagined how it might feel to wear that outfit, to maybe even push a pair of Victoria Beckham style sunglasses onto her head and toss a mane of glossy blonde curls. How would it feel to be the kind of woman who could wear such a dress and draw admiring looks wherever she went? Catching a glimpse of her refection Lucy winced; that dowdy woman in shapeless jeans and a faded fisherman’s smock would never know. She was better off putting such daft ideas firmly away. Women like her weren’t made for romance or glamour – and even if Lucy Penwellyn had been, her time was well and truly past.

  “You should buy it,” said a cheerful voice.

  Jolted from her thoughts, Lucy looked up, straight into twinkling brown eyes. While she’d been daydreaming a man had paused beside her and was also admiring the dress.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, with a nervous laugh. “It’s hardly the sort of thing I’d wear.”

  The man frowned. “Why not?”

  Why not? Where did she start? Because she was too old? Too frumpy? Would look ridiculous? Had nowhere to wear it?

  “It’s just your colour,” he added.

  Was he laughing at her? A few years older than she was and with a friendly face, he didn’t look the type to mock anyone.

  “I know these things,” the man continued conversationally. “I’m an artist.”

  Lucy wasn’t surprised to hear this. With its scoured light and breathtaking views, St Pirran was a magnet for artists. Usually they liked to drift around in paint-stained smocks, holding pencils up at the horizon and squinting thoughtfully. They didn’t tend to wear dusty combats with knee pads, though – and they were seldom seen holding hard hats. This smiley man with his thick blond hair and outdoorsy tan looked nothing like an artist.

  “Technically I’m a stonemason,” he told Lucy, seeing her surprised expression, “but that’s pretty artistic in my book and I’ve been known to sketch in my spare time, so I think I’m qualified.”

  “Right,” said Lucy. Her face felt hot and she was oddly flustered by this peculiar conve
rsation. “That’s great. Fantastic.”

  “I think so,” said the man cheerfully, “and it pays the bills and means I’ve been able to move to Cornwall. My boy loves St Pirran and it’s much better here for kids than London is, don’t you think?”

  Lucy nodded. This was something she did feel qualified to talk about. She was just about to tell him that growing up in St Pirran was wonderful, when they were interrupted by a blasting horn as a white van drew up alongside them.

  “Hey, Adam! You can’t stand here all day chatting up the locals!” the driver called as the window hissed down. “Some of us have work to do!”

  Lucy’s new friend rolled his eyes. “That’s my summons. Better go. I meant what I said though. You really should buy that dress.”

  Then he hopped into the van, leaving Lucy bemused. As the driver pulled away, with another cheery blast on the horn, she saw the familiar red fox logo and swirling scarlet script of Reynard Developments. Ah. Now it all made sense. Another of Max Reynard’s builder teams, shipped in from London to turn around a development in record time. She felt oddly disappointed.

  “Time to go home,” Lucy said to Biscuit.

  Further down the hill, past the new deli (which had once been a very basic grocers where Lucy had faithfully bought her father’s favourite shrimp paste for years), was the expensive wine merchants boasting London prices so that the likes of Jamie and his ilk could show off. Beyond that was the chandlery and the small fish market where the St Pirran fleet landed their catch. At the far end of the quay was the church, facing patiently out to sea as though waiting for Jesus to return. If they did, they’d be disappointed because Reynard Developments had bought that beautiful building eighteen months ago and was converting it into luxury apartments. For a figure that took Lucy’s breath away and sent the hopes of locals nosediving, Londoners could buy themselves a slice of heaven on earth with views to die for and even a private parking space, something that was like gold dust here. Both of Lucy’s parents’ funerals had taken place in that church, and she’d been to more weddings and christenings and midnight Masses there than she could even remember. To think that all this history had been smothered by oak floors, designer kitchens and Farrow and Ball paint turned Lucy cold – but Jamie, who was thick as thieves lately with Max Reynard, called it progress.