Once Upon a Star

by Nora Roberts

Portia looked it over. “Good quality. Look at that elaborate tin stamping. It doesn’t appear to be an item one of the maids could have afforded. Perhaps it belonged to an upper servant.” Her eyes lit. “Or even a member of the family. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we found a photograph of the second Mrs. Tregarrick? There must be one somewhere.”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” James said, leaning against the carved newel post. “It awaits your pleasure, my lady.”

  Portia’s face shone with excitement. “You never know what you might find—clothes, or letters and documents that might shed more light on the Tregarricks. One old valise was packed with remnants of a wonderful Oriental brocade, embroidered with gold thread. I’ve displayed some fans against a piece of it, in the case in the ladies’ parlor.”

  Lily caught her breath. For a moment James and Portia, the stairwell and the leather trunk, were overlaid with the image of shelves filled with rich silks and satins in every color known. She could smell incense and flowering plum outside the window.

  She could see Rees Tregarrick nodding at the Chinese merchant, and turning to smile at her. So real she could reach out and touch his face.

  The vision vanished, and Lily swallowed, hard.

  Portia hadn’t noticed anything unusual. She twisted the hitch that held the lid closed, and opened the trunk. Cedar and lavender filled the air, along with a scent of must. The inside held a woman’s summer garments—tucked and frilled white organza and finely embroidered lawn—all neatly packed away in layers of silver paper. But on the very top, placed exactly in the center, were a pair of very modern-looking woman’s canvas summer shoes.

  Portia snatched them. “How on earth…?”

  “How did they get into the trunk?” Lily exclaimed, recognizing her missing shoes.

  “Don’t be daft, the both of you.” James put his hands on his hips. “There’s nothing hocus-pocus about them. They had rubber-soled shoes like that for beachwear in Victorian times.”

  “No, I don’t think they had Keds back then,” Lily said quietly, pointing to the inner markings. “They’re mine. There’s the place where I snagged the toe when I was almost caught by the tide. But I swear I have no idea how they came to be there.”

  The air shimmered in front of Lily. For a disorienting moment she found herself in two places: She was standing at the foot of the staircase with Portia and James, staring at her shoes—and at the same time she was in a huge bedchamber, laughing as she slipped them atop the items in the trunk. There was a soft rushing sound in her ears, like the flow of fast water over smooth stones. She had to put her hand on the stair rail to keep her balance.

  Portia shook her head. “How do you explain the cobwebs over the lock?”

  James made a sound of disgust. “A busy spider. Nothing more.” Portia glanced from the shoes to Lily, and gasped.

  “What, have you been bitten, then?” James took her hand in his and examined it anxiously. “No. It wasn’t that,” Portia said shakily. “When I looked at Miss Kendall just then…” She paused and rubbed her eyes. “For a moment I thought…” She gave Lily an apologetic smile. “I swear that it looked as if you had become transparent.”

  “You need a vacation,” James said, scowling. “And no more episodes of Twilight Zone on the telly or reading those reincarnation books old Mrs. Polgelly sells to the tourist trade.”

  He took the canvas sandals from her and handed them firmly to Lily. “As to the shoes, you must have wandered into the attic that night, Miss Kendall, and left us a souvenir of your visit.”

  “I suppose I could have,” Lily said without conviction. “I don’t recall doing it, though.”

  Portia bit her lip. She was still pale and agitated. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that trunk hadn’t been opened in a hundred years.”

  7

  LILY RETURNED TO St. Dunstan after spending more time at the museum, staring at the paintings and photographs of Rees Tregarrick. As she wound her way down, her chance meeting with him on the headland seemed like a strangely vivid, erotic dream.

  She wondered again if that was what it had been. Every time she did, she stopped to examine the small bruise his thumb had made on the inner side of her wrist, and the love-bite beneath the strap of her dress. He’d been real enough to leave them both.

  Or perhaps I am imagining them as well, she thought with a tiny flutter of unease. She rejected it. Even in her wildest imagination, she could not have invented a man like Rees Tregarrick, or the marvelous things he had done to her as they made love.

  The village was bathed in pale shades of muted gray and blue. Like a Vermeer, she thought, but without the tranquillity. She made her way down the steep, cobbled High Street, past a few chattering tourists and the ubiquitous artists busily painting the view out over the quaint rooftops to the sparkling turquoise bay. Beyond the Atlantic stretched to the horizon like striped satin in tones of blue and gray.

  Since talking to Dr. Landry, she’d been thinking about her love of art and painting. About how she’d turned her back on it in despair when she realized she hadn’t the talent to take the visions from her mind and put them on canvas to share with others. She’d gone into a field that was all ruled lines and by-the-numbers regulations, a discipline where everything was precise to the last degree. It was the antithesis of everything she had once wanted. Small wonder that she now felt so stifled.

  And since Rees Tregarrick had touched her, bringing her body alive with sensations she hadn’t known existed, she realized how barren her life had become. This trip to Cornwall had forever changed her.

  A hard rain pelted down all afternoon and didn’t let up for two days. While the other tourists flocked to the local cinema and the Tin Museum, or sat around the fire in the quiet lounge over cards, she kept to her room. Except for a brief courtesy call by Dr. Landry, she hadn’t seen anyone but the maid and the waiters from room service.

  With her face against the cool panes, her body on fire with need, she watched the gray silk rain and thought of nothing but Rees Tregarrick.

  He came to her in dreams, as she lay in the high tester bed, bringing every inch of her alive and glowing. In dreams her breasts tingled to his touch and ached for his kisses. Time and again, her dream-lover brought her gasping to the edge between anguish and glory, and she would awaken in the lavender dimness, sweaty and tangled in the sheets, groaning with loss as the image of Rees Tregarrick’s strong, hard body and the lingering sensation of his strong embrace faded from her mind.

  The phone rang, startling her. It was the front desk. “You haven’t been down since early yesterday, Miss Kendall,” the head clerk said. “I took it upon myself to make sure that you’re not ill…?”

  “Thank you, no.” Lily tried to think of an excuse. “I’ve been catching up on my sleep and my reading, enjoying the quiet of the suite.”

  “Very good. If you require anything you have only to ask.”

  Lily replaced the phone and sat up. The clerk had sounded relieved. She wondered if the maid had said something about the way she sat at the window, staring over the cobbled waterfront to the gray, wind-ripped bay. Perhaps this was how Catherine Tregarrick had waited for him to come home from the sea, watching for him to make safe harbor.

  She must have loved him when she married him, Lily thought. Any woman in her right mind would have fallen in love with him. Yet it must have been lonely for a young girl left behind, even by her own choice, while her husband sailed the oceans. “She should have gone with you,” Lily murmured to the falling rain. “I would have.”

  She wished she knew more about both of them. Rees Tregarrick was a powerful lover—could a man capable of such intense passion be capable of other, more violent emotions? A chill ran through Lily. She wrapped her arms around herself. She wanted to see Rees Tregarrick again. To ask him about Catherine. To have him take her into his arms and kiss away that very faint, lingering shadow of doubt.

  Pacing the carpet before the windows that overlooked
the harbor, Lily wept and cursed the rain.

  The sun came out on the third afternoon, and St. Dunstan village bloomed once again with nasturtium and giant hydrangea, tourists in shorts with cameras slung about their necks, and artists dabbling in oils and pastels and water-colors along the quay. Her heart in her throat, Lily dressed eagerly, carefully, as if for a bridegroom. She’d done a lot of reading. A lot of thinking. She thought that she had finally figured out what she must do.

  Leaving the hotel that had been both sanctuary and prison, Lily walked past the greengrocers and tea room to a little stationery store run by Mrs. Polgelly. It was a fascinating little hole in the wall, filled with postcards, artists’ supplies, and souvenir books on one side, the latest magazines and paperback fiction, some old favorites, and a section of New Age books, crystals, tarot cards, and pamphlets on the other.

  The rest was given over to everything from paperweights hewn from the local granite to miniature teapots and hand-embroidered tea towels. The proprietor bustled over and assessed Lily from head to toe.

  “Visiting relations in St. Dunstan, are you?” she asked.

  “No, just a tourist, I’m afraid.”

  “Ah, but you’ve Cornish blood, aye, and it’s brought you back.” The old woman fixed her with a bright blue gaze. “You’ve the look of the old Trelawnys about you. They have the farm up beyond Yearning Head. They’ve been at Old Cross Farm these three hundred years and more. Young Miss Portia who runs the Starr House Museum lives there.” She wrapped Lily’s purchases—a sketchbook and drawing pencils—nodding in satisfaction. “You’ve Trelawny blood. I’m never wrong, you know.”

  Bemused, Lily went out and started the long climb up the zig-zag street toward the headland. Could it be true that she and Portia Trelawny were some sort of distant cousins? That might explain her feelings of belonging in Cornwall, her sense of having come home. Or perhaps it was only Rees Tregarrick who made her feel that way. The nearer she got, the harder her heart beat with anticipation. Her excitement at the thought of seeing Rees Tregarrick again made her tremble inside. Whether he was man, or ghost, or illusion, she longed for him with such intensity it was a physical ache.

  She sat beneath the same tree where he had come to her before and waited. Time passed, marked by the scudding clouds and the angle of the westering sun, but she felt no presence. She remained alone.

  Lily tried to sketch the view, but her hands shook too much, and her perspective was abominable. The vast expanse of the headland was empty. The wind soughed through the line of twisted trees, sounding like a woman’s muffled sobs. There was nothing there but sea and sky, and the strange, intense longing that swirled through the very air along the headland. It seemed to emanate from the violent meeting of stern, unyielding granite and insistent, lapis sea.

  Like doomed lovers. Lily thought, watching the waves. Always meeting in passion, never able to hold on to the moment…or each other.

  Finally she gave up trying to sketch the wild Atlantic, rushing to engulf the great granite rock formation offshore that the locals called St. Petroc’s Cathedral. Her waves were lumpy, not liquid, and her rendering of the delicate salt spume looked as thick as frosting on a cake. It was too much for her minor skills, she realized.

  Setting her sights on something less grand, she concentrated on the wildflowers that dotted the grassy slope and clung to the lichened rocks. The colored pencils filled in the shadows and highlights as the flowers came to life on her page, but there was nothing else that stirred around her.

  The sun lowered over the water, gilding the rocks and turning the wave-tossed sea to a cauldron of gold, and still Rees didn’t come. Disheartened, Lily packed up her things and went back to the hotel.

  Every morning for four more days, she went out to Yearning Head and spent the hours sketching the odd shapes of the wind-sculpted trees and the wildflowers that dotted the rugged headland. Every evening she returned to her hotel room with nothing but pages of carefully tinted sketches to show for her vigil, and a heart filled with aching disappointment.

  By week’s end she was anxious and out of sorts. Only three days of vacation left, and then she had to leave. How far away her life in the States seemed! How infinitely lonely. Once more she went along the strand and climbed the granite steps while the wind plucked at her skirts and pulled her hair loose from its clips.

  She stood on the headland and lifted her face to the wind. “Where are you?” she cried softly. “Why won’t you come to me, Rees Tregarrick?”

  The sun warmed her face, a breeze kissed her mouth, but that was all. The doubts that had been growing in her heart loomed large. Perhaps Dr. Landry was right. Her loneliness and romantic imagination, compounded by a blow to the head, had conjured up what was nothing more than a vivid hallucination.

  But, oh, the pressure of his hot mouth on hers, the feel of his warm hands upon her naked body, had been so wonderfully real.

  Lily sat on the headland until well past dinnertime, and finally came to a decision. There was no use pining away over a man who’d lived a hundred years ago—and she couldn’t face the boredom of returning to her job with the Department of Transportation. Not just yet.

  She would wire her supervisor and request a leave of absence. Then she’d pack up and leave St. Dunstan, hoping her experiences would fade in time from sharp loss to a happily remembered dream. The world was full of other places to visit: Rome and Athens, Cairo and Capetown, Jakarta and Hong Kong. She would see them all. When her leave was up, she would know what to do about reshaping her life. One thing was sure, she wouldn’t continue on the same worn path she’d been treading for years.

  That decision made, Lily was still reluctant to leave Cornwall behind. She knew, with overwhelming sadness, that once she left she would never come back to St. Dunstan.

  Two nights before she was to leave Cornwall, Rees came to Lily in her dreams once more, handsome and virile as before. She reached out to him, but he vanished into the gathering fog. The scene shifted in the strange way of dreams. Lily stood on the headland, wind whipping her hair against her face, while he watched her from the star window, his fists beating soundlessly against the stained-glass panes.

  She wakened, drenched in sweat, heart fluttering with fear. And with hope. Lily lay awake till dawn, thinking. In the end, there was no real decision to be made. She knew what she must do.

  On her last day in the village, Lily stayed in her room, packing. A quick call to the airline confirmed her flight home. She tucked in two of the sketchbooks she’d filled with her drawings, and placed the souvenirs she’d bought in her carry-on. Ignoring her half-finished letter to a friend on the desktop, she shot several pictures of her room with the new camera she’d bought in the little town. It was late in the day when she set out on a final pilgrimage to Yearning Head.

  She walked briskly along the High Street and made her way to the strand. She reached the base of the cliffs as the sky turned from gold and pink to lavender. Twilight closed in, but she was not afraid. The water had gone out in the bay and shimmered in the distance like gray, watered silk. Lily couldn’t help remembering her frantic scramble in the fog, racing the rising tide. The bright, burning star that had guided her footsteps.

  The voice—his voice, calling her to safety. Oh, Rees, my love!

  She smiled at the rich life of the tide pools, the colorful clumps of barnacles and limpets exposed on the rocks by the retreating waves.

  “Good-bye,” she said softly to the tide pool, and the silvery sea, and the great craggy bulk of Yearning Head.

  As she rounded a jutting rock, her foot slipped on the loose shingle, and she went sprawling. Her sketchbook flew out of her hand. Lily ignored it. Before she could get to her feet, the air darkened and shimmered, and she knew. He was waiting for her at the head of the stairs.

  She made the climb eagerly, grasping the rough railing to pull herself higher. When she reached the top of Yearning Head, there was nothing but a wide sweep of wind-bent grasses, the
stunted trees to one side and the graceful lines of Star House against the rapidly darkening sky.

  The wind grew chill, and she wrapped her arms around herself for warmth as night fell. Stars spangled the firmament, but the mansion’s tower was a black bulk rising up like a threat, its great stained-glass window blank and unlit.

  Lily lifted her arms to the sky. Love and a fierce longing flowed from her like an invisible force. The air crackled with tension.

  “Damn you, Rees Tregarrick! Come to me. Come to me!”

  The wind snatched her voice, carrying it inland, yet it seemed to echo from behind her, from the granite mass of Yearning Head. As those lonely echoes faded, a faint light bloomed in the tower, grew and blossomed before her eyes. Lily held her breath, afraid to move. Then the great star window lit the night, blazing in all its golden glory. “Rees!” she whispered.

  And suddenly, miraculously, he was there.

  He stood a little away. He looked older, and his cane was gone. His jaw was so hard, his eyes so angry that it frightened her a little. Was this how Catherine Tregarrick had seen him that fatal night? But, no, whatever it was that sparked in the depths of his eyes, she knew beyond doubt that he would never harm her.

  “Rees!” She held out her arms to him, but his own stayed at his side.

  “What do you want of me, woman?”

  The harshness of his voice stung her. Lily went toward him despite it. All the longing in her soul welled up, compelling her to go to him.

  He was no hallucination. He cast a shadow in the lowering sun, and she could smell his scent of cedar, see a few small whiskers he’d missed in shaving along his squared jaw. Her fingers itched to touch him, to reassure herself that he was really there. She restrained herself with difficulty.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” she told him. “Calling for you.”

  He sighed. “I heard you tonight, in every sigh of the wind. Why are you tormenting me, woman? For the love of God, go away! Go back to wherever you came from and leave me in peace!”