The Cornish Secret of Summer's Promise

by Laura Briggs

  "For you, I'll wave the usual pound," he said. "Consider it a gesture of friendship."

  He closed the door for me as I climbed in, leaning against its open window momentarily with his arms crossed in its frame. This put us closer together, and I felt the strength of his arms with only a glance, and felt the spark in his eyes strike to life something deeper in me again. Amazing how quickly only a little bit of encouragement can ignite something which threatens to catch the whole place aflame.

  "Hoy! Are you driving into the village?" Another guest was trotting our direction, this one with a travel backpack slung from his shoulder. "I need to catch the bus in twenty minutes."

  "Climb inside," said Sidney, opening the back passenger door. "Kip, up front," he said, with a low whistle. The terrier hopped over the front seat, and nearly clambered onto Sidney's lap as he climbed inside also. Sidney turned the ignition key and shifted into gear, steering the creaky rambler down the hotel drive. True to Sidney's questionable brakes, it began to pick up speed more quickly than either of his passengers would prefer.

  "So why are you driving people around today?" I lifted my voice above the momentary roar of the wind through Sidney's window as he tried to crank it closed again.

  "The vicar's on holiday, so I haven't anything else to do, once the lawn is mown and the hedges are trimmed," he said. "I thought I'd spend a bit of time at the shore — and it's a long walk to and a treacherous climb up the hotel beach's stairs after you've spent a long time in the water, so I thought I'd oblige a few tired tourists ... then there were a few new arrivals at the bus shelter ..."

  "I've never heard of an accidental taxi driver," I said, with a grin. Kip nuzzled the contents of my purse, snuffling as he came in contact with my bottle of hand lotion.

  "It's rather fun," Sidney answered. "Of course, I wouldn't want to do it all week long. I'm thinking of becoming an itinerant gardener as well. Do the lawns for the vicar's neighbors who haven't the time or the health for it. Mrs. Primmer's hedges need a bit of a trim. And I could always come help with the hotel's grounds. Their gardener's always behind in his labors, if his remarks in the pub are true."

  I could well imagine Norm grumbling about his labors over a pint. Though the hotel's garden always looked immaculate, I had yet to observe its gardener in the throes of backbreaking labor on its behalf. "What does Mrs. Graves think of you taking up a second trade?" I asked.

  "She's a tad upset with my work right now, so it might be better if I make myself scarce for a few days," Sidney replied. "I trimmed her lilacs too vigorously, apparently. I had no idea they were so delicate. And I might have run the grass clipper over a patch of tulips."

  I managed not to smile at this.

  "Might you finish rolling up that window?" asked the passenger in the back. "That constant breeze is chilly."

  "One moment." Sidney began cranking the window's old-fashioned handle again. It fell off and he fumbled around for it, temporarily drifting into the next lane.

  "Car, Sidney," I said, urgently, reaching for the wheel.

  "Oops. Sorry." He scrambled upright and swerved to the left again, applying the near-useless brakes to slow us as an expensive black car continued past in the direction of the hotel's car park. It might be a member of the legendary auction house en route to meet with Mr. Trelawney, I thought. Or one of the many curious visitors who had been waiting anxiously to see its latest collection's unveiling.

  "Bit slower, please." The passenger behind us sounded nervous.

  "I'm trying," Sidney answered, although we were picking up still more speed on the steepest stretch of the road. Kip uttered a harsh bark and scrambled to the floor, ducking behind my ankles as we merged with the ordinary traffic lanes of the village. A lorry honked at us as it suddenly reversed from a car park — Sidney's jeep emerged from a cloud of straw dust produced from multiple crates of poultry stacked in the lorry's bed, filled with cackling hens and speckled roosters.

  The bus shelter had a cluster of backpackers already gathered and waiting as Sidney's jeep rattled to a stop a short distance away. He shifted into park. "Need a hand with your luggage?" he asked, turning to the passenger seated behind him.

  "No, thank you." Sidney's passenger scrambled out as soon as the vehicle stopped, collecting his bag hastily before he disembarked without lingering — as if escaping a death trap more than a taxi, truthfully.

  "I think I was just forced to forego my tip," Sidney said. He glanced at me, his expression causing me to laugh. Kip was nudging his way between my feet now, eating the crumbs of Sidney's biscuits off the car floor.

  "Where to?" Sidney asked me. A playful glimmer in his eyes dared me a little to pick any place at all, anywhere in the world — and not the conventional choice that I should make, given my uniform and work obligations. But today was not the day to break that commitment to my incognito role as a hotel maid.

  "The post office," I said.

  "Ah, well. As you wish." Sidney shook his head, hiding his smile at the same time. "The post office it is." He shifted the jeep into gear again and steered in the direction of the village's high street.

  ***

  The beast, or the hotel kitchen's dishwashing machine, whichever you prefer, dropped its roar to a low growl as I shut off the water. Its clanging pipes rattled to silence, and the last tray of pots and pans emerged from their steam bath behind the rubber flaps at the stainless steel ramp's head.

  It was my last official load of dishes — tomorrow, Niles returned from his holiday and would resume his morning shift of scrubbing pots and rinsing plates Tuesday through Thursday, and I would go back to spending mornings in the laundry room ... or wherever Mrs. Finny felt moved to schedule me.

  I pulled off my plastic apron. In the kitchen's sunny space outside the dish room, it was the afternoon lull after the lunchtime rush. Jonah the sous chef was leaning against the counter, watching a roast turning on a rotisserie oven's spit. Two of the hotel's teatime waiters, Cameron and Janice, were having a semi-friendly argument in the service pantry about a sitcom's episode they had both watched last night, their voices and movement drifting through its doorway as they polished the silver trays.

  "Where are my mushrooms?" The hotel's customary chef, Ligeia, was searching the cooler for the misplaced item. "How many times must I tell you all to put things back where you find them! Sam, this is your fault — I know it's you who did this," she added, her head emerging long enough to glare at the kitchen assistant at his station. "Do it again, and I'll take the cost out of your pay. Do you hear me?" The small, spiky chef had now located the item in question, shoved behind several cartons of blueberries and fresh strawberries.

  "I'm sorry," Sam said. "I swear, it won't happen again. Maisie, hand me a towel from the rack. I've the fingers of a serial killer at this moment." The kitchen assistant's hands were covered with beet juice — on the rare occasion when Sam was cooking and not cleaning up messes in the kitchen, he was nearly always stuck with boring or gross-looking cooking tasks. Right now, he was filling a saucepan with chopped canned beets, destined for a dish I couldn't quite picture, although it must have something to do with both roast beef and mushrooms.

  "I'm off duty in a half hour, and the dishes are done," I informed Ligeia, as I handed Sam a towel. "Is there anything else you'd like me to do?"

  "Apron, onions, celery," she ordered, using short, blunt phrases. "Produce is on the counter." She lifted a thermometer from a food-safe disinfectant solution, rinsed it, and clipped it inside a saucepan on the stove, into which two pounds of bright yellow butter slipped from wax wrappers.

  Chop, chop, chop. The steady rhythm of the knife through each fruit or vegetable from my pile created a drumbeat in time to the song in my head. Old-time jazz tunes, spinning from an old record of Sidney's that he sometimes played on his friend Dean's hi-fi. The songs from the Randhouser ball where I had been disillusioned about my writing future and dizzied by the prospect of an impulsive kiss; the ones from lazy afternoons spent
debating the fate of my novel's characters with Sidney, arguing, musing, and teasing back and forth as we shelled peas in the kitchen or meticulously cleaned Dean's paintbrushes and pallets in mineral spirits and water.

  The bright sunshine through the kitchen window was enticing me towards the outdoors, its picture glass facing the rose garden behind the hotel, its paths rambling towards the umbrella shade of certain old trees to the threshold of the wood beyond the garden boundaries. Unlike the manicured side lawn, which faced the sea like a perfect green square beneath an azure blue sky.

  I dumped cupful after cupful of chopped vegetables and fruit into the silver bowl at my elbow, between tears for the onions I chopped. I diced stalks of celery now, losing myself again in water droplets sparkling on paintbrush bristles, and the sound of Sidney's laugh. Whenever I was remembering moments of happiness, or in need of a comforting thought, it was the recollection of it which came floating to the surface of my mind first, always within easy grasping distance.

  How quickly something like that becomes so vital. How quickly a person who was a stranger only six months ago becomes someone who seems integral to everyday life. Fighting the feeling that Sidney was indispensable was becoming as routine to me as waking up each morning or breathing air to stay alive; only it was becoming stronger and more palpable than either of those daily essentials. I was swimming against an emotional current that was going to push me further out to sea. My arms were growing tired, and my mind was blurring the lines between sensible choices and the longing — or maybe it was planning to push me against a rock wall like the steep and jagged ones along the coastline instead.

  This idea seems perfectly natural one moment, and silly the next. Sidney didn't even know that the last name he called me by wasn't my real one, and that the name he mistook as my pen name was legally mine. Or that I had turned aside from my only chance to salvage my Tucker Mentorship prospects to stay in this place; and I stayed because he had asked me to. I didn't know where Sidney was born, or where he lived before he moved to Port Hewer. I didn't know whether he had ever loved anybody else in his life.

  How was that for the beginning of a possible love story? It's not what real-life cases of true and eternal love are made of. Only the ones in books or movies, as most of us sensibly know. But I would have to declare myself an idiot if I claimed any other feeling than that of caring deeply, passionately, and constantly for Sidney Daniels.

  Chop, chop, chop. That was my last vegetable. The pile was empty, and so were my thoughts, as if I had come to the customary stopping point in my dilemma. The gentle sound of a saucepan's contents bubbling rose in the kitchen's quiet space, rivaling the sound of a bird's wings fluttering against the window glass as it peered inside.

  I pulled off my chef's cap and unknotted my apron. "That's me for today," I said.

  The rose garden was brighter in the mid-afternoon sun outdoors, which felt pleasant on my head and shoulders in the cool breeze. I left behind the arbors and hedges of swelling buds in red, mottled pink, white, and blue-purple amidst the stalks of late spring's flowers, and hiked down the footpath leading between the shade patches of old trees and the little stream that rippled slowly along mossy stones.

  I had changed from my chef's smock and uniform trappings into a pair of denim shorts embroidered with daisies, lace-up sneakers, and an old knit blue jacket pulled over my thin tunic top, its fabric patterned with polka dots and daisies also. I paused and broke off one of the long-petal flower heads from the last bed before the garden dropped into lush, deep green on the wood's edge. With a smile, I tucked it behind one ear.

  Sidney wasn't oiling the gears of his grass trimmer or helping paint a cast-off canvas, but attempting to weed Dean's back garden. It was an intensely wild spot of tall, dry weed stalks from last autumn, with matted yellow grass and green tufts of new growth. Saplings pencil-thin or thick as my thumb crowded together in random clumps springing from the tide of wildflowers and seedling survivors of a previous gardening experience, which added the only color other than the pinkish, budding foliage of an ornamental tree from its past. It was the view from Dean's picture window, rambling back to a sparse shady dell with an old farm pond just beyond it, as I had seen last winter when Sidney and I walked there from the densest part of the wood between Dean's cottage and the next clearing.

  "Foxglove survived, at least," said Sidney. He dug up a clump of invasive grass, using a small spade. "I think we should try something equally strong and un-killable this time. Mrs. Graves had some sort of yellow lily that can't be crowded out or mown to death, I've discovered."

  "I despise lilies," said Dean. "The stuff of funeral wreaths."

  "Then we'll plant something else. Petunias are nice. Or daisies. You fancy daisies, don't you?" Sidney's eye met mine with a subtle wink. "The long-petal kind, not the little button ones."

  "I read somewhere that iris are nice and hardy," I volunteered, helpfully.

  "You're wasting your time," said Dean. "I won't hire a gardener to look after it. It will simply be a ruin in the wild again by autumn, and whatever you plant will be wrestled into submission by those tall, fluffy seed stalks that cause everyone to sneeze."

  I had already disrupted one of those while pulling up dead stalks, and sent tiny, cottony bits into the air, undoubtedly to plant themselves in neighboring clearings. There were a dozen more like it, some of them taller than me — all of them seemed to be friends with a short weed with little dried pods attached to is head, sharing the same space at a different level.

  "You're the one who complained endlessly about the view," said Sidney, as he tossed another ball of grass and root into his pile. "I'm simply sick of hearing it mentioned. Now I won't have to endure it for six months, will I?"

  With a sigh of resignation, Dean's finger touched his wheelchair's lever and wheeled himself further into retreat in the only cleared space near the cottage's back gate. "Don't dig up that," he instructed Sidney. "It belongs. It's a lilac. Can't you see its buds?"

  "It's awfully short for one," said Sidney.

  "Unless it's been trimmed back," I noted. Sidney grinned guiltily.

  "It's a dwarf variety," said Dean. "It's not meant to be a towering hedge. A whole cluster of them was planted there once upon a time. "

  "How would I know that if you hadn't told me?" Sidney asked, withdrawing his shovel from the plant's base.

  "You're supposed to be the gardener," said Dean, dryly.

  "You know that my gardening knowledge can be fit neatly into one hand," Sidney replied. "I only cut down things that look a bit out of place and trim back things that seem to be growing into spaces they shouldn't be." He dug around the base of a massive weed that was already sending up fresh green shoots for this year's cottony seed supply, grunting a little as he struck a thick base. "This one doesn't want to leave," he announced.

  "Clearly, you should have read horticulture at university," said Dean. "Taxonomy would tell you that species has a root network that forms a nearly-impenetrable carpet around it."

  "How do you know all this?" I asked, as I dug up a new clump of grass — one with a lesser root network, apparently.

  "I used to be fond of gardens, once upon a time," said Dean.

  "Don't listen to him. He still is," said Sidney. He tossed a small clump from the bigger weed.

  "Must you always be so infuriatingly contradictory?" Dean asked. "I can hear your words from this distance. I'm not deaf, merely mobility impaired."

  Sidney rolled his eyes. "Shall I wait for this bit of a mood to pass before I suggest planting anything else? Or would you like this lot to grow tall enough to simply block the view outside? You wouldn't need to draw your drapes against the morning sun anymore."

  "Very funny," said Dean. But he didn't issue any further objection to Sidney spading up one of the invasive sapling clusters.

  I pulled up the last of the dry stalks nearest to the cottage. "Did you garden as well as paint?" I asked Dean.

  "Hardly," he answe
red. "I puttered, at best. But I was painting a garden, the last summer ..." he paused. "It belonged to a friend of mine, whose gardener was very chatty on the subject of its care. We used to go for walks through the grounds, me and my canvas's subjects, and he would tell us all about his labors."

  I wondered if this was the canvas Sidney had been helping him finish last year, of the woman and two children sitting on a blanket in a garden.

  "Sidney would just like you to see something nice when you look outside," I said. "You could help him out by suggesting a few things, maybe?"

  "I'm perfectly aware of what he's trying to do," said Dean. "Subtle was never one of his gifts."

  "Politeness, however, was one of yours," replied Sidney. His spade drove earthwards into the hard tangle of roots.

  "Hardly," scoffed Dean. "Call it patience. Even then, however, I wasn't clever at disguising opposite feelings. You remember Professor MacKenzie's complaints about me having 'tae much cheek' in conversation."

  I stopped snapping off the weed stalks. "You knew each other at university?" I said. I had no idea they had been friends for that long. I had been under the impression that Sidney met him after coming to Port Hewer — not that Sidney himself ever offered a true description of events. I glanced from Sidney to Dean.

  "We did," answered Sidney. "For the time I was there, at any rate. Quite awhile ago, now that I think about it." He tossed a new clump into the pile. "Dean was a year ahead of me in studies."

  "So you knew him when you came to the village," I said.

  "We hadn't seen each other in some time when I came here," said Sidney. "You could call it a reunion of sorts now. We caught up on old times, made up for lost time." He smiled in Dean's direction, but without any of the usual mischief or humor to color it with an alternate meaning.

  "What was he like in those days?" I asked Dean.

  "Dreadful. He read poetry aloud in the commons and on the lawn, never slept, and made a frightful racket whenever he chose to attend his classes."