The Cornish Escape: The perfect summer romance full of sunshine and secrets

by Lily Graham

  William Blake said he could see a world in a grain of sand, but what he never said was how you could ever see it again as sand. I don’t think you can. I have found a world in my friendship with you.

  ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose…’ X, 3:1.

  I believe that there is a time for everything, and this is ours.

  T

  Chapter Eleven

  A world in a friendship? Had I ever felt that way? I doubted it. Though I felt in reading those words that I wished that I had.

  I must have read Tilly’s letter three times before I finally talked myself into going to bed that night.

  In the morning I woke to the sound of seagulls and a dull knocking noise. I pulled my pillow over my head, but the knocking noise grew louder. I sat up, realising that it was coming from the front door. I pulled on my robe and made my way out of the cabin to the front of the boat, my eyes widening in surprise as I saw three men staring at me.

  One of them was Adam, and he gave me that now familiar lazy smile. ‘Sorry, did we wake you? I tried calling…’

  I blushed. Next to Adam were two young men, and all three of them were holding a rather large barrel between them. I frowned. Had I missed something?

  ‘Fresh water,’ said one of the guys. He had red hair and a very wide grin. ‘Just delivered.’

  ‘Jason and Derron offered to help bring it aboard,’ said Adam, nodding first to the redhead and then to the other, darker-haired, guy.

  ‘We live on that boat down there,’ said Derron, nodding his head at a rather ramshackle houseboat near mine called The Piston Rings.

  ‘You’re the ones in the band?’ I asked.

  ‘The Piston Rings,’ said Jason. ‘Named after our boat.’

  ‘Angie told me about you guys,’ I explained.

  ‘Angie,’ he said, his face splitting into a grin. He didn’t need to say much else. ‘Cool top,’ he added, eyeing my Def Leppard T-shirt.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, tying my robe a little tighter. ‘Come on in.’ I stepped aside and they marched past me and got started on replacing the old barrel. ‘This is really great of you guys,’ I said, touched. This would never have happened in London.

  ‘’Tis nothing,’ said Jason.

  While the boys fitted the new barrel, Adam looked around. ‘Wow, love what you’ve done with the place! Cool chair.’ He pointed to my rattan, egg-shaped rocking chair.

  He eyed the string lights I’d put around the kitchen and my collection of Cornish pottery on the shelves. Near the window sat the little geranium in its yellow pot.

  ‘Gerald likes his spot by the window,’ I said.

  He gave me an amused look. ‘Gerald? Do you always name your plants?’

  ‘Just this one,’ I admitted. ‘Angie gave me the idea.’

  I couldn’t say for sure if Gerald had perked up because he was closer to the light or because he now had a name. I suspected what Angie would say about it though.

  Adam laughed. ‘She’s something else, isn’t she?’

  ‘A true original,’ I agreed.

  There was so much I wanted to ask Adam – about the cottage, what he knew about the Waters family and their relationship with the Aspreys, why he hadn’t told me that it was owned by his family – but with Jason and Derron there, I didn’t bring it up.

  ‘So you’ve got everything you need?’ asked Adam. ‘Stove okay?’

  ‘Yeah it’s great, thanks.’

  I was just about to ask him if he wanted to stay for a coffee or meet up later to have a chat about the cottage when he said, ‘Well, I better get going, I’m off to Truro for a few days – family stuff. You’ll be alright?’

  I wasn’t used to this. In London you just got on and did your own thing. No one ever worried if you were fine – you just had to be.

  ‘Course I will,’ I said, perhaps more brusquely than necessary.

  Adam nodded, his face impassive. Before he left he looked at me. His eyes were so very blue. ‘Sorry – I have four sisters, it’s hard not to play big brother sometimes.’

  ‘Well you don’t need to play big brother with me,’ I said, and then wished I could take it back, as it came out not at all how I had meant.

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  I shook my head. ‘Sorry, I only meant that you don’t have to worry. You’ve got enough on your plate with your uncle and everything, you don’t need to add something else to that list.’

  He gave me that lazy smile, his eyes scanning mine like he knew something I didn’t. ‘You’ll see – it’s different down here, people look out for you, even if you tell them not to. You may as well start getting used to it,’ he said, giving me a wink before he left. I couldn’t help but smile.

  After they left I thought about what Adam had said. My mother was the poster child for feminist rights, with her successful organisation, Women in Finance. I was raised to be independent and to never rely on anyone for anything, especially a man. In many ways it was a good thing – I could think of nothing worse than never being able to stand on your own two feet – but there was a downside too. If I always insisted that I could do anything, and didn’t need anyone, it was hardly surprising that I found myself doing everything alone.

  Something Mark had said when I’d first confronted him about Jess came to mind now. It was before the affair had started, when he had simply become friends with his personal trainer and I’d asked him if he had feelings for her. He’d said that he didn’t know. ‘Mostly I like talking to her. Maybe it’s just that she’s young and she needs someone to guide her. She’s always asking my opinion. It’s nice.’

  I’d scoffed in response. ‘So if I run every decision I make past you, will that satisfy your masculinity?’ I’d regretted saying it as soon as it came out.

  ‘No, it wouldn’t. But it would be nice, as your husband, to feel maybe just a little like my opinion mattered to you from time to time. It’s nice to feel needed.’

  ‘I need you,’ I said.

  ‘Since when?’

  The truth was that there had been a time when his was the only opinion that mattered. But somewhere along the way, after his career started to flail and he seemed increasingly resentful of mine, I stopped asking his advice. I stopped needing it, too, as it was almost always sprinkled with a scoop of passive aggression.

  Still, I didn’t want to chase people away. Was it the worst thing in the world to admit that I needed people?

  After I showered and dressed, I went down to the allotment to see if Sue was still there before she headed off to the Harbour Cafe, deciding to take her up on her offer of a cup of tea and to put into practice my new vow to let more of the world in.

  As I walked past rows of bare winter patches, I breathed in the rich scent of freshly turned earth. There were few people about, which I might have expected due to the cold, though here and there I spotted a light on in a garden shed and saw people leaving and entering greenhouses.

  I found Sue near the middle, dressed in stripy pink wellingtons and a purple bobble hat. Her brown eyes lit up as I neared. ‘Well now, this is a nice surprise. Fancy a cuppa?’

  I grinned. ‘I’d love one.’

  She beckoned me inside the greenhouse. ‘Ahh,’ I said, peeling off my scarf. ‘It’s so warm.’

  ‘I know, thank goodness,’ she said. ‘I’m so sick of winter, but at least here you can pretend it’s spring.’

  ‘Especially with this,’ I said, looking at all the little seedling trays, many of which had new shoots.

  ‘There’s Swiss chard, radishes and carrots. And over here,’ she said, taking me to the back, next to a small trolley on which were a kettle, a few mugs and tins of sugar, tea and coffee, ‘is my winter flower patch. I have impatiens and hyacinths at the moment.’

  ‘I love it,’ I said truthfully. ‘It reminds me so much of my brother. I think I told you about him – the one with the green fingers. He’s got his own catering company and he grows his own produce.’

  ‘
What’s it called?’

  ‘Sea Cottage.’

  She looked at me in surprise. ‘You’re kidding! We just ordered from them the other day. Such exotic condiments – there was even turnip chutney.’

  I thought of Stuart’s experiments the year before with pak choi jelly and stifled a laugh. ‘You have no idea.’

  ‘But it’s good though. I mean at first you wouldn’t think so, but…’

  I laughed. ‘That’s Stuart.’

  She grinned. ‘He sounds nice. Are you close?’

  I nodded. ‘We used to be closer, but I think we’ll get that back now that I’ve moved down here. I was in London, before,’ I added, probably unnecessarily. Sue seemed to know everything around here.

  ‘Tea or coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘Tea, please,’ I said.

  ‘Ah yes, I remember now – not an instant coffee fan,’ she said, nodding her bobble hat.

  I grinned. ‘I know, I sound like a terrible snob.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Okay, maybe a little,’ she laughed. ‘But I know what you mean. I used to think a vegetable was a vegetable, you know, until me and Abbie started growing our own. Now I know the difference between homegrown, seasonal veg that has just come out the ground, and the limp, watery stuff that’s been on the shelf for a few weeks. Maybe I’m a veg snob now.’

  I grinned. ‘Maybe. I won’t tell.’

  ‘So… you and Adam?’ she asked, passing me my cup of tea.

  I stood up straighter. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, I was just wondering… are you friends? I mean, when I met you, you were waiting outside their offices, but I got the impression that you didn’t know who he was. Then next thing I know you’re renting from him.’ She gave me a look. ‘It’s just, well, he’s single and you’re…’ It looked like she was fishing.

  ‘Going through a divorce?’ I supplied.

  She bit her lip. ‘Oh. Sorry. Well, it wouldn’t be the worst idea, him and you – would it?’

  ‘Not the worst, but not one of the best,’ I said with a grin. ‘We’re strictly business, I’m afraid.’ I remembered that Sue had admitted she was a little nosy at times. ‘I’ve bought a cottage in the area that needs fixing up, and until it’s ready I need a place to stay. Hence the Somersby.’

  ‘A cottage, that’s lovely!’ she exclaimed. When I told her it was Seafall Cottage, her mouth popped open in surprise. ‘You’re kidding?’

  I hadn’t brought it up the other night over the mulled wine, but as she was the one who’d told me that they were going to demolish the cottage by the end of the month, I felt she should know.

  ‘I couldn’t let them tear it down.’

  She loosened the soil in a seedling tray and transferred the new shoots into a larger pot, pressing down with her fingers and patting the soil into place. ‘You know, I knew when I met you that there was something different about you. Just be warned, there’ll be people round here who won’t be too impressed. A lot of the locals were happy that it was finally being torn down.’

  ‘Well, they’ll just have to get over it,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘Yeah… Well, good luck with that.’

  It turned out to be fair warning. It seemed that news of me buying Seafall Cottage had spread – and not all of the locals who heard about it were as happy as Sue and Angie.

  I was in the post office in Tregollan when I ran into Gilly, the owner of the Black Horse Inn, later that week. She pursed her lips and her thin frame seemed to radiate disapproval when she saw me. I was reminded of my first night at the inn, arriving late at night, with wet hair and tracks of mascara down my cheeks from the many tears shed during the long drive away from Mark.

  She made a beeline for me, abandoning the queue she was in. ‘Is it true?’ she demanded.

  ‘What?’ I asked. But I had an inkling that I knew what she meant.

  She shot me an incredulous look. ‘That you bought Cursed Cottage?’

  A few people had turned to stare at me. I pulled my jacket closer to me, as if I could hide inside its embrace. ‘It’s not cursed,’ I said.

  Her brows shot up, almost disappearing into her short and spiky magenta hair. ‘Oh yes, it is. I told yer not to mess with that place. It was finally being torn down and…’

  She muttered something under her breath. A plump woman in a green coat tutted loudly and Gilly shot her a silencing look. ‘Well, ’tis true – only an emmet would do something like that. Yer should have just left it well alone,’ she said to me.

  I knew that ‘emmet’ was the word for foreigner in Cornwall. To many locals, anyone who had to cross the Tamar Valley to get here was considered a foreigner. It wasn’t an altogether bad word, but it wasn’t exactly polite either.

  ‘Gilly, I’m sorry you feel that way, but it’s a lovely place – or it will be soon.’

  She shook her head. ‘’Tisn’t me you should be worried about. ’Tis yerself.’

  ‘Well, thank you, but I’ll be fine. I don’t think that Seafall Cottage is cursed. I really don’t.’

  She gave me a doubtful look. ‘Lass, for yer sake, I hope not.’ And then she went and stood back in her queue, her posture stiff and disapproving.

  Afterwards, I tried to shake away her words. She was wrong about it – after reading Tilly’s letter, I was convinced of that. I just wished that I could know more so that I could prove it to be true. As I stood there in the post office, I vowed that there would come a time when I would.

  It was that thought that changed everything. That word: time. It sat there like a pebble in my mind and it wouldn’t go away.

  When I went home I reread the letter. Looked at the diary, paged through it yet again. I set it down, thinking of Tilly’s words, of the quote: ‘To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose.’ Then I felt a small, sharp thrill. It seemed familiar to me somehow. In the letter it was followed by an X and the numbers 3:1.

  My throat was in my mouth when I opened the diary again. I skimmed the pages, forgetting to breathe. For there it was, along with the word Asprey, and it came up time and again: X and the numbers 3:1.

  I took my phone, typed ‘To everything there is a season’ into Google and waited. It was the Book of Ecclesiastes, verse 3:1.

  I sat back in shock. I took the first line of the verse, and matched the coded sentence before the word Asprey, and found that the number of letters and numbers matched.

  When dawn broke, turning the sky from shades of pewter to claret and then faded denim, I’d deciphered the code. It would take days and weeks, however, for me to fully unlock the secrets of the diary, as each word had to be deciphered letter by letter, making it slow, painstaking work. It would be worth it though, as in time, I would discover that it was so much more than an ordinary diary.

  Part II

  Chapter Twelve

  Cornwall, 1905

  Tilly

  Father changed the day the letter arrived. It was an ordinary Tuesday morning, a day as unremarkable as any other, with my sister Rose reading The Lady and counting the days until she ‘met her fate’ and Mother still in bed sleeping through hers, that he found a purpose for it all. One that would change my life and Fen’s forever. Although, of course, I only understood that later.

  Back then I was simply ten years old, sitting in the breakfast room across from Father’s distant scowl, when the footman, Edmund – the one with an ear that Rose said had been twisted by his mother so many times so that it poked out like a cauliflower – brought in the mail.

  I’d been eating my two-minute egg, the shell all cracked, ready to scoop the gooey yolk into my mouth, my face set in an agony of contempt as I hate eggs and soft-boiled eggs are the worst, when he opened up the letter and all the colour faded from his face.

  He was out the room before I even got a chance to ask him what was wrong. Even Rose, who is always oblivious to anything unless it is printed on a society page first, deigned to notice. ‘Papa?’ she called. ‘Is something wrong?’ But he’d already
gone into his study, the door closing behind him with a distant click. ‘Tilly, do you have any idea what that was about?’ she asked, her grey eyes unusually troubled.

  I shook my head.

  Some time later, the rumours began.

  It was hardly surprising that they started below stairs; I suppose they heard the news before we did. Even Mother didn’t really know what was happening until the builders came, and that was only because they trundled past the house with wagons filled with bricks and stones and bags of cement, going past the west and east farms, past the sea of daffodils, to the very back of the estate where nothing grew and no one lived, to where the sea lapped at the very edges of Father’s domain.

  It never occurred to Father to explain his motives to Mother, or to any of us really. Even though he was building a house for someone we’d never heard of. Someone Father had, it turned out, known for a long time.

  That’s what I overheard Mrs Price say when I snuck into the kitchen to get a spare bit of chicken for old Bess, our Border Collie, who hadn’t been eating properly for days but seemed to rally at the sight of some cold roast chicken.

  Oh yes. Long before we knew, Mrs Price did. After all, Mr Waters was her sister’s husband, wasn’t he? Funny, at first I didn’t think Father knew that. Later, I realised, of course, he did. That’s why she came to work for us in the first place. Mother had wanted the Talberts’ cook, Mrs Blunden, when old Mrs Carrick retired. But before anyone could say anything, there was Bertha Price, the youngest cook anyone had ever seen, who’d given herself the title of ‘Mrs’ solely because all respectable cooks were ‘Mrs’ as far as she was concerned. Who, if I’m being honest, didn’t start off as the world’s best cook either.