Will North

by Water, Stone, Heart (v5)

  Boscastle Flood Special Issue,

  Journal of Meteorology 29, No. 293

  fourteen

  “I don't think Nicki was very happy with you yesterday.”

  “Thank you, Harry; what a wise wizard you are.”

  Lee shot Andrew a look. She had been sitting on the wall outside his door again, reading her Harry Potter, when Andrew emerged from his cottage Monday morning. Now she had the book buried in her little forest-green knapsack. The two of them were walking through the Valency valley toward the port. Andrew had promised to help Jamie and Becky with the new hedging volunteers; he wasn't entirely sure what Lee's agenda was, other than to point out that he'd blown it the day before. It would have been annoying had he not been so fond of the kid … and had it not been so true.

  “I'm just saying …,” Lee continued.

  “Yeah, yeah. I know.”

  “… that maybe it's not so bad to believe Rocky Valley is magical. A lot of people do.”

  Andrew recalled all the little offerings tucked into niches by the carvings, and the bits of fabric tied to tree branches nearby.

  “Just because maybe the labyrinths aren't so old doesn't mean there isn't magic there anyway,” she concluded.

  This was a reasonable position, Andrew mused, so long as you believed in magic in the first place. Certainly, Rocky Valley was an enchanting place, and he had to admit it was more than just that the place was visually dramatic. Was there a sort of continuum from “enchanting” to “enchanted”? From “magical” to “magic”? Maybe this was somehow similar to the inexplicable way he had gone from being attracted to Nicola to understanding—very much to his own surprise—that he loved her. How had that transition occurred? What was the point along that particular continuum where certainty emerged? If that was a question that eluded rational analysis, that could not be ascertained through deductive reasoning, then why not other aspects of being? Why not magic?

  It was an odd morning, the air close, almost sticky on the skin. There was almost no birdsong, as if there were insufficient oxygen from which to create trills and chirps. Andrew was moving slower than usual. After the unpleasantness at Rocky Valley, he'd moped around his cottage a bit and finally gone down to the Cobweb late Sunday afternoon. He wanted to talk to Flora, but it turned out that she'd gone off duty after the lunch crowd cleared out. So he sat at the bar and had a bag of salted crisps and couple of pints, then a couple more, then ordered a dinner of shepherd's pie and another pint, and finally wandered unsteadily home, collapsing into bed before eight.

  “Gonna rain this afternoon,” Lee announced, apropos of nothing. “A lot.”

  Andrew looked up at the milky-blue sky. “What makes you so sure?”

  “I just know. Dad was gonna cut hay today, but I told him not to. He always listens to me about stuff like that.”

  This sort of thing no longer surprised him. Lee seemed to live closer to nature than anyone, much less any child, he'd ever known. It was as if she occupied some sort of nether zone between the world of humans and that of animals and plants. More magic, perhaps. Or just the magic of childhood.

  They stopped by the weir that had once fed water to the mill downstream.

  “This is as far as I go,” Lee said.

  “Got plans, do you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What kind?”

  “Just out and about. You know, exploring.”

  “Okay, kiddo. Thanks for the company this morning. And the advice.”

  Lee smiled, turned, and skipped back the way they'd come. He watched her until she rounded a bend and disappeared. The girl was enough to make you believe magic was an everyday occurrence. Then he turned downstream to meet Jamie and Becky.

  The new hedging crew had been at it for nearly four hours when the rain started. As had been the case the week before, it had taken only a couple of hours for the group to sort out their respective roles and settle into a steady rhythm as the new recruits gained skill and confidence. Stone by stone, section by section, the new hedge lengthened beside the car park along the bank of the River Valency. Jamie had been levering a particularly large grounder into place when one of the volunteers pointed out the cloud, like a massive black-and-blue bruise, that had appeared in the otherwise blue sky to seaward. The valley was so narrow, they hadn't seen it coming.

  Jamie squinted at it for only a moment, laid down the iron pry bar he'd been working with, looked at his watch, and shouted, “Right, lads, time for lunch. Indoors, I should think. The Cobweb!”

  The rain began as a mist. As they put tools in Jamie's van, it settled on the crew's dusty clothes so lightly that it was like dew on leaves. But by the time they'd hurried across the road to the inn and ordered drinks, the clattering hiss of raindrops on the steaming pavement outside could be heard even within the pub.

  * * *

  High up in the Valency valley, near the village of Lesnewth, which Andrew had walked through two days earlier, the rain gauge recorded that it was raining at the rate of nearly two inches per hour.

  Jamie was sitting on a stool at the bar, chatting up Flora, who was wearing a deeply plunging, décolletage-revealing, knit blouse—in keeping, she would have said if asked, with the sultry weather.

  “You mark my words,” Flora said as she leaned on her elbows opposite Jamie, “in fifteen minutes, this place'll be cheek-by-jowl. Here we are a seaside village, and everyone comes to walk the cliffs and see the harbor, but when the rain comes, everyone wants to be in the pub. You watch.”

  “I don't know, Flo,” Jamie said. “Might be the scenery in here that draws 'em.”

  “Go on, you dirty old man,” Flora protested, with a grin. She slipped off to attend to another customer, but not without giving the stone craftsman a lascivious wink.

  And sure enough, in they came, tourists who'd been nosing about the harbor and the gift shops and had dashed up the street to shelter, ramblers in dripping anoraks who'd been out hiking the coast path, and passers-through who decided a shower was a good excuse to stop for a pint. In no time at all, the pub was jammed, and Flora and the manager, Alan, were working at full tilt taking people's orders.

  Andrew had been standing to one side, talking with the new volunteers but also enjoying the spectacle of his mentor, Jamie, courting Flora in his sweet if awkward way.

  He envied Jamie. He would have liked nothing better than to have the kind of warmly affectionate relationship with Nicola that Jamie and Flora seemed to have, one in which intimacy had grown, like a hedge, stone by stone, upon a foundation of history and mutual acceptance. Andrew had no such history with Nicola. And as for mutual acceptance, well, that seemed to come and go like the tide in the harbor. What Andrew knew with certainty was that whenever he was with Nicola, his heart felt like it was about to become airborne, to lift, as if winged, from his chest. And yet whenever he tried to really reach her, whenever he tried to offer her some part of himself, share some part of his mind or heart, it backfired. She could be so warm and playful and, on occasion—like that moment by the waterfall the day before when she'd pressed against him to cover his eyes—downright sexy. And then, as if someone had thrown a switch, she could turn distant, withdrawn, even icy. He felt perpetually off balance, and none of the crutches he'd relied upon in the past—rational thinking, walling himself off from feeling too much, being an observer rather than a participant—worked. He wasn't rational when he was with her; he was flooded with emotions he hardly comprehended—awe, excitement, affection, need, protectiveness, tenderness. The sturdy stockade he'd always been able to depend upon to shield him from uncertainty, cupidity, dissatisfaction, and anger from Katerina was gone. When Nicola flared, it was as if his heart were made of dry tinder and she was intent on immolating it. Try as he might, he could not maintain a safe distance; there did not seem to be a distance that was safe. She flashed so quickly between warm affection and blowtorch anger—or fear, or something else he didn't yet fully understand but thought was connected to her dead b
rother—that it was dizzying.

  And yet despite all this, despite the damnable and persistent prickliness of the woman, he was more sure every day that he'd finally found the woman he was meant to be with, the woman who was both his match and his counterbalance, the woman with whom anything was possible.

  If only he could stop screwing up.

  The rain stopped entirely at about 12:45, and the sun came out a few minutes later. Jamie's gang returned to their labors. Jamie had given Andrew the task of overseeing the hedge builders, while he and two assistants found and laid big grounders ahead of the crew. It was so humid that everyone was soaked with sweat. Quick, sometimes fierce, sun showers swept over the valley from time to time over the course of the next hour and a half, but the hedgers were grateful for the cool rain, and afterward their shirts steamed in the sun as they worked. The hedge progressed at a pace that seemed glacial, and yet when Andrew stopped to check their progress, he was amazed to see that they'd advanced several feet.

  Lee was getting cranky. All morning, acting on advice from Elizabeth at the Visitor Centre, she'd been hunting newts in the boggy spots higher up in the Valency valley, without success. Among the lush, violet-strewn water meadows far upriver, she'd seen legions of pearl-bordered fritillary butterflies and, every once in a while, a dive-bombing dipper flying right into the water to seize aquatic insects. In the oak copses there were flashes of color from electric-purple hairstreak butterflies, too. And hovering just above the surface of the river, she'd seen two linked golden-ringed dragonflies, whose wings fluttered so fast they seemed invisible. It wasn't until she began returning downstream again, to the shadier parts of the valley, that she began to find the newts, along with creepy slow worms—a bronze-colored kind of legless lizard. Apart from the on-again, off-again bursts of rain, she'd had a lovely time. The showers were more an annoyance than anything else; they came and went so quickly it was hardly worth one's while to look for shelter. But she felt sticky and dirty as she poked around under rocks beside the river.

  She'd been having a streamside lunch just below the little cluster of cottages called Newmills when she heard the dull rumble of thunder. She looked at her watch and was surprised that it was already coming up on three o'clock, and she still had a long way to go to get back down the valley toward home. She'd just tucked her Harry Potter into her backpack when a bolt of lightning flashed directly above her. There was a moment of absolute silence, and then the air sizzled and erupted into the loudest, closest, scariest crack of thunder she'd ever heard. This was no low growl; this was like Zeus cracking a spectacularly big whip directly over her head, just like in the Greek myths she'd learned about in school. Almost immediately, the rain hit. She grabbed the backpack and raced downstream to a spot where, in another time, the curving river had cut overhanging ledges out of a cliff of night-black slate. She ducked beneath one of them and was amazed that she could barely see the other bank of the stream; the rain was falling so hard it was like being behind a waterfall.

  Though it was at that moment sunny in Boscastle, Andrew heard the thunder and looked up at Jamie. Jamie, in turn, was looking up at the sliver of sky above the narrow valley. Downstream, over the harbor, the sun threw diamonds across the ruffled surface of the water. Upstream, though, the sky was black as a crow's wing. Andrew noticed that the river—only some twenty feet wide and clasped in its ancient stone channel—was rising. Though the afternoon showers in Boscastle had been tolerable, clearly, somewhere else it was raining much harder. There was another flash of lightning, and, as if there was an intuitive channel of communication between them, Jamie and Andrew nodded to each other.

  “Lads and lasses, you're in luck,” Jamie announced. “It's an early day we'll be having today. But I'll expect you all bright and early tomorrow, raring to go!”

  The novice crew cheered and groaned, in rough proportion to their respective ages, and began the process of cleaning up the work site and putting away tools. A few headed for their cars, but several returned to the Cobweb. Jamie locked the van, looked at Andrew, and they, too, repaired to the pub. Becky had already left for an appointment with a local landowner.

  A little after three o'clock, beneath the darkest of the clouds, the Lesnewth rain gauge far up the valley registered rainfall at the rate of nearly six inches per hour.

  The Cobweb was even more crowded than at lunchtime. The two men eased their way through the throng, and when Flora saw them coming, she had two pints of Doom Bar ready for them. Jamie executed an awkward bow in her direction. Andrew took a quick slug from his glass but found himself feeling oddly restless.

  “Back in a bit,” he shouted into Jamie's ear above the din, but the older man just nodded, his attention otherwise engaged by the fluid movements of the voluptuous woman behind the bar.

  Out in the street, Andrew was struck by how loud the rain was. What had sounded like the noisy hiss of static earlier was now a low roar. He pulled the drawstring on the hood of his anorak tight and wandered down the street past the row of attached buildings called Bridge Walk, ducking under awnings where he could. When he rounded the corner of the Riverside Hotel and followed the sidewalk onto the two-lane bridge, the sun came out, and he realized the roar was not the rain, but the river. He peered over the parapet and was stunned by what he saw. A stream that was normally clear as tap water was now black as graphite and flowing at a terrific speed, its normally comforting burble an angry, fraught rumble, as stones carried by the flood tumbled along the bedrock in the streambed like dice in a cup, punctuated now and then by the dull thud of rolling boulders. And in the few moments it took to take all this in, he realized it was only a matter of time before the muddy flood reached the cottages downstream, including Nicola's. He ran off the bridge and down the lane along the south bank of the river to her house and pounded on the door. No answer. He opened the door and called again. Again, no response. He stood there for a moment, then looked across the tumbling river and saw the Museum of Witchcraft. Of course. She was at work. He dashed across the footbridge and saw the river, so thick with sediment it was viscous, slip over its banks just upstream and spread, slowly but without interruption or hesitation, like an ugly tide.

  Lee knew it was time to do something. The thing was, she wasn't sure what. She had been huddling beneath the ledge for nearly half an hour and there had been no letup in the rain. For most of that time, she'd been excited by the scene before her. She loved lightning and thunder; it thrilled her to feel the air shudder, the vibrations penetrating into her bones. But that part of the storm seemed to have passed now and there was only the relentless rain. She'd been staring at it for a while now, enjoying the way it made all the familiar features of the landscape soften into a blur, as if they were melting.

  She didn't notice until it was too late that while she was safe in her niche in the cliff, the footpath had been flooding both above and below her. Where earlier had been a well-beaten path, there was now only swirling, frothy water, dark as licorice. And the slightly elevated platform beneath the slate overhang where she'd been sheltering was getting smaller by the moment as the water rose.

  A high-pitched screech, like hard chalk scraped across the blackboard at school, but much, much louder, pulled Lee's attention to the river upstream. This was followed by a strange whooshing sound, and then a thud. And suddenly, she knew it was a tree that had crashed into the river. Almost as suddenly, she realized the footpath was reemerging; the river was dropping. She picked up her backpack, slung it over one shoulder and ran pell-mell downstream toward home.

  It took a while, given the amorous distractions, but eventually Jamie realized Andrew hadn't yet returned to finish his pint. Now, a pint of real ale was, in Jamie's expert opinion, a delicate thing, and something one did not want to let sit for very long. That slight effervescence, so much more subtle than the assertive fizz of an imported lager—he could not for the life of him understand the attraction among young Britons to gassy American swill like Budweiser—that gentle tang,
did not survive long out of the cask. So, naturally, he drained Andrew's pint and set off through the bar, thick with dampish humans, toward the front door to see what had become of his friend.

  He knew almost the moment he stepped into the street that something was wrong. Unlike Andrew, he understood instantly what the deep, thundering noise was, and he took off at a dead run to the car park. It was almost completely filled with cars, and dozens of people stood beside the stone hedge his crews had been building, watching the roiling river, which even here upstream was close to bursting its banks.

  “People,” he said calmly as he reached them, “I think it might be wise for you to stand back from the river and, if you have autos in the car park, to remove them to higher ground. You are in some danger here.”

  One or two men nodded and moved away toward their cars, pulling their gawking spouses after them, but the rest seemed hypnotized by the scene before them: the churning black water, the chunks of debris flowing downstream, the steady rise in the river level. It had now topped the channel edge and was inching toward the base of the new hedge.

  He turned from them and climbed into his van, reversed out of the lot, and drove up the steep road to the north, pulling onto the verge just above the newsagent's shop. He locked the doors and jogged back downhill to the pub.

  Inside, no one seemed to have the slightest idea what was happening outside, or to much care. He wrestled his way to the bar, catching nasty looks from more than one bloke waiting to order, and got Flora's attention.

  “Listen, luv, this is important: The river's topped its banks, and I reckon there's more to come. So we need to get these folks out to their cars and heading up the hill. I want you to promise me you'll stay upstairs, in the dining room, out of harm's way. You'll be safe here. Tell Alan he needs to assume there'll be water in the bar. I don't know whether it will get this high, but he needs to deal with it. He needs to deal with it right now.”