A Rather Remarkable Homecoming

by C. A. Belmond

  The meeting was held at the old theatre in town. Harriet’s group had a conference room on the second floor, but when we arrived, she was meeting with her “refreshment committee” so Jeremy and I stayed downstairs, where Trevor and his actors were rehearsing their “Scenes from Shakespeare” right on the old stage.

  We stood at the back of the theatre, at the top of the sloped floor, and I couldn’t help being delighted by the beautiful rows of seats covered with crimson damask. They were old and dusty, but still wonderful. The trim around the molding of the stage, the balconies and box seats were all done in gilt, and there were six fine crystal chandeliers overhead. The onstage curtain was also crimson, decorated with embroidered gold theatre masks of scowling Tragedy and smiling Comedy.

  Trevor was onstage with several of the elderly thespians from the Actors’ Home, as well as a scattering of the young summerstock actors that Simon had told me about, and they looked both wide-eyed and amused. Trevor appeared quite dapper with a silk foulard around his throat, and a green knitted vest; and he had his white shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows.

  So there they all were, innocently rehearsing their Shakespeare scenes, totally unaware of the bomb we were about to drop. And maybe I imagined it, but I could swear that the actor who gazed straight back at us over the footlights was delivering these very prophetic words just for our benefit:“Thus do all traitors;

  If their purgation did consist in words,

  They are as innocent as grace itself.

  Let it suffice thee that I TRUST THEE NOT!”

  “How do you like our Frederick in As You Like It?” Harriet asked, when she came down to find us. “Everyone’s ready upstairs,” she said eagerly. “We are all on tenterhooks.”

  “And they’re going to hang us on a meat hook when this is all over,” Jeremy mumbled to me.

  My heart sank as we entered the conference room, for Harriet and her ladies had decked out a side table with a red paper tablecloth, upon which they’d artfully laid out plates of cookies and other nibbles, with pots of coffee and tea available. Harriet exhorted everyone to partake of the refreshments.

  Trevor Branwhistle joined us now, breathless and eager. The big conference table awaited us, with neatly arranged pads of lined paper and pens at each seat, so everybody could take notes. There were twelve seats, and nine were already occupied by members of the Legacy Society as well as various merchants from town who were eager to coordinate their summer business with whatever Shakespeare findings we could give them. Even the chef Toby Taylor was here, because he was planning a whole Shakespearethemed summer menu to coincide with the “Scenes from Shakespeare” performance in August.

  But mercifully, Jeremy had managed to schedule this meeting for when the town politicos were away at a one-day conference in London. While the last few stragglers settled into their seats, Jeremy, as if bucking up his courage, muttered to me:“Over hill, over dale,

  Thorough bush, thorough brier,

  Over park, over pale,

  Thorough flood, thorough fire.”

  Then he squared his shoulders and stood up before the whole expectant group. He carefully explained our findings, walking his audience through the evidence so they could see for themselves. We had printed out all our research, and now I spread it on the long conference table.

  The whole time that Jeremy spoke, the group remained in stunned silence. I was forced to watch the expressions on their faces go from bright hopefulness, to puzzlement, to wariness, disbelief, and finally, fury.

  When Jeremy came to the end of his presentation he took a deep breath, then said, “Any questions?”

  One of Harriet’s ladies turned accusingly to Trevor and said, “But you looked at the document and you told us that your so-called expert at the University was impressed. How could this be?”

  Trevor, looking embarrassed and horrified, said defensively, “Now, Martha. You know perfectly well that every step of the way I warned you that nothing was certain.”

  “We all clutched onto every stitch of hope that we could,” Harriet said diplomatically, but she glared at Jeremy when she added, “of course, you two could be mistaken. Couldn’t you?”

  “It is highly unlikely. I cannot advise you to pursue this any further,” Jeremy said frankly.

  “Well, then it’s all a damp squib!” said a neatly bearded man who, I later found out, was the manager of the Homecoming Inn. (I also later learned that a squib is a kind of firecracker. So, you can imagine what a damp one is worth.)

  Harriet sat back in her seat and pursed her lips. I’d never really seen her annoyed before. When people have unrealistic expectations of you, then it doesn’t really matter if you’re right or wrong. They just believed in you, that’s all, and now they clearly felt that we had betrayed their trust and let them down.

  And then there were the folks who never wanted us around in the first place, voiced by a lady with frosted blonde hair who said, “Well, I for one warned everybody from the start that bringing in a detective team from London, who know absolutely nothing about our ways and our people, was a terrible idea.”

  She glanced around the room with a spiteful smirk of satisfaction, her gaze flickering at me, although she was unable to look me in the eye.

  “Always thought the whole thing was a lot of hokum smokum,” an elderly gentleman agreed.

  Now everyone around the table began grumbling, and a few simply scraped back their chairs, rose and walked out of the room, still murmuring to each other.

  I heard Toby Taylor out in the hallway, already on his mobile phone, instructing somebody back at his restaurant, “Kill the whole Shakespeare menu. This is what comes of working with local amateurs.”

  But Trevor and his theatre group unexpectedly refused to change their plans for the Shakespeare fête.

  “The show must go on!” Trevor declared, and the others in his group nodded vigorously. “After all, the hospital is depending on us. We’ll just have to try that much harder to sell tickets. We must advertise—put a sign in every shop window.”

  Yet although his group seemed determined as they filed out, they also looked worried.

  “Well, you two sure know how to empty a room,” said a white-haired man who ran a local tour-bus operation. He reached for a cookie from the tray, then walked out.

  Harriet and a meek little lady from her group quietly began collecting the half-empty cups of tea.

  “I am so sorry about this,” I found myself saying.

  Harriet didn’t respond, but the meek lady patted my hand and looked at me through her tortoise-shell framed eyeglasses saying, “Don’t worry, dearie, this was not an easy job. I think you two are very nice.”

  Jeremy jerked his head at me to indicate that nothing more could be done. Harriet said casually, “Well, that’s that. I’ll let my friend know how things turned out.”

  Oh, God, I thought. She’s going to ring Buckingham Palace the minute we’re out of here. Once the word spread through London, nobody was going to want to hire us again. At this point, I was so wretched I hardly cared.

  “At least that’s over and done with,” Jeremy said as we got in our car.

  The day was warm and all the other creatures on earth were happy—the butterflies were flitting, the bees were buzzing, the birds were singing, the squirrels were chattering. Apparently they were all completely unaware that everything had just gone totally bust for the poor town of Port St. Francis.

  “I feel just terrible,” I said. “My stomach aches. Does this mean Nichols & Laidley are history?”

  “No. Frankly, I’m fed up with these people,” Jeremy said. “I mean, they’re not children. They ought to have expected that something like this might happen. It’s Shakespeare, for God’s sake. I don’t enjoy bursting anyone’s bubble, but they had to know it was a long shot to begin with. And to be honest, I’m getting sick of this entire little tin-pot town.”

  “Well, that’s just fine,” I said, “because there’s no way we’ll be
able to hold our heads up and walk down main street anymore anyway. What are we going to do? We’re booked into the cottage for a whole month. Geez, I just can’t face Shannon and Geoffrey at the farm. They’ll hate us, too. And wait till they tell Colin!”

  “Let’s go to the beach and take a good, long walk to clear our heads,” Jeremy suggested firmly, swerving away from the country lane that led to the farm, and instead heading back toward the harbor. “Then we can figure out where we want to go from here.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The sea was a soft blue-and-pewter grey with frisky waves that raced up the shore and splashed across our bare feet as we walked on the beach near the harbor. The air was cool and bracing and tasted of salt. We held hands and just walked in silence, skirting along the shoreline. Once we were farther beyond the sheltering harbor, we collected some beautiful seashells which Jeremy deposited in the pockets of his shirt. This kept us occupied for awhile, and it was all very soothing and meditative.

  Had we but gazed out to the horizon line, we might have identified an innocuous-looking, but distinctly battleship-grey row of clouds, as if the Spanish Armada were massing for war. It began as just a painterly streak across the vista; yet it was moving toward land more rapidly than a couple of amateurs like us could guess. But we were so engrossed in examining the marine life, which clung to the rocks on the cove and washed up on shore, that we hardly noticed.

  Until that first rumble, like a cannon firing the opening salvo.

  “Did you hear something?” I asked.

  I moved closer to where Jeremy was peering into a small, shallow cave that was already knee-high with seawater. Now he popped his head back out again, frowning at the sky.

  Before he could even speak, a rare, hostile wind came whistling in at us, filling the little cave with a mournful, shrieking sound. A split second later, we saw jagged lightning, breaking into scary-looking branches across the sky.

  And then, sudden, swift and decisive, the downpour began.

  To say that this deluge came down in sheets would not even begin to do it justice. It was more like a great big cloth whipping about us, as if we were on the deck of a ship whose sails had just collapsed on our heads. Plus, the wind and lashing rain were now driving the tide against the shore, filling up the rock pools in an alarming new way.

  “Come on, babe!” Jeremy shouted, grabbing me by the hand and hauling me across the beach, back the way we had come.

  But I hardly recognized the coves now; the storm was crashing in so violently that I could barely distinguish sea, sky, earth and air. It was all just one big dark wet mess. As we hurried for the safety of the town, I felt as if we were hurtling ourselves with all our might, and yet we seemed to be struggling in slow motion. My feet and ankles were sinking deeply into the newly-soaked sand with every step I took. By the time we straggled onto solid land, my feet were so caked with sand and mud from the wet ground that I looked as if I were wearing a thick absurd pair of socks.

  When we finally reached the parking lot, it was coursing with rivers of rainwater that immediately washed off my sand-socks. Jeremy fumbled in his pocket for his car key, cursing all the while. Finally the headlights and tail-lights flashed as the car unlocked.

  “Phew!” I cried as I cannonballed into the passenger seat, struggling to haul the door shut against the wind, while Jeremy ran around the front of the car to get into his seat. The windshield was completely awash outside, and it quickly fogged up inside with our panting breath.

  Jeremy started the engine and drove hurriedly away, just as another forked tongue of lightning split the sky. Once he got the windshield wipers going, we could see that the main road of the town was flooding quickly, so Jeremy turned the car away and took a side road that climbed up to higher ground and the country lane that led to the farm.

  “Eek!” I cried involuntarily as a new round of thunder bellowed directly overhead, and seemed to rattle everything like chattering teeth, including the car and the ground we were travelling on.

  Jeremy’s nice little zippy Dragonetta was designed for tooling around sophisticated, dry Riviera highways. It was certainly not a car made for plowing through wild and wet dirt roads. The very farm paths that had been so hard and dusty just scant hours ago were now fast becoming sticky mud trenches. But the Dragonetta gamely chugged forth and, despite the gobs of mud that spattered her beautiful deep-green fenders, she got us to the farm just as a fresh wave of rain came hurling down on us.

  When we pulled up to our cottage at last, I struggled to shove the car door open and get out. By now my clothes clung to me uselessly like limp old lettuce leaves. My hair was plastered across my face, no matter how I pushed at it. Jeremy had to use all his strength to haul open the cottage front door against the bellowing wind, and then he had to hang on to the door to keep it from being blown right off its hinges.

  Once inside, we didn’t even have time to catch our breath, for the sky had become as dark as night. I stumbled about, gasping, fumbling around to turn on the lights. The very walls and windows seemed to be shuddering in dismay.

  A moment after I’d turned on the lights, the power blew out. But Jeremy anticipated this and had already yanked open the cupboard that contained the lanterns, candles, flashlights and batterypowered instruments which Geoff and Shannon had shown us when we arrived. Back then, the whole thing seemed cute and quaint. Like ooh, sure, how nice, something to know about in case of a storm.

  Now we set about planting the lanterns in strategic places—bedroom, kitchen, bath. But it had grown eerily cold and damp as the temperature outside plunged rapidly. Well, you just try lighting a fire in a fireplace when it’s raining elephants outside. It was as if Neptune himself was spitting on our fire.

  We peeled off our wet clothes, and hastily toweled each other dry, then ended up in bed, snuggling under the extra blankets that were also tucked away for “a rainy day” such as this, when a guy like Noah would be busy counting pairs of animals.

  For a moment, we just lay there, panting, silent.

  “Wow,” I said finally, master of understatement that I am. “It’s a whopper.”

  “Huh,” Jeremy answered, shivering. Then he added ruefully, “I get the feeling that even Mother Nature is pissed off at us for screwing up the whole Shakespeare connection.”

  I giggled, but then found myself quaking at each new roll of thunder. The rain was still furiously lashing the sides of our poor little cottage.

  “How long can it last?” I asked.

  It turns out that this innocent question of mine was key. Because there was a deep, dark secret that all the sly Cornwall residents had failed to share with us. That nice, sunny summer weather—which had been so pleasing to the many tourists who flocked here, booking every hotel room and cottage in sight for the entire season—was, it turns out, a complete aberration. It had already lasted far too long. The earth must have had some strange cosmic blip, some jolt of its axis, making the Mediterranean countries wet in the past weeks, and the British Isles sunny and balmy. Perhaps the stars and moon had been pulling the tides in odd directions. Or perhaps the clouds and oceans were temporarily distracted, recalibrating themselves in an attempt to compensate for man’s contribution to global warming—and thereby permitting a sunny July in Cornwall.

  But in any event, Mother Nature had now finally decided to redress the imbalance and put things back the way they used to be. The sun returned to the Mediterranean where it belonged for the rest of the summer . . . and the cold wet weather for which the West Country of England is so famous returned with a vengeance to the land of King Arthur.

  And as far as I could tell, this tempest was here to stay . . . for a long, long while.

  Part Five

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Strange things can happen to two people when you’re stuck with each other for days on end, in a small, confined space. When you can’t even venture outside because the weather is so evil. When you finally get the TV going again and the re
ception is so awful that you just switch it off. When your Internet connection, which was tenuous to begin with, repeatedly gives up the ghost. When telephones sound so squeaky and squitchy that you think you’re talking to someone on Mars.

  The first bad thing was that Jeremy got sick. And that’s when I came to realize how much I’d grown to depend on him. The sweet guy just does things without complaining, so I had gotten spoiled, often awakening to discover that he’d already made coffee and boiled eggs for breakfast, or that he’d cheerfully chopped wood to feed the little black stove, or that he’d worked in the garden to pick us some nice vegetables for dinner.

  But now, here he was, sick as a dog, for the first time since I’d known him. A guy like him doesn’t stay in bed unless he really can’t get up. At first, all he said that morning was, “I feel weird,” and he kept pausing after each chore as if waiting for his energy to return. By noon, he had no appetite for lunch, which was totally out of character for him. By five o’clock, his forehead was burning.

  “Take your temperature,” I commanded, handing him the thermometer from my first-aid kit, which my mother gave to me when I was eighteen, fully stocked with Band-Aids and all, and which I’ve replenished and carried with me like a talisman my whole life.

  Now, the thing about men who never get sick is that they don’t really know how to be sick. So when Jeremy impatiently took the thermometer and stuck it into his mouth, three minutes later he took it out and announced dubiously, “I’m 94, all right?”

  “Gimme that,” I said, examining the thermometer suspiciously, then shaking it down again. “Only a lizard has a temperature of 94. Try it again,” I said, and this time I watched to see what he was doing wrong. “You’ve only got the tip of it in!” I said incredulously. “Put practically all of it on a diagonal under your tongue,” I admonished. “Even a two-year-old knows that.”