A Rather Remarkable Homecoming

by C. A. Belmond

  “We left them lying flat, but exactly where we found them,” Peter said. “They seem to have been arranged on a diagonal line.”

  Barbara spoke to no one, and instead began circling the field, sometimes kneeling, sometimes standing on tiptoe.

  “She looks like a Native American scout,” I said. “What’s she after?”

  “Not sure,” said Jeremy, fascinated.

  When she returned to us, Barbara, who initially did not strike me as a particularly excitable person, now looked highly animated, her eyes glinting.

  “I have to call in my team,” she said, as if her fellow archeologists were the only ones who’d really understand how truly fantastic this all was. So she got on her phone and conferred with her pals at her office. When she was done, she spoke to Jeremy, me and Peter in a low voice.

  “Look, here’s what I think,” she said. “We need to excavate this area, and find out if there are more stones like this. Thanks to Peter, we already have a permit to do so. But once we begin, it’s going to be hard to keep it quiet. And if news about this find hits the press, then all the antiquities dealers and looters will descend on us.”

  My ears picked up the word “find”, which she’d used before. Barbara must have noticed the expression on my face, because she smiled conspiratorially now.

  “I can get the geological survey going today,” she said, “but after that, we need to clear the site of grass and stuff before we can start a proper dig. That’s going to take a bunch of interns to help.”

  She probably meant she wanted to hire some posh grad students from universities in London.

  But I had a better idea. “Hey, if you want to keep it quiet, then deal with the locals, not the London crowd,” I said. I turned to Jeremy. “Let’s call Alfred and bring on the eco-warriors.”

  “You mean the ones that kidnapped Rollo?” Jeremy asked incredulously.

  “Why not?” I said. “They’re supposed to do community service. I can’t think of a better service to Port St. Francis, can you?”

  And that’s how Colin and Alfred were put in charge of the very penitent eco-warriors. Over the next few days, they were like an advance army, carefully clearing and assisting under Barbara’s team leadership. And every evening, Alfred posted twenty-fourhour police guards around this new “historical site of interest”, which included Grandmother Beryl’s house.

  Then the dig began in earnest, and over the next few weeks Barbara uncovered more marvels as her team dug trenches, and sifted, and dug some more. I looked at the newly excavated stones that the archeologists were re-assembling, standing them up now in the rows where they’d been discovered. Apparently over time the stones had fallen and sunk, but Barbara believed that they once stood in a very distinct and formal arrangement of lines that emanated outward like the spokes in a wheel.

  On one bright, sunny day, even I could see that what the archeologists were reconstructing was beginning to look like a miniature Stonehenge. The dig had expanded slightly into Shannon and Geoff’s farmland, so they came to watch and help out when they could.

  Shannon paused to talk to me about it. She said, “Look. Geoff was right about the ley lines. See how this row of stone markers forms a line that goes straight through the farm? Remember he told you that for some reason the crops grow taller here? Energy,” she said, her eyes shining. “The ancients knew how to channel the best energy.”

  By noon that day, the earl had come to the edge of his property to check on the progress of the dig. Barbara now told him that the team needed to expand their work into his property as well.

  “C-c-certainly,” he said uncertainly. But then, being a nature and history aficionado himself, he sat right down on the ground and sketched their finds.

  Harriet had stopped by, and she perked up now. “All of this could change everything,” she said meaningfully to the earl. “Can you imagine the kinds of house tours you’ll be able to have when people find out about this Celtic site?”

  The earl looked as if he’d wakened from a dream. “What a l-l-lovely turn of events!” he said, sounding vastly relieved, and smiling not only at Harriet but at anyone who caught his eye. I had to smile back when he gave me a grin of such childlike delight.

  By the end of the day, Barbara had more news for us . . . and the earl. She took us all tromping over to see a spot where Geoff ’s farm met the earl’s property and the town property. This was the “hub” of the wheel from which all other lines of stones emanated. Barbara’s team was now carefully digging and cataloging whatever items they turned up there.

  “I don’t want to say for sure,” she said, looking like the cat that swallowed the canary. “But, judging from what we’ve found so far, this could be the site of an ancient Celtic holy well with hidden springs beneath it,” she continued, gesturing at smooth round stones being piled up neatly. “If so, it may explain the other markers, because the Celts might have erected the big stones to guide people in a ceremonial procession, from both land and sea, to converge here at this sacred spring.”

  For a moment we all stood there gazing silently, visualizing the hordes of ancient Celts clad in animal skins—elders, children, men and women from all around—making perhaps a once-a-year pilgrimage to their sacred site, just like the pilgrims who visited the church in Madeira.

  “Incredible,” I sighed. “But, what does it all mean now?”

  Jeremy gave the answer.

  “It means the Mosleys are toast,” he said triumphantly.

  Part Ten

  Chapter Forty-One

  I am happy to report that, as the summer season was winding down, the archeologists did indeed uncover a hidden spring and enough artifacts to make a lot of people very happy. Already the impact of the discovery was becoming more clear. The area that needed protecting from development was the western corner, where Shannon and Geoffrey’s farm met the town land and the earl’s. No new building could possibly be done here now. However, building could occur on the eastern, outlying land opposite the dig, exactly where Harriet had planned . . . but even so, it would be unthinkable to embark on a scale of development with an impact such as what the Mosleys had in mind.

  The earl had already declared that he had no intention of selling “a single blade of grass” to the Mosleys or anyone else like them. “Why, I will show them the door . . . with great pleasure, madame,” he told Harriet. “I do not do business with criminals!”

  For indeed, it looked as if the Mosley brothers weren’t going to be doing an awful lot of property development anywhere for awhile.

  “Alfred gave me a little call this morning,” Jeremy confided as we were having breakfast at our cottage on the farm. “He agrees that part of the reason the Mosleys were so keen to develop this area of Cornwall was the elaborate security system they intended to build, ostensibly for their wealthy tenants, but actually so that they could expand their nasty little racket with impunity. But now, Alfred says they’re in deep jinx with the law for drug smuggling, because he got Scotland Yard to catch up with the Mosleys’ truck in London. It was loaded with the kind of stuff we saw them carrying off the boat. The cops impounded everything.”

  “What were they smuggling?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

  “Cocaine, mostly,” Jeremy said. “Stuffed to the gills. Not only that, but the coastal guard raided the Mosley yacht. They found more stash, probably for the Mosley brothers to use as deal sweeteners for special clients.”

  I shuddered to think of what Port St. Francis might have become if the Mosleys had had their way. And right then and there, I knew that everything we’d been through was worth it.

  On the weekend that we were scheduled to leave, Harriet insisted on throwing us a party. Trevor let her hold it at the old banquet hall in the Priory. Some of the elder residents weren’t quite sure exactly what we were celebrating, but it didn’t matter because the champagne was flowing. Colin’s band played ancient Cornish or Celtic songs, I couldn’t say which. But everybody was singing an
d dancing.

  “To the earl!” said Trevor, holding up his glass, and everyone hoo-hah’d to that.

  “To Harriet!” said someone else, and the glasses clinked again.

  “To Penny Nichols and Jeremy Laidley!” said a voice in the crowd, and I saw that it was Simon, sitting in his wheelchair with a glass in his hand. I had to kiss him, he looked so sweet.

  Everyone clinked again, and the music started up as they sang, “For they are jolly good fellows.” Jeremy actually blushed, and I ducked behind him.

  But for me, the best news was delivered by Harriet when she proclaimed that funds were already flowing in from new donors, to make the Legacy Society become the permanent custodians of the house and all the protected land that the town had bought. What’s more, she assured me that Grandmother Beryl’s house would not only be saved from the wrecking ball, but would be restored to its former glory, just as she’d originally promised us. She seemed especially proud of being able to make good on that.

  As the festivities began to wind down, Jeremy murmured to me, “I say we get out while we can go on a high note.”

  “Right-O!” I agreed.

  But, I have to admit that I felt kind of sad when we hugged and kissed everyone goodbye. Geoff and Shannon presented Jeremy and me with two beautiful, handmade sweaters from the farm. I said au revoir to Simon and Trevor and the Priory; and gave Colin and Harriet a big hug. Harriet handed us our own personalized Cornish pasties for the ride home; and I said a fond farewell to sweet old Basil, and the earl, and Barbara and the whole team of eco-warriors.

  On the way back to the cottage, we stopped at Grandmother Beryl’s house, so I could have a special, private moment. I walked inside the parlor one more time, while it was still quiet with my family’s history-dust, just to whisper, “Well, Grandma, I hope this is what you had in mind. But I bet even you had no idea what you were protecting.”

  As we drove away from the house, I found myself also giving silent tribute to the Scarlet Knot and the caves and the sea below; and to Paloma and Prescott, who surely must have found each other by now; and to Tintagel and Merlin and Arthur and the whole noble dream of a perfect kingdom.

  When we went back to our little cottage on the farm to pack up the car, we realized that Rollo had already taken the broken rocking-horse out of the closet where we’d stored it, and brought it back to London. He’d left us a note, swearing that he would have it “carefully restored” for us.

  “Hah! That’s the last we’ll see of that pony,” Jeremy commented.

  “He earned it!” I said loyally. We’d arranged to have the lamps, credenza and croquet set trucked to our town house in London. We had already donated the masthead to the maritime museum. I somehow felt Paloma would surely approve.

  The drive home out of Cornwall seemed to go a lot faster than our arrival had, months ago. In fact, I felt as if Jeremy and I were whooshing through all those layers of history at warp-speed. For awhile we drove in silence.

  Then Jeremy said, “Hey, hand me those Cornish pasties that Harriet gave you.”

  I unwrapped them. Each was a pastry shaped like a half-moon, crimped on the edges, kind of like an apple turnover. Both pasties had initials carved into them, one saying PN and the other JL.

  “Wow, personalized Cornish pasties,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s an old tradition,” Jeremy explained. “They used to make pasties for the miners, and they put their names on them so the miners wouldn’t mix up each other’s lunch.”

  I bit into my pasty, which on one end was filled, essentially, with a delicious chicken stew and vegetables. But as I ate my way down, I reached a pastry divider. Beyond it was my dessert, where the pasty now became a fruit tarte.

  Munching his, Jeremy explained, “See? It’s a whole meal-inone. So those miners could eat it all with one hand, and not get it dirty from handling it too much.”

  “Mmm, tastes great,” I commented, enjoying every bite.

  “That’s because Harriet made sure we got a real one, made in a good Cornish bakery,” Jeremy answered. Gently I picked up his napkin and touched it to his lips.

  “You’re my knight,” I said.

  “Still?” he teased.

  “Still,” I affirmed.

  We drove onward, and, when at last we reached the hub of roads around London, I got an e-mail from my father. I scanned it quickly.

  “Dad says the house in Antibes is ready and waiting for us,” I reported.

  “Great,” said Jeremy. Then his phone rang. All I heard him say was, “Yes? Uh-huh. Right.”

  “What’s up?” I asked when he rang off.

  “Well,” he said, “it seems we must first make one little stop in dear old London-town.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The leaves of the silver maple trees along Buckingham Palace were green with just a touch of September’s royal gold at the edges when Jeremy and I came careening around the corner in the slightly mud-splattered but heroic forest-green Dragonetta. We pulled right up to the entrance, where two palace guards in full regalia had come out of a little booth and now approached us rather warily. One peered into Jeremy’s window, the other in mine.

  Jeremy rolled down his window. “We have an appointment with Prince Charles,” he said, looking like an English schoolboy who’s been called to the headmaster’s office.

  “Name?” asked the guard on my side.

  “Give him your card,” Jeremy murmured out of the side of his mouth.

  Hastily I fished around in my purse for something I thought I would never use in my life—a fancy little antique calling-card case made of ebony and edged with gold trim and tiny opals, which Rollo had given me as a wedding present. I had filled it with formal, engraved calling cards that, in a burst of nineteenth-century nostalgia, I’d purchased at an old-fashioned Parisian stationery shop while ordering my wedding invitations last year. The cards matched my bridal invitations, for they were of the same cream-colored Italian paper with a hand-crafted burgundy monogram.

  Now, trust me. Back then I had no inkling that I’d ever end up paying a fancy afternoon call on any royal personages. Yet at the time, I thought that if I bought the cards, then surely fate would chuck me a glamorous opportunity to use them. And, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about life, it’s that if you just put one foot on the road you’d like to travel, pretty soon you find yourself arriving there. Only, it’s never quite the way you pictured it . . . and, you could get into trouble.

  So now I nervously handed the guard this card:Madame Penny Nichols

  of Nichols & Laidley Ltd.

  has called upon you today

  for the pleasure of your company

  I suppose I could have told the French printer to leave off the “Madame” before my name. But hell, I was in Paris. And I was getting married. So, I couldn’t resist the idea of officially becoming “madame” instead of “mademoiselle”.

  The guard took the card and, seeming slightly dubious at our windblown appearance, he and his fellow guard retreated into their little station behind the gate.

  “It looks like the kind of booth you go into at an amusement park, to pose for a row of pictures while you’re sitting in each other’s lap,” I noted. “What do you suppose they’re doing in there?”

  Jeremy leaned forward and craned his neck. “They’re on the phone,” he reported. “They’re holding up your card and reading it aloud.”

  He sighed heavily. For, despite all the English bluster about the royal family being obsolete and irrelevant to modern times, when you’re right there at the palace with all the costumed attendants, you do sort of feel as if you’ve been summoned to a higher calling . . . and you could get hanged if you somehow manage to piss off the Queen.

  “What say we high-tail it outta here while the going’s good?” I suggested.

  But suddenly, without any pomp or circumstance, a whitegloved hand emerged from the booth to vigorously wave us in, and Jeremy’s sleek little Dragonetta glided
forward as we were directed where to leave the car.

  When we walked into the front door of Buckingham Palace—or, Buck House, as we chums of the royals like to call it—we entered a reception area containing the Grand Staircase. And it was grand indeed. Trimmed with elegant wrought-iron rails, it swooped and curved in arcs overhead, which made it look as if it were awaiting the arrival of Eliza Doolittle of My Fair Lady. The walls were a dreamy cream color, trimmed in gold, and there really was red carpeting underfoot.

  “Jeremy Laidley and Penny Nichols? Follow me, please. You are expected.”

  This came from a youngish yet slightly bald man in a neat dark grey suit, who never bothered to tell us his name. Nor did we ask. He began walking at a fast, purposeful pace, so we hurried along, past several huge reception rooms with names that invoke Alice in Wonderland: the Green Drawing Room with framed portraits of stern-looking people staring back at us as if to inquire disdainfully, “And who-oo are you-oo?”; followed by the Blue Drawing Room (which they tell you was originally red, and frankly it still looks mostly red to me, so I don’t know why they changed its name, except, I suppose, for the blue-seated chairs everywhere); and then the White Drawing Room with its mirrored walls which disguise a secret door to a hidden inner chamber.

  I caught my own image flickering by in those darned mirrors in the White Room, and I saw that my brown eyes were wide with sheer, undisguised terror. My hair looked as if it had been blown dry by a Mad Hairdresser, because of all the previous hours riding along the highway in a convertible that had chosen this day to get its top stuck permanently down. But when you are summoned by H.R.H., well, you drop everything and show up on time.