Trevega House

by Will North

“Did you wish to hear the weekly reports from our team, sir?” he asked.

  “No, we wish to know why scarce police resources are being squandered on something as inconsequential as a dead cow!”

  “Bullock, sir,” Penwarren corrected.

  “I repeat.”

  “You needn’t, sir; we heard you the first time.”

  Smiles around the table.

  “We want an explanation, dammit, Penwarren. We have to justify it to the brass!”

  At some point after his elevation to DCS in Exeter, Crawley had begun referring to himself only in the first-person plural, a habit that amused Penwarren’s team to no end.

  “That explanation, which we are happy to provide, would be for your ears only…sir,” Penwarren said, his voice calm, his chosen pronoun mimicking Crawley’s.

  “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “It means it is something we should discuss privately. At your convenience, of course.”

  THEIR MEETING AFTERWARDS was short and not at all sweet.

  “Why didn’t we know about this Trevega matter, Penwarren?”

  “Because we were advised not to divulge it.”

  “By whom?”

  “By Sir Michael Rhys-Jones.”

  “Who the hell is he when he’s at home?”

  “He’s an adviser to Prince Charles and MI5.”

  Crawley blinked. “But we are your superior officer!”

  “Though not superior to domestic military intelligence, from whom we received official instructions.”

  “This is intolerable!”

  “I’m sure MI5 will consider your complaint.”

  Outflanked but unwilling to admit it, Crawley rose: “We will remember this, Penwarren,” he said, stalking out and slamming the door behind him. Penwarren smiled and shook his head. Crawley would never recommend him to advance to detective superintendent, but that didn’t matter as he loved being a DCI and being in the thick of every investigation. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in being moved up into administration…or in leaving Cornwall for Exeter.

  LEE HAD BECOME fascinated by the prehistoric stone monuments that were scattered about the high and storm-swept moorland above her new home. Their age was almost incomprehensible to her—thousands of years: Bronze Age and Iron Age, some even earlier. She’d looked it up. Amazing: not to mention that they actually still existed, rising from the bony hills like messages from another world altogether.

  Back in what she’d come to think of now as her previous life, in Boscastle, she’d roamed the valley of the Valency River and had learned most of the plants, trees, wild flowers, and wildlife there. But now she was a student of stone and moorland. She reckoned working with Jamie and Andrew was part of it. Through them, she’d learned that stone had a history all its own: sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous. Back in Boscastle, the local stone was sedimentary; houses and walls were built mostly of thin slabs of blue-gray slate. But all around Trevega and the rest of West Penwith, it was blocks of igneous granite. Granite was much stronger than slate, Jamie explained, and that was somehow comforting. It wouldn’t flake or break. This stone was old, formed by volcanoes millions of years ago. This stone was forever: its permanence was something you could count on. That’s what she believed, anyway.

  Lee’s whirring brain was always planning ahead, and lately her ambitions zig-zagged between becoming an architect like Drew or an archaeologist. She couldn’t choose and so she studied. She’d found the website for the Cornish Ancient Sites Protection Network (CASPN) on her school laptop. She wanted to join their walks over the moorland and learn more about the ancient monuments that littered the landscape around her new home, but she worried she was too young and would not be welcomed. So instead, using an Ordnance Survey Explorer Map for West Penwith and Land’s End, she decided to explore on her own. She wanted to see an especially mystifying site, the Men-an-Tol, a triad of two standing stones with a third round one with a carved hole it its center that sat between the uprights, all in a line. Many mysteries and rites had been woven around these stones over the centuries.

  On Tuesday morning, having checked on the recovering Randi in his kennel, she stepped off the pokey St. Ives-to-St. Just local bus at Rosemergy farm, a few miles south of Zennor, crossed the B3306, and followed a faint footpath up the steep valley to the moorland ridgetop. The path wound through thickets of yellow gorse, purple heather, pale green bracken fern, and thorny bramble that clawed at her bare legs. At the exposed summit, she stopped and pulled a half-liter plastic bottle of water from the small knapsack she carried, the same pack she used during the year to carry her school books. From this high viewpoint, she could see the roiling Atlantic far below to the west and, across the finger-slender peninsula, the English Channel to the east, its smoother, sun-burnished surface cut in silver slivers by the wakes of pleasure and fishing boats. Just to the northeast beyond Penzance, as if a misty mirage floating above the Channel, she could make out the pinnacle and castle of St. Michael’s Mount, just offshore the village of Marazion. She felt on top of the world.

  Descending the gentler eastern flank of the peninsula’s spine, picking her way through the dense thickets, she found the rough farm track leading south marked on her map. Within only a few minutes she saw the well-worn footpath leading southeast toward the stones.

  When she reached the Men-an-Tol, she just sat in the tall grass for a bit and studied the stones. The two vertical ones were short by megalith standards hereabouts, barely four feet high and clearly shaped by someone long ago to come almost to a point. She wondered why. But it was the center stone, slender and round as a four-foot tall doughnut with a nearly two-foot hole in the center, that held her attention. She got up and walked around it. The three stones were in horizontal alignment: if you sighted from one of the uprights you saw straight through the hole of the round middle stone to the upright on the other side. She’d read that local lore claimed you could be cured of back problems by crawling through the hole. The tales also said by doing so you could have success getting pregnant.

  She didn’t crawl through the hole.

  Strange as they were, she felt disappointed by the Men-an-Tol stones. She’d hoped they might talk to her, tell her something ancient and meaningful, but they were just three big rocks in a row and mute, at least to her. They did not divulge their mystery. She wondered if it was because one of them had been moved and they no longer made sense, no longer had anything to say to someone who listened. Not even her.

  She retraced her steps, reached the crest, and once again marveled at the view to the west. From this height, at nearly two hundred fifty meters, she could see far beyond the verdant stone walled meadows of the coastal plateau to the cliffs along which she so loved to walk. Directly below was Castle Rock. Just to the north, the sliver of pebble beach at Porthmeor Cove glittered in the sun. Farther north was Gurnard’s Head, the sea-shattered promontory she loved most, where the ceaseless pounding of the Atlantic surf had bludgeoned the cliff and broken off slabs of granite big as houses that now lay on the sea floor, breaking up incoming swells. Sometimes there were seals, fat as sausages, basking on the broken rocks. She’d climb out to the rim of the headland to watch them. Sometimes they called to her. But she didn’t know their language.

  SHE HAD JUST begun her descent back to Rosemergy when it happened: she sensed another presence. She scanned the ridgetop and saw nothing. But the back of her neck prickled. She did not feel so much afraid as guarded. She’d long since learned not to fear her sensations, but she dearly wished Randi were with her; he’d have known if something was out there. Following the steep footpath into the valley and listening for any odd noise, feeling watched the whole way, she reached the B3306 and, unwilling to wait for a return bus, began walking north. Fifteen minutes later, a farm tractor going the same way stopped. She recognized the driver. It was Eldridge Biggins. She knew him from the Tinners Arms.

  “You’re a long way from home, girl,” he said.

  �
��I took the bus.”

  “Won’t be back along here for a while. Come on up,” he said, offering a hand. “I’ll fetch you home.” He set her on his lap and they bounced along the road on the tractor’s big fat tyres until they reached the lane leading down to Trevega.

  “This is fine,” she said, slipping down to the road. “Ta!”

  IT WAS AFTER supper when Lee walked across the estate grounds and knocked on the weathered oak door of Jamie and Flora’s cottage. Jamie answered. Having washed off the stone dust and dirt from the day’s work he looked younger and handsomer than she’d noticed before. No wonder Flora was smitten.

  “Would Flora see me?”

  Jamie ducked his head and whispered: “She’d thrash me if I didn’t let you…”

  “Who’s there, love?” Flora called from their sitting room.

  “Someone from the Old Lady’s Care Charity come to see you, dear.”

  “Tell them to piss off!”

  “Flora!” Lee said, entering the room. “Language!”

  Flora started laughing and had to will herself to stop so her burnt skin would not hurt. The burns were now like leathery patches on her limbs, but they would soon yield to new skin. She was recovering faster than expected. Jamie withdrew to the kitchen to leave the ladies alone.

  Lee loved this room in the old property manager’s cottage. It had a low ceiling supported by thick oak beams. The walls had once been whitewashed, but Jamie had cleaned them and exposed the granite stone blocks beneath. The ground floor was covered with worn slate flagstones and several old hooked rugs were scattered here and there to soften the look and warm the feet. There was a coal fire glowing in the grate in the ancient hearth at one end of the room, and Flora sat in a plump old chair with her feet propped up on a padded bench. She’d been reading.

  “Shouldn’t you be doing homework at this hour, girl?”

  “School’s over, Flora.”

  “And no one’s found something else to keep you out of my hair?”

  Lee crossed the room and kissed the top of Flora’s head.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  ‘Manners, you rude young lady! Respect for your elders!”

  “Yeah, well that’s why I came. Advice from my favorite elder…”

  “I think that was rude, too, but I’m too tired to fight. What is it, you troublesome child?”

  “I’m not a child.”

  “No, no. You’re right. You’re the oldest girl I’ve ever known. More than a bit strange, you are. Now then, what is it?”

  “I sensed something today, Flora. Watching me. I’m almost sure, but I didn’t see anything.”

  “Where?”

  “Near the Men-an-Tol.”

  “You went way down there?”

  “It interests me. I took the bus.”

  “What about Randi?”

  “He’s laid up.”

  “So I heard, poor devil.”

  “Between Randi and you, I’m on my own. You both need to get better soon.”

  Flora’s laugh was a low rumble like boulders rolling in a stream bed. “What do Nicola and Andrew say about what you felt?”

  “You think I’d tell them? They don’t understand. Not like you. You told me about this clairsentience thing. It’s a pain in the bum, I can tell you. I get way too much information most of the time.”

  “Yes, I know. And it’s not like having visions, either; it’s about feeling. I think that is harder. So, you sensed you were being watched?”

  “It wasn’t just that I felt watched. I felt tracked. Like an animal.”

  “By an animal?”

  “Of course not. By a human. A man, I think. I’m almost sure.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  Lee shook her head. “I don’t know why. First, it’s just this sensation, like you’ve become a target, like someone’s focused one of those little red laser lights on you like you see on someone’s shirt before they’re shot in a movie at the cinema. I can feel it. I’m a target. Then there’s the scent.”

  “The what?”

  “No, not the scent. I don’t know how to explain it but I can smell something in the air that isn’t the heather or gorse, something that does not belong. You know that kinda sharp smell that happens just before a thunderstorm on a hot day?”

  “It’s called ozone.”

  “Well it’s like that, only different.” Lee shook her head. “I don’t know how to explain it, Flora. I’m sorry.”

  “I think you’re doing just fine, girl.”

  “Is that the smell of the devil?”

  Flora laughed. “No, the devil’s supposed to stink of Sulphur, but that’s just Christian lore, that devil talk. A rotten egg makes the same smell. Is an egg the devil?”

  “I reckon it’s just an egg.”

  “Correct. Plus, we’re pagans, you and me, and in our world, there is no devil.”

  Lee nodded. “Can I tell you something else?”

  “Why else am I here?”

  “I think what I sensed today, being watched, is connected to the dead bullock and the fire in the gardener’s cottage. Maybe even Randi’s accident.”

  “Why?”

  “I feel like someone is trying to scare us.”

  Flora studied the girl for a moment. Between the flood and the death of her parents, was this simply hyper-vigilant watchfulness, or was it paranoia? Did Lee really sense what was real? Flora loved the girl. They kept talking and she listened carefully.

  Eleven

  AFTER SUPPER THAT same evening, Nicola and Andrew sat in two of the old overstuffed chairs facing the big hearth in the kitchen at Trevega. There was a fire glowing in the coal grate. Even though it was early summer, the forested swale from which the house rose could be chill and damp when fog-thick ocean air snaked in from the sea as it had this evening. They could barely see across the narrow valley. Nicola, Andrew, and Lee spent most of their family time here in the old kitchen, and it was easier and cheaper to heat this room with the fire than trying to heat the whole house. In the upstairs bedrooms, they had plug-in radiant heaters to warm them when it was cold and damp.

  The three of them loved to do jigsaw puzzles on the big kitchen table, the more complicated the better, and spent long hours on them. To Nicola, the formal dining room, with its high ceiling, ornate plaster cornice moldings, draped windows, long Georgian era walnut table polished to a blinding shine, and neat rows of matching dining chairs, always seemed too austere for regular suppers…other than, perhaps, a rare overnight visit from Sir Michael. From her point of view, the dining room did not compare with their big warm kitchen. Still, she loved everything about the graceful old house. The formal living room was made somewhat less so by being furnished with cushy slipcovered old furniture. A vast, worn, but still luminous antique Persian rug, a Heriz, covered much of the parquet oak flooring. There was a yawning fireplace at the north end with a mantle made of rough-hewn local granite, the center of its lintel blackened by more than two centuries of use. They sometimes spent evenings there in the winter, with a wood fire blazing. French doors on the south wall led to a glassed-in orangery which soaked up sun and made it possible for Nicola to maintain lemon trees in big planter boxes. This was Randi’s favorite space in winter. He’d bask in a shaft of sunlight on the orangery’s warm brick floor and drag himself across it as the sun made its slow transit across the bricks during the course of the day.

  IT HAD BEEN another hard day of rebuilding at the gardener’s cottage. Andrew was slouched in his chair, staring at the glowing coals in the kitchen fire, and sipping on a pint of Figgy’s Brew, a local amber ale.

  “You okay, love?”

  “It was way easier being a professor.”

  She reached a hand across to stroke his forearm. “But not happier, am I right?”

  Andrew smiled. “Yes, of course. This work is honest, the other wasn’t.”

  “Come on, teaching isn’t dishonest.”

  “Never dishonest to my students
; dishonest to me. I arrived there, professionally, by climbing up the academic ladder, yes. But I know now it wasn’t what I was meant to do.”

  “I’m very proud of you, you know. It took courage to leave that life behind.”

  Andrew grinned: “No, it just took falling in love.”

  Andrew Stratton had been a popular professor of architectural theory at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He’d never worked in an architecture firm, though, and had never built anything. He was a theorist. It wasn’t until his wife divorced him for someone more ambitious that he finally realized that his academic career was as arid and bloodless as his marriage. Shocked awake and suddenly adrift, on a whim he’d come to Cornwall, the home of his ancestors, to take a one-week course in building dry stone walls—hedges, as they were called here in Cornwall. Buried somewhere deep beneath his academic façade, or maybe in his family’s history, Andrew craved a kind of architecture that was genuine, sustainable, and true to local materials and traditions; he’d just had no experience with the very idea that spoke to him most. His wall-building course transformed him. Jamie Boden had been his teacher. Then, in less than an hour one afternoon, the Boscastle flood swept away all that he and Jamie’s other students had built that week: gone, as if insubstantial as tonight’s sea fog.

  But having met Nicola and so many others in Boscastle, he’d decided to stay on to help rebuild the village; he never returned to Philadelphia. He’d found home at last on this rocky coast, he’d found Nicola, and he’d found work that was tangible and deeply rewarding, work that wasn’t just a theory in his or someone else’s head to be spooned out to students, but something meaningful, something lasting—something you created with your bare hands.

  After the flood, what Sir Michael had given him and Nicola, as well as Jamie and Flora, was more than just a new home and a fresh start: it was a challenge to make his family’s slowly deteriorating country estate come alive again and, by the way, earn its keep. But Andrew also understood that Michael was not simply interested in creating a group of holiday rental properties from the estate’s outbuildings, he also wanted to create a showcase for Jamie and Andrew’s skills as stone builders. Andrew shook his head and smiled: Sir Michael’s motives were never fully transparent.