Don't Go Baking My Heart

by Cressida McLaughlin

‘I told you I’d reserve judgement until today.’ He gave her a long, lazy smile, then reached up and pulled the cord. The bell dinged. ‘Bloody hell. I didn’t know buses still had these.’

  ‘Most don’t,’ she said. ‘I wanted to bring some of the original features back. Here.’ She picked up the ticket machine, pressing the button so a piece of paper spewed out of the bottom. It was a replica, and modified so that she could amend what was printed or add a short message alongside the date. ‘Have a memento.’ She tore off the ticket that said: Cornish Cream Tea Bus. Grand opening, 4 May, Porthgolow. She held it out to him and, after a pause, he took it. ‘That’ll be a piece of history one day,’ she said. ‘When Gertie is famous for travelling throughout Cornwall and perking up the village.’

  ‘You’re staying then?’ he asked. He was still looking at the ticket, though surely he could have read what was printed on it at least ten times over by now.

  ‘What, in Cornwall?’

  ‘Here, in Porthgolow.’ He met her gaze.

  Charlie felt like a fried egg stuck under a heat lamp. ‘I don’t know yet,’ she admitted. ‘The great thing about Gertie is that she’s mobile. But then, I love being with Juliette and Lawrence; it’s so much more relaxed than my parents’ place – even though they’re brilliant, too – and Marmite, that’s my Yorkipoo that you met in the pub, loves the beach. There are no beaches in Herefordshire. And Porthgolow is … it’s beautiful. So …’

  ‘So? That was a lot of words without any kind of conclusion. But it sounds as if you like it here.’

  Charlie folded her arms, embarrassed at all the detail she’d spilled out. ‘I do. I don’t know how long I’ll be staying, but I like it here.’

  His expression was unreadable.

  ‘So it looks like you’re going to be stuck with my shabby bus for a while longer,’ she added, to fill the silence.

  ‘Looks like it.’

  She waited for him to correct her, to tell her it wasn’t shabby any more, but he didn’t.

  ‘Ooh, we need a photo,’ she said, hoping this, at least, would break the tension.

  ‘A photo?’

  ‘I’m taking them with all of my customers, to show that there were actually some people here on launch day. I’ll put it online and tag you, and then—’

  ‘It’ll look like I’m endorsing your bus.’

  Charlie suppressed a smile and, turning her phone to selfie mode, stood next to him. She could smell his aftershave, something woody and fresh with citrus. She held the phone up and Daniel leaned his head towards hers, resting his hand lightly on her shoulder.

  Charlie inhaled, and took the photo, then she moved quickly away from him, back into the kitchen.

  ‘Thanks, Daniel. Thanks for coming.’

  ‘I thought I’d better check out my competition,’ he said.

  ‘And?’ Her mouth was suddenly dry.

  ‘It suits you. The red.’

  ‘Gertie’s paint job, or—?’ she put a hand up to her hair, remembering how he’d mentioned it in the gardens of his hotel.

  He didn’t reply, but simply turned and walked towards the door, giving Charlie a perfect view of his wide shoulders in the purple shirt, the snug fit of his grey trousers. He reached up and pulled the bell cord again, and then jogged down onto the sand and disappeared out of sight, the ding echoing in his wake.

  Charlie swept crumbs into the bin and cleaned the counter with a ferociousness it didn’t need. He was utterly maddening. Had he really come to see if the bus was suited to the village? It wasn’t as if she had loud music playing or had invited Lawrence to set up marquees along the entire beach. It wasn’t a bloody carnival. It was one bus, with a very lovely café on it.

  While everyone upstairs focused on the dolphins, Charlie sat at one of the downstairs tables and added the photo of her and Daniel to Instagram. She bigged him up in the caption: Daniel Harper, Esteemed owner of Porthgolow’s luxury spa hotel, Crystal Waters. She made it sound very much as if he had endorsed her bus. She tagged the hotel account, added the hashtags she hoped would widen the reach of the post, and linked it to Facebook and Twitter. She looked at the photo of the two of them, her smile a bit too wide, his cool and composed, even though she’d caught him off-guard.

  She pushed her phone away and stared out of the window. The sun was trying to make an effort, and the surface of the water glistened invitingly. She tried to picture Daniel’s face if she did bring a festival to Porthgolow beach, with food trucks and music, the sheltered cove full of people and laughter, dogs running on the sand and children paddling. An ice-cream van with an old-fashioned jingle – the Popeye theme or ‘Greensleeves’ – maybe even a mobile bar. This wide, hard-packed strip of sand was the perfect location for a fair.

  Charlie smiled. The idea was so clear that she knew she had to try it. The council had approved her pitch on the beach, so they might well consent to allowing more, as long as they weren’t all permanent. The weather was warming up, she had her bus and her fledgling social media pages, she was living with a brilliant digital marketer and an expert marquee-wrangler. It would be a crime if she didn’t use all that to her advantage.

  She had hoped Gertie would liven up her adopted village, and today it certainly felt buzzier, but what about tomorrow? The Kerrs, Anton and Stella and Hugh had all turned up. They might make it a regular thing, treat her like any other local café, but they wouldn’t come every day. And if the bus had failed to inspire some of the villagers, would a festival, with a wider choice of refreshments, do the trick? Hal had used themes to brighten up his tours, and she could put on special events, create new flavours and products to tie in with celebration days, but she needed to make an even bigger splash if she wanted Porthgolow to have the attention it deserved.

  She realized she had an answer to Daniel’s question. Yes, she was going to stay in Porthgolow. As long as Juliette and Lawrence would have her, she could see about turning this festival idea into reality.

  Jonah ran down the stairs, his eyes alive with the excitement of seeing the dolphins, and beckoned her to come with him. Charlie put the drinks on a tray and followed. She found Juliette and several customers peering out of the windows at the front of the bus.

  ‘They’ve been in the bay for half an hour,’ Jonah said.

  ‘Come and look,’ Juliette added.

  Charlie knelt on the bench alongside her friend, and within seconds she could see them, their bodies arching out of the water, their fins cutting through the spume.

  ‘Aren’t they magnificent?’ Juliette murmured.

  ‘They are,’ Charlie replied emphatically, thanking her lucky stars that she had given in to her friend’s requests to come and stay with her.

  Here, Charlie knew, she had found purpose. Porthgolow was one of the most beautiful places she’d ever visited: it had a charm that was recognizable as a British seaside village, but also its own, individual character. She loved that she could stand on the end of the jetty and gaze back at the seafront, the houses that looked as if they were almost carved out of the cliff. She was intrigued by the mystery of Reenie and her yellow house, and she couldn’t deny that she wanted to go back to Crystal Waters, to take Daniel up on his offer of a tour of his hotel and, most of all, convince him how wonderful Gertie was.

  If she stayed, she could run The Cornish Cream Tea Bus, walk Marmite along the beach, spend time with her friends and, hopefully, make a real difference. Daniel’s amused, handsome face flashed into her mind, distracting her from Juliette and the dolphins. When the bell sounded, she raced downstairs to greet her next customer.

  It didn’t matter who might be against her, what challenges she would encounter. She was prepared – willing, even – to face them all down.

  ‘Bring it on,’ Charlie whispered to herself as she ground coffee beans for the young couple’s espressos, ‘I’m ready.’

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  Read on for an extract of Cressy’s heart-warming novel, The House of Birds and Butterflies…

  Chapter One

  The robin is a small, brown bird with a red breast, that you often see on Christmas cards. It’s very friendly, and likes to join in with whatever you’re doing in the garden, especially if you’re digging up its dinner. It has a beautiful, bubbly song that always stands out, much like its bright chest.

  — Note from Abby’s notebook

  Abby Field was off the reserve.

  She didn’t know how it had happened, but one minute she was treading the well-worn woodland trail, intent on finding the perfect spot for the ladybird sculpture, the final creature in her nature treasure hunt, and the next she had pushed her way through the branches of the fallen elder and was standing at the side gate of Swallowtail House, looking up at the impressive, empty building. As always, she strained to see inside the grand windows, which remained free of any kind of boards, as if she could discover what Penelope’s life had been like all those years ago.

  She wasn’t sure why she had ended up here now, deviating from her course and slipping away from the nature reserve, but something about this beautiful, deserted building captivated her, and not just because it belonged to her boss, and had been standing empty for over fifteen years. She wondered if any furniture remained, or if the large rooms had been stripped bare of everything except cobwebs. She passed the house’s main gates on her way to and from work every day, could imagine the trail of cars that had, at one time, driven through them. But now they were kept secure, the huge padlock not to be messed with.

  The house might be abandoned, but Penelope Hardinge was still intent on keeping people out.

  She owned the Meadowsweet estate, the greater part of which was now the Meadowsweet Nature Reserve. Only Swallowtail House, abutting the reserve but secluded behind its redbrick wall, was off limits. The stories Abby had been told by long-term residents of Meadowgreen village varied, but it seemed that Penelope and her husband Al had started the reserve soon after their marriage, that Al’s death sixteen years ago had been sudden, and that Penelope’s flight from Swallowtail House had been equally hasty.

  She had left it as if it was plagued, purchasing one of the mock-Tudor houses on the Harrier estate, a five-minute drive out of the village, leaving the grand, Georgian mansion to succumb to the nature she and her late husband loved so much, although she had continued his legacy. She had been running Meadowsweet Reserve with a firm grip ever since, showing no signs of slowing down even though she was now in her sixties.

  For the last eighteen months, Abby had been a part of it. She had found a job that she was passionate about, and while she occasionally bore the brunt of Penelope’s dissatisfaction, and sometimes felt her confidence shrinking in the older woman’s presence, she could understand why Penelope had to be so strict, especially now the reserve was in trouble.

  Abby closed her eyes against the September sun and listened to her surroundings. The wind rippled through the woodland, the dancing leaves sounding like the rhythmic churn of waves against sand. A robin was singing its unmistakable, bubbling song, and she wondered if it was the young one who, for the last few weeks, had been landing on the windowsill next to the reserve’s reception desk, curiosity winning out over any fear of humans. He was a fluffy bird, his feathers never entirely flat, as if he hadn’t quite got the hang of preening, and she and Rosa had named him Bob. But she wasn’t sure he would stray this far out of his territory, and the reserve wasn’t short of robins delighting the visitors with their upbeat chorus.

  Somewhere in the house’s overgrown grounds was the melodic trill of a warbler. It could be a blackcap or a garden warbler, their songs so similar that, even now, she found it hard to distinguish between them.

  Opening her eyes, Abby turned away from the house and towards the laid-out trails of the nature reserve. She often wondered if Penelope ever returned, if she walked through the rooms of her old home and found it calming, or if her husband’s death had forever tainted the place in her memories.

  Abby didn’t know why she was drawn to it, but ever since she had moved to the village she had found herself frequently staring up at the serene house, as if it held answers to questions she didn’t yet know how to ask.

  The swallowtail butterfly it was named after wasn’t a regular visitor to north Suffolk, making its UK home exclusively in the Norfolk Broads, and this in itself was intriguing. She wondered if, at the time the house had been built, the population of large, yellow butterflies had been much more widespread; like so many other species, its numbers had declined, crowded out by the constant expansion of humans. Stephan, who ran the reserve’s café, had told her that since Meadowsweet records had begun, there had only been two swallowtail butterfly sightings, and those were likely to be visitors from the continent. In some ways, it added to the house’s mystery.

  Threading her slender legs through the fallen elder and the tangle of brambles, she stepped onto a narrow track that led to the woodland trail. When she had first been shown round the reserve she had noticed the house, and as she found out more about its history, had decided that when Penelope and Al had lived there, this must have been their main route to the old visitor centre. She thought that the fallen tree might even have been left there on purpose – discouraging people from heading towards the abandoned building.

  Back within the confines of the reserve, Abby turned her focus to her job, to the place she would now have to work so hard to rescue.

  Meadowsweet wasn’t the only nature reserve that looked after the lagoons and reed beds around Reston Marsh in north Suffolk. But whereas Penelope owned Meadowsweet, Reston Marsh Nature Reserve – already more identifiable because of its name – was run by a national charity. That the two were so closely situated had never been a problem up until now; the habitats were worth protecting, and while the visitor experience was a little less polished at Meadowsweet, it hadn’t stopped people coming to enjoy the walks, weather and wildlife on offer. There was enough to go around, as Stephan always said, and Abby liked the slightly less kempt trails she walked along every day, the sense that nature was always on the verge of taking over completely.

  But Meadowsweet didn’t have a committee to make the decisions, to test ideas collectively. Penelope kept everything close to her chest, and no amount of gentle encouragement or forcefulness could persuade her to share. Nobody had yet worked out how to chip away at her firm, upright exterior.

  And now the reserve was in trouble. The last few months had seen falling visitor numbers, the damp summer not helping, and recently there had been another dark cloud hanging over it, something which Abby was convinced was the subject of the staff meeting Penelope had called for later that morning.

  She was nearly finished. The ladybird was the final piece in her nature trail, a new activity she had devised for the school visits that would happen throughout the autumn term. She found a particularly gnarly root, easily visible from the wide walkway that cut a swathe through the woodland, and secured the ladybird beneath it, writing down its location in the notebook she always carried with her. The sculptures had been made by a local artist, Phyllis Drum, crafted from twigs and bound with twine. Abby liked the hedgehog best; it must have taken Phyllis hours – days, maybe – to put his spines in place.

  When she got back to the visitor centre, she would create the map and the questions that would lead intrepid groups of children across the reserve to each of the crafted creatures.

  It was the first week in September and the sun was still strong, sparkling on the surface of the coastal lagoons, but there was a faint chill to the air, a clarity that made Abby shiver with nostalgia for fireworks and bonfires, crunching through drives of shin-high leaves. She loved autumn; the sun bold b
ut not stifling, the ripples of leafy scent and pungent sweetness of apples, the way everything burst forth in a blaze of colour, as if refusing to succumb to winter. She picked up her pace, hurrying along the trail that was one of the reserve’s main arteries. Paths led off it down to the water, to the heron and kingfisher hides, to the forest hide, and along the meadow trail.

  She greeted a couple in matching navy parkas, a tripod slung over the man’s shoulder, the woman’s rucksack bulky with extra camera lenses.

  ‘Anything doing down at the heron hide?’ the man asked, spotting Abby’s reserve jacket, the logo of a sprig of meadowsweet and a peacock butterfly on the breast pocket.

  ‘A little egret, and some bearded tits were in the reeds in front of the hide about half an hour ago.’

  ‘Excellent, we’ll head there first. Thank you.’

  ‘No problem,’ Abby said, and waved them off.

  The visitor centre was a round, high-ceilinged building constructed out of wood and glass, the huge windows cleaned regularly, letting the weather encroach on the indoors. It was only eighteen months old, and was welcoming, modern and eco-friendly. Inside, it was split into four sections that reminded Abby of the Trivial Pursuit wedges. Penelope’s office, the storeroom and the kitchen made up one wedge, the reception and enquiry desk made up another, the gift shop was the third and, leading out onto a grassy area with picnic tables that looked out over the lagoons, Stephan’s café was the fourth.

  When Abby walked in, Rosa was behind the reception desk, looking elegant in a loose-fitting teal top, her black, springy curls pulled away from her face in a large butterfly clip. She handed over day passes to two men dressed in camouflage and shouldering impressive telescopes.

  ‘Busy so far?’ Abby asked once they’d taken the map Rosa had offered them and headed out of the door.

  ‘Not very,’ Rosa admitted, her shoulders rising in a sigh. ‘But it’s still early. And lots of people go back to school and work this week so it’s understandable that it’s quieter than usual.’