Chloe didn’t think she’d ever been so cold in her life.
The warmth of the cottage was so blissful that all Chloe could do was stand still as it wrapped itself around her like a hug. Just what was the temperature outside today anyway? Her face was aching with cold and her hands could hardly move.
“Where on earth have you been?” Tess demanded, looking up from the sofa where, yet again, she was surrounded by piles of exercise books. “It’s gone six and I’ve been really worried. Silver Starr said you were in her shop at three but that was hours ages ago!”
Glancing across at the mantelpiece clock Chloe was staggered to see it was almost six-thirty in the evening. Just how long had she been out in the mist with Sam? Astonished, she checked her watch too but the hands had stopped at three forty. Either the battery had given up or else time really had stood still.
“I’m really sorry, Tess. I had no idea it was so late.”
“I’ve been worried about you. Haven’t you seen the mist? Why on earth did you go out in it? People can get lost or swept out to sea here when the weather’s bad.”
Chloe nodded. She knew that, all right, but she didn’t want to share what had happened with her sister. Not only because Tess would freak but because Sam was her secret and, crazy as it sounded, to talk about him felt like breaking a magical spell. For as long as she lived Chloe knew she would never forget the sweetness of her first kiss. She would remember it even when she was old and grey but for now she just wanted to hug the secret to herself.
“I went for a walk to find inspiration like you said,” she told her sister and had the pleasure of seeing Tess’s eyebrows shoot into her dark hair.
“Did it work?”
Chloe nodded. Oh yes, it had worked all right. She could hardly wait to open the lap top and start writing. All she had to do was think about Sam and the words would flow faster than the River Wenn. She just knew it.
“Fantastic!” Tess looked thrilled but then frowned. “You’re frozen, Chloe. Even your lips are blue. You’ve hurt your head too. My God! It’s bleeding.”
Chloe hadn’t noticed the dull throb on her forehead until now. Touching it, she was taken aback to see that her finger tips were sticky with blood.
“I slipped in the mud.”
“Slipped? That looks like a deep cut to me. You’ve really walloped it. I’m surprised you didn’t knock yourself out.”
Tess was out of her seat like a rocket and examining Chloe’s forehead immediately.
“Are you going to fill out the accident book, Miss?” Chloe teased, but her sister wasn’t laughing, in fact Tess was looking worried.
“I’m not sure this doesn’t need stitches,” she said.
Stitches? Chloe was horrified. No way was she going to meet the gorgeous Sam Pendeen tomorrow looking like the Bride of Frankenstein.
“It’s fine,” she insisted. “I didn’t black out or anything.”
Tess fetched a first kit from the bathroom and began to clean the wound. “Are you sure? You look a bit dazed.”
Chloe felt a bit dazed but not from bumping her head. She was one hundred per cent certain she’d been conscious for Sam’s kiss.
“I’m fine,” she said, wincing as her sister applied TCP liberally. “It was just so slippery and my wellies were useless.”
“It’s not quite like London here, is it?” Tess teased. She stood back and examined her handiwork through narrowed eyes. “OK, I’m done. Why don’t you go and have a hot bath while I heat us up some soup?”
“I’m fine, I’ll just sit by the fire for a bit and thaw out.” Free from her sister’s ministrations, Chloe peeled off her coat and kicked her wellies onto the stone flags. “I borrowed your red scarf by the way and I’ve leant it to someone.”
“You mean you’ve lost it,” Tess grinned. “It’s OK. I don’t think it was my colour anyway. Red clashes with my tired eyes after all the marking!”
“No, I really did lend it to someone. Sam Pendeen.” Chloe couldn’t help it, she just had to say the name out loud because doing this made him real. “Do you know him? He’s one of the fisherman. He’s about twenty, I think.”
“Sam Pendeen,” Tess said thoughtfully. “Can’t say that name rings any bells. There are Pendeens in the village though. I think Alice Tremaine, Nick and Issie’s granny, used to be a one before she was married.”
Ah. That made sense. Chloe had thought that there was a resemblance to Nick. He and Sam were probably cousins.
“I’m meeting him tomorrow,” Chloe said, reaching for her iBook and flipping open the lid, “and before you tell me I need to do my essay first, I’m on it! Right now! OK?”
Tess held up red ink stained hands. “You must have bumped your head hard but I’m not arguing! You get started and I’ll sort us out some soup. You look like you need thawing out.”
But Chloe hardly heard a word. She was far too busy typing.
The following morning bathed Polwenna Bay in sunshine and it was as though the mist never was. After a late night spent with her fingers flying across the keyboard the essay was finished and Chloe had a great feeling about it. The hero rescued the heroine from a foggy path and the part where the heroine and hero kissed practically singed the page. Chloe could hardly wait to confirm that the real thing was even better than her literary efforts.
The late night spent working had caused her to sleep in and instead of having hours to choose an outfit and perfect her makeup, Chloe tore down to the quay with a bare face and her dark curls flying in the breeze. Strangely this didn’t worry her at all. Maybe there had been some mysterious power in Silver Starr’s crystal?
Once on the quay, Chloe tried her hardest to look fascinated by the coiled ropes and piles of sunshine yellow fish boxes as she wandered up and down. There was no sign of Sam anywhere and after ten minutes she started to feel nervous. What if he didn’t want to see her again?
An old man mending nets outside his fisherman’s store, glanced her way several times before finally asking if she was looking for someone special.
Chloe blushed. Was it really that obvious? “I said I’d meet a friend here? He’s a fisherman.”
He laughed. “Oh aye, maid? A friend, you say? You emmets and our fisher boys!”
Ignoring the jibe, Chloe pressed on. “I’m sure you’ll know him. Sam Pendeen? Blonde curly hair and blue eyes? I was stupid enough to get lost up on the cliffs yesterday and he helped me get back to the village. He said I’d find him here.”
The old fisherman looked at her long and hard. “Sam Pendeen? That’s not a name I’ve heard in a while. Are you sure it was him, maid?”
It was all Chloe could do not to roll her eyes in frustration. Of course she was sure. There was no way she could possibly forget that kiss.
“Yes, I’m sure,” she said. “Have you seen him today?”
“In a way I suppose I have,” the old man replied slowly. “Sam’s always here. Follow me.”
Abandoning his mending, the elderly fisherman shuffled to the furthest end of the quay and pushed aside heap of tangled nets, uncovering a weathered plaque decorated with leaping dolphins.
Sam Pendeen 1917-1937
Always at home here
“Sam’s boat hit the Shindeep Rocks in a bad sea fret just before the war,” the old fisherman explained as Chloe’s hand flew to her mouth. “He never made it back to the village even though his boat washed up just along the coast. His family never stopped hoping he’d come home and Alice Pendeen – Alice Tremaine now of course – still lights a candle here when it’s her brother’s birthday. They say Sam wanders the coast keeping an eye out for those in danger and from the look on your face, maid, I’d say you know that’s true.”
Shocked beyond words, Chloe stared at the memorial stone. It wasn’t possible! It couldn’t be, not when her lips still tingled from Sam’s kisses. Yet there was no mistaking what she was gazing at, evidence she couldn’t deny even though it made her feel as though she was stepping into thin air and f
alling very, very fast…
Crumpled at the base of the memorial was the very same red scarf she’d wound around Sam’s neck and now returned to her just as he had promised.
Chloe knew she’d hit her head while lost on the cliff top but surely not so hard she’d imagined everything that had happened? And even if that was the case, and Sam Pendeen nothing more that a concussed dream, this couldn’t explain the reappearance of Tess’s scarf. Chloe supposed she could have dropped it and somebody placed it here but behind a pile of nets and on a memorial? Why would anyone do that? And anyway, how could she have had such a vivid dream about a young man she had never even heard of?
As a thousand questions whirled through her mind there was one thing Chloe did know for sure – she could never have imagined her first and most magical kiss or the way her heart fluttered when Sam’s sweet mouth touched hers.
That had been the most real experience of her entire life.
Did Silver Starr’s crystal really possess some kind magic? Had the sea goddess granted her wish as the psychic had promised? Had Sam Pendeen crossed time to help her? Chloe shivered. Surely not? All these things were totally impossible, almost as impossible as trying to explain love…
Write a piece in which a ghostly presence of a lost love haunts a present day narrator that was what her English assignment demanded and, as she stared at the scarf and those stark engraved dates, Chloe realised exactly what Sam Pendeen had done for her. Whoever he was and wherever he’d come from, Sam and his kisses had been real and helped her in more ways than one. Silver Starr was right; there really was magic and mystery and love to be found in Polwenna Bay. You just had to know where to look.
Chloe kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed them against the cool marble. The unyielding stone was every bit as cold as Sam’s lips had felt against hers.
“Thank you, Sam Pendeen, wherever you are,” she whispered. “Thank you.”
THE END
I really hope you enjoyed this Polwenna Bay short story. The series begins with RUNAWAY SUMMER and the latest instalment, TREASURE OF THE HEART, is published on March 24th.
Chapter 1
Summer Penhalligan was only five years old when she stood on the stage of the Polwenna Bay Village Hall and sang Somewhere over the Rainbow, but even before the final verse was over her mother knew she was destined for fame and fortune, far away from Cornwall and in the bright lights of the West End. Nothing was going to get in the way of Susie Penhalligan’s dreams – least of all her daughter.
Summer had spent most of her childhood learning lines, being trundled up and down the county to rehearsals and practicing ballet and tap until her feet hurt. While her siblings had spent their time playing on the beach or surfing – or, later on, drinking scrumpy in The Ship – Summer had focused on her acting and tried not to care that she was missing out on what looked like a lot of fun. On the odd occasion when she’d felt like missing a dance class or Saturday rehearsal to spend time with her best friend Morwenna, just the thought of her mother’s disappointment had been enough to stop Summer in her tracks. Susie had lived and breathed Summer’s acting, thinking nothing of driving her daughter hundreds of miles to auditions or classes in their exhausted Ford Fiesta, and she’d saved every penny from her job cleaning holiday cottages to help pay for it all. Even Summer’s father Eddie, a gruff fisherman who spent more time propping up the bar than he ever did at home, would sometimes make it to a show and then boast drunkenly to all and sundry in The Ship that his girl was going to make them proud. Summer had always known that she had to succeed. Letting her parents down hadn’t been an option.
Fortunately hard work, dedication and talent had been in Summer’s favour, and so had her striking looks and slim figure. Like all of the Penhalligan family, Summer had been blessed with a combination of inky black hair and olive skin – rumoured to be the legacy of a Spanish Armada survivor who’d been washed ashore in Cornwall and had found comfort in the arms of a local girl – and eyes as sea green as the waves that danced beyond the harbour wall.
It had broken Summer’s heart to leave her family and friends behind, especially one friend in particular, whom even now she couldn’t think about without her chest constricting. Nevertheless, she’d left Cornwall shortly after her sixteenth birthday and set off for London, where (to her mother’s immense pride) she’d managed to secure a place at a top drama school. In the twelve years since, Summer had scarcely had time to breathe. She could certainly count on one hand the amount of times she’d been free to return home.
Home. When she’d first arrived in London, just the thought of Cornwall had been enough to make her eyes prickle. Whenever she’d allowed herself to dwell too much on everything she’d left behind, from the higgledy-piggledy rooftops to the ceaseless crash of the waves breaking on the rocks below her bedroom window, Summer had started to panic – and she’d had to think very hard indeed about how many sacrifices her family had made to send her all the way up country to drama school. Each time she’d thought about that one person in particular, the person whose hurt and anger had made Summer feel as though her own heart was being clawed out, she’d had to screw her eyes tightly shut and concentrate on how proud everyone at home was and just how much they’d given up so that she could be here. It would have been selfish and ungrateful to turn tail to Paddington Station and hurl herself onto the first train home.
Sometimes Summer had resorted to pulling one of her precious Topshop earrings out of her earlobe and digging it into her arm, until the bite of metal managed to blunt the homesickness. Then, when her emotions were back under control, she’d always give herself a stern lecture: about how her mother had toiled for her, clearing the mess left behind by the Range Rover-driving holidaymakers who rented the prettiest cottages down by the harbour, and about how her brothers had chosen to go to sea with Eddie and put money into the family pot rather than take their A levels. She couldn’t let them all down. Ironically, even her friend Morwenna had once sacrificed the money she’d saved for a new saddle so that she could buy Summer a beautiful collector’s edition of Shakespeare’s plays.
As it turned out, though, Mo and the rest of the Tremaine family had ended up letting Summer down in just about the worst way possible…
In those early, lonely days, thinking about her best friend had often meant another earring jab. The two girls had grown up together and been closer than sisters. Although Morwenna was as fair skinned as Summer was dark, they’d often liked to imagine that they were twins. Back then it was certainly true that wherever one girl was, the other was never far away. Even more than a decade on, Summer often still found herself thinking that she must tell Morwenna about some incident or other, or feeling her heart lift when she caught sight of a curly red head in a crowd. The subsequent realisation that the friendship was long gone was every bit as painful as if the loss had happened yesterday. Mo and Summer no longer spoke – and they probably never would again.
In desperation, Summer had thrown herself into her studies, and before long the excitement of her new life in the city had been a balm to the homesickness. The longer she stayed away from Polwenna Bay, the less upsetting the memories became. It was easier not to think about home, Summer had soon learned, to shut the door firmly on the longing to be back and to refuse to dwell on it. Besides, it couldn’t have been made any clearer that she was no longer wanted.
There were many advantages to having years of acting classes under her belt; not least of these was discovering that if she played the part of a confident and sassy city chick, she could pretty much convince everyone around her and possibly even herself too. Elocution and acting classes had soon smoothed away the warm Cornish drawl from her voice and with practice Summer had managed to erase Polwenna Bay from her heart as well, or at least lock it away in a very small corner that she was determined to seldom visit.
As time slid past in that imperceptible yet alarming way that years do, Summer found that if she did ever miss the calling of the gulls
, the tang of salt in the air or the lemon-sharp light of the bay, then she was able to console herself with the knowledge that at least she’d managed to find the fame that her mother had craved for her.
Had she made her family proud? Summer wasn’t so sure. Maybe proud wasn’t quite the right word; somehow Summer doubted that her Shakespeare-loving mother approved of the direction Summer’s career path had taken in the end. Her father had been utterly mortified – no more bragging in the pub from him, she imagined – but at least she’d managed to pay off their mortgage and could make sure they were taken care of. Her brothers were less delicate and had readily accepted the down payment on their new trawler, Penhalligan Girl, but Cornwall was a small place and people had long memories, so Summer stayed away. Her face was on billboards and magazines the length and breadth of Britain; she belonged to that small and very select group of celebrities known solely by their first names, and she lived a lifestyle that most people could only dream of.
Summer had never intended to disillusion her family by letting them know that the dream was actually more of a nightmare. But now, suddenly, it seemed that she didn’t have much of a choice…
After all those years away, it was a shock to find herself returning to Polwenna Bay, the small Cornish fishing town where she’d grown up. Summer hadn’t known that this was where she was heading, or even that she was leaving London. Everything had happened in such a hurry. Her head was still spinning at how an entire life could change in a heartbeat. One minute she’d been sitting at the bottom of the stairs with her head in her hands, an entire galaxy of stars whirling in front of her eyes, and the next she’d been scooping up her car keys from the table and running out of the door, down the scrubbed steps and out into the street. Had she even shut the blue front door of their sweet Kensington mews house? Summer didn’t have a clue – and as she’d floored it along the A38, she hadn’t really cared. She was away from Justin and that was all that mattered.
Magic in the Mist: A Polwenna Bay short story Page 3
