Trees arched overhead, their branches cloaked in gray-green lichen, their trunks often wrapped in glossy green ivy. Here, just above the port area, the valley's wooded slopes climbed steeply up from the banks of the stream, leaving just enough room for the riverbed and the narrow footpath. But a little farther on, the floor of the valley opened, and the path meandered through a grassy meadow. Here and there, massive boulders of creamy, apricot-veined quartz lay about in the riverbed like some giant's abandoned marble collection, washed down from who knew where by some terrible force.
“You've missed most of the flowers,” Lee said, as if Andrew hadn't been paying attention.
“What do you mean?”
“There are masses and masses of primroses, and daffodils, and bluebells, and things here in the spring. You should see Minster churchyard then; there's so many daffodils then you can barely see the gravestones. But they're all gone now. You came too late.”
Andrew felt as if he should apologize. “Still lots of flowers here, though,” he countered, somewhat defensively. “Like this, for instance.” He pointed to a bush flecked with pale pink blossoms maturing to ivory.
Lee snorted. “That's just dog rose. It's a weed, like these nasty, prickly blackberry brambles. They get everywhere. I hate them.”
“Your mother told me she makes blackberry wine.”
“Lotta good that does me.”
Andrew couldn't argue with this line of reasoning.
They passed through a wooden gate in a stone wall.
“Mind the stinging nettles,” Lee warned.
“Which are they?” He pushed aside the branches of a fringe-leafed plant that clustered around the gateposts and his hand suddenly felt on fire. “Damn! I think I just found out.”
Lee stopped and shook her golden head with disgust. “I told you! Now I'm going to have to find you some dock.” She stomped off up the path, then bent and snapped off a broad, bladelike, greenish-yellow leaf. Andrew followed.
“Here. Crush this and rub it where it stings.”
He did so, and in moments the pain vanished.
“How'd you know that would work?” he asked, amazed.
The girl looked at him as if he was brain-damaged. “Everybody knows dock cures nettle stings. Why do you think they grow near each other?”
Having no idea what either nettles or dock were, Andrew had never given this question much thought.
“Come on,” Lee said. “I don't have a lot of time to waste.”
“Yes, ma'am!”
A gentle bend revealed a pool created by a low stone dam that slowed the stream's flow. They stopped and sat on a rock, where Lee said you could see fish in the still water. Andrew stared at the surface intently.
“I don't see any,” he said finally.
“They're shy sometimes.”
“Are they big?”
“I should say so; really big.”
“How big?”
“That's a weir, that is,” Lee volunteered, changing the subject and pointing toward an outlet just upstream of the dam. “It used to shunt water to the leat.”
“Leat?”
“You know, leat … what carries the water to the mill. I thought you Americans spoke English.”
“I used to think so,” Andrew said, “but now I'm not so sure.”
“Okay, you know that big red wooden waterwheel by the leather shop, down near the car park? Used to be a mill there. Water that ran it came from here.”
“What kind of mill?”
“A mill that grinds stuff, silly.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“You sure have a lot of questions for a grown-up.”
“You sure know a lot for a kid.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“I never compliment before lunch.”
Lee smiled. “You remind me of my friend Nicki. She says things like that. You'd like her. She's funny.”
“Am I funny?”
“Not before lunch.”
Lee hopped off the rock and spun off up the path again, sometimes walking, sometimes skipping. From time to time, she'd stop and peer at something in the bushes—a bird or a butterfly—and name it.
Andrew was amazed at how much Lee already knew about the natural world. “Where did you learn all this?” he asked when he caught up with her.
“Mostly from Elizabeth. Mum says I'm to call her ‘Mrs. Davis,’ but she says I can call her Elizabeth. She runs the Visitor Centre and knows loads of stuff.”
“But wait, you're not a visitor.”
Lee looked at him a moment, as if trying to decide whether he was teasing or just stupid.
“That's silly,” she said, and off she skipped again.
Andrew followed happily, his eyes sweeping the hillsides. The trees climbing the slopes included ash, beech, and hazel, but mostly they were gnarled sessile oaks, which looked to him like something from a fairy tale, their mossy branches thick, twisted, and dense. It was the kind of woodland that should have fairies and elves, and he said so.
“I never saw none, but Nicki says there are piskies down here.”
“Piskies?”
“You know; little folk.”
“Has she seen them?”
“Never asked. Mostly, if Nicki says something, that's good enough for me.”
Andrew was admiring the elaborate structure of one particular oak, a very old one that overhung the river, when Lee piped up.
“Guess what, Drew?!”
“I don't know, what, Lee?”
“That's my secret tree.”
“Is it indeed?”
“Uh-huh. I climb way high up in it sometimes with a book and read there.”
“I bet it's peaceful up among the leaves.”
Lee's secret tree was made for climbing; its branches began low and continued, ladderlike, far up its thick, knobby trunk. Andrew swung up onto the lowest branch and said, “Come on; show me where you sit!”
Lee scrambled up past him with the sureness of a monkey, until the two of them were deep in a cylinder of green leaves, virtually invisible from the ground.
Lee settled into the crotch of one of the branches and leaned against the trunk. Andrew balanced on a branch beside her.
“Maybe I'll come up here and read sometimes, too,” he said.
“Better ask me first,” she said with a proprietary frown. “It's my tree, after all.”
“Of course.”
She leaned toward him and confided, “Sometimes I sit here and spy on people walking along the footpath.”
“No kidding! See anyone interesting?”
“Uh-huh. Saw the vicar once.”
“What was he doing?”
“Not ‘he,’ silly, ‘she.’ He's a she!”
“You're joking.”
“Don't you go to St. Symphorian's?”
“I've only been here a few days, Lee; gimme a break.”
Her eyes narrowed to slits. “You're not one of those Methodists are you?” She asked this as if Methodists had horns.
“No, I'm not. Wait a minute; how can St.—what was it?”
“Symphorian's.”
“Right, Symphorian's. How can they have a priest who's a woman? I didn't think Catholics allowed that.”
“It's not Catholic; it's C. of E., innit!”
“Huh?”
“Church of England. You don't know a whole lot, do you?”
“Geez, I guess not.”
“Me and Mum, we're C. of E. Dad is, too, I think, but he's too busy with the farm most Sundays to go to church. Goes Christmas and Easter, though.”
“And the C. of E. has lady priests?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wow.”
The girl shot him a look. “You got a problem with that?”
“No!”
“’Cause some people do, I guess. My friend Nicki, she calls them ‘nanderthals.’”
“Ne-anderthals. Boy, your friend sure uses big words.” He wondered whether all the kids in
Boscastle were as precocious as these two.
“Yeah, Neanderthals; that's it. It means backward, sort of. You're not one of them, are you?”
Andrew placed his right hand over his heart. “Neither a Methodist nor a Neanderthal, to the best of my knowledge. Promise.”
This seemed to satisfy Lee. Back on the ground, the two of them continued along the riverbank until they reached a narrow wooden footbridge that crossed the stream to a path that led up the thickly wooded hillside opposite.
“End of tour,” Lee announced.
“That's it? What about the wells and witches?”
“Have to wait till next time. Got to meet my mum so's we can go to Wadebridge. For the boots.”
She dashed across the footbridge.
“Thanks for the ice cream,” she called over her shoulder.
“I'm going to complain about this to the Visitor Centre,” Andrew called after her. There was no reply, but he thought he heard a distant giggle.
He slipped off his day pack, unzipped it, and pulled out an Ordnance Survey Explorer Map. He checked it for a moment, shouldered his pack, and continued upstream. At a tiny cluster of cottages the map identified as Newmills, he climbed out of the valley and turned seaward. He was heading for the coast path and, unbeknownst to him, an encounter with a stranded sheep.
Flash floods are sudden and often unpredictable events resulting from massive and sudden rainstorms, a rapid snowmelt in mountain regions, or a failure of natural or man-made water defenses. Although these events are relatively rare in the UK, flash floods do occur, often with devastating consequences.
Boscastle Special Flood Issue,
Journal of Meteorology 29, no. 293
two
Nicola Rhys-Jones was berating herself. And not quietly. She was shouting into the wind.
“Idiot! Bloody idiot! Meet a nice-looking guy with a conscience, toss off a few wisecracks, walk away. Brilliant!”
Randi, her seven-year-old Siberian husky, rocketed around her, barking, as she tramped along the coast path. Randi liked this game: His mistress yelled and waved her arms, and he ran in circles. Any minute now, he knew, she'd stop, look at him, and say, “What the hell do you think you're doing, you crazy dog!” Then she'd kneel down and give him a big hug, because she felt even more foolish than he looked. He knew this. He loved it. Especially the hugs.
Nicola did exactly that, then stood up and looked back along the cliffs to the north. High above Pentargon, near the stream of the same name that flung itself over the cliff edge, becoming no more than mist by the time it reached the beach far below, she saw the tiny figure of a man. The handsome man who'd tried to help the idiot sheep. The handsome man with the thick, curly, salt-and-pepper hair and the gentle, caring face. She would not wait for him to catch up. She wanted to, sort of, but mostly she didn't. Too obvious. She passed the tall pole with the fish-shaped weather vane at the top of Penally Point, then trudged down the steep path toward Boscastle harbor and her tiny stone cottage–cum-studio near the jetty.
Nicola Rhys-Jones, single—divorced, if you wanted to be technical about it—was rapidly approaching “woman of a certain age” status and pretending it didn't matter to her in the least, though it did. Anyone—any man, at least—passing her on the coast path would have observed a woman beautiful by any definition but her own: long, softly wavy dark-brown hair; big brown eyes beneath thick, expressive brows; a handsome nose admittedly a bit too big for her face; high, angular cheekbones; skin slightly olive and remarkably unlined; full lips that curved up at the corners with the perpetual hint of a smile, as if she was keeping a secret; the beginnings of softness beneath the chin—the only part of her, so far, that was giving way to gravity. She was nearly forty, but didn't look it. Yet. She stood three inches shy of six feet (a little too tall, she thought) and had broad shoulders (a little too broad, she worried), generously proportioned breasts (too generous—her Italian heritage), and slender legs attached to shapely hips she worked hard to keep from spreading (thus the dog walking, not that she didn't enjoy it). Her ex-husband, Jeremy, used to say something coarse she had secretly enjoyed, before she began hating it: “I like seeing daylight between your thighs.”
Nicola unlocked the low wooden door to her tiny stone cottage, went into the kitchen, filled a bowl with water for Randi, then mixed herself a gin and tonic and climbed the steep stone steps to her studio. She loved the house, especially the light-filled studio with its view of the harbor. She lay back on the chaise opposite her easel and put her glass on the floor. The upper story of the cottage had once been a loft for drying fishing nets. The ground floor had been an office and a storage room for crab pots. The place suited her at this stage of her life, though it was a far cry from the gracious home she had shared with Jeremy.
Jeremy. What a disaster. Ten years of marriage to a rich, well-educated, hopelessly narcissistic Englishman who also happened to have an abusive streak. As if she hadn't had enough of that as a girl.
Nicola DeLucca, graduate student at the Art Institute of Boston, had met Jeremy Rhys-Jones, son of an English peer, while she was on a fellowship in Florence, Italy. His family had a modest estate on Cornwall's rocky, wind-wracked Penwith peninsula, near the artists' colony of St. Ives. She was the sole daughter of a working-class immigrant family from the claustrophobic Italian enclave that was Boston's North End. She had had two brothers: one younger, James, the older one, John—named after apostles, saints, though only James would later warrant that honor. Her father, Anthony, had abandoned his family when she was only six, and her mother, Angela, had been forced to go to work cleaning offices in the State House at night—an unspoken source of shame in the neighborhood.
After high school, Nicola had won an art scholarship to Boston College. Four years later, she graduated and landed a part-time job as a book jacket designer for a publisher. In her free time, she took advanced painting courses at the Art Institute. Winning the fellowship freed her from the need to work and forced her to take seriously her talent as a painter.
In Florence, she floated in a nearly perpetual state of sensory overload. Her breakfast was cappuccino and biscotti amid the continuous hiss of the espresso machine behind the long marble counter of the steamy corner café near her student rooms. Then she wandered out into the city. She quickly realized that the elaborate palaces left her cold. Even the glorious Duomo felt strangely oppressive. The places that stirred her were far more pedestrian: tiny shops lining the narrow stone-paved alleys and arched arcades; the agricultural abundance of the public markets at the Piazza Lorenzo Ghiberti; the black and red capes the Florentine police wore as they sat astride horses so white and muscular they seemed carved from the same dazzling Carrara marble as Michelangelo's David; the street artists chalking pastel reproductions of Renaissance masterpieces on the pavement of the Via Santa Maria; and the equally brilliant artistry that went into the product displays in every cheese and smoked-meat shop in the city, as if their owners considered artful merchandising as important as the mouthwatering quality of their foods. She spent hours sketching the alleys, rooflines, the window displays, and the milling crowds in the piazzas of the city for oil studies she would later complete in class.
Jeremy was not in Florence studying art; Jeremy was in Florence studying Italian women. It was just her luck that he preferred his Italian women to be English-speaking. Though a year younger than she, he was mature, and cultured, and charming. And tall. And dishy. And unlike anyone she'd ever met in the North End. His accent, which exuded solicitude and breeding, reached her in a way the salaciously insinuating voices of her Italian classmates never could.
Nicola fell hard. Many afternoons, she and Jeremy climbed the hill opposite the city to the terrace of the Piazzale Michelangelo to watch the setting sun gild the stone and stucco walls and red-tiled roofs stretching toward the distant, mauve hills. One evening, Jeremy took her to the Ponte Vecchio to see the statue of Cellini, the famous goldsmith. Every post and railing of the cast-iron f
ence surrounding the statue was trimmed with padlocks. Lovers, he said, sealed their love by attaching locks inscribed with their names to the fence and then throwing the key into the Arno River, far below. And when he presented her with a similar lock etched with their names, she was surprised. She was even more surprised when she clasped the lock to the fence, turned the key, and flung it into the river.
Jeremy returned to England while she continued studying and painting in Florence, but he wrote ardent letters to her almost daily. No one had ever done that for her before. He flew down every few weekends. Then, as winter approached, he invited her to spend Christmas with his family in Cornwall. Charmed by the cookie-tin image of Christmas in England—the thatched cottages, the mistletoe, the horse-drawn sled tracks in snowy lanes—and unable to afford the airfare back to Boston anyway, she accepted. She flew to London, then took the long train ride down nearly to the tip of Britain's southwest peninsula. Jeremy met her at the station in St. Ives in a drafty, beat-up Land Rover. He was wearing an oily-smelling, waxed-canvas waterproof jacket, a flat tweed cap, and green rubber boots she learned were called Wellingtons, though she didn't know why.
Jeremy had described his family's home as a “country house,” and Nicola had in mind something small, sweet, and ivy-clad. So when they passed through pillared gates, she was completely unprepared for either the scale or the grandeur of the granite mansion to which the long, tree-lined drive led. Compared to the cramped row houses of the North End—or, for that matter, to the houses in Florence—the house seemed to her palatial.
Trevega House, as it was called, lay in a sheltered valley cut by a stream that raced west from the high moor tops before emptying into the sea. The estate ranged for several hundred acres and included a clustered hamlet of former tenants' cottages, a farm complex, even a disused water mill. Over the generations, the Rhys-Joneses had created lush landscape gardens and broad lawns around the manor house, as well as a massive walled vegetable garden. Even at Christmas there were fresh herbs, salad greens from glass-topped cold frames, beets, kale, turnips, rutabagas (“Swedes,” the cook called them), and arm-thick leeks.
Will North Page 2
