“Nice meeting you, Drew. Thanks for the drink.”
She had started to turn away from him but stopped. “Lee was right about what she said about you.”
“Which was?”
Nicki smiled a conspirator's smile. “Oh, that's just between us girls.”
“Do you have a name, besides Nicki?” Andrew felt like he was trying to lasso Nicola and pull her back.
“Nicola Rhys-Jones, formerly DeLucca.”
“Married then?”
“Not anymore.”
Andrew smiled. She didn't.
“And you're called …?” she asked.
“Stratton, like the village up the coast. Andrew Stratton.”
“Married?”
“Not anymore.”
This time Nicki did smile.
Then she was gone. She slipped through the crowd like water through rocks, disturbing nothing. Andrew fought his way to the door, just in time to see her disappear across the narrow bridge over the river. She was swinging her purse and Randi was dancing around her again.
The village of Boscastle lies within a conservation area amongst some of the most beautiful countryside within the British Isles, and is one of the very few unspoilt harbor villages in Cornwall. Designated an Area of Outstanding Beauty (AOB), the National Trust own and care for the surrounding coastline including the cliffs of Penally Point and Willapark which guard the Elizabethan harbor (built in 1584).
Boscastle Flood Special Issue,
Journal of Meteorology 29, no. 293
five
It was still too early for the sun to have crested the steep hills to the east as Andrew made his way down through Minster Wood to the footpath along the river on Monday morning. The valley was cool and misty, the grass laden with dew, the soft earth moistly fragrant. Mercifully, it was also too early for the tourist throngs. The street through Quay Town was nearly deserted, most of the shops still closed. He had a sudden glimpse of the peace that must descend here in the fall, when the only sounds were the stream clattering over its slate shelves and the raucous complaints of seagulls, when the air held the tang of smoke from coal fires in cottage hearths, when the only people along the pavements knew one another by their given name.
The coastal fog was beginning to break up; it promised to be another fair day. He stood at the edge of the car park where he was to meet his instructor, watched the river race past, and thought about Nicola. She intrigued him. Yes, she was right; they had been flirting. But there was an awfully sharp edge to her flirtation. It wasn't that she was caustic, really, or even sarcastic. But her teasing was prickly. She reminded him of the blackberry bramble bushes that overran empty lots in Philadelphia in the summer: the berries were irresistibly plump, sweet, and juicy, but the thorns lacerated you when you collected them. You could learn a lot about desire from a blackberry bramble.
Desire. He hadn't felt any for months. But Nicola had resurrected it. It wasn't even the flirty banter, though that had been fun, in a vaguely dangerous way. After all, it had been a very long time since he'd had a date. He didn't even know how to go about starting and wasn't even sure he could. Or should. It wasn't that he still loved Kat; she'd made sure he wouldn't. No, it was that he kept replaying in his head the charges she'd leveled against him; they swirled around in there like harpies. Was he too intellectual? Too controlled? Did he lack ambition, or was he simply happy teaching? Or were all those charges just the weapons she used to justify her affair and defection? In the year since she'd left, Andrew had felt as if he'd been treading water. Or just marking time. Maybe he'd become self-absorbed. Or maybe he was just so badly flayed by Kat's leaving that he was bleeding still.
But there was that galvanic shock when Nicola touched his hand. It amazed him. It confused him. It nagged at him. What was that about?
A few cars had turned into the nearly empty car park and a little knot of men was gathering by the slate-stone Visitor Centre. Andrew wandered over to join them.
“Morning! We all waiting for the teacher?” he said.
He received two curt nods and one “I reckon.” Men of few words.
“Where're you from?” asked the talkative one, a wiry, balding fellow of perhaps thirty-five with a sharp, ferretlike face. Andrew's accent had given him away.
“Philadelphia,” he answered.
Three pairs of eyes widened. Finally, another of the men, a tall, heavily built fellow in manure-splattered green rubber wellies and blue coveralls, looked him over.
“Bettur fit yew staid 'ome, lad; no 'oliday, this. This be 'ard lowster.”
Andrew stared at the man for a moment, smiling what he was sure was an idiot's smile, while he waited for his brain to translate. He thought he got the gist.
“Yeah, reckon it will be,” he answered, shrugging to suggest hard work was nothing new to him.
Now the third gent spoke up; it was becoming a real gabfest. “There's a lot of fine stonework around Philadelphia; it was the Pennsylvania Dutch, was it not?”
Andrew looked at this fellow in frank amazement. How would he know that? The man seemed overdressed for the task ahead: neatly pressed denim shirt with a button-down collar, sharply creased khaki trousers, and what looked like brand-new work boots. He looked like a Bostonian, sounded like a Londoner, and was certainly no Cornishman. He extended his hand to Andrew.
“Ralph Newsome; I studied engineering at Drexel for a year.”
“Andrew Stratton; I teach architecture at Penn.”
“Small world,” Newsome said.
The ferret didn't want to be left out. “Jacob Casehill,” he said, taking Andrew's hand. “Stonemason. Everyone calls me Case.”
The three of them turned to the big fellow, who suddenly seemed as shy as a child.
“Burt. Pencarrow. Farmin' out Holsworthy way.” He kept his hands in the pockets of his coveralls.
It was at this point that a beat-up white van lurched into the car park. On the side of the van was written THE STONE ACADEMY.
The teacher's name was Jamie Boden, and Andrew had expected, given the diminutive first name, a young spark of a fellow. But the man who climbed down out of the van was, Andrew guessed, at least sixty, his face weathered, freckled, and deeply creased, his head crowned with a wild tangle of wispy ginger hair going white. He wore stiff canvas trousers with long patches from knee to thigh and a collarless blue shirt, both of which seemed impregnated with fine, gray dust.
“Coffee!” he said by way of greeting.
Casehill—Case—jerked his head to the left. “Bakery's open. Few doors down from the village shop.”
“Excellent,” the man responded, and promptly took his leave. “One more coming,” he said over his shoulder. “Gel, thank the good Lord.”
Burt lumbered after the instructor, big and slow as a draft horse.
Andrew mumbled, “Gel?”
“A woman,” Newsome explained. “And, like all women, late.”
As if to prove him instantaneously wrong, a dark-green Land Rover with NATIONAL TRUST stenciled on its doors roared into the car park and whipped smartly into a space. The driver's door snapped open and a young woman who looked to be in her midtwenties fairly exploded from the car and strode toward them. She was stocky, had broad shoulders, and sported a deep tan set off dramatically by a helmet of close-cropped platinum-blonde hair. She was wearing olive-drab hiking shorts, and her calves looked carved from stone.
“This it? Just the three of you?” she said without introduction.
“Lovely to meet you, too,” Newsome answered with a broad grin. Andrew gathered this was not the sort of “gel” he'd anticipated.
Her manners caught up with her and she thrust out her hand. “Sorry. Becky Coombs. Got stuck behind a bloody charabanc full of tourists.” She shook hands all around. “Where's Jamie?”
“You know him, then?” Andrew asked.
“Oh, yes. Jamie's by way of being a god around here. Figured it was time I took one of his classes, especially since the proje
ct's on my patch. Volunteers will join us next week.”
“You're at the National Trust office downstream from the first bridge?” Andrew ventured.
“That's the place. In the old forge. When I'm not out in the field, that is.”
“Must be great to have a job that takes you out into countryside this beautiful,” Andrew said.
“It is that … except maybe in the winter. Rains constantly and the wind never lets up. Storms take a toll, especially along the coast path; we've a lot of stonework needs doing.”
Andrew liked Becky Coombs, her energy, her straight-ahead attitude.
Case had been quiet. Now he gave the girl a sly look and said, “Reckon you can hoist all the stone we'll be shiftin'?”
Becky smiled at Case.
“No, not all of it; just my share.”
Andrew glanced at the sturdily built “gel” and then the wiry little man and figured Becky Coombs could take the ferret out in maybe twenty seconds, no contest. He chuckled.
Jamie Boden was back, big Burt close behind, both of them clutching Styrofoam coffee cups. They gathered in a circle, and Boden looked each of them over like they were rocks he was sizing up before lifting them.
“Right then, what're you chaps driving?”
“Thought we was workin' right here, by the car park,” Case said.
“Will be,” Boden said. “That's our remit: Build a barrier between the verge and the river. But not this morning. This is a course, not a work party—not yet, anyways—so today we learn things. And to do that we go to my place, up on the moor. But it's rough going. Becky's got her Land Rover, so that's good. The rest of you?”
Burt rumbled that he had a Toyota pickup. Case was driving a beat-up Ford Fiesta. Newsome had a BMW 3 Series.
“Well, that's out,” Boden said. “Fiesta, too, most likely.”
“You?” he said to Andrew.
“I walked here.”
“You'll be the American then. You ride with me in the van. Becky, you take Mr. BMW here. Burt, can you take Mr. Casehill? Right, then, stick close or you'll never find it.”
A little after eight-thirty, Randi dragged Nicola out for his morning walk. She didn't mind; it was a splendid day, and she wasn't scheduled to work at the Museum of Witchcraft until ten. She smiled at the thought of her “job.” She'd been volunteering at the museum—“the world's largest collection of witchcraft-related artifacts”—for more than two years now. She often wondered what her very Catholic mother, dead not long before her divorce from Jeremy, would have thought. But it was really all Randi's fault. He'd belonged to an elderly woman in a nearby village—a practicing witch known only as Joan—and Colin Grant, the museum's owner, had taken the dog in after she died. Nicola met Colin while out walking along the cliffs just after sunrise one morning. He was sitting atop a ledge on Penally Point, meditating so quietly that Nicola hadn't noticed him. When he wished her a soft-spoken good morning, she'd nearly jumped out of her skin. She recognized the fellow—the museum was just across the lower bridge over the Valency, directly opposite her own cottage. She'd often thought him rather sweetly gnomish: small in stature, shy in speech, with a slightly too-large head aswirl with gray curls, and a curious aura of peacefulness that wreathed him like a cloud. He climbed down from his perch and joined her on the coast path.
“You're up early,” he'd observed.
“As are you,” she'd noted.
“Oh, I'm here most mornings, communing,” he'd said.
He'd asked if she took walks every day and, when she said she did, mentioned he'd inherited a lovely dog that needed walking and that given the press of work at the museum during tourist season, he didn't have enough time to do it himself. Somehow she'd agreed to walk the animal, and she and Colin arranged a time later that day to meet.
The dog's name was Randi. It seemed Joan the witch had a sense of humor. She'd named her companion—her “familiar,” as witches called their special animals—after a famous magician and debunker of psychic phenomena. Be that as it may, Colin explained, Joan claimed the dog had extraordinary powers, most notably knowing instantly whether anyone who came to their door was friend or potential foe.
Looking back, her first meeting with Randi still seemed like something of a miracle. The dog, who was three at the time, took one look and immediately began running joyous circles around her, bouncing on all fours like a lamb, his long, white-tipped tail wagging furiously. But he didn't let out a single bark. Colin stood there with his mouth agape.
“That's exactly what he used to do with Joan,” he said finally, shaking his head in astonishment. “He connects the two of you. You're not a witch, perchance?”
Nicola laughed. “Not to the best of my knowledge!”
“Well, he seems to think you are. Perhaps you should reconsider.”
“What, taking him for walks?”
“No. Whether you have the gift.”
“The only gift I have is being a sucker for a sweet dog, and you'd already sussed that out, hadn't you?”
“Actually,” Colin said with a mischievous smile, “yes.”
“You're not a witch, too, are you?”
“Um … yes. I thought you knew that.”
“Look, I didn't even know men could be witches, but it doesn't mean a damned thing to me. I'll take the dog.”
“I only wanted you to walk him.”
“The hell you did …”
“Are you sure you're not a witch?”
“Why?”
“Because you're a dab hand at reading minds.”
And so Randi came home with Nicola, and the two of them had been inseparable ever since. He was a stunningly handsome animal. His lush coat, thick as a woman's fox-fur coat, was tan and black on his back, but snow-white on his belly. His legs and paws, too, were white, as were his muzzle and chest, the mask around his eyes, and his eyelashes. His perpetually upright ears were edged with black, as if with kohl, and soft as a lamb's. But his most distinctive feature was a dark charcoal widow's peak on his forehead with a lightning slash of white in its center.
Best of all, as fearsome as he sometimes looked, the dog had a sweet, gentle soul. Strangers fawned on him, children pawed him, and all he did was pant happily, his curled tail wagging madly. And what Colin had told her was true: Randi instantly knew friend from foe, not that foes were thick upon the ground in this little village she had come to love.
Randi usually chose the route for their morning walks, and on this day he turned right out of their front door, trotted up to the main road, crossed the road bridge, and headed up hill, past the Visitor Centre, the Cobweb, and the newsagent's shop, finally turning right onto the footpath heading up the Valency valley. Nicola wondered, not for the first time, why she needed to accompany him at all. And he never needed a leash.
They'd passed the wide part of the stream behind the weir that once had shunted water to the mill down by the bridge when Randi stopped and looked up into one of the trees. He looked at Nicola, looked up at the tree, and looked at Nicola again. Lost in a reverie of her own having vaguely to do with the American, she kept walking. But Randi didn't follow, and eventually he barked once. This was unusual. She walked back to the tree by the river and the dog looked up again.
“What?” Nicola said, exasperated.
The dog barked again, but kept looking up.
That was when she heard the giggling. She recognized it immediately.
“Lilly Trelissick! What are you up to?”
“I'm up to about half the whole tree,” Lee said, giggling louder now.
“Well, you're driving Randi around the twist, so come on down and walk with us.”
There was a scuffle of boots on bark, a shaking of leafy branches, and then a pair of skinny, tan legs emerged from the canopy. Nicola caught Lee as she dropped the last few feet to the ground and gave her a hug.
“Listen here, you ragamuffin; you'll break your neck one of these days.”
“Uh-uh!”
“Uh-hu
h!”
“Will not.”
“Will too!”
“Will not, 'cause that's my special tree and we have an agreement.”
“An agreement?”
“Yup. If I climb it carefully, it won't let me fall.”
Nicola looked at the girl and realized there was no rebuttal to such an argument. So she changed the subject.
“So tell me about this Andrew Stratton.”
“I told you.”
“What?”
“He's a nice man. We're chums. That's all. Why? Wait! You like him, don't you!”
“That's ridiculous.”
“You do, you do! Nicki and Drew, Nicki and Drew!”
“Stop that! What's he doing here? That's what I want to know.”
“Goin' to school is what.”
“School?”
“Yup. Stone-wall school. Told him we already had plenty, but he wouldn't listen. Figures.”
“Why?”
“He's a guy. Guy's don't listen. That's what you said, anyway.”
“What are you talking about?”
“’Member that guy? The one with the gallery in St. Ives who wanted to show your paintings and you said no and he wouldn't listen?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“That's when you said it: Guys don't listen.”
“Do you remember everything I say?”
“Mostly.”
“Good Lord.”
Randi, evidently bored, barked. And they set off up the valley.
A little way upstream of the footbridge, at a point where a tributary stream plunged over a rock shelf and joined the river, they stopped to chuck stones. Randi was off rummaging around in the undergrowth on one of the slopes, following enticing smells.
“Why's an American going to stone-wall-building school?” Nicola muttered, as much to herself as to Lee.
“I think it's to do with his work,” Lee ventured.
“Which is?”
“He's an art- something.”
“An artist?”
“No. An art …” Lee was searching. “Art-tech.”
Nicola stared at the girl blankly for a moment until the penny dropped.
“An architect?”
Will North Page 7
