Will North

by Water, Stone, Heart (v5)

  “Andrew!”

  He spun on his heel and looked uphill toward the voice. Just above the cordon, Roger Trelissick was climbing down from his ATV.

  “Have you seen Lilly?” her father yelled.

  Andrew glanced downstream again to the ruins of Nicola's cottage and then trudged up to meet Roger.

  “Not since this morning. We walked together for a bit. Said she was going up-valley.”

  “Lord help her; she's missing!”

  “Jesus, Roger; did you check below Minster Wood?”

  “Tried, but the bridge is gone. Hell, the whole bottom of the valley up there is underwater! I was hoping she was with you. Or Nicola.”

  “Nicola was alone when Colin saw her a while ago.”

  Roger stood in the rain, drenched. And Andrew watched as the man's face went from hopeful to desperate. Andrew was suddenly overcome by the sheer extent of the devastation around him: physical, financial, human. Only this morning, he and Lee had been strolling happily through the meadows along the quiet riverbank in the sun …

  And suddenly, Andrew knew.

  … much of Cornwall had a dry and fine sunny day, with a maximum temperature of 22.6 degrees C. Beaches were well-populated.

  Boscastle Flood Special Issue,

  Journal of Meteorology 29, No. 293

  sixteen

  “Roger!” Andrew shouted.

  The farmer had just climbed back onto the ATV.

  “I might know where she is!”

  Andrew raced up the hill.

  “Can we get to the river below your farm?” Andrew asked as he climbed up and straddled the seat behind his friend.

  “The Jordan's overtopped the road. Police have everything closed off. We'd have to go overland. Where is she?”

  “I want you to understand it's only a hunch, Roger, okay?”

  “I'll take whatever I can get!”

  “Right, then: she has a favorite tree—”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. A big twisted oak by the river near the weir. She likes to climb into it and read. It's like she thinks she and the tree are friends.”

  Roger shook his head. It didn't surprise him in the least. He gunned the ATV. “Hang on!”

  Andrew gripped the handles at his hips, and they raced up the switchback main road south out of the lower village. Instead of taking the main road to Camelford, Roger jerked the four-wheel farm motorcycle up a narrow lane, around the ancient Napoleon Inn, uphill past medieval cottages, and east.

  “We'll cut through Paradise!” Roger shouted, and Andrew wondered if Roger was hallucinating. The landscape looked anything but: The lane was more like a stream than a thoroughfare; the gardens and fields were ripped bare by sheets of floodwater. He later learned that the lane paralleled a stream called the Paradise. They seemed to be going a long way away from the valley, but Andrew just hung on. When they reached the high fields at the crest of the valley, Roger jerked the handlebars left and they plowed through the flooded bed of the upper reaches of the Paradise. The rear end of the ATV slewed sideways in the current, but Roger gunned the engine and powered out of danger.

  Then they were plummeting downhill through fields Andrew knew were Roger's.

  “Do you have any rope at the farm?” Andrew bellowed into Roger's ear.

  Roger simply nodded, and they barreled across fields and farm lanes. They lurched to a stop by one of the barns. It was still raining, but not with the intensity that it had been. In moments, Roger was back with a thick loop of rope tossed over his shoulder, cowboy-style.

  “Where's this tree?” he yelled as they rocketed off downhill again.

  “Below the footbridge and just above the weir!”

  “We'll have to go down through the woods on foot!”

  Andrew just patted the man's back. He could only imagine the fear the father felt. He prayed—something he was unaccustomed to doing—that his hunch about Lee was right.

  Roger finally stopped at the edge of a thicket of brush and trees and tore off into the woods. Andrew followed. The two men crashed through the undergrowth and clambered down the steep slope of the valley toward the river roaring below. The ground was as slick as grease, and they fell, slid, stood, and fell again, repeatedly, as they struggled downhill.

  When they reached the racing river, Andrew could recognize nothing.

  “Where's the weir?” he called.

  “Under there!” Roger called back, pointing to the swirling maelstrom of water and debris below them.

  Andrew headed upstream, most of the time on his hands and knees, gripping branches to give him stability in the slimy morass of mud and leaves on the hillside. Roger was right behind him. A few minutes later, Andrew stopped. Below him, leaning more than he remembered, but still stubbornly clutching the ground with its roots, was Lee's tree. Around it swirled a torrent of brown, whitecapped water. The noise was incredible. There was no way Lee could have heard him if he called, so he peered through the rain looking for a sign of her in the tree's canopy. He searched to no avail until the wind picked up and shuddered the leaves, and there, in the crotch of two branches, was a little girl in khaki shorts and a T-shirt. She was clutching a battered red and white umbrella.

  Nicola had been standing on a dining chair in front of the fireplace, lifting Laura Knight's exquisite Ella: Nude in a Chair from the wall above the mantel, when the river tore her front door off its hinges and flung it across the room as if it was made of balsa instead of thick pine.

  Instinctively, she leaped from the flimsy wooden chair to the floor as a three-foot wall of inky water surged through the room, the flood rising as fast as water filling a bucket beneath an open faucet. Moments later, when she reached the stairs to the studio, the portrait under one arm, both front windows imploded, sending glass shards and wood fragments skimming across the oily, roiling cesspool that had once been her sitting room.

  With the water rising quickly, she clawed her way up the rest of the flight to her studio. Upstairs, she pulled a drop cloth from the floor and wrapped the painting in it, clutching it to her breast not so much because of its monetary value, but because it was her one tangible connection to Sir Michael.

  She stood at the long window as if nailed to the floorboards. Outside, the scene before her would have been unimaginable, a nightmare, were it not so obviously and hideously real. The humpbacked stone footbridge, across which she'd fled after locking up the museum, was buried beneath the flood. Cars, vans, recycling bins, even the venerable red public phone booth that had stood across the street from the Welly, sped by below her on the waves. Suddenly, she felt very alone and wished she hadn't left Randi with the museum staff when she ushered them out to the terrace above the building—not that he'd be anything but sympathetic company. A power failure had thrown the windowless museum into pitch darkness and halted their work rescuing artifacts. Now, beneath her, furniture thudded against the walls as water whirlpooled through the sitting room. She had the bizarre, if momentary, sensation that she was watching an old black-and-white newsreel with modern Dolby sound effects. Despite the maelstrom downstairs, she felt safe in her sturdy seventeenth-century fisherman's loft.

  This illusion lasted for perhaps two minutes. Speeding out of the gloom on the surface of the rushing river, an entire tree, big as a bus and stripped of its August leaves and most of its branches, hurtled directly toward her house. It was just like what she'd read about in stories: a disaster approaching as if in slow motion, the kind that gives you plenty of time to think, which is to say the worst kind. She grabbed Ella and fled to the back of the loft, praying the tree would slide by.

  But her prayers went unanswered.

  Andrew grabbed Roger's shoulder and pointed toward the swaying oak in the middle of the flood. Roger's face flashed from desperation to almost heartbreaking relief when he, too, saw the umbrella. While Roger tried vainly to call out to his daughter, Andrew sat on the muddy slope and studied the current. It was an architectural problem, he realized: a ma
tter of angles and forces. After a few minutes of silent calculation, he started crawling upstream, pulling the rope behind him. Roger understood immediately and followed. The idea was to fix the rope to a tree on land and have one of them go downstream with it to Lee's tree. If they could get to it, and get Lee down, they might be able to get her back to the hillside to safety.

  There was a brief shouting match about who would stay ashore and who would go with the rope. But Roger was a much bigger and stronger man than Andrew, and they agreed he needed to be at the pulling end. They clove-hitched one end of the rope to a well-positioned young alder that so far had survived the flood, and Andrew wrapped the other end around his waist, cinching it with a quick-release knot—glad now he'd helped Katerina learn her climbing knots. And then he entered the river.

  His plan was to ease himself into the flood, slip downstream, and use his feet to stop him whenever he got swept away. This strategy worked well for perhaps twenty seconds, at which point subsurface debris knocked his legs out from under him and he spun on the end of the rope, alternately above and below the water, until his feet found purchase again and he sputtered to the surface. The principal advantage of this unintentional maneuver was that Lee saw him.

  “Drew!” she screamed. It was the scream of a very frightened, very little girl.

  “It's okay! Come down!”

  “No way!” A stronger, more Lee-like voice this time.

  Andrew ignored her and concentrated on his footing, inching closer to the tree. The boulders in the streambed were constantly on the move. He'd steady his feet on one and, almost immediately, it would be swept out from under him. His ankles and shins were constantly under attack from shifting rock and branches. Twice more he went under, but each time Roger held him tight and he was able to right himself in the rushing, mud-choked water. After perhaps ten minutes of this battering, Andrew was closing in on the tree, though still swinging wildly in the current. He began wondering how Roger would ever get them back to shore. Lee's father let out one last length of rope and timed it perfectly; Andrew slammed into the trunk of the tree, caught his breath, and began climbing toward Lee, the climb made easier by the fact that thanks to the flood, he was already in the lower branches.

  Like a huge, out-of-control lorry, the massive tree trunk tore through the front of Nicola's cottage, as if the whitewashed wall were made of paper instead of stone. The entire building shuddered and the massive beams and pegged joists supporting the upper story groaned.

  Nicola clung to the banister at the top of the stairs as the house lurched. The glass in her beloved studio window shattered, but the frame held. There was no way to know how long the structure would last, and she knew she needed to flee. But like many old cottages, there was only one way out: down the stairs. And the lower floor was flooded to the ceiling. Unlike her neighbor Trudy, she had no back garden; her house was backed by a sheer slate cliff face.

  When she heard the rescue helicopters thumping up the valley, her head instinctively jerked upward and she saw, at last, her escape. She placed the wrapped portrait on her paint stand and, with her eyes clenched tight, smashed a wooden chair through the glass of the old skylight in the loft's sloping rear roof. On the second try, it splintered like an antique Christmas ornament, raining razor-sharp shards on her head. She shook them out of her hair as best she could, then pulled a folding step stool beneath the hole. With a pillow from her bed, she snapped off the remaining bits of glass in the window frame. Then she tied the drop cloth holding Ella around her neck and, grateful at long last for her height, pulled herself out onto the wet slate roof.

  But that was as far as she could get. The distance to the roof peak was too great and the slate too slick for her to climb higher. And so she sat there in the downpour, her feet braced against the frame of the skylight, and prayed the cottage would hold.

  By 5:15, the rain gauge at Lesnewth had recorded no significant rain for nearly forty-five minutes; in Boscastle, however, the rain was so diabolically heavy and the visibility was so poor that Captain McLelland called to the crew in Rescue 193, “Check your orientation points in case we ditch!”

  Andrew had just managed to coax Lee down through the tree limbs toward the rushing water and the rope when he heard a shout.

  “Andrew!”

  He peered through the branches and saw Roger scrambling furiously upslope, and, a moment later, he saw why: yet another wall of water was funneling down the narrow valley, one so choked with debris that the water was barely visible, as if the surging mass were a torrent of trash. Effortlessly, the tidal wave ripped the young tree that held their rope from the ground like so much brush. Andrew tore open the quick-release knot at his waist and watched the rope whip away through the branches like a line on a harpooned whale.

  “See?” Lee yelled, and just for a fraction of a second, he wanted to throttle the wise little kid. Instead, they climbed higher into the venerable old oak.

  And there they sat. Roger had disappeared.

  “Where's Daddy?” Lee cried, clinging to Andrew's soaked shirt. And Andrew prayed that he hadn't been sucked into the flood.

  What Andrew didn't know was that Roger had heard the helicopters farther down the valley. Now, with their own rescue plan destroyed, he'd scrambled back up the hillside to his ATV. At the edge of the woods, he threw downed limbs, leaves, and a bale of just-mown hay into a pile until he heard the hammering rotors of one of the helicopters again. Then he poured half the contents of his spare fuel can on the pile and lit it. There was a towering explosion of flame, and then a thick, white cloud of smoke as the wet leaves and hay burned.

  Then he waited. He looked at his watch. It was nearly 6:00 p.m. The rain had stopped. He willed a helicopter up-valley.

  Nicola was desperately cold. It might have been August, but the rain felt arctic, and as if it were trying to suck the life out of her. Her calves, flexed to hold her against the skylight frame, kept cramping. The hard roof slates felt like ice cubes through her wet slacks. She was at the limit of her courage, and her consciousness. She drifted off to that night, not even a week ago, when Andrew was caressing her on her chaise—how flushed with warmth she had felt, how full of life and joy and tenderness, how loved. And it was to this memory, as much as to the roof, that she clung, waiting, praying to be seen. But the helicopters seemed fully occupied upstream, above the heart of the village itself, and not down here near the harbor.

  It was the copilot of one of the second wave of rescue helicopters, a bird from RAF St. Mawgan, who noticed the pillar of smoke in the valley. The chopper was on its way to respond to a report of stranded motorists in a shallow valley near Otterham, where the deluge at times had been even heavier than at Lesnewth, when Tim Llewellyn, a Welshman who, like the crewmen in Rescue 193, had also seen service in the Gulf War, tapped his pilot's shoulder and pointed down. A hundred feet below, beside the smoky fire, a man was pointing frantically west, toward the center of the flooded Valency valley. They circled once but, seeing nothing obvious, continued to Otterham. It was fifteen minutes later, as the helicopter returned to Boscastle after having lifted and dropped the motorists to safety, that the copilot saw the smoke again and, almost immediately thereafter, a flash of orange flame. Roger had thrown the rest of his gasoline onto the smoldering pile.

  This time, the helicopter dropped and pivoted around the signal fire. Again, the fellow below was waving them toward the center of the valley.

  Llewellyn peered into the canopy of trees as the pilot banked sharply and brought the aircraft low into the valley and hovered. And then, amid the mass of green and brown that was the valley floor, a flash of red appeared. Bizarrely, a man in a tree was waving an opened red and white umbrella. Llewellyn radioed his winchman in the back to prepare to descend again.

  As they held position above the raging river, the downdraft from the blades tore the leaves from the old oak and its neighbors and whipped them into a green storm. In moments, the winchman was down, and, to Llewellyn's surpris
e, a child appeared from the foliage beside the man with the umbrella.

  Robbie Campbell, the winchman, balanced on a limb and cinched the girl—who, to his amazement, was grinning broadly, as if this was the best adventure yet—to his chest, then signaled to be lifted. And up they went, spinning slowly in the backwash, until another crewman pulled them both in through the side door. Then Campbell descended again for the man, and Andrew, too, was carried up to the hovering craft.

  In the field beside the smoky bonfire, Roger Trelissick waved with both arms like a madman. Then he sat down in the wet grass and wept.

  21:00 hours: First fire brigade relief crews mobilized from St. Ives, St. Austell, Newquay, Camborne, and Penzance. Helicopters return to bases. Over 150 people have been air-lifted to safety by the emergency services. Cliff rescue and lifeboat teams continue to search for casualties.

  Boscastle: The Flood (North Cornwall District Council, 2006)

  seventeen

  Lee clung to Andrew's soggy shirt like a limpet to a rock once the helicopter dropped them at the football pitch above town, like everyone else who'd been airlifted. Volunteers guided them down to the rectory, where Janet Stevenson, the vicar, enveloped them in care, served hot tea, and found them dry clothes. Andrew realized, with a suddenness that seemed like someone had thrown a switch, that he was utterly spent. He slouched in an easy chair, and Lee, dry now, curled into his chest. He held her there for all he was worth, as if she were life itself.

  But his love for Lee—who'd turned out to be a little girl after all—and his joy at having found her, could not ease the dread he felt about Nicola. No one had seen her. No one knew where she was. And the people gathered at the rectory were so overcome by their own traumas they had little emotional energy left to give to someone still missing. Elizabeth, from the Visitor Centre, was the exception. Having herded her flock to safety, she moved through the little clutches of refugees asking after everyone's health, offering encouragement, reminding them how lucky they were.