A Rather Remarkable Homecoming

by C. A. Belmond

  I’d thought it was just a tourist trap, but Rollo, with his compulsive love of vintage doodads, had been right at home there, and he now pulled out a rosewood cigar box whose lid bore a painted portrait of Paloma on it. With her fiery dark eyes and sensual red mouth, she looked as if she were inviting a male guest to avail himself of a highly fashionable cigar. It occurred to me that her dark, good looks might have reminded Prescott of his beloved mother.

  “Only cost a few quid,” Rollo admitted.

  Jeremy peered at it. “That’s our Paloma, all right,” he said.

  “Apparently, opera singers were like movie stars in their day,” Rollo explained. “You know, they sometimes did product endorsements. You should see all the stuff she lent her name to—lady’s fans, scented soap wrappers, powder puffs, tea canisters, sheet-music scores and music boxes, even the backs of hairbrushes!”

  “But Paloma never returned to Cornwall?” I asked, amazed by it all.

  Jeremy jumped in, quoting what he’d read at the museum. “Well, according to the locals, there have been a few sightings of a Woman in White trailing her seaweed-covered wedding gown and veil as she ‘searches for her betrothed along the shores of the sea, like a bride looking for her beloved’.”

  “You mean a ghost?” I exclaimed, feeling goose-bumps as I pictured it. Jeremy nodded.

  Now the waiters were politely chasing everybody off the dining deck, because the cocktail hour had ended and they were setting the tables for the first seating of dinner. We rose and headed back to the cottage, where we cooked our own meal of freshly caught fish.

  Naturally, Rollo stayed with us for dinner. Afterwards, I made up the sofa for him, then I went off to the bedroom, shut the door, and climbed into the big bed with Jeremy, where I put my head on his chest and lay snuggling there.

  “Maybe we should let Rollo stay here on his own, and see what else he can learn,” I suggested.

  “Why? Where are we going?” Jeremy asked suspiciously.

  “Oh,” I said airily, “I just thought that now would be an excellent time to take a break somewhere sunnier, and warmer, and more helpful to this case.”

  “Spill it,” Jeremy advised.

  “I’ve been all over the Internet to find out about Paloma’s villa,” I admitted, “or as they call it in Madeira, a quinta. You were right—it’s now a museum—so wouldn’t you think they’d have a Web site listing their exhibitions? And the program for that classical music festival? But the darned place doesn’t even have a domain name! Did you ever hear of such a thing? How can you have a museum and a music festival without a Web site?”

  “They do that on purpose,” Jeremy explained. “To maintain the exclusivity. My grandparents used to go to Madeira,” he told me, smiling. “Every year, at the same old hotel. They went for the cream tea and the music and the scenery—and the reason they loved it was because it always stayed the same, year after year. I bet Paloma’s museum caters to that crowd. Doesn’t surprise me at all that the place avoids advertising. They’re not interested in attracting new people. You either know about Madeira . . . or else you don’t know.”

  I had met Jeremy’s snobby Grandmother Margery, and I could well imagine the scene. Even on vacation, her type only wanted to see their “own kind.”

  “All right, then,” I said briskly. “We’ll just have to go there and find out for ourselves. Because I’m getting one of those spooky feelings that if there’s any mysterious and historical story to uncover about Grandmother Beryl’s house, it’s got to do with Paloma.”

  I expected Jeremy to object, but he said wryly, “Well, I guess it beats hanging around here and being run off the road, and having eggs thrown at us, and the whole town despising us for screwing up Shakespeare. I’m sure Harriet will be happy to see the back of us. So, hell. Why not?”

  Part Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The tropical island of Madeira is really the tip-top of an underwater mountain range born of volcanoes nearly twenty million years ago. It sits twelve hundred fifty miles north of Africa, and six hundred miles east of Portugal, who has “owned” Madeira for about five hundred years. In all those centuries, many a ship and many a sailor who were blown off course have made emergency landings on Madeira, which to them seemed to rise out of the mists like an enchanted world unto itself.

  “They say that Christopher Columbus plotted his voyage for the New World from Madeira,” I told Jeremy on the airplane. “Legend has it that he got the idea when a dying, shipwrecked sailor washed ashore and whispered the secret of a new continent to him,” I said in delight.

  “What was Columbus doing on Madeira?” Jeremy asked.

  “Possibly chasing after a girl from a wealthy seafaring family who had lots of good charts and maps,” I said.

  “I myself am coming here just for the madeira wine,” Jeremy announced. At my slightly puzzled expression he said, “You’ve never heard of it? Then you don’t know your American history. Your Founding Fathers drank madeira in a toast to each other just after they’d signed the Declaration of Independence.”

  “Really? So, what does it taste like?” I asked, for Jeremy was becoming quite a wine connoisseur.

  “It’s like port or sherry, only better,” he replied. “Supposedly the secret to making it was discovered by accident, back in the early 1700s, when the crew of a ship that docked in the New World forgot to unload a barrel of the wine, and the cask sailed right back to Madeira. They discovered that the wine, after months of gently swish-swishing in the warm hold of a boat slowly gliding along the equator, had matured perfectly. They say it’s ‘eternal wine’ because no matter how old it gets, it’s always drinkable.”

  “Can’t wait to see this place!” I exclaimed, and a passing flight attendant smiled at me.

  When we landed in Madeira, all my senses were immediately aware that I was now in a lush, tropical world of its own, with mountains, jungle, beaches, prized forests of laurel and mahogany, and a very old, elegant European town. At the airport, the buzz of voices around us were Portuguese, Brazilian, English, Spanish, African. The air was fragrant with flowers, fruit and the salty taste of the sea.

  However, I have learned one interesting rule about travel anywhere: If you plan to visit a museum, beware of arriving on a Monday. Nine times out of ten, it will be closed. Paloma’s quinta was no exception. The gate at the foot of the hill was locked, so we couldn’t even get near the villa to see what it looked like. A sign with the museum hours posted on the gate said they’d be open tomorrow.

  Therefore, Jeremy and I had no choice but to take a day off and enjoy ourselves. First, we went for a swim in the hotel pool. Then, we walked into the main town of Funchal, whose name comes from the word funcho for fennel. From there we took a cable car ride and went swaying all the way up a mountain, swinging high over adorable pastel candy-colored houses, ancient churches, and venerable evergreens. Jeremy pointed out fields of sugar cane and vineyards and orchards, interrupted by beautiful, faraway waterfalls spilling silently below us.

  Our ride ended at the tiny mountaintop town of Monte, with its centuries-old tropical gardens. We were so high up that I could immediately feel the difference in the air, which was refreshingly cool and gave the whole area a purifying quality.

  “You see that church?” I asked Jeremy, pointing up at an amazingly steep staircase that led to a beautiful building made of white baroque stucco trimmed in grey, with a tower on each side.

  “It’s called ‘Nossa Senhora do Monte’,” I said. “Let’s go look.”

  “Penny dear,” Jeremy objected, “we’ve just ascended a mountain in a bucket. You can’t possibly think that we’re going to now climb those stairs. There must be a hundred of them!”

  “Just seventy-two,” I answered cheerfully, remembering what I’d read on the plane. “Come on, true believers have been coming here for centuries and they climb those stairs on their knees. I’m not asking you to do that!”

  “Okay, okay,” Jeremy sa
id, taking the challenge now. And up we went. The basalt steps were old and in some places cracked, sunken and uneven, so I was soon fairly breathless.

  “Whew!” I exclaimed when we finally reached the top. “We made it.”

  I glanced up at the church. Perched this high, it seemed to almost float among the clouds. At that moment, the pretty blue clock on the outside face of the right tower struck the hour, and then the bells in both towers began to toll. The sound reverberated solemnly in the thin air.

  We went inside, where we could hear our footsteps echoing in the cool darkness. Jeremy gazed at the gilded woodwork and ornate glass chandeliers, but I led him to the one, more humble item that was the main object of centuries of pilgrimage: a little wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, which a fifteenth-century shepherd girl claimed she’d gotten as a gift from a mysterious lady who appeared to her. To this day, people still believe that the statue has miraculous powers. There was something sweet and touching about this modest item being the true focus for faithful visitors.

  Although the painted and carved face on this wooden statue was very different from Paloma’s masthead, I was reminded of it in a forceful way. We were in her world now, and I could sense the influences that had shaped her. When we went back outside, blinking in the brilliant sunlight, I said to Jeremy, “I just got the strangest feeling of Paloma’s presence.”

  We were moving along with a flow of other visitors and now we paused at a small park nearby, with flowering shrubbery and some wooden benches. As soon as I mentioned Paloma, Jeremy appeared startled and then nodded toward one of the benches.

  “Look,” he said, pointing.

  There was a gold plaque on the back of the bench, with these words engraved in Portuguese:

  Na memória de meu Prescott amado.–Paloma Manera

  “In memory of my beloved Prescott?” I guessed. Despite the warm sunlight, I felt an eerie shiver. It was as if she had spoken directly to us. “She loved him so much,” I mused. “I guess she never went back to Cornwall because she just couldn’t face the loss. I think we’ll learn a lot when we see her place tomorrow.”

  We descended the church steps in silence. Finally, still dizzy from the view and the scent of the fragrant flowers, I said curiously, “How do you want to get back down to town? The cable car again, or should we take one of those taxicabs?”

  “Hah!” Jeremy said with a mysterious look on his face. “Why go the ordinary way, when you can have a sleigh ride?”

  I looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Darling,” I said. “We are in the tropics. I know these misty mountain peaks are high, but I am fairly certain there is no snow up here.”

  “Who needs snow?” Jeremy scoffed. “Follow me, my girl.”

  We were at the foot of the church’s stone staircase, and Jeremy walked over to where a group of moustachioed local men, all dressed in white pants and flat straw hats, had been sitting around smoking. But now, when they saw that a bunch of tourists had just been dropped off by the cable cars, they stood up smiling, stubbed out their cigarettes, and gestured at what, to me, looked like a row of big wicker baskets on long wooden runners, with Santa-Claus-shaped seats inside that had white padded cushions.

  “Quick, let’s grab one of those toboggans,” Jeremy said. “You can’t leave Maderia without going for this ride.”

  I glanced about doubtfully. Other people were doing it, including old folks and couples with kids. Jeremy and I climbed into one, and suddenly, two of the men with straw hats pushed our toboggan right onto a steep, narrow road. Then, with a quick shout, they ran madly alongside us, giving the sleigh a great big push down the hill. Once we’d gathered enough speed, the men hopped onto the runners so they could stay aboard and steer us all the way, giving an extra push with their feet if necessary.

  And suddenly we were plunging headlong down the very narrow road, with high stone walls on both sides. The road curved so abruptly that at each turn I was sure we’d go crashing into a wall. But miraculously, we didn’t. We just kept picking up speed and careening around each stone corner as we flew downward like an arrow toward its mark—our target being the town of Funchal.

  Once I settled back and relaxed, it was fun, whooshing past the pastel-colored houses and going down, down, down until we reached the very bottom of the hill, where some flower vendors were waiting there to laughingly toss flowers at us. When the sleigh stopped, my lap was full of roses, violets, the famed fennel, and other fragrant beauties, which Jeremy obligingly paid for.

  “What say we head back to the hotel for dinner?” suggested Jeremy. So we walked hand-in-hand along the harbor, which was filled with fishing boats, yachts, and cruise ships.

  Since it was still a bit early, we were able to bag a table on the balcony of the dining room, where we had a splendid view of the sheer cliffs, the sea and the mountains. A tall, curly-haired singer was strolling among the diners carrying a very rounded, mandolinstyle Portuguese guitar, and singing the dramatic, yearning music that the waiter told us was called fado.

  When we got our menu, Jeremy insisted I try the grilled sardines (which are big and fresh and fat, not tiny and oily and crammed into little tins), accompanied by a young white wine called vinho verde. Then we tasted fresh beef cooked on an open grill and skewered with laurel sticks, which have the fragrance of bay leaf. Everything was soft, scented and dreamy. It might have gone down in my record books as a perfect evening . . . except for one thing.

  The mosquitoes. Now, there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who rarely get bitten, and even when they do, they seldom react to it.

  And then there are people like me. Mosquitoes crave us. They mass in the shrubs, they hover overhead, and they speak to each other on their little mosquito walkie-talkies and proclaim, “There she is! Let’s go get her now!”

  And the worst part is, I don’t always see and feel them right away. They sneak up on me, they make their snippy little pinches and I absently brush them away . . . until suddenly I realize I’m under attack. By then it’s too late.

  “Good God,” Jeremy said, staring at my arms and legs when we returned to our hotel room, where the maid had heedlessly opened the windows to let in fresh air . . . and more night-biting mosquitoes who may have missed out on me downstairs. I was covered with big red bites that were growing alarmingly more swollen by the minute.

  “Why me?” I wailed. “How come they never ever bite you?”

  “Your blood is sweeter,” Jeremy suggested, unoffended by my question.

  “Bosh,” I said.

  “Well, the other theory is that they are attracted to the warmth and scent of human breath,” Jeremy told me. “And you, my dear, are a bit of a chatterbox sometimes. So they adore your conversation.”

  I was too busy shuttering the windows to comment. Jeremy called down to the front desk and asked if we could have some mosquito netting put over the bed. Apparently I wasn’t the first to need it, because shortly afterwards a man came up and strung the ghostly white netting all around the bed.

  And there we stayed all night, kissing in the moonlight, sleeping with the scent of pine and roses, and the far-off sound of the sea . . . until the morning light finally woke us.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The next day, something about the old-fashioned formality of Madeira prompted both Jeremy and me to get dressed up a little bit before going out. I rummaged around in my suitcase to find an outfit pretty and feminine enough to match the way the soft air made me feel. I’d packed a sleeveless silk dress, but, mindful of the mosquitoes, I chose instead a silk pantsuit with a white, pink and green floral pattern, and a pink halter top.

  When I paired this with white leather sandals and a wide-brimmed white straw hat I’d bought yesterday, Jeremy glanced up at me and said, “You look beautiful—the way I always imagined Aunt Pen did in the 1930s on all her exotic travels.”

  I beamed with delight. “Hey,” I said, frankly appreciative of his white linen suit and beautiful blue s
hirt that brought out the deep blue in his eyes, “you look pretty spiffy yourself. Like you stepped out of that movie Casablanca.”

  “Well, Casablanca is just about a hop, skip and a jump from here,” Jeremy noted. “Let’s get out and about before the sun gets too hot.”

  I was very excited when we pulled up to the wrought-iron gates of Paloma Manera’s villa, or quinta, and found them open. There was a small stone hut for a guard, but nobody was inside it, so we drove past and continued up the steep, curving driveway that was made of irregularly shaped and various-colored flat stones.

  When we reached the top of the driveway in front of the quinta, there was a dramatic turnaround, in the center of which was a large, round inlaid stone mosaic depicting a compass with its needle pointing toward Madeira on a map of the world. We circled it and went off to the side, where we found a parking area.

  In front of the house was a stone lily pond, and as I watched, a small frog hopped off the sunbaked stone and disappeared into the water with a tiny plop! The quinta was a soft, cotton-candy pink stucco with a russet-colored tile roof and dark green shutters. The first-floor windows were protected with fancy iron grillwork, and the second and third floor each had wrought-iron balconies outside bigger windows.

  The front walkway was flanked on both sides with neatly planted palm trees, white orchids and pink-blossomed shrubbery; and the front door had two large stone urns on each side, from which an abundance of red and pink roses spilled out. Standing there in the driveway, we saw that the quinta was built on a high hill overlooking terraced farmland, evergreen woods and, beyond all this, the town of Funchal and the sea. The front door was wide open, so we stepped inside the cool, dark interior.

  “Look at these beautiful floors!” I said. “The concierge at the hotel told me that there’s nothing better than mahogany from Madeira forests.”

  “Probably accounts for the fine wood that the masthead was made of,” Jeremy observed.