A Stargazy Night Sky

by Laura Briggs

  "She's going to be worried when she hears about this. She's always saying you'll get yourself killed on a risk."

  He slipped off his shoes again, which I suspected were now soaked with seawater as well. "She only worries about the safety of the jeep and the cracked surfboard of mine," he answered "Will you take the towel back to the hotel when you go there later? I don't want to steal one by accident." He pulled a t-shirt from the back of the old armchair.

  "The hotel will wonder what happened to you," I said, as I picked up the wet linen, and draped his wet shirt over the chair. "The swimmer will want to thank you for saving his life."

  Sidney was rummaging for dry clothes in a pile of garments next to the bureau, which made me suspect he was behind on his laundry. "I wasn't the only one who rescued him," he answered. "Anybody on the beach would've done the same if they'd noticed first. Besides, I'm not very fond of fuss. It'll be the talk of teatime, then everyone will forget quickly enough once they see he's not hurt badly."

  He emerged from the bathroom a moment later, in a dry pullover and trousers instead of his wet clothes, with his hair tousled dry. His bare feet left faint water prints on the floor. He grinned at me, but not the carefree one from when we'd been joking along the hotel road, because it wouldn't suit at all now. He could tell from my expression that I felt the same.

  His gaze softened, and he held out his arm for me. I put my own around him, holding him tight with my face buried in the hollow between his neck and shoulder. Burrowed in the gray shirt's fabric, scented faintly by mechanical oil and wood shavings.

  "I think you were wrong about you not being the mature one of the two of us," I said.

  It took him a moment to say anything back as he rocked me closer against him, enfolding me in both his arms. "Because of this?" he replied, making a poor attempt at a scoff.

  "Not just this." When the moment called for it, the silly humor and good-natured cockiness proved to be only one facet of himself. An everyday face that gave way to seriousness, focus, and strength, as naturally as the wind could change its course. The fact that occasions rarely called for me to see it meant it was all the more significant.

  "Do you prefer it over the rest of me?" asked Sidney. "The careless boy who's never quite serious enough when he answers you?" He rested his cheek against my hair.

  "I love the sum total of your parts," I answered. "I just realized how much so." My boy, according to Sidney's own declaration, with his heart of gold under those faded clothes.

  One hand cupped his cheek, feeling damp, cool skin slightly crusted by salt where the towel had missed a spot. My other hand slid around the opposite side, drawing his face closer to mine as I kissed him, feeling Sidney's in return. Passion built to the intensity of the last kiss between us in this shed. His hands surrounded my face as I held onto him, feeling strength and surety of presence in his arms.

  The creak of the shed door was the reason we broke apart. The vicar's housekeeper entered without knocking. "Lizzie Langdon told me in the market what happened at the hotel," she announced, placing her shopping basket on his table. "Did you truly save that poor young man from drowning?"

  "He went out a bit far and dizzied himself when he bumped his head on a surfboard," Sidney answered, reassuringly. "That is the sum of the events, Mrs. Graves, truly."

  "I've always said those things were dangerous. You'll be killed yourself someday if you don't behave more sensibly. Stick to proper swimming in the water without trying to walk on it."

  Sidney and I exchanged glances. I hid my smile.

  "I should be going," I said, picking up the hotel's towel. I couldn't go from kissing Sidney to listening to the housekeeper's well-meaning scolding quite so easily. "I'll leave you to Mrs. Graves, who will probably suggest you should take a shower and remove the rest of that sea salt." I swiped a bit of it from his chin, lightly. Behind the privacy of the crumpled beach linen, I squeezed his hand, as Mrs. Graves tsked about the state of his floors.

  "Think of it as a promising beginning to a good autumn cleaning," he suggested to her.

  She wasn't convinced. But this scolding was just the mark of how much she cared about him, although Sidney was hardly the most helpful of groundskeepers, having mown over many a tulip's green leaf by accident.

  Funny as it seems, listening to her scold him out of love brought Brigette's behavior towards Riley to my mind.

  ____________________

  The breakfast shift at the Penmarrow was surprisingly busy — there were no morning panel discussions on the science of comets, apparently, so a crowd of very hungry astronomers were in want of sausages, eggs, toast, and coffee.

  I searched for George among them, but he wasn't there. Not surprising to me, since the young astronomer was a notorious camper and stargazer who came back to the hotel for a shower and work space for whatever scientific project he was working on. Molly wasn't in yet, and whenever she was, she was hard at work in the laundry due to the woeful stroke of Brigette's staff duty highlighter. That was hardly the push that budding love needed.

  "I saw the delivery lorry for the astronomers' big to do go past on my way here," said Riley, who was buttoning his jacket as he sat in the silver pantry.

  "What delivery? The banquet's not for days," snorted Trevor, who was one of Ligeia's kitchen hands. He fetched a chafing dish from one of the shelves.

  "It's some prototype telescope for afterwards," said Riley. "Some proper genius in the lot worked on it, now they're testing a smaller, nifty version for watching the comet on the big night. They've permission to set up along the south coast, put up a temporary security fence and locked shed and so on. They're driving the whole lot of stargazers down in a bus after the champagne. Hooking up computers and monitors and all sorts of rubbish to its electronic lens or whatever."

  "I've heard about this," I said, as I collected a new pair of silver tongs for the coffee station. "It was in the dossier Brigette gave us. They're giving an award to the telescope's developer at the banquet's ceremony."

  "You read that lot?" Riley snorted. "You must have time to burn or dull evenings to kill, either one."

  Sonia had left a note taped to the chicken salad in the cottage fridge: Feed hungry guests with this, then feed yourself. I'm off to London, will be back before dawn. Feed shepherd's pie for tea whilst I'm away if the hikers return early from Par or the vampire awakens. Cheerio. XX. A smudge of raspberry-wine lipstick was on one corner of the paper, where she must have pinned it between her lips while searching for the tape.

  My lips tugged apart in a smile for my hostess/landlady/friend/part-time employer's pithy choice of words. I peeled back the lid and made sandwiches for the two guests off to explore yet another Cornish village, and spread some for myself on the homemade wheat crackers in the copper tin beside the breadbox. The guests requested cake — experience taught me they were serious about thick slices of sponge, particularly Sonia's lemon poppyseed recipe. That, and thermoses of stout tea, had given them the strength for a ten-mile ramble to the Devon border, they had claimed.

  Today was a painting day for Dean, who was still capturing views from behind his cottage, this time a little clearing on the banks of a former cow pond on the edge of the wood behind his garden — a pond turned lily pad and reed farm now that saplings had overtaken the site. The gate to his garden's decrepit fence opened to the wood path, where Sidney toted the canvas, easel, and paints to a spot with even ground and plenty of sun in late afternoon, where the wheels of Dean's chair would encounter flattened grass and not marshy mud from the bank's soft edges. I brought along the cleaning rags and brushes, and the basket packed with the harness and remote-operated mechanized arm that held Dean's paintbrush.

  Slender white birch trees, silvery leaves, and a soft yellow canopy filtered the warm afternoon sun above us. I sat with my notebook open on my lap, and my back to the overgrown garden fence, cross-legged in the golden grass, watching the breeze shiver the pond rushes and Dean slowly paint the trunks of a
skinny tree stand huddled on the pond's opposite side. His touch was more deft than the first times it attempted brush strokes a few weeks ago, and today's process of wetting the brush was made quicker by Sidney's role as assistant.

  "I always liked the view from the back garden," I said. "I'm glad it's being immortalized in a fitting way." The canvas was a stark background color of sky blue shades, except for where Dean's working fingers had laboriously outlined the trees, rushes, and pond's banks.

  "Speaking too soon, are we?" Dean replied, dryly. "My impression of it was generally that of a wilderness in desperate need of mowing and trimming. Possibly a blowtorch for that horrible weed that towers above all others."

  "I spent a good bit of labor on that garden this past spring," said Sidney, pretending to protest this statement. "I offered to root out the offensive matter, but someone was terribly unhelpful about the entire project."

  Sidney had attempted to tame the enclosure behind the cottage, where its previous tenant had obviously planted flowers and shrubs that had dwindled with neglect, leaving mostly foxglove. Dean's resistance to the idea of tidying it had mostly been obstinacy, I suspected at the time.

  "Less of the gray, more of the white," Dean said, referring to the palette on which Sidney was daubing the brush. "A pearly sheen is the goal. That will be sufficient." His voice was brusque, but it always was when he was concentrating — that much I didn't expect would change with Dean's thaw.

  "Are you painting the reeds and water? If so, I'll need to squirt a bit of those colors on your palette," said Sidney, who then flopped on his back a short distance away.

  "Not while I'm concentrating, thank you," Dean mumbled. The brush tip flicked downwards, producing the effect of mottled bark.

  Sidney plucked the stems of the light purple aster-like flowers growing between the grass and began braiding them together. "Are you writing the next chapters?" he asked me.

  "Hardly. I'm still working on tricky character motivations," I answered.

  "The delicate issue of the forfeit?" he guessed.

  I laughed. "Terribly obvious, is it?"

  When I met Sidney's gaze we were both struck by the same urge to laugh, this time without the blushes for previous mentions of 'delicate' details. It attracted Dean's notice.

  "What are you talking about?" He relinquished the paintbrush to its mechanical grip.

  "Maisie's new book," answered Sidney. "The scandalous Celtic tale of Tam Lin and the fairies."

  "And the thought of the fairies exacting the price of a young woman's maidenhead for entering the forbidden wood is amusing?"

  "Of course not. Don't be thickheaded," Sidney replied. "We were laughing at something else entirely — our own brand of silliness." There was no need to drag the Lady Marverly book out of the past, or our moment of passion-hued embarrassment to clue Dean in.

  "You intend to flesh out the legend with all its prickly issues?" Dean asked, before guiding the brush's movement again.

  "That's the trouble. The story itself is compelling, challenging, suspenseful — but the issue of how the heroine and hero meet and — er — come together, seems brutal and exploitative." There were still 'bodice rippers' in the book market, and not just reprints of Lady Marverly's stories, but I definitely wasn't planning to join their ranks with this story.

  "You're reacting to it as anybody sensibly would, in light of modern controversies about coercion," said Sidney. "But maybe you should try responding only to the characters themselves. Poor Tam is a prisoner and pawn, made to do what the fairies want — and what kind of beings would demand that kind of physical and psychological punishment just for trespassing? And Janet — why does she go to a place with all sorts of rumors and superstitions attached to it? Give her a reason to risk it in the first place, not just foolish curiosity. Form a bond between her and Tam in the face of danger that will defy the fairies' forfeit as an unwilling price."

  "We would be talking about creating a bond worth risking a lifetime of shame and misery after mere hours' of acquaintance — binding in every sense but official record — in a time in which a woman could be shunned simply for being a victim." Dean's sarcasm was unmistakable.

  "I intend Janet to be brave and complex, not a stupid girl wandering into a trap," I said. "And I know Tam has to have a sense of right and wrong, even if he's twisted into not having a choice by his captors ... so I suppose what I'm searching for is a way for him to try to save Janet from this fate. Even though it obviously fails, according to the original version." I tapped my pencil on the blank page where I had scribbled a list of names for secondary characters in the past.

  "I think that's a fair solution," said Sidney.

  "And as for the 'delicate nature' of the forfeit?" I asked, arching one eyebrow suggestively.

  "Maybe he rescues her from the worst of it, as best he can," answered Sidney, this time without a trace of a teasing smile.

  "What does that mean?" I furrowed my brow.

  "You're the storyteller, so it's up to you to figure it out," he answered. "How would I know? Tam's hardly my creation."

  "He's barely mine at the moment. But maybe I can find a creative way to make what happens between them meaningful."

  "And tasteful?" mumbled Dean, lifting one of his eyebrows.

  "Of course. I am writing this for young adults and lovers of knights and chivalry," I retorted.

  "Perhaps also not without love," suggested Sidney, gently. "Some vestige of it, anyway." He sat all the way up as he folded and tucked the flower braid, forming a wreath. Or, as it turned out, a crown which he placed on my head now.

  His gaze met mine as his thumb gently dusted away one of the wreath's flower petals from my cheek. "Think of them as miniature daisies for Janet," he said. "Or as the crown jewels from the fairy queen, if you like." His smile was in his eyes, teasing me. It saved me from losing myself in his depths, however, on this occasion.

  "Would Tam plight his troth to Janet with a flower ring?" I asked.

  "Perhaps. It would be a pretty poor troth given his hostage state, but maybe that's enough for her," he answered. "If she truly cares for him, maybe that's all she asks. Especially if he has no other choice but to do as he's bid."

  "I assume there will be terrible consequences if he doesn't?" said Dean, who had just muttered an oath for a stray brush stroke marring the shape of a tree limb.

  "I'm sure it will be as torturous as possible if he doesn't punish trespassers," answered Sidney on my behalf. "A living death, if necessary, like the 'tithe to Hell' in the traditional story. Maisie will devise a suitably-persuasive method. "

  "Maybe she should ask herself what Alistair Davies would do," Dean responded, sarcastically.

  "What would Alistair Davies do in this situation?" Sidney pondered, tucking his hands behind his head as he laid back on the grass again. "Light his pipe and gaze introspectively through his study window? Go for a long walk across a lonely moor, face to the wind, to brace himself for the challenge?"

  He was being mildly sarcastic, but his picture was so eerily similar to the way I once pictured the author that I still felt a little tingle of surprise. A specter, that grizzled, rugged, Renaissance man of an author, laid to rest alongside several other naive assumptions from my past.

  "I think I'll stick to figuring it out with the help of a few friends, thanks," I replied. "I'll take their suggestions under advisement the next time I'm in the thick of my manuscript." Sidney's suggestions were locked in my head, but all that ended up on the notebook's page was a tiny drawing of a daisy.

  "You're probably bored with talking shop," remarked Sidney. "And Dean is far behind me on your work, so he thinks all our jokes about it are at his expense."

  "Hardly," said Dean, dryly.

  I was glad for a subject change if it was available, for talking about my book with Dean was never quite the same as sharing it with Sidney. Dean's sarcasm was an entirely different beast, and its essence tended to invade innocent remarks, even when he didn'
t mean it to.

  "I suppose I'll have to prove I care about Maisie, if you insist on besmirching my interest," said Dean. "You're mocking the fact that I'm a literary snob in comparison to both of you."

  "Well, you are," Sidney retorted, grinning broadly. "With your Sartre and Kant."

  "I despise Sartre. You know I merely keep my copy to complete the philosophical set."

  "And you do possess all three of Alistair Davies' novels, which is utter proof if anything is," Sidney continued. He was just being wicked now.

  "So do I," I pointed out. "As do you." Sidney himself owned at least two, for I had seen them on his bookshelves. I was merely guessing the middle novel was somewhere between the Watership Down and the threadbare Greenmantle.

  "Ochre and charcoal," said Dean, as he withdrew his paintbrush from the canvas.

  "What would those be for?" Sidney asked, as he squeezed some paint onto the palette after inspecting the labels of various tubes from Dean's color kit.

  "The pond. There's some water in the bottle at the bottom of the case to refresh the jar. It's getting rather murky."

  "Bottle's empty," Sidney announced. "We'll make do." He dipped the cleaning jar into the pond.

  "That's hardly appropriate," Dean protested. "It's the color of tea."

  "It's the color of the pond," Sidney pointed out. "Now its essence will forever be a part of your painting." I managed to keep back my smile, and wondered if some part of Dean did the same whenever it came to Sidney's more creative logic.

  "Speaking of great novels, I have been curious as to why you chose your field of literature, Maisie," said Dean, clearing his throat — possibly to alert Sidney to this non-sarcastic field of query. He wheeled his chair aside so he could see me better around the canvas and easel.

  "What do you mean?" I was prepared for the sarcasm to come, perhaps intentionally, since Dean was hardly a reader of fantasy literature in the modern sense.

  "Generally, amateur writers imitate authors they admire," he said. "You've said before that Alistair Davies is your authorial hero, if you'll pardon that rather silly expression for lack of a better one. I have the strong impression that you do not imitate his style, nor do you intend to write novels even remotely like his own."