IT HAD TAKEN almost an hour of climbing for him to reach the moor top. The pale granite tors along the summit ridge were so weathered that their edges were rounded and their strata so eroded that they looked like stacks of petrified flapjacks. They rose from the heather, gorse, and bracken-cloaked slopes like the bones of some ancient beast stripped bare by eons of relentless storms. The ancients had revered these tors, given them magical names, built settlements nearby and fortresses atop, and buried their chieftains beneath cairns and quoits on the high ground facing west to the Atlantic.
He leaned against a rock face and took in the view far below: the lush meadows of the farm, the stone mansion house, and the assortment of outbuildings that dotted the Trevega Estate north and south along the coast. As he watched, he beat his right fist against the stone like a pulse until the knuckles were nearly worn raw. He barely noticed. Anger rose like a fever:
They don’t belong.
“YOU ALL RIGHT, Lee?” Nicola asked. The now eleven-year-old at the table was staring out the kitchen window as if into another plane of existence.
It had been many months since Lee’s parents had been killed, but the girl had surprised everyone by being as resilient as a willow whipping in a high wind. She missed them, of course, but she also accepted her loss with a strange equanimity unlike any other child her age might have done. Something of an old soul, Lee reckoned that her loss was a bit like the turn of the seasons: there was death in winter and rebirth in spring. The loss of her parents, she reasoned—because she was a thoughtful girl—was like the natural cycle of things: the world turns; things change. Sometimes change hurt. That was also to be expected. But she had Andrew and Nicola now and that was everything. Their love was warm as a thick down duvet on a stormy Cornish night. And she had this new home by the Atlantic cliffs.
It was a chilly Friday evening despite being early summer, and Nicola was spooning out beef stew from a heavy Dutch oven. The updated but cavernous old kitchen on the ground floor of nineteenth century Trevega House was redolent tonight with the comforting aromas of their own farm beef, onion, garlic, rosemary and thyme, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, and new peas. Atop the stew were eight fluffy dumplings.
“No, I’m fine, really,” Lee said, finally.
Nicola had got used to this sort of delayed response; it was as if the girl chewed for a while on the gristle of every question, giving it thought before composing an answer. At her new school, she stood back from the chatter of her classmates. Her teacher was concerned that she did not blend in. The truth was that Lee could sense what her classmates really felt or cared about and for the most part it bored her silly. What she cared about were the lessons and there she excelled.
“It’s just something I saw out on the coast path this afternoon,” she continued.
The Southwest Coast Path, one of Britain’s many National Trails, edged the cliffs and hollows along the whole length of Cornwall and Devon’s Atlantic and English Channel coasts for some six hundred thirty miles. The Trevega Estate bordered the cliffside path above the Atlantic and ranged for nearly half a mile north and south along a gently sloping grassy plateau a few miles south of St. Ives. The plateau itself was the remnant of a shelf of beach from eons before, when a prehistoric ocean lapped at its shore. Now it stood high above the Atlantic and was crisscrossed by stone field walls, some of which dated to the Iron Age and possibly before. The verdant meadows, sequined by drifts of tiny white English daisies no higher than the grass blades, supported Trevega’s large herd of Black Angus cattle, a hardy breed and a major source of income for the estate.
Having finished serving, Nicola sat and sipped from her own wine glass. A shapely woman a bit taller and more broad-shouldered than most, she had thick brown hair so dark it seemed almost black. It fell in gentle waves to between her shoulder blades. Raised in a poor Italian enclave in North Boston, her maiden name had been DeLucca. During an arts fellowship in Florence, Italy, she had met and later married Jeremy Rhys-Jones, the son of Sir Michael Rhys-Jones, an investment banker. The marriage had not gone well. She lived now at Trevega, the family’s “country house.”
“So what did you see?” she asked.
“Someone walking north. I’d just come ‘round Mussel Point on the way to Zennor when Randi noticed this walker far away to the south above that gully at Tregarthen Cliff. I was watching the pink thrift dancing in the wind at the cliff edge—they’re beautiful right now. The wind came at us from the south and maybe Randi caught a scent. He barked once, then twice, his warning bark, you know, and when I looked up,the figure had turned and was hurrying back the way it had come.”
“It’s a public footpath,” Andrew said, looking up from his plate.
“Plus, our big Siberian husky can be pretty intimidating,” Nicola added.
“But from a tenth of a mile off?” It was like the girl thought them both idiots. She shook her head and continued eating.
“What did you see of this walker? Male or female? Tall or short?” Andrew asked.
“No idea, Drew. Dark trousers, olive green anorak I think, hood up because it was sprinkling.”
“Probably just a tourist at the end of a walk, avoiding the rain and heading back to the Tinners Arms for a pint,” Andrew said.
“Yeah. Probably. Yeah, that makes complete sense.” Lately, Lee liked things to make complete sense. So much of her life recently hadn’t.
“Did you continue on to Zennor?” Nicola asked.
“Me?” she said, laughing and shaking her head. Lee had let her previously close-cropped sandy hair grow to a bob after her parents’ death and now it danced along the line of her fine-cut jaw. As she matured, her features were becoming chiseled and angular, as if cut from the granite cliffs all around her.
“No, me and Randi, we turned inland around Treveal Farm and came straight up our valley to home. When Randi speaks, I listen. He’s very wise, Randi is.”
“Randi and I,” Andrew corrected.
Lee made a face. “Like I didn’t know?” Lee had gained a good three inches in the past year and a half and had loose, gangly limbs that suggested she hadn’t quite got used to her new body. She’d also begun to develop a certain resistance to what she thought was expected by the adults in her life, no matter how much she loved and needed them.
But Nicola heard Lee say “home” and it warmed her heart. She’d never had a child, nor had Andrew. In their mid-forties now, they never would. But they had Lee, and they could not imagine a finer daughter. Not that they had a clue how to raise one, especially a rare one like Lee.
Nicola and Andrew had lived together ever since the flood. Nicola’s former father-in-law, who was among other things a financial advisor to Charles, Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall, had arrived in Boscastle with the Prince’s entourage a few days after the catastrophic flood to survey the damage. While the Prince moved through the shattered village talking with residents, Sir Michael stepped away to check on his beloved ex-daughter-in-law, Nicola, who had lived alone in a cottage near the harbor’s mouth ever since he had arranged for her divorce from his abusive son, Jeremy. But the flood had torn her house apart and there was no sign of her.
When he found Nicola at last, battered, in shock, but alive, and met the man who’d rescued her, the visiting American architect Andrew Stratton, he begged the two of them to move to his family’s country estate, Trevega House, just south of the historic artists’ colony of St. Ives. The estate had been neglected, and he directed Andrew to begin its restoration. Andrew recruited his stone wall-building mentor, Jamie Boden, to join him, along with his partner, Flora Penwellan. They all now lived on the estate.
This particular evening, Drew, as Lee always called Andrew, clutched a glass of red wine in his right fist but did not lift it. Nicola noticed his hands were raw and gave his arm a squeeze. She could tell he was exhausted. He hadn’t had time to bathe and his thick mass of curly salt and pepper hair was tinged with grit. He and Jamie had been heaving stone all day to rebuild a collapsing wall in the estate’s old gardener’s cottage so it could be converted to a rental unit. Lee, too, school now being out, had helped them most of the day. The girl had loved stone work ever since she’d watched Drew and Jamie working on that new wall behind the tourist car park in Boscastle, the unfinished wall that was washed away as if it were made of nothing of substance in the flood that had nearly destroyed her home village and so much else of what Lee once believed was rock-solid and permanent in her short life.
NICOLA PUT HER fork down and turned her attention to her partner: “How’d you and Jamie get on with that wall at the gardener’s cottage?”
Andrew shook his head; grit fell from his hair. “That Jamie is a genius. I was sure we’d have to tear down the whole west-facing wall and remove the roof, it was all so weathered, but old Jamie just said, ‘trust the stone.’ He rammed a vertical supporting timber beneath the roof’s end-rafter and we’ve rebuilt the upper half of the exterior stone wall beneath it, as if the roof were floating above us. It’s taken a few days but when we’re done he’ll ease out that support and the old timber and slate roof will settle down onto the new wall right as rain, completely stuck and sturdy. That’s what he says, anyway.”
“And you, Mr. Architect,” Nicola teased, “Did you serve as his structural engineer?”
“No way; I’ll never stop learning from that wily old man. And this young lady,” he said, nodding at Lee, “she was with us all the way. Her spatial sense is amazing.”
“What’s that mean?”
“This girl of ours can see in three dimensions. She can turn space around in her head and tell you where a particular stone will fit as if it were meant to be sewn there. It’s a rare talent, Jamie says.”
“Wow!”
“Whatever,” Lee said to her plate.
“She could be an architect,” Andrew added.
The girl smiled but did not look up.
“Where’s Jamie’s Flora tonight?” Nicola asked.
“Off to one of those pagan meetings she goes to once a month,” he said. “’Moots’ they’re called. I don’t know if Jamie’s a believer or not; he doesn’t say. But tonight he’s off to the Tinners for supper and a pint or three with the neighbors while she’s out. Bit of a reprieve from the witchcraft for him, I suppose.”
Nicola locked her ebony eyes on him: “Listen, you: I believe in her and in her faith and skills. She lifted a great burden from my soul after the flood…and made it possible for me to trust and love you. If that’s witchcraft, I’ll take it.”
“It wasn’t my inherent charm?”
She relaxed: “Yes, well, maybe a bit of that too….”
Andrew marveled at the woman beside him: her feisty Italian edge was never far beneath her smooth, slightly olive skin. Andrew’s ex-wife had been tall, slender, and cold, but his Nicola was a comforting warm armful when they curled up together at night. He especially loved waking up early in the morning to see her long dark brown hair, burnished with tints of copper in the sun, splayed out across her pillow. That’s when he wanted her most, but he let her sleep and slipped off to brew tea for them. It was little ritual of theirs, having tea in bed to begin each day, a still point of catching up, looking forward, and being together before their worlds started turning again.
Lee watched the two of them banter and considered how lucky she was that these quirky grownups had adopted her. The formal process was not yet complete, she knew, but what seemed like half the population of Boscastle had turned up for the hearing at the Family Proceedings Court at Bodmin to support Nicola and Andrew’s petition. Lee’s own grandparents said they were too old to look after the precocious girl and endorsed Andrew and Nicola wholeheartedly. It was only a matter of time now before the order would be final. It hardly mattered to Lee, though; Andrew and Nicky were her anchors now.
What she did not know, and what they had not told her yet, was that the settlement from the accident that killed her parents, when it finally wound its way through the courts, would likely protect her financially for the rest of her life. Others of the company’s drivers were on record reporting that the truck that had lost control had continually leaked brake fluid. In response to their warnings, the owners had simply topped up the reservoir as needed and ignored them. A corporate manslaughter charge would be heard in Truro Crown Court. Psychiatrists for the injured and emotionally shattered driver had already been deposed and they doubted the young man would ever be the same.
As for Bottreaux Farm, Lee’s home, the rich land above Boscastle had been rented quickly by a neighboring farmer, and the farmhouse itself had been purchased and turned into a posh bed and breakfast venue…where no one spoke of the tragedy. The proceeds of the sale, and the rental income, went to a trust fund for Lee established by Sir Michael.
AS SHE ATE, Lee could not stop thinking about Flora’s pagan moots. She just knew somehow, like an itch beneath her skin, that she was meant to attend those meetings, too. There were things she knew, things she sensed, but she did not yet have the words or the courage to talk about them. Only Flora understood.
Flora Penwellan had worked behind the bar at the Cobweb Inn at Boscastle dispensing drinks, food, and sage advice in roughly equal measure for as long as anyone could remember…until the flood nearly destroyed the pub and swept her finally into Jamie Boden’s arms. The two had flirted with each other for years but had both been too shy, and thought themselves too old, to act on their attraction. In the end, all it took to bring them together was a disaster that could have killed them both.
Jamie Boden was as wiry and tough as a goat, lean but strong from years of stone work. His weather-beaten, freckled face possessed an almost perpetual look of mischief and his unruly thinning red hair, touched now with threads of white, was like a storm swirling around his head. Just encountering Jamie Boden made you smile.
Full-figured Flora—“strapping,” some might describe her—was what locals called, privately, a “village wise woman,” one of several in this part of Cornwall… someone you could count on to lift an ache from your soul or a curse from a neighbor, among other maladies: in short, a witch. And, although she was almost sixty, she had also been Lee’s closest adult friend both before and after the flood. It was simple: they loved and respected each other. Plus, Flora had already sensed that Lee was unusual. She kept an eye on the child as if the girl were her own, and now that they all lived on the Trevega estate that was easier to do. She loved that Andrew and Nicola had wrapped their arms around the orphaned girl and given her their hearts, but she did not believe they understood, at least not yet, how different the girl really was. And it was Flora’s job, she believed, to protect and nurture that difference. It was, she felt, the last big task of her life.
That, and maybe Jamie.
HE CLIMBED BACK over the ancient stone hedge and stood at the edge of the coast path, admiring his handiwork. It had been harder than he’d expected and he was winded, even a bit frightened by what he’d done. But he smiled nonetheless:
It’s a first step. There will be more.
And then he strode south, careful not to be seen.