AFTER SUPPER THAT same evening, Nicola and Andrew sat in two of the old overstuffed chairs facing the big hearth in the kitchen at Trevega. There was a fire glowing in the coal grate. Even though it was early summer, the forested swale from which the house rose could be chill and damp when fog-thick ocean air snaked in from the sea as it had this evening. They could barely see across the narrow valley. Nicola, Andrew, and Lee spent most of their family time here in the old kitchen, and it was easier and cheaper to heat this room with the fire than trying to heat the whole house. In the upstairs bedrooms, they had plug-in radiant heaters to warm them when it was cold and damp.
The three of them loved to do jigsaw puzzles on the big kitchen table, the more complicated the better, and spent long hours on them. To Nicola, the formal dining room, with its high ceiling, ornate plaster cornice moldings, draped windows, long Georgian era walnut table polished to a blinding shine, and neat rows of matching dining chairs, always seemed too austere for regular suppers…other than, perhaps, a rare overnight visit from Sir Michael. From her point of view, the dining room did not compare with their big warm kitchen. Still, she loved everything about the graceful old house. The formal living room was made somewhat less so by being furnished with cushy slipcovered old furniture. A vast, worn, but still luminous antique Persian rug, a Heriz, covered much of the parquet oak flooring. There was a yawning fireplace at the north end with a mantle made of rough-hewn local granite, the center of its lintel blackened by more than two centuries of use. They sometimes spent evenings there in the winter, with a wood fire blazing. French doors on the south wall led to a glassed-in orangery which soaked up sun and made it possible for Nicola to maintain lemon trees in big planter boxes. This was Randi’s favorite space in winter. He’d bask in a shaft of sunlight on the orangery’s warm brick floor and drag himself across it as the sun made its slow transit across the bricks during the course of the day.
IT HAD BEEN another hard day of rebuilding at the gardener’s cottage. Andrew was slouched in his chair, staring at the glowing coals in the kitchen fire, and sipping on a pint of Figgy’s Brew, a local amber ale.
“You okay, love?”
“It was way easier being a professor.”
She reached a hand across to stroke his forearm. “But not happier, am I right?”
Andrew smiled. “Yes, of course. This work is honest, the other wasn’t.”
“Come on, teaching isn’t dishonest.”
“Never dishonest to my students; dishonest to me. I arrived there, professionally, by climbing up the academic ladder, yes. But I know now it wasn’t what I was meant to do.”
“I’m very proud of you, you know. It took courage to leave that life behind.”
Andrew grinned: “No, it just took falling in love.”
Andrew Stratton had been a popular professor of architectural theory at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He’d never worked in an architecture firm, though, and had never built anything. He was a theorist. It wasn’t until his wife divorced him for someone more ambitious that he finally realized that his academic career was as arid and bloodless as his marriage. Shocked awake and suddenly adrift, on a whim he’d come to Cornwall, the home of his ancestors, to take a one-week course in building dry stone walls—hedges, as they were called here in Cornwall. Buried somewhere deep beneath his academic façade, or maybe in his family’s history, Andrew craved a kind of architecture that was genuine, sustainable, and true to local materials and traditions; he’d just had no experience with the very idea that spoke to him most. His wall-building course transformed him. Jamie Boden had been his teacher. Then, in less than an hour one afternoon, the Boscastle flood swept away all that he and Jamie’s other students had built that week: gone, as if insubstantial as tonight’s sea fog.
But having met Nicola and so many others in Boscastle, he’d decided to stay on to help rebuild the village; he never returned to Philadelphia. He’d found home at last on this rocky coast, he’d found Nicola, and he’d found work that was tangible and deeply rewarding, work that wasn’t just a theory in his or someone else’s head to be spooned out to students, but something meaningful, something lasting—something you created with your bare hands.
After the flood, what Sir Michael had given him and Nicola, as well as Jamie and Flora, was more than just a new home and a fresh start: it was a challenge to make his family’s slowly deteriorating country estate come alive again and, by the way, earn its keep. But Andrew also understood that Michael was not simply interested in creating a group of holiday rental properties from the estate’s outbuildings, he also wanted to create a showcase for Jamie and Andrew’s skills as stone builders. Andrew shook his head and smiled: Sir Michael’s motives were never fully transparent.
“Andrew?”
He came back from his thoughts. “Yes, love?”
“Lee. She’s changing. Have you noticed?”
He blinked, took a sip from his glass and prodded the coals, buying time: “Well, she would do, wouldn’t she, after losing her parents. It’s got to have shattered her, not that she’d ever show it. Not our Lee. Too tough for that, she is. But let me tell you, when she works with me and Jamie I feel like she’s trying to build a new life through the stone, she’s that focused.
“We’ve adopted her, or will have done when the paperwork’s finalized, and we love her like she’s our own. She feels safe with us, too, that’s clear, but I doubt it’s the same as a bond of birth. And I think she needs a bit of distance from us sometimes, her alone time. So, she goes off walking. I think that’s fine.”
“No. That’s not it. That’s not what I’m talking about.”
Andrew turned. “What, then?”
“I mean that in Boscastle she was such a supple girl, absorbing the energy of the world around her as if she were a fruit ripening. But lately she seems, to me at least, to be hardening, or maybe toughening is a better word. She’s such a bright girl, but she questions everything now, no matter how trivial. It could be just an inquiry about how her day went, but she takes it almost as an intrusion. She’s becoming private, almost secretive. Now that school’s out, I really have no idea where she is when she’s not working with you and Jamie. And she seems to have lost interest in painting just at the very point when she was becoming uncommonly good. She has a wonderful eye and I love teaching her.”
Nicola looked at the fire. “I miss her, Andrew; I just miss my old Lee.”
Andrew took her hand. “Nicky, she’s always been her own person, even back in Boscastle, remember? Wandering up the river valley for hours all on her own, exploring and discovering what so few other children her age ever would: a wood nymph, almost? It nearly killed her in that flood. She was lucky to have escaped that valley alive.”
“That was mostly your doing…”
“And her dad’s, too. He was brilliant to think of setting that smoky brush fire to catch the rescue helicopter pilot’s attention. But as wise old Flora tried to explain even then, our Lee is different. You can’t expect her to be otherwise, nor can she continue to be a little girl.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Yes, you do; you just don’t want to accept it. She’s not your fantasy of a daughter. Nor mine, either, for that matter. No flouncy dresses for this one: it’s denim coveralls in winter and shorts and tee-shirts in summer. I’m never going to be able to spoil the girl, much as I might like to. She wouldn’t have it, and I love that about her. I guess we could call her a tomboy, but with an edge of something else, according to Flora, something beyond our guidance or in any child-rearing manual. This is Cornwall: there are people, like Flora, who tap into deeper streams of the spiritual world here than we ‘normal’ folks do. I’m only beginning to accept their alternate vision of reality. Lee is just plain gifted, Flora says. She senses things, like that loft about to collapse during the fire. She sensed it, ran back in even as it fell, pulled Flora out, and saved her. Can’t we just accept her differentness and love her all the more for it?”
“But she’s become so headstrong…”
Andrew chuckled, his modest belly bouncing. “Like you’re not? But she always was, love. Always. And then there’s that other matter…”
“What?”
“Hormones.”
Nicola punched his shoulder. “That’s such a ‘man’ explanation! And anyway, what would you know about pre-adolescent girls? She’s only eleven!”
“No, almost twelve, but I know girls are maturing earlier than ever. And, as I understand it from my inadequate ‘man’ perspective, that will not be easy either for her or for us. So, I’m expecting a bit of a rollercoaster ride in the next few years…are you up to that?”
Nicola flashed back to her own early adolescence in Boston, and to the older brother who repeatedly molested her. No, she’d never had the opportunity to be a rebellious pre-teen; she’d been too busy trying to protect herself, and doing so unsuccessfully. She wondered whether she’d ever have the courage to tell Andrew the whole story. Was it even necessary? Couldn’t that part of her past just stay buried? She often feared she was not an affectionate enough partner for Andrew and wondered if she’d ever find the trust to give her heart and body fully and fearlessly, like a precious gift, to the man she truly loved. And she wondered if she could protect Lee from the dangers of being a young woman out in the world and knew she could not. Not really. She could only prepare her…if Lee would even permit it.
“Of course I’m up to it,” she said. But her answer was mostly bravado. However uncertain she was in this new role as mother, at least she had Andrew, her anchor. And Lee adored him. They had Jamie and Flora, too. They’d be fine. She looked at the clock on the kitchen wall; it was time for Lee to be home. The fog was thickening. She opened the kitchen door and beat an iron rod against an old bronze bell hanging outside. The bell had been salvaged from an old sailing ship that had been wrecked on the Carracks, a group of rocky inshore islets just off their coast that had brought many ships to grief over the centuries. Away across the valley she heard Lee’s answering whistle. Randi, on the hearth, heard it too, barked once, and dropped his head back to the rug. He was still recovering.
“I think she’s been with Flora and Jamie,” she said, and she felt her body relaxing.