A Train from Penzance to Paris Read online

  A Train from Penzance to Paris

  By Laura Briggs

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2020 Laura Briggs

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com to purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover Image: “Penzance to Paris”. Original art, “Fashionable young girls” by Filitova and “Seaside promenade and suitcases” by Moremari19 and “Cities skylines set. Flat landscapes vector illustration. London, Paris and New York cities skylines design with landmarks” by Millena12. Used with permission. http://www.dreamstime.com/

  Dear Readers,

  Everyone dreams of finding their big break in life. For Maisie, that moment has never been closer than on the train to Paris, her literary hero and new mentor at her side, prepared to show her just how bright her future can be. Ahead lies the opportunity to see her dream come true; behind, the grand Cornish hotel by the sea—and Sidney, to whom Maisie confessed the deepest of passions for mere hours beforehand …

  Word of warning. This is not the book that answers everyone’s question of ‘are they/aren’t they’ of Maisie and Sidney; the book where they reunite and answer all those deep questions about love and consequences. This is the book where Maisie has to face herself first, and set out on a journey to discover exactly how she wants the next chapters of her own story to unfold. The road she began by accident in Cornwall, with all its chances, mistakes, and kismet, has now transformed itself into the road she always dreamed about, a path that she controls for the first time ...and she’s going to discover exactly how complicated that can be.

  As usual, she’s not alone in this journey, and new voices will add their inspiration and (sometimes) blunt truths to Maisie’s story, in particular a motley crew of amateur writers with whom Maisie finds refuge from her romantic woes and the pressures of fitting in with this new world. With Alli, she finds as many questions as she does answers, about her work and about the author she admires so deeply … but that’s a subject for much later. There’s plenty of time for Maisie to discover adventure and friendship as she makes her way from Alli’s version of glittering Paris to a posh flat near London’s West End — and experience every emotional state from hopeful to heartsick — all as she battles her longing for Sidney and life at the Penmarrow.

  In every romantic story of a heroine with a quest, there comes the moment of facing their dream away from the place and the people rooted in their very core. As fans, we know that all roads eventually lead them home again, but the detour is the fire that tests their love, their convictions, and the core of who they are. Nothing can be the same afterwards, especially in the case of unresolved passion. As a writer (even if a fictitious one!) even Maisie knows it.

  I hope you enjoy the ride on Maisie’s grand tour, and that you are as excited as I am about where it takes her in the future … especially when it comes to her future with a certain someone. Big resolutions and big secrets unfold here and promise that Book Six will take her places emotionally where she’s never been before, so if you’re one of the readers eagerly awaiting that romantic moment of truth, I’m happy to let you know that the pre-order is now on sale!

  A Train from Penzance to Paris

  by

  Laura Briggs

  My first experience traveling on a train happened when I was eight years old. Old enough to keep a sticker-covered journal and write down the whole experience in it as I sat beside my mom, watching the scenery of California's gold rush country fly past as I scribbled eagerly to capture the moment and keep it forever in my pink butterfly-adorned notebook.

  And what did I, aspiring novelist-to-be even then, actually write? The train goes really fast. All the trees are blurry, and so are the rocks. And the train doesn't have a steam pipe like in the old movies. Why is that? There are cows in the field. I hope to take a lot more trips on trains in the future!

  What can I say, other than I was a succinct writer back then.

  Maybe I was saving words for the train journeys I would be taking in the future: incredible ones that I didn't know were in store when I was eight year-old Maisie Clark, third runner up in the grade school essay contest. Certainly I never dreamed I would one day buy a ticket on the famed Eurostar, travel across countries and continents, or watch the villages of England race past my window.

  Now, I gazed at my reflection in the corridor's glass door on a moving train, as the realization of this experience finally settled within me. My heart was beating fast for the adventures yet to come, the kind that I had once believed only happened in novels. The ones behind me were a colorful tapestry of scenes that had been pushing me towards this decision from the beginning.

  The girl reflected in the glass smiled, although if I looked closely, I could probably see redness beneath my eyes where a tear or two had escaped recently. Just because my heart knew this was the only choice for me didn't mean it had cost me nothing, given all that happened to me so recently — the career chance of a lifetime landing in my midst like a thunderbolt, for example. But a little regret is the price of living out one's dream on their own terms, as someone wise once showed me.

  I took a deep breath, smoothed back my dark hair, and placed my hat on my head again: a cloche one with a knit flower on one side, my 'traveling' hat. Against the train's sway, I made my way back to my window seat and the French magazine tucked in the seat's pocket, with only three or four words printed on its cover that made any sense to me. The countryside swept by outside, miles traveled through green fields with stone walls and distant church towers, roads leading to places I had never seen nor heard of, all with their own magic and possibilities.

  "Is it your beginning or your end?" my seatmate asked, his polite English touched subtly by an accent as French as the glossy magazine.

  "What is?" I asked.

  "The journey?" he asked. "The city where we are going? Is it your beginning or end?"

  This question suggested I was hardly the picture of an experienced, sophisticated traveler, not that it was any surprise. The way I was glued to the scenery was probably a dead giveaway. I looked like someone waiting for something, eagerly and a little impatiently.

  "Both," I said, smiling. "I guess you could say it's complicated." My fellow passenger smiled back, though I could see he didn't quite understand.

  It would be hard to explain to anybody, the reasons why. I was only beginning to understand them myself as I settled against my armrest, closed my eyes, and waited to arrive at my destination.

  Or, as I was beginning to think of it, my destiny.

  ____________________

  Three weeks earlier....

  If anybody had told me that I would ever be crazy enough to run away to Cornwall in pursuit of a famous novelist, my hero in the literary world, I would have laughed in their face.

  Let's rewind that part. Picture me and my novel struggling for a chance that had just been ripped away from me. My long-awaited place in the Tucker Mentorship slot had fallen through at the last minute, which meant I was no longer a candidate for the Ink and Inspiration Prize — one that guaranteed a new novelist a shot at publication. I had quit my job in anticipation of it, and was now unemployed with rent to pay and my hard-earned savings saved for nothing but a supplement until I found a new job at a low point in the Los Angeles job market.

  So I wrote a letter to my favorite author. Brilliant, reclusive, and British, only a
privileged few had ever met Alistair Davies, and probably no one had ever scored his attention in the form of a couple of hours to review their work and write an assessment of their talents. But I tried it on a lark, and received a response of encouragement, and of regret that distance prevented him from helping me. So I did the craziest thing: I decided to follow that address back to its origins at a hotel in Cornwall and find out if Alistair Davies would give me those hours — enough of them that I could claim his assessment as that of a mentor and be back in the running for the prize.

  After arriving, I did something even crazier: I let the hotel think I was their truant newly-hired maid so I could stay at the hotel — for free — and work at the hotel — also for free — until I found said author. Who, unfortunately was long gone before I ever set foot in England, as it turned out.

  In less than a year, I had moved to England on impulse and transformed a two-week stay into a work visa application at a grand and eccentric international hotel by the Cornish sea. Where, once installed, I proceeded to embroil myself by accident in the affairs of its guests. I built a new life for myself and my in-progress novel, and found an unexpected connection of the heart to a most-unexpected village wanderer, who swept me off my feet ... or, rather, into his arms after an unlikely meeting.

  I was in no place to laugh at any possible predictions for my life.

  Meeting the legendary author, however, was something I had given up after my first few months in Cornwall, given that he didn't materialize at the hotel where his secret writing suite sat empty. So how did fortune finally put me in the path of Alistair Davies, the celebrated and elusive genius behind A Dark and Glorious House and Let to Lie? Books that still took my breath away more than a decade after I first read his words, truthfully. And how, in the universe's crazy, unpredictable version of life, did Alistair Davies turn out to be a 'she'?

  Those are both circumstances that take far too long to explain. But Alistair, 'Alli' or 'Megs' as I had been introduced to Alistair Davies by her various Christian names, had promised to explain that last part on the train journey from Cornwall to London, where we stopped briefly to lunch with an associate of hers, then on the Eurostar journey to Paris, to meet with her friends for a few days. 'Alistair' being what she is, however, I found that little of the explanation pertained to her pseudonym and secret identity, and more pertained to the passing scenery, the glamour of train travel, and the whirlwind of meetings and errands that lay in store for her in France.

  This was how I imagined it would be, from the moment I agreed to come away with her. I was going to let her guide me through my novel's edits — and give my creative talents a chance at introduction, as she implied strongly — among her friends and contacts in the literary world. Even so, it was nothing like what I imagined when I first came in search of the writer and left behind my life as a California waitress.

  With my luggage in an overhead rack, a first-class seat on the high-speed Chunnel train, and my literary hero seated across from me, all my abandoned goals were suddenly alive again. Struggling for years to save my money and save every free second for writing had come to breathless wonder the moment those train doors wooshed closed behind me, carrying me to equally-breathtaking opportunities.

  Almost like the moment when Sidney and I truly kissed.

  I shouldn't think about that, not here, not now. There was a contrast between the two aspects of that moment. The intensity of that feeling, and the crushing revelation I made to him about leaving would shove a knife into me. My breath came short for different reasons, then. And to think I had been naive enough to hope the pain of waving goodbye yesterday would actually grow easier once I couldn't see him.

  Putting pen to paper, that's how a writer deals with feelings — or avoids them. That's why I brought a journal, a new leatherbound one sans pink butterflies.

  The Eurostar travels so fast, the world becomes an ever-moving film reel of nature and town, farm and family home. I can't take it all in, yet I'm trying, and all the while, I'm listening to Alistair tell me how busy the next few weeks will be. All these appointments, the promised meetings with acquaintances, an obligatory luncheon with the publisher ... I wonder how we'll ever find time to write. I suppose this is the author's way of reminding me how hard it will be to balance the demands of everyday life with the demands of writing professionally. I'll have to give up sleeping to squeeze it all in.

  I paused, tapping my pencil as I gazed at a distant cathedral, the points of its grand towers rising above the village like a crown. Across from me, Alli paged through her little Chinese silk notebook, jotting down something that I could only hope belonged to her long-overdue fourth novel. The one devoted fans like me had been dying to read and had been denied for the past six years.

  The villages we pass seem to beg me to visit them, wander down little lanes and look for cottages draped in red ivy, sprawling oaks let to live in cobblestone main squares. I have a thing for villages now, thanks to Port Hewer. I'll never pass one without wondering what kind of life happens there, and knowing it's never as small as I used to imagine, with everyone a quaint clone from an episode of 'Cranford.'

  I'll feel a little homesick if I visit one, even though the place I'll be missing isn't technically my home. Just the sight of somebody riding a sky-blue bicycle might leave me with the need to curl up with comforting chocolates and a cup of tea, incapable of writing a single word of my manuscript's revisions for the rest of the day.

  The train announcement for the Paris arrival time caught my ear, snatches of dual-language nouns. That was good, because I almost closed my eyes and pictured myself cycling down the hill with Sidney, me waving at those scornfully-staring neighbors who knew all the rumors about his dubious past long before I did. Because of that picture, I felt my heart squeezed tighter in the grip of that longing.

  I could write something else here. Am I crazy? Crazy to get on a train to Paris with a stranger, who promises that I'll brush shoulders with movers and shakers any novelist would be dying to meet? Or would I have been crazier to stay behind and clean rugs and clear tables as a hotel maid, my fingers crossed while my manuscript lay in some publisher's 'to review' heap?

  I think everything I've done may have been certifiable, since the day Wallace Scott told me I'd been turned down for the mentorship program. And I mean that down to the moment I said the words 'I love you' and then boarded this train twenty-four hours later, like I was running away from the one person who had kept me and my dream from growing stale and dusty, and getting hopelessly lost in that world.

  My pen didn't write those words down in reality, but these were the questions my mind had turned over multiple times since leaving. Never in a million years would Sidney have let me make another choice, we both knew. But I watched it cut him deeply, knowing there was nothing we could do. It had always been coming, I tried to tell myself. One of us was always going to leave, as we both knew. But it didn't help one bit.

  "We're coming into the station shortly," Alli said, shoving her little notebook into her leather satchel. "Don't forget to collect all your suitcases from the upper compartment. Silly me, I once fell asleep on the line from Reading to Bristol after an all-night sing and carouse in a pub near the old playhouse — I bolted off the train just before the doors closed, only to remember I'd left my handbag underneath me on the seat. Twenty perfectly good quid lost, which was all my worldly possession at the time."

  In keeping with most of the stories she'd told me, it rambled on its own path and left gaping holes. I was curious to know just when and where any of this fit in the unusual past of the celebrated writer. "Fortunately, I travel light," I answered, since all my worldly goods were tucked in the suitcase above, including my stuffed carnival prize giraffe Mr. Bubbles and my scant souvenirs from life in Port Hewer. Everything except my red cloche hat, which lay on my lap beneath my open journal.

  My pen returned to the page. The clouds traveling past on the horizon couldn't move more quickly than my thou
ghts, and even the scenery is slow compared to my revolving question. I ask myself every hour if I'm truly ready for this, for what it means to take this leap as a writer.

  A wise friend once told me I could never know the answer without trying — that no one but me will ever know if I'm ready; or, for that matter, what I should do when the time comes. So I won't trust Alistair's word, or anybody else's, more than I trust my own judgment in this process. That's a promise.

  Write me a letter soon and tell me how you are. Tell me how things are in the village, and what Mrs. Graves and the vicar are doing, and of Dean battling his nurses. If you see anybody from the hotel, Molly or Brigette or Riley, or even Norm in his grumpiest mood, then tell them hello from me.

  I miss you, Sidney.

  Love, Maisie

  The train's speed becomes a mechanical crawl as it eases into the Gare du Nord station, and I feel as if a breath of steam is about to be released by the train, a mist that will part in dramatic revelation. Of what, I ask myself? A postcard city? The stage for my dream's first act? Or maybe an experience I truly can't face as a twentysomething year-old former waitress, whom only a year ago was wearing a sequined Mexican hostess dress while taking taco orders. Here I am now, in the company of one of the world's most critically-acclaimed writers, about to take the streets of Paris — and my first manuscript's revision stage — by storm.

  I am excited, terrified, and exhilarated. I have no clue if this is how destiny feels.

  ____________________

  Paris

  Alli's destination after a brief stop at our hotel was a tour of the shopping district in the heart of historic Paris: a place filled with chic department stores and fashion shops that offered everything sophisticated for millionaires with a modest clothing budget of a few thousand.