A Romance in Cornwall Read online

  Michael looked up from his recipe book. "Good morning," he said. Well, grunted, anyway. As if I had been gone five minutes instead of five months.

  "Julianne!" Lady Amanda now abandoned her morning tea and tart, giving me a welcoming hug. "I thought you'd pop in and bid us hello in a few days, after you were nicely settled! I never dreamed you'd come here so soon."

  "I thought I should go ahead and plunge into the chaos again," I answered, following her through to the main hall. "After all, our things won't be here for a week, at least, and Matt will be busy with the garden. And I'm sure I have things to catch up on." Little bits of news here and there. After all, I was prepared for the fact that a few changes had taken place, since I had been gone for months.

  The first one to greet me was the main hall itself. A vivid shade of yellow covering the walls, so that I felt I had stepped into the wrong manor's foyer for a moment.

  "Like it?" Lady Amanda asked. "I can't believe that William forgot to mention it when he spoke to you last week. We've been dying to do it for a month now, and he finally sent for the painters before the summer tourists begin to arrive."

  "Wow. It's ... really bright," I ventured. After the ivory color of old, I was at a loss for words.

  "It all begin with the sketches of the manor's Regency decor. Did I mention those?" Amanda continued. "Surely Kitty did. At any rate, we realized that the main hall's color had been far more brilliant, in keeping with its original country house charm — we were living in the Edwardian version of it, when Lady Hamilton had it repainted to seem a bit more modern." She rested her hands on her hips, a satisfied smile on her face. "Its cheeriness is rather growing on me."

  Kitty had forgotten to mention the sketches ... but there had been other pieces of news in her emails, so maybe it slipped her mind. "Where is Gemma?" I asked. I was surprised that Cliffs House's chief maid wasn't here already, dusting the usual knickknacks and sampling one of Michael's muffins.

  "She's off today. Volunteering, I think. Since we're between events, really, there's far less for her to do around here. That enthusiastic American event promoter is going to Paris, you know, and it's given us a bit of a holiday from our usual chaos," said Lady Amanda.

  I had heard about Nathan's recent career opportunity, so this wasn't surprising. "A quiet spring of you, me, and Kitty putting together the summer calendar, I gather?" I said.

  "For another week, until she leaves, I suppose," said Lady Amanda. The look on my face dissolved her smile, since it was obvious I had no idea what she was talking about. But my heart gave a thud of concern, because I could tell this wasn't a mere holiday that Lady Amanda had alluded to.

  "Oh, dear," she said. "She hadn't told you yet, had she?"

  "Told me what?" I asked. Kitty herself appeared now from the direction of our office, and I could see from the look on her face that she wasn't thrilled that this piece of news had been introduced accidentally.

  "I was meaning to tell you," she said. "I guess I thought it wouldn't be best over a mobile. It's good news ... I mean, I think it is." She looked a little awkward, and a little hesitant, too. I remembered that same look — on my own face, however, when I came to tell Lady Amanda that I was leaving.

  In our office, Kitty told me about the move to Paris. I wasn't the least bit surprised, since Nathan was moving. It was the perfect opportunity for Kitty, and it made sense that she had let her big news wait a few days until I was back.

  "I'm really happy for you," I told her. "Honestly. You're going to love it. And you'd miss Nathan way too much if you stayed here and waited for him."

  "Yeah, I suppose. He's a bit of a romantic. Not exactly the long distance type, he says, so I didn't want to disappoint him," she said. Despite Kitty's eye roll with this statement, I knew her reluctance was mostly feigned.

  "I'll miss you, of course," I said. "But I'm sure I'll survive. Maybe I'll even find another annoying, headstrong assistant who will make my work so delightfully unpredictable."

  "Is that a compliment?" said Kitty. "Or your way of getting a bit of yours back since I was such a pain in the beginning?" She arched one eyebrow, her smile only the hint of one around one corner of her mouth. Kitty's poker face which had once baffled me with its mixture of emotions, although I could read it plainly now.

  "Which do you think?" I asked, trying to hide my own smile. "As if I could replace you with just anyone."

  My first assistant ever — my biggest risk to date, maybe, in my Cornish life, since taking the job itself. Replacing her wouldn't be easy, and I didn't want to think about trying. In fact, I was sure I couldn't. She had come so far since that girl in the ragged red sweatshirt, who had become invaluable to me in a matter of weeks back then. I wished I could tell her how much that had meant, but the words didn't come to me at this moment as I congratulated Kitty on her new opportunity.

  Now, sitting alone at my desk with my empty event diary, I noticed that the artwork on the wall in my office had been changed. Just like the ones in the newly-painted foyer, come to think of it. Even the cookware on the walls in the kitchen was different when I went downstairs for a cuppa, since Michael had finally made the kitchen his own, it seemed. When I reached into a cupboard for a mug, my hand emerged with a can of soup instead.

  I sighed, feeling a few lines of unhappiness crease my forehead. This was not quite how I pictured my first day back. Not hearing news like this, that Kitty was leaving; or finding that a few little changes to the decor could make this place seem less familiar than before.

  At least the cliffs couldn't have changed, I reassured myself, but would be the same as always. But before I could even take that first return walk down to my beloved spot, the cluster of clouds overhead turned the blue sky to grey, and sent a shower of rain down on the gardens. And I had left my umbrella at home.

  Perfect.

  Kitty was only staying a week before her new job in Paris began. True to her natural reserve, she refused vehemently all offers of a goodbye party, so we were forced to make do with one of Michael's splendid cakes and a farewell pint at the Fisherman's Rest. A casual night with the staff was all she would accept, and only if her family was definitely not invited, but on a separate list of goodbyes for Kitty. So we toasted farewell to Kitty, just the staff with Amanda and William. Even Gemma seemed sad about it, although the two of them had never warmed to each other.

  "I'm coming back, you know," said Kitty to me, as we stood outside the pub that night. "Eventually. I wouldn't keep away from this place forever. I'll come for a proper visit."

  "I know," I said. "But it's not the same."

  She shrugged. "Maybe I'll come back to stay someday," she said. "I did before. Besides," she glanced around in the dark, where the outline of the village's businesses seemed like sleeping, closed faces of stone or limewash, "this place grows on you. You can't live here and not want to come back sometime."

  "Truer words never spoken," I said. After all, I had come back here for the same reason. That's why I was standing here now.

  Of course, I hadn't thought I would come back to say goodbye to Kitty before I had even had the chance to finish unpacking. It was too soon and I hadn't been prepared for this, but there wasn't any choice. Not with Kitty catching a train tomorrow morning.

  "I guess this is goodbye," I said. "Tell Nathan I say hello."

  "Of course," said Kitty. "So. Goodbye, I guess." The catch in her voice gave her away. I couldn't help but smile.

  It was proof how far Kitty had come that we hugged goodbye, a brief one, but a warm one. She was far from the prickly girl who had stormed out of my office two years ago, when I suggested she was a diamond in the rough, who would have died rather than admit how much she wanted that job at the manor.

  I sighed as I stood in the pub's doorway, watching Kitty speed towards home on her motorbike. I wondered what would happen to her battered ride while she was away in Paris. Would she ship it there? Buy another secondhand one in France? I imagined her speeding along the Paris
circle in a helmet and a fashionable French dress, running errands for her new boss. I was picturing her new life already, as if Kitty was truly gone from ours the moment she turned the corner.

  In her summer remodeling quest, Lady Amanda had made plans to repaint my office with its original shade of 'hunting green' as she called it, which meant I would decamp elsewhere during the next week. And since there wasn't much for me to do, didn't I want to take a few days off? Spend them with Matthew, spruce up the cottage, enjoy a pasty and some cream tea without worrying about schedules or summer parties?

  I didn't. Well, except the part about Matt, that is. But I didn't have a way to explain that to Lady Amanda, not with the answer so obvious and logical it was staring me in my face. Along with the fact that the paintings on the walls were different, and the tapestries in the ballroom had been moved to the upstairs hall.

  A period of adjustment was clearly in order to chase away my blues. I made the best of it after my official return to Cliffs House, by ignoring Kitty's empty desk and making myself enthusiastically compliment the new wall colors as often as possible. Change was good. Without it, life would probably cease to be, right? People would go mad underneath all that sameness, without little things like new wall colors, new people moving to towns, other people moving away. I knew that and would be happy about it in no time.

  In my newly-repainted office, I hung Constance Strong's painting of the cliffs, which had formerly occupied a place on the cottage's wall. Unless Mathilda our landlady gave us permission to add a new room onto our home, we needed to reduce our clutter just a teeny bit to avoid being crowded out of our parlor. In the spirit of change, I decided it was time to arrange things differently both here and at Rosemoor. Time to move on and embrace what was different since my return.

  I was searching for a good spot for a butterfly paperweight, a gift from Aimee, when my office door opened and Gemma's head popped inside. "Have you heard the rumors yet?" she asked.

  One thing which hadn't changed — at least not that I could see — was Gemma's love for news, gossip, and all things rumored in Ceffylgwyn.

  "Not of an event?" I made the idea sound terrible, even though it was how I made my living as an event planner. But the thought of a celebrity wedding or another celebrated baking show was the last thing I really wanted at the moment. With Nathan in Paris, I thought maybe the manor could enjoy a brief lull in spectacular or surprising events, at least until I felt more like my old self.

  "No, nothing like that," said Gemma. "I'm talking about the celebrity sighting. Andy's mum's best friend's sister does for the Pendragon from time to time, you know, when she's not cleaning houses over in Truro; and she said she saw the names on the hotel register the other day and recognized one right away — a famous writer, no less. And you'll never guess who."

  "Who?" I said. The Pendragon was a hotel not far from Falmouth, and it was known for now and then attracting a few special guests en route to Penzance. Since Gemma's celebrity-crazy days had dwindled in Pippa's absence, I imagined it must be someone extremely recognizable.

  "Rowena St. James? The romance novelist?" said Gemma. "You've heard of her, surely. Even my mum's read all her books, and she usually only reads a good spy novel now and then."

  "Rowena St. James?" I said. "The author of The Lightkeeper's Heart?" I had a copy of her first and most famous book on a shelf at home, tucked next to Matt's Treatise on the Flora and Fauna of Southern England. Romance and gardens go hand in hand, in my opinion.

  "That's her. And rumor says she's taking a room at the Dumnonian," whispered Gemma, excitedly. "Anyway, that's what she heard from Charlotte Jones's sister what delivers dairy goods there on Thursdays, when she told her about the register. Mind you, we're not supposed to spread it around, since it's not certain. And the guest book's supposed to be private, too. We wouldn't want to get anyone into trouble."

  I tried not to smile, knowing that Gemma was not only breaking this rule without a second's thought, but so was everyone else in the village, too. "Of course," I said. "I won't tell anyone."

  "Think we'll see her about while she's here?" asked Gemma. "Think she'll visit Cliffs House to see the gardens? I've always wanted to meet someone famous — Donald Price-Parker and Wendy Alistair don't count, really." Gemma mused over this fantasy. "I wonder if she'd tell me whatever became of Alaric and Georgia in Love's Winding Path."

  "Most likely she plans to keep traveling and stay in Penzance for awhile," I said. "Ceffylgwyn's probably not exactly the location she has in mind for her next novel." I read somewhere once that inspiration for her first book had struck her during a holiday in Penzance, so she was probably revisiting whatever site planted inspiration for her greatest literary achievement. I made a mental note to tell Aimee about this in our next conversation — that book was her favorite of all time.

  "I wish it were," said Gemma. "Then maybe we'd have a bit of romantic magic around here and not just boys nattering away about rugby and beer. But she wouldn't write about a dull little village when she writes about lonely, wind-swept plains, or islands adrift in the foamy sea. That's a lot more romantic."

  How about windswept cliffs? I wanted to reply, but knew that Gemma was quoting the author's description of book settings. "You don't think Ceffylgwyn could be the scene of a fictional romance?" I laughed.

  "Maybe. If Rowena St. James made it into someplace exciting or irresistible," said Gemma. With that, she was off to tell the same news to Lady Amanda, probably.

  I hung Constance's painting above the mantel in my office. It was the perfect spot for the portrait of my favorite place on earth — which was more romantic than even Rowena's lonely lighthouse, in my opinion. But I'm not a writer, as my long-abandoned personal journal proved, so maybe I'm wrong.

  Maybe journaling was the answer to my feeling a little lost upon coming back. I wondered just where it had ended up when we moved.

  ***

  "Who?" said Matt.

  "Rowena St. James," I said. "You wouldn't have heard of her. She writes romance novels. The kind where the hero leads a noble, lonely existence until rescued emotionally by a beautiful, intelligent heroine who suddenly appears in his life. So, like you and me." I kissed his cheek.

  "Ah. I see." Matt glanced up at me. "I'm not sure I pictured my past existence as 'noble.' Perhaps a little lonely, true, but hardly worthy of being chronicled in a love story. Just ordinary loneliness that everyone has from time to time."

  "Well, that's your opinion," I answered. "Maybe I have a different one."

  Matt's days as the somewhat reclusive but charming gardener at Cliffs House were long in the past now, but I still remembered keenly my first impression of my husband-to-be when I came to Cornwall. Just as keenly as I remember my surprise as the layers were peeled away, revealing facets of Matt's life that I never would have guessed. Like the fact that the seemingly-ordinary gardener was actually a famous scientist specializing in plant genetics and botanical diseases. And that his sometimes-teasing, sometimes-serious manner was the front for a nature as noble as any possessed by a novel's hero.

  "You just like the idea of being the heroine," he teased me now. "Rescuing the heart left wounded by faithless love." He was referring to his ex, one Petal Price-Parker, whose name still made me bristle a little.

  "You told me it didn't need rescuing," I reminded him. "I prefer to think I accomplished what no woman before me could do. I found the way into its secret garden." Leaning over him, I tapped my finger against his chest, over the beating heart that now belonged to me as much as to him.

  He laughed. "A secret garden?" he echoed. "I hope these aren't the lines that your author pens in her books. Not many men imagine their hearts to be a tangle of dead climbing roses and buried spring bulbs. You make it sound like I was a hedge maze you had to navigate — internally speaking, of course."

  "You're a gardener. It suits you," I answered.

  In reply, Matt fished his net out of the water, removing a sticky glob of some
sort of sea goop that looked anything but romantic, and popped it carefully into a vial. He patted the pockets of his fisherman's waistcoat — one transformed into a scientist's toolkit — then frowned.

  "I seem to have misplaced my notebook," he said. "Didn't I put it in my pocket?"

  Any other time, a walk along the shore for the two of us could have made a romantic picture worthy of a St. James novel ... only ours was a little less romantic for the drizzly rain, the smell of wet dog, and the fact that we were both wearing muddy wellies while Matt took samples of seawater and silt from along the shore's edge.

  The wellies couldn't be helped — and the rain would be more romantic if it wasn't making us feel slightly chilled, and the overcast sky making everything from the sky to the sea look rather drab and hopeless. As for the smell of wet dog, that was explained by a thin, long-legged, shaggy white dog that appeared to be half-Airedale, half homeless as it wandered along the shore, snuffling the rocks.

  It gave us an interested glance — but when I held out a savory biscuit coaxingly, it dodged expertly out of my reach and continued trotting along the shore.

  "I thought you put the notebook in your other pocket," I answered Matt. "The one where you keep your tweezers for specimens."

  The notebook wasn't full of sketches of crag-filled rocks and red-billed chough, like the heroine's in The Lightkeeper's Heart would have been if she was on a Cornish holiday, but full of notes filled with Latin names and scientific shorthand unintelligible to me. All chronicling the molecular health of Ceffylgwyn's shoreline on behalf of the foundation who had been meeting in Cliffs House's drawing room the past two days.

  In Seattle, Matt had done similar work for a university studying algae along Washington's coast. His latest job was more or less a souvenir from our months abroad, albeit a more practical one than my antique clock. It involved hours of combing the beaches and fishing slimy things from the tide, so I came along to keep him company when I could.

  A figure was now jogging towards us. "Did you see a dog come this way?" asked Rosie, who rested her hands on her knees as she caught her breath.