A Rather Remarkable Homecoming (24 page)

The waiter had just brought us the tab, but Jeremy hastily ordered another round of nibbles and cocktails, looking impressed with Rollo now.

“So what did the earl
tell
you?” I demanded.

“Well, for starters, Penny dear, Prescott Doyle may well have been a shipping magnate, but his
father
was a bit more than that. Jonathan Doyle was more commonly known as Blackstrap Doyle. Because although he owned a shipbuilding shop, he made his real fortune smuggling.”

“Not an uncommon occupation in those days,” Jeremy observed. “What did he smuggle?”

“French brandy and Spanish lace,” Rollo said, looking down at a stained paper coaster from the Red Rooster bar, upon which, evidently, he had hastily jotted down notes while talking to the earl.

“The brandy sold in England for five times what he paid for it!” Rollo exclaimed. “But it was dangerous work, and he had a lot of close shaves with the law. The earl says that Blackstrap Doyle knew these coves like the back of his hand. Among the locals, old Blackstrap was a folk hero—he was generous to his Cornish neighbors, selling his booty cheaper than the going rate—and tax-free.”

“But how does the earl know all about this?” I asked. Rollo and Jeremy exchanged a knowing look.

“Blackstrap Doyle couldn’t run an operation that size without—shall we say—partnering with the earl who lived in his day?” Rollo explained to me gently. “Both men made tidy profits. Our earl today
wishes
he had someone like that to help him pay for the upkeep of his estate. He doesn’t really like the Mosleys any more than you guys do. But, as he says, ‘One must live’.”

“So tell me more about Blackstrap Doyle,” I urged, fascinated.

“Well, he drove his wife to suicide!” Rollo said, awaiting my shocked look. “They say she was a beautiful, dark-haired lass. But that didn’t stop Blackstrap from carrying on an affair with a local barmaid. The poor wife plunged to her death from a high cliff. It was recorded as an accident, but the earl says it was definitely suicide. After his wife’s death, Blackstrap felt guilty and got more and more careless with his smuggling.”

“Did he get caught?” I asked, wide-eyed.

Rollo nodded, reaching into his pocket to pull out another paper coaster from the Red Rooster Tavern, with a whole new set of his scrawled notes. This time I caught Jeremy’s eye, and we both worked hard to suppress our grins.

“Yep,” Rollo said, “in 1837, Blackstrap’s smuggling ship, the
Falstaff
, was captured off the shores of St. Ives, with a full load of brandy from Normandy. Blackstrap was convicted and sent to an Australian penal colony, where he soon died.”

“So, did Prescott Doyle continue the smuggling operation?” Jeremy asked.

“Briefly,” Rollo chuckled. “But after his father was arrested, the coastal guards were getting more sophisticated and a lot harder to dodge. Prescott knew that his prospects as a smuggler weren’t great,” Rollo said.

He broke off when the waiter returned with more appetizers. Rollo leaned forward, savoring the choice, and selected three appetizers, putting two on his own plate and one into his mouth.

“But Prescott saw a bright future in those fancy new clipper ships,” he continued, still chewing. “The clippers could get to China quicker and carry back tea to England, where, of course, there was a huge market,” Rollo explained. “So, Prescott wisely focused on the perfectly legal importation of Chinese tea. He quadrupled his family fortune within ten years.”

“Not bad,” Jeremy said.

I was gazing down at the harbor, watching the boats unloading their day’s catch, and I could well imagine Prescott’s crates of tea being unpacked onto these very docks.

“However,” Rollo continued, “his personal life was another story. Prescott was rich, he was good-looking, but he was very moody. Everyone in Port St. Francis knew it was because he had a shadow hanging over him from his mother’s suicide. The ladies considered him a ‘catch’ but, try as they might, they couldn’t touch his heart. That is, until that fateful evening at the opera, when he first heard the voice of Paloma Manera. And the rest, as you might say, is history.”

Rollo sat back in his chair, looking satisfied but not yet done. He reached into his pocket while saying casually, “Oh, by the way, the earl also told me all about a fine antiques shop in town called
The Frantic Antique
.”

“The one with all those whale’s teeth and ships’ wheels in the window?” I asked.

I’d thought it was just a tourist trap, but Rollo, with his compulsive love of vintage doodads, had been right at home there, and he now pulled out a rosewood cigar box whose lid bore a painted portrait of Paloma on it. With her fiery dark eyes and sensual red mouth, she looked as if she were inviting a male guest to avail himself of a highly fashionable cigar. It occurred to me that her dark, good looks might have reminded Prescott of his beloved mother.

“Only cost a few quid,” Rollo admitted.

Jeremy peered at it. “That’s our Paloma, all right,” he said.

“Apparently, opera singers were like movie stars in their day,” Rollo explained. “You know, they sometimes did product endorsements. You should see all the stuff she lent her name to—lady’s fans, scented soap wrappers, powder puffs, tea canisters, sheet-music scores and music boxes, even the backs of hairbrushes!”

“But Paloma never returned to Cornwall?” I asked, amazed by it all.

Jeremy jumped in, quoting what he’d read at the museum. “Well, according to the locals, there have been a few sightings of a Woman in White trailing her seaweed-covered wedding gown and veil as she ‘searches for her betrothed along the shores of the sea, like a bride looking for her beloved’.”

“You mean a ghost?” I exclaimed, feeling goose-bumps as I pictured it. Jeremy nodded.

Now the waiters were politely chasing everybody off the dining deck, because the cocktail hour had ended and they were setting the tables for the first seating of dinner. We rose and headed back to the cottage, where we cooked our own meal of freshly caught fish.

Naturally, Rollo stayed with us for dinner. Afterwards, I made up the sofa for him, then I went off to the bedroom, shut the door, and climbed into the big bed with Jeremy, where I put my head on his chest and lay snuggling there.

“Maybe we should let Rollo stay here on his own, and see what else he can learn,” I suggested.

“Why? Where are we going?” Jeremy asked suspiciously.

“Oh,” I said airily, “I just thought that now would be an excellent time to take a break somewhere sunnier, and warmer, and more helpful to this case.”

“Spill it,” Jeremy advised.

“I’ve been all over the Internet to find out about Paloma’s villa,” I admitted, “or as they call it in Madeira, a
quinta.
You were right—it’s now a museum—so wouldn’t you think they’d have a Web site listing their exhibitions? And the program for that classical music festival? But the darned place doesn’t even have a domain name! Did you ever hear of such a thing? How can you have a museum and a music festival without a Web site?”

“They do that on purpose,” Jeremy explained. “To maintain the exclusivity. My grandparents used to go to Madeira,” he told me, smiling. “Every year, at the same old hotel. They went for the cream tea and the music and the scenery—and the reason they loved it was because it always stayed the same, year after year. I bet Paloma’s museum caters to that crowd. Doesn’t surprise me at all that the place avoids advertising. They’re not interested in attracting new people. You either know about Madeira . . . or else you don’t know.”

I had met Jeremy’s snobby Grandmother Margery, and I could well imagine the scene. Even on vacation, her type only wanted to see their “own kind.”

“All right, then,” I said briskly. “We’ll just have to go there and find out for ourselves. Because I’m getting one of those spooky feelings that if there’s any mysterious and historical story to uncover about Grandmother Beryl’s house, it’s got to do with Paloma.”

I expected Jeremy to object, but he said wryly, “Well, I guess it beats hanging around here and being run off the road, and having eggs thrown at us, and the whole town despising us for screwing up Shakespeare. I’m sure Harriet will be happy to see the back of us. So, hell. Why not?”

T
he tropical island of Madeira is really the tip-top of an underwater mountain range born of volcanoes nearly twenty million years ago. It sits twelve hundred fifty miles north of Africa, and six hundred miles east of Portugal, who has “owned” Madeira for about five hundred years. In all those centuries, many a ship and many a sailor who were blown off course have made emergency landings on Madeira, which to them seemed to rise out of the mists like an enchanted world unto itself.

“They say that Christopher Columbus plotted his voyage for the New World from Madeira,” I told Jeremy on the airplane. “Legend has it that he got the idea when a dying, shipwrecked sailor washed ashore and whispered the secret of a new continent to him,” I said in delight.

“What was Columbus doing on Madeira?” Jeremy asked.

“Possibly chasing after a girl from a wealthy seafaring family who had lots of good charts and maps,” I said.

“I myself am coming here just for the madeira wine,” Jeremy announced. At my slightly puzzled expression he said, “You’ve never heard of it? Then you don’t know your American history. Your Founding Fathers drank madeira in a toast to each other just after they’d signed the Declaration of Independence.”

“Really? So, what does it taste like?” I asked, for Jeremy was becoming quite a wine connoisseur.

“It’s like port or sherry, only better,” he replied. “Supposedly the secret to making it was discovered by accident, back in the early 1700s, when the crew of a ship that docked in the New World forgot to unload a barrel of the wine, and the cask sailed right back to Madeira. They discovered that the wine, after months of gently swish-swishing in the warm hold of a boat slowly gliding along the equator, had matured perfectly. They say it’s ‘eternal wine’ because no matter how old it gets, it’s always drinkable.”

“Can’t wait to see this place!” I exclaimed, and a passing flight attendant smiled at me.

When we landed in Madeira, all my senses were immediately aware that I was now in a lush, tropical world of its own, with mountains, jungle, beaches, prized forests of laurel and mahogany, and a very old, elegant European town. At the airport, the buzz of voices around us were Portuguese, Brazilian, English, Spanish, African. The air was fragrant with flowers, fruit and the salty taste of the sea.

However, I have learned one interesting rule about travel anywhere: If you plan to visit a museum, beware of arriving on a Monday. Nine times out of ten, it will be closed. Paloma’s
quinta
was no exception. The gate at the foot of the hill was locked, so we couldn’t even get near the villa to see what it looked like. A sign with the museum hours posted on the gate said they’d be open tomorrow.

Therefore, Jeremy and I had no choice but to take a day off and enjoy ourselves. First, we went for a swim in the hotel pool. Then, we walked into the main town of Funchal, whose name comes from the word
funcho
for fennel. From there we took a cable car ride and went swaying all the way up a mountain, swinging high over adorable pastel candy-colored houses, ancient churches, and venerable evergreens. Jeremy pointed out fields of sugar cane and vineyards and orchards, interrupted by beautiful, faraway waterfalls spilling silently below us.

Our ride ended at the tiny mountaintop town of Monte, with its centuries-old tropical gardens. We were so high up that I could immediately feel the difference in the air, which was refreshingly cool and gave the whole area a purifying quality.

“You see that church?” I asked Jeremy, pointing up at an amazingly steep staircase that led to a beautiful building made of white baroque stucco trimmed in grey, with a tower on each side.

“It’s called ‘Nossa Senhora do Monte’,” I said. “Let’s go look.”

“Penny dear,” Jeremy objected, “we’ve just ascended a mountain in a bucket. You can’t possibly think that we’re going to now climb those stairs. There must be a hundred of them!”

“Just seventy-two,” I answered cheerfully, remembering what I’d read on the plane. “Come on, true believers have been coming here for centuries and
they
climb those stairs on their
knees
. I’m not asking you to do that!”

“Okay, okay,” Jeremy said, taking the challenge now. And up we went. The basalt steps were old and in some places cracked, sunken and uneven, so I was soon fairly breathless.

“Whew!” I exclaimed when we finally reached the top. “We made it.”

I glanced up at the church. Perched this high, it seemed to almost float among the clouds. At that moment, the pretty blue clock on the outside face of the right tower struck the hour, and then the bells in both towers began to toll. The sound reverberated solemnly in the thin air.

We went inside, where we could hear our footsteps echoing in the cool darkness. Jeremy gazed at the gilded woodwork and ornate glass chandeliers, but I led him to the one, more humble item that was the main object of centuries of pilgrimage: a little wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, which a fifteenth-century shepherd girl claimed she’d gotten as a gift from a mysterious lady who appeared to her. To this day, people still believe that the statue has miraculous powers. There was something sweet and touching about this modest item being the true focus for faithful visitors.

Although the painted and carved face on this wooden statue was very different from Paloma’s masthead, I was reminded of it in a forceful way. We were in her world now, and I could sense the influences that had shaped her. When we went back outside, blinking in the brilliant sunlight, I said to Jeremy, “I just got the strangest feeling of Paloma’s presence.”