A Rather Remarkable Homecoming (5 page)

“So where are you going this time?” Rollo asked, his mouth full of roast potato.

“Cornwall,” I said. I paused, since Jeremy and I had sworn confidentiality about any further information on this case.

“Really?” Rollo said with interest, taking a healthy slug of his wine. “Been a long time since I’ve gone to Port St. Francis. Nice house Beryl had. Can’t imagine what a place with that view would go for now. Loved it when I was a little kid. Didn’t see much of it once I grew up. Must have changed a lot.”

Something in his face indicated to me that Rollo was perfectly aware that the family elders considered him
persona non grata
. Well, it’s hard to remain a welcomed guest when you constantly harass your old aunties for money. Poor Grandmother Beryl and Great-Aunt Penelope used to dread Rollo’s arrival, then breathe a sigh of relief when he disappeared. But until now, I hadn’t realized that Rollo actually knew how his aunts felt about him, and why they had stopped inviting him to visit.

“Frightful long drive, Cornwall is. That’s why I didn’t pop over to Beryl’s house more often,” he said lightly now, as if it had been his choice to stop summering there. “Got friends there now, do you?”

“Right,” Jeremy said noncommittally.

“Which route will you take?” Rollo asked, and they launched into a spirited guy-discussion about which highway is best for driving out to “the West Country” for the weekend: Take the busy M5 . . . or take the A303 to the M3? I have seen people come to near fisticuffs at dinner parties over this debate.

Allow me to weigh in here. I say, a road is a road is a road. And a highway is a highway is a highway. So no matter what route you pick, the final result after hours of driving is the same: a physically challenging, slightly nerve-wracking haul, which in traffic jams can become the true test of a marriage. But I was still keen to go.

Finally, when Jeremy had yawned enough times, Rollo took the hint and rose to go home. As I walked him to the front door, he whispered conspiratorially to me, “Off on another case already, aren’t you?”

There was no point in denying it, so I just smiled mysteriously.

“Remember, I am on e-mail if you should require my services,” Rollo advised in a low voice so Jeremy wouldn’t hear. The truth is, Rollo has actually been extremely helpful to us on previous cases . . . in those dicey moments when you need a thief to catch a thief.

“Simply say the word, my dear girl, and I’m ‘in’,” Rollo whispered with a grin. “After all, life in London has been so very dull without you.”

C
ornwall once belonged to the Celts, who arrived from Europe in the Iron Age with their mysterious culture of Druid high priests and their strange rock formations like Stonehenge. Some folks say that the map of Cornwall resembles an inverted map of England: that is, if you could take the western tip at Land’s End, pick it up and plunk it north where Scotland is, then Cornwall itself is practically the same shape as England.

The Romans, however, thought Cornwall was shaped like a horn of plenty, which may account for why they called it “Cornovii” from the same root for “cornucopia” or the horn of plenty. And the Romans certainly got “plenty” of tribute from the Celts, but somehow they all managed to do business together for awhile—until the brutal invasion of the Angles and the Saxons, who contributed the suffix
wealas
, which means “foreigner”—hence, the name “Cornwealas” or Cornwall. The Danish and Viking invaders came next, until the Normans from France took over; and finally, after fierce struggle and strife, Cornwall came under the rule of the English kings.

So the Cornish people have seen foreigners come by land and by sea, with torches blazing, arrows flying and flags waving. I, however, arrived singing.

“Pardon me,” Jeremy said, interrupting my enthusiastic, if slightly off-key, singing, “but there is no snow. What
is
this little ditty you’re singing?”

I stared at him in disbelief. “You’re kidding,” I said scornfully. “I realize that you grew up on this isolated, sceptered isle of ye olde England, but surely you’ve heard of a little American holiday called Thanksgiving, have you not?”

“Is that the one where you rogue Puritan colonists were invited to a nice dinner with the natives, after which you all behaved like very bad guests and took all their land?” Jeremy inquired wickedly. “And anyway, wasn’t that November? It’s only late June, dear girl.”

“Forget Thanksgiving,” I advised pityingly. “It’s about
To Grandmother’s house we go
. All my childhood friends sang it whenever they went off on long car drives to visit their grandparents, no matter what the season. I was always wistful because my grannies lived in England and France, so I never got to drive to their house singing this song.”

“But one fateful summer as a little girl, you finally hopped on a plane to England,” Jeremy reminded me, as if I were the heroine of a fairy tale. “Whereupon you met your future husband, alias
moi
. You promised to love, cherish . . . and feed me. What say we dig into one of those sandwiches now?”

“Are you kidding? We’ve just barely gotten out of London,” I objected. “If we break into our stash now, we’ll never even make it to Bristol.” We had pulled away from the great wheel of highways that surrounded London, reaching out to every corner of England.

“If I were a horse you’d feed me,” Jeremy objected. “How do you expect me to run without fuel?”

“Okay,” I warned, “but don’t eat all of it, or you’ll be sorry later when we’re only halfway there, driving through the moors with nothing to eat for miles, and the ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy wailing to each other across their
Wuthering Heights
all night.”

I rummaged around in the cooler and handed Jeremy a wrapped turkey sandwich.

“Thanks, navigator,” Jeremy said enthusiastically, considerably cheered. “Let me know when the next exit is coming. Because if we take a wrong turn, we could end up in Scotland.”

I dutifully studied the map, and did my best as co-pilot. Jeremy is a good driver and he steered his way heroically through the big city hubs, beginning with Bristol and its old stone buildings juxtaposed with modern high-rises; then the next major switch at the cathedral city of Exeter, after which things got more rural, with sheep grazing unperturbedly along the green fields near the highway.

“Keep an eye out for a sign that says Kennards House,” I announced. “That’ll take us right past Dartmoor National Park.”

“Home of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
,” Jeremy announced in a nasal tone like a bus tour guide.

“Oh, of course!” I cried ecstatically. “I
thought
I heard Sherlock Holmes telling Dr. Watson that the game’s afoot.”

Jeremy gave me an affectionate smile. “Who knew that you and I would end up being a team of English sleuths ourselves?” he said. “To think it all began as kiddies in Cornwall pretending to be international spies.”

“And you taught me Morse code,” I recalled. “You tap-tapped to me all through dinner. Boy, that really annoyed the grown-ups. I was very impressed that you knew the code.”

“I was just showing off for you,” he confessed. “Until you came along, all I had to look forward to was getting car-sick when Mum hauled me out there every summer.”

“How sophisticated the grown-ups seemed, with their cocktail parties in the garden,” I commented nostalgically. “Grandmother Beryl and Great-Aunt Penelope did love to gossip, mostly about their brother. Wish I’d met Great-Uncle Roland.”

“No, you don’t,” Jeremy advised. “Rollo’s father was a strange duck. Always sidling around with a furtive look, sneaking extra drinks when nobody else was looking. I always thought he would pocket the family silver if it weren’t for Beryl’s sharp eye.”

“Sounds like Great-Uncle Roland was a lot like Rollo is today?” I asked curiously.

“Yes, without the redeeming qualities, I’m afraid,” Jeremy said frankly.

“Did he look like Rollo?” I asked. I’d never really known about Rollo’s relationship with his dad. Great-Uncle Roland had died much earlier than his sisters, Beryl and Penelope.

“Yeah, Rollo and his father resembled each other,” Jeremy replied.

“Maybe that’s why Rollo’s mum is so mean to him—because he reminds her of her ne’er-do-well husband?” I suggested.

“Dorothy’s rotten to everybody,” Jeremy responded. “As you well know. Mum and I always avoided going out to Cornwall on the same weekend that Rollo’s folks were scheduled.”

I yawned noisily. “Go to sleep,” Jeremy advised. “I’ll wake you when it starts to get interesting.”

 

I must have slept for quite some time, because when I awoke, the light was beginning to fade, and I could feel in my very bones the strange new open expanse of sky. Immediately my nostrils picked up a distinct scent of seaweed in the air, and a tingling from the salty sea, and other earthier smells I couldn’t identify—heather, bracken, gorse, moss, peat?

At the same time, my ears were adjusting to something unusual—the absence of traffic. All that relentless whoosh-whooshing was gone, replaced by the somewhat ghostly sound of the wind rolling off the sea and across the open farmland, downs and moors.

Jeremy, stoic as ever, had been driving steadily the whole time, drinking tea from his thermos. He smiled at me gently now, saying affectionately, “Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty. We’re very nearly there.”

I sat up excitedly, rubbed my eyes and peered out the window, occasionally catching glimpses of pretty old stone farmhouses with silos, and cottages with thatched roofs. The roadside hedges and shrubs were scrubbier now—the tough, scraggly kind that know how to dig their roots in deep and hang on against fierce gale-force winds that blow in off the North Atlantic. It reminded me of America’s northeastern coastline, like Nantucket Island in Massachusetts, and Montauk in Long Island. But this terrain was even wilder than that.

“Where are we?” I asked, fumbling for the map that had slipped from my lap to the floor.

“Just passing Slaughter Bridge, where they say King Arthur was killed,” Jeremy replied.

“Wow. Really?” I said enthusiastically, straining to get a look out the window, half expecting to glimpse castle turrets and knights jousting, but seeing only the passing roadside.

“We’ll be in Port St. Francis shortly,” Jeremy said.

We had reached the northern coast of Cornwall, not as far east as the castle town of Tintagel, but not as far west as fancy Padstow with its trendy gourmet restaurants. Port St. Francis was one of the little villages in between, perched on a cliff above the rugged shoreline where the Atlantic Ocean comes pounding in. I couldn’t see the water yet, but I could already sense it in the wind, and feel its mighty presence crashing somewhere below against beaches and ancient craggy rock formations along the coast.

Now things were happening very fast, as we made a quick turn and a loop, and suddenly there we were, right in the center of town. It was really just one long main street with impossibly narrow country lanes springing out of it like vines climbing up into the hills, all crammed with whitewashed and slate-roofed houses that looked just like huddled ladies putting their bonneted heads together to gossip on market day.

The main street itself was lined with only a few essential shops and public buildings, most of which were closed for the evening and only dimly lighted, so I strained my eyes to peer at the weather-beaten signs rocking slightly in the breeze. There was a town hall, a bank, a very old post office, a hardware store, a hairdresser and barber, and a few typical tourist shops, all closed at the moment.

Farther along was a stone church with its grey-shingled rectory sitting quietly beside it, and an old graveyard beyond that. There were a few Edwardian houses with white fences and tiny immaculate gardens, but there were no lights on in any of them, indicating perhaps that they were owned by “second-homers”. And there was a venerable but worn-out theatre whose street-level windows were boarded up, its marquee still bearing the traces of letters from some long-forgotten theatre troupe’s appearance.

Then suddenly there was a brief, clustered spark of life: two very grand Victorian houses sitting side by side, the larger one with its lights ablaze and a grand wraparound porch filled with welcoming old-fashioned wooden chaises longues, and gliders and rockers.

“That’s our hotel!” I said, pointing to the painted wooden sign that read
The Homecoming Inn
.

Jeremy steered the car around the corner to a well-lighted parking lot behind the hotel, where there were only a scattering of cars. He turned off the ignition and we both let out a sigh of relief.

We trundled our suitcases up the walkway and across the hotel porch. The heavy front door had a small window covered with a white lace curtain. We pushed it open and entered a dark, old-fashioned parlor with formal chairs and a grandfather clock whose grave
tick-tock
was the only sound echoing in the hotel. The lobby was a smaller room at the foot of a staircase with paisley carpeting. Behind the stairs was an elevator; but we stopped at the broad reception counter and waited.

A young girl in a white blouse and black skirt was sitting sleepily behind it. When she saw us she straightened up, rose from her chair and attempted a professional smile. Jeremy gave her our name, and she consulted her computer, clacking away for a time, until she finally handed us our key.

“You’re all set,” she said shyly to Jeremy. “Do you need help with the bags?”

“I can manage. But can we get some supper?” Jeremy asked.

The girl hesitated, then said, “Well, the restaurant is closed. But I think I can send you up a cold plate.”