Page 5 of A Cornish Love Story
The Cornish Sands series was full of letters: love letters between star-crossed lovers declaring their intentions, between members of the Rosevar family discussing secrets that really shouldn’t have been written down, except that the plots would have been thin without them; notes passed between children sitting at school desks, and dropped through unsuspecting letterboxes in the fictional Cornish village Spence had created. There was something about having the stories partly told in those scribbled monologues, when the characters had nobody to interrupt them, and no immediate judgement on what they were saying. It meant they could be more honest. The letters between Amelie and Connor inThe Whispers of the Sandshad been my favourites, and I’d been gearing myself up for their perfect happy-ever-after, then completely blindsided when it didn’t happen.
‘I can’t wait for the letters,’ I admitted.
Spence laughed. ‘My dear, you’re going to be writing them with me. A true collaboration. Your name on the cover alongside mine. And all you need to do, before we start, is get inside and see the house.’
I folded over the corner of the magazine’s cover, pressing it hard so the crease was permanent. ‘Not every architect would bother attending the sales event of their project, would they?’ I so badly wanted this to be true.
‘What utter piffle,’ Spence scolded. ‘Have youseenthe photos, Georgie? Read the piece? It’s a feat of sheer magnificence. A modern marvel. Of course he’s going to be there.’
I wanted to open a window to let the breeze banish the close air in the bungalow. I needed to help Spence with her correspondence, and make a list of all the things I had to get done at the open house, so that I could get enough information to satisfy Spence and to write my piece for Wynn. Then I could leave it all firmly behind me.
‘It is beautiful,’ I said grudgingly, and looked at the magazine again, a master of my own punishment.
There he was, in all his handsome, stern deliciousness. That conker hair, long on top and untamed as it always would be, every single day of his life. His arms were folded across his chest, the action pressing the simple blue shirt tight against defined biceps, and showing off the strong shape of his shoulders, as if his body was a walking advert for his architectural prowess.
The photo had a plain black background, and there was something stark about the way he was looking straight at the lens. His face was impassive unless you knew him well, and I had done. I knew, for example, that there was a spray of freckles over his nose that the harsh light had bleached out – I couldn’t imagine him caring enough to ask them to be airbrushed away, and why would the editor bother? The freckles had softened him, a dot-to-dot that I’d once completedwith a biro while he’d protested weakly, a corner of his mouth lifting. I’d known him well, and I’d tried to forget him, after everything that had happened.
But now, here he was, in black and white and glossy colour: the person who had converted Tyller Klos from a deserted shell into a modern masterpiece.
I forced myself to read the paragraph, written in bold, the one the editor was drawing every reader’s eye to, the one they wanted you to notice even if you skipped over the rest.
Alperwick House has been reimagined by up-and-coming architect Ethan Sparks, who has returned to the village where he spent some of his formative years to give the house on the cliffs a second chance. This isolated, luxury mansion has a long history, an association with the famous writer S. E. Artemis, whose fictional family pile Tyller Klos was undoubtedly inspired by it. Now it has been renamed Sterenlenn, which in Cornish means ‘blanket of stars’, imbuing it with the romance of the remote, clifftop setting. ‘The house is a part of the landscape,’ Ethan says, leaning forward, his focus sharpening. ‘It’s a landmark along the coastline, a building seen and admired from land, sea and sky, and I wanted to keep that sense of it being organic alive in my redesign. The name, well …’ He pauses, nodding to himself. ‘It was never going to be called anything else.’
I stared out of the window, at the view of Spence’s manicured garden, then a tight cluster of rooftops down to the blue of the Atlantic, a soft haze over everything as the June sun rose steadily in the sky, banishing the dew. It was almost the longest day of the year, the light would be slow to fade, and I knew the evening – thisspecificevening – would be never-ending.
A shiver ran up my spine as the full realization hit me: everything I had to pull off, now that I knew the truth; the fundamental fact that, after so many years without him, I would be in the same room as Ethan. Because those words printed in the magazine, definite and un-smudgeable, confirmed that not only was he behind Tyller Klos’s transformation and would, in all probability, be at the event, but also that – even if he’d been trying as hard as I had – he hadn’t been able to forget about me, either.
Chapter Three
Now
The day was agonizingly quiet. I pottered through the tasks Spence had given me and kept an eye on the clock, which seemed to have ceased moving at its normal speed. Eventually it was time for me to change into my work outfit, collect my bag and leave.
I already felt like I was walking towards a doom-laden fate, and Spence came to wave me off at the door, which was a big deal for her and somehow made it all worse. I thought my best course of action was to minimize the whole thing, turn it into the list of simple actions she’d given me: take photos; ask polite, probing questions; have a nosy in all the rooms; find what you need to and get out.
I had memorized them while I was folding up Spence’s correspondence, sliding letters into envelopes,writing addresses on the front.One: take photos.Spence always replied to her fans using a fountain pen filled with navy ink, on pure cotton writing paper she got me to order online from L’Ecritoire.Two: ask polite, probing questions.Her handwriting was elegantly slanted, like something out of the earlier Cornish Sands books, when children had to practise their upstrokes and compound curves in school instead of learning how to turn on a computer.Three: have a nosy in all the rooms.I felt a sharp spike of adrenaline at the thought of slipping through the house unnoticed, seeing Ethan’s attention to detail embodied in every square foot.Four: find what you need to and get out.Spence hadn’t clarified exactly what I needed to find so we could resurrect Amelie and Connor, so I assumed it was that flash of creative inspiration at seeing the old mansion revitalized, a mental lightbulb flaring on.
Now, Spence pressed her palm into the door frame, her other hand clutching her stick. ‘Don’t sweat it,’ she said, when she saw me looking at her with concern.
‘Youare,’ I replied. ‘Can’t I help you back to your chair?’
‘That would completely negate me coming to the door to see you off.’
‘It was a struggle, though.’
‘Life is full of them. If it wasn’t, nobody would bother writing books. We’d all just sail through our days on a cloud of easy contentment, and where would the fun be in that?’
I thought of the last few days before Mum had gone, the mix of anger and loss mingled with guilt-tinged relief; of Ethan in my bedroom doorway all those years ago, a blink that took his expression from pleading to shuttered, before he turned and walked away from me; of the scattered beginnings of stories and ideas on my laptop and in various notebooks, none of them even close to ‘the end’. I would prefer easy contentment: it seemed a whole lot more fun than the alternative.
‘The struggles elevate the good parts,’ Spence went on, as if she could see the thoughts spinning through my head. ‘When I get back to my chair, I’ll be relieved and grateful, and I’ll have earned the Cornish pasty Denise is bringing me for my tea. It’ll be sweeter.’
Denise was Spence’s evening carer, a broad woman with dyed-scarlet hair, talons for nails and a voice so soft I sometimes wondered if I’d accidentally muted my surroundings. ‘And if tonight is so hideous I run screaming from Sterenlenn?’ I asked. It was the first time I’d said the name aloud, and I wanted to know how it sounded. Verdict? It sounded beautiful, as if music had been captured in those three syllables, and it was the perfect name for the house on the cliffs. I swallowed.
‘Then you’ll have felt everything out loud, and that can sometimes be a blessing.’ Spence patted my arm. ‘Off you trot. You don’t want to be late and draw even more attention to yourself. You’re far too pretty to be a journalist. Wynn could never send you undercover.’
I smiled at the compliment, and at the thought oftheNorth Cornwall Starcovering something so serious and newsworthy that they needed a reporter on the inside. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t get me to wear a bodycam so you could see tonight play out in real time.’
She gave me her wickedest grin. ‘I might win awards for my nosiness – the burden of every writer – but there are some things that simply aren’t for my eyes.’
