A Gathering Storm(6)

Lucy had been dearly fond of her father’s mother, but childhood visits to the musty London mansion flat could be something of an ordeal. There was an air of shabby grandeur about the place, an expectance of best behaviour. Angelina Cardwell liked Lucy to dress nicely, which Lucy sometimes fought against, causing ructions between her parents. Her mother Gabriella held that people should be allowed to wear what they liked, while her father argued that best clothes were a form of respect, and that Granny Cardwell liked to see little girls in pretty dresses and proper leather shoes, not jeans and trainers. Since Gabriella refused to accompany Tom and Lucy on these visits, Tom usually won. As she grew into her teens, Lucy came to enjoy the challenge of meeting Granny’s high standards whilst satisfying her own colourful sense of style. Granny didn’t mind clothes being fashionable, indeed she rather approved.

The three of them would sit together on the over-stuffed chairs and drink tea served by Granny’s Polish daily woman, and chat about what Lucy had been doing at school and whether Granny, who suffered badly from nerves and arthritis, was well enough to join some friends on a cruise. As far as Lucy remembered, she never was.

One Sunday afternoon, in a pensive mood, Lucy investigated the box she’d taken from her father’s study. Angelina’s cake-tin contained a lock of Tom’s baby hair folded in tissue; a birthday card he’d made her, drawn in a childish hand; a pair of knitted mittens. She fitted a finger inside one. Had her father really once had hands tiny enough for these?

There were a few letters and postcards he had sent his parents from school, or from holidays. And lots more photographs: only one or two of Tom as a toddler, but several of him as a schoolboy, then a teenager. Here was a photograph of her parents’ wedding, a picture of herself aged three in her mother’s arms, with the large green teddy she’d famously won at a fairground. All these her grandmother had collected together in this box of memories and it made Lucy feel both sad and happy at the same time to look at them.

She put the cake-tin aside to find what else was in the box. There were none of her father’s identity documents, but she supposed Helena would have needed to keep hold of those. There were yet more photographs, from further back in time, a rare one of her Grandfather Gerald as a young man, before he was wounded. She only remembered him faintly, an alarming-looking old gentleman with a scarred face and a glass eye.

An Elizabethan house with high chimneys featured often. In one snapshot an elfin maid was shaking a duster from an open window, in another, a troupe of five children played croquet on the lawn. There were two boys in the picture, one dark, one fair, both older than the girl who was Granny. The youngest child, a glum, square-faced girl, squinted at the camera, pointing her mallet like a rifle – that must be Great-Aunt Hetty. A slender dark girl hung shyly in the background. Lucy had no idea who she could be.

Her grandmother had sometimes talked about the house on the south Cornish coast where she’d been brought up. Carlyon, she’d called it, Carlyon Manor. It was gone now, she’d say. Lucy wasn’t sure how. Lucy next unearthed a black and white postcard of a seaside town. St Florian, the caption said. That was where Carlyon was, she remembered now.

She went back to the photograph of the children at Carlyon. It was sad to think of the change time had wrought. Granny’s eldest brother Edward was dead, killed in the war. Great-Uncle Peter was still alive, but living in Manhattan, and little heard of. Great-Aunt Hetty, a rather grumpy lady whom she only saw on important family occasions, lived in a residential home somewhere, and had been too unwell to come to Lucy’s father’s funeral.

There was nothing so far about Great-Uncle Rafe. It seemed indeed that he’d been wiped from the family annals. What on earth had he done? Lucy delved once more into the box and brought out a photograph that had caught itself in a corner. She’d almost missed it. As she studied it she felt she was staring into the face of someone she’d known once, long ago, but forgotten. Could this young man be Rafe?





Chapter 3


The Mermaid Inn on the quay in St Florian had been newly painted the colour of clotted cream. On the bright sign, an alabaster-skinned siren lolled in the surf. Lucy smiled at the mischievous look in her eye and walked inside.

The reception area was empty, though a delicious smell of frying butter suggested that someone couldn’t be far away. The ping of the bell brought a round-faced young woman with a scrappy ponytail, who struggled through the service door with a parcel of clean laundry and dumped it next to the desk.

‘Sorry to keep you, lovely,’ she said. ‘They’re all late with deliveries today. What can I do for you?’