The House at Mermaid's Cove(86)

“Isn’t that a wonderful sight?” I leaned over the rail of the liner, craning my neck.

“It is.” Jack’s hand was on my shoulder. “Hard to believe it’s more than a year since the place was liberated. Even harder to believe that we played a part in bringing it about.”

Another, smaller hand tugged at my skirt. “Mummy, is it dinnertime yet? I’m hungry.”

I bent down to straighten the captain’s cap that had slipped so far back on Ned’s head that it was about to fall off. Merle and Fred had given it to him on his birthday, and he insisted on wearing it all the time, even at the table. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, it won’t be long now. I promise.” I glanced at Jack. “We’ll have to ask if he can have his meals earlier in future.”

Jack dropped to his knees, his head level with Ned’s. “Tonight’s a special occasion,” he said. “That’s why you’re allowed to stay up late, with all the grown-ups. It’s Mummy and Daddy’s wedding anniversary. Do you remember that day?”

Ned nodded. “I was hiding behind the door with Auntie Merle. And when you came out of the church, we throwed those things at you.”

“Rose petals.” Jack smiled up at me. “They stuck in Mummy’s hair, didn’t they? She looked like the fairy queen.”

“And then we had currant cake—and Louis was sick on Danny’s dress.”

“It’s funny, what kids remember, isn’t it?” Jack murmured as we made our way down to the dining room. “What sticks in my mind is all the faces. The smiles. People like Leo Badger and George Retallack—the whole village, crammed into the church, singing their hearts out.”

“Is that all you remember?” I nudged him in the ribs with my elbow.

“Well, of course, I couldn’t wait for it to get dark.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “We were lucky it was so warm, weren’t we? And thank heaven for the blackout . . .”

The memory of our wedding night was as vivid as if it had happened days ago, not two whole years before. Jack had laughed when I’d asked if we could spend it at the boathouse. He said he’d thought of taking me to London—to somewhere fancy, like the Ritz. But it had been magical, lying outside on a blanket, listening to the lap of the waves and the piping cries of the seabirds, watching the sky turn scarlet in the west as the sun disappeared, counting the stars as they began to appear. And then, when it was dark enough to know that no one could possibly see us, we’d begun undressing each other.

In the morning we’d found rose petals everywhere. They must have tumbled out of our clothes. I’d even found some in my underwear. The tide was in and we’d run into the waves, wading out as far as the barricade across the cove before wrapping arms and legs around each other and making love again, right there, in the water.

There hadn’t been time for a proper honeymoon. Although we could no longer make the clandestine runs across to Brittany, there was plenty for us to do. As well as intercepting messages and training the agents who were still being parachuted in, we had two hundred American soldiers camping in the cow pastures beyond the walled garden. They were building a road through the valley to the beach, preparing for the tanks that would soon be on their way to France for the D-Day landings.

“Mummy, will there be ice cream?” Ned’s voice brought me back to reality.

“We’ll have to wait and see,” I replied. “You’ll have to eat up all your dinner first.”

Later, when he was tucked up in bed, we sat outside the cabin in deck chairs, sipping champagne. I reminded Jack of the day, eight months after the wedding, when we’d sat on the rocks above the cove watching hundreds of American troops massing at the water’s edge, about to embark for the Normandy beaches.

“Yes, I remember,” he said. “We’d just been to see the stone, hadn’t we? We counted all the tanks and jeeps as they came down the valley. It was never ending—and we watched them all being loaded onto the landing ship.”

I nodded. On that day, June 1, 1944, Jack had erected a granite tombstone in the churchyard in memory of Morwenna. It gave the dates of her birth and death, and the fact that she was the mother of Edward John Trewella. It had been Jack’s final act of contrition, his way of making peace with the past. We’d taken Ned with us to see the stone put in place and explained to him that his real mummy had died when he was a baby—just like Jack’s mother, whose gravestone was just yards away. We’d been worried about Ned’s reaction, but he didn’t cry. He stared at the inscription for a while, then heard the shouting in the cove below. Half an hour later he was so engrossed in watching the American troops he seemed to have forgotten everything else.

Jack reached for my hand. “I wish they hadn’t had to blow up the boathouse. That upset you terribly, I know.”

The memory of seeing the shattered ruins of my old home brought a lump to my throat. They’d had to dynamite it to make way for the tanks they were transporting to France.

“We’ll rebuild it, I promise, when we open the place up to the public,” he said. “The War Office has a fund to help put things back to how they used to be.”

“I’m looking forward to that,” I replied. “To working with you on the house and the gardens.” That was how we planned to live: inviting the outside world in to experience the history and beauty of the Penheligan estate. Merle and Fred were already hard at work, converting one of the barns into a tearoom, which Merle was going to run while Fred helped us restore the lush tranquility of the tropical groves Jack’s ancestors had created.