The House at Mermaid's Cove(87)
We’d had to sell off some of the farmland to raise the extra cash, which had been a hard decision for Jack. He hadn’t liked the idea of people invading what had always been his family’s private sanctuary. But when I told him what a healing place the valley had been for me, how simply walking among the towering trees and fragrant shrubs had felt like a spiritual experience, he’d been persuaded that others should share that.
“I couldn’t even have contemplated it without you.” He squeezed my hand. “I was like a bird in a gilded cage. You opened the door, Alice.”
I smiled and leaned in close, brushing his cheek with my lips. If I had opened a door for Jack, then he had opened one for me—the day he’d gathered me up from where the sea had swept me, seen past the flotsam of my life, and given me the chance to be the person I was meant to be.
It took us ten days to reach our destination. We stopped at Lisbon, then the island of Tenerife, and at various ports down the west coast of Africa before docking at Lobito in the Portuguese territory of Angola. It gave me a dizzy sense of déjà vu, stepping off the gangplank, as I had eleven years ago. Like a reluctant host, the smell rose up to greet me—the odor of decay mixed with engine oil and the tang of spices. Women dressed in brilliant colors stared out from behind market stalls stacked with swordfish, bushmeat, cigarettes, and soap. Men milled around, loading cargo, piling suitcases. Mangy dogs and skinny cats lurked in the shadows, hiding from the burning sun.
We faced a long and dusty train ride east, across the border to the Belgian Congo, but I didn’t mind and neither did Jack—especially when the motion of the wheels lulled Ned to sleep and I broke the news I’d been longing to reveal.
“A baby?” Jack stared at me, a bewildered smile on his face. “How long have you known?”
“Well, I wasn’t sure, but I suspected before we left Cornwall.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” The smile stretched into a beaming grin.
“I . . . I was afraid you might change your mind. That if you knew there was a baby on the way, you might think it was too much, taking on the twins as well.” I felt ashamed, looking into those liquid eyes. I knew I shouldn’t have doubted him. “I’m sorry—it was underhanded of me. But I—”
“Alice!” He put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me to him. “I know how much it means to you. The house is big enough for a dozen children, if that’s what you want.”
“Hmm—I think four’s enough to be going on with, don’t you?” With a wry smile I glanced at Ned, whose head had shifted sideways in my lap. His mouth was opening and closing, as if he were catching flies in his sleep.
With his free hand, Jack reached across to stroke Ned’s hair. “He’s going to be a busy little fellow, isn’t he, with a new brother and sister to take home and another one on the way?”
I put my hand on top of his. “Did you ever imagine, in your wildest dreams, that you’d marry an ex-nun who’d drag you halfway across the world to adopt a couple of orphans?”
“Did you ever imagine you’d fall in love with a man who’d send you into a war zone with enough dynamite strapped to your body to blow up ten bridges?”
We both started laughing then, covering our mouths, trying not to wake Ned.
By the time the border guard came to check our documents, Jack had fallen asleep, too. I put my finger to my lips as the carriage door opened. I had the passports in my handbag.
“Thank you, Lady Trewella,” the guard whispered as he handed them back.
It still sounded strange, that new name. But I’d had so many names since the day the sea had washed away the trappings of my old life: Sister Anthony had given way to Alice; Alice had turned into Jean-Luc; Jean-Luc had doubled as Ariel; and Ariel had become Soeur Antoine, before reverting to Alice again. Now I was Lady Alice, Viscountess Trewella.
I looked out of the window, at the great African sky studded with a million glittering stars. My hand went to the silver chain that hung around my neck—a gift from Jack, to hold the ring that I’d worn as a nun. It was a symbol of my old life and I had not wanted to part with it.
A song drifted through my head as I ran my fingers over the curve of the ring, my eyes still on the stars: “Regina Caeli.” “The Queen of Heaven.” Those Latin words had been the first I’d heard while lying on the sand, hovering between life and death. Jack’s voice, singing me home.
Afterword
The idea for The House at Mermaid’s Cove came to me in an ancient church on Cornwall’s northwest coast. Saint Senara’s, in the village of Zennor, contains a medieval bench end, carved more than five hundred years ago, with the image of a mermaid. The carving is said to have been made as a warning to the congregation. According to legend, a chorister, Matthew Trewella, was lured into the sea at Pendour Cove by a mermaid who came to the church in disguise to hear his beautiful singing.
The church’s name echoes the centuries-old link between Cornwall and the region of Brittany on France’s northwest coast. Saint Senara is thought to have been the sixth-century Irish princess Asenora, who was married to a Breton king. Folklore has it that the king’s mother disliked her because of her Christian faith, and when Asenora became pregnant, persuaded her son that his wife had been unfaithful. Asenora was nailed to a barrel and cast adrift but was visited by an angel while floating in the sea and washed ashore in Cornwall, where her baby was born—a son with whom she eventually founded Christian communities in Cornwall. The idea of an anguished woman being washed onto a Cornish beach mingled in my mind with the mermaid legend and grew into the opening chapter of the novel.