A Rather Remarkable Homecoming (17 page)

Simon’s face looked like a small boy’s as he beamed with abashed pleasure. “Certainly, young lady!” he said with great dignity. “Mr. Coward told me my rendition of
Red Peppers
was, and I quote, ‘bright as a button’.”

By lunchtime Trevor Branwhistle was on hand to personally welcome Simon. Both men immediately engaged in a very animated conversation about the latest version of
Hamlet
currently in London. They invited Jeremy and me to join them in the dining hall for lunch, but we were eager to head back into town and get some supplies for our stay at Shannon and Geoff’s cottage.

So I gave Simon a kiss, and told him I’d be back to visit soon. He seized my hand, squeezed it, and said with bright eyes, “Darling Penny, you are a treasure.”

 

“Simon will be just fine,” Jeremy assured me now, as if reading my mind. We were driving away from town and heading for Shannon and Geoff’s farm.

“Good thing we found Simon when we did,” I said grimly. “I don’t think he was going to last much longer where he was.”

“So what kind of bargain did you have to make with Rollo to get his help busting Simon out?” Jeremy asked suspiciously.

“Um, well, somehow Rollo got wind of the fact that Grandmother’s house in Cornwall is up for grabs,” I said, flushing a bit guiltily. “And Rollo really does have fond memories of summering at Port St. Francis as a kid.”

“Rollo has fond memories of every freebie he ever got,” Jeremy answered.

“Well, he said he could do with ‘a bit of Cornish R&R’, so I asked Shannon if she had any space for Rollo. She’s renting him a small cottage next to ours,” I blurted out, then added hastily, “but it’s only for a week.”

Jeremy rolled his eyes, then changed the subject. “You do realize,” he said, “now that we’ve committed to spending July in Cornwall, we’ve also committed to solving this case. Otherwise, they’ll lynch us. So—the question is, can it be done?”

“Only if we come up with more than I’ve found so far,” I admitted gloomily. “Some scrap of evidence that it was really the Bard who showed up in Port St. Francis, let alone in Grandma’s house! Trevor isn’t going to like it, but that fragment of manuscript isn’t as earth-shattering as he’d hoped.”

I sighed. “How’d you make out with the stay-of-execution for Grandma’s house?”

“It has to go through a few legal hoops and get signed off by a judge. Even so, it would just be a temporary halt to the sale of the house and property,” Jeremy reminded me. “We’ll know soon if it’s going to come through.”

“Okay,” I said, leaning my head back and gazing out the window.

 

We followed the directions that Shannon had given me, and were now passing her farmland, which was sprawled out across a series of lush, green undulating hills. Wooden fences and gates rimmed fertile fields with neat rows of plantings, and a horse paddock and rich pastures for the sheep and cows to graze on. Shannon and Geoff resided at a great big rambling old farmhouse that sat close to the road, beyond which were dirt paths that led to barns, silos and various-sized outbuildings that had once belonged to tenant farmworkers. Our cottage was the largest of these, at the end of its own unpaved driveway. It was tucked away in a nice corner of land that eventually bordered the property which the town had acquired through Harriet near Grandmother Beryl’s.

When I got out of the car, I stopped short in delight. Parked on the lawn were two bicycles, one blue, one rose-colored. The blue one had a saddlebag; the rose one had an antique country basket in front. I squealed with delight, and Jeremy beamed, proud of the little surprise he’d arranged for me.

“His-and-her bikes!” I exclaimed. “They’re adorable, so old-fashioned!”

“They only look old-fashioned,” Jeremy corrected. “They’re brand-new, see the gears? The whole thing is ergonomically balanced. Try it out. The guy at the shop in town said you might want to stop in after you’ve ridden it a bit, and he’ll adjust it for your height. You have long legs, but I think this looks like it’s right for you.”

“Are these ours for keeps?” I asked, drawing nearer, for I saw my name painted on the fender at the front.

“Yep. Best way to get around town,” Jeremy advised. “The guy in the grocery store told me there won’t be a car-parking space available on the street until September. An exaggeration, perhaps, but why struggle? Just don’t forget to lock your cycle when you leave it in town. There are plenty of bike racks in Port St. Francis for that.”

I was already wheeling around the front yard to test it out. “This is perfect!” I cried. “I’m on my way to the hall of records to see if old Will Shakespeare got a traffic ticket or something.”

“Have some lunch first,” Jeremy advised, reading a note tacked to the front door. “Shannon says we can have use of the cottage vegetable garden as long as we tend it ourselves. She says she left us some ham and eggs and goat’s cheese in the refrig. We can make a hell of a chef’s salad.”

My stomach growled. “Okay!” I said, hopping off and knocking down the kickstand.

Well. We ate. And then, we fell asleep from the long drive. And then we said, heck, let’s go for a swim at the town beach. And then we collected seashells to decorate the cottage with, and we stopped for an ice cream cone. And if you’ve ever had ice cream in England, well, that’s about as dreamy and creamy as it gets anywhere. My cone was lined with melted dark chocolate, and the ice cream was that pure fresh vanilla with the little bean bits in it, and the whole thing was topped with crushed hazelnuts.

We then went down to the pier where the fishermen were selling the catch of the day, and we bagged a fish for dinner. After that I barely had the strength to pedal back home.

And how sweet it was to return to the quiet little cottage that sat in its lush garden away from the roar of the sea, with only the sound of birds chirping in the trees around us. Jeremy loved the rough wood table in the kitchen where we dumped out the groceries, and he set to work chopping vegetables, making me read aloud to him from the cookbooks that my dad had given him.

 

We spent the next day working like field hands in our own little garden, which had several varieties of lettuce, spinach, and other vegetable and herb plantings, some still under cold frame.

“Absolutely no pesticides are to be used here!” Shannon warned us when she and Geoffrey stopped by to see how we were doing. She showed us how to use a spray of water-and-garlic instead.

Geoff handed Jeremy a large, beautiful head of lettuce. “No chemicals. The only thing you have to worry about with
my
lettuce is that maybe a rabbit pissed on it. That won’t kill you.”

“As long as that’s all the rabbit does,” Jeremy said wickedly. Geoff grinned, and showed Jeremy how to let the ducks wander about in the garden paths picking off some of the pests. While we were strolling about knee-high in vegetables, a curious bird landed on Geoff’s shoulder and then flew away again.

Geoff shrugged. “They get used to you,” he said.

I had never been on a farm before, so I guess I can be excused for spending the better part of a week learning how to milk a cow, and collect eggs from bossy hens, and herd sheep (Tip: let the sheepdogs lead you, they know where to go) and how to divide the roots of seedlings to plant vegetables in raised beds.

Then I would go visit Simon to make sure he was getting along all right, and after that, Jeremy and I would check out the nearby courthouse. We scoured old legal files about Port St. Francis, hoping to discover that Shakespeare had sued somebody out here or poached deer—anything to prove he’d been around.

In the later afternoon, we’d go down to Grandmother Beryl’s cove for a swim, and we’d ransack the house to see if we could turn up anything that Harriet and Trevor may have overlooked, like a diary by old Will, or a letter or a sonnet, or even one of those starched ruffs with his name sewn in the tag . . . I was desperate to find anything that could be linked to him. But there was nothing. Zippo.

We’d bicycle back to the cottage at sunset, where I’d collapse in a hammock in the back garden, and laze about until I got up the energy to help Jeremy with dinner. At night, we lay on our backs together on the patio chairs to watch the stars spread themselves across the sky with stunning clarity, the likes of which you never see in well-lit cities.

“This is a good life. I think I want to be a farmer’s wife forever,” I declared as we climbed into the big bed and snuggled under the pale, undyed linens and hemp bedspread. We didn’t stir until the farmyard rooster squawked about the sun before it was humanly possible to do so.

And thus we were, in our little Eden in merry olde England . . . until one day when the party came to an unceremonious end.

“
T
he earl has gone bung!” Harriet announced on the telephone the next morning, in a strange, unusually urgent tone. “He’s finally agreed to sell that big plot of land adjacent to the town property at your grandmother’s. He’s been waffling back and forth on this, but my sources say the Mosley brothers got to him at last. So, the pressure on the town to fasttrack this deal is enormous. If you’re going to come up with something, it’s got to be now.”

She really sounded rattled, so I said promptly, “Okay, we’ll put it into high gear.”

But when I hung up, I had no idea what we’d do. Jeremy had just come out of the shower, toweling his hair dry, and I filled him in. “We can’t just wait around for some injunction to come through,” I said, adding dramatically, “this train has left the station and it’s got no brakes.”

“Steady on,” Jeremy counseled. “I agree that we’ve got to do more. But let’s not do anything foolish. I’d better head back to London and stay one step ahead of the Mosleys, to make sure they don’t interfere with the injunction. You want to come with me?”

“Hmmm?” I said absently. “No, I think one of us had better stay here and push on the local front.”

Jeremy eyed me suspiciously. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Oh, I just thought I’d check out the local library records,” I fibbed. “You never know.”

 

Actually, oddly enough, in the end it wasn’t a lie. Not really. I
did
go to a library—but it wasn’t the Port St. Francis Library. It just so happened that the day Jeremy left for London was the one day of the week when the earl’s mansion was open to the public for a house tour. Now, I certainly couldn’t wait for Jeremy to return. I
had
to go that day. Therefore, the library I found myself in was the earl’s.

His grand manor house, which looked more like a castle to me, sat serenely facing its own private headland that jutted out to the sea. If the earl wanted to, he could look to his right and see Grandmother Beryl’s house and cove. But the earl’s property also extended in the other direction, encompassing over a hundred fifty acres of woodland, streams, meadows, farmland and spectacular formal gardens.

I arrived at the earl’s place on my bicycle, just as a tour bus was entering the main gate. I followed the bus up the front drive through meticulous parkland, and tucked my bike under a tree. The tour group exited the bus and was herded together in the gravel driveway, where I joined them. Together we shuffled forward like polite buffalo, while the guide, a rather snippy Scotswoman with blonde-grey hair informed us that the house had thirty-nine rooms, not including the “recent” addition in 1802 of a tower. She made us line up like school-kids before she let us inside through the big front doors that were flanked by giant lions.

“This is the great hall,” the guide announced, as we stood in a very imposing main foyer. “It was used for important banquets when it was built in 1079. This staircase was built later, in the mid-1800s, of Carrara marble imported from Italy. Above, you see the visitors’ gallery, and these portraits are all important family members, extending throughout the centuries.”

We all craned our necks to view paintings—which the guide called “pictures”—of various ladies with lace-trimmed white bosoms, and men with pencil-thin moustaches and wary expressions in their eyes.

“Note the green paint on the walls,” the guide intoned, “which originally got their color from the use of arsenic. And to your right, we see the first parlor. Note the crimson damask fabric on the wall, which was quite the rage in the nineteenth century.”

We continued to shuffle about obediently with sufficient awe, as the guide pointed out a Van Dyck here and a Gainsborough there and a Wedgwood vase over yonder. The dining room was a “saloon” and the music room was “the round room” and the view out of each window was spectacular.

Finally we reached the enormous library. While the tour guide nattered on in breathless admiration of the statistics of the earl’s collection—how many books it held (squillions), how long they’d been mouldering there on the shelf (eons), how the loyal servants had rescued the books from a house fire in the 1800s (truly heroic)—I found myself staring across the velvet ropes into an adjacent alcove, where the manor house’s ancient books were kept in a series of tall shelves with lattice doors.

While the guide went into the history of the King James Bible, I casually squinted at the volumes in the alcove, and saw that among these books were account records, meticulously kept year by year, down through the centuries. The section on the 1600s was right ahead of me, and as I peered at the spines, one volume in particular caught my eye, for it was labelled
The Earl’s Players
.

I stifled a gasp, quietly transfixed for so long that I scarcely noticed the tour group moving on without me. They followed the guide into the next room without ever realizing that I’d been left behind; and I heard their voices successively fading away as they continued from room to room, until there was nothing left but silence, the empty library, and me. And that roped-off alcove.

It was inches away. Quick as a cat, I ducked under the rope and slipped into the darkened cubbyhole. A weak shaft of light came from a very narrow, stained-glass window. I knew I wouldn’t have much time, so I grabbed
The Earl’s Players
and opened it right there, gently but quickly turning the pages.