The Snow Globe (35 page)

Stephen had cleaned the glass, polished it so that it looked almost as good as new. It had taken him some time to find, almost the entire day, but he'd been determined. Feeling with his feet, pulling back heather and bracken and gorse, he'd walked back and forth, searching the area Daisy had pointed out to him when she'd said, “It landed there.” The last person he'd expected to meet was Nancy, out walking—hand in hand—with the chap from Beacon House. And lost for words, for a reason why he was there, rummaging among the heather, he had told her: “I'm looking for Daisy's snow globe. She threw it from up there last Christmas,” he'd said,
nodding to the ridge, “and she told me it landed somewhere about here.”

“Oh yes, last Christmas,” Nancy had said, just as though she knew and understood how someone could do such a thing
then
.

Nancy had insisted that she would help him look, and Stephen saw her peck her companion on the cheek, heard her tell him that she'd see him later. And Stephen learned more about Nancy in the hour that came afterward than in all the previous eighteen years at Eden Hall. Searching through the bracken and heather with him, she told Stephen all about her fiancé, John Bradley, killed at the Battle of the Somme: about his farm and their plans, his love of that part of the country, and his love of her.

“We both wanted a large family,” she said, staring into the distance and smiling. “Yes . . . seven, we used to say . . . because seven is a lucky number. Four boys and three girls, I thought. But only because John would need the boys to help him on the farm, you see.”

When, eventually, Stephen found the globe in a tangle of wild rose and honeysuckle, garlanded with bryony, its glass intact and glinting in the early-evening sun, he'd felt how he imagined Howard Carter must've felt discovering Tutankhamen's tomb. He'd picked it up and kissed it. And holding it to his breast, closing his eyes for a moment, he could have sworn he felt a faint vibration and couldn't help but think of Daisy's heart. And then Nancy came forward and kissed him on the cheek.

She said, “I hope that girl knows what she has in you, Stephen Jessop . . . what she could have.”

Clutching the globe to his chest, Stephen had watched Nancy walk back up the hillside and disappear under the trees that
bordered the grounds of Eden Hall, and he'd made a wish that she'd know another love in this lifetime. She'd never have her lucky seven with the man she'd loved, not now. But she deserved some happiness, deserved to be loved again.

Later, when Mr. Forbes had appeared in the kitchen of the cottage, Stephen had been surprised. Not so much by the man's appearance as the manner of it: for he hadn't even knocked on the door, but had burst in—as though a baby had just been born.

“Stephen,” he'd said, extending his hand, smiling, “I don't think I've ever been happier to see anyone in my entire life.”

When Stephen took hold of the hand, the man had pulled him to himself, hugging him tightly. It had been rather embarrassing. It wasn't as though he'd returned from any war; he'd only been down in the valley.

“I need to ask you something,” Mr. Forbes said, stepping back, and with unusually intense and glistening eyes. “I need to ask you if you love Daisy . . . and I need you to tell me the truth.”

The truth. It wasn't something Howard Forbes had been too extravagant with of late. But it was a question Stephen was able to answer unequivocally and without any hesitation.

“Yes, sir,” said Stephen, looking the man in the eye, “I do. I love her.”

Howard Forbes nodded. He rubbed his hands together. “Life is very short,” he said. “Too short for some . . .” He glanced up. “Could you do me a favor, Stephen? Could you come over to the house in . . .” He shook his head. “No, no—not the house. Could you meet me by the pond in . . . in, say, half an hour?”

Stephen shrugged. “I suppose so,” he said. “Though I was hoping to catch up with—”

But he'd gone.

Then he was back: “Oh, and Stephen, no more
sir
, or
Mr. Forbes
, please. I think we've known each other long enough to dispense with formalities, don't you? My name is Howard.”

Stephen lifted his jacket from the hook on the back of the door, slipped the globe inside his pocket and headed out of the cottage. He hoped Mr. Forbes—he couldn't possibly start calling the man Howard, he thought—wouldn't keep him too long and he'd be able to find Daisy.

Mabel and Howard stood together at Daisy's bedroom window, watching their daughter as she waited beneath a luminous flickering sky.

Mabel gripped Howard's hand tighter. “I do wish he'd hurry up,” she said.

“He'll be there.”

But Mabel was anxious. Doubt made her so. An unreliable father had made her so. The only person she'd ever been sure of was Howard, and, bizarrely, even through what they now referred to as the Wilderness Years.

Mabel's mouth twitched and then curved up at one side. They had come through it. They had come through their crisis, somehow held on and weathered their estrangement. They had made it to the other side of twenty-five years.

Together, they had witnessed the dawn of a new century, the death of a queen and empress, and war; and cars and airplanes and telephones; the gramophone and the wireless. It was hard to imagine what else might be invented, or change. But the business, Forbes and Sons, a family business that had been there and grown over two centuries, was finished, or would be soon enough.

Times had changed, fortunes had been made and lost, and would be made and lost again. It was, as her husband had said, the way of the world, and would continue to be so long after they were gone. Where their daughters' lives would take them, how they and any future grandchildren might live, Mabel had no idea. The only thing she was certain of was that her heart belonged to the man at her side. He had been her love—her first love, her only love—and she knew now that he would be for the remainder of her days.

Daisy knew. There was nothing she could do about it. Her life was bound to him, every perfect memory wrapped around him, each shining minute spent with him. And a future without him at its center was not a future she wished to contemplate.

She wasn't sure how her father knew Stephen was back, or how he knew Stephen would be at the lily pond at that time, but neither did she care. The only thing that mattered was that he
was
back. But did he still love her? So many months had passed since she'd read his words—as fresh and breathtaking to her now as the clear evening air:
I love all of you . . . everything about you . . .
But what had happened to that note? Had his precious words been destroyed,
torn up and thrown onto a fire or into a wastebasket? Were they and the passion behind them lost—lost forever? It made her heart shrivel to think such a thing. And then she realized: They could never be lost, because they had been read, read and devoured and forever remembered by her: the person to whom they had been addressed.

Sitting on the bench by the pond, Daisy smiled and stared upward, and with her gaze locked heavenward she contemplated the extraordinary and inexplicable nature of love and loves, so infinite, so varied, over millennia and centuries. What strange alchemy, she wondered, made two people know and understand they belonged with each other; that their lives could only ever be whole and complete together? Who or what had arranged such magnificent chemistry?

Then an owl—singular, tremulous, connecting and clear—called out to her. The evergreens took on an ethereal glow and the infinitesimal stars began to appear. Diamonds in the sky, she thought. The universe never had been black-and-white. And like a revelation, a profound momentary connection during which she and the earth and the moon and the stars—and everything she had been and would be—fused and became one, she finally understood the smallness of her body and the greatness of her love.

Sensing his nearness, she rose to her feet; hearing his footsteps, she turned. And desperate, trembling, weak with longing, and uttering only one word—his name—she stepped toward him and buried her face in his warmth. She held on to him tightly as they swayed, gently swayed, just as they had at sunrise.

“Never let go of me.”

“I have to,” he said. “But only for a moment, because I have something for you.”

And with his eyes fixed on hers, he reached into his pocket, lifted her hand and placed the globe in her palm.

“You found it . . .” She looked up at him again. “You found it and you're here, and I thought you'd gone.”

He said nothing. He took her head in his hands, lowered his face to hers and kissed her. And kissed her. And kissed her.

Daisy would never be able to recall quite how long that first kiss between them lasted, though Stephen would always claim it had gone on until every one of Eden Hall's lights had been extinguished. He would tell their children, and later, their grandchildren, how he'd had to wait eleven years—his age again—to kiss the girl he'd fallen in love with at eleven; that he'd danced with her as the sun rose and finally kissed her as it set. And each and every Christmas, when the globe came out, he'd tell the story again: about the late summer's day he'd found a snow globe, and a mother,
and
got his girl.

Firstly, special thanks to Ellen Edwards, my editor, for her patience and good advice, and to all of the team at NAL/Penguin Random House; special thanks also to my agent, Deborah Schneider at Gelfman Schneider in New York, and to Sam Copeland at Rogers, Coleridge and White in London.

Thank you to the lovely Jo Rees and Doug Kean, and to my friends and first readers—Harriett Jagger, Rivinia Ahearne, Dixie Jenks and Sophie Durlacher. Thanks also to Tim O'Kelly and my favorite bookshop: One Tree Books at Petersfield, Hampshire. Huge and heartfelt thanks to all of my readers, and to my friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook. And, as ever, I send my unending love to Bella, to Max and to Jeremy.

Finally, I am forever indebted to my late agent and friend, Ali
Gunn, who passed away in Switzerland as I was writing
The Snow Globe
. Her extraordinary passion for life and faith in me continue to be a source of inspiration and strength.

JK
HAMPSHIRE, ENGLAND
SEPTEMBER 2014