“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.
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.