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.
The character of Alice was inspired by Marie Louise Habets （1905–1986）， whose life was the subject of Kathryn Hulme’s book The Nun’s Story （published by Frederick Muller Ltd., 1956）， which was made into a film starring Audrey Hepburn. Marie Louise was a Belgian nun who served as a nurse in the Congo but left the religious life because of a crisis of conscience during World War II. The story of Alice is purely fictional, but many of the challenges she faces mirror those experienced by Marie Louise.
The description of the twin babies Alice discovers about to be buried alive with their dead mother is based on a real incident related by Charles F. Hayward in his book Women Missionaries （Collins, 1906）， in which the father-in-law of the explorer David Livingstone came upon a group of native men digging a grave for a dead woman and her two living children and begged the men to let him take the boy and girl.
The setting for The House at Mermaid’s Cove is based on the Trebah estate and the tiny fishing village of Durgan on Cornwall’s south coast, between Falmouth and the Helford River. Warmed by the Gulf Stream and indented by steep, narrow valleys running down to the sea, this part of Cornwall is home to some of the most beautiful gardens in the world. The unique microclimate means that plants and trees often grow faster and stronger here than in their own countries of origin.
Jack Trewella’s ancestral home, Penheligan, is a hybrid of two historic Cornish mansions, Cotehele, near the border with Devon, and Lanhydrock, near Bodmin. Both houses are more than four centuries old, and both contain depictions of the pelican symbol mentioned in the novel.