Dedication

 

To all the key workers across the globe who kept us going. To the doctors, nurses, teachers, healthcare workers, scientists, virologists. To everyone who worked so tirelessly to keep the wheels on the wagon. Thank you.

 

This book is for you. 

 

 

 

Note from the Author

 

Dear Reader, 

 

A series of lockdowns in the United Kingdom from 2020-21 meant I rarely travelled beyond the corner of Cornwall I’m lucky enough to call home. During this time, like so many of us, I was apart from friends and family and people I loved were lost and unwell. This was unsettling and also frightening at times. Seeking solace I spent a lot of time walking along the banks of the Fowey, watching the river flow and the reflections of trees and clouds trembling in the water. There’s something timeless about a riverbank and I found comfort in this. How many other people had wandered these footpaths? Rested in the shade of the trees? Glimpsed the sapphire dart of a kingfisher? Who else had written about these places? And what stories were waiting to be told?

 

On my walks I explored the world of the river. When the tide turned and the sand was exposed I would tug on my wellies and walk along the shore. Further along the riverbank, tucked inside a wooded meander, I came across an abandoned house. Totally concealed from the lane and invisible from the small town across the river, it was a secret and magical place shielded by tangles of brambles and specimen plants gone rogue. The winding drive was cracked, the house wore an ivy shawl and the small boathouse slipped further into the river with each turning tide. When the water peeled away the ribs of old boats rose from the sand and the shore was covered in oyster shells. It felt as though I had stepped into another world and a story whispered to me in the magical way stories do.

 

For the next ten months Oyster Shore became my escape (and my obsession!) as the story and characters took shape. I lost myself in writing and when I walked along the riverbank I was always surprised not to see the places and people I was spending so much time with. The book evolved and grew and my patient editor and readers waited for it far longer than I ever anticipated – but these have been extraordinary times and this is a novel which helped me through them. 

 

I really hope you enjoy the world of Oyster Shore.

 

x Ruth x

 

 

Prologue

1963

London

Gerald

​

Each night, during the dreadful hours before daylight came, Gerald returned to Oyster Shore. Transported to the no man’s land between waking and sleeping, he wandered the familiar tideline where dreams were dashed on the shore and hearts picked over by cruel-beaked seabirds. There he saw Madalyn again, a slender figure in white, following the ragged shell line with a pail swinging from one hand as she stooped to pick up precious pieces of flotsam. Although her face was turned from him, Gerald knew her green eyes were bright with excitement and her cheeks dusted with sand as she pushed away the unruly curls which refused to be bullied into place by pins.

How he longed to beg her forgiveness! In his dream Gerald stretched out his hand – but his grasp always fell short, the air slipped through his fingers, and Madalyn remained out of reach, pail swinging and skirts trailing in the sand. Engrossed in picking up bright nuggets of sea glass and holding them to the light, she gazed right through him. Then the tide turned and she was gone, lost to him once more.

His face wet with tears, Gerald would turn for the boathouse and spot Ned sitting on the riverbank with a pen held loosely in his hand and a notebook splayed on his knees. He longed to tell Ned he was sorry, that since then not a day had passed when he hadn’t wished he could turn back time to undo the mistakes he’d made and be a better friend. He knew his eternal soul was stained with guilt; a drunken decision born of jealousy had been the defining moment of his life and the fork in the road that led to his own hell.

“For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world but lose his soul?” he muttered, his hands clawing the blanket and his eyes wide open. “I have lost my soul! My soul!”

The nurse who sat with him each night had become used to such laments and these incoherent monologues. Brother Snowe always cried out in his sleep and sobbed. At first she had pitied him for he was so frail and shrunken-looking, often weeping in that raking and despairing manner old folk did, but once she’d gleaned a little sense from his ramblings her pity trickled away. If she hadn’t needed the pay so badly, she thought, she might have handed in her notice altogether. She tried to ignore her patient’s ramblings now, but some things could not be unheard.

When she had been interviewed for the position the Abbot had told her that Brother Snowe was quite mad, and had been for many years. He was dying, and the morphine affected his mind. He didn’t always know what he was saying or even where he was. He wandered the land of his childhood and she might hear words only intended for a confessor – so, like a priest, she must carry this man’s secrets to her grave. Brother Snowe was the seminary’s greatest benefactor, and her discretion was paramount. Was she prepared to carry such a burden? Was she willing to sign legal documents which bound her to silence?

She had said she was. She would have said anything to secure the position, for her husband was sick and she needed the money. Besides, she couldn’t imagine what this poor old boy might have to say that could be so bad. A few screams wouldn’t frighten her, she’d insisted, for she’d worked in asylums. She was made of sterner stuff.

But once hired, the nurse soon discovered that her new patient was very different to the troubled souls she’d tended in the past. They had certainly been muddled and pitiful, and some even dangerous, but when Mr Snowe cried out into the blackness and pleaded with people she couldn’t see but who were as real to him as though they were perching on the edge of his bed, she was chilled to the marrow. The fervour in his eyes was religious in its zeal, and his conviction was absolute. The more her patient’s mind unravelled, the more the nurse suspected the reason for his religious vigour was very dark indeed. Sometimes she even crossed herself. She didn’t wish ill on him, but surely the old boy couldn’t last much longer?

The sands of Gerald Snowe’s life were running out. He was growing weaker by the day, the nurse reminded herself, but his words would stay with her just as whatever crimes he had committed would always remain with him. She straightened his counterpane and returned to her knitting, longing for dawn to chase away the darkness and herald the end of her shift.

As his nurse knitted the old man wandered through the past. He saw a book, pages blank with promise, and knew that time had rewound itself in this liminal place between life and death. Here a man was offered all the richness of his life’s choices for a second time, and he could make amends if he could only be heard! Surely somebody would listen?

“Madalyn!” he cried. “Come back! I didn’t mean it!”

Abruptly, he was on the riverbank once again, but the girl he sought was not to be found. Above his dark head patches of sky shone through dense leaves, and the glimpses of light were so bright that patterns danced across his vision and haunted him even when he closed his eyes. The brackish water had retreated, to reveal a muted treasure-chest of pink rocks, emerald weed and gleaming channels of mud. The young man on the pontoon began to write, his pen capturing the submerged relics of a lost maritime world. Gulls and egrets strutted over his page just as they worked the tideline with timeless intensity, plucking out stranded sea creatures from secret hiding places as their webbed feet followed tracks known only to seabirds. They picked their way through the ribbons of dark weed hurled higher upriver by summer storms, balanced en pointe like ballerinas atop green tressed boulders as graceful foils to the orange-footed gulls; and Ned scribbled it all down in his notebook.

The scene was captured for ever, just as Gerald knew that his fate – indeed the fate of all three of them – was sealed yet again. Why could he never change this dream when it seemed to offer him a new path? Why must it always be the same no matter what he did? Hadn’t he tried hard enough? Hadn’t he given Bess everything? Why hadn’t she allowed him to atone? Why wasn’t he granted peace?

“Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners,” he cried out. “Now and at the hour of our death!”

Somebody was beside him, a woman with frosted hair and a starched cap. Matron? Nanny? Mama? But not Madalyn.

“You’re not Madalyn!” he cried, lashing out with his clawed hand. Despairing tears slid down his sunken cheeks, wetting his thin hair and trickling into the pillow. “Where is she? Is she in the river? What have you done with her?”

“Shh, Brother Snowe. It’s just a dream,” the woman said. But Gerald no longer saw her, for the focus had shifted and he was in the boathouse once more, hidden amongst the shadows and watching two little boys hide their secret treasures. The scene was set, the players were in place, and the curtain was poised to rise. All was still to unfold, and he wept to know he couldn’t change events no matter how hard he tried. Only those who came after could do that, if only he could make them understand.

“Help me!” he begged. “Please, help me. I must go back and tell them! I must stop Madalyn.”

But Gerald couldn’t return to his past self; the people we used to be are marooned in time and cast away on the shores of memory. Their course cannot be changed any more than the tide can be ordered not to rise with the silvered moon. As the rocks are covered and the water soothes the ribs of rotting hulls and nibbles the riverbanks, so time feasts on what used to be, altering it indelibly until all we once knew becomes both familiar and foreign, like a once-loved tune played in a minor key.

Yet in the place between life and death there is redemption, and when Gerald saw three children playing on the riverbank he knew that if he could make amends all might yet be well. As he straddled life and death he understood that the past and the present and the future run side by side, and sometimes the veil is thin. Somebody might glimpse through it. Perhaps it would be the girl with violet eyes and the spaniel that he saw in his dreams? Or the man with pale curls, whose face was so familiar and yet unknown? In the hinterland of death Gerald could cross time, and now he saw them both, these people of the future, as clearly as he saw those from his past. Did they see him? Would they be his salvation? 

There was an older woman, too, whose memory swam like his, and she sometimes visited him with a young woman. They both promised they were sending someone to him, but Gerald could never catch who this might be or when they might arrive. Maybe the women had never said it at all and this was no more than another false hope. Then he would never be able to make amends and he would die unforgiven.

“Madalyn,” he wailed. “Oh Madalyn!”

The nurse leaned forward. “Who’s Madeline, my love? Was she your wife?”

He swatted her away angrily. Was this harpy hiding Madalyn from him? “Where’s Madalyn? What have you done with her? Is she still in the river?” he demanded.

Why could he never change this dream? Why was it always the same no matter what he did? Hadn’t he given Bess everything, the key to it all? Why hadn’t she allowed him to atone? He’d been but a boy, a stupid, selfish boy. He hadn’t understood what he had set in motion. He’d been a different person then. A stranger to the self he had become.

“It all ended as it began,” he whispered, struggling to sit up, his voice as thin as the cord which tethered him to life. “On Oyster Shore. That’s where all this began and where it will end. On Oyster Shore.”

“Oyster Shore?” The nurse had no idea what he was talking about. “Where’s that, my love? Is it a holiday resort?”

But her patient did not reply. His head fell forward to slump onto his bony chest, and when she touched his throat the nurse knew he’d taken the answer with him. She crossed herself and closed his eyes, feeling no sadness, only relief that she would no longer have to hear the confessions of his tortured soul. Wherever he had gone, wherever this Oyster Shore might be, her patient wouldn’t be returning to speak of his past crimes or plead with invisible onlookers for forgiveness. He would never call out again, because the sands in his hourglass had run out.

Gerald Snowe, once one of the wealthiest men in England, was gone – and with him his tangled web of guilt, regret and long-kept secrets.

 

 

Chapter 1

​

The present

Cornwall

Lowenna

​

The sign hanging from the gate hides behind tangles of ivy, a lichened whisper of a half-forgotten name.

Oyster Shore.

I glimpse a listing gate slumping behind waist-high grasses, and cow parsley foaming into the lane like breaking surf. The letting agent was right: you’d never know there was a house here. It’s perfect for me, because a place to be forgotten and a place to forget is exactly what I need. I’ve already driven past this overgrown entrance twice, and if my attention hadn’t been snatched this time by the promise of water through the leaves I would be sailing by it on my third pass. Finding this place has been through luck rather than map-reading.

“You have reached your destination!” bellows the satnav, jolting me from these thoughts. “Re-routeing!”

Ordered to attention, I stand on my brakes while clinging to the wheel – I haven’t made it this far to veer into a hedge at the eleventh hour – and send a bottle of Evian tumbling into the footwell. Breakspear, dozing on the back seat, barks reproachfully.

“Sorry, Breaky!” I say, delving for the bottle. I’ve gone too far past the gate to reverse, which I find impossible in these unforgiving narrow lanes, so I decide I’ll carry on to look for a turning space. “Not much longer now. We’ll soon be having a lovely walk.”

If cocker spaniels could speak I suspect Breakspear would say, “Yeah, right,” in the same weary tone my niece Ellie adopts when adults say something she considers lame. If dogs had iPhones Breaky would probably be messaging his friends to moan about his mad human dragging him away from pavements and his beloved patch of garden with all his carefully buried bones. Seven hours in a car, even with several lengthy stops for exercise along the way, is practically a case for the RSPCA, he’d complain, and in the exact tone of voice Ellie used when her parents had booked a family holiday in Cornwall.

“No mobile signal. Crap wifi,” she’d wailed. “Have you any idea what that’s going to be like?”

“Heaven. Maybe we should take things a step further and leave all our devices at home? Have a digital detox as well as a holiday?” her mother, my big sister Marina, had threatened.

Ellie had paled. Glued to her phone, she needed social media like the rest of us need oxygen.

As a lead resus officer in a busy London hospital, Marina has bigger problems to contend with than teenagers moaning because they can’t access TikTok from their holiday cottage. Ellie, who knew better than to push her luck, shut up like a clam. Besides, she secretly loved every salt-soaked minute of their Cornish holidays, just as Marina and I once had. Growing up in London, we lived for our summers at our grandparents’ cottage just a pebble’s toss from Readymoney Cove. The wooden floors were strewn with sand as we’d wandered back and forth to the beach, our hair bleached by salt and sunshine and our faces as freckled as the eggs we’d collected from Granny May’s chickens.

As I drove westwards this morning I felt my heart grow lighter with every mile that slipped beneath the bonnet. When I crossed the Tamar Bridge a huge weight lifted off me, plummeting into the depths, sinking to the muddied riverbed, and leaving me lighter than I had felt for a long time. The life I’d sleepwalked into was behind me, and I was back in Cornwall. I was free to be Lowenna Scott once more, because my Cornish name and my Cornish roots anchored me to this magical county. I was home.

As a young child, going down to Cornwall to visit Granny May and hearing her tales of her Cornish childhood, I’d fallen in love with the idea of living in a place where your family was as much a part of landscape as the crying gulls and crash of breaking waves. In London, though, nobody knew the Scott family. We were anonymous in our Harrow semi in an unremarkable street lined with cars and dusty plane trees, and if we’d vanished overnight I doubt our neighbours would have noticed. My mother liked this; she said there was nothing worse than everyone knowing your business, but Granny May always disagreed. She was proud that there had been Penwurthies living in Trevellan since God was a boy. Their blood ran in my veins, she told me, and their names were carved on the harbourside war memorial. Why,  it was a sign of just how much she’d loved Grandpa Bill that she’d allowed herself to be uprooted the whole twenty miles to Fowey!

“Didn’t you go back and visit?” Marina had once asked.

“Bless you, love, of course I did, but it wasn’t my home any more, was it? My home was here with Grandad, and I had your mum to keep me busy.”

“You could go back and live in Trevellan now Mum’s grown up. She won’t mind as long as she can stay at home,” I’d pointed out. My mum was really old, at least thirty, and she didn’t need Granny May to look after her any more. In fact, the more I’d thought about it the more I realised our mother didn’t need Granny at all. Mummy rarely stayed more than a couple of days when she dropped us off with our grandparents, and it was always Daddy who picked us up because he liked digging on the beach, staying in the dolls’ house cottage and eating the delicious pasties Mummy said were fattening.

My grandmother had laughed a lot at my suggestion. It was as though I’d made a joke, even though I didn’t think I’d said anything funny at all.

“You’re right there, Lowenna my bird! I often think the stork dropped the wrong one off with us. She’s a townie through and through, your mum.”

Marina and I nodded (although we suspected the stork wasn’t real). Mummy liked shops and busy streets and restaurants. Daddy liked the countryside, but as he always did what Mummy wanted we lived in the town. I’d supposed that doing what someone else wanted rather than what made you happy was how you showed you loved them: Granny May had left the place she loved for Grandad, and Daddy had stayed in London for Mum. I’d internalised this lesson which, as it turned out, was not a good thing.

“Would you like to go back to Trevellan one day?” Marina asked.

There was always a wistful look on Granny May’s face when she recalled her childhood home. She wove tales of haunted moors, and recalled legends of smugglers stealing through the narrow streets. My favourite tale was the haunting story of a local girl who’d drowned a long, long time ago and whose loss Granny May said was still felt when the sea mists rolled in. We’d clamour to know who she was and where she had drowned, but Granny May didn’t know any more of the story. Maybe she hadn’t drowned at all and the piskies had stolen her? Or perhaps she walked through a tear in time’s fabric and couldn’t return? Cornwall was full of such places, Granny warned: standing stones, old crosses and shifting tides – all these could whisk the unwary somewhere far, far away. Was this true or was it just another of her tales? It was hard to tell when you slept beneath beams made from the timbers of wrecked ships and the sea whispered below your bedroom window. True or not, these tales made Marina and me shiver, and we’d loved Granny’s stories.

“Maybe I’ll retire to Trevellan when I’m very old? Older than I am now, that is, before you say a word!” Granny May would say. “But Fowey’s my home now and Grandad wouldn’t want to leave here for all the tea in China. Besides, there aren’t any of my family left in Trevellan nowadays. I’m the last of the Penwurthies. The family box and your old granny are all that’s left of them.”

As well as being the keeper of stories, Granny May possessed a collection of family belongings which she kept safe inside a wooden box. On wet days when the whole world dripped she would let us look inside at her treasures and we would make up her own games and stories about the contents.

“Mind how you go with it,” she’d warn each time. “My mother kept this box safe all her life, and before she died she made me promise I’d look after it.”

“Why?” we’d ask and Granny would shrug.

“Blowed if I know. It was hidden under the stairs, but she’d go spare if anyone moved it or dared try to look inside. Ma could give a sharp slap when she needed to!”

“Is it worth a lot of money?” Marina asked, hoping for treasure.

“Aren’t you your mother’s daughter! Sorry, bird, but it’s only of sentimental value,” Granny said. “All I can really remember about it is that a man delivered it to our cottage when I was very small. I answered the door because Ma was feeding the baby —”

“Was that baby your brother who died in the war?” I asked.

We knew the story of the brave uncle who’d died flying a Spitfire. Great-uncle Eddie was a hero, and if he had lived there would have been more Penwurthies; and Granny always said, too, that if Eddie had lived her father might have not been quite as unhappy; Marrick Penwurthy’s black moods had been famous in the village and everyone had been afraid of him.

“That’s right, Wenna, God rest him. Anyway, our caller was a smartly dressed man, a gentleman as we’d have said back then, and I’d never seen one of those on our doorstep before. He had an ebony cane with a silver top, which he leaned on heavily, and his dark hair was slashed with grey, but he wasn’t old. No older than my Pa, probably. It was his eyes I noticed, because they were so very sad. I was only a dot of a thing, but I thought he must be the saddest man in the whole world.”

“What did he want?” Keen on the Famous Five and Secret Seven, I’d loved the mystery element of the tale. If only I could solve it!

“He said he was looking for my father and called Pa by his name as though he knew him well. I was surprised at that because Pa was just a fisherman. How would he know a gentleman? Of course, I shouldn’t have opened the door to a stranger,” she added swiftly, “but it was different back then. We all knew everyone, and the village had a bobby at the police house.”

“Who was he?” Marina asked.

“Lord only knows,” shrugged Granny May. “Nobody ever told me, and in those days children were seen and not heard.”

Marina and I took the hint and stopped asking questions. Granny May continued with the story. Her gaze was distant as though she was seven again and back in her childhood home.

“My pa was at sea and Ma tried to slam the door when she saw the visitor. She was furious, but he pleaded with her to take in a box he’d brought, and said something about it making our fortune. Ma was hissing like a cat and wouldn’t give him house room. She had a fierce temper on her, my mum. Nobody ever crossed Elizabeth Penwurthy!”

“She sounds just like me,” Marina remarked, tossing her curly dark hair. “Mum says I have a temper!”

“A bad temper is not something to be proud of,” Granny scolded, but my sister didn’t believe her and neither did I. I was in awe of Marina’s temper and would have liked a fraction of it for myself. Even as a child I was always too quick to placate others and too swift to put aside what I wanted in order to keep the peace.

“Anyway, Ma sent the man packing and I never saw him again,” Granny concluded. “She shoved the box under the stairs and that’s where it stayed. Eddie and I peeked in sometimes, and when Ma caught us nosing we felt the back of her hand.”

“What did your dad say? Was he angry too?” I wondered. Great-grandfather Marrick was a shadowy figure, part war hero and part bogeyman.

“I don’t think she dared tell my father about the visitor. Pa hated talking about the past, and Ma must have learned how to avoid setting him off on the rampage. His moods were dreadful. We all tiptoed around him,” said Granny May. “He was a very angry man.”

Marina frowned. “Why was he so angry?”

“Oh, love, that’s a hard question to answer. It was the war that changed him, or so I was told. He saw some dreadful things and he never got over them. Mum lost her brother in the trenches and she said my poor dad saw him killed. They’d been best friends since school. Can you imagine what that was like for him? The First World War was awful.”

We couldn’t. Although we knew about poppies, sold in school with sharp pins to poke through your jumper, the First World War was so long ago. It was strange to think Granny May’s father had fought in it. To my sister and me it was a storybook event rather than something real.

“After the war ended lots of the men who went back home were in a dreadful way. Some had lost arms or legs. Others were badly injured or burnt. That was almost better because at least everyone could see what was wrong – but others, like my father, were hurt in their minds. Shellshock they called it back then, and my poor old dad had it pretty bad. When he had a funny turn we all hid. I expect Mum was scared that mentioning the visitor, or passing on the box, would set him off.”

“But you told us it was meant to make your fortune!” I said.

“I probably dreamed that bit, Lowenna,” Granny smiled. “Children have vivid imaginations – as you know!”

I loved writing stories and spent hours scribbling in exercise books but nothing I’d ever invented was as exciting as Granny’s stories. She was imaginative and could hold us for hours. Looking back I often think she should have been an author.

“Maybe’s a treasure map hidden in there?” Marina had been hopeful, but Granny rolled her eyes.

“Nothing so useful. Just some drawings and old photos. Mum put some of her own bits and bobs in there too over the years, photographs and buttons and the like, just like you two will, I expect. Although it’s our family box now, it won’t mean much at all one day. I expect when I’m gone your mum will chuck it out.”

“We won’t let her,” promised Marina.

“Well, good luck with that,” said Granny May.

“Who was the man?” I asked.

Granny May ruffled my hair. “No idea, my love. I only saw him that once, and for a few minutes. I think he must have been an officer who’d been in France with Pa because, as I said, he was what we called a toff. That’s an old-fashioned word for a posh person. As for making our fortune, there was definitely no treasure map. Heaven knows we could have done with a few bob. We had hardly any money once Pa stopped fishing.”

This was always the part in the story where Granny would tell us moralistic tales of shoes with holes, darned clothes and no television. These tales were designed to make Marina and me grateful for Clarks shoes and British Home Stores, but invariably caused us to tune out since her stories bore absolutely no relation to our world of Neighbours and Tammy Girl. We preferred the fortune story by far, and the box had become our treasure-chest. Marina and I would empty the contents onto the hearthrug and pore over our booty. We especially loved the collection of washed sea glass kept in a small black velvet bag and squabbled over the blue and green wave-smoothed nuggets. To us these were precious stones, and we would hold them up to the light and arrange them in order of size on the rug.

There was one special item which truly seemed treasure to us, and this was an enamelled ornamental hair comb in the shape of a blue bird with a glowing red eye, bright sapphire plumage and cruel golden claws. Even in its chipped state, and missing several teeth, whichever of us managed to pin her hair up with it felt like a princess and oversaw that day’s games. Often this role fell to Marina, with me as her willing handmaiden.

Other favourite treasures were postcards and pictures. One was of a mansion which we thought looked like a castle, and another of an elegant white house with two little boys and a girl posed stiffly on the terrace. One of the boys wore a sailor suit and a scowl, and the other looked like a ragamuffin, at least according to Granny, who tutted at his bare feet. The little girl was beautifully turned out in a white dress and white hat, which I imagined she longed to rip off and stamp on. I liked to picture the trio running away shrieking and laughing once the shutter had clicked and they were free to play. Marina and I made up names for them and played detailed games, taking it in turns to pretend to be the little girl, who we called Princess Clementine, for no better reason than because Grandad Bill liked clementine marmalade. We christened the two boys Henry and Joe; these lads got into all kinds of trouble and were always rescued by Clementine, the brains of the operation.

“Who are they?” we always asked, but Granny May said she had no idea. Friends of her mother’s perhaps? Elizabeth Penwurthy would have been a little girl at the turn of the century, the period which seemed to fit their clothes, but there were no names written on the back of the picture, only faint pencil scribbles that looked like lines of verse. There was no record of who might have taken the photo, and Granny May didn’t recognise the house.

“It might be the St Wyllow River near Trevellan,” she suggested. “I know, though, the stately home in the postcard is Vyvyan Court. Lots of us Penwurthies were in service there, including my mother at one point. It’s been empty for years; the family who owned it died out, and when the American soldiers went home after the war it was left empty.”

When my sister and I tired of Princess Clementine and her minions we played with a set of marbles from the box or invented stories about the handsome man in uniform who Granny said was her scary father when he was still young and smiley.

“Pa was one of the lucky ones, because he came back,” she explained. “But so many of his friends didn’t. They were only boys when they enlisted, and they wouldn’t have had a clue what they were in for. None of Pa’s brothers came home, and that broke my grandmother’s heart. They said she died of grief.”

This was a sad story, but it belonged to the history books and didn’t hold our attention any more than the dog-eared paperback book covered in scrawled numbers and smelling of damp. We much preferred the old sketch book with its yellowed pages, each filled with drawings of a handsome young man, and endless sketches of a wooded riverbank. The young man had thick pale hair and often had his shirt sleeves rolled up as he bent over a book or gazed into the distance. One sketch showed him sitting on a pontoon with a pen held loosely in his hand and a notebook balanced on his knees. Another depicted him bare-chested and sprawled across a bed. Looping handwriting at the bottom of this drawing declared N. OS. 1914.

Was this his name, N? Or was it the artist’s signature? We’d asked Granny May, but she hadn’t known this either, nor could she tell us who the artist was, although she did frown and tut at the bed sketch.

“Some things are lost in time, which may be just as well!” she said firmly, shutting the sketch book and placing it back in the box. “These must have meant something once, but I can’t imagine what, and I have no idea who that bold young man was! I think the river in the drawings could be a higher stretch of the Penhayes Estuary. Remember when we went to Trevellan, girls? We crossed the river by car ferry and had a pub lunch.”

That day is still a happy memory of sunshine, crab sandwiches and hot plastic seats sticking to bare legs. We only visited Trevellan once, though, because Granny May died when I was ten and Grandpa Bill, who’d doted on her, hadn’t lived much longer. Their cottage was sold, and our sunny Cornish summers were consigned to the land of childhood past.

The years rolled by, but Cornwall remained a magical place in my imagination and one which held my heart as I devoured every Poldark and du Maurier novel I could get my hands on. Whenever possible I would snatch a weekend in Fowey to revisit childhood haunts, but London is a long drive from Cornwall and David had preferred city breaks or the Med. If I yearned for salted air, torn sky and sweeping beaches, I did my best to ignore these longings and told myself it was time to focus on my relationship and my career. Asserting my desires had become alien to my nature.

Today, though, as I crawl along the high-banked lane in search of a turning place, I believe with all my heart that my Cornish roots have drawn me here. Trevellan, the village where my forebears lived for generations, is only three miles from Oyster Shore, and the landscape of my grandmother’s stories is all around me. Although uprooting my entire life to live in a place I haven’t seen makes no sense on paper it makes perfect sense to my heart. It is quiet and healing here. It is safe. I can rest, and I can write again. Coming to Cornwall is the right thing to do. I feel certain of this.

***

“Beep! Beep!”

A sturdy Landrover Defender is coming head-on towards me. As it’s built like a tank, and with enough dents to suggest it’s had more than a few close encounters with drystone walls and gates, I don’t fancy my chances if I don’t get out the way quickly.

“At the first available opportunity perform a U-turn,” repeats the satnav as I frantically attempt to steer my car and dive for the Evian, which is still rolling about, in danger of bursting. This is as hard as it sounds, and my car slaloms until I’m able to grab the runaway bottle. Heart racing, I return my full attention to driving and not a moment too soon since the Defender shows no signs of slowing. The driver, hidden behind a pair of wrap-around mirrored shades, appears intent on driving straight at me. I’ll be squashed flat before I’ve even arrived. Not quite the new start I’m hoping for.

“At the first available opportunity perform a U-turn!”

“Yes! Yes! I know!” I say, grinding gears. “I need a turning place! Any thoughts?”

Sunken lanes are pretty but very steep, and there isn’t anywhere I can turn or even pull in since there’s a ditch on one side and a stone wall on the other. I’ve already gone along this road twice so I know it opens up in about half a mile and there’s a clearing where I can swing around, and although there’s a caravan parked there, surrounded by beautiful wooden sculptures, nobody has comes out to tell me off for turning there, which is a relief.

The Defender’s headlights flash. Is this a friendly signal, signifying he’s going to pull into the edge so I can creep by? Or is it an aggressive local code for out of my way you stupid emmet? This thought makes my hackles rise. I’ve got as much right to drive down this lane as he has. No more being bossed about. I’m through with all that.

“This is it, Breaky,” I say. “Like Russell Crowe at the start of Gladiator, I will hold! At my signal unleash hell!”

Actually, on second thoughts, maybe not. That Defender looks very solid, and my little car is made of tin foil. Maybe I ought to reverse. Is that what he’s asking? Cornish lanes, I’m quickly learning, are governed by a rather lethal game of chicken where whoever holds their nerve for the longest forces the other party to reverse. It’s easy to spot the locals, though, because they go back to a passing place at dizzying speeds. So far today I’ve been given the finger by a puce-faced man in a Jag, a merry wave by a tractor driver and a pitying look by an old lady who swiftly backed up half a mile while I ground my gears in panic.

Emmets, I imagined them saying pityingly. Townies can’t reverse. Well, let them navigate the Hangar Lane gyratory system in rush hour! Or how about the one-way feeder system into Heathrow Terminal Three? That tangle of roads and feeder lanes makes London cabbies blanch, but after picking David up from countless business trips I can do it blindfold. Even he couldn’t find anything to criticise.

Beep! Beep! Flash! Flash!

Four-lane carriageways, jet-lagged ex-partners and low-flying aeroplanes vanish. I’m back in the lane with Defender man closing in on me by the second. I grab the gear stick and do my best to find reverse. The gears grind, and abandoning any hope of preserving my paintwork I reverse into a gateway in the walls.

The Defender draws alongside and the driver winds down the window. Pushing his shades into thick blond hair, he leans out and beams at me.

“G’day! You lost?” The broad Australian accent, more Neighbours than Poldark, takes me by surprise.

“I’ve seen you drive past a couple of times. Trevellan’s the other way if you want the village,” he adds when I don’t reply.

“I’m fine. Just looking for a place to turn around,” I say, recovering from the shock of bumping into Bradley Cooper’s better-looking twin. “But thanks anyway.”

“Easier said than done around here, hey? There’s a turning place just round the corner by my van. You can spin around?” The grin widens. “Again?”

So much for not being spotted.

“Sorry about that,” I say. “I didn’t know anyone was home.”

He waves a tanned hand. “No worries. I’m used to it. You’d be surprised how many people miss the turning for Trevellan and end up out here. I’m always giving directions to the village or, if they’re in a flash car, sending them up to Vyvyan Court.”

“Are you suggesting my car isn’t flash?” I say, deadpan.

“British humour, right?”

We study my old car. Nobody could accuse a twelve-year old Peugeot 207 of being flash.

“A guess,” I admit. “Anyway, I’m not lost. I overshot my turning.”

I consider telling him I’m going to be living in the old boathouse on Oyster Shore but Breakspear interrupts with a volley of impatient barks.

“Are we holding you up, mate?” the driver asks as Breakspear thumps his tail delightedly, straining against his car harness and frantic to say hello. So much for guarding me from strangers when I’m all alone in my new house. I’d be better off with the snarling satnav, which is still issuing curt orders from the dashboard.

“At the first available opportunity, turn around!”

“Jeez! She doesn’t take any shit! Better do what she asks,” Defender man chuckles. Afternoon sunshine lights his eyes, startlingly green against tanned skin peppered with golden stubble. Faint white stars beam outwards from the corners of his eyes and dive into his thick hair. “I’ll squeeze by. There should be enough room.”

“Should?” I say nervously – but it’s too late to worry because the Defender is creeping forwards and there’s only a few inches between its mud-splattered flanks and my car’s glossy black paint. I hold my breath and even suck in my stomach in sympathy, exhaling with relief when our cars are clear of each other. In my wing mirror I see him give a cheery thumbs up before accelerating away. I continue down the lane, feeling relieved to have escaped disaster. From now on I’ll work on improving my backing-up technique – or perhaps walk everywhere. It could be easier.

I spin my car around by the caravan, noting the tubs of bushy herbs placed on the steps and the small vegetable patch dug alongside. I take a little more interest in the sculptures too, now I’ve met their creator. No crude chainsaw toadstools here, but a selection of delicate carvings of woodland creatures, abstract shapes and even a powerful rearing horse. An artist, then? Or an Aussie traveller, stopping for the summer and picking up some casual work – although he seems a little mature to be a backpacker. I’d have said he was just a bit older than me. Early forties, perhaps? Not that it’s any of my business. I haven’t come here to socialise. Quite the opposite.

Once back at Oyster Shore’s turning all I can distinguish of the drive is a choppy sea of concrete waves where tree-roots have erupted, furred with emerald moss and edged with receding pools of bluebells. Somewhere deep within the rhododendrons and azaleas the old house sleeps, and I’ll see it properly for the very first time soon, the crumbling white walls and shuttered windows becoming a reality rather than blurred images from an out-of-date website.

No wonder this property has been so hard to let. These deep ruts and potholes will render access impossible for any vehicle other than a four-wheel drive. David’s Mercedes convertible won’t stand a chance, even if he does decide to follow me. If I loop the rusty gate-chain around the gatepost behind me and hide my car inside, nobody will guess Oyster Shore is now inhabited.

This is perfect. Excitement dusts my skin with shivers, for this place is everything I’d hoped for and so much more. It’s a romantic setting, the drive melting into dark trees echoing the mysterious Cornwall of du Maurier novels, and the bright splashes of water conjuring endless Enid Blyton summers.

I drive in and the car judders along the drive. Once around the bend, out of sight of the road, I pull the car onto the verge, kill the engine and exhale. Lowenna Scott has reached her destination.

Hopping out, I stretch my arms skywards and rotate my stiff neck. It’s so good to feel the salt breeze against my cheeks and hear birdsong. I think I can even hear the whisper of waves breaking on the beach, so the sea can’t be very far away. This is perfect!

“Okay, Breakspear,” I say, opening the back door. “Ready to explore our new home?”