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Chapter Nineteen
Summoning Jowan
The silver weathervane on the turret top of Clove Lore Big House span like a merry-go-round. The visitor centre car park at the summit of the precipitously high and winding village was long since closed off, the girls from the shop had been sent safely home, and the donkey sanctuary stables locked.
Up here, there was no shelter from onshore winds determined to lift tiles and rip away Victorian guttering. So far, the Big House held firm, an indifferent old matriarch in her dotage, refusing to budge for anything.
Minty, wishing she was as impervious, had watched the storm coming in off the Atlantic from her childhood nursery window.
The whole west gable end of the attics belonged to Izaak and Leonid and while they’d been misting their Calathea collection – Leonid’s absolute favourites – Minty had rapped at their door and begged a spot at the porthole window which she knew had the highest and best views in the house.
She’d come armed with a newish pair of field binoculars – ‘new’ to Minty meant anything from the eighties onwards – and climbed the ladder attached by runners to the attic walls up to the vantage point.
‘What can you see, Captain?’ Izaak asked, standing at the foot of the ladder with a cup of Leonid’s excellent black cherry tea for her.
Minty didn’t reply for some time.
A massive blue-and-white container ship was perched precariously on the thin navy line of the horizon, a car transporter, she reckoned, probably a couple of hundred metres long, a great high-sided tub of a thing. It was listing badly. The undercurrents must be giving it hell.
Overhead, a helicopter droned past the house on its way out to sea and Minty prayed to a god she’d never believed in to save all the souls on board and noted grimly that ifthatship was in trouble, what luck would smaller boats out there have?
‘These gales are enough to blow the horns of the devil himself,’ she said eventually, looking down with a stoical smile, before refusing Izaak’s tea.
Izaak sat by the ladder and drank it himself while Leonid stared broodingly from the low window at the far side of the attics. Below him were parked the developers’ vehicles, all in a row upon his beautifully manicured front lawns, lush and free from weeds even in December.
The builders had checked and re-checked the scaffolds on the entirely empty shell of the east wing before downing tools and calling the Christmas holidays early this morning. The house was quieter than it had been in weeks – or would have been, were it not for the wind whipping down the chimneys.
Rain had fallen heavily all morning and puddles were forming in great patches the size of golf-course bunkers. ‘The rain is lying on the lawns. It is not draining,’ Leonid called back to his landlady-boss.
‘Let’s hope the drainage channels are up to the job of taking any run-off safely down to the sea,’ she said.
From where she stood, Minty could see all the way down over the jumbled rooftops of the village to the harbour and the Siren’s Tail. She also had eyeball on a certain old B&B cottage and the comforting sight of smoke rising from its chimney, which today was being whipped away and diffused by the wind no sooner than it escaped the mossy old pot.
She fixed the crosshairs upon it today with a deeper interest than usual. Jowan had promised to bring Aldous up to the house for lunch and maybe then stay until the storm had passed, but it was past noon and there was no sign of him yet. It was never his habit to be late.
Her eye was drawn by the sudden appearance of the Icelander, out on the slope. She turned the focus ring of the glasses, setting her sights on him, sharp and clear. Even from this distance she could make out the fact that he was struggling against the winds. He was turning left and right as though unsure which way to go, when another figure, sandy-haired, bearded, and with a second, fluffy head peeping out from his coat, appeared. It was Jowan, at last.
The men talked together for a moment and Jowan gestured with a pointed finger coastward. The holidaymaker leaned intently towards him, perhaps straining to hear over the sea-blast. Minty observed him seem to shrink, shoulders dropping, and Jowan patting his arm. The Icelander was shaking his head disconsolately and turning back the way he’d come, back to the alleyway that led to the bookshop – the safest place for him.
What was he thinking, striding about in the storm – and a stranger, too, who couldn’t know all the little cut-throughs and safe spots in the village like those born here did?
A plume of litter rose high into the air, a twister of trash – chip wrappers and ice-cream tubs. One of the bins Down-along must have tipped over. If she hadn’t sent Bovis home this morning he’d have taken one look at the mess and stomped off with his picking claw and a bin bag. The man hadn’t taken a day off since last Christmas, even on high days and holidays when he was supposed to be at home doing whatever it was that a Bovis might do in his spare time. He’d always turn up and insist on staying at his post at the Big House.
Not having him glued to her side or skulking around the estate was an unexpected relief for Minty. The storm, she realised, had brought a moment’s respite from her over-attentive staffer. She really would have to have a word with him come the New Year, encourage him into some kind of hobby, perhaps?
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of a blue tarpaulin that was supposed to be tied over one of the builder’s skips flying past her window and up over the rooftop. It was getting dangerous out there. She pitied anyone still outside in this.
When Jowan got here she’d insist he stayed for supper and then the night. It was only right, and there was a put-up bed she could have made up in the ballroom for him by the fire.
It would be like the old days when soldiers were billeted here and the whole place was turned over to folding beds. Her grandfather used to talk about the men using the chapel’s silver font and mirror for shaving. The prospect of Jowan bedding down at the Big House, unable to return to his home, sparked a Girl Guide sense of adventure and making do within her, but there was something else there too, something hopeful that told her if only she could get him away from his home with all its memories, if she could get him cosseted here with her overnight, there might be the tiniest chance of him forgetting how loyal he was to his Isolde. There might be the smallest chance of them talking honestly and openly to one another, something the old friends had never really attempted. Yet, just as she was imagining the possibilities that a night by the fire might conjure for them both, the memory of Isolda de Marisco snuffed out the little bit of hope she had. Jowan belonged only to Isolde, her old friend too, and nothing could make room in his heart for anyone else.
‘Especially not you, silly Minty, lumbering old stick. Who’d want you? The last deb on the shelf,’ she said to herself, echoing a voice from long ago, her mocking father, who never saw the harm in pointing out the truth.
‘Sorry?’ Izaak asked, glancing up.
‘Nothing. I didn’t say a thing,’ she corrected him brusquely from above, making Izaak and Leonid exchange baffled glances.
‘Come on, Jowan de Marisco, best foot forward, up the hill,’ she urged under her breath, making sure nobody overheard this time.
