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‘I remembered an old writing bureau I’d seen in a museum that had hidden drawers, and I noticed that two of these cubby hole drawers were a different size from the rest.’
‘Is the box locked?’ asked Corey, after a moment’s silence. He gave the lid a shake but it stayed put. It must have locked automatically when Lettie closed it in the early hours.
‘How did you open it?’ asked Florence.
‘With the key that she wears around her neck,’ answered Corey, his voice flat. ‘Give it to me.’
Lettie undid the chain and handed over the key which Corey inserted into the lock. There was a click she hadn’t heard before, in the midst of the storm, as the mechanism inside turned and the box sprang open.
‘Oh, my.’ Florence was staring inside the empty box in amazement. ‘And the letter was inside, you say?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Oh, my,’ repeated Florence, fumbling behind her for the bed. ‘Give me the letter, Corey.’
She sank heavily onto the covers and began to read, her hands shaking. Corey sat beside her and read Cornelius’s words over her shoulder. Outside, last night’s clouds had been chased away and the sun was shining in a clear blue sky. People were going about their business and Lettie could hear shouts from the quay and the clip of heels on the cobbles outside. But in here, in Cornelius’s bedroom, time was spooling backwards as Florence read the words written by her brother almost eighty years earlier.
‘I was lost without you, Cornelius,’ she whispered, stroking the letter with her bony hand, criss-crossed with purple veins.
Corey put his arm around his grandmother’s shoulder. ‘It’s a lot for my grandmother to take in,’ he said to Lettie, his face set and his expression unreadable.
‘Of course.’
‘To think that his letter has been in this house for all these years, unread,’ said Florence faintly. ‘He meant it to go to Iris with the desk after he died. She’d have known there was more to it because of the key. She’d have found what he left behind.’
‘His letter shows how much Cornelius thought of you all, and that Iris didn’t encourage him to go to war,’ said Lettie gently. ‘In fact, the exact opposite. She tried to get him to stay. She wasn’t responsible for his death after all.’
Florence bit her lip. ‘It seems that my parents believed wrongly, as did I, and we have maligned Iris. We couldn’t bear the thought that he’d wanted to leave us,’ she whispered.
‘He didn’t want to go, Gran, but he felt it was his duty to fight,’ said Corey. ‘I can understand that. He saw his friends playing their part and didn’t want to stay here, in a quiet backwater.’
Lettie suddenly imagined Corey in uniform, marching away from Heaven’s Cove for good. The thought made her eyes water and she turned to look out of the window so no one would see. Iris must have been distraught, seeing the man she loved marching off to war. And then to be blamed by his family for his loss. No wonder she’d never wanted to return to the village.
‘What is this gift that Cornelius is talking about?’ asked Florence. ‘He can’t mean the desk. It means the world to me for obvious reasons but it can’t have held great sentimental value to Cornelius.’
‘I think he meant this. It was in the box with his letter.’ Lettie pulled the deed from her pocket and handed it to Florence, who read through it quickly before passing it to Corey. He scanned through it, his face clouding over.
‘Did you know about this?’ he asked, a crease appearing between his eyebrows.
‘No, of course not. I don’t even know what land it’s talking about.’
Corey tilted his head to one side and stared at Lettie. His gaze was hostile. ‘The land this deed is talking about is Cora Head, the headland that Simon is so keen to get his hands on.’
Lettie began to feel wobbly and sank onto the chair behind her. ‘How could Cornelius gift Iris a piece of land that belongs to your family?’
‘It belonged to him,’ said Florence, wiping a strand of white hair from her eyes. She stared at Lettie distrustfully. ‘Did you know that already?’
‘No, I honestly knew nothing about any of this.’
Florence stared again at the deed in Corey’s hands. ‘The land was no good for farming and no one was interested in developing it back then. But it was my brother’s favourite spot – he would spend hours up there, looking over Heaven’s Cove and watching the sea. He’d take me up there, to look for dolphins and seals and watch the boats coming into the quay after a night fish. So my father gave the land to him on his eighteenth birthday. Cornelius was planning to build a house there one day.’ She blinked away tears. ‘And he wanted it to go to Iris after his death, it seems. Iris, who tried to persuade him not to go to war, despite what my parents believed. The key to my heart, your letter said. It was Cornelius’s final riddle.’
‘I still don’t properly understand.’
‘The full name of the land is Corazon Head,’ said Corey, still staring at the deed. ‘And corazón in Spanish—’
‘—means heart,’ finished Lettie, as the final pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
‘And now,’ said Florence, ‘according to this piece of paper, the land belongs to you.’
