Cottage by the Sea (3 page)

   "Who knows if any of Lucinda Barton's notions are true?" Blythe replied with a shrug. Her lawyer obviously wasn't interested in hearing about her client's recently deceased grandmother. Lisa Spector was the kind of woman who did not dwell on the past. "Cornwall seemed like a nice, obscure place for a rest cure," Blythe added with a touch of irony she assumed, correctly, would be lost on her attorney.

   As the two women waited for Blythe's car to draw near, she wondered now if her own carefully plotted "getaway" would merely turn into a damp and miserable form of exile.

   "Are there still Bartons living there?" Lisa inquired absently as they headed toward the Jaguar just nosing out of its preferred parking place some hundred yards distant.

   "The place is currently owned by an offshoot of the Barton-Trevelyans… a family named Teague."

   "It's still private? How did you persuade them to let you stay there?" Lisa queried, casting one eye toward Blythe's car, which was slowly making its way toward them.

   "I won't be staying at the manor. I've leased a cottage on the estate for the month of May," Blythe disclosed, wondering silently if Lisa's description would prove to be closer to the mark than the tasteful brochure the owner, a man named Lucas Teague, had forwarded to her travel agent.

   "Sounds cute," Lisa replied, but her tone sounded skeptical. "Did you rent a car for the month?"

"No. I can walk to the village."

   "How quaint. But what if I have to fax you something over there?" her lawyer demanded, waving at the driver of Blythe's blue Jaguar.

   "The cottage has no phone," Blythe replied. "But I figured that was the appeal," she added pointedly. Wasn't solitude what she wanted? Total privacy to lick her wounds? A chunk of time in which to figure out what she would do if she didn't do film production design anymore? A quiet, secluded place to gather her strength so she could begin to rebuild her life—and mend her heart. "Visitors can use the manor-house exchange as long as they don't abuse the privilege. I was told that his housekeeper is willing to take urgent messages. I left the number with your secretary," she finished, sensing a familiar weight of sadness settling in her chest.

   "Well… I guess I could FedEx you in an emergency," Lisa considered doubtfully.

   The sound of running footsteps interrupted their conversation.

   "Oh, boy," groaned Lisa. "Here come the reptiles. Quick, get in the car!" she said, pointing to the dark-blue vehicle coming their way.

   From around a concrete pillar a man with earphones clamped on his head and a recorder slung over his right shoulder suddenly bore down on them, shouting, "There she is! Mrs. Stowe! Mrs. Stowe! Can you tell us your reaction to today's divorce proceedings? Mrs. Stowe!"

   Blythe stared, frozen to the spot, as the radio reporter thundered toward her. The microphone held in his outstretched hand was suddenly inches from her chin.

   "What's your response to being two-timed by your own sister while you were looking after your dying grandmother?" he persisted, panting like an overheated dog after his dash across the cavernous garage. His shirttail dribbled below a waistline that bore the signs of too much booze and fast food. Several other reporters ran up behind him.

   "How do you feel about her having a baby with your husband? Ex-husband, I mean," another journalist demanded, looking pleased with his stab at accuracy.

   "Excuse me!" shouted the network anchorwoman who prided herself on still going out in the field to do breaking stories, and to whom Chris had been talking on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. "Isn't it true that you're walking away from this marriage with a financial settlement in the seven figures?"

   Blythe swallowed hard and blindly began to back toward her car.

   "Oh, for God's sake, you creep!" Lisa shouted. Then she flung open the left rear passenger door and practically shoved Blythe into the backseat. "Get in! Get in!"

   Soon the phalanx of reporters had surrounded the sedan. Tungsten lights mounted on top of the television news cameras harshly illuminated the car's leather interior. Lisa, elbowing the disheveled radio reporter aside, rapped sharply on the chauffeur's window until the glass glided open.

   "Just move forward, driver!" the tight-lipped attorney commanded. "They'll get out of the way if they see you mean business." Then, lowering her head, she whispered into the man's left ear, "Take her directly to LAX. British Airways."

Some twenty-one hours later, Blythe felt like a hapless extra in
The Longest Day.
She groggily roused herself to attention in the backseat of the hired Volvo as the driver sped across an arched stone bridge spanning the River Tamar into Cornwall proper. The trip had followed hard on the heels of air traffic delays on two continents and a numbing twelve-hour plane ride to London's Heathrow. Now the car's engine was slowing audibly as the vehicle labored down increasingly tortuous one-track roads that featured a few "lay-bys" here and there to solve the problem of face-to-face confrontations with approaching automobiles.

   Each succeeding turn led to a narrower lane that was flanked on both sides by stone hedges. These six-foot-high "fences" were clad top to bottom in a wild profusion of lush greenery and hedgerow trees, which, at this late hour, rendered them gloomy and forbidding.

   "You can't see a bloody thing!" Blythe muttered darkly, hopeful that her use of the British epithet, so favored by her former husband, would elicit a response from her hired driver, who had performed his services in silence the entire journey down from London.

   There was no reply forthcoming as the car suddenly glided under a stone arch attached to a turreted gatekeeper's cottage. A discreet sign posted near the open gate announced Barton Hall–Private Residence.

   In the lingering twilight that foretold of the coming summer months, Blythe and her taciturn chauffeur drove nearly a mile down a leafy green tunnel bordered by sixtyfoot larches whose top branches mingled overhead. The column of trees eventually let out on a circular gravel drive that led to the stone steps of a small-scaled castle. The crenellated round towers on each of the imposing structure's four corners looked to Blythe as if Richard Burton might suddenly materialize in tunic and hose bellowing, "Camelot!" The fairy tale gray stone edifice boldly poked its parapets above a low-lying mist that boiled up from a narrow valley, bisected by a modest river burbling on Blythe's right. Lush green grass dotted with a profusion of bluebells and pink campion carpeted the banks of the meandering stream. The colorful sprinkling of flowers outlined the River Luney's path in the dusk as it flowed down to and across a narrow strip of beach and ultimately disappeared into the brooding waters of the English Channel.

   Having stared for hours, semi-comatose, at her copy of the ordinance survey map "Landranger Number 204—Truro, Falmouth, and Surrounding Area," Blythe determined that a grass-clad crescent called Dodman Point embraced the left side of the cove. In the distance on her right, the shadowy outline of mighty Nare Head must surely be the landmass that jutted its lava-laced cliffs into the sea.

   Blythe gazed out her window at the only objects moving on the rural Cornish landscape—picturesque clusters of sheep, along with Highland cattle whose broad heads were crowned with formidable, curving horns. The large, shaggy carrot-colored beasts seemed somehow miscast in the quilted landscape of gentle, rolling hills and fields crosshatched by tall flower-encrusted stone and grass hedges.

   Minutes later Blythe arrived at the three-thousand-acre seat of her supposed ancestors, the Barton-Trevelyans, only to be informed that her landlord, Lucas Teague, whose antecedents had been both Bartons and Trevelyans, had already departed for dinner with friends in nearby Mevagissey. A glance at her watch told Blythe that she was more than three hours past the time of her estimated arrival. Even so she felt unaccountably deflated by the news that the lord of the manor had not remained at home

to greet her.

   An elderly housekeeper in a navy-blue pleated skirt, white blouse, and gray cardigan who introduced herself as Mrs. Quiller had appeared at the front door the instant their car crunched to a stop at the gravel entrance. Lucas Teague's retainer—a small, neat woman with an exceedingly pleasant manner—promptly handed the visitor a large old-fashioned iron key and directed Blythe's chauffeur to proceed back up the drive, and down another twisting single-track road toward the sea, where they would find a wooden gate with a carved sign announcing Painter's Cottage.

   "Just mind to clo-ose the gate for the goin' in or comin' out," she cautioned in the soft, elongated manner of Cornish speech. "Us don't want to lose the few sheep that're still on the place," she added, exchanging her pronouns in the fashion typical of the locals. "I've left a pasty near the hob, if ya be of a mind for something fillin'. There's a fire laid, that'll give ya some extra heat if it's needin'."

   By the time they bumped down a dirt track and reached a broad field flanking the sea, the swirling fog had turned into a driving rain. With lichen clinging to its slate roof, a small stone dwelling looked forlornly out across the English Channel. The cottage was illuminated by a solitary lamp glowing in one of its deep-set windows. Facing north was a distinctive twelve-foot-by-eight-foot square-paned artist's window.

   Blythe noted with some satisfaction that, as per the inviting prose in Lucas Teague's brochure, which had accompanied the booking form and outlined the lodging's amenities, Painter's Cottage was, indeed, located thirty feet from a cliff near Dodman Point, a half mile from Barton Hall itself. However, at the moment, thanks to a steady downpour, she

couldn't see five feet in front of the car.

   It was close to eight by the time she found herself standing alone in the middle of the frigid cottage overlooking Veryan Bay—now completely shrouded in fog. As the hired car and uncommunicative driver disappeared into the deepening gloom, Blythe paused at the threshold, watching the taillights vanish into the mist.

   Then suddenly she was overcome by a wave of loneliness so devastating that her breath caught, as if she'd been assaulted. Like a DVD endlessly replaying itself, her mind began to focus once again on the terrible sequence of events that had led up to the moment when she'd walked inside her husband's luxurious director's trailer.

   
Don't think about it
…
just don't think about it!

   As she ventured farther into the deserted cottage, Blythe's eyes were drawn to the shadowy corners of the small chamber.

   Try as she might, she couldn't seem to switch off the flood of memories regarding a scandal taking place half a world away.

   Prior to her own shocking discovery of her husband's unorthodox infidelity, apparently everyone but she had been privy to all manner of gossip and innuendo. Those in the know whispered that Christopher Stowe, the brilliant filmmaker, had spent many a sultry afternoon at Ellie's artist's loft in Santa Monica, where she illustrated children's books, no less. Her sister had been occupying real estate she, Blythe, had paid for, hoping her directionless younger sibling would find a sense of purpose and some personal pride. And it had been there, during the last weeks of Grandma Barton's life, that Chris and Ellie had fallen into each other's arms with the doors locked, the blinds drawn, and the voice mail picking up on the first ring.

No kidding, Grandma,
she thought bleakly.

   For the thousandth time Blythe's mind scanned the details of the double betrayal, searching for some overlooked clue that might finally explain such sordid treachery.

   "He was my husband!" she raged inside the dimly lit cottage, her fists clenched rigidly by her side. Her outburst was muted by the hand-hewn beams of her supposed place of refuge. "She was my sister, for God's sake!" And, perhaps worst of all, the furtive lovers had even brazenly claimed to be overwhelmed with work and had both remained in California the day Lucinda Barton was buried in the snowchoked cemetery that November afternoon.

   Blythe began to pace in aimless circles around the luggage piled in the center of the room. With bitterness guaranteed to give her heartburn, she recalled racing to catch the last flight out of the minuscule airport nestled under the shadow of the Grand Tetons, desperately seeking solace in her husband's arms by nightfall. She could remember perfectly which parking space she'd chosen that day on the Paramount lot. She saw herself rushing across the pavement toward Chris's director's trailer stationed next to soundstage 27. Various members of the crew on their dinner break had watched her try the door, find it locked, and dig in her purse for her keys. Once she'd gotten it open, she merely stood on the trailer's threshold, staring inside. There, on the daybed, she beheld her husband—stark naked and sprawled across the tanned thighs of his twentynine-year-old sister-in-law. Both were fast asleep.

   Blythe sat down on the largest piece of her luggage and closed her eyes.

   If only she could cry, instead of
think.

   The story of the affair had been gossip too lurid, too

juicy—and too valuable—not to have been sold to one of the sleazier television newsmagazine shows by someone on their film crew. Like a scalpel probing a wound, her mind once more conjured up the salacious tabloid headlines, the TV trucks from the networks and CNN parked in front of her condominium complex when the news of the incestuous tryst between the Oscar-winning director and his wife's sister became public.