The Little Country

  She looked for, but couldn’t find a teasing twinkle in his eyes.

  “Gramps! You don’t believe that a book could‌—”

  “Come get your old grandfather his tea and I’ll tell you a wee bit more about the Mousehole half of your two Billys.”

  “Two Billys” was their private joke for her infatuation with the work of Billy Pigg and William Dunthorn. Something very, very good was “almost two Billys’ worth of bully.”

  “I still can’t believe you never told me about this,” Janey said as she led the way to the kitchen.

  “Yes, well”‌—the Gaffer’s gaze settled on the top of Dunthorn’s letter marking her place in the book‌—“I see you’ve read the letter, too, so you know why I kept it from you.”

  “I just happened upon it,” Janey said, ready to apologize all over again.

  “Getting my tea’s penance enough, my love,” the Gaffer told her.

  The center of the Little household was the kitchen‌—it always had been, especially when Janey’s grandmother was still alive and filling it with the tempting smells of her baking and the warmth of her presence.

  Janey and the Gaffer had shared equally in the auto accident that had taken the Gaffer’s wife and son, Janey’s grandmother and father. She was just nudging eight at the time, so that most of her growing up had taken place in this house that she and the Gaffer had made their own special place over the years. Her mother‌—Constance Little, née Hetherington‌—had run off with a filmmaker on holiday from New York a few years before the accident and remained unheard from since the day the divorce papers became final. Although Janey’s mother had reverted to her maiden name for legal purposes, she kept Connie Little as a stage name. Considering the sort of film work she was involved in, Janey’s father Paul had remarked in an odd moment of bitterness before his death, she should have used Lingus as a surname.

  The Gaffer didn’t like to think of the woman. So far as he was concerned, the day she’d walked out on Paul and Janey, she was no longer to be considered a part of the family. She had no place in the life that he and Janey had made with each other.

  No matter where Janey’s music took her, nor for how long, Mousehole would always be her home‌—this house on Duck Street where the Gaffer lived, just a half-minute’s walk from the harbour from which he’d once set sail in his boat along with the other fishermen of the village. Though the pilchard shoals had ceased at the turn of the century, there was still work for a fisherman when the Gaffer was a young man. That work declined decade by decade until now it was only a shadow of the industry it once was. Most of the boats leaving Mousehole harbour now carried only a crew of tourists.

  The first tune that Janey ever wrote was a simple reel on the fiddle called “The Gaffer’s Mouzel,” and the front cover of her first album jacket was a photo of the village, taken from the ferry that ran between Penzance and the Scillies, out on Mount’s Bay. The village was in her blood as much as in her grandfather’s.

  The Gaffer sat at the kitchen table, rubbing his hand on the cover of the book, while Janey busied herself at the counter making their tea. She brought sandwiches and steaming mugs of tea over, then sat across from him and put her hand on his.

  “I’ve made you sad, haven’t I?” she said. “Made you remember sad things.”

  The Gaffer shook his head. “I could never forget, my robin. Garm, we were a pair, Billy and I, and isn’t that God’s own truth? Always into mischief. Born a century earlier and I don’t doubt we’d both have been smugglers. We knew all the old places where they landed, you know.”

  Janey nodded. She never tired of rambling the whole countryside around Mousehole with him, the Gaffer full of old bits of lore and stories. He was always ready to tell a tale about these standing stones, that cliff, this old road, that sandbar, that abandoned tin mine. Everything had a story. Especially the stoneworks that riddled Penwith Peninsula. The Merry Maidens stone circle with the two pipers stones just a field over. The Men-an-Tol holed stone east of Penzance. The Boscawen-Un stone circle with its nineteen stones and tilted center pillar just south of Crows-an-Wra. The old Roman Iron Age village on the Gulval downs.

  “This letter,” she said. “It’s so mysterious. . . .”

  “Oh, I know. Billy was a real dog in a tayser sometimes‌—a gruff fisherman with a streak of the old madness in him a league wide and then some. Where do you think I got half my tales from, my queen? The giants and piskies, the saints and smugglers. It was Billy talked of them all, one as real as the other.”

  “But what’s so wrong with him being like that?” Janey asked. “I’ve heard the old fellows talk down at the local. They’re all half-mad with the same kind of stories themselves.”

  As you are, she added affectionately to herself.

  The Gaffer shrugged. “Self-preservation, I suppose. For both of us. We fought in the War together, you know. The other soldiers made enough fun of our country ways as it was without letting them think we might believe in piskies and the like as well. The simplest things, like gulls being‌—”

  “The spirits of dead sailors,” Janey said.

  “That’s what my own dad told me, and I believe it. But there’s those you tell that kind of a thing to and they treat you like a half-wit. Or they’ll think you’re quaint‌—like the tourists do. Billy didn’t much care, but I did. At least I did then. Became sort of a habit since then, I suppose.”

  “So Billy really believed in what he wrote?”

  The Gaffer laughed. “Oh, I don’t know, my robin. He’d tell you he believed, and in such a way you’d swear he did, but there was always a gleam in his eye if you knew to look.”

  Just like there was in the Gaffer’s, Janey thought, when he started a similar kind of tale. “Do you see that stone there, Janey, my beauty?” he’d begin. “Time was . . .” And off he’d go on some rambling story. Face solemn, not a twitch of a smile, but the gleam was there in his eyes.

  “Why do you think Billy didn’t want anybody else to see this book?” she asked. “I’m not far into it, but I can tell it’s as good or better than the others. And if it’s so important that it be kept a secret, why was it published at all?” She opened the book to the copyright page and read aloud, “ ‘Published in an edition of one copy.’ It seems so . . . odd.”

  She flipped to the title page and glanced at the bottom where the publisher’s name was Goonhilly Downs Press, Market Jew Street, Penzance.

  “Odd,” the Gaffer agreed. “It is that.”

  “You never asked him about it?”

  The Gaffer shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “A man’s entitled to his secrets if he wants them. A woman, too.”

  “I suppose.” Janey put her finger on the publisher’s name. “Maybe we could ask these people. Goonhilly Downs Press. Do they still exist?”

  “I’ve never heard of them before.”

  The Goonhilly Downs were out on Lizard’s Point, across Mount’s Bay. It made Janey wonder why a Penzance publisher would take them for the name of its imprint. Well, she could ask them that as well.

  “Think of all the people who would love to read this,” she said, thinking aloud.

  “You mustn’t talk about it,” the Gaffer said. “I made a promise‌—a family promise, my flower. You’re held to it as well.”

  “But. . .” Janey began, but then she nodded. A promise was a promise. “I won’t tell anyone,” she said.

  “Is there more tea?”

  Janey rose to get the pot. After first putting a half inch of milk at the bottom of each mug and two spoons of sugar in the Gaffer’s, she poured them each another tea.

  “Is this book the only secret writing of Billy’s?” she asked as she sat down again.

  “The only one he had me promise to keep secret. There’s some unpublished articles in a folder in the same chest where you found this book‌—writings about local things‌—but I never did anything with them. Hadn’t the heart, to tell you the
truth. It never seemed right to make money from a friend’s death. Not to me.”

  Janey covered his hand with her own again. “Not to me either,” she said.

  They sat quietly, holding on to the moment of closeness, then the Gaffer shifted in his seat and found a smile.

  “Well, then, my beauty,” he said. “I think you owe me a favour.”

  “What did you have in mind?” she asked warily.

  “Oh, nothing bad. There’s just this session at Charlie Boyd’s tonight and‌—”

  “You wanted to show off your granddaughter.”

  “I only have the one.”

  Janey smiled with genuine affection. “I’d love to go,” she said. “Gives me a chance to show off my granddad.”

  3.

  Felix Gavin walked through London’s Victoria Station with the rolling gait of the seaman he was. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, deeply tanned, with dark brown hair cropped close to his scalp, pale blue eyes, and a small gold hoop in the lobe of his right ear. He drew the gazes of women he passed as he made his way to his platform, not so much for his size, or because he was handsome, as that his were features that instilled an immediate trust.

  He radiated a sense of strength and calm; the promise that he was a man who could be counted on. He wore loose flannel trousers, a plain white T-shirt with an unbuttoned pea jacket overtop, and sturdy black workman’s shoes. In one hand he carried a navy blue duffel bag, in the other a squarish wooden box, painted black and plastered with decals from the ports where his various ships had docked‌—mostly European and North American, but others from as far away as Hong Kong and Australia.

  He’d been a sailor for a good third of his twenty-eight years, most recently as a crewman of the freighter La Madeleine, sailing out of Montreal. He’d left the ship in Madrid when he’d received the letter that was now in the front pocket of his trousers. Taking the first flight he could get to London, he’d arrived at Gatwick early this morning, changed his money to British currency, and immediately boarded a train to Victoria Station.

  Now he waited at the platform for another train to take him into the West Country.

  He set his baggage down at his feet and leaned against a pillar, hands in his pockets. The fingers of his right hand touched the folded letter.

  “Oh, Felix,” it began, and went on:

  I feel terrible writing this. You always send me postcards, when I haven’t managed much more than a Christmas card, and it doesn’t seem fair. But you said if I ever needed help, I could call on you.

  I do need help. Can you come to the Gaffer’s?

  Please don’t hate me. I wouldn’t ask, but I’m desperate.

  Love,

  Janey

  The letter was typed, even the signature. The postmark was Mousehole, in Cornwall, where her grandfather lived. Where Felix sent his postcards every few months. The cards were never more than just a few lines from whatever port he happened to be in‌—brief condensations of the long one-sided conversations he had with her when he was at sea and she couldn’t hear him.

  Sighing, Felix prodded the letter with his fingers, folding it into an even smaller square.

  Hate her? Never.

  His feelings were always mixed. He was happy that he’d known her, sad that everything had fallen apart the way it had, frustrated that they hadn’t been able to put it back together, that they hadn’t really tried. The good history they had‌—the two and a half years when everything just seemed perfect‌—couldn’t seem to defeat the last few months of pointless arguments when things better left unsaid were aired and then regretted too late. Once spoken, those words had taken on a life of their own and couldn’t be recalled.

  But he never stopped loving her; never stopped hoping that someday, somehow, they’d be together again. Yet now, now that she was finally asking for him, hope was tempered with the fear of what could have happened that was so bad to make her reach out to him.

  Not the Gaffer, he prayed. Don’t let anything have happened to that sweet old man.

  But what had happened? The letter was so vague‌—so was Janey, in some ways, with her thoughts bouncing every which way.

  His train arrived and he thankfully gave up the worry in the bustle of boarding, stowing away his gear, and finding a seat. The carriage was only a quarter full. This time of year‌—mid-October‌—the English didn’t flock to the West Country for their holidays the way they did in the summer. The area around Penzance was known as the Cornish Riviera, and in the summer, it lived up to its name. Now only the people who lived there, or those who had business there, made the trip out to the Penwith Peninsula.

  Settling into his seat, he pulled out a paperback mystery novel and tried to read as the train pulled out of the station. But Janey’s features kept intruding on the storyline and he couldn’t follow the private eye’s narrative for more than a few sentences before he had to go back and begin the paragraph again. Expectations of what he could look forward to were mixing too strongly with an anxiety born of that same anticipation of seeing her again.

  Finally, once they left London, he set the book aside and stared out the window, watching the hedgerow-bordered fields flicker by. As memories rose up, one after the other, he simply let them come.

  A little more than five hours later, he disembarked at Penzance Station and stood out in the car park, looking over at St. Michael’s Mount where it rose like a humpbacked swell from Mount’s Bay. It was already dark, the grey skies slating into night. A brisk easterly wind blew in from the water, thick with the tang of salt and the promise of rain.

  He turned finally, walking towards a phone booth before changing his mind. He wasn’t ready to call her. He didn’t want the first contact to be an impersonal communication over a phone line. He thought of taking a taxi to Mousehole‌—the village lay a few miles west of Penzance, just past Newlyn, the three set all in a row along the shore of Mount’s Bay like three gulls on a ship’s railing‌—then decided against that as well.

  More memories were waking here. Better to walk through them now, before he reached the Gaffer’s old house on Duck Street, he decided, than try to deal with them in the back of a cab.

  Swinging the strap of his duffel bag to his shoulder, he hefted his wooden box and set off, taking the Quay Wharf Road to where it met Battery Road, then following the Western Promenade out of the town and into Newlyn.

  Even in the dark, Mousehole was just the way he remembered it. Maybe especially in the dark, because he’d rambled through its benighted streets with Janey often enough to know it as well as he did his own hometown of Deschenes, in West Quebec. Both were fronted by water, but there the resemblance ended.

  Deschenes, at least when he was growing up there, was a poverty-stricken village on the wrong side of the tracks that fronted that part of the Ottawa River known as Lac Deschenes. The streets were packed dirt, the buildings ramshackle, some of them little better than tarpaulin shacks. The memories he carried away from it centered around the fighting of his alcoholic parents, his brother Barry who wrapped his Harley around a lamppost, killing himself and his girlfriend, their sister Sue who had her first kid when she was fifteen, and a hundred other unhappy events.

  Mousehole was an ancient port, an unspoiled fishing village of narrow streets and alleyways that wound through tiers of cottages and tiny flowered courtyards. If there was poverty here, it didn’t show the same underbelly to the world that his hometown did.

  He entered by the Parade, passing the Old Coastguard Hotel, and made his way to North Cliff. There he stood in front of the newsagent’s and looked seaward at the two arms of the quay’s seawalls that enfolded the village’s harbour in a protective embrace. He’d sat on one or another of those walls with Janey on more than one moonlit night, listening to the waves beat at the stone walls, watching the sea, or sitting with their backs to the water and taking in the picturesque view of the terraced village as it climbed the hill, lights twinkling in the windows of the cottages. Those were
good nights. They didn’t always need conversation. The darkness simply held them in a companionable embrace as comforting as the arms of the quay’s seawalls did the harbour.

  Felix turned away from the view. He was dawdling, and he knew why. This close to seeing Janey again, all his courage was washing out of him as surely as the tide stole the water from inside the seawalls.

  He walked past the newsagent’s to where a tiny alleyway separated the buildings on either side of it and walked up its narrow length. This was Duck Street, starting out no wider than a couple of yards, but broadening into a one-lane street by the time it reached Wellington Place, the square just before the Gaffer’s cottage on Chapel Place, across from the Methodist Chapel.

  A black and orange cat eyed him curiously from the stone wall as he opened the wrought-iron gate that led into the Gaffer’s tiny courtyard. There were lights on in the two-and-a-half-story stone cottage.

  Janey was in there, he thought. Probably sitting around the hearth with her grandfather. Reading. Or playing a game of dominoes with the Gaffer. She wasn’t playing music, because he couldn’t hear either her pipes or her fiddle.

  He hesitated at the door.

  Come on, he told himself.

  He lifted the brass knocker on the door, rapping it sharply against the plate screwed into the wood behind it. And suddenly he got a strange feeling.

  There was no one home. He could feel the emptiness that anticipation had hidden from him. Neither Janey nor the Gaffer was in. But there was somebody. . . .

  He knocked again and heard a crash. Without stopping to think, he let his gear drop to the cobblestoned walk and tried the door. It was unlocked, opening at his touch. He stepped inside, nerves prickling, and sensed the blow coming before it struck.

  That momentary warning was enough to give him time to turn aside and take the blow on his shoulder. A figure darted by him, something bulky under his arm. Felix caught his balance and snaked out a hand, snagging the man by the shoulder of his coat. Before he could pull him back into the cottage, the man slammed what he was carrying into Felix’s midsection.