Blackthorn Winter (6 page)

"I wasn't inviting
you,
Madame President," said Mr. Cooper cuttingly. "I was speaking to our American visitors."

Liza tossed her head in annoyance. Duncan looked embarrassed. Mom came to the rescue in her usual tactful way. "Thank you so much, Mr. Cooper. My children and I would love to stop in for a cup of tea with you and your wife—if you'll give us a rain check on the invitation. I'm afraid we need to get back to our new little cottage and finish our unpacking. We were so tired from the long journey yesterday, we didn't get to it last night."

"A rain check, you say?" chuckled Mr. Cooper, peering outside. It was starting to rain again and we all fumbled to open our umbrellas. "All right, very well, if you're certain. We'll keep the kettle on for another day, then. Duncan, you see that you bring these Americans back soon. Granny will make them her famous scones!"

"I'll do that, Grandad," said Duncan. He reached out and plucked the script from Liza's hand. "And I'll take this, shall I? Maybe you'll decide you want to be in the play after all..."

"Enough, boy!" shouted the old man, glowering at Duncan. "I won't be in any play run by that woman. Hanging's too good for her, if you ask me. I admit she can paint
a fair likeness, and she ought to stick to
that,
thank you very much, and not try to meddle in what she has no talent for!"

"
Er
—good-bye!" Duncan said desperately to Liza and to us. "Er—see you tonight!" And he closed the door quickly. But I could still hear Mr. Cooper ranting on the other side.

"Poor Dunk," said Liza, shaking her head as she led us back down the street. "The Coopers are his mum's parents. Both of them are batty old dears, but he tries to help out with them. Goes over to the house a lot to look in on them and do errands and suchlike."

"Why is Mr. Cooper so mad about your play?" I asked.

The wind blew her black hair across her face and she raked it back impatiently, her wild eyes flashing annoyance—at the rain, I wondered, or at the old man? "He's a fool, that's all! A jealous old fool. Used to be president of the Drama Society himself for years, he was, and always creamed the best parts for himself. Now I've been elected and I've made sure people get the parts they deserve. He's lucky I didn't put him on the backstage props committee! But props is run by the chemist, Mr. Browning, and I wouldn't want to do that to him. He's brilliant, he is." She strode ahead of us.

"Such drama in Blackthorn!" Mom murmured to me from under her umbrella.

"Please, I beg you," I replied pertly, "do
not
confuse drama with melodrama."

"
Shhh!
" hissed Mom, glancing down the street at Liza's indignant figure.

We all stopped to have a cup of tea at the Angel Cafe on the corner. The Goops had a sticky bun apiece.

"Ah, this is good tea," Mom said. "At home it seems I'm always drinking coffee—just because David drinks coffee, I guess. This is much nicer." She smiled at her old art-school friend.

"Well, you're English. Tea is in your blood," Liza said with a grin. "Starts out there, and stays there."

Mom smiled. "Remember how Nora always said a good strong cuppa tea could save your life? I think I need to start drinking tea again, Liza. Wash away all my troubles and cares!"

Liza leaned across the table. "Now, you tell Auntie Liza about those troubles, luv. It's that husband of yours, isn't it? I always do say that husbands are more trouble than they're worth—and I can speak from experience, let me tell you! But, go ahead, what's the scoop on old David? Still got a stick up his bottom?"

"Liza!" admonished Mom, glancing over at me and the Goops. "
Shhh!
" But she giggled. "Actually, I've been thinking of dropping Drake from my name and going back to being just Hedda Martin. But my paintings are all signed 'Martin-Drake.' What do you think, Liza?"

I glared at Mom and Liza both, then drained my cup of tea and turned my attention to the Goops, who were quietly engaged in drawing mazes on their place mats.
Fine, just fine. Let Mom change her name. Let them sit there and drag Dad through the mud.
I'd heard it all already from Mom. How Dad was a workaholic, how ever since he'd been promoted to partner in the architectural firm, he couldn't stop thinking about business long enough to have fun anymore. He had become an old stick-in-the-mud, Mom said, and all his late nights and conferences and business trips kept him so much away from home that she
might as well be a single mother. They never went out to the opera, which they both had loved, or to art shows, and worst of all, Mom never had time for her painting anymore, thanks to him. I'd heard it, and heard it, and
heard
it until I thought I would scream if Mom complained anymore about "How Hard It Is to Live Without Art." And if she was gearing up now for a long chin-wag with Liza about Dad, then I wasn't about to sit here and listen. I'd leave, and go ... somewhere. Anywhere.

But maybe Mom was more thoughtful of us kids than I was giving her credit for being, because instead of talking about Dad in front of me and the Goops, she turned the talk to the upcoming Springtime Art show in the village. Liza reported that much of the local talent was a crock, but some of it was truly good, and that was why the London art collectors liked to come to the show. Both Quent and Nora had been asked to exhibit in London galleries after being discovered in Springtime Art shows, and Liza herself had sold a painting to a London gallery last year. It all seemed very exciting to Mom. Liza and Mom finished their tea and went off to see the Pethering Portrait Gallery. I opted to go down to the rocky beach with the Goops. Beaches are rarely my first choice, but the Goops could not go alone yet, Mom said. Plus, the sun had come out, and I'd had enough of a tour of Blackthorn, and I definitely needed some time away from Liza. She was the sort of person my dad described as "enervating." Someone who sort of sucked the life out of a room with her energy. I felt exhausted now, though it was still morning, and even the thought of seeing Duncan at Quent Carrington's party tonight didn't perk me up.

Or maybe it was just jet lag.

As long as I could remember, walking on beaches brought on a strange, lost feeling. Especially at night—or on foggy days—standing on a beach could make my stomach churn in a sick sort of way. Even on sunny days, I often felt a little dizzy as I approached a beach. It wasn't that I was afraid of water. In fact, I was a really good swimmer—Mom and Dad had seen to it that all three of us kids had lessons from a young age, and we were all adept at both swimming and diving. My uneasiness was more to do with the atmosphere of the beach—the expanse of open sky and stretch of sand, and the sense I always had of being very small and vulnerable. But once I forced myself to go to a beach, the sound of the surf made me feel better and after a while I forgot the weirdness. Maybe it was something to do with all those negative ions bouncing around in the waves—at least that's what Tim Raglan had told me was responsible for the improved mood I got at the water's edge. He was a brainy sort of almost boyfriend. He said my good mood came from the energy generated by the waves. Whatever. Maybe he would also have come up with a theory about my stomach-churning reaction to beaches on overcast days—or in darkness. But I'd never told him about my problems.

All I know is that after the Goops and I said good-bye to Liza Pethering, and promised Mom we'd be back at the cottage in forty-five minutes, we walked to the end of the main road, where Blackthorn met the sea. I was so tired I was dragging my feet. As we approached the seawall, the dizziness started, and I felt tiny and unprotected. But I kept walking, and when we had climbed down the steep, stone steps from the sea wall to the rocky beach, and when I was standing at the edge of the sea with Ivy and Edmund, the cold salty spray swept my tiredness and dizziness away. In no time the three of us were hurling those round, smooth beach rocks into the water, trying to see who could throw the farthest. All of us were pretty good at tossing a baseball around, thanks to Saturday afternoons in the backyard with Dad, back in the days before his big promotion, when he wasn't always so busy with his job.

"Hey, did you see
that
one?" crowed Edmund. "That one went almost all the way to that ship out there!"

"Pretty good," conceded Ivy. "But watch this one!" She let fly a round, smooth stone. "I bet mine goes all the way to
Russia
!"

"Mine went to Russia, too!" Edmund shouted back. Then he pointed. "Hey—I bet that ship is going to Russia."

"Russia," I informed them, "is totally in the other direction." But it was the nature of Goops never to listen to big sisters, and so in two seconds they had completely forgotten our rock-throwing contest and were off into a game, pretending to be on board the big ship we could just see out on the horizon ... pretending that they were docking in Moscow (though from what I recalled of my geography, Moscow wasn't even on the ocean, anyway)... pretending
they were taking a train to the orphanage where we'd first seen Edmund nine years ago...

"Hey, let's adopt some babies and take them home on the ship with us," Ivy said, and Edmund, who wasn't really into babies, agreed, because he
did
like adoption games.

"Okay," he said readily. "Now we're getting off the train and going to meet the director of the orphanage. Her name is ... Mrs. Bobblehead.
Yes,
Ivy!" he shouted when she started to protest. "It really is! That's what the director was called when I lived there. I remember—"

"Edmund, can you really remember anything?" I asked him suddenly. "I mean, really remember?"

"He was only a baby," Ivy said severely. "I don't remember anything before I was about two and a half. Why should he?"

I sighed, and the brisk wind carried my sigh out to sea. "Oh, never mind."

"My first memory is of Ivy taking my bottle," Edmund yelled over the crash of waves. "Stole it right out of our double stroller and threw it in the road."

"I never did that—," protested Ivy.

"Oh, yes you did," I told her. "Because I was pushing that stroller, and I remember."

"There, you see?" said Edmund comfortingly. "You do remember
some
things."

"Not much, but a few things," I concurred.

"Maybe the reason you don't remember more is because you got hit on the head and have amnesia," Edmund suggested helpfully. "Or—maybe you got taken by space aliens who did weird experiments on you, and it was so nasty you don't want to remember. I saw a TV show like
that once. Hey!—" He broke off, bending down to dig in the sand at the edge of the rock line. "Hey! Look at this, you guys. A bottle! Maybe there's a message inside!"

Ivy ran to help him rinse the beer bottle in the waves. "Empty," Edmund said, disappointed. But Ivy took the bottle and held it up to the sunlight.

I watched them, bemused, thinking about amnesia and aliens.

"Maybe it's really old, Edmund," Ivy said. "Maybe it's an empty bottle of
mead.
And it was last held by King Henry the Eighth as he..."

"As he sailed past this beach in his royal yacht—"

"They didn't have yachts then, I bet," I said dourly, but nothing would shut the Goops up once they got into a story.

"Maybe he was on his royal
barge,
sailing to Russia to visit Mrs. Bobblehead, and he drank his mead from this very bottle—"

"And then a huge wave nearly capsized the barge! And the bottle fell overboard..."

"Maybe it fell down, down into the sea, and it conked a mermaid on the head! And she put a
curse
on it—"

"Yeah—a
curse
!"

And the Goops were off again as the clouds rolled in and obscured the sun. I shivered on the cold beach. My brother and sister were perfect playmates for each other. It was always like that with them. I could just as well have gone to the Pethering Portrait Gallery or be back at the cottage for all they needed me there, or noticed me. But I knew Mom wouldn't want the nine-year-olds left alone at the ocean's edge. They were good swimmers, true, but that
was in California, where the sky was as blue as the water. This English ocean was as gray as the English sky above it had become, and I didn't trust it. I was glad to turn away from the wind blowing off the water and zip my raincoat and walk up the deserted beach a bit. Glad, too, to get away from the Goops and their ancient bottle, and Mrs. Bobblehead, and all of Edmund's dumb, fake memories.

They had to be fake. Of course he couldn't remember anything about his adoption or what life was like before
us;
he had been only a few months old when we brought him home to California. It wasn't as if he'd been older, as I had been when Mom and Dad adopted me. I had been, after all, fully five years old and ready for kindergarten when I joined this family. And kindergartners were old enough to remember all sorts of things.

So why
didn't
I?

The waves crashed over the concrete pier with a vengeance, spraying me. I jumped back, then tripped on a loose stone and sat down hard on another one. "Ouch!"

"Are you all right?" called a concerned voice out of nowhere, and I jerked my head up to see a girl about my age and my height (which is pretty tall), striding down the beach from the stone stairway. She wore a bright red jacket and had a large camera slung around her neck. The wind blew her short mouse-brown hair into spikes, then flat again. Her gray eyes looked worried. I stood up slowly, rubbing my bruised backside (
bum,
Mom said it was called here).

"Yes, I'm okay," I called back.

"I saw you fall," the girl said, coming to stand next to me, and then we both just stood there awkwardly for a moment. Then she added, "You sound American."

"I am American!" I laughed. "My name's Juliana Martin-Drake. We just moved here." I pointed to the Goops, who by now had taken off their shoes and started piling stones into a big tower by the water's edge. "And
those
strange, half-frozen creatures are my brother and sister."