"Trapsing Through Time Can Lead to Love"
Reviewed by Teia Collier
Posted September 23, 2011
Romance Historical | Romance Time Travel
Susanna Kearsley's latest is an imaginatively captivating
trip through time. I found complete hours swallowed whole
as I devoured THE ROSE GARDEN. After the death of her very famous sister, Eva Ward is set
with the heart-wrenching task of spreading her sister's
ashes where she felt the most love, in a place that feels
the most happy. She decides to return to the a home of
their youth, on the Cornish coast of England. Upon her return,
Eva is immediately accepted as family by the close
confidants and friends of their mutually shared childhood. Grieving and a little heartbroken, Eva settles into life at
the old house when the whispers start. Voices that no one
hears but Eva. Thinking she is loosing her mind, she does
what almost every modern woman does and consults the
internet. But when the voices become handsome men in
eighteenth century garb, Eva finds herself swept to an fro
and haphazardly deposited on a narrowly winding sea of time. In a touchingly romantic, slightly mysterious and utterly
entrancing tale that sweeps from the present and the past
and back again with fluid ease, Kearsley carries readers on
a ride that feels real and made me feel as if it could be
happening right now in some small corner of Cornwall. I
enjoyed getting to know the family at Trelowarth, and look
forward to the stories of the other members, particularly
the deliciously broody Mark.
SUMMARY
Acclaimed author Susanna Kearsley's previous works have
won
the RT Book Reviews Reviewers Choice Award, and finaled for
both the UK Romantic Novel of the Year and the RITA awards.
When Eva's film star sister Katrina dies, she leaves
California and returns to Cornwall, where they spent their
childhood summers, to scatter Katrina's ashes and in doing
so return her to the place where she belongs. But Eva must
also confront the ghosts from her own past, as well as those
from a time long before her own. For the house where she so
often stayed as a child is home not only to her old friends
the Halletts, but also to the people who had lived there in
the eighteenth century. When Eva finally accepts that she is able to slip between
centuries and see and talk to the inhabitants from hundreds
of years ago, she soon finds herself falling for Daniel
Butler, a man who lived - and died - long before she herself
was born. Eva begins to question her place in the present,
and in laying her sister to rest, comes to realize that she
too must decide where she really belongs, choosing between
the life she knows and the past she feels so drawn towards.
ExcerptChapter 2
Crossing the Tamar for some reason made me feel
different inside. It was only a river, yet each time I
crossed it I felt I had stepped through some mystical veil
that divided the world that I only existed in from the one
where I was meant to be living. It was, my mother always
used to say, a kind of homecoming that only those with
Cornish blood could feel, and since my blood was Cornish on
both sides for several generations back, I felt it strongly.
I’d been born in Cornwall, in the north beyond the sweep
of Bodmin Moor, where my film-directing father had been
working on a darkly Gothic thriller, but both my parents
themselves had been raised on this gentler south coast—du
Maurier country—and after my father had settled into
lecturing in Screen Studies at the University of Bristol,
his more regulated schedule made it possible for us to
cross the Tamar every summer and come back to spend our
holidays with his old childhood friend George Hallett, who
lived with his young and lively family in a marvelously
draughty manor house set on a hill above the sea.
We’d come back every year, in fact, until I’d turned ten
and my father’s work had taken us away from England
altogether, setting us down on a different shoreline in
Vancouver on the western coast of Canada, where he’d become
a fixture at the University of British Columbia’s Centre
for Cinema Studies.
I had loved it in Canada, too. And of course it had been
in Vancouver that my sister, newly turned eighteen, had
first begun to get her acting roles—small parts at first,
then larger ones that brought enough attention from the
Hollywood directors who came up to film their movies in
Vancouver that they’d wanted her to come down to L.A., and
so she had.
I’d followed her in my own turn years later, more by
accident than anything. My own career path took me into
marketing, and sideways through an unexpected string of
opportunities to corporate public relations, and from
there, again by chance, to a PR firm that worked mainly in
the entertainment industry, and so I found myself at twenty-
five being transferred down from Vancouver to the office in
Los Angeles.
It never was my favorite place, L.A., but shortly after
I’d moved down my parents had crossed paths with a drunk
driver on a rain-drenched road back home, so after that
Katrina was the only family I had left, and I was loathe to
leave her.
We were close. When she was shooting somewhere, I would
always find the time to visit. I was there when Bill
proposed to her, and there when they were married in a
private ceremony to avoid the paparazzi. And she’d hired
me, of course, to represent her. Just to keep it in the
family, she had said. These past two years, with her
success, she had become my main account.
But I had never really settled in L.A., not with
apartments—I had gone through four—nor with the men I’d met
and dated. I had gone through even more of those, and none
had stuck, the last one fading from the picture with
convenience when Katrina had grown ill.
I’d barely noticed his departure, then. I didn’t miss
him now. I had been all but dead myself these past six
months, a walking shadow, but this morning as my First
Great Western train ran rattling on its rails across the
Tamar I felt something deep inside me stir to life.
I was in Cornwall. And it was a kind of homecoming—the
swiftly passing landscape with its old stone farms and
hills and hedges held a warm familiarity, and when I’d
changed the big train for a smaller one that ran along the
wooded valley branch line leading down towards the coast, I
felt an echo of the childish sense of thrilled anticipation
that had signaled each beginning of those long-lost summer
holidays.
The station at the line’s end was a small one, plain
with whitewashed walls, a blue bench set beside it and a
narrow platform with a white stripe painted at its edge,
and a handful of houses stacked up the green hillside
behind.
Three people waited on the platform, but I only noticed
one of them. I would have known him anywhere.
The last time I had seen Mark Hallett he’d just turned
eighteen and I’d been ten, too young to catch his eye but
not too young to be completely smitten with his dark good
looks and laughing eyes. I’d followed him round like a
puppy, never giving him peace, and he’d taken it in the
same good-natured way he took everything else, neither
making me feel like a bother nor letting it go to his head.
I’d adored him.
Katrina had, too, though for her it had gone a bit
deeper than that. He had been her first boyfriend, her
first great romance, and when we had left at the end of the
summer I’d watched both their hearts break. Hers had
healed. I assumed his had, too. After all, we were twenty
years on and our childhoods were over, although when I
stepped from the train to the platform and Mark Hallett
turned from the place he’d been standing, his eyes finding
mine with that shared sense of sure recognition, his smile
the same as it ever was, I couldn’t help feeling ten again.
‘Eva.’ His hug was familiar yet different. He wasn’t a
tall man, despite his strong West Country build, and my
chin reached his shoulder, whereas in my memories I’d
barely come up to his chest. But the comfort I felt in his
arms hadn’t changed.
‘No trouble with the trains?’ he asked.
‘No, they were all on time.’
‘A miracle.’ He took my suitcase from me, though he left
me with my shoulder bag, I think because he knew from what
I’d told him on the phone what I’d be carrying inside it.
The station didn’t even have facilities, it was so
small, and the car park wasn’t much more than a leveled bit
of gravel with a payphone at one side. Mark’s van was
easily identifiable by the ‘Trelowarth Roses’ logo on its
side, ringed round by painted vines and leaves. He noticed
me looking and smiled an apology. ‘I would have brought the
car, but I had to run a late order to Bodmin and there
wasn’t time to stop back at the house.’
‘That’s all right.’ I liked the van. It wasn’t the same
one his father had driven when I’d come down here as a
child, but it had the same mingling of smells inside: damp
earth and faintly crushed greenery and something elusive
belonging to gardens that grew by the sea. And it came with
a dog, too—a floppy-eared mongrel with shaggy brown fur and
a feathered tail that seemed to never cease wagging, it
only changed speed. It wagged crazily now as we got in the
van, and the dog would have crawled right through onto the
front seat and settled itself on my lap if Mark hadn’t with
one gentle hand pushed it back.
‘This is Samson,’ he told me. ‘He’s harmless.’
They’d always had dogs at Trelowarth. In fact they had
usually had three or four running round through the fields
with us children and traipsing with muddy feet through the
old kitchen and out to the gardens. Mark’s stepmother,
Claire, had forever been washing the flagstone floors.
Scratching the dog’s ears, I asked how Claire was doing.
‘Much better. She’s out of the plaster now, up walking
round on the leg, and the doctor says give it a few weeks
and she’ll be as right as rain.’
‘Remind me how she broke it in the first place?’
‘Cleaning gutters.’
‘Of course,’ I said, sharing his smile because we both
knew how independent Claire was, and it was no surprise
that, even now that she’d moved from the manor house into
the cottage, she still tried to do all the upkeep herself.
‘It’s a good thing,’ said Mark, ‘it was only the
gutters, not roof slates.’ The dog pushed his way in
between us again and Mark nudged him back, starting the van
and reversing out onto the road.
Cornish roads were like none other anywhere. Here by the
coast they were narrow and twisting with steep sloping
banks and high hedges that blocked any view of what might
lie ahead. My father had shaved several years off my life
every time he had driven down here, at high speeds, simply
honking the horn as we came to a corner and trusting that
if anyone were approaching unseen round the bend they’d get
out of the way. When I’d asked him once what would have
happened if somebody coming towards us had chosen to do the
same thing he was doing, to honk without slowing down, Dad
had just shrugged and assured me it never would happen.
And luckily for us, it never had.
Mark drove a little less recklessly, but I nonetheless
needed some kind of distraction from watching the road, so
I asked him, ‘Is Susan still living at home?’
Susan being his sister, a little bit younger than me.
‘She is.’ Mark pulled a face, but he didn’t convince me.
I knew they were close. ‘We got rid of her once. She was
living up near Bristol, but that didn’t stick and now she’s
back, with plans to start some sort of tea room or
something to bring in the tourists. She’s full of ideas, is
Susan.’
‘You don’t want a tea room?’ I guessed from his tone.
‘Let’s just say I don’t think there’ll be too many
tourists who want tea that badly they’d brave the hike up
from the village to get it.’
He did have a point. We were entering the village now—
Polgelly, with its huddled whitewashed houses and its
twisting streets so narrow they were closed to all but
local traffic and the taxis that each summer ferried
tourists to and from the trains. Mark’s van, as compact as
it was, could barely squeeze between the buildings.
Polgelly had once been a fishing port of some renown,
but with the tourist influx into Cornwall it had changed
its face from practical to picturesque, an artist’s haven
full of shops that sold antiques and Celtic crafts, and Bed
& Breakfast cottages with names like ‘Smuggler’s Rest’. The
old shop near the harbor where we’d always bought our fish
and chips still looked the same, as did the little fudge
shop on the corner. And The Hill, of course, remained the
same as ever.
From the first time I’d walked up it I had thought of it
like that—The Hill, for surely there could be no other hill
on earth that could with more perfection test the limits of
endurance. It was not its height alone, nor just the angle
of its slope, though both were challenging. It was that,
once you started up it, there seemed not to be an end to it—
the road kept rising steadily through overhanging trees on
stone and earthen banks, a punishing ascent that made the
muscles of your thighs begin to burn and left them shaking
for some minutes when you’d finally reached the top.
Yet being children, and not knowing any better, we’d
gone down it every day to play with Mark and Susan’s school
friends in Polgelly and to sit along the harbor wall to
watch the fishermen at work, and in the cheerfully
forgetful way that children have we’d pushed aside all
thoughts about The Hill until the time came round again for
us to climb it. Mark had actually carried me the final few
steps, once, which was no doubt why I’d developed such a
crush on him.
This time, we had the van, but even it seemed to
approach The Hill with something like reluctance, and I
could have sworn I heard the engine wheezing as we climbed.
From either side the trees, still bright with new spring
green, closed overtop of us and cast a dancing play of
light and shadow on the windscreen, and I caught the swift
familiar blur of periwinkle tangled with the darker green
of ivy winding up along the verge. And then I looked ahead,
expectantly, as I had always done, for my first glimpse of
the brick chimneys of Trelowarth House.
The chimneys were the first things to be seen, between
the trees and the steep bank of green that ran along the
road—a Cornish hedge, they called it, built of stones
stacked dry in the old fashion, herringbone, with vines and
varied wildflowers binding them together and the trees
arched close above. Then came a break in both the trees and
hedge, and there, framed as impressively as ever by the
view of rising fields and distant forests, was the house.
Trelowarth House had weathered centuries upon this hill,
its solid grey stone walls an equal match to any storm the
sea might throw at it. For all its size it had been plainly
built, a two-storey ‘L’ set with its front squarely facing
the line of the cliffs and the sea, while its longer side
ran fairly close beside the road. In what might be viewed
as a testament to the skills of its original builders, none
of its long line of owners appeared to have felt the need
to do a major renovation. The chimneys, dutifully
repointed, were in the original style, and a few of the
casement windows still had the odd pane of Elizabethan
glass, through which the people who had lived here then
might well have watched the sails of the Armada pass.
The house itself did not encourage such romantic
fancies. It looked stern and grey, unyielding, and the only
softness to it was the stubborn vine of roses that had
wound their way around and over the stone frame of the
front door and waited there to bloom as they had done in
all the summers of my childhood.
Three-quarters of the way up The Hill, Mark took the
sharp left turn into the graveled drive that angled right
again along the fifty feet or so of turf that separated
house and road. The garages themselves were in the back, in
the old stables at the far edge of the leveled yard, but
Mark stopped where we were, beside the house, and parked
the van, and in an instant we were overrun by what appeared
to be a pack of wild dogs, all leaping up and barking for
attention.
‘Down, you beasts,’ Mark told them, getting out and
going round to take my suitcase from the back.
I got out carefully myself, not because I was afraid of
the dogs, but because I didn’t want to step on them by
accident. There were only three of them, as it turned out—a
black cocker spaniel, a Labrador, and something that
underneath all the dirt looked a bit like a setter—and with
the little brown mongrel dog, Samson, who’d jumped out
behind me, the pack was quite manageable. Once I’d patted
all the heads and rumpled a few ears and scratched a side
or two the leaping changed to energetic wagging, with the
four dogs weaving round Mark’s legs and mine as we followed
the curve of the path round the corner.
At the front of the house a small level lawn had been
terraced out of the hillside, with hedges around it to
block some part of the wind, and below that the steep green
fields tumbled and rolled to the edge of the cliffs.
I was unprepared, as always, for my first view of the
sea. From this high up the view was beautiful enough to
steal my breath with such a swiftness that my ribcage
almost hurt. There were the green hills folding down into
their valley, with the darker smudges of the woods marked
here and there with paler arcs of blackthorn blossom.
There, too, was the harbor of Polgelly with its steeply-
stacked white houses looking small so far below us, and the
headlands curving out to either side, already showing the
first spreading cover of sea pink that made a softer
contrast to the darkly jagged rock beneath. And past all
that, as far as I could see, the endless rolling blue of
water stretched away until it met the clouds.
Mark stopped when I stopped, turned to watch my face,
and said, ‘Not quite like California, is it?’
‘No.’ This ocean had a very different feel than the
Pacific. It seemed somehow more alive. ‘No, this is better.’
I hadn’t heard anyone open the front door behind us, but
suddenly someone said ‘Eva!’ and, turning, I saw a young
woman in jeans and a red sweater, her dark hair cut even
shorter than Mark’s. This had to be Susan, I thought,
though I wouldn’t have known her if we’d met away from
Trelowarth. She’d only been seven or eight when I’d last
been here. Now she was in her late twenties, grown taller
and slender, her smile wide and welcoming. ‘I thought I
heard the van.’ Her hug was just as warm. ‘Honestly Eva,
you look just the same. It’s incredible. Even your hair. I
always envied you your hair,’ she told me. ‘Mine would
never grow like that.’
I didn’t really think much of my hair, myself. My father
had liked my hair long, so I’d left it that way. It was
easy enough to take care of, no styling required, and
whenever it got in the way I just tied it all back.
‘Short hair suits you though,’ I said to Susan.
‘Yes, well, it’s not by choice.’ She smoothed it with a
hand and grinned. ‘I tried to dye it red…’
Mark said, ‘It came out purple.’
‘More maroon, I’d say,’ she set him straight. ‘And when
I tried to fix it, it got worse, so I just cut it.’
‘By herself,’ said Mark.
‘Well, naturally.’
‘I could have done as good a job as that,’ he told her
dryly, ‘with my garden shears.’
Their banter was affectionate, and utterly familiar, and
I felt myself relaxing in the way one only did when in the
company of friends.
Susan let Mark score that last point and shrugged as she
told him, ‘Just drop that suitcase here for now, Claire
said to bring you both round to the cottage when you got
here. She’s made sandwiches.’
Mark did as he was told and then fell in behind as
Susan, with the dogs bouncing round her as though they’d
caught some of her energy, led the way along the front walk
of the house and down the long green sweep of hill towards
the sea, to the place where the old narrow coast path,
trampled hard as rutted pavement by the feet of countless
ramblers who came up along the clifftops from Polgelly,
disappeared into the Wild Wood.
I’d given it that name the summer Claire had read me
Kenneth Graeme’s timeless tales of Mole and Rat and Mr.
Toad. A chapter a night of The Wind in the Willows and
never again could I enter that old sprawling tangle of
woods without cocking an ear for the scurrying footsteps of
small unseen creatures and feeling a touch of the magic.
I still felt it now, as I followed Mark into the dim,
sudden coolness. The air changed. The light changed. The
scent of the woods, dank and earthy and rich, rose around
me. The woods was an old one, and where it was deepest it
stretched down the hill to the edge of the cliffs, but the
trees grew so thickly I lost my whole view of the sea. I
was closed round in branches and leaves—oak and elder and
blackthorn and ghostly pale sycamores, set amid masses of
bluebells.
The coast path, which entered the woods as a narrow
track, broadened a little in here so two people could walk
side by side, as though those who came into these woods
felt more comfortable walking that way in this place where
the shadows fell thick on the ferns and the undergrowth,
and the high trees had a whispering voice of their own when
the wind shook their leaves. But I’d never felt fear in
these woods. They were peaceful, and filled with the
joyously warbling songs of the birds tending hidden nests
high overhead.
Susan, leading us through, turned to tell me, ‘We
actually do have a badger. Claire’s seen it.’
If it was anything like the reclusive Mr. Badger who had
ruled the Wild Wood in The Wind and the Willows, I didn’t
hold out too much hope that I’d catch a glimpse of the
creature myself, but it didn’t stop me looking while we
walked.
I caught the sharp scent of the coal smoke from Claire’s
cottage chimney before we stepped into the clearing, a
broad semi-circular space blown with green grass that
chased to the edge of the cliff, where again I could have a
clear view of the sea.
I knew better than to go towards that cliff—there was a
wicked drop straight down from there, all unforgiving rock
and jagged stone below—but the view itself, framed by the
gap in the trees with the flowers and grass in between, and
the glitter of sun on the water far out where the fishing
boats bobbed, was beautiful.
And facing it, set tidily against the clearing’s edge,
the little cottage waited for us with its walls still
painted primrose-yellow underneath a roof of sagging slates.
The cottage had been rented out to tourists when I’d
come here as a child, to earn a bit of extra income for
Trelowarth, but apparently Claire had decided just this
past year to move into it herself with all her canvases and
paints, and leave the big house for her stepchildren. I
couldn’t really blame her. While Trelowarth House was
wonderful inside, it was an ancient house with draughts and
rising damp and tricky wiring, and it took a lot of work,
whereas this little cottage had been put here in the
Twenties and was snugly made and comfortable.
There wasn’t any need to knock. We just went in, the
three of us, and all the dogs came with us, spilling
through into the sitting room. Claire had been reading, but
she set aside the paperback and came around to fold me into
the third hug of warmth and welcome that I’d had this
afternoon.
Claire Hallett was a woman who defied the rules of
ageing. She looked just as fit approaching sixty as she’d
looked those years ago. Her hair might be a little shorter
and a paler shade of blonde now from its whitening, but she
was still in jeans and giving off that same strong energy,
that sense of capability. Her hug seemed to be offering to
carry all my burdens. ‘It’s so good to have you here,’ she
said. ‘We were so very sorry when we heard about Katrina.’
Then, because I think she knew that too much sympathy on
top of my reunion with the three of them might lead to
tears I wasn’t ready yet to cry in front of anybody, she
turned the talk to other things: the cottage and the
decorating projects she had planned for it, and the next
thing I knew we were all in the kitchen and sitting at the
old unsteady table with its one leg shorter than the
others, drinking Claire’s strong tea and eating cheese and
pickle sandwiches as though it had been months, not years,
since we’d all been together.
Susan raised the subject of the tea room she was
planning. ‘Mark’s against it, naturally,’ she told me. ‘He
was never one for change.’
‘It’s not the change,’ Mark said, with patience. ‘It’s
the simple fact, my darling, that there’s really no demand
for it.’
‘Well, we’d create one, wouldn’t we? I’ve told you, if
we opened up the gardens more to tourists, we could bring
them by the busload.’
‘Buses can’t come through Polgelly.’
‘So you’d bring them in the other way, across the high
road from St Non’s. The tourists go there anyway, to see
the well—they could come on here afterwards, for lunch.’
Her tone was certain, as she turned to her
stepmother. ‘You’re on my side, surely?’
‘I’m staying out of it.’ Claire leaned across both of
them to pour me a fresh cup of tea. ‘I’ve given up the
running of Trelowarth to the two of you, you’ll have to
work it out yourselves.’
Susan rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, well, you say you’ve given
up Trelowarth, but we all know you could never?’
‘If you’re wanting an opinion,’ Claire said
lightly, ‘you might think of asking Eva. That’s her job,
you know—promoting things, and dealing with the public.’
Suddenly Susan and Mark were both looking at me, and I
shook my head. ‘I think I should stay out of it, too.’
Mark’s amusement was obvious. ‘Sorry, there’s no likes
of that, not with Susan about. She’ll be picking your
brains the whole time that you’re here.’
Susan said, ‘You will stay for a while, won’t you? Not
just the weekend?’
‘We’ll see.’
Claire, who’d been watching me quietly, glanced at my
hand. ‘That’s your mother’s ring, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ The gold Claddagh ring that Bill had slipped from
Katrina’s still finger and given to me in the hospital
room. It had come to my mother from her Irish grandmother
who’d moved across into Cornwall and who, by tradition, had
passed down this small ring of gold with its crowned heart
held lovingly by two gloved hands, a reminder that love was
eternal.
Claire smiled, understanding, as though she knew just
what had brought me here, why I had come. Reaching over,
she covered my hand with her warm one and said, ‘Stay as
long as you like.’
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