Chapter 16
Istir in the long, slanted rays through stained glass and a frantic sense of impending loss quickly crowds my mind. I rise, glancing down at AJ, my AJ, his flushed cheeks and tumbled curls. I risk a great deal, chasing down my memories…yet what might I gain?
Shaking out my bunched-up skirt, I step outside in the breezy coastal air and pocket a piece of bottle glass, edges worn smooth.
Rubbing its surface with the pad of my thumb, I look out over Cornwall’s rugged beauty.
Grassy headlands rise to meet the sky, then drop dramatically into the Atlantic.
As the wind picks up, tiny sparks of knowing skitter about, but always just out of sight.
I scan the horizon toward where a castle is supposed to be…
but of course there isn’t one. Why would there be a castle on the sea?
But I close my eyes and the ancient structure is strikingly clear.
Large and rambling with towers piercing the gray sky…
then the windows narrow like eyes and a voice says, It’ll kill him if you leave. Absolutely kill him.
I force my eyes open, heart hammering, and hurry back to the church, shutting the door against the wind—and the warning that pierces my mind.
I sink to my knees, lightheaded and anxious.
It’s coming for me. Like a storm cloud sweeping in, my past is returning, only I cannot tell what will rain down.
I do not want to know. I do not want my memories anymore.
A tap on my shoulder makes me jump.
Behind me stands a weathered, bearded face. A local man, his neck wrapped in a red kerchief that’s tucked into a worn wool sweater.
“Oh.” I fumble to sit. “I’m sorry, we shouldn’t be—”
“Nay, don’t go on about it,” he says, his dark face creasing in layers of smile as he shoves a blue-and-white Cornishware bowl toward me. The aroma of steaming porridge nearly knocks me over. “Ye’re where ye need ’a be, no mistaking. He hideth my soul…”
“In the cleft of the rock.”
He brightens. “Ye know it.”
I do.
But how?
Those simple words tumble about in my mind, tossed and smoothed by waves of thought.
“Thank you, kind sir.” Humbled, I accept the bowl and brush hair off my face.
I eat quickly, enjoying the porridge topped with a fried egg.
It warms me through and through, this hearty, unexpected food from a stranger, and the panic ebbs.
“There’s another on the side table for ’im.” He jerks his head toward AJ. “I’m the churchwarden. Live over th’ way. Cottage on the ridge.” His words are a warm mix of local dialect and something else I cannot place. “Where do ye hail from?”
Dread kicks up again. “Here, actually. I think. Have you heard of Dunn House?”
“Rumors and legends,” he says, furrowing his brow. “Who be ye, maid? Where ye come from?”
“That’s…complicated.”
His knowing look digs down several layers. “The past, she can be thorny, aye?” His voice is full-bodied and pleasant, quieted in respect for the still-slumbering AJ in the sanctuary. “Then ye be in the right place, sure. A church—she’s meant for the broken, to hold ’em together.”
I’m not broken. I open my mouth, but the words do not come. Perhaps because they aren’t entirely true. I’m not broken, exactly. More a piece of something—like the bottle glass. There’s much more to me…somewhere.
How little I have to offer my AJ.
“Come, I’ll show ye.” He strides into the sanctuary.
“This seems too sacred for brokenness.”
“Depends on who’s finding these pieces. And what’s holding ’em together.”
Now that the sun is streaming through the windows, I can see what we’re standing on—a vibrant mosaic.
It melts from the wall all the way down the center aisle, a waterfall flowing into a sparkling river between the pews.
Hundreds of pieces of stone and glass lie beneath our feet, grouted into a majestic portrayal of the Cornish sea.
I fish out the bottle glass I found and hold it out before me. “I found this today.”
He blinks, wiping one hand down his beard. “May I?”
I hand it to him, and the man kneels with difficulty, trying the piece in the unfinished edge of the mosaic at different angles. Then he rises and walks to a place where the edges of the sea are green and lays it in a blank space where it fits perfectly, drawing out a richer color.
It’s exactly right.
“May I keep it?” he asks, and I nod.
“You made this.” I stare down at the hundreds—thousands—of broken fragments of seashell and rock and glass smoothed beneath our feet.
I step back and a picture of Jesus’ disciples comes clear on the wall, the water from his body flowing in blue, green, and milky-white stones and shell pieces down the aisle where we stand.
“How long did this take you? Where did you come from? France, if I might guess.”
His smile is amused. “I come from Greece, long years ago. I learn at my grandfather’s knee, Dimitrius Stavrakis, and he shows me how broken bits make a story.”
I rise, walking backward to grasp the entirety of the picture. If I squint I cannot even see individual pieces—just the effect of men supping together, and the outpouring of water that rushes down the chapel floor. “The rocks up there are darker.”
He huffs down the aisle and crouches, perching on the edge of a pew across from me. “How long do ye guess it took me to make this?”
“I…I cannot even imagine.”
“Twenty-seven years, and still working. When I come here from Greece on the boat, I am running away. I have lost my pretty wife. And my precious…” His eyes swim with tears and he does not finish.
“My family, they are gone. Mother, father, two brothers, my Nikoleta, and our…our baby girl. It was the revolts.”
Memories collect in his throat, silencing him for a moment. I kneel beside him and lay a hand on his back. Who sits with him and untangles all the evil he’s suffered? How lonely he must be. Untold tragedies are etched into every line around his eyes and mouth.
“I come here and want to work hard. I know how to do the tiles, and they like. I collect pieces on the shore, like my grandfather did in Greece. Blues and greens and reds…and I make the water. But I work slow, and the beaches, they change.”
I run my hand along the smoothed stones. “What has made them change color?”
He shrugs. “Many things. Time. Life.” He rises and moves toward the front again, kneeling to touch the stones.
“Here, they open the mines on the rise, smelting copper. Sulfur leaks into the water, makes rocks darker. Then down here”—he takes a few steps down the aisle—“here, they discover iron. Makes a reddish-pink, and cloudy. And then here”—he points at the most beautiful, crystalline rocks of pale blue—“is where the ship crashes into the rocks and there is something like salt in the water. Makes the rocks look like this.”
He rises, looking over his years of work. “It is the story of Cornwall. Of many tiny moments over long time, and the picture they make.”
“You’ve done beautiful work, Mr.—”
He smiles, his eyes nearly disappearing into his browned cheeks. “Call me Lambros.”
“Light. Your name means light.”
He looks at me. “My parents, they wish me to keep a lighthouse in Greece.”
“So they named you accordingly.”
A nod. He is impressed. “Perhaps they are disappointed that I am not.”
“You keep a lighthouse, Lambros—right here. Drawing the broken to a sanctuary.”
His face melts into warmth. “A lighthouse. Yes.”
Lighthouse. My mind registers another image near the castle I cannot seem to find—a lighthouse. I can see it in my mind’s eye, the light revolving in the dark.
I’m close. I can feel it.
Lambros struggles to rise, and I help him up. “Is Dunn House a lighthouse?”
He stills. “Why would ye be asking about that place?”
“Is it near here?”
He hesitates. “Quite. What’s left of it.”
“Has it been damaged?”
“There was a fire. Burned many years ago.”
Burned. The word shudders through me.
“You’ll find the site on the headland of Clodgy Point, just outside of St. Ives.
” He moves away and shoves fists into his back, clearly ending the conversation.
“Ye come find if ye need more of this,” he says, pointing at the bowl.
“I bring more.” Then he limps out of the church, leaving an air of gentle wisdom in his wake.
I walk outside and sit on the broken steps, the wind off the water ruffling the pages of the book AJ gave me, and I capture the fragments of story I still possess.
Life is a desperate scramble to order the pieces of our life into the sort of picture we desire—believe we’re owed, even—but what about when a different picture emerges?
Perhaps we will never see it for what it is, only what it isn’t.
And therefore, the true picture will always appear to be a disappointing collection of broken stones.
Today when I find my home, my Dunn House, I shall place a great many stones into the picture. My mind is hungry for a glimpse of it—yet dreading what I shall see.
When AJ wakes, I give him the extra bowl of porridge, and then we set off across the windswept knolls.
We walk for hours along the rugged southwest coastal path that rims the shoreline, always with the sea to our right, until there’s a tug of familiarity.
Like a gentle undertow it grows stronger as we wade deeper into it.
It has been forever since we left the church, but we’ve hardly spoken. AJ has something to say to me—something important—but I cannot bear more important things. So I focus on walking…and remembering.
We pass through the busy town of St. Ives, where fishermen perch on the rocky outcroppings, mending nets and shouting to one another. The cadence of their voices rings with familiarity. Sailboats and fishing vessels clog the narrow inlet.
Then, like a hound following the fox’s scent, I make my way up the cliffs on the other side of town, over the rugged headlands, following signs to Clodgy Point.
The sea has begun to feel like home, but this precise view makes my heart pound.
“We’re close, AJ. I can feel it.” I check for a castle on the water.
I visualize those lines carved into stone.
My mind fingers each shard of memory, twisting and turning them, arranging them this way and that.
AJ follows, his lips in a grim line. He dreads what we’ll find as much as I do.
What I gather along this shoreline will either cement us or tear us irreparably apart.
AJ pauses, hands shoved in his pockets, and looks out over the water.
The wind ruffles his clothing, his hair.
He looks so foreign in my Cornwall, as if he doesn’t exactly belong in the picture of who I was.
I push on, around an overgrown hedge and around a corner and then I freeze on the path.
There before me, in all its windswept glory…is a pile of rubble.
Forgotten, overgrown, and vacant. “Dunn House,” I mumble. Lichen-covered granite footings trace the outline of what was once several hearths, and blackened shapes mostly reclaimed by nature. It isn’t a recent fire—perhaps not even in my lifetime. No Dunns have lived here in a very long time.
Yet it’s the only lead I have.
My heart plummets into the swaying grass around my feet. Emptiness rattles through my soul. But then in the distance…a noise. The cry of gulls and the whop of waves finding the hidden caverns below. I know those sounds, much as I know there’s a footpath hidden in the vines below.
While AJ is distracted I clamber over the rocks and down to the edge, breathless at what I might see.
What I might not want him to see. I feel my way down the embankment and find the remains of a well-worn footpath nearly hidden by overgrowth, twisting down along the cliff face.
I climb around boulders, descending onto that narrow path forgotten by the world.
“Merryn. Wait!” AJ’s shout sounds overhead, but I’m following my footpath, feet on the fine-grain sand warmed by sunshine.
I know the way. I’m in the past again, moving toward something that’s mine.
The way is lush and overgrown with thorny vines and the lacy purple sea thrift.
Heather blankets each narrow ridge as the secret footpath continues around the front of the rock face.
Soon the slate roof is in view against the rocky cliffs, as if it has grown out of the rocks themselves.
I descend farther, round a narrow flowered knoll, and there, nestled onto a ridge on the cliffside is a tower.
A tumbledown, forgotten old stone mess built right into the cliffside, with a small cottage at its base and ten cracked steps leading up to a heavy green door.
No one would ever see it from above, or perhaps not even from the water, as if it wishes to keep all its secrets to itself.
My pulse triples as I look up at the place as much a part of me as my name. This…this is Dunn Cottage.
Green shutters I once closed hang at odd angles and roses twist up the walls, curling delicate fingers into the mortar. Two top-floor windows look upon me with friendly welcome as the sea air wets my face in a way that feels incredibly right.
I’ve found it, and I am home.
I am Merryn, girl of the sea. I’ve left my sea, but it has pulled me back. Images sweep over me and at last I let them come.
Hearty porridge with butter.
Happy, smiling faces and voices lilting with song.
A harmony of lovely aromas and sounds, beckoning me into the kitchen.
Warm summer days, birds singing, and welcome rains beating on the roof.
Goats nudging their faces into the window, bleating you awake in the morning.
Bread rising on the sill and songs and music drift with the rhythm of recurrent waves, washing over and over the warm sand.
They are drowning me now, these memories. But I let them. They aren’t the enemy. They aren’t terrifying.
They are home.
Why did I fight coming to this place for so long?