Phillipa Ashley - A Perfect Cornish Christmas

Scarlett huffed. ‘I won’t be going into that pub again, that’s for sure, and it’ll be awkward to even be around the town to start with, but I thought I could see how things go and try to keep a low profile.’

‘OK.’ Ellie shook her head, a smile on her face. ‘When are you thinking of coming?’

‘Um. Two weeks’ time?’

‘ Two weeks ?’

‘Actually, less than two weeks. I plan on coming down a week on Thursday. Is that OK? One of the neighbours has offered to bring some of my stuff down in his van when he visits his boyfriend in St Ives the following weekend. I can manage with what I can fit in my car until then.’

Bloody hell, Scarlett really did have everything worked out. She must have been thinking this over for a while. ‘Yes … it’s slightly short notice, but why not? Let me know what I can do to help.’

Ellie spent a while making more arrangements and then put down the phone. She went into the kitchen to cook some supper, realising that she was now starving. Even after a day at the café, she found it relaxing to slice a few mushrooms, grate some Gruyère and whip up an omelette.

While she chopped and cooked, her mind worked overtime on the latest surprise this day had delivered. Having her sister around would be different. It could be a lot of fun but it would also cause disruption. She’d become used to her own company, and she and Scarlett did argue sometimes, but Scarlett was obviously hell bent on this plan. Ellie had been reminded of how much her sister had been affected by the revelations on Christmas Day. Finding out her father wasn’t her biological dad must have left an enormous hole in her life, and their mother’s continued state of denial and unspoken anger with her daughter wasn’t helping at all. In one fell swoop, Scarlett had lost both parents to some degree. This change in lifestyle might be her way of getting through it.

And all of this happened just after the split with her boyfriend and the loss of her core client. It was no wonder Scarlett felt her world had been turned upside down. Whether moving almost three hundred miles to a new home that might only be temporary was a good idea, Ellie wasn’t sure.

There was something else. Scarlett had listed her reasons for moving as if it was the most rational decision in the world, but Ellie had a powerful feeling that she hadn’t heard the full story yet. And as for ‘keeping a low profile’ after her dramatic entrance at the Christmas lunch … in a place like Porthmellow, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance of that.

‘Hello! How was the journey? I was worried you might be held up by the road works on the motorway.’

Scarlett’s spirits lifted as Ellie met her on the drive of Seaholly Manor. It had been a long journey but Ellie’s welcoming smile more than made up for it.

‘It was OK until the mist came down. Look at it. It’s like something out of the Hound of the Baskervilles !’ Scarlett tried to make out the house through the October mist, which hung in wispy threads among the tree branches and seemed to press on the roof of the manor. Although it wasn’t as sharply cold as it was in the Midlands, the damp clung to everything, leaving pinpricks of moisture on her teddy coat.

‘It’s a real pea-souper that rolled in after lunch. I don’t think it will clear until morning,’ Ellie said.

A shiver ran through Scarlett, and not for the first time since she’d handed back the keys to her flat and said goodbye to the neighbours. She’d shed a few tears as she’d driven out of the city suburbs, past her favourite balti restaurant where the owners didn’t even need to take her order they knew her so well. She would miss the Victorian swimming ‘baths’ where she ploughed up and down twice a week and the park where she met up with her friends for a coffee in winter and a picnic in summer.

Seaholly Manor was isolated, and so far from her parents and Marcus. With dusk approaching on a gloomy autumn evening, she was half-tempted to turn the car around and head back to the bright lights of Brum.

Oh God, what had she done?

As if reading her thoughts, Ellie gave her a hug. ‘Come inside. I lit the fire in the sitting room as soon as I got in from work, and the kitchen will be nice and cosy too.’

Scarlett dragged up a smile. The lamplight glowed from the window of the sitting room. That was cheery at least.

‘Is your car fixed, by the way?’ she asked.

‘Oh, it’s er … at the garage in town. We’re waiting for a part.’

‘What a pain. How do you get to work?’

‘I walked over the coast path. The fog wasn’t as bad then, though I definitely wouldn’t try that path in this murk. Come on, I’ll give you a hand with your stuff.’

After abandoning Scarlett’s luggage in the hallway, they sat at the kitchen’s oak farmhouse table. The warmth from the Aga enveloped Scarlett and sparked another memory: of last Christmas Day when she’d stepped into the Smuggler’s Tavern’s Lunch for the Lonely.

However, with Ellie chattering away about the latest local gossip while she made them both hot chocolates, she soon perked up. She had to face the locals again sometime and it wasn’t as if the people at the pub hadn’t been friendly. In fact, they’d been too friendly. Which could be both a good and bad thing. Good for finding out gossip about her real father; bad for stopping it from spreading.

Scarlett had always prided herself on being honest with Ellie, so she felt doubly guilty about being economical with the truth this time.

Yes, the lease was up on her flat. Yes, she was struggling with the rent and, yes, she did want to make a fresh start. What she’d left out was the part about how she’d discovered that her ‘biological father’ was – possibly – from Porthmellow and she desperately wanted to know who he was.

His identity had occupied her thoughts since last Christmas and she’d been listening out for any clue from her mother, not that her mum had even admitted she might have had an affair. Scarlett had worked out when she must have been conceived, and from old photos in a family album had pieced together that her mother had been staying with Auntie Joan during that time. So the ‘deed’ was very likely to have taken place in Porthmellow.

Plus, there was another, more compelling clue to her origins. When she, Ellie and their mother had been sorting through Joan’s stuff, Scarlett had found a postcard with a message that had struck her as weird. It hadn’t meant that much at the time, but had taken on much greater significance since, and Scarlett couldn’t recall the exact words. She’d meant to show it to her mum at the time, however, in the chaos of sorting out her auntie’s vast collection of books and papers, she’d forgotten about it. Of course, she could be clutching at straws and probably was, but once the idea that the postcard might be related to her mum’s affair had formed in her mind, she couldn’t get rid of it.