Melanie Hudson - The Last Letter from Juliet

‘Before you go, let me just …’ Edward surprised me by taking a folded handkerchief from his coat pocket. He wrapped a corner of the cloth around his finger and lifted his hand towards my face. ‘You have a smear of oil across your face, that will never do at a house like Lanyon. Far too proper.’ I didn’t move away, but allowed him to wipe my cheek.

‘How long has that been there?’

‘All day. I let you run with it.’ He stepped back to admire his handy-work. ‘There, all gone. Although, I actually preferred you as you were, with the warrior stripe – it really suited you,’ he added, softly.

A cloud passed over our fragmented bits of conversation. We had had our moment, both of us knowing I should have dashed back to Lanyon much earlier, but we had already taken on the selfish attitude of lovers and from the ambivalent view of the naïve observer – the men working on the fishing boats, for example – we would have appeared to have had nothing more than a pleasant afternoon enjoying the polite interaction of two friends. But Edward and I knew differently, and we knew it from the first, ‘Hello’. Because that was the thing with love at first sight, it was like the birth of time – the big bang of the universe itself. It was the ignition of a silent understanding exchanged in body language – in the blink of an eye, the angle of the head and the positioning of the body. It was that first spark of a silent understanding that set in motion an unstoppable series of events. A motion that creates a kind of energy that forever links two people in an impenetrable and invisible connectedness. A connectedness that almost always brings a heady emotional mix of absolute joy and unbearable pain.

Mother would not be happy.

As I waved goodbye and dashed up the hill, I felt like Cinderella running away from her Prince Charming. And just like Cinderella, I knew that the road would not lead us apart for very long, but would curve all the way around our respective destinations in the shape of an interconnected heart, and that we would stand in front of each other again, smiling, not wanting to walk away. And yet, at that very moment, I still didn’t know what he did, where he was from, why he was here – and most importantly, I realised dashing up the road, smiling – I still had absolutely no idea what a coddiwompler was!

No one at Lanyon knew what a coddiwompler was either. Pa Lanyon thought it sounded like ‘old English’ and after a rebuke from Lottie for being gone all day and a strange side-eyed glance from Charles, Pa pointed me in the direction of his library where I would find a miscellany on old-English quirky words. Sure enough, between cockamamie (ridiculous; incredible) and codswallop (something utterly senseless) I found coddiwompler: someone who travels in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination.

How very vague, and elusive, and exciting, and mysterious … and , he was an American, too … just dreadful!

I lay the manuscript down on the sofa and stoked the fire before selecting the search engine on my phone.

Several sites popped up on the search feed associating themselves with coddiwompling, including a webpage dedicated to the written ramblings of free-spirited bloggers who shared their adventurers on the internet.

One particular blogger – The Last Coddiwompler – caught my eye. He was a man who occasionally travelled with no real agenda other than to seek out one thing and one thing only – fun. He aimed always, he said, to simply ‘stumble’ across adventure, rather than to seek it out, genuinely believing that if he kept his eye out, even in the most mundane on places, adventure was only ever a heartbeat away. It seemed that in the process of hitting the road aimlessly, this blogger regularly found himself spending time in the most amazing places and meeting the most fascinating people – and not necessarily in exotic locations from glossy magazines, he stressed, but absolutely anywhere – Spain, Mexico, Hull … As I read this tale of modern-day adventure and stared in admiration at his photographs, I couldn’t help but be drawn in, and all the while a clearer picture of Juliet’s mystery man began to take shape, because if Edward Nancarrow was anything like the man staring out of the screen in front of me, he would have been a fun, free, sexy, enticing kind of a man. And yet wasn’t this exactly the sort of person Juliet was, too? An adventurer, a dare devil, a coddiwompler? Edward clearly thought so, and he knew it from the moment she landed her Tiger Moth on the field in front of him.

But it was only when I scrolled to the bottom of the webpage that I noticed and recognised the name of the blogger–Sam Lanyon.

My head tipped to the angle of a questioning puppy.

Sam Lanyon? The Sam Lanyon, Juliet’s grandson? It couldn’t be, could it?

With my interest in this family suddenly piqued to even greater heights, despite the early hour of the morning and itchy eyes, I huddled closer to the fire, wrapped the shawl tightly around my shoulders and read on.

The morning after the pre-wedding party I woke with a desperate desire to jump into my Tiger Moth, fire up the engine and fly right away.

I had behaved foolishly. I’d begun to flirt, to toy, and what good ever came of that kind of shenanigans?

What happened?

I was unmasked, shown to have behaved like a fool, and I deserved it.

Having been standing in the hallway with Charles, welcoming guests to the Lanyon Christmas party, I was utterly gobsmacked when, of all people, Edward walked in. I had no idea that he was at all acquainted with the Lanyons. He hadn’t said he was attending the party that afternoon. Perhaps, thinking me single, he had wanted it to be a surprise.

He arrived at eight. I saw him before he saw me, walking through the door, smiling, naturally at ease, a happy and contented man. I wondered momentarily, as I stood there, my heart in my shoes, waiting to greet him, if Edward had known I was Charles’ fiancée all along and if the attraction between us had been on my part only. That I had misunderstood his interest in me.

But when Charles introduced me to Edward as the future Mrs Lanyon, my heart broke to see that he had not known. Edward tried to hide his confusion, before quickly walking away and disappearing into the gathered crowd. He spent some of the evening with Lottie before retiring back to the village early, with the excuse of a headache and an early start the next day. We did not speak that evening, which was both a relief and an overpowering disappointment.

The following morning, having arranged with cook to breakfast before the house had risen and having previously arranged with Jessops for fuel to be delivered to the barn, I dashed to my aircraft, desperate to fly.

I was not surprised to find Edward there, waiting. He was sitting on his adopted hay bale, a blue and white striped scarf wrapped tightly around his face, no dog with him, no Beano and he’d clearly been on no more than nodding terms with sleep.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about Charles?’

Because I’ve fallen in love with you …

‘I’m not sure. Does it matter?’

Edward didn’t answer.

I busied myself around the aircraft, avoiding eye contact. We fell silent, unsure how to behave, how to speak. A few jerrycans of fuel were hidden at the back of the barn, exactly where Jessops, now amiable thanks to the cider, had left them.

‘You’re going flying?’ Edward jumped down from his lofty position on the bale.