A Sky Painted Gold Read online

  For my brilliant mum,

  who taught me that the clotted cream

  always goes on top of the jam.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Two

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  It all started with an apple. Trouble often does, I suppose, and this particular apple was a real troublemaker – a Pendragon, red-fleshed and sweet, that I stole from someone else’s orchard.

  I don’t know why I chose that particular day to make my way over to the island. After years of staring longingly across the water, it seemed suddenly urgent that I make it there, that I put my feet on the shore. When I arrived I practically fell into the orchard, plucking the shining red apple from its branch without a second thought. With the first bite of that apple I was lost.

  By then the Cardew House in all its sprawling, faded beauty had not seen a single friendly face (or an unfriendly one, for that matter) in over five years. The walled orchard, like the house, had been abandoned, growing tangled and wild until I crept in and started helping myself. After that first taste I didn’t even try to stay away. I came back the next day, and the next, always exploring a tiny bit further, pushing deeper into the secret island, making each part of it my own.

  The house itself was on top of the island, a grand old Georgian building with far-reaching views. The front, facing towards the village on the mainland, was long and low with tall windows cut into the honey-coloured stone and tangled ivy. Rough steps reached down through overgrown gardens to a sloping gravel driveway that stretched to meet the causeway. At the back, a huge lawn overlooked the changeable sea – at times a dazzling turquoise, at others a murky, mysterious grey-green. The orchard that first drew me to the island curled around one side of the house, groaning with apples or ruby-skinned cherries, or heavy, velvet plums depending on the time of year. On the other side of the building, more crumbling steps wound their way down to a small hidden cove of golden sand where the sheltered waters were still and warm. It was a jewel, this island, a treasure left alone and unloved for too long.

  A restless feeling hung over my visits, and I knew that it was only a matter of time before my curiosity moved beyond the grounds to the building itself. I began by skirting around the house, as though afraid of antagonizing it. When I discovered a broken window latch on the ground floor, it felt as though the decision had been made for me.

  The old building should have been unwelcoming in its emptiness, with the furniture draped in sheets and the shutters closed up tight, but to me it felt calm and friendly. Odd shafts of light cut through the gloom here and there, illuminating clouds of dancing dust particles and giving the place an air of drowsy sadness. It seemed like the sleeping princess in a fairy tale just waiting to be brought back to life.

  For almost a year after that first apple I escaped to the house at any opportunity – to raid the neglected library and to curl up comfortably on a faded oriental rug, enjoying the quiet. My own home was never quiet, but all that noise didn’t stop me from feeling lonely at times. Somehow, despite being more alone than ever, I never felt lonely when I came here. Slowly, I began to feel that the sleeping house and I were getting to know one another. I daydreamed about what it would be like if it was full of people – about the conversations they would have, about the parties they might throw and the way the rooms would come to life, full of blazing light. I wrote pages of nonsense, scribbling furiously in my notebook, or I read detective novels and ate stolen apples, throwing the cores into the fire that I lit to warm the huge, empty sitting room.

  In the end it was that fire that gave me away.

  It was a cold, wet Friday when I first saw them.

  Grey sheets of rain pounded outside while waves hammered against the rocks to the back of the house. I was oblivious to the noise, quite happily lost in an Agatha Christie novel, making myself sick on too much fruit. I had been there for a couple of hours, maybe more, when I heard a sound: something new, something more than the usual groans of the old house settling. I froze, the book dangling from my fingers, and strained my ears, listening carefully.

  Voices.

  Someone was here.

  Someone had finally come.

  And more than one someone: I heard the low rumble of a man’s voice and the higher melody of a woman as well. Already I could tell that these voices belonged, that they fit into the house like missing puzzle pieces. Footsteps clipped along the floors, echoing through the empty hallways, growing louder as they came closer and closer to where I sat, still frozen.

  My heart thundered, as though someone had broken in – although the only intruder here was me. I dropped the book and slipped over to the window as quickly and as quietly as I could, though my legs trembled at this abrupt breaking open of a space I had come to consider completely my own. I threw one shaking leg over the sill, and my bare foot burrowed into the long, wet grass below. There, half in and half out of the house, I realized that the voices were almost on top of me. I scrambled out of the window and stood safely on the other side, holding my breath and pressing myself flat against the wall. Then I heard the door to the sitting room open and the footsteps stopped.

  “Robert! Who on earth has lit the fire?” The girl’s voice was clear and precise, ringing through the air like a knife against a glass. “I didn’t think we were expected?”

  I didn’t wait to hear any more. As fast as my legs would carry me I darted around the side of the house and down the crumbling steps, across the crunching gravel drive that led to the causeway. Luckily, the tide was out and, as I sped past it, I saw that the strangers had arrived in a dazzling blue car. With a glance over my shoulder and small whoop of exhilaration at finding no one chasing after me, I plunged along the cobbled path, running until my chest ached, filling my lungs with jagged gulps of salty air.

  I was laughing now, the runaway laugh of the thief who knew that she was getting away with it. I dared myself to turn around, to look back at the house.

  A silhouette appeared in the front doorway – a man, tall and silent and too late to catch me. The wind whipped my hair around my face, stinging my flushed cheeks, and the rain had finally stopped.

  I looked down, and I was still holding a shining red apple in my hand.

  Part One

  “And so with the sunshine and the great

  bursts of leaves growing on the trees,

  just as things grow in fast movies, I had

  that familiar conviction that life was

  beginning over again with the summer.”

  — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  June, 1929

  The morning of Alice’s wedding dawns bright and clear. It is, naturally, the perfect summer morning: nothing but birdsong and pastel-blue skies and the whisper of a breeze rolling in fro
m the sea. Anything less would be completely unacceptable for Alice’s big day. When I wake, Alice is already up, her bed rumpled and empty. Aside from the imprint of her head on the pillow, there is no other sign of her. Pulling on a pair of shorts and one of Pa’s old shirts, I slip my feet into my battered plimsolls and make a beeline for the kitchen. It is early, but delicious smells are drifting up the stairs to meet me.

  “Lou! Lou!” I am greeted by a trio of rowdy little boys in overalls, barefoot, with mouths full of bread and butter. The triplets are three years old, and until the recent birth of Anthea (usually known simply as “the baby”), they were the youngest members of my ramshackle family. I am the second oldest, after Alice, who is nineteen, then after me comes Freya, who is fifteen, Tom, who is eleven, then the triplets and Anthea. Eight children in all, and Pa says that who knows but there might have been more if it hadn’t been for the war, and we should thank God for small mercies. I’m fairly sure he’s only joking, but he does sometimes look surprised by the number of children that tumble in and out of our small farmhouse, as if we are the result of an absurd magic trick rather than his own flesh and blood.

  In the kitchen, the triplets, Joe, Max and Davy, are finishing their breakfast at the long table while Midge bustles about preparing the wedding feast that the village will enjoy later, the baby squawking cheerfully on her hip. Midge has a smudge of flour on the end of her nose, and a look of determined concentration in her eyes as she wrestles, one-handed, with enormous pats of golden butter and the collection of old tea tins that contain sugar and spices. I know better than to ask if she needs help.

  “Where’s Alice?” I ask over the noise instead, helping myself to a piece of bread and smearing it with Midge’s famous ginger jam.

  “Skipped out of the house an hour ago on the hunt for flowers,” Midge says, in her gruff little voice. Midge is my mother, and even though her real name is Mary, everyone calls her Midge, including her husband and her children. At a dab over five foot tall, she is a reassuring, if tiny, force of nature. When I stand beside her I feel gangly and oversized. While she answers my question, Midge is stirring something together in a bowl with a burnished silver knife.

  Midge always uses this knife to bake, and once, when our aunt Irene witnessed this, her face took on an expression of horror and she cried, “Ah, Midge! But you’re never supposed to stir with a knife … stirring with a knife, that’s stirring up trouble!”

  Midge looked wholly unconcerned, replying placidly, “Well, then, I’ve been stirring up trouble so long it’s hardly worth worrying about now, is it?” before carrying on just as before.

  I don’t know if it is because of the knife or not, but no one can cook like Midge; she’s famous for it. Pa says he proposed to Midge over her Stargazy pie, which sounds quite romantic, I suppose, if you don’t know that Stargazy pie is made with pilchards whose heads stick through the pastry and stare up at you with mournful eyes. I don’t think I would like a mournful pilchard to be in attendance at my engagement, but then I am, as yet, fairly inexperienced in the art of romance. Apart from in books, of course. You can learn an awful lot from books … but it has always seemed highly unlikely that I’d stumble across any of the dashing heroes I read about on the streets of Penlyn, so what do I know? Perhaps with the right man a pilchard pie can be sheer poetry. Midge certainly seems to think so, and she laughs a pleased, pink laugh whenever Pa tells the story.

  I cut myself another piece of bread and munch on the crust. A wail from the triplets alerts me to their own breadless state, and I prepare slices for each of them, although they’re more interested in the bread as a jam delivery system than anything else. With three sticky faces enjoying their second breakfast of the day, a hush falls over the kitchen. In this moment of relative calm my thoughts turn – as they often seem to these days – to what is going on at the Cardew House.

  For as long as I can remember that place has held me firmly under its spell. The island it stands on is separated from the mainland by a cobbled causeway. The road vanishes and rematerializes as the tide rushes in and out, submerging it entirely as if it were never there at all, or leaving it exposed and shockingly solid. There is something magical about this process, I think, the disappearance and reappearance of the ancient road – it comes and goes with the tide, but each time it emerges from the water it feels like a surprise. Its peculiar magic means that half of the time the house is cut off, a world of its own, remote and separate from the bustling life of our tiny fishing village.

  When I had returned home, bedraggled and elated from my near-escape several months earlier, it was to the news that the owner of the Cardew House, Robert Cardew, was planning to holiday there for the whole summer, and so had come to look the place over for repairs.

  Even in deepest, darkest rural Cornwall, we’ve heard all about Robert Cardew. Perhaps it is his connection to the village that sends whispers of his wild lifestyle and his fashionable friends snaking furiously from door to door through the winding lanes of Penlyn, but I think that even if it wasn’t for the Cardew House, Alice and I would still be fascinated by the exploits of this man and his glittering band of bright young things. We devour the society pages, giddy on the glimpse they give us into a world so different to our own. It seems outrageous that a boy of twenty-three – not so much older than us – should have so much, that his life could be so completely unlike ours. When Lord Cardew died a couple of years ago the village was agog to see if the young heir would turn up, but there was no sign of him, no hint that he even remembered the old house lying empty and unloved. Until now. I lick the jam from my fingers thoughtfully. We have seen the photographs of him, of course, of the outlandish clothes, the outrageous parties, and we know that Robert will bring his fiancée, the deeply glamorous American heiress Laurie Miller, along with a menagerie of other exotic creatures, when he comes to stay.

  According to the papers the couple have been engaged for about six months now. They’ve been positively splashed about on the pages. They’ve attended every party, every fashionable event, and they’ve looked spectacular while doing it. Alice and I have followed their romance closely. To us, they are paper dolls, characters in a story, and each week we eagerly await the next instalment.

  And soon, I remind myself with a delicious thrill, the subject of all this juicy gossip will be right here in Penlyn. It’s hard to imagine a less likely place for such birds of paradise to roost. Our village is a world away from the bustling metropolis of nightclubs and dazzling parties that Robert Cardew usually inhabits.

  But they are coming. Builders and decorators have been in and out of the house with increasing frequency over the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately, they all seem to be coming down from London, so no one in the village knows a thing about what is going on inside. This has been the subject of much ire because local workmen feel snubbed, and there has been some dark muttering that the “young people” who own the house now aren’t behaving properly by bringing in outsiders. We’re all also very nosy and, truthfully, the whole village is fizzing like so many overeager bottles of ginger beer to know what the place looks like and exactly when the new arrivals are due. Of course I haven’t been able to visit the house again, not since my escape on that rainy afternoon. I did try once, but already the place was teeming with people and I was lucky to get away unseen.

  My thoughts are interrupted by the triplets, who are being rackety, and the baby, whose squawks appear to be building up to a wail. Chaos seems inevitable, but this is the moment that Alice drifts in looking like an actual Greek goddess, and everything stops as she enters the room.

  A halo of blue cornflowers crowns her golden head and her arms are full of trailing honeysuckle and delicate pink roses. “Give me a hand, Lou!” she huffs, rather spoiling the picture she’s created by unceremoniously dumping the fragrant bundle into my arms and pinching the bread from between my fingers in one swift move.

  “Where did you get all these roses?” I ask, admiring the fat, perfect
blooms as I lay them gently on the kitchen table.

  “From Mrs Penrith’s garden,” Alice mumbles through a mouthful of bread and jam, and a dimple appears in her left cheek.

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “Alice Trevelyan.” Midge stops her stirring and waves the knife rather menacingly in Alice’s direction. “Tell me that you didn’t steal those flowers from Susan Penrith’s rose garden! You know she’s so particular about them.”

  “I didn’t steal them,” says Alice, and she sounds as if she’s offended by the very idea, even though it wouldn’t exactly be out of character. “I asked for them, perfectly nicely, and Mrs Penrith gave them to me.” She pops the last mouthful of bread into her mouth and chews slowly. “It is my wedding day, after all,” she finishes, and the expression on her face is one Midge would describe as “butter wouldn’t melt”.

  It should really come as no surprise that Mrs Penrith parted with her prizewinning roses at Alice’s request. It’s difficult to refuse my sister anything when she decides to be charming. One reason for this is that Alice is a beauty, plain and simple. People sometimes say we look a little alike when they’re trying to be kind, but where Alice’s hair shines smooth and golden blonde, mine is curly and more of a muddy brown with just a touch of red. (Though sadly not enough to be described as auburn, let alone the longed-for and deeply romantic “titian”.) Alice’s eyes are as blue as the cornflowers she is wearing on her head, and mine are a murky, troubled grey. Alice’s skin maintains a peaches-and-cream complexion no matter how much time she spends outdoors, while mine tans unfashionably and freckles scatter themselves across my nose with great abandon, despite my liberal and frequent application of lemon juice. We are the same height and we share similar features, but there is no question that I am my sister’s shadow – a distorted, much less brilliant reflection of her perfect beauty. Alice through the looking glass.

  And now, today, Alice, my Alice, is getting married! The thought rattles through me once more, as shocking as ever. She, on the other hand, seems unfazed. I watch her gathering flowers together and tying them with string, her movements deft and certain, and I think about the ways her life is about to change – the way all of our lives are about to change. No more Alice in the house. No one to chatter with while seeing to the chores, no older sister in the bed next to mine to whisper secrets to. The thought is strange and unnerving. Alice is humming, and she looks up and catches my eye. “Don’t mope, Lou,” she says with a laugh. “It’s a wedding, not a funeral.” She winds an arm around my waist and squeezes gently. And of course she’s right, plus Alice is only moving a few minutes away, into the tiny cottage that Jack found for them in the middle of the village. Still, it feels as though it may as well be on the moon. It isn’t the physical distance that I can’t wrap my mind around, it is that Alice will be leaving us – me – behind, and becoming someone else. A grown-up. A wife.