The Last Letter from Juliet - Melanie Hudson Page 0,23

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!

Chapter 7

Katherine

A moment’s pause

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.

Chapter 8

Juliet

19 December 1938

Flying with Edward

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