Water, Stone, Heart - By Will North Page 0,13

you imagine? Pleasure to give it to someone with your talent.” He glanced again at the painting. “Maybe she'll be your muse—eh, my girl?”

Nicola rose from the chaise and descended to her kitchen. Outside, the sun had set, and the harbor was in shadow. She fed Randi, refilled his water bowl, and made herself another gin and tonic. Then she went into her sitting room, lay down on the sofa, sipped her drink, and stared at the painting of Ella Naper that now hung above the rough granite mantel. She thought of Ella as her spiritual companion, though one nearly a century removed—a free spirit, naked and confident in her world. It was who she wanted to be. It was, in fact, who she'd become in the nearly four years she'd lived in Boscastle.

Moments later, she was asleep. After a while, Randi came in from the kitchen, nuzzled his mistress's hand, got no response, and curled up in his usual place, on the rug in front of the hearth.

… flash floods arise when the ground becomes saturated with water so quickly that it cannot be absorbed. This leads to “run-off.” Run-off is part of the hydrologic cycle connecting precipitation and channel flow. It occurs when the infiltration capacity of the soil surface is exceeded, and the subsurface can no longer absorb moisture at the rate at which it is supplied.

Boscastle Flood Special Issue,

Journal of Meteorology 29, no. 293

three

“Guess what, Drew?!”

Andrew had just opened the door of his cottage to a soft August Sunday morning. Lee was in her usual place. She had on her new wellies.

“You're going to finish the tour today and take me to see the sacred wells and the witches?”

“No, silly; it's nearly time to go to church! You'd better hurry up.”

“Well, thank you for that reminder, but I'm afraid I have other plans. I'm going walking this morning, since somebody I know cut short yesterday's outing.…”

Lee squinted at him from the wall. “You sure you're not one of those Methodists?”

“Positive.”

“Well, suit yourself, then. I'm off.”

And she was. She pivoted on the stone at the top of the wall, legs outstretched, hopped off the other side, and dashed across the meadow toward home.

Lee Trelissick made Andrew's heart ache, the way it does when you long for something you know you will never have. Lee was exactly the kind of child he'd dreamed of having with Katerina—and was glad they hadn't. Andrew was a professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania when he and Katerina Vogel met, at an awards dinner for the school's most promising graduate students. She'd worked in real estate but had discovered that her strength was in finance, not selling property. When she completed her MBA at the top of her class, Mellon Bank snapped her up and put her on their executive fast track.

Katerina—“Kat” to her friends; “the Ice Queen” to those jealous of her poise and style—was older than her fellow students and far more sophisticated. When Andrew first saw her, it seemed to him as if she'd been created by a Cubist. She was all sharp angles and hard edges. Even her shiny, jet-black hair was asymmetrically cut. Almost painfully thin and taller than average, Kat stood apart from her classmates and, Andrew noticed, spent most of her time talking with the professors. That evening, she was wearing a simple sleeveless sheath dress in smoke-gray silk charmeuse. It fell to her calves and was kept from simply pooling on the floor by two thin spaghetti straps that emphasized her broad shoulders. When she turned away, he realized that the back plunged in soft, draped folds almost to her waist. The only color she wore was a small red clutch purse that matched perfectly the scarlet of her lipstick. She was the kind of woman who, had she smoked, would look perfectly normal holding her cigarette in a long ebony holder. She stood as if she was waiting for someone with a lighter. It put him in mind of old black-and-white movies. When she noticed him in the crowd, she simply lifted an eyebrow. He was mesmerized.

When they married a year later, she was far too busy with her career to consider children. That made perfect sense to him at the time; though he was a full ten years older than she, Katerina, at thirty, had plenty of time left on her biological clock. But he also sensed that she was ambivalent about children, as if she feared she wasn't mother