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impressed that you knew the code.”
    “I was just showing off for you,” he confessed. “Until you came along, all I had to look forward to was getting car-sick when Mum hauled me out there every summer.”
    “How sophisticated the grown-ups seemed, with their cocktail parties in the garden,” I commented nostalgically. “Grandmother Beryl and Great-Aunt Penelope did love to gossip, mostly about their brother. Wish I’d met Great-Uncle Roland.”
    “No, you don’t,” Jeremy advised. “Rollo’s father was a strange duck. Always sidling around with a furtive look, sneaking extra drinks when nobody else was looking. I always thought he would pocket the family silver if it weren’t for Beryl’s sharp eye.”
    “Sounds like Great-Uncle Roland was a lot like Rollo is today?” I asked curiously.
    “Yes, without the redeeming qualities, I’m afraid,” Jeremy said frankly.
    “Did he look like Rollo?” I asked. I’d never really known about Rollo’s relationship with his dad. Great-Uncle Roland had died much earlier than his sisters, Beryl and Penelope.
    “Yeah, Rollo and his father resembled each other,” Jeremy replied.
    “Maybe that’s why Rollo’s mum is so mean to him—because he reminds her of her ne’er-do-well husband?” I suggested.
    “Dorothy’s rotten to everybody,” Jeremy responded. “As you well know. Mum and I always avoided going out to Cornwall on the same weekend that Rollo’s folks were scheduled.”
    I yawned noisily. “Go to sleep,” Jeremy advised. “I’ll wake you when it starts to get interesting.”
     
    I must have slept for quite some time, because when I awoke, the light was beginning to fade, and I could feel in my very bones the strange new open expanse of sky. Immediately my nostrils picked up a distinct scent of seaweed in the air, and a tingling from the salty sea, and other earthier smells I couldn’t identify—heather, bracken, gorse, moss, peat?
    At the same time, my ears were adjusting to something unusual—the absence of traffic. All that relentless whoosh-whooshing was gone, replaced by the somewhat ghostly sound of the wind rolling off the sea and across the open farmland, downs and moors.
    Jeremy, stoic as ever, had been driving steadily the whole time, drinking tea from his thermos. He smiled at me gently now, saying affectionately, “Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty. We’re very nearly there.”
    I sat up excitedly, rubbed my eyes and peered out the window, occasionally catching glimpses of pretty old stone farmhouses with silos, and cottages with thatched roofs. The roadside hedges and shrubs were scrubbier now—the tough, scraggly kind that know how to dig their roots in deep and hang on against fierce gale-force winds that blow in off the North Atlantic. It reminded me of America’s northeastern coastline, like Nantucket Island in Massachusetts, and Montauk in Long Island. But this terrain was even wilder than that.
    “Where are we?” I asked, fumbling for the map that had slipped from my lap to the floor.
    “Just passing Slaughter Bridge, where they say King Arthur was killed,” Jeremy replied.
    “Wow. Really?” I said enthusiastically, straining to get a look out the window, half expecting to glimpse castle turrets and knights jousting, but seeing only the passing roadside.
    “We’ll be in Port St. Francis shortly,” Jeremy said.
    We had reached the northern coast of Cornwall, not as far east as the castle town of Tintagel, but not as far west as fancy Padstow with its trendy gourmet restaurants. Port St. Francis was one of the little villages in between, perched on a cliff above the rugged shoreline where the Atlantic Ocean comes pounding in. I couldn’t see the water yet, but I could already sense it in the wind, and feel its mighty presence crashing somewhere below against beaches and ancient craggy rock formations along the coast.
    Now things were happening very fast, as we made a quick turn and a loop, and suddenly there we were,