Secrets of Magpie Cove

by Kennedy Kerr

Genres: Family Life; Holiday books; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; Clean & Wholesome Romance; Holiday Romance

Synopsis

Lila had a favourite rock to sit on towards the back of the cove, where she often ate her breakfast, gazing out at the tumbling Cornish sea. As the sun rose that morning, Lila wished with all her heart that the grey-green waves could wash away her old life. That Magpie Cove would help her move on, and to forget... When aspiring pastry chef Lila Bridges flees her life in the city after a heartbreaking tragedy, she finds herself working behind the counter at Magpie Cove's most beloved local establishment – Serafina's Café. The sweet, buttery aroma of freshly baked chocolate croissants, the cheerful gossip of the regulars and the elderly owner Serafina's feisty humour are a much-needed balm to Lila's broken heart. For the first time since it happened, Lila is beginning to laugh again...But when Serafina unexpectedly passes away, the future of the café looks bleak. Nathan Da Costa, Serafina's estranged son, inherits, and returns to Magpie Cove determined to inject some big-city glamour into the place. To Lila, it seems impossible that dour, money-obsessed Nathan could be related to dear Serafina. He may have his mother's mop of curly dark hair and deep brown eyes, but he has none of her warmth or heart. Lila needs this job and the sense of peace the town has brought her, so she's determined to make it work with Nathan as her new boss. But her resolution is tested when the secret Lila has been keeping about what brought her to the cove begins to unravel, just as she discovers an unexpected, sweeter side to Nathan. Will trusting Nathan Da Costa with her long-held secret be Lila's new beginning in Magpie Cove, or her emotional undoing? Be totally transported to the windswept beaches of Cornwall with this heart-warming and unputdownable story that will leave a huge smile on your face. Perfect for fans of Shari Low, Veronica Henry and Heidi Swain. What readers are saying about Secrets of Magpie Cove:'Absolutely beautiful and perfect read!!... Completely swept me away... compelling and addictive, heart-lifting read that kept me turning the pages until late at night... absolutely fantastic!' Bookworm86'Delightful... lots of lovely characters, gorgeous setting... There are plenty of laugh out loud scenarios, a few heartbreaking revelations and lots of love, too, making this a marvellous read to escape into... highly recommend!' Splashes into Books'All the feels, this was a wonderful escape and a charming read... I absolutely loved this... The characters felt like old friends, while the plot twists and turns kept me completely engrossed.' Page Turners Blog, 'Oh my goodness, what a story. I want to visit Magpie Cove and Serafina's Cafe!' @karen_loves_reading-

Release date: June 16, 2021

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 350

Sample

Somewhere, at the very top of the house, a baby was crying.

Lila stood in the shadowed, high-ceilinged hallway. On the walls, the light was just good enough to make out a row of portraits in grand golden frames. She squinted to study the details. The first was an old-fashioned Italian-style painting of Madonna and child; the Virgin Mother stared at her with an inscrutable expression while breastfeeding her baby. For some reason, the painting gave Lila a sense of deep unease. She kept walking, hearing the baby in the distance.

Lila didn’t recognise the house, and yet it felt somehow familiar. Why wasn’t someone comforting the baby? She started to hurry along the hallway, trying to work out where the noise was coming from.

The hallway seemed to lengthen and telescope away. She walked briskly past the paintings: next was a family posed in a traditional grouping, with two King Charles spaniels sitting docile at their feet: the mother’s voluminous skirts and pulled-in bodice suggested the 1700s. Then, a more modern painting of a young child reading a book. Next again, a black and white photo of a baby sleeping.

Each one made Lila feel worse: a combination of sadness and panic. She had a feeling that something terrible would happen if she didn’t get to the baby in time. And, yet, something in her wanted to stop and gaze at the pictures too. There was a longing in her that rose up like a wave: to hold a child against her body, to stroke its soft cheek, to feel its warm heaviness in her arms.

As is so often the way in dreams, Lila’s brain – or her soul, or whatever it is that takes us away to strange worlds every night – did not know she was dreaming. At the same time, though she knew she had never been to this house before, it felt familiar. As if this was her house and she had merely forgotten it.

It was with this feeling of strange familiarity that Lila followed more and more family and baby portraits along the hall. Finally, she reached the bottom of a long, grand set of stairs with varnished dark wood banisters and elaborately carved balusters. The carpet was a deep blood red.

Lila’s unease intensified as she placed her foot onto the bottom stair; nevertheless, she started to climb.

The staircase seemed to reach up and up, out of sight, but she kept climbing. Now the staircase turned around on itself; when she reached the small landing, the cries grew louder. And yet when she started to climb again, the cries grew more distant.

Lila started opening the doors she passed, but none of them led her to the baby. The cries grew quieter. She turned around and went back down the stairs to where the cries had been loudest, but now there was nothing but silence. She felt filled with panic that she was too late. She reached for the handle of the door closest to her and opened it. In the dream, she started to sob.

Beyond the door lay jagged grey-black cliffs that plunged into a turbulent grey-blue sea. She woke, the sheets damp with her sweat and clenched between her hands, and tears running down her cheeks.

Lila Bridges waited anxiously outside the café. It had been closed for a month now after Serafina Lucido, its garrulous, flamboyant owner, had died.

There had been no warning. Lila couldn’t say if Serafina had been suffering from a heart problem beforehand; she didn’t think so, but Serafina was the type of person who wouldn’t have told you if she was feeling ill. Occasionally, she took the morning off or would head upstairs to her flat if the café was quiet, but that was part of the privilege of owning your own business. Serafina had always seemed pretty robust to Lila.

Yet it was a sudden heart attack that took Serafina Lucido, and Magpie Cove – a tiny ex-fishing village on the Cornish coast – would never be the same.

Lila had been working at Serafina’s, Magpie Cove’s only café, for about eight months now. The first time she’d walked through the door, a little despondent and needing a coffee, she had felt the café wrap her in its warm fug of coffee and battered leather sofas. She specifically remembered that a David Bowie CD was playing in the background – Serafina had five CDs in constant rotation. Lila had drunk an exceptional coffee and admired the pot plants which hung in macramé holders from the ceiling. All around her, groups of friends, mums with kids and people with their laptops chattered amicably or looked happily lost in a world of their own. Lila had sat at the counter, aware of being alone, but Serafina had chatted to her and made her feel welcome.

The café’s rough white walls – where the original stone had been painted over – were hung with paintings and drawings, all done by local artists. The front of the counter, where Lila had sat that first time, acted like a kind of local noticeboard. It was covered in business cards and leaflets or adverts for meditation lessons, local cleaners, vegetable deliveries from local farms and all manner of other goods and services. And it was true, Lila had discovered, after working there a while – if you needed a handyman or a babysitter or a recommendation for the best local restaurant, Serafina’s was where you went. It was always busy, but in a comfortable way. In bad weather, the village congregated there to gossip and drink hot chocolate. In the summer, Serafina had sometimes set up a bar on the beach. In all weathers, she had thrown parties: birthdays, anniversaries, Halloween, Easter and the summer solstice, when surfers watched the sunrise over the ocean and then came back for a celebratory breakfast.

Lila looked up and down the street, but there was no sign of Serafina’s son, Nathan, yet. She tapped her foot impatiently. She had a practical exam at culinary college tomorrow and she’d planned to spend the day practising her mille-feuilles. Not that she didn’t want to know whether she still had a job or not – she definitely did – but she could have been piping cream onto perfectly crisp, buttery pastry rectangles about now; if he was late, it just meant more time she’d have to make up, baking into the night.

Serafina had been so loved in Magpie Cove. Every single one of the two hundred people in attendance at her funeral – locals, regulars at the café but also tourists who came to Magpie Cove every year – had wanted to pay their respects. Serafina’s younger son James had been in Jamaica when Lila had tracked him down, finding his mobile phone number in Serafina’s battered address book. Her other son Nathan lived in London. When Serafina’s will had been read, it transpired she’d left her café solely to Nathan. Lila supposed that made sense: if James was usually abroad, what was he going to do with a café?

She checked her phone to see if Nathan had messaged her, but there was nothing. He had called her last week to ask if she could meet him at the café for a chat, presumably finding her details somewhere in Serafina’s messy paperwork.

Lila had moved to the sleepy Cornish village of Magpie Cove from London eight months ago. For a long time, she’d thought she was happy in the capital – sure, she didn’t really like her job, but who did? At least, that’s what her boyfriend Tim had always said. He hated his job as an actuarial assistant in a large City firm. Lila had fallen into an IT recruitment job she was thoroughly unsuited for. She wasn’t even interested in tech – or in trying to sell people on jobs she thought were boring – but a friend had got her the position and she’d stayed, not knowing what else she really wanted.

When she had first met Tim at an after-hours bar, several drinks the worse for wear – it was Lila’s friend Alice’s birthday. Lila had wanted to go home hours ago but didn’t feel she could disappoint the birthday girl – they’d spent the night competing as to who had the worse job. Tim had claimed the moral victory at being expected to get his boss’s morning bagel every day.

Yet, it eventually began to irritate Lila that Tim seemed content to complain about his job without doing anything about it. A year after they started going out, Lila had booked herself onto a beginner’s bakery course at a college in central London. She’d been waiting for Alice in a café on a Saturday morning and picked up the college prospectus to leaf through while she was bored: other leaflets advertising fashion sample sales, pop-up gift shops and restaurants were distributed around the tables. She’d happened to open the prospectus on the cooking and bakery page and started reading. She’d always liked baking as a child; she’d spent hours in Aunt Joan’s kitchen, learning how to rub butter into flour and carefully measuring out sugar, then marvelling at whatever fluffy, perfect creation Aunt Joan took from the oven. It had seemed like magic.

The next night, Tim had launched into his usual Sunday night I-hate-my-job depression and she’d told him that if he hated it so much, he should do something else. And he’d thrown it back in her face, saying she was exactly the same as him, which was more or less true.

She’d wanted to prove Tim wrong. She’d wanted to show him that some people really did love their jobs. That living a happy, fulfilled professional life wasn’t a myth or a conspiracy, despite his many theories to the contrary. She had begun to see that Tim adored hating his job and complaining about it was a full-time, masochistic hobby.

So, Lila had impulsively booked herself onto the course as a kind of revenge, but the truth was that she wanted more for herself. Tim might have derived an unconscious pleasure from feeling like a victim, but she knew that wasn’t who she was. The sudden realisation that unless she did something about it, she would be right where she was in another five years – in another ten years – made her feel sick.

In a way, she hadn’t expected to enjoy the course as much as she did. Yes, she’d liked baking with Grandma as a kid, but that was a long time ago. Every Saturday for eight weeks Lila got out of bed, got on the tube and spent the day learning how to make bread, Chelsea buns, scones, Cornish pasties, lemon meringue pie, even pasta. She loved it.

After that, Lila knew that she wanted more, so she enrolled on a second weekend course. After she’d completed that course, her tutor told the group that she had some contacts at London restaurants who could take on a few students for work experience, if they were interested. Lila took two weeks’ holiday off work and spent it doing twelve-hour days washing dishes and helping the prep cooks with hours of fruit and vegetable slicing, paring, peeling and chopping at a prestigious Michelin-star eatery.

Tim thought she was crazy. Why spend your holidays working? he’d asked her, but Lila had found something that made her feel alive and she wasn’t going to give up on it.

For those two weeks, she couldn’t wait to get out of bed every morning.

Then, one day, she’d fainted at her workstation. On the tube home, she threw up. She’d assumed it was some kind of bug.

Two months later, she’d miscarried.

Lila’s stomach rumbled; she’d come out to the café this morning without having breakfast. Looking at her phone again and seeing there was still no message, she dashed across the road and pushed open the door to Maude’s Fine Buns, which took up half of one of the narrow shopfronts on the street that had once been Victorian terraced houses.

‘Morning, my love. What can I get yer?’

Maude, the owner of the bakery, was a rotund woman in her early forties, her brown hair a long plait which was pinned around her head. She wore a baby-pink apron with the name of the shop sewn on it in white script. Lila had often joked with her that the name of the shop should be Maude’s Fine Baps if Maude was going to persist on displaying it across her ample bosom.

‘Hi, Maude. Bacon roll, thanks.’

‘Right you are. Lovely day…’ Maude cast an eye out of the bakery window. ‘How’s things?’

‘All right. I’m supposed to be meeting Serafina’s son. He’s telling me what he wants to do with the café, apparently.’ Lila pulled at a loose thread on the cuff of her cardigan.

‘Keep it open, I hope.’ Maude handed her a soft white roll filled with salty, mouth-watering bacon and tomato sauce; Lila was a regular. She’d often pop in on the days she wasn’t working at the café and pick up a bacon or sausage roll for breakfast and a coffee – Maude’s was just as good as the thick, chocolatey coffee they served at the café – and take it down to the beach to eat, if it was a bright morning.

Lila loved the mornings in Magpie Cove. There was nothing nicer than waking up at six or seven, pulling on a sweatshirt and jeans and running down to the beach to watch the tide go out and expose the white sand that lay beyond the pebbly part of the cove.

She hadn’t known she was pregnant before the miscarriage. Her periods weren’t that regular anyway and after a couple of weeks of nausea she felt more or less all right again, so when it came, she had at first put the cramps down to a heavy period. Then, when it was clear that wasn’t what it was, she had run to the bathroom and sat on the toilet, staring at the bathroom door in shock for what seemed like hours, though it must have only been minutes. It had been a child.

After some time had passed, she’d made her way – uncomfortably, a towel wedged between her legs – to her phone and called the ambulance.

Only when the paramedic arrived at the flat had she cried.

Tim hadn’t said much that was helpful. He’d asked her, confused, wasn’t she on the pill? How had it happened? When she hadn’t been able to explain, he’d hugged her awkwardly and told her it was probably for the best.

Two weeks after it happened – when she could more or less move around as normal again – Alice helped her pack. Lila was traumatised by the miscarriage, but above all, she didn’t want to have Tim’s baby. Once she’d realised that – as she lay on their bed with a hot water bottle on her back while he was out at the pub – all the decisions were easy. She gave in her notice at the IT recruitment company. She had a few weeks of leave she hadn’t taken and some savings in the bank.

Lila went to stay with her Aunt Joan in Plymouth, not knowing what she’d do next, but knowing she couldn’t stay in London anymore. She just couldn’t. Nothing good had happened there, apart from learning to cook, and she could do that anywhere.

The one upside of Lila’s recruitment job was that the pay was decent, and she’d been saving up for a deposit on a house for years. She was still a long way from that, but seeing as she’d pretty much said goodbye to the city for now, it was time to make different plans.

‘All goin’ well? The course?’ Maude had become a bit of a mentor to Lila since she’d been living in Magpie Cove: helping her perfect her puff pastry one rainy Sunday; another day they’d spent hours making choux pastry and filling what seemed like thousands of profiteroles with crème patissiere for a birthday party Maude was catering. Occasionally she needed a hand, and it was good experience for Lila. Maude was a little older than Lila, but not that much – it was like being friends with a school friend’s older sister, had she had any close friends at school.

‘Yeah. It’s great.’

Lila had a favourite rock to sit on towards the back of the cove, where she ate her bacon rolls on weekend mornings and gazed out at the sea – when the weather was good, anyway. On the other side of the rock promontory that ran behind her spot, you could see the roofs of a couple of houses. There was only one house on the beach, though; it had been renovated a year or so ago. Serafina had told her that before then, it had been a bit of a ruin. The woman who lived there with her family, Mara, had worked at the café before Lila. They’d had a few polite chats but nothing significant: Mara wrote children’s books and Lila thought she and her husband – or boyfriend, Lila wasn’t sure – might be involved in property renovation too.

On one of her mornings staring at the sea, Lila had realised that she and Tim had been what women’s magazines called co-dependent. Tim had loved her for as long as she supported his need to resent his job – and his life, really – by hating her own. When that changed, their relationship had changed – the miscarriage hadn’t even been what had truly ended it. If she was honest, it was over on the day she booked herself onto that first eight-week cooking course.

At the time, Alice had said, He’s jealous of you, babes. You’re finally doing something that makes you happy and he’s scared. But Lila hadn’t wanted to see it then. It had taken the miscarriage for Lila to see that Tim didn’t really love her in the way that she wanted to be loved. And that she didn’t love him either.

One day, as she lay despondently on Aunt Joan’s . . .