The Saffron Trail

by Rosanna Ley

Genres: Family Life; Holiday books; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

Once, there was a girl who loved saffron. She loved its secrets, its mystery, and best of all, she loved its hint of magic. After the death of her mother, Nell travels from rural Cornwall to the chaos of Marrakech; exploring the heady delights of Moroccan cuisine could help her fulfil her dream of opening her own restaurant. It's there she meets Amy - a young photographer trying to unravel the story behind her family's involvement in the Vietnam War. The two women develop a close friendship and discover a surprising connection between their own pasts.

Release date: November 9, 2017

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 544

Sample

Prologue

She left the evening haze of the town behind her and began to trudge up the hill. It was one of those long, late-spring days that used to hold out such hope, when summer was something to look forward to rather than something to dread. But now at last the sun was setting and part of her journey would be in darkness. It didn’t matter. She knew this pathway of old; it was as dear and familiar as a still-cherished lover. She could feel it. She knew exactly which way to go.

‘Take care.’ Tania had lifted her hand to wave. ‘You sure you don’t want me to call a taxi?’

She shook her head. ‘I’d rather walk.’ Walking meant thinking and, lately, she’d been doing a lot of that. Tonight, she’d had a couple of glasses of wine, too, and that was unusual these days. Perhaps she’d said too much. She’d got used to keeping her own counsel and it was unlike her to let it all out like that. She grimaced. Some of it at least.

The cliff wasn’t easy. She paused to catch her breath. Below her, the last of the sun’s rays illuminated a small shoal of mackerel leaping through the waves, slippery backs gleaming. And then they were gone. She watched as the sun sank lower, dipping into the horizon, its orange shadows darkening the water. She would take her time, she decided, on this journey back home.

She climbed the stile into the meadow. Last year, she’d seen a group of primary-school children here on a field trip, picking blackberries, their fingers stained red and blue, their teacher smiling as she talked to them about insects and birds. How heartening that had been. She had felt like congratulating the teacher on bringing these children back to nature; on encouraging such a love of the countryside in a world where people were spending most of their time indoors getting to grips with technology.

Bah, humbug. She was becoming a grumpy old woman. Perhaps she already was one. But things were changing. And now this . . . She shivered, although it wasn’t cold.

She passed the tangled hedge of briars and brambles. And thought back. It was usually best not to. What had been done couldn’t be undone. There had been a time when she’d imagined it would be different. But then again, perhaps it was like that for everyone. Everyone could think of ‘a time’. If I had done that differently, or that . . . The course of events would be changed, perhaps for ever. Only they wouldn’t be, because you couldn’t play that game. There was no point.

She had recognized the finality of not replanting the saffron bulbs. Nell had known it, too. She had seen the knowledge in her daughter’s eyes. She wasn’t even sure why she had made it so obvious – she could, after all, have simply left the field as it was. But it was the fourth year. It was a compulsion. And so she had done what she always did. Let Nell make of it what she would. She had given her daughter a sign; it was all she would do for now. Nell must learn to read it for herself.

She came to the end of the meadow and climbed the second stile. The day was shifting towards its close; the final curtain. The sun had set, the redness in the sky was merging with the grey, and all the shapes she knew so well – of cliff edge and hedges, of wooden gates and dry stone walls – were blurring into the fuzzy shapes of twilight. The birds had stopped their flying and their chirruping. And the landscape around her, the landscape of Roseland, Cornwall, which she loved, was settling into the quiet of night-time, where the rustle of a creature in the undergrowth and the swish and scramble of the sea were the only sounds she could hear.

Nell, out of everyone, was innocent in all this. Whatever. And if she didn’t need to know the truth then neither did Nell. What did it matter, after all, who belonged to who and who had done what? Every child was blameless when they came into the world.

The path here was narrow and close to the cliff edge. Below, in a tiny, rocky bay, the water sashayed through into the inlet, splashing on to the pebbles and larger rocks, drawing back with the tide towards the darkness of the ocean mass and the soft glow of the waning moon. She almost held her breath. Was there a sight more beautiful?

When you found out you were pregnant, she found herself thinking, it should be the most glorious feeling in the world. She put her hands on to her belly as if she could recall that feeling from more than thirty years ago, when she had been pregnant with Nell. Glorious . . . But that was in an ideal world. She looked out to sea. Her world had not been ideal, even then.

She sighed and walked on. And now? Around her now the darkness seemed to rest on the grass and the trees and the undergrowth; on the ocean and the rocks and stones below. The truth had always been a burden – even what she knew of it. And she didn’t know it all. But that didn’t give anyone the right to offload, and she wasn’t about to offload now. That wasn’t her way. Nell deserved better. She had not always done right by Nell. She had tried to protect her too much – she could see that. In the end you had to let your child go, no matter how you worried for her. And this was all she could do for Nell now.

She walked on, by feel, knowing exactly where she was from the familiarity of the path. And then it widened and she could sense rather than see the lane in the distance, a faint light from one of the cottages showing her the way. One way. Life was full of choices. There wasn’t far to go now. And yet . . .

She moved closer to the cliff edge, drawn by the ruffled water, by the shimmer of the moon, by the hiss and the slap of tide on beach down below. She could see it and she could feel it. There really wasn’t far to go now.

Chapter 1

Five months later

She had been dreaming about her again. And that wasn’t all. In those last seconds, just before waking; in those brief moments when you’re not sure where you are, or sometimes even who you are, when a dream can seem your reality . . . Nell had seen the field of saffron. The flowers of the crocus bulb had just begun to bloom – it was that precious momentary pause before harvesting when the mauve coverlet seemed to have been gently drawn over the earth under an ice-blue late-October sky. It filled her vision, seemed to fill her world as it always had. Purple saffron.

But before she could catch it, before she could keep it, there was a swish of curtains and the vision was gone. It was morning. It was late October. But there was no saffron. Instead, there was her husband Callum, who had drawn the curtains and now stood by the bed carrying a tray and wearing a grin which seemed forced, perhaps because he hadn’t worn it for such a long time.

Nell felt herself tense, though whether this was due to her dream, to Callum or because of the grief that still hung over her like a dark cloud, she wasn’t sure. Her mother had died five months ago while walking along the cliffs sometime around midnight. She had gone and the saffron had gone, too. And Nell had lost her way.

‘Wakey, wakey, sleepyhead.’

Nell opened her eyes wider and tried to smile reassuringly back at him. I’m fine, really. She’d done that a lot lately. But the truth was that she wasn’t fine. And neither were they.

‘Ta-ra! Breakfast in bed for the birthday girl!’ His dark hair was still rumpled from sleep; she saw the determined shadow of stubble on his jaw. He was trying so hard to pretend.

‘Thanks.’ Her birthday. She’d almost forgotten. She was thirty-four today and this was her first birthday as a married woman. Her first birthday since the death of the mother she’d adored – which didn’t bear thinking about, really.

So Nell pushed herself into a sitting position, grabbing a pillow to lean against. ‘What a treat. How lovely.’ The words seemed to echo around the room. Nell wondered if Callum found them as unconvincing as she did. But she didn’t have the heart not to play the game he seemed to want to play. He was trying so hard. On the wooden tray was a mug of tea, a croissant on a plate, a big dollop of apricot jam beside it, a butter knife, a Japanese anemone in a slim vase and a fat cream envelope. This filled her with trepidation.

‘Happy birthday, Nell.’ Callum positioned the tray carefully on her lap (almost as if she were an invalid, she found herself thinking) and leant over it to kiss her lightly on the cheek.

When had they stopped kissing on the mouth, she found herself wondering. Was it before her mother died or after? And did it honestly matter? He smelt of mint toothpaste and autumn leaves. ‘Good dreams?’ He smoothed her hair from her face and Nell closed her eyes for a second, thinking of another hand, a softer hand.

‘I think so.’ She decided not to tell him about the saffron.

It had been hard for them both since the death of her mother. Why? she thought, as she had thought so many times since it had happened. Why did it happen that way? And what had happened exactly? She had no idea. Her mother had been alone, walking along the cliff path in the middle of the night, for God’s sake. And then . . .? So Nell didn’t know how she had died, which added to the long list of other things she didn’t know, other things which her mother had decided in her infinite wisdom not to tell her.

Nell realized that she was clenching her fists and that her shoulders were up to her ears. With a determined effort, she relaxed her muscles. It was bad enough not knowing things when her mother was alive – at least then she’d hoped she would tell her one day. But now that she was gone . . . This meant Nell would never know. And mixed up in this awful well of grief was the anger she felt against her for that.

Callum had done his best to support her. He’d held her in his arms when she wept – she couldn’t believe there were so many tears inside her – he’d listened to her talking about the good times. He had stroked her hair, held her hand, soothed her brow, massaged her shoulders; done everything he possibly could. He had dealt with as much of the grisly administrative aftermath of death as was permitted. While Nell tried to make sense of it all.

In March, she had married him and her mother was still alive. By the end of May her mother was dead, and by mid-October she wasn’t even sure if she and Callum would still be married by Christmas. What was going on? He was supposed to be her husband and yet it was her mother who seemed to have been the lynchpin that made Nell’s world go round. Without her, everything, including her marriage to Callum, was flailing.

‘Drink your tea, then,’ Callum said, rather gruffly. ‘Before it goes cold.’

‘Sorry.’ Nell took a deep breath. She must try harder, that was all. She couldn’t give up on them without a fight.

Because Callum had always been worth fighting for, hadn’t he? In Callum’s well-ordered world – which was light years from the disordered planet Nell had grown up in – there was a right way to do things. You met a girl and you went out for drinks. This part had been easy; Nell had liked him from the first moment she saw him in the café where she made sandwiches and baguettes at lunchtime and in the evening ran around ragged to the tune played by Johnson, her boss, the head chef. Only chef. She’d wanted to get to know the tall, outdoorsy man with the warm hazel eyes rather better. In Callum’s world, if this went well, you progressed to dinner (it had and they did), the cinema (a romantic comedy; he had laughed even more than she had), a music gig at the local arts centre – a local band who knew how to get everyone up on the dance floor – a walk along the cliffs from St Mawes to St Just, and a pub lunch. This would at some point lead to sex, although Nell had been seeing Callum for almost a month before the subject was broached – by Nell, in a ‘what’s wrong with me, anyway?’ kind of fashion.

Callum had smiled at her, kind of strong and slow – boot-meltingly gorgeous, she had thought back then – and said, ‘I just wanted us to take our time.’ Which was lovely and, frankly, refreshing, in Nell’s experience, where most men expected the full works after only a couple of dates. But when he leaned forward to kiss her – they were sitting in a crowded bar in Truro – and she felt the full force of him, as if he’d turned the intensity notch up by several dials, she had thought . . . I don’t need any more time. And from the way he had made love to her that night in his one-bedroom flat near the river, gentle but with a rising passion that drew her irresistibly in, he hadn’t needed any more time either.

That was about as far as Nell had ever got with any man. Sometimes it was her who finished things, sometimes him; sometimes it had simply petered out or never really got going in the first place. But it wasn’t like that with Callum. They spent more and more time together. They both liked walking and cycling in the countryside and being outdoors, rain or shine. Nell enjoyed cooking and Callum enjoyed tasting the results. Their passion grew and they fell in love. The next stage for Callum was making a decision to share their lives. Living together, getting married.

‘I don’t know,’ she’d said, the day he’d first suggested they move in together. They were eating pasta and drinking red wine at their favourite Italian café, and as usual Callum had managed to reserve the seat by the window. They had been together now for two years.

‘What don’t you know?’ He was watching her closely; she could feel it. ‘Whether or not you’re ready? Whether or not you love me –’

‘I love you.’ She put her hand on his. She was sure of that much.

‘Is it that you don’t want to leave your mother?’ he asked.

She wouldn’t have put it quite like that. She would have said perhaps that she didn’t want to leave her mother on her own, that she needed to get her mother used to the idea, that she wasn’t quite sure how her mother would react. Or all of those things. ‘Not exactly,’ she hedged.

‘Everyone leaves their parents one day,’ Callum had pointed out, quite reasonably. ‘It’s what you do.’

Nell knew that. The words ‘unhealthy’ and ‘unnatural’ were hovering, though unsaid. But hovering was enough for them to emerge in a row, in the future, and so she wanted him to understand. It wasn’t just a case of her saving up for a deposit to buy her own place, although that was part of it. It wasn’t just how well they got on – most of the time. The usual conventions of life had not applied to her family. And there was just her mother; that was the way it had always been. Which meant that Nell felt responsible. Even so . . . ‘You’re right,’ she said.

‘But you’re not sure how she’d manage without you?’ he pressed.

‘Sort of.’ The truth was that she’d be more than capable. But they’d always been a team. The two of them against the world – or that’s how her mother had always played it. And it was true, up to a point. So why had her mother always refused to talk about the past? About where Nell had come from? About who she really was? Team players wouldn’t stay so stubbornly silent when one of the members needed to know something so badly.

‘Is it because you’re scared?’ Callum’s expression had softened. ‘I’d look after you, Nell, you don’t need to worry.’

But she wasn’t a child . . . Just for a moment, she looked past him, out of the window into the street, where it had rained and the pavements were greasy and slick and a group of lads were standing around, smoking, laughing and drinking from cans of beer. ‘Perhaps I should live on my own for a bit first.’ Though she hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud until she saw his hurt expression.

‘You’re not sure,’ he said. ‘About us?’ And he pushed his plate away, although he hadn’t even finished his pasta, which was unheard of for Callum.

‘I didn’t say that.’ And then she felt bad. ‘I just think we should wait a bit,’ she said. ‘We’re still young.’

‘All right.’ He rubbed at his jaw in that way he had and frowned. ‘But you’ll have to leave her some time, you know.’

Nell knew.

*

‘Aren’t you going to open it, then?’ Callum went back to his side of the bed and, although he was already dressed – in blue jeans and a red-and-grey checked shirt – he unfolded himself back on to the bed beside her and grabbed his own tea from his bedside table. Hers was green tea with jasmine. His was Clipper Gold – strong and well-brewed.

Nell could tell he was excited. She felt her sense of trepidation grow.

‘Have you got plans for today?’ she prevaricated, sipping her tea, splitting the still-warm and crumbly croissant with her fingers, spreading some apricot jam.

‘’Course not,’ he said. ‘It’s your birthday. And it’s Sunday. You get to choose.’

Hmm. Nell would bet he’d already decided, though, what her choice should be. She lifted the white anemone in the vase closer, sniffed the delicate and wintry scent. She hadn’t quite been able to catch the fragrance of the saffron this morning, though she knew it so well. Fragile petals sheltering fiery-red stigmata. The fragrance was alluring and almost impossible to pin down; a mixture of flame, honey and fresh hay. Could you experience a fragrance in a dream? Nell wasn’t sure. She could unscrew a jar from the store cupboard in the kitchen downstairs and sniff the red threads of saffron inside anytime she liked. Savour their exotic aura, an elusive whiff of Moroccan spice roads and Persian palaces. But not the flowers – saffron flowers were far too transitory for that.

She thought back to the saffron she’d grown up with. They would harvest each plant when it was ready, gathering the crop in trugs to take inside. Her mother and Nell, and often a friend or two, would sit around the old and pitted farmhouse table where the plucking of the saffron took place every year. They would spread back the petals of each unopened flower as if it were an oyster sheltering a pearl and gently, deftly, tug the red, jewelled stigmata from the centre until their fingers were coloured slatey blue-grey on one hand from opening the petals and ochre on the other from pulling the threads. Meanwhile, the spent petals would gradually shroud the table as the precious tangle of threads gradually grew.

It wasn’t easy work. The threads were delicate; they had to be pulled separately from the yellow stamen, the presence of which would dilute the batch; lavender petals would stick to their fingertips, stigmata would break, eyes would become sore. And the pile always grew so very slowly. But there was something about the dim light, the easy companionship between the women, the sharp scent of the saffron that started off like honey and then developed into something deeper, more musky, something much more potent that was, Nell found, its own reward, even when she wasn’t much more than a girl.

The threads would be dried in batches on top of the Aga – Nell’s mother had adapted a tray for this purpose. And they had to be dried quickly, before they turned musty and spoiled. So Nell’s mother would watch over them, solicitous as a mother bird watching her chicks, spreading them out gently with her fingers until she was satisfied that they were fully dried and ready for storing. Their bitter-hay scent would drift from the kitchen into the rest of the house and on to their clothes. Faint stains of powdery yellow would appear on chairs, towels, pillows, as the saffron crept into their lives once more. And when it was over, Nell’s mother would collect the leftover ephemeral wisps of purple flowers in her wicker basket and put them in a box in the airing cupboard to be used as what she called ‘memory pot pourri’ throughout the winter months. It was a reminder all right. As if they could ever forget.

Nell had grown up with the field of saffron in full view of her bedroom window in the farmhouse on the Roseland peninsula in Cornwall. Every four years her mother saw to it that the corms were lifted and moved to another site in the tradition of crop rotation so that land could be refertilized and the daughter corms which had crowded to the surface could be divided for replanting. That was how saffron fields grew. But the saffron was always in Nell’s sight; she guessed that her mother had wanted it that way. And she watched the small saffron crop from the moment that the first papery, white, triangular sheaths protecting the tips of the leaves pushed through the soil to form a small tuft with the covering of the flower bud in its centre. Gradually, the leaves would grow. If the weather was good, a bud could become a fully developed flower overnight. And then the moment of glory when the temperature was perfect, the flowers finally unfurled and the long threads emerged and dangled, ready for the taking.

Saffron had been grown by their family for generations; her mother had often told her that. ‘We have to work for our traditions to survive.’ And she had become quite fierce as she said this, her eyes – such a dark shade they were almost indigo – burning with the passion of her words; her hands, floury from the dough of the saffron bread she was baking, dusting the dark hair which she pushed from her face as she worked. According to tradition, her mother used the whole saffron infusion rather than sieving it to get the very best flavour. Later, she would add currants, mixed peel, nutmeg and cinnamon. It doesn’t need tarting up, her mother would say. Just a slice of golden sunshine and a little clotted cream. That fragrant yellow crumb. That hard-to-define saffron flavour. Heavenly. Nell could salivate just thinking about it.

‘You, too, Nell. It’s your legacy.’ And she would turn around with a flounce, hair tumbling down her slim back, her brightly patterned skirt flowing with her as she fetched more ingredients from the larder. ‘You have to keep it going, too.’

That legacy was an awful responsibility, Nell thought now, as she sipped her tea. Her mother should not have died – not so suddenly, and certainly not like that. Nell had been so terribly unprepared. She picked up the fat, cream envelope. ‘Is this my present – or a card?’ she tried to tease.

Callum raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ll have to open it and see.’

It would be both, she knew; she could tell. It had taken Nell a while to understand her husband – the way he ordered his life just as he ordered people’s outside spaces. He was a landscape gardener and planner – and he did it the old-fashioned way. He liked nothing more than designing a garden space on paper on his drawing board, with a ruler, a pencil and the deep frown she always wanted to smooth away. And then he’d recreate it with lawn, with local stone, paving, decking and plants. And even while Nell sometimes longed for him to change his mind spontaneously, for his plans to dissolve into chaos, for something to turn out differently than he had expected . . . She was aware that it was this seductive sense of order that had probably attracted her to him in the first place. Callum – the living opposite of her mother.

Nell weighed the envelope in her palm. Callum had done his best to support her through her grief and her anger. But he had made it clear that what she now should be doing was moving on. How could you move on, though, when something inside you seemed to have died?

‘We have to put the farmhouse up for sale,’ he had said to her two months ago, when they were sitting in their cramped courtyard garden one sunny afternoon. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

‘Ridiculous?’ Nell hadn’t liked the word. She had grown up there, lived most of her life there. She wasn’t sure she could bear to sell it.

‘It’s been three months.’ He’d got up from the bench and begun to pace the courtyard, as if he were trapped. ‘It’s just sitting there. Doing nothing. You have to face it. She’s not coming back, is she, Nell?’

Nell felt the tears rise to the surface. Even after three months they were never far away. ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘She’s not coming back.’

‘And we could use the money.’

Nell hoped she hadn’t heard him say that. But of course she had.

He came back to the bench and sat down beside her. ‘We could buy a bigger place. I could put some money into the business. We could even make plans for you to open your own restaurant. That’s what you want, isn’t it? What we both want?’

Nell said nothing. Her throat seemed blocked with an emotion she couldn’t identify. Right at this moment, she couldn’t say what she wanted.

‘It’s time, Nell.’ He put his arm around her.

She wanted to rest her head against his shoulder. She wanted nothing more. She wanted to close her eyes and just let him take over. ‘I don’t know.’ It felt like the conversation they’d had about moving in together all over again. But this time she didn’t seem to have the strength to stand up for what she really wanted. It was her legacy. The farmhouse. The saffron.

‘You’re not your mother,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to look after a smallholding, do you? I don’t. I can’t. You don’t want that to be your life?’

Only it was. ‘No.’ Miserably, Nell shook her head. But . . . Her mother had been a tireless worker on the land – though when she could afford it she’d hired help. And there had been men – often there would be a man who would stay with them for months, working with her in return for a hot meal and shelter. These men had never stayed. By autumn, when the apples, pears and plums had been picked from the trees, when the fruit bushes had been harvested, when Nell’s mother was making jam and preserving fruit and preparing for the winter months, that’s when they left. Sometimes before; sometimes after the saffron. As a child, Nell never really knew why. One day they would be there, the next they’d gone. And it never mattered. Her mother was still smiling and singing and it was still just them, as it had always been.

But not any more. Callum was right. It was only five acres and a farmhouse; she had to look at it that way. There was the goat – already given to a family in the village who thought a pet goat would be a fun idea; they were from London, what did they know? And the chickens – sold to a neighbouring farmer’s wife who lived down the lane. And there was the saffron.

‘That place, that house, the land . . . It was Mum’s world,’ she tried to explain. And my world, she thought. For years, as a child, it was all she ever knew. Kept away from things on the outside that her mother thought could hurt her. Trapped, she thought guiltily. Or protected. It was a fine line. And she never knew why her mother had wanted to protect her so badly, what had happened to her that made her feel the world was such a bad place. Because she had never told her.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I understand how you feel, and I realize how difficult it is.’ But he shifted away from her as he spoke, and she felt it. ‘Leave it to me.’ And she recognized the tone of his voice. It was the same tone he used with clients when he started to plan their landscaping. ‘I’ll get it all organized. You won’t have to do a thing.’

Now, Nell slid her thumb under the seal of the envelope. They hadn’t sold the farmhouse, not yet, that was the main thing. It was up for sale, but it was still hers. For now.

She drew out the card. It showed a stick man kneeling in front of a stick woman offering her a heart. The stick man had dark hair and hazel eyes, like Callum, and the stick woman a mass of blond curls and blue eyes, like Nell. She wondered how many card shops he’d scoured to find it. It made her want to cry – again.

‘Callum, I know things haven’t been –’ so good between us lately, she was going to say. Her mother’s death had sent them on to different wavelengths and suddenly she wanted to acknowledge that truth between them, needed him to acknowledge it, too.

But he stopped her. He stopped her with a shake of his head. ‘Don’t, Nell. Not today.’

She hesitated.

A thin paper folder fell out of the card. Her present. Nell read the words inside the card – ‘Happy birthday to my favourite chef.’ She really mustn’t cry again. She reached over and kissed his warm and stubbly cheek. If not today, she thought, then when?

‘And . . .’ Callum was waiting expectantly.

Nell was almost scared to pick up the paper folder. What if she didn’t like it? What if he’d got it terribly wrong? It was bad enough having her first birthday without her mother – no one singing loudly in the kitchen, clattering pots and pans in the preparation of birthday pancakes, stomping around in her wellingtons because she’d just been out to feed the chickens, talking to a stray hen that had wandered into the house or the goat tethered in the yard. Happy birthday, my Nelly! Her mother’s deep laughter. My ray of sunshine. Her mother had called her Nell because that’s what her name meant in old English – light, ray of sunshine. She had been named after saffron.

Nell sniffed.

‘Come on, Nell.’ Callum squeezed her shoulder.

‘OK.’ She really had to stop this. Damn that dream. She opened the folder. A return ticket. A flight. She frowned. To Marrakech. ‘Why . . .?’

‘And . . .’ Callum said again.

Nell realized there was another piece of paper. A sort of card receipt. She picked it up. For a cookery course, she read. In Riad Lazuli. In Marrakech. A five-day class studying Moroccan cuisine.

‘What’s this?’ Though