The Return: Scotland Bay the Return

By Cecly Ann Mitchell

*Intriguing and Interesting*

Astral Le Noireau and Desmond Roche, childhood best friends, keepers of each other's secrets that are about to be revealed when their carefully crafted lives are upended again

on that fateful date, March 29th.

Now truth or dare becomes a matter of life and death.
 

 

The Return, the prequel to Scotland Bay the Return series sets the stage for the Le Noireau heirs to unravel mysteries and expose secrets festering on the Caribbean island of Trinidad.

• The Legacy
• Chateau on the Hill
• The Remous
• Fire Dance
• A Cocoa Panyol Christmas
• The Macquarie Beach Club
• Dame Lorraine
• The Midnight Robber
• Petit Carême

• Language: English
• Publisher: Les Grand Editeurs Publishers Ltd
• Release date: Aug 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201873097

Cecly Ann Mitchell

Most days I wear several hats. Author, Wordsmith, Writing Coach, Editor, Public Sector Communications Consultant, and Workshop Facilitator. In my world of Caribbean Historical fiction, readers meet long-forgotten island people, who lived through events remembered in the whispered recollections of living historians or between the pages of tomes in dusty archives and long-abandoned places. My non-fiction work marries my passion for Public Sector Communications and the craft of writing Commercial fiction while resident in the Caribbean. The most important thing you need to know about me, I'm not human until I've had my first cup of homegrown coffee.

Book preview

THE RETURN

SCOTLAND BAY the RETURN

PROLOGUE

By

CECLY ANN

MITCHELL

Text copyright © 2022 by Cecly Ann Mitchell

Cover design : Keffi Rosita

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Cecly Ann Mitchell and Les Grand Editeurs Publishers Ltd, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. All the names, characters, organizations, places, events and incidents portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 9798201873097

Les Grand Editeurs Publishers Ltd

61 Old St Joseph Road

Success Village,

Laventille

Trinidad and Tobago

www.LesGrandEditeurs.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE RETURN

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

ABOUT THIS SERIES

THE LEGACY

THE CHATEAU ON THE HILL

THE CAST OF CHARACTERS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BOOKS BY CECLY ANN MITCHELL

ABOUT

THE RETURN

*Intriguing and Interesting*

Astral Le Noireau and Desmond Roche, childhood best friends, keepers of each other's secrets for almost forty years.

Now on another fateful March 29th, their carefully crafted lives are about to be upended again

and truth or dare becomes for one of them, a matter of life or death.

The Return is the prequel to Scotland Bay the Return series which is set on the Caribbean island of Trinidad.

The series includes:

The Legacy

Chateau on the Hill

The Remous

Fire Dance

A Cocoa Panyol Christmas

The Macquarie Beach Club

Dame Lorraine

The Midnight Robber

Petit Carême

THE RETURN

Chapter 1

ASTRAL

SUNDAY 29TH MARCH 1981

Washington DC

Astral Le Noireau rested her elbow on the banquette table and propped her chin in the upturned palm of her hand staring vacantly as the snow tumbled in heavy clumps outside. 

What wouldn’t I give to be back on the beach at Scotland Bay now, she mourned, with her soft, raspberry breath.

Or jumping up to a good steelpan on the Savannah stage. Desmond Roche’s strong baritone rasped from across the banquette table, bringing her back to Washington DC, and her dinner companion.

She watched enraptured as his long fingers tapped out the melody of ‘Ethel’, on the vinyl table top, beating the rhythms of the most popular calypso of  Trinidad’s Carnival season. Two days of unbridled merriment which had ended just two weeks before.

Every West Indian radio station in Caribbean diasporic communities scattered along the east coast of the United States of America was blasting the calypso.

Never mind those same communities were decidedly Roman Catholic, and it was, the season of Lent. 

Carnival, the reign of the merry monarch, with its colourful costumery and free-letting of the creative spirit had just concluded in Trinidad. The thousands who travelled to the island for the festivities were now returning to cold wintry Washington with sun tans, rum in their bellies, and raunchy calypso lyrics on their lips. 

Astral could not resist humming the catchy Blue Boy rendition which had stomped away with the island’s Road March title. The most popular calypso played by the parading bands on the streets of Trinidad and Tobago during the festivities.

The melody eased the melancholy of sitting at dinner with Desmond during a snowstorm, thinking about home, Carnival, and Scotland Bay.

Do you remember the year we got Gus in trouble? She gawked.

How can I forget? Your grandfather banned you from coming down the hill by us for two months and I had cow-pen duty for three. But that jump up was worth it. Desmond laughed shaking his head.

An awkward silence dawned between them. The din of food preparation in the diner, background noise to the stillness at their banquette. Desmond lost in his own memories of carnivals past and Scotland Bay, was reluctant to ruffle the laid-back ambiance that cocooned them.

Astral had something on her mind. He knew her best. Her furrowed brow, her golden eyes a dark shade of amber, her full lips, taut in a straight line.

For all the years of their friendship, Desmond Roche, not his sister Avril, who was her age, had been her confidante.

Outside the snow fell in clumps, not the feathery snowfall of Christmas carols and movies, but the angry rigid snowfall of a Washington DC winter.

Opposite her, Desmond sat taking in her exquisite beauty.

Where did the years go?

He was hitting close to 60 and Astral, vivacious and still beautiful was high-stepping into her 56th year. 

Her golden Le Noireau eyes shone with unshed tears. Those eyes could express anger or pleasure with a shift in the shade of her irises. Her delicate straight nose belied the Afro-Caribbean heritage, which she hid so well. Her full lips were now coloured in a rich shade of purple. Her defiant chin, and the tumble of blue/black hair that no hair colourist could emulate.

This woman was the perfect chameleon walking a fine line between the black and white communities with ease.

Astral, the restless millionaire who fled Trinidad just after the war, taking her infant twin son and daughter, to Britain, where she quickly and easily assimilated into the lifestyle her grandfather planned for her.

The Chief Executive Officer of Coconel, the coffee, cocoa, and chocolate brand with roots deep in the Gran Couva forest of Trinidad. The brand, that before the war, graced the tables of high-end tea rooms, homes, and offices in Europe and the nations of the Commonwealth; had significantly increased in value.

Astral had done well, expanding Coconel’s reach into American and Canadian markets so much so that she was appointed to a similar role across the Atlantic in 1965.

Tonight, her eyes held another mystery.

His restless princess Astral, with her golden eyes and blue/black hair and her perfect French creole manners.

What’s stopping you from going home, Le Noireau? he teased. He knew she hated when he said her name as the Yankees did.

She cocked her eyebrow.

You know better Roche, it’s Lee-nor-ri-aye she drawled in her distinctive French creole accent that had never left no matter where she had lived.

He chuckled.

He knew she hated the Americanized pronunciation of her name. 

She was a proud descendent of free Frenchmen who had fought on Louverture’s side and fled St Domingue when the colour of their skin determined whether they could be trusted.

She loved the French way of saying it, and over the years of their friendship repeatedly corrected him, although she knew Desmond of all people, knew exactly how her family’s name was pronounced. After all, he was her Godbrother and best friend of more than fifty years.

They both were from the same battered village of Scotland Bay in Trinidad. That picturesque seaside village of Scotland Bay, which American naval officers and Seabees had overrun, and from which the locals had been unceremoniously evicted on