“Dear, dear!” I skimmed to the bottom of the paper with one eye, while watching the window with the other.
Porridge oats, one lamb chop-obviously single; my guess was a widow-three wild mice.
My turn to shudder. Surely if the cat’s owner could eat convenience foods, Puss could be persuaded to do likewise.
“What’s wrong?” From the sound of him, Ben was still dwelling on the decadence of caramel blancmange.
I moved his finger up a notch to the offending item. His dark eyebrows drew together, but he shrugged. “Nothing wrong there. I happen to prefer white, because of the greater scope for play, but everyone to his own taste.”
“Taste!” I twitched the list away, staring at that mouth which I had so recently kissed. “Sweetheart, you
“Do I ever joke about food?” Ben drew the list back from my nerveless fingers and laid it on the seat. “I concede that wild rice has its place in the scheme of things, but the texture is so often flawed by impetuous boiling. It is at its best when simmered for thirty-two and one-half minutes and served with almond butter.”
Light dawned-my mind had leapt to the macabre; it had been that sort of day. I saw again the widow going up the church steps, poor woman, so… so…
“Ellie, do let’s get out of here. This discussion reminds me that our nuptial bash is at the mercy of that woman Dorcas hired to serve, and I keep getting these flashes that something terrible has happened to the lobster aspic.” Ben had his door halfway open when we heard it-a roar, deeper, throatier than the wind and charged with a different kind of energy. We looked at each other.
We were outside the car, my dress and veil bundled up in my hands, when the motorbike leapt toward us through swirling rain, accompanied by a joyful
“Freddy!” exclaimed Ben, with rather more pleasure than I thought necessary or appropriate.
“You two sure are my kind of people. Couldn’t hold out till you got home, could you?” Freddy favoured us with his familiar leer. He was now dressed in everyday attire-a black leather jacket, a shirt collar, but no shirt; a weighty tangle of chains flattened the damp hairs on his chest.
“Sorry to disappoint you, old man, but we were merely seeking shelter from the deluge.” Ben wound an arm round me.
“Got you!” Freddy lowered an eyelid in a man-to-man wink. “Can’t wait to tell Jill. She was rather concerned, Ellie, that you might suffer from the flannel nightie and woolly bedsocks syndrome.”
He moved before I could grab hold of his long, untidily plaited hair and wrap it around his throat. A dark huddle of figures was forming outside the church. I could hear the distant murmur of Rowland’s voice, but Freddy wasn’t looking in that direction. “By the way, where is Jill? Don’t tell me the girl who worships the shadow I cast has nipped off to the wedding feast without me.”
“What did you think she would do, you turnip, stand under a tree until you returned or she got struck by lightning? Don’t worry, Jill is being looked after,” I said benignly. “She accompanied your parents in their car back to Merlin’s Court.”
“Oh, God!” he groaned. “Mum will have pinched her purse en route, and we all know what Dad will have tried to pinch!”
Damn Freddy! I watched his eyes, the lids still dusted with neon purple. Should I be held accountable for his romance with Jill simply because they had met at Merlin’s Court? Admittedly, Freddy considers being asked for the time by any female under ninety a romance. But I did suspect that Cupid’s arrow had got him in the aorta this time. Despite all my claims to sanity, I was fond of Freddy, and it was hard not to feel some pity for the person the fates had assigned Aunt Lulu and Uncle Maurice as parents.
Faking a yawn, Freddy yanked at the chains around his neck. “Okay, love doves, the meter’s running. Afraid I can only manage one passenger, so will it be you, Ellie?”
Motorbikes terrify me. However, the wedding guests were beginning to prey on my conscience and Ben refused to ride while I jogged home. I gazed into my husband’s face, memorizing every line, as I warned him to keep to the middle of Cliff Road. He tends to daydream while out walking about such things as the ultimate marinade.
Freddy leaned on the hooter. “Come on! I realise this is the first time you two have been parted since your marriage, but I would like to get there before Mum has nicked half the family heirlooms.”
One last lingering kiss and I hoisted aboard. The rain was now a gauzy mizzle; the elms were sketched in charcoal. Even though I knew it was unlucky I looked back over my shoulder. The dark morass of humanity around the newly dug grave was separating into forlorn shadows. Something squeezed inside me. Tonight, the widow would go home to her empty house, empty bed… The bike vibrated and we were off. Flung vertical, we zoomed onto the narrow, bumpy road.
“By gum, this is the life,” bawled Freddy over his shoulder.
Soaring like a seagull on airwaves of terror. Below us, the waves seethed against the jagged rocks. Think happy thoughts, Ellie! Do not focus on that Mr. Woolpack who had driven over the cliff edge one foggy night last spring. What would it take, a pebble in the wrong place at the wrong time, to send us in Mr. Woolpack’s flight path? I fear I almost gouged out Freddy’s appendix. Life was rather meaningful to me right now.
Through the wrought-iron gateway of Merlin’s Court we blasted. The motorbike hit a blemish on the surface of the drive, leapt two feet in the air, and flew like Mary Poppins onto the narrow moat bridge and under the portcullis.
“Aint much, but it’s home, right, El? The place has class-ivy-encrusted walls, turrets and battlements galore, whence the lovelorn can hurl themselves, and never forget the gargoyle doorbell. All mod cons, really! Except a comfy dungeon or two.”
“No house has everything,” I said stiffly. Ours was but a small-scale, nineteenth-century repro of a castle, but the dearth of dungeons with manacled skeletons crumbling to dust was rather a sore point with me.
“Ellie”-Freddy lurched to a stop-“how about spotting me a few quid so I can take Jill out tonight for a bang-up tofu dinner?”
“What’s a few?” I was struggling to flounce out my dress.
“A hundred?”
“Freddy.” Taking his arm, I moved us to the door. “Why don’t you get a job? A proper job instead of pinging a triangle in that dismal band.”
“Work?” He looked aghast. “The way I see it, cousin, if you have to be paid to do something, can’t be much fun, can it?”
“Wrong. Some people love their jobs. I do, and Ben can’t wait to begin another cookery book and open his restaurant in the village.”
Freddy reached for the doorknob. “My heart bleeds! Inventing new ways to fry bacon. My! My! I’ll wager that when Ben opens that restaurant, he won’t lift his pinky to crack an egg. Eh, but it makes a chap glad to be born shiftless. About that two hundred nicker, Ellie?”
“After the wedding cake, I’ll look and see what I’ve got stashed under the mattress.”
Simultaneously, Freddy released the brass knob and I grasped it; the iron-studded door flung inward, almost sending me sprawling.
After these many months in residence, I still experienced a sense of embrace on entering Merlin’s Court. “Thank you, Benefactress Ellie,” the house would whisper, “for everything-these gorgeous Turkish carpets on the flagstone hall floor, the peacock and rose elegance of the drawing room, the Indian Tree china in the blackened oak dresser in the dining room. And, especially, thank you for loving me as passionately as Abigail Grantham once did.” But on this most venerable day, I didn’t get that sort of greeting.
A complete stranger stood beyond the threshold-a stocky man with a sallow-skinned pug face and an oversized mop of glossy black curls. He held a half-filled wineglass and his expression was one of extreme disappointment, like someone expecting the postman and finding a policeman on the step instead. The man started to close the door with his foot as Freddy and I stepped inside.
He tapped the wineglass to his forehead in a mea culpa of embarrassment. Wine slopped out. “A thousand pardons. For the minute I didn’t recognise you, Mrs. Haskell.”
Oh well, when a man used the two most beautiful words in the English language, I had to smile at him. “It’s
