Tassie made her tea and sat at the table and sipped it slowly, enjoying it with a piece of the lavender shortbread that Rachel had made with the last of the summer lavender. When she finished the tea, she swirled it three times and spun the cup and placed it upside down and waited a few minutes.
She took a moment and then turned over the cup and saw the raven. It was time. She couldn’t run from it anymore and a sense of peace came over her tired body.
She went to the front room and found her good onion-skin paper and her favourite pen. Then she went back to the kitchen to write her letter and sealed it in an envelope. She carefully wrote Clara’s name on the front and then propped it up against the cup, turned down on the saucer.
Clara would be the one to find her and while she wished she could have made it easier for Clara, she was selfish in her last moments. She wanted to be with a friend and Clara was that and more.
You have done what you said you would do – teach people, help them, show them they are worth loving, she heard a voice in her head say as she closed her eyes, while sitting at the table.
54
The tearoom renovation was underway. The bakery had stayed open but Henry had hired two men from Chippenham to help gut the rooms and now he and Clara stood in the open space.
‘I have a fireplace coming from a yard in Salisbury,’ said Henry. ‘Lovely Victorian one with a mantel. We can put a gas fire it in; they are very realistic nowadays.’
Clara walked around the space.
‘What about these floors – can we polish them?’
‘We can,’ said Henry, ‘but they need some TLC.’
‘I’m going to pop over and see Tassie,’ said Clara. ‘I’ve haven’t seen her since she came over after Naomi’s ceremony.’
Henry nodded and pulled out his measuring tape and started using it on the walls, so Clara went out into the bakery, which was in between rushes of customers.
‘All okay?’ she asked the new girl who had taken over from Alice who was back at school.
‘All fine, Rachel is in the kitchen,’ she said to Clara.
‘Tell her I am seeing Tassie if she asks,’ she called and went outside. The air was colder, with a crispness to it that signalled autumn was on its way. She was looking forward to some cooler weather in the cottage. The sofa had arrived and they had rugs and even a television, which Pansy was thrilled about and Henry less so.
The oak trees seemed to be quieter now, less rustle of the leaves and some were turning yellow at the tops and the garden was slowing down also. The cottage was painted pink and the garden beds were dug up and edged.
Tassie had given Clara boxes of cockleshells that she had in her little shed. George used to collect them, she said, but didn’t say why he collected them, and Henry had attached them to the garden bed edging.
And they finally had the vegetable patch where she had planted broccoli and carrots and rhubarb. Henry had made little wooden labels and painted the names of them onto the front and Pansy had carefully read the letters out to him as he worked.
Tassie had done wonderfully with her lessons, she thought, as she knocked on Tassie’s door.
She waited for a bit but didn’t hear the sound of Tassie coming to open it. She knocked again but nothing. A gnawing worry grew in her chest and she knocked louder and called Tassie’s name.
Running back across the road, she grabbed Henry.
‘Tassie’s not answering.’
‘She might have gone out,’ said Henry, writing measurements down on a small pad.
‘She doesn’t go anywhere,’ said Clara, glancing back at Tassie’s house, hoping the door would suddenly open and put all her worries to rest.
‘That’s not true, she went to Salisbury yesterday.’ he said.
‘How do you know? Why didn’t you tell me?’ Clara demanded to know.
‘She asked Joe to ask me to come and get some boxes out of her roof cavity and she told me then. She made it sound like it was perfectly in order.’ Henry stopped writing and looked at her. ‘Is she supposed to tell you when she comes and goes?’
Clara stamped her foot in frustration. ‘No, of course not but I don’t like this. She’s old, and alone, and she might have fallen. I think you should break in and check on her.’
‘Or you could use the key that Rachel has,’ said Henry.
‘Rachel has a key? God, why doesn’t anyone tell me anything?’ she said crossly.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Henry, and Clara got the key from Rachel, and they crossed the road together. A magpie stood on Tassie’s fence, his head tilted in interest.
‘Tassie will know what magpies mean when they sit on your fence,’ said Clara as she slipped the key into the lock.
‘It means they’re tired of flying?’ Henry joked as Clara opened the door.
But Clara wasn’t listening. The house was still, not even the loud, old clock on her mantel was ticking. She closed her eyes.
‘She’s gone,’ she said.
‘To Salisbury?’ asked Henry.
Clara shook her head. ‘She’s died. I can’t look. You look.’
Henry called out Tassie’s name and waited and then went to the bedroom. ‘The bed is unslept in,’ he called out to Clara but Clara had gone to the kitchen to wait and that was where Tassie was sitting. Still upright. In her purple cardigan with the little brooch of flowers on the lapel and her pretty blue dress. Her hair was neatly combed and her eyebrows drawn on perfectly but Clara knew
