Last night she’d called at the farm, totally out of the blue, and asked him to go for a walk with her. Luckily Dad had been upstairs in the bath at the time, so he’d been spared any knowing or speculative looks.
And so they’d walked, and Janet had been lively and bright and lovely and, somehow … somehow, she’d let him know that he had caught her eye, and before he knew it, they’d become an item and shared their first kiss.
And, despite the confusion he’d felt about what was happening, he was sort of excited and pleased about it too, because Janet was such a catch. Everyone knew her mother had money, and she was pretty and clever and a proper lady – not like that tart Iris!
How Ronnie hated Iris.
And, although he couldn’t say why or how, during their giddy few hours together last night, he had formed the impression that Janet hated her too. But that couldn’t be right, could it? Everyone knew that they’d been friends.
‘Is fruit cake all you have?’ Janet asked, breaking into his reverie, and he looked at the mundane, shop-bought offering and shrugged apologetically. ‘It’s Dad’s favourite,’ he muttered by way of apology.
But, at the back of his mind, Ronnie felt deeply uneasy. What had brought all this on? Why did he feel as if Janet had turned into a sleek cat, and he had suddenly grown a set of mouse-whiskers and a long thin mouse-tail?
‘Oh well, it’ll go well with an apple and some cheese,’ Janet said blithely, and smiled. But the fact was, she was feeling distinctly nervous. It was important to her plans that the whole village knew that she was with Ronnie now, which was why she’d made their pairing so public and obvious. Because it was just possible that, before the day was out, she would need the protection that gave her. Ronnie must be made to see that he couldn’t possibly hurt her without bringing disaster down on himself.
Hopefully, it would be all the advantage she needed.
Angela Baines sat on her daughter’s bed, a picture of misery, with her head in her hands. Around her lay the scattered proof of the frenzied nature of her search, and she wearily set about tidying everything up before her daughter got home. But all the effort had been wasted. She’d found nothing that might explain Janet’s behaviour, and felt exhausted and frightened, and still clueless.
As she glanced up bleakly to look out through the window, her eyes rested on the big wooden jewellery box resting on her daughter’s vanity table. Tunbridge ware, it was a beautiful thing, made of many different kinds of wood, worked into an intricate design. Janet had brought it home one day a few years ago, as a birthday present to herself.
She had already opened and rifled through it, of course, but it had contained nothing but her daughter’s modest collection of tasteful jewellery.
With a sigh, she set about restoring the vanity table top to pristine order, as Janet always kept it, but something about seeing the box resting there suddenly struck a dim and distant memory of her own childhood. Hadn’t her mother owned something similar … Yes, she was sure she had. And something in her memory tickled at her, making her smile almost with realising it. Something about her mother’s box had been exciting and pleasing to the small girl she’d once been. What was it? Something …
With a sudden cry of remembrance, Angela Baines’s hand shot out and pounced on it, for she remembered now. For her mother had called her own case a ‘puzzle box’. And she had shown her fascinated and delighted daughter the ‘secret’. How, by pressing and sliding certain sections of the different-coloured wood, you could find a hidden drawer, and had explained to her what it had probably once been used for.
As a child, she hadn’t understood what love-letters were, or why ladies in the Victorian era would want to hide them, but, for a short while, the puzzle box had been her favourite thing, until something else had caught her attention, and she’d slowly forgotten about it.
Now Angela sat back on the bed, studying the box carefully. She removed the trays of jewellery and eyed the side of the box, trying to calculate if the trays were as deep as the carcass of the outer shell – and she realised that they weren’t!
Her heart leapt. Quickly she turned the box this way and that, probing, pushing, pulling and finally finding the first piece of wood that moved. After that she spent a frustrating ten minutes twisting, pulling, tweaking and swearing viciously. Had the ladies at the church been able to hear her, they’d have blanched in shock, for who’d have thought the genteel, cool and ladylike Angela Baines would even know such words, let alone use them?
Finally she felt something inside the box go ‘ping’ and the invisible bottom drawer sprang open.
With a cry of triumph, Angela pulled it open, revealing the treasure. And treasure it was indeed – no less than her daughter’s diary.
The little madam, Angela thought furiously. She’s always said she never wanted to keep a diary!
Feverishly, she opened the first page and then paused, taken aback, for just one glance told her that the neatly written pages were not filled with her daughter’s familiar, rather flowery handwriting.
Instead …
Angela Baines’s mouth went bone-dry as she realised just whose diary this was. And what it meant.
For a moment, she was unable to take it all in. But when her numbed mind finally unlocked, so too did a tidal wave of despair, for she knew that she was literally holding catastrophe in her hands.
What could she do? How could she fix this?
But before she could even begin to formulate an answer to that, she heard the sound of a door opening downstairs, and she quickly and guiltily thrust the diary back into its hiding place and set the
