“I did find it,” she replied. “Though not without ending in a cow pasture first.”
“Yes,” he said.
She tilted her head. Her hair caught the light again, just as it had done at Boldre Gardens. He wondered, stupidly, if she put sparkles in it. He’d never seen hair with such a sheen. “Yes?” she repeated.
He stammered, “I know. I mean yes I know. I could tell. From how you were going.”
“Oh. You were watching me from the rooftop, were you? I hope you didn’t laugh. That would be too cruel.”
“No,” he said.
“Well, I’m wretched at map reading and not much better with verbal directions, so it’s no surprise I got lost again. At least I didn’t run into any horses.”
He looked round them. “Not a good place to be, this, is it? If you’re bad with maps and directions?”
“In the wood, you mean? But I’ve had help.” She gestured to the south and he saw she was pointing to a distant knoll where an enormous oak stood beyond the wood itself. “I very carefully kept that tree in sight and on my right as I came into the wood and now that it’s on my left, I feel fairly sure I’m heading in the direction of the car park. So you see, despite stumbling onto a thatching site and into a cow pasture, I’m not entirely hopeless.”
“That’s Nelson’s,” he said.
“What? D’you mean someone owns the tree? It’s on private property?”
“No. It’s on Crown land, all right. It’s called Nelson’s Oak. Supposedly he planted it. Lord Nelson, that is.”
“Ah. I see.”
He looked at her more closely. She’d sucked in on her lip, and it came to him that she might not actually know who Lord Nelson was. Some people didn’t in this day and age. To help her out while not embarrassing her, he said, “Admiral Nelson had his ships built over Buckler’s Hard. Beyond Beaulieu. You know the place? On the estuary? They were using up a hell of a lot of timber, so they had to start replanting. Nelson probably didn’t put any acorns in the ground himself but the tree’s associated with him anyway.”
“I’m not from this place,” she told him. “But I expect you worked that out yourself.” She extended her hand. “Gina Dickens,” she said. “No relation. I know this is Tess—” with a nod at the dog who’d settled herself happily at Gina’s side—“but I don’t know you.”
“Gordon Jossie,” he told her and clasped her hand. The soft touch of it brought to mind how work roughened he himself was. How filthy as well, considering he’d spent all day on a rooftop. “I reckoned as much.”
“What?”
“That you weren’t from round here.”
“Yes. Well, I suppose the natives don’t get lost as easily as I do, do they?”
“Not that. Your feet.”
She looked down. “What’s wrong with them?”
“The sandals you were wearing at Boldre Gardens and now those,” he said. “Why’ve you got on wellies? You going into the bog or something?”
She did that bit with her mouth again. He wondered if it meant she was trying not to laugh. “You’re a country person, aren’t you, so you’ll think I’m foolish. It’s the adders,” she said. “I’ve read they’re in the New Forest and I didn’t want to run into one. Now you’re going to laugh at me, aren’t you?”
He did have to smile. “Expect to run into snakes in the forest, then?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “They’re out on the heath. They’ll be where there’s more sun. Could be you might run into one on the path as you cross the bog, but it’s not very likely.”
“I can see I should have consulted you before I changed my clothes. Have you lived here forever?”
“Ten years. I came down from Winchester.”
“But so have I!” She gave a look in the direction she’d come from and said, “Shall I walk with you for a while, Gordon Jossie? I know no one in the area and I’d love to chat, and as you look harmless and you’re out here with the sweetest dog … ?”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself. But I’m just following Tess. We don’t need to walk at all. She’ll take herself into the wood and come back when she’s ready …I mean if you’d rather sit instead of walk.”
“Oh, I would actually. Truth to tell, I’ve had quite a ramble already.”
He nodded to the log on which he himself had been seated when she’d first emerged from the trees. They sat a careful few feet from each other, but Tess didn’t leave them, as he’d thought she would. Rather, she settled next to Gina. She sighed and put her head on her paws.
“Likes you,” he noted. “Empty places need filling.”
“How true,” she said.
She sounded regretful, so he asked her the obvious. It was unusual for someone her age to move into the country. Young adults generally migrated in the other direction. She said, “Well, yes. It was a relationship gone very bad,” but she said it with a smile. “So here I am. I’m hoping to work with pregnant teenagers. That’s what I did in Winchester.”
“Did you?”
“You sound surprised. Why?”
“You don’t look much more’n a teenager yourself.”
She lowered her sunglasses down her nose and looked at him over their tops. “Are you flirting with me, Mr. Jossie?” she asked.
He felt a rush of heat in his face. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to. If that’s what it was.”
“Oh. Pooh. I rather thought you might.” She shoved her sunglasses to the top of her head and looked at him frankly. Her eyes, he saw, were neither blue nor green but something in between, indefinable and interesting. She said, “You’re blushing. I’ve never made a man blush before. It’s rather sweet. Do you blush often?”
He grew hotter still. He didn’t have these sorts of conversations with women. He didn’t know what to make of them: the women or the conversations.
“I’m embarrassing you. I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to. I tease sometimes. It’s a bad habit. Perhaps you can help me break it.”
“Teasing’s all right,” he said. “I’m more …I’m a bit at sixes and sevens. Mostly, well …I thatch roofs.”
“Day in and day out?”
“That’s ’bout it.”
“And for entertainment? For relaxation? For a diversion? A break?”
He tilted his chin to indicate the dog. “That’s what she’s for.”
“Hmmm. I see.” She bent to Tess and petted the dog where she liked it best, just outside her ears. If the retriever could have purred, she would have done so. Gina seemed to reach a decision, for when she looked up, her expression was thoughtful. “Would you like to come out for a drink with me? As I said, I know no one in the area and as you do continue to seem quite harmless and as I’m harmless and as you have a lovely dog …Would you like to?”
“I don’t drink, actually.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You take in no liquids at all? That can’t be the case.”
He smiled, in spite of himself, but he made no reply.
“I was going to have a lemonade,” she said. “I don’t drink either. My dad …He hit it rather hard, so I stay away from the stuff. It made me a misfit in school but in a good way, I think. I’ve always liked to be different from others.” She rose then and brushed off the seat of her trousers. Tess rose as well and wagged her tail. It was clear that the dog had accepted Gina Dickens’ impulsive invitation. What was left for Gordon was simply to do likewise.
Still, he hesitated. He preferred to keep himself distant from women, but she wasn’t proposing involvement, was she? And, for God’s sake, she looked safe enough. Her gaze was frank and friendly.
He said, “There’s a hotel in Sway.” She looked startled, and he realised how that declaration had sounded. Ears burning, he hastened to add, “I mean Sway’s closest to here and they’ve got no pub in the village. Everyone uses the hotel bar. You can follow me there. We can have that drink.”
Her expression softened. “You are really the loveliest-seeming man.”
“Oh, I don’t expec
t that’s true.”
“It is, really.” They began to walk. Tess loped ahead and then, in a marvel that Gordon would not soon forget, the dog waited at the edge of the wood where the path curved down the hill in the direction of the bog. She was, he saw, pausing to have the lead attached to her collar. That was a first. He wasn’t a man to look for signs, but this seemed to be yet another indication of what he was meant to do next.
When they reached the dog, he attached her to her lead and handed it over to Gina. He said to her, “What did you mean, no relation?” She drew her eyebrows together. He went on. “No relation. That’s what you said when you told me your name.”
Again that expression. It was softness and something more and it made him wary even as he wanted to approach it. “Charles Dickens,” she said. “The writer? I’m no relation to him.”
“Oh,” he said. “I don’t …I never read much.”
“Do you not?” she asked as they set off down the hillside. She put her hand through his arm as Tess led them on their way. “I expect we’ll have to do something about that.”
JULY
Chapter One
WHEN MEREDITH POWELL AWAKENED AND SAW THE DATE on her digital alarm clock, she absorbed four facts in a matter of seconds: It was her twenty-sixth birthday; it was her day off from work; it was the day for which her mum had suggested a gran-spoils-the-only-grandchild adventure; and it was the perfect opportunity for apologising to her best and oldest friend for a row that had kept them from being best and oldest friends for nearly a year. This last realisation came about because Meredith shared her birthday with that best and oldest of friends. She and Jemima Hastings had been thick as thieves from the time they were six years old, and they’d celebrated their birthdays together from their eighth one on. Meredith knew that if she didn’t make things right with Jemima today, she probably wouldn’t ever do it, and if that happened, a tradition that she’d long held dear was going to be destroyed. She didn’t want that. Dear friends weren’t easy to come by.
The how of the apology took a little thought, which Meredith engaged in as she showered. She settled on a birthday cake. She would bake it herself, take it to Ringwood, and present it to Jemima along with her heartfelt apology and her admission of wrongdoing. What she would not include in the apology and the admission was any mention of Jemima’s partner, who’d been the source of their row in the first place. For Meredith now understood that would be pointless. One simply had to face the fact that Jemima had always been a romantic when it came to blokes, whereas she—Meredith—had the complete and utterly undeniable experience of knowing men were essentially animals in human clothing. They wanted women for sex, childbearing, and house-wiving. If they could just say that instead of pretending they were desperate for something else, women who involved themselves with them could then make an informed choice about how they wanted to live their lives instead of believing they were “in love.”
Meredith pooh-poohed the entire idea of love. Been there, done that, and Cammie Powell was the result: five years old, the light of her mother’s life, fatherless, and likely to remain that way.
Cammie was, at that moment, bashing away on the bathroom door, calling, “Mummy! Mummmmmmmm-eeeeeee! Gran says we’re going to see the otters today ’n we’ll have ice lollies ’n beef burgers. Will you come ’s well? Cos there’s owls, too. She says someday we’ll go to the hedgehog hospital but that’s for an overnight trip and she says I got to be older for that. She thinks I’ll miss you, that’s what she says, but you could come, couldn’t you? Couldn’t you, Mummy? Mummmmmeeeee?”
Meredith chuckled. Cammie awakened every morning in full-monologue mode, and she generally did not cease talking until it was time to go to bed. Meredith said as she toweled herself off, “Have you had your breakfast already, luv?”
“I forgot,” Cammie informed her. Meredith could hear some scuffling and knew her daughter was shuffling her slippered feet on the floor. “But anyways, Gran says they’ve got babies. Baby otters. She says when their mums die or when they get eaten, their babies need someone to look after them properly and they do that at the park. The otter park. What eats an otter, Mummy?”
“Don’t know, Cam.”
“Something has to. Everything eats everything. Or something. Mummy? Mummmeee?”
Meredith shrugged into her dressing gown and pulled the door open. Cammie stood there, the mirror image of Meredith at the very same age. She was too tall for five and, like Meredith, far too thin. It was a real gift, Meredith thought, that Cammie did not resemble her worthless father in the slightest. This was beyond good, since her father had sworn he would never see her should Meredith “be pigheaded and carry on with this pregnancy because, for God’s sake, I’ve a wife, you little fool. And two children. And you bloody well knew that, Meredith.”
“Give us our morning hug, Cam,” Meredith said to her daughter. “Then wait for me in the kitchen. I’ve a cake to bake. D’you want to help?”
“Gran’s making breakfast in the kitchen.”
“I expect there’s room for another two cooks.”
That turned out to be the case. While Meredith’s mother worked at the cooker, turning eggs and overseeing bacon, Meredith herself began the cake. It was simple enough as she used a boxed mix, which her mother tut-tutted as Meredith emptied its contents into a bowl.
“It’s for Jemima,” Meredith told her.
“Bit like taking you know what to Newcastle,” Janet Powell noted.
Well, of course it was, but that couldn’t be helped. Besides, it was the thought that mattered, not the cake itself. Beyond that, even working from scratch with ingredients provided by some goddess of the pantry, Meredith would never have been able to match what Jemima could fashion out of flour, eggs, and all the rest. So why try? It wasn’t a contest, after all. It was a friendship in need of rescue.
Gran and granddaughter were off on their adventure with the otters and Granddad had taken himself to work when Meredith finally had the cake completed. She’d chosen chocolate with chocolate frosting, and if it was just a tiny bit lopsided and a tinier bit sunken in the middle …well, that was what frosting was for, wasn’t it? Copiously used and with plenty of flourish, it covered a host of errors.
The heat of the oven had raised the temperature in the kitchen, so Meredith found she had to shower another time before she could set off for Ringwood. Then, as was her habit, she covered herself shoulders to toes in a caftan to disguise the beanpole nature of her body, and she carried the chocolate cake to her car. She placed it carefully on the passenger seat.
God, it was hot, she thought. It was absolutely boiling and it wasn’t even ten A.M. She’d thought the day’s heat had been all about having the oven blasting away in the kitchen, but that was clearly not the case. She lowered the windows in the car, eased herself onto the sizzling seat, and set out on her journey. She’d have to get the cake out of the car as soon as possible or she’d have nothing but a pool of chocolate left.
The trip to Ringwood wasn’t overly long, just a dash down the A31 with the wind blowing in through the windows and her affirmation tape playing at high volume. A voice was intoning, “I am and I can, I am and I can,” and Meredith concentrated on this mantra. She didn’t actually believe this sort of thing really worked, but she was determined to leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of her career.
A tailback at the Ringwood exit reminded her it was market day. The town centre was going to be jammed, with shoppers surging towards the market square where once each week stalls spread out colourfully beneath the neo-Norman tower of St. Peter and Paul parish church. In addition to the shoppers there would be the tourists, for at this time of year the New Forest was teeming with them like crows on roadkill, campers, walkers, cyclists, amateur photographers, and all other forms of outdoor enthusiasts.
Meredith gave a glance at her chocolate cake. It had been a mistake to place it on the seat and not on the floor. The sun was blasting fully upon it, and the chocolat
e frosting wasn’t benefiting from the experience.
Meredith had to admit that her mother had been right: What on earth was she thinking, bringing Jemima a cake? Well, it was too late now to change her plans. Perhaps they could laugh about it together when she finally managed to get herself and her cake to Jemima’s shop. This was the Cupcake Queen, located in Hightown Road, and Meredith herself had been instrumental in Jemima’s finding the vacant space.
Hightown Road was a bit of a mixed bag, which made it perfect for the Cupcake Queen. On one side of the street, redbrick residences took the form of terraces and semis that curved along in a pleasant bow of arched porches, bay windows, and dormer windows with white gingerbread woodwork forming their lacy peaks. An old inn called the Railway Hotel stood farther along this side of the street, with plants tumbling from wrought-iron containers that hung above its windows, spilling colour towards the pavement below. On the other side, things automotive offered services from car repair to four-by-four sales. A hair salon occupied space next to a launderette, and when Meredith had first seen, adjacent to this, an empty establishment with a dusty TO LET sign in the window, she’d thought at once of Jemima’s cupcake business, which had been going great guns from her cottage near Sway but was in need of expansion. She’d said to her, “Jem, it’ll be grand. I can walk over in my lunch hour and we can have a sandwich or something.” Besides, it was time, she’d told her friend. Did she want to operate her fledgling business out of a cottage kitchen forever or did she want to take the leap? “You can do this, Jem. I have faith in you.” Faith with regard to business matters, was what she didn’t add. When it came to personal matters, she had no faith in Jemima at all.
It hadn’t taken much convincing, and Jemima’s brother had provided part of the cash, as Meredith had known he would. But soon after Jemima had signed the lease, Meredith and she had parted ways in their friendship because of a hot and frankly stupid discussion about what Meredith saw as Jemima’s eternal need for a man. “You’ll love anyone who’ll love you back,” had been the way Meredith had concluded her passionate denunciation of Jemima’s most recent partner, one in a long line of men who’d come into and gone out of her life. “Come on, Jem. Anyone with eyes and half a brain can see there’s something off about him.” Not the best way to assess a man whom one’s best friend declares she’s determined to marry. Living with him was bad enough, as far as Meredith was concerned. Hooking up permanently was another matter.
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