Rosemerryn

by Rosemerryn (retail) (epub)

  As he spoke his dark eyes swept up and down her slender form. She was looking very lovely today, wearing a red and yellow floral summer dress and dainty sandals, her sleek hair tucked neatly behind her small ears. How could he have let this woman slip away from him again? She wasn’t bold or brassy; she possessed a unique understated beauty that appealed to the innermost reaches of his soul.

  ‘Aren’t you curious as to why I’m here?’ he asked, arching his strong brows.

  ‘Not really,’ she said offhandedly, looking slightly uncomfortable now her fright had died down. She brushed her dress down unnecessarily with tremulous hands. ‘I assume you’ve forgotten something that belongs to you.’

  ‘Something like that,’ he said smoothly, moving in close and putting his hands on her waist. ‘You.’

  ‘What do you think you’re doing, Ince?’

  ‘I’m romancing you.’ He smiled into her eyes. ‘For a while I stupidly forgot that I love you.’ He pulled her as near to him as he could, bent his head and closed his eyes to kiss her lips.

  Eve struggled. This was beyond the wildest dreams she had invented through the long lonely nights since he had so mysteriously gone cold on her, but she wanted an explanation. ‘Have you gone mad? I’d expect this sort of behaviour from that man Lean, but not you. Let me go this instant, Ince.’

  He put his hand behind her head and eased her face to his. ‘It was pride that kept me away from you, Eve, because you made a deal with Arthur Waller without telling me. Don’t let pride come between us now.’

  Her movements against him were not violent, her protest only half-hearted. Her ladylike resistance was merely token. Her heart stopped beating and started again, faster. Ince’s warm breath was fanning her cheek, then his lips were covering hers, pressing, gently exploring, sweetly singing the song of love he had just declared to her. Eve felt that she would die of bliss. When finally he ended the kiss, she rested in his arms, her face against his warm neck.

  ‘I thought you would put up more of a fight than that,’ he murmured dreamily into her fragrant hair.

  ‘Ada said this would happen but I didn’t believe her,’ she breathed back. ‘She kept saying that you wouldn’t let me go but would come to me and sweep me off my feet. She made it sound like a fairytale ending and I thought she was just being a silly old lady. I swore to myself that I would only ever be polite to you.’

  Lifting her chin, he gazed into her eyes. ‘I hurt you. I’m sorry, Eve, darling. Forgive me?’

  ‘Yes.’ She hugged him. ‘What happened to make you come here?’

  ‘I was feeling sorry for myself. It got Laura hopping mad. She tore a strip off me and then Ada said you weren’t at her house and I panicked. I thought you’d left Kilgarthen. I would have followed you to the ends of the earth. I love you, Eve. Will you marry me?’

  It was a good, old-fashioned proposal, one Mrs Howard-Armstrong would have approved of but one the sour old lady had said Eve would never receive.

  Eve answered him in a similar vein. ‘I will be honoured to be your wife, Ince.’

  They sat side by side on the stairs and kissed, long and passionately. Then holding her close, Ince looked at her very seriously. ‘I know it would have been a devil of a job to get old Les to agree to us getting married, but it’s a shame he’s not around. I think he would have changed his mind eventually and been glad to see us happy.’

  ‘Yes, I think so too.’

  ‘We have to think about somewhere to live, princess, but I’ve already got an idea. Laura and Daisy Tamblyn are selling the shop, and the house goes with it. How about us buying it together? I’ve got a hundred and fifty pounds in savings and I know you like to be independent, so if you don’t want me to approach the bank for the rest, you could put it up. I know it’s different to your old life, but could you fancy running a shop with me? I find it very different to farming and I miss being outdoors but I like meeting the people, serving the community.’ Ince had formulated this plan on the way here. His only worry was that Eve might not want to mix with the villagers. He looked at her anxiously.

  She kissed his chin and snuggled into him. ‘I couldn’t think of anything better for us. The house has got three bedrooms, hasn’t it? Plenty of room for children.’

  ‘Lots of children.’ He pecked the tip of her nose and winked. ‘And we can always build on an extension.’

  They stayed on the stairs kissing and cuddling for several moments. Then went upstairs to Les’s bedroom so Eve could sort through his personal papers, both eager to get back to the village and tell Laura and Ada they were officially engaged, yet happy to stay here so they could be alone.

  Eve pulled an old biscuit tin out of the bottom of the wardrobe. She tipped the contents onto the bed. There were dog-eared photographs of Les and Ruby whom Eve resembled a little, and a small girl, presumably Angela, on the smallholding. Others were of Les in army uniform during the Great War. Legal documents included birth, marriage and death certificates, invoices and receipts, and a certificate stating that Les, as a private in the army, had passed some exams.

  ‘This is my mother’s birth certificate,’ Eve said excitedly, waving a document at Ince.

  He sat behind her and with his arms round her waist looked over her shoulder as she read it. He felt Eve freeze against him and he read the reason why. ‘Dear Lord, he wasn’t her father,’ she murmured thickly. ‘Grandfather wasn’t my mother’s father. The name on this is William Lean. Who was he? His address is given as Hawksmoor House. That’s where Felicity and Harry Lean live.’

  ‘Harry’s father was called William,’ Ince said softly, caressing her shoulders and holding her close.

  ‘So it’s possible Harry could be my uncle?’ Eve groaned. ‘Grandfather left me three hundred and twenty-five pounds. I wondered how he had amassed that amount. You don’t think he could have blackmailed this William Lean to keep quiet about him fathering my mother, do you?’

  ‘Let’s not jump to conclusions, darling.’

  Eve dissolved into tears and clung to Ince. ‘Just when I thought everything was working out smoothly I come across this.’

  Ince moved and held her face between his hands. ‘Don’t get upset. As long as you don’t turn out to be my sister it doesn’t matter who you’re really related to, does it?’ He smiled and the depth of his love and concern took her breath away.

  She twitched her nose and sniffed back tears. When she’d dried her eyes, she said, ‘You’re right, perhaps I shouldn’t look through any more of this.’

  ‘I should find out all there is to know, then you can start a new life with me with it all behind you.’

  The next thing Eve picked up was a long buff envelope, addressed to her, sealed with red wax. She looked at Ince nervously. ‘Grandfather could only have written this recently. I’m afraid of what it might contain.’

  ‘There’s no need to be afraid. I’m here with you.’

  She opened the envelope with trembling fingers and took out two sheets of white writing paper. They had been taken out of her own pad. She glanced at Ince uneasily then read the scratchy writing out loud.

  Dear Eve,

  When you read this I should be dead. God bless you, child. I want you to know I love you. You’ll find out that I weren’t your real grandfather but let me tell you that he that was, William Lean, weren’t no good, anyone in Kilgarthen will tell you that, if you care to ask them. You asked me about your mother, why we hated each other, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell you. I think you have the right to know so I’m writing this although it causes me pain. Ruby, your grandmother, worked at Hawskmoor House and was seduced by William Lean’s glamorous ways. She told me the child she was expecting weren’t mine.

  It hurt me because it was after we was married. After that I couldn’t go near Ruby or any other woman again.

  Me and Angela never got on. I tried to love her but couldn’t, not because she was another man’s child but she was evil. When she got pregnant at sixteen she told Ruby
that I was—

  Eve made a terrible choking sound and tears flowed down her pale face. Ince gently prised the paper out of her fingers. He continued reading.

  —she told Ruby that I was the father, that I’d raped her, but it was all lies. I was glad when she up and left but Ruby never forgived me. I don’t know who your father was, Eve. If I did I swear I would tell you. All I know is that I bless the day I agreed to meet you. You comforted a lonely old man in his last days on earth. I hope one day you will find the love and happiness you deserve, hopefully with a man like Ince. He’s a good man. Don’t feel you have to stay on here. Do what you like with the place and the money.

  Your loving ‘grandfather’,

  Les Tremorrow

  P.S. I won the pools backalong. You’ll find the official letter in this tin.

  Eve was sobbing wretchedly in Ince’s arms. He put the letter down and cradled her to him.

  Some time later, he whispered to her, ‘Well, that leaves out all the blackmail theories, darling. Do you feel better now?’

  She nodded against his shirt, soaked with her crying. ‘Th-that sweet old man.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ince ran his fingers through her hair. ‘Les wasn’t a bad old stick. I enjoyed working for him even though he was a bit of a slave-driver. And if it wasn’t for him I would never have met you.’

  Eve was quiet for a while then, bitterly, she made an uncharacteristic statement: ‘My mother was a right bloody bitch.’

  ‘Forgive her, Eve. Without her we wouldn’t be here like this.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right.’

  Once more she mopped her face then kissed Ince with all the tenderness and emotion she had dampened down inside her for most of her life. ‘And now we have a wonderful future to look forward to. Let’s pack up the things I want to keep and start by going to the shop and asking Laura if she’d like to have us at Rosemerryn for supper.’

  Chapter 32

  Laura’s pregnancy was confirmed. Ince and Eve announced their engagement. The sale of the shop and premises went through to them like clockwork. Daisy bought the old Angrove cottage, the renovations and decorating were finished and she moved in. New tenants, a young, childless couple called Barry and Alison Hoskins, moved into the Millers’ house. Laura decided not to rent Little Cot until the following summer. Guy Macarthur was baptised and Laura passed him to Kinsley Farrow with the added joy of looking forward to having her own baby baptised next year.

  For six weeks there were no dramas of any kind in Kilgarthen and it settled down to its old sleepy pattern. Autumn had come, sweeping its beautiful unique hues of gold, brown, red and russet over moorland, plantations and hedges, bringing with it a few frosty mornings and fresher winds and darker evenings. Fallen leaves scurried about, congregating in the church porch, heaping up against verges and doorsteps, choking the ditches and floating away to pastures new down the streams and the Withy Brook. Creatures were not seen so often as they prepared to batten down the hatches for the next season.

  The village was, however, still half expectantly waiting for the ‘third death’ to occur. So it came as no astonishment when the postwoman, delivering a rare letter to Ma Noon, discovered the fat old woman dead on the stout wooden settle in her kitchen.

  ‘Horrible, it was,’ she recounted to Ince and Eve after she had made a dash back to the sub-post office on her bicycle. Being a stalwart woman with a severe perm who, she claimed, ‘had seen it all’, she passed on the details a trifle gleefully. As luck would have it, it was pension day and the shop was heaving with customers out for their weekly chat. Having dislodged ‘question time’ on Ince and Eve’s wedding plans and the furnishings they were choosing for the house, the postwoman played like a prima donna to the eager audience that crowded round her.

  ‘I felt something was wrong, you see – you know how you get a sixth sense about this sort of thing? So I knocked on the front door to put the letter straight into her hand and ask if everything was all right. Well, you like to, don’t you? Mrs Noon has always been far from friendly, a bit of an enigma really, but you like to think all is well with her.’

  Everybody nodded.

  ‘Well, there was no answer so I went round the back, and although there was no sign of her little pony, the jingle was there. Odd, I thought, perhaps her pony had died or been taken away by the farrier for re-shoeing or something. Anyway, all was quiet, strangely quiet, and the back kitchen door was slightly ajar.’ The postwoman paused, raised her hands and spread them out dramatically. All eyes followed them. ‘“Mrs Noon,” I called out. Of course I got no answer. Matilda, I said to myself, there’s something strange going on here.’

  Matilda lowered her voice to barely above a whisper. ‘I crept forward, like you do.’ She made the actions. ‘I peeped in the kitchen window and got the fright of my life.’ A gasp, tilt of the head, hand to the heart. ‘And there she was, on the settle, as dead as a doorknob.’ Matilda shuddered exaggeratedly. ‘I can tell you there was no way I was going in there. I could see she had been dead for ages. Ugh!’

  With the sorry tale finished, instead of an outbreak of chatter and speculation, a pin could have been heard dropping to the floor. Without exception, all were feeling a measure of guilt. Excuses and reasons would be given later, but for now each individual knew full well that Ma Noon had not been seen out and about for several weeks and no one had bothered to go to her home to see why.

  ‘The poor woman,’ murmured Eve, feeling the least guilty because she had never known Ma Noon, only heard about her. ‘If we weren’t so new here we would have wondered why she hadn’t come in for her pension.’ This stirred sad memories of Les and she went to Ince for comfort.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Ince said quietly, putting his arm protectively round Eve’s waist, ‘but wait for the doctor and Constable Geach to arrive.’

  It was several hours before Ma Noon’s body was removed from her dilapidated dwelling, during which time her death was chewed over and digested in the village.

  ‘Well, that’s the third. Better she than one of the young’uns.’

  ‘If she’d been a bit more forthcoming somebody might have gone over to see her now and then. She hated people setting foot on her property without she inviting them.’

  ‘She never really was one of us.’

  ‘A shame really.’

  ‘Awful to die alone, but there’s been so much going on round here lately, how were any of us to know?’

  ‘S’pose she’ll be buried on top of her husband in the churchyard.’

  If Kilgarthen had been aware of the circumstances of this latest death, it would have braced itself. Suddenly it found itself aswarm with policemen and an incident room was set up in the residents’ lounge of the pub. Soon after the law arrived, a few newspaper reporters started buzzing around like hungry bees.

  ‘Murdered? Who’d want to murder an old woman like she?’ Mike Penhaligon shook his great bushy head disbelievingly as he relinquished part of his premises to a tall, thin, plainclothes officer with a jolly air about him.

  ‘That’s what we’re here to find out, Mr Penhaligon,’ Chief Inspector Lionel Whitehead informed the landlord brightly. He had a West Country accent but it was hard to define from which region. He parked his small buttocks on the deep window ledge and with an expression that spoke of time and patience, watched the movements of a young fresh-faced constable as he placed papers, pens and pencils on the writing table.

  ‘I hope you’ve got a map of the area, Constable,’ Whitehead said briskly, rubbing at his nostrils with the back of his hand, something he did with gusto at regular intervals.

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’

  ‘Three bags full, sir.’ Whitehead grinned impishly at Mike as the constable scampered out of the room. ‘Can’t do enough for you when they’re new like him. A few years into the job you’re lucky if you can get the bleeders off their backsides to get you a cup of tea.’

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea now, Inspector?’ Pa
t said politely. She had just rushed downstairs after changing into her best white blouse. A plainclothes sergeant in crumpled trousers and a tight-fitting, dog-toothed jacket let a box of papers thud onto the magazine table and she found herself staring at him. He had a mass of interesting spots on a pockmarked face. Pat thought that if she took a pen and joined the spots together on one cheek she could make a map of the British Isles.

  ‘Chief Inspector, Mrs Penhaligon,’ Whitehead corrected her airily, tossing his trilby aside and revealing thinning grey hair. ‘I’d be obliged if you could keep the tea coming, strong, sweet and often. Making inquiries is thirsty work.’ He winked at Mike and Mike tapped his big nose in understanding.

  ‘Wheel in the postwoman in five minutes, Sergeant,’ he bellowed in a voice not dissimilar to Mike’s. ‘She found the body. But first I’ll have a few words with the landlord and his good lady. You two must hear all the gossip. What was Mrs Ariadne Lavinia Noon, widow of nearly half a century of the late Wilfred John Noon, like?’

  As he spoke, the chief inspector had been making faces as if he had an invisible toothbrush inside his mouth cleaning his wide-gapped, yellow teeth. Both Mike and Pat had been avidly following these contortions and took a moment to answer. The reason for the yellow teeth appeared when Whitehead took a cigarette out of a new packet and offered them round.

  Pat declined, Mike took one for later. As Pat marvelled at what she thought were Ma Noon’s romantic first names, Mike, bemused, rubbing his thatched chin, making loud scratching noises, said, ‘We haven’t been in the village more’n twelve year and didn’t know her at all really. No one did. She were an unfriendly soul, kept herself to herself, inclined to be cantankerous. Only saw her passing through the village on her jingle. ’Twas rumoured she were mad and the mothers wouldn’t let their kids go near her. Some said she hated her husband and was glad when he died, sudden from all accounts, of pneumonia. She never visited his grave in the churchyard down the road, to my knowledge.’