“How’s this for the perfect picnic spot?” Ben set down the basket. And I tried not to notice that he did not have a travelling rug tucked under his arm, ready to unroll and lay at my feet. Or a hot water bottle. Shame on me! So what if the grass was damp and I developed sciatica? I suddenly remembered Vanessa and how she had once fielded our cousin Freddy’s suggestion that she ought to try a camping holiday, with the response that, as far as she was concerned, roughing it was black-and-white TV. Heaven forbid that I should develop her pampered-puss mind-set.
“You couldn’t have chosen a more idyllic place.” I knelt down and felt my knees turn green, while Ben began the business of unloading packages and plates, to the rustling annoyance of the beech tree, which clearly did not think me up to snuff without a parasol, or that the tablecloth Ben was spreading out on the grass made up for the missing travelling rug. “Darling,” I said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you …” A raindrop plopped on my nose.
“What’s that?” Ben scanned the sky, bulging with wooly grey clouds, and with a wary eye continued unwrapping with increased speed.
“Nothing earthshaking,” I replied as a rumble of thunder caused a couple of knives and forks to scuttle under the tablecloth which had been blown up by the wind. “Only that I got the strangest bit of news this morning. Mrs. Malloy told me that her son—”
“I didn’t know she had one.”
“Well, she does. And it seems he’s going to marry Vanessa.”
“What a very small world!” Ben held his hair down with a plate as he laid out the serviettes and caught both of them one-handed as they attempted to blow away.
“It turns out”—I shuffled on my knees after the escaping salt and pepper shakers—“that George Malloy has done rather well for himself financially.”
“Even so, I’d have expected our lovely Vanessa to hold out for a chap with a title as well as money.”
“My thinking exactly.”
“We’ll have to drink a toast to the engaged couple.” Ben, having secured the tablecloth with a hefty rock at each corner, was rummaging frantically in the picnic basket. “You won’t believe this, Ellie! I can’t find the corkscrew!”
It was a wonder to me that he could find the hand stretched out in front of him in the drizzling rain, but I mopped my face with my serviette and said brightly that it really didn’t matter.
“Of course it matters.” Ben sounded as thoroughly exasperated with me as with the situation. “I brought wine”—he held up the bottle—“and, by damn, we are going to drink it.” Stumbling to his feet, he rooted around the trunk of the disgruntled beech and returned to the tablecloth with a stout-looking twig that snapped in two the moment he jammed it into the cork.
“Here, let me try.” I picked up a knife, took the bottle from him, broke off the top of the cork, and began stabbing away at the remainder until it broke into chunks that ended up in the drink.
Ben firmly removed the bottle from my hands. “I don’t like my wine chewy.” He poured us each a glass and attempted to convert his grimace into a grin to show a determined party spirit. “Drink up, my darling, before it’s two-thirds water.”
“You could not have foreseen the rain,” I soothed.
“I could have looked out the window.”
“Never mind.” Resolutely I sat down on the grass and promptly felt my underwear shrink two sizes. “Let’s make that toast, Ben.” I tapped my glass to his as he squatted gingerly down across the tablecloth from me. “To Vanessa and George!”
“May they be as happy as we are!”
“At this very minute!” I agreed, taking a sip of sauterne and almost choking on a chunk of cork. My resulting croak was echoed by several crows perched in ungainly malevolence on a bough halfway up the beech tree. Hugging my cardigan around me, I tried to push away the feeling of foreboding that came with the memory of Vanessa telling me, when we were children and saw a bunch of black crows in a tree, that their infernal cawing meant somebody was going to die. My affectionate cousin had been suggesting that my days were numbered, and here I still was; but even so … I reached for something to put in my mouth to keep my teeth from chattering.
“You remember, don’t you, Ellie?”
“That old saying about the crows?” I should not have been surprised that a husband could read his wife’s mind.
“No, the food!” His smile wavered in the mist that had mercifully replaced the rain. “Don’t you recognize it?”
I stared at the assortment of dishes. Of course I recognized lobster and green salad and crusty brown rolls when I saw them, but I wasn’t getting the point of the picture.
“Our first picnic!” Ben ran his fingers through his damp hair, instantly bringing the curl back to life in a way many a woman would have envied. “Surely you remember on that occasion I prepared this same lobster dish—stewed in white wine, chilled to icy perfection, and dressed with capers and my own special mayonnaise.”
“It is coming back to me.…”
“I can hear myself as if it were yesterday, Ellie, explaining that the mystery ingredient of the rolls was a tablespoon of treacle added to the yeast base. And I remember your exclamations of delight over the salad with its lemon and sweet vermouth dressing.”
“I do recall vaguely …”
“There is nothing the least vague about it!” Perhaps the shadows cast by the beech tree were responsible for the darkening of my husband’s face. “The dressing may be subtle, but it is never insipid. The secret is in the tossing, which must be extraordinarily gentle so as not to bruise the spinach or the baby oak leaf lettuce.”
“Did I say vaguely?” I shook my head at such stupidity. My tongue must have slipped on my wet lips. I looked meaningfully up at the clouds. If they dropped any lower, they’d be sitting on our heads like knitted hats. “I meant to say that I vividly recalled that first picnic. We had it … outdoors, didn’t we?”
“Under the beech tree in the garden at Merlin’s Court.”
“That’s right!” I beamed, hoping the sun would follow my example, but, cowardlike, it remained resolutely wrapped up in its dirty grey woolies.
“Unfortunately the garden was an impossibility this time.” Ben began spooning lobster onto our plates and garnishing it with radish rosettes and cucumber leaves. “I was thwarted, sweetheart, by the image of Gerta tying red and yellow streamers to the trunk of the tree, and she and the twins dancing around the maypole, while you and I were trying to relive our memories. Then I remembered seeing this place with the beech, so strikingly similar to the one at Merlin’s Court.”
“You’ve thought of everything!” I scooted around the wet tablecloth to nestle up close to him. For several moments the warmth of my love for this man, whom I did not deserve, drove back the chilly damp. We ate in a companionable silence, broken only intermittently by the crows’ unmelodious chorus. The rolls were not quite as crusty as usual. But I did not mind and Ben made no apologies for them. It would seem that his sensitivities as a chef had been totally subliminated by his ardour as a husband.
The mist had cleared but, even had it turned into a pea-souper, it could not have masked his mounting passion. His eyes had darkened to a glittering emerald green and a muscle tensed in his jaw as, with intensity of purpose, he removed my half-finished plate from my hand, set it down slowly but surely on the tablecloth, and brought his lips down on mine in a kiss that would have lit a fire within me but for the weather conditions. As it was, it smouldered nicely, and I made no effort to resist as he drew me back to lie upon the grass.
“Alone at last, sweetheart!” His hand caressed my cheek and my throat with feathery delicacy before moving ever lower. Who knows how far things might have gone? Alas, when I turned my head in the throes of a warm rush of pleasure, I interrupted his heavy breathing with a horrified shriek.
“Stop!” I struggled to sit up and immediately fell back down, cracking my head on the wine bottle that had inconsiderately rolled off the tablecloth. “Ben, we can�
�t do this!” I was making frantic attempts to button my cardigan back to respectability. “We are being watched.”
“Nonsense!” He made a grab for me, but I managed to elude him and stagger to my feet.
“I tell you”—I pointed a finger at the upper portions of Tall Chimneys showing through the trees—“I can see someone at the top window. It’s … it’s a woman in a black frock, with long hair—or maybe she’s wearing a veil.”
“Then it’s not the ghost of Hector Rigglesworth. Or did you forget to tell me that he was a transvestite?”
“Legend does not say anything to that effect.” I took a couple of steps towards the thicket separating us from the house, hoping for a clearer view of the apparition. “Besides, as far as I know, he restricts his hauntings to the Chitterton Fells library. Doesn’t it seem more likely that this is one of the seven daughters watching from the window for the man of her dreams to come driving up in his curricle?”
“What I think is that you’re not making any sense.” Ben spoke with ill-concealed irritability while making no attempt to get to his feet. “It is either a real live woman at that window, or you are seeing a shadow caused by the way the curtain is looped.”
Indeed, when I looked again, the figure at the window was gone. Perhaps I had imagined her, or perhaps she was one of the present-day occupants of Tall Chimneys. It did not matter. There was no way for me to recapture the moment of passion with my husband. And he was, I thought defensively, partly to blame for continuing to lie prone on the grass, hands folded on his chest, as if awaiting interment. Suddenly I could not think of a more unsettling spot for a picnic, let alone lovemaking. It was clear to me that an unspeakable evil lurked within the walls of Tall Chimneys. An evil that reached out to permeate the thicket and even the island of green grass on which I stood shivering.
“I have the creepiest feeling that beech tree could tell some harrowing stories of what it has seen and heard in its time,” I told Ben. “Who knows? Perhaps one of the seven Rigglesworth daughters occasionally interrupted her reading of romance novels to trudge out into the gloom of night and bury an unsuitable suitor? One who tried to make a virtue out of his warts and the fact that he never took a bath. There are men who won’t take no for an answer—even when a slammed door is staring them in the face.”
“I think I get the message.” Ben shot to his feet and began repacking the basket with a ruthless disregard for the life span of china and glass. “All it will take to put a lid on this ill-fated adventure”—he banged one down on the butter dish—“is for us to hear a spectral hound howling among the trees.”
Foolish man! It was made hideously apparent that one did not sneer at the forces present on this unhallowed spot, for we immediately heard a series of unearthly woofs. Before I could grab up the two broken pieces of twig that Ben had used in his attempt to uncork the wine and form a cross with which to protect myself, a huge animal—more wolf than dog—came careening onto the grass. Fur bristling, stalactite fangs exposed, the monster rushed towards us in a blur of black—and attempted to crawl, whimpering, under the tablecloth.
“Why, blow me down!” Mr. Babcock stepped out of the lane and onto the grass. “If it isn’t Mr. and Mrs. Haskell!”
“And isn’t that Heathcliff?” Ben glumly addressed the tablecloth that was lumbering around his feet.
“Your missus very kindly gave the dog to me this morning.” The milkman sounded decidedly nervous. “And already we’ve become such mates, you wouldn’t believe! You don’t want him back, do you?”
“You must be joking!” My husband was looking at me with rekindled affection.
“Speaking of spouses … is Sylvia happy about the new addition to the family?” I inquired.
“That’s one I can’t answer.” Mr. Babcock scratched his ear. “To tell the truth, I got the wind up thinking about how she might react to Cliffy here, so when I finished my rounds I decided to take him on a bit of a walk. And believe you me, he was walking to heel as nice as you please, when all of a sudden like he went all to pieces. It happened just when we came up to that house back there—the one that looks like it’s haunted. And spooked he was all right. The poor lad!” Mr. Babcock’s beefy face looked the worse for worry as he puffed across the grass towards the tablecloth that was chasing its tail in increasingly frenzied circles.
“Heathcliff was Miss Bunch’s dog,” I reminded Ben. “Surely, my love, that must make even a skeptic like you stop and think that there may be more to Tall Chimneys and the Rigglesworth legend than meets the mortal eye.…”
Chapter
6
When Ben dropped me off at the vicarage some ten minutes later, I experienced the rapturous relief of being returned to the sanity of the everyday world after journeying to the dark on the other side. Whether Ben was in equally good spirits was questionable. But I hoped that his soul would be restored when he entered the kitchen at Abigail’s and saw the last of the picnic basket.
As I entered the churchyard gates I made a vow to unearth my lacy sea-green nightie when I got home, and to brush my hair a hundred strokes before getting into bed for the night. A husband deserved to be pampered, and I would not succumb to the temptation of sitting up till the small hours to finish reading Her Master’s Voice. My aunt Astrid, Vanessa’s mother, was known to say grimly that she had never once refused her husband. I could only imagine what she would think of my slipshod approach to marital duty.
I had to laugh at myself as I wended my way down the mossy path that angled left towards the Norman church with its narrow stained glass windows, and right towards the early Victorian vicarage. Making love with Ben could never seriously be viewed as a duty—it was just that I was always hoping for the perfect moment, when I would be several pounds thinner, and the children would be older and less likely to interrupt at the crucial moment, and I would finally he caught up with the ironing.
Perhaps, I thought, nipping along faster so that the wind wouldn’t catch hold of me and spin me around like a top, perhaps I would have a word with Eudora and see if she thought my fondness for romance novels bordered on an addiction that might have a negative impact on my marriage, and whether I should attempt to quit cold turkey or just try to cut back.
What I didn’t think about was Miss Bunch’s freshly dug grave, lying in the dark green shade of the weeping willow.
“Hello, Ellie!” Eudora opened the front door as I mounted the last of the stone steps which the wear of countless footsteps had scooped out to resemble a headsman’s block. “I saw you from the sitting room window and thought I’d save you ringing the bell. Gladstone is in the study working on the Clarion Call, otherwise known as the parish bulletin, and you know how men are,” Eudora laughed fondly, “it doesn’t take much to break their concentration.”
“I certainly wouldn’t want to disturb him!” Smiling my understanding, I tiptoed into the hall with its dark brown varnish and pictures of various Archbishops of Canterbury on the walls, and closed the door as silently as I could behind me. “Gladstone has done a marvelous job since he took over the bulletin. Quite honestly,” I whispered, “before his day I never got much further than the first paragraph, but he has made it into a real page-turner. His reporting of the Babcock wedding in last week’s issue brought tears to my eyes. The description of Sylvia wafting down the aisle on a rose-scented cloud, with the sun framing her radiant face like a golden halo …”
“Yes, well, I did think Gladstone might have done better to leave that last bit out.” Eudora led me into the sitting room. The painting mounted above the fireplace was of a sailing ship glued on top of an unbudgeable wave. The china in the glass-fronted cabinet was a common-or-garden rose pattern. The brown sofa and fireside chairs sagged comfortably like women with middle-age spread who breathed sighs of relief at being finally, and irrevocably, freed from their corsets. It was a room where nothing matched and harmony was the result. And it suited St. Anselm’s clergywoman perfectly.
Eudora was a substant
ial woman—not fat or even plump, just solidly built. A woman inclined to beige twin sets and a single strand of pearls with her tweed skirts and good shoes. Recently our vicar had begun to wear her greying hair in a softer style, emphasizing the natural curl, so that it no longer resembled a serviceable felt hat. And I noticed that today Eudora was wearing a new pair of glasses whose speckled frames picked up the colour of her hazel eyes.
“It really is nice to see you, Ellie.” She plumped up a cushion and arranged it at a more inviting angle on the easy chair to the left of the fireside. “Make yourself comfortable and we’ll have a good chat.” Turning away from me, she shifted a sheaf of legal-looking papers to the middle of the coffee table and set the Delft vase of daffodils on top of them. “There! That gives you more elbow room …” She laughed a little self-consciously. It was unlike her to fuss. There had been only one time when I had seen Eudora seriously discomposed, when her mother-in-law came to visit for several weeks with dire results. “So tell me, Ellie”—she sat down across from me—“are you here to help me redecorate?”
“That sounds a bit drastic,” I faltered. “Weren’t you just thinking about a new bedroom wardrobe?”
“Originally, yes. But you know how one thing leads to another. And now that spring is here”—she looked around the room—“everything suddenly looks so shabby. The wallpaper has faded so badly, you can hardly see the pattern, and the furniture, well—you can see for yourself, Ellie.”
“I don’t see too much wrong.” I shifted to the edge of my chair and the springs gave a heartfelt groan as if fully aware that their end was near.
“Perhaps I’m just ready for a change.” Eudora seemed to be eyeing the paperback novel on the coffee table with Karisma on the cover. It was impossible for me not to recognize those torrents of windblown hair and bulging biceps, even when viewed from the wrong way round. “Life doesn’t stand still, and if we don’t make some effort to keep up—” She broke off. “Well, I certainly don’t want to turn into a fuddy-duddy.”
How to Murder the Man of Your Dreams Page 8