“When we first met,” the brigadier addressed his knees, “I steered you to the conclusion that I have never been married. I did the same thing with all my other acquaintances in Chitterton Fells. The truth is, however, that many years ago I entered a marriage that ended as quickly as it began.”
“My goodness!” My laugh went down the wrong way when I swerved to avoid a woman weighed down with shopping bags who stepped off the curb almost under my wheels. “Why would you make a deep dark secret of that?”
“It’s an extremely painful memory.”
“Oh, do forgive me!” Dropping my hands from the wheel, I inadvertently rounded the corner onto Sea Gull Lane as I turned a contrite face towards him.
“It took me years to put the experience behind me.”
“Please, Brigadier Lester-Smith, don’t upset yourself by talking about it.”
“But I wish to tell you, Mrs. Haskell.” Brigadier Lester-Smith raised his head and spoke in a firmer voice. “Our shared experience of discovering Miss Bunch’s corpse has created a very special bond between us. Indeed, after witnessing your womanly combination of strength and compassion on that occasion, I have not been able to think of you as I did before. The bond between us transcends our mutual involvement in the Library League.”
Oh, dear! Was the poor man going to reveal he had fallen head over heels in love with me?
“You have become a … friend, Mrs. Haskell!”
“Thank you!” I floated past a bicycle on a wave of relief.
“And, therefore, I would like to tell you about my wedding night.”
“Really?” The car wheels came down to earth with a bump.
“I had met Evangeline when I spent a weekend with a soldier friend of mine in Pebblewell. She was acquainted with one of his sisters and—you know how these things happen, one tennis party led to another, and within two months Evangeline and I were engaged. Our romantic moments together included no more than hand-holding and the occasional chaste kiss.”
“Quite proper,” I said.
“She was a very modest girl, Mrs. Haskell, and being deeply in love with her, I kept a stiff rein on my passion. We were married in November on an unfortunately bleak and stormy day, and upon arriving at our honeymoon hotel in Brighton, I delayed the moment when we made ready for bed for fear that the ominous rolls of thunder would make it difficult for Evangeline to relax. I anticipated that she might be nervous when the moment for our coming together as man and wife arrived, but I never dreamed she would react with terror and—if I may be frank with you, Mrs. Haskell—utter revulsion when I—”
“Bared your soul?” I kept my eyes on the road.
“She went into hysterics!” The brigadier’s eyes turned glassy at the memory. “Roused the entire hotel! Someone broke down the door and people poured into our room before I could even grab up my briefcase and make some attempt to cover myself! The shouting was unbelievable! People hurled the vilest of epithets at me! I was called a loathsome monster and a ravager of women. And then Lady Heidelman, whom we had met at dinner, hit me over the head with her walking stick, and when I recovered consciousness, Evangeline was gone. I did not see her again until we met, with a clergyman and solicitor present, to discuss the annulment.”
“What a heartbreaking experience!”
“The emotional scars have never faded.” Brigadier Lester-Smith pressed a folded handkerchief to his lips. “It all came back to me in waves of shame and sorrow when Mrs. Dovedale spoke this afternoon of the romance novels she reads, where the bride, having no idea what the wedding night entailed, flees into the tempest-tossed night.”
“Have you,” I asked gently, “never thought of marrying again?”
“I wouldn’t risk it, Mrs. Haskell!”
“Do you know what became of Evangeline?” I had drawn the car alongside the curb which fronted the little house on Herring Street.
“Our paths have never crossed since our marriage was dissolved.” He sighed, then endeavoured to speak cheerfully. “And so we come back to the present. What do you think of my new abode, Mrs. Haskell?”
In truth, it was a nondescript terraced house identical to the one Mrs. Malloy occupied several doors down the road, except that hers had acquired some character by the liberal application of purple paint and a community of brilliantly coloured garden gnomes. But who knew what wonders Miss Bunch may have worked in the interior of her house?
“I think we have to make it your home,” I assured the brigadier.
“I wonder,” he mused, “if it might not be better for you to go inside without me. That way your impressions will not be influenced by mine and you will feel more free to come up with decorating suggestions. Also, I’m sure you have … plans for this evening and would like to get done here as early as possible.”
My suspicion was that, given all he had just told me, he was feeling somewhat embarrassed and wanted to go off by himself. So I took the key he handed me, and when assured that he did not have far to walk to his rooms, said good-bye. I went in through the gate to the handkerchief garden and up the crazy-paving path to let myself in at the front door.
The halls in these little houses were so narrow that in Mrs. Malloy’s you had to walk sideways in order not to bruise your hips on the coat stand or knock over the china poodle that served for a door stop. Here there was nothing but the staircase and beige walls, not even a carpet runner on the floor or a shade for the naked bulb that came starkly to life when I flicked the switch. Removing the notebook in a businesslike manner from my handbag, I decided to begin upstairs.
A quick tour revealed that Miss Bunch’s decorating habits ranged from using a pink sponge for a soap-dish in the bathroom to covering her bed with a curtain with its hooks still in the tape. There were no pictures on the walls, no photographs anywhere in sight, nothing to tidy away, and very little to dust. I went back downstairs, torn between excitement at bringing this sad little house to life and a wistfulness for the emptiness of Miss Bunch’s solitary existence.
The kitchen was exactly what the upstairs led me to expect: bottle-green paint, a bare table and one chair, and a gas cooker that looked as if it had forgotten why God gave it a pilot light. There was only one heartwarming touch—Heathcliff’s dog bowl sitting in front of the sink. How, I wondered as I went back into the hall, would Miss Bunch feel about my having given him to the Babcocks? Not that I had high hopes, given the excessive timidity of Sylvia Babcock, Heathcliff would last long with her.
The tiny back room of Heathcliff’s former home looked out onto a garden that was no longer than its clothesline and was paved in concrete, apart from a narrow border along the bottom that was lined with bushes. The view inside was equally bare, just a sideboard and a drop-leaf table on opposite walls. My expectations of the front sitting room were minimal. I was scribbling away in my notebook, already seeing the house as it could look if Brigadier Lester-Smith were prepared to spend a little money and think in terms of ivory paint with primary accents of teal and burgundy, when I pushed open the door and was stopped dead in my tracks.
The sitting room in which I stood was a miniature version of the Chitterton Fells library. Oak ceiling beams, Jacobean-patterned curtains at the window, and two framed hunting prints on the wall facing the minuscule fireplace helped create the dizzying sense of déjà vu. There was even a bust of Shakespeare mounted on a pedestal. And everywhere I looked there were books. On shelves, on tables, on the two easy chairs, and on the floor. The only striking difference from Miss Bunch’s workaday domain was that here organization was obviously not key. On the shelves, biographies rubbed shoulders with novels. True crime was interspersed with books of poetry. And several volumes lay open, as though they were old acquaintances who had walked into the house to sit at their ease as they shared thoughts, remembrances, laughter, and tears with each other as well as with the lady of the house.
Tears filled my eyes at the realization she had not been a woman alone in the world. She’d had countless frie
nds to give warmth and joy to her life. The fact that I was here to measure walls and windows and plot a new décor for the brigadier completely slipped from my mind. I picked up a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, lying open on a footstool, but there was no need to regret that Miss Bunch had never come home to finish it. She had read it many times before. I went from book to book, shelf to shelf, with no awareness of time ticking away on the mantel clock. And once again I saw something that made me stop: Her Master’s Voice, squeezed in between Crime and Punishment and A Brief History of the World.
Taking out the worn paperback volume with Karisma in all his untamed splendour on its cover, I got all teary-eyed. Miss Bunch and I had all along been sisters under the skin. As if an unseen force was at work, the book fell open to the very page where I had left off reading on the night Gerta arrived at Merlin’s Court. Abandoning my notebook, I settled down in the easy chair to the right of the fireplace and was immediately swept up in the nineteenth-century world of Hester Rosewood and the diabolically gorgeous Sir Gavin.
“My angel,” he rasped through lips vibrating with the torment of his passion, “I love you as I have never loved any other woman I have sought to take as my mistress. Deny me no longer the sight of your milk-white body! Let me strip away every last vestige of your clothing so that I may feast my eyes upon the exquisite swell of your breasts and …”
Sir Gavin turned back the silk sheets as I turned a page. Hester’s mounting desire for the rake whose hands and lips found her points of least resistance seeped through the pores of the paper, scorching my hand as I reached the bottom of yet another page. Would his petulant wife succeed in destroying their love? Would the allegations that Sir Gavin was not the true heir to the title, but was instead the son of the local innkeeper, cast a permanent shadow over Darkmoor House?
I had reached the last chapter and a happy ending was in sight when the mantelpiece clock chimed, and when I looked up into its smiling face, I experienced a chill equal to the one I had felt when Hester was thrust into the dungeon by the vengeful wife and told not to expect room service. It couldn’t be—but it was! Seven-thirty! And I was supposed to have met Ben for dinner at Abigail’s at six!
Dropping Her Master’s Voice like a hot coal, I grabbed up my handbag, forgot all about the notebook, and raced out of the house to the car. Usually it started up before I could finish turning the key in the ignition. But tonight of all times, the beastly vehicle turned balky, and I had to pound on the steering wheel and kick the pedals before the engine responded with an injured growl. I was off, but barely moving—trapped in traffic that seemed to be sleepwalking. At last I made it around the corner of Market Street. I drove at a quickening pace around the village square. Thank God! a parking place only yards from Abigail’s entrance.
What would Ben be thinking? I agonized as I dashed up the steps and stood to catch my breath for half a second under the green and gold awning. Would he be picturing me in a ditch with my head caved in? A fate I thoroughly deserved, I decided as I pushed open the door and entered the restaurant foyer with its eighteenth-century rent table serving as a reception desk and the gilt-framed portraits on the Regency-striped walls.
There was no one—not so much as a scurrying waiter—within view, but I could hear people speaking in the main dining room. I hurried in that direction. The voices fell silent as I stepped through the doorway. The room was full of gaily coloured balloons and faces—familiar faces! Everyone from the Library League, other friends, such as Frizzy Taffer and her husband, Tom, and Pamela Pomeroy and Deirdre Jones from my Lamaze class. And, my eyes blinked, I saw Vanessa over in the far corner with Abbey in her arms. Next to her stood Gerta, holding Tam!
“Surprise!” someone said in a voice that was as flat as champagne from which all the bubbles have evaporated.
Ben stepped out of the press of people to hand me a glass. “Happy birthday, Ellie.” He was smiling, but his eyes were those of a man who has had an arrow plunged in his heart.
Chapter
9
Ben wasn’t talking to me. This may have been because it was four A.M. and he was sound asleep with his face burrowed into the pillow, but guilt caused me to read hostility and wounded feelings into every inhale and exhale.
At the restaurant I had apologized until my lips were numb. And he had been extremely nice about my not arriving until the beef tenderloin was as rubbery as the deflated balloons. He assured me the fiasco was entirely his fault, that surprise parties were juvenile stuff and he should have taken into account that I was a woman newly returned to the workforce, with an entirely new set of priorities. He comprehended completely that I had felt obliged to inspect each stripe on the brigadier’s wallpaper with my industrial spyglass. And goodness only knew how many times I had to flush the toilet before convincing myself that the plumbing was up to snuff.
Ben had stopped harping on about how utterly he understood only when poor Brigadier Lester-Smith nervously scooped up a knife from one of the linen-clad tables and appeared ready and willing to cut his own throat in atonement for having been the unwitting cause of ruining the celebration. I’m sure at that moment the wretched man wished devoutly that Miss Bunch had never left him the blasted house in her will. But his agitation did stop Ben in his tracks before I was brought to my knees under the weight of all that unrelenting husbandly benevolence. Gerta handed Abbey and Tam over to me, and the twins squealed with delight at being reunited with the mother who had vanished into the afternoon sunlight without a backward glance. After that, the party picked up momentum.
My friends and acquaintances surged around me, most of them saying “hello” and “good-bye” in the same breath. Did I feel like an archvillainess! And I could have had such a lovely time being fêted! Here came Mrs. Dovedale, Bunty Wiseman, and Sir Robert Pomeroy, all of them explaining at once that the Babcocks weren’t able to come because they couldn’t leave the dog, or was it that the dog wouldn’t let them leave the house? And Mr. Poucher hadn’t come for two reasons—he couldn’t leave his mother and he loathed parties. How silly, because this had been such a super get-together and they all hated to cut the evening short, but … The “buts” were still buzzing in my ears and Abbey and Tam were dragging on my arms until I felt like a mother gorilla, when I saw my chums Frizzy Taffer and Jacqueline Diamond coming towards me.
My eyes blurred with tears as the point sank in—with the brutal precision of a six-inch blade—that Ben was a prince among husbands and I was a lamentable excuse for a wife.
“You really don’t deserve him, darling!” Vanessa, the toast of all eyes, in a sleeveless, backless, virtually frontless green taffeta frock, whispered this home truth in my ear. And her words continued to beat upon my guilty conscience as I now lay in bed with a spouse who refused to talk even in his sleep and a clock ticking relentlessly towards dawn. A dawn when Ben would pick up where he had left off in being relentlessly understanding and obdurately affectionate until I was driven screaming from the house in the manner of a Gothic heroine in urgent need of a cliff from which to take a flying leap into oblivion.
My eyelids flickered and I saw my foot inch its way out of the sheet to dangle purposefully above the floor. No! I fought for physical and emotional control, thrusting my shoulders into the mattress and straightening my spine, until I felt like a trampoline that could have bounced a half dozen or so gymnasts off the ceiling. I would not sneak out of bed, pick up a novel (preferably one by Zinnia Parrish), and sneak with it into the bathroom!
For last night I had learned the bitter truth. I was a romance novel addict, incapable at stopping at one page. And if I didn’t make a change in my lifestyle I would have more than a ruined surprise birthday party on my conscience. I’d end up losing everything that had meaning for me—my family, my home, my self-respect. My mind shied away from the image it projected of an unwashed hag, hair hanging in snakes, stumbling around a refuse pit, searching among the rubble for a tattered paperback with Karisma’s egg-stained face
on the cover. No! It wouldn’t happen because I knew I had a problem, and I’d deal with it one day at a time. But—my foot quivered and inched towards the floor—one day was as good as another and tomorrow was yet another day. Surely there was no point in rushing things. I’d be so much more successful at beating this thing in the long run if I started from solid ground, having worked up my momentum. Quitting cold turkey wasn’t the answer. In fact I’d surely find I’d do best by cutting back, one novel at a time.
My eyes turned back to Ben as I gathered up my night dress, so as to prevent any telltale rustling, and tiptoed towards the door. He looked so dear, so unsuspecting in the depths of sleep. His black hair rumpled and his long eyelashes fanned out upon his cheek. A sob caught in my throat and I raced out onto the landing, without a glance at the bookcase, and along to the bathroom. Opening the door, I leaned against it for several tormented minutes before turning on the shower and stripping off my night dress. The bracing beat of cold water did a good job of restoring me to common sense, and I had just stepped out and was reaching for a towel when the door opened and Vanessa stuck in her titian head.
“Posing for National Geographic, Ellie?”
“If they need a headhunter for the centerfold!” I glared at her.
“You do look cute when you frown.” She smiled sweetly. “The lines on your forehead match your stretch marks.”
“If you’ll kindly excuse me”—I flexed my toothbrush with a view to scrubbing the smirk off her beauteous face—“I would appreciate a few moments’ privacy before beginning the day.”
“Oh, all right.” Vanessa peered over my shoulder into the mirror to groom an already perfect eyebrow with a coral fingernail. “But don’t waste time trying to make yourself look gorgeous, it doesn’t do to tangle with Mother Nature when she seems to have had it in for you from the beginning. Just teasing, Ellie darling!” My cousin backed strategically towards the door. “I’ve got coffee in the kitchen to warm us up before we set out.…” Her voice trailed gracefully away as she disappeared.
How to Murder the Man of Your Dreams Page 13