‘He didn’t mean to hit her, and he was very brave attacking Dave like that, and then saving him from drowning, so he’s expiated his crime. He had a bit of a guilt trip about not having found out from the computer where Dorinda was much earlier, but now I’ve got him sorted out he should be all right.’
‘Have they removed Dorinda from the cave yet?’
‘No, it’s going to take quite a bit of doing, shoring the tunnel up first, though the ancient bones survived intact. Gil wants them to name the new cave in honour of Dorinda.’
‘Well, why not?’
‘His first suggested name was “Dorinda’s Hole”, until I persuaded him that “Aces Hole” sounded much better.’
‘He has such an innocent mind, that man, it’s alarming,’ agreed Mu.
‘I suggested he put “Fight the good fight” on her gravestone, and he thought that was a good idea, too.’
‘He seems to be putty in your hands.’
‘And Miranda’s – but although she’s fond of him, I think she’s going to be jumping right off the rails just as I’m jumping back on to them. She’s off with me to Lefkada in September, to research a book about Greek cooking: Greek Stuff.’
‘But you aren’t still going to teach writing this autumn, are you?’
‘Why not? I’m only doing two weeks, and Nye’s coming over too – it’ll be fun.’
‘You’ll be about six months pregnant by then, Sappho, and you might not feel like it.’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘No, I don’t think you do,’ she agreed resignedly. ‘And I expect you’re quite right.’
‘I don’t think Lili will be coming out this year, because she daren’t leave Dave at this stage, and Bob’s flatly refused to have him in the house after the way he’s behaved towards me,’ I told her.
‘How’s Dave doing? I mean, not that I really care, but you can’t say leaping off a cliff did him much good!’
‘He didn’t leap – he was pushed by Gil, and apart from two broken arms, a ding on the head, and an internal saline rinse, he’s doing fine. It’s cured him of me, if nothing else. You know, one of the highlights of the whole incident was watching Lili claim him from the hospital casualty department, broken, battered, helpless and traumatized, and wheel him off to her cottage. With a bit of luck he may never emerge – and if he does he’ll be a shadow of his former self.’
‘It’s like a Stephen King novel – only I don’t suppose she’ll maim him any more now she’s got him where she wants him,’ said Mu.
‘I don’t think she’d stop at anything if the urge took her. He did try to resist – said he would pay for nursing at his London flat – but Lili did this wonderfully ham act pretending the memory of who stoned her was coming back – and he caved right in.’
‘Have you seen her since? I mean, they’re not both still incarcerated in her cottage, are they?’
‘Oh, no, she often pops in. She’s not one to hold a grudge, and she fell for Dave the minute she set eyes on him. He’s just her kind: tall, dark and tricky. She said she had a brief moment of indecision between the two – and anger when they both only seemed interested in me – but she finds Nye boring other than to look at because he’s only interested in his work.’
I looked at Mu. ‘Odd, isn’t it? That’s the best thing about him – it’s what we’ve got in common. How can she say he’s boring?’
‘Poor taste, clearly.’
‘Must be – she’s absolutely besotted with Dave. And forget her vampire phase, she’s now into Regression . . . or was it Transgression? Some crank comes out to visit her from Cardiff and hypnotizes her into a past life. She was an Egyptian princess, and Dave was her lover, or something. She’s starting to dress accordingly in see-through muslin, like an ancient Egyptian Liz Hurley.’
‘Perhaps she’s having Dave hypnotized too,’ Mu suggested. ‘And that’s why he’s so malleable? Though lots of nurses marry their patients, don’t they? Propinquity and dependence or something.’
‘Yes, he won’t get away now,’ I said happily. ‘And once the nuptial noose is around his throat he’s had it. He’ll be too exhausted to be anything other than monogamous, even when he has full use of his arms and faculties, but if he tries anything she’ll rebreak them for him.’
Mu looked a different woman from the one who’d arrived so precipitately that morning, relaxed and comfortable, and with a bit of colour in her face.
‘I must go soon, or Ambler will be wondering where I’ve got to – and why. Say hello to Nye for me. I take it he’s at the workshop, potting?’
‘Potting sounds an awfully mundane word for the sculptures he produces, but yes. I think he was here last night . . . in fact, I’m pretty sure he was, only I’m well into the writing now, and you know how it is. And he just steals in and out like that damned cat.’
‘You mean the damned cat sitting on your knee with its head under your chin, purring?’
I looked down. ‘There you are. I don’t notice she’s there half the time, and the same with Nye.’
‘How can you possibly not notice Nye?’
‘He doesn’t notice me, either, when he’s been struck by a brilliant idea – but it’s OK. Good, in fact – we understand each other.’
And when we do notice each other, well, that’s pretty good, too!
‘When the barn conversion’s finished there will be lots of room for both of us.’
‘You love him, don’t you?’
‘When I made my leap, I seem to have committed myself without knowing it. I do love him, and we’re fated to be a double act – or a triple act, as it turns out, what with the little silver-eyed cuckoo in the nest.’
‘I don’t think you should call your baby a cuckoo!’
‘No, I’m going to call it Cromlech if it’s a boy, or Rosetta if it’s a girl.’
‘You are joking, aren’t you?’ she asked anxiously.
‘No. What about Mustard Spoon Graythorpe?’
‘I’ll have to call mine Tsambika or Tsambikos,’ she said. ‘I think the results of the pilgrimage were just slightly delayed.’
‘Poor little thing,’ I said.
‘Tsam?’
‘That’s quite nice, actually. Maybe it will survive school.’
‘How’s the new book coming along?’ she asked, changing the subject, and absently reaching for another biscuit: one of the curly chocolate-coated wafer ones, which I think are among Miranda’s best.
‘Dark Dreams, Deadly Desires? Very well, I think: the whole plot simply fell into my mind as I finished the last one.’
‘And it’s really the last of the Vengeane series?’
‘Absolutely. I can’t write about someone who looks like the man I’m living with, but isn’t him, any more. Well, I can – I am – but he isn’t going to like it.’
The biscuit was suspended halfway to Mu’s lips. ‘Sappho, you aren’t going to do anything nasty to Dragonslayer, are you?’
‘See what I mean? Just because he looks like Nye, and Nala looks a bit like me, it doesn’t mean we’re living parallel lives! Nye seems to have got the idea that that’s how the last book will turn out, but’ – I grinned at her – ‘it ain’t necessarily so!’
‘You can’t!’
‘I can, and I will: it’s necessary to the story, this last twist in the tale, and it’s open to interpretation. I must be true to my art!’
‘Bollocks,’ said Mu, but she knew I meant it.
Chapter 35
Date Expired
Nye and I are sitting on the cliffs of Lefkada watching the sun go down.
We are near the spot where I stood on my thirty-ninth birthday, feeling so panic-stricken: as though the sands of my life were starting to run out too quickly.
Well, I wanted to do something meaningful in the last year before the big Four-O, and you certainly can’t say I haven’t!
‘It’s beautiful,’ Nye says softly, putting his arm around me.
‘Yes, it is,
’ I agree, ‘but the funny thing is that for the first time ever I feel homesick! I’m missing Bedd, and the cottage and even the cat. It’s not that I don’t want to travel again, just that I’m now always going to have that sense of being ready to go home at the end of it.’
‘Home, with just you and me,’ Nye says.
‘And the cat. And the baby, eventually. It’ll be good to get back just so I can finish the final Vengeane novel, too: the end of one era and the beginning of another.’
‘Another fantasy series?’
‘There are new worlds out there to invent and explore,’ I reply.
‘But first the Vengeane happy ending: you and me, Dragonslayer and Nala – Raarg and Sirene?’
I open my mouth to speak and then shut it again: why spoil a magic moment, after all?
Life – and the unfolding storylines of my books – are just one constant surprise to me.
And that’s the way I like it.
Recipes
These are the sorts of things that Miranda is always baking, and are perfect for when you have friends coming round for tea or coffee.
Double chocolate biscotti
Ginger thins
Apple fruit cake
Double chocolate biscotti
This recipe makes around 20 biscotti: crisp, crunchy Italian biscuits that are delicious with a hot drink or on the side of a creamy pudding. The recipe really isn’t as complicated as it looks and the results are well worth it!
You will need . . .
100g butter
125g caster sugar
4 tablespoons good quality cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 eggs
½ teaspoon vanilla essence
200g plain flour
125g milk or dark chocolate, chopped (or you could use chocolate chips)
100g white chocolate, chopped
Preheat the oven to 190°C (170°C fan) and line a large baking sheet with greaseproof paper.
Whisk the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy, then add the cocoa powder and baking powder and beat for another couple of minutes.
Add the eggs one at a time, then the vanilla essence, and whisk again to combine.
Stir in the flour and all the chocolate chips by hand.
Cover the dough and chill in the fridge for 10 minutes.
Divide the dough into two, and roll each part into a sausage about 25cm long. Transfer them to the baking tray about 10cm apart, and flatten to a thickness of 3cm.
Bake for 20-25 minutes or until a skewer in the centre comes out clean. Remove from the oven and reduce the temperature to 160°C. Cool on the tray for 5 minutes then transfer to a chopping board.
Cut into 2cm wide slices then place the slices on the baking tray, cut sides up, and bake for 10 minutes. Turn the biscuits, and bake on the other side for another 5-7 minutes. Cool completely on a wire rack.
The biscotti will keep in an airtight container for three weeks.
Ginger thins
As Sappho says, ginger is excellent for digestion. It’s great for morning sickness too. So you could almost say these biscuits are medicinal and it’s therefore essential that you eat them . . .
This recipe makes around 40 biscuits.
You will need . . .
170g plain flour
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
A pinch of salt
80g unsalted butter
4 tablespoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves
¼ teaspoon pepper
A pinch of cayenne pepper
100g dark brown soft sugar
40g black treacle
1 large egg
Mix the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt together in a bowl.
Heat the butter in a pan over a medium heat until melted, then lower to a medium-low heat and continue to cook, swirling the pan often, until the butter just begins to brown and the foaming has subsided a little. Turn off the heat.
Add the spices, the brown sugar and the treacle to the butter and mix until the sugar has melted. Whisk in the egg: you should have a dark, smooth and shiny mixture.
Pour into your bowl of flour and combine with a spatula until you have a dough – be careful not to overwork it. Cover the bowl and chill in the fridge for an hour.
Preheat the oven to 150°C (130°C fan). Line two baking trays with greaseproof paper.
Put a portion of the dough on to a lightly floured surface and roll it out with a rolling pin as thin as you can make it – 1mm if possible – as they do rise a little in the oven. Use a small cutter to cut out your shapes. I like circles or stars at Christmas.
Carefully lift each biscuit and place on your baking trays, leaving a slight gap between them. Repeat until all your dough is used up. While one tray is baking, you can roll out and fill up your next tray.
Bake the biscuits for around 15-20 minutes or until they are hard to the touch and a deep golden brown. Cool on a wire rack.
The ginger thins will keep in an airtight container for three weeks.
Apple fruit cake
The addition of the apples makes this a lovely moist fruit cake, and it doesn’t take too long to bake.
You will need . . .
200g self-raising flour
200g dark muscovado sugar
200g butter
3 eggs, beaten
1 tablespoon black treacle
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons mixed spice
200g eating apples, grated (about 2 medium-sized apples)
300g mixed sultanas and raisins
Preheat the oven to 200°C (180°C fan). Grease and line a deep, round 20cm cake tin.
Beat all of the ingredients except the fruit in a large bowl until the mixture is thick and pale.
Then fold in the apples, sultanas and raisins until all the fruit is combined and well distributed in the batter.
Pour the batter into the cake tin and bake for 50 minutes to 1 hour, or until the cake is deeply golden and a skewer in the centre comes out clean.
Turn out on to a wire rack and cool completely. The cake will keep in an airtight container for up to a week.
If you wanted to decorate it, you could top with royal icing, or an apricot glaze: simply warm 75g apricot jam with 1 or 2 tablespoons of water and brush over the cake. You could top with some chopped pecan nuts or walnuts and brush over a little more glaze.
Read on for a sneak peak of the first pages of Trisha Ashley’s new novel
THE LITTLE TEASHOP OF LOST AND FOUND
coming in Spring 2017
Prologue
West Yorkshire
Liz
March 2nd, 1978
There had been no signs to warn me of the imminent catastrophe about to overtake me – or if there were, I’d been oblivious to them. When everything kicked off that night, I felt as if I’d been catapulted straight into a horror movie and a gross one, at that – or the nightmare from hell.
Fear and confusion were quickly followed by realization, panic, shock and revulsion – for who’d have thought a birth involved so much goriness? Certainly not me, even though, ironically enough, my sights had re-focused on gaining an Oxford place to read medicine the very moment my brief first love affair had come to an end the previous summer.
But then, that wasn’t because I felt any kind of vocation to heal the sick, the halt and the lame, it was simply part of my plan to mould myself so much in Father’s image that he forgot I wasn’t actually his biological child at all.
As these thoughts jostled chaotically together in my normally clear, cool and analytical mind, my eyes met Mum’s over the small, misshapen, skinned-rabbit of a thing that lay weakly mewling on the bed between us and I expect the expression on her ashen, stunned face mirrored my own.
Her mouth moved silently once or twice, as if it had forgotten how to shape words. Then finally she whispered, ‘Liz, your father must never find out!�
��
She was always entirely mistress of the bleeding obvious.
1
Once Upon a Fairytale
Alice
Autumn 1995
I grew up knowing I was adopted, so it was never a shocking revelation, merely one of the things that defined me, like having curly copper-bright hair, distinctive dark eyebrows, a fine silvery scar above my upper lip and pale green eyes. (Like boiled gooseberries, according to Mum, though Dad said they were mermaid’s eyes, the colour of sea-washed green glass.)
As a little girl I’d sit for hours painting with Dad in his garden studio, while his deep, gentle voice wrapped me in a soft-spun fairytale, in which my desperate young birth mother had been forced to abandon her poorly, premature little baby, hoping that someone like Mum and Dad would come along and adopt her.
Or like Dad, at any rate, since eventually I came to see that Nessa (she’d insisted I call her that rather than Mummy, practically the moment I could string a sentence together), had had no maternal yearnings, she’d just been paying lip-service to his longing for a family, smug in the knowledge that she couldn’t physically carry a child even had she wanted to.
‘A bad fairy had put a spell on baby Alice, but when the nice doctors had made her lip all better, everyone agreed she was the prettiest princess in the whole of Yorkshire,’ he’d finish his story, smiling at me over his canvas.
‘And they put the wicked fairy in a metal cage and everyone threw rotten tomatoes at her,’ I’d suggest – or even worse punishments, for some old fairytale books given to me by my paternal grandmother, including one strangely but wonderfully illustrated by Arthur Rackham, had had a great influence on my imagination. We lived near Granny Rose in Knaresborough until moving to a village just outside Shrewsbury when I was eight and I can still remember her reading to me the long, long poem by Edith Sitwell about Sleeping Beauty, once she’d tucked me up in bed. I’d slowly drift off on a sea of musical, beautiful words about malevolent fairies and enchantments.
A Leap of Faith Page 27