He’d talked to Brian about the Hugh thing, in the pub.
“I don’t understand why he didn’t get done. You saw how much they’d all been drinking, and he was partying with them.”
Brian chuckled. “You are a bit green sometimes, Dillon.”
“What do you mean?”
Brian tapped his nose.
“What does that mean?”
“He’s a little bit fond of the old Bolivian marching powder, isn’t he?”
Dillon still looked puzzled.
“Didn’t you see how many times he nipped off to the toilet?”
“For a slash?”
“No, idiot. For a line of cocaine.”
Dillon blinked. “Cocaine? Bloody hell.” He thought about it. “So he wasn’t drunk?”
“No. Just high as a kite.”
“How come the police didn’t notice?”
“He’ll have charmed them, won’t he?”
“You mean they turned a blind eye?”
Brian shrugged. “Just gave him the benefit of the doubt when he passed the Breathalyzer. They wouldn’t suspect him, would they? He’s marrying a Basildon.”
“So the bastard got away with it.”
“Yep. And it’s too late to grass him up now.”
“Do you think Alice knows what he gets up to?”
Brian shrugged. “Probably not. She’s a nice girl. He wouldn’t want to blot his copybook with her.”
“How do you know, anyway? That he does cocaine?”
Brian scoffed. “You ask Pogo. That’s where all Hugh’s money goes—in Pogo’s pocket. Pogo supplies him and all his mates.”
Pogo was the local drug dealer who skulked about in the dodgier pubs in Peasebrook and thought he was a bit of a gangster, with his dreadlocks and gold front tooth. Dillon had been at school with him and thought he was an idiot. He wasn’t going to lower himself to ask Pogo for corroborative evidence to incriminate Hugh. Pogo would say anything if he thought it would save his own skin.
“Why haven’t you told me this before?”
“I thought you knew.”
Dillon shook his head. He felt shocked. He hadn’t thought much of Hugh in the first place, but this was even worse. But what could he do?
If he told Sarah that Hugh had been off his head on cocaine the night of the accident, Hugh would deny it. And no one would believe Dillon over Hugh, because Hugh had passed the Breathalyzer test. They’d just think Dillon was trying to cause trouble. They wouldn’t want to think anything bad of Hugh, because he was probably going to be the savior of Peasebrook Manor. The one with the deep pockets. Money trumped everything.
Yet if he said nothing, Alice was going to end up marrying him. She deserved so much better.
He kicked a clod of earth into a flowerbed. It was frustrating, being the lowest of the low. When it came down to it, he was just a nobody.
He walked back to the garden room. He felt angry with Sarah, even though she had done nothing wrong. But he was hurt that she didn’t want him to go and visit Alice. It wasn’t as if she was whiter than white. What would Ralph say, if he knew the truth about her and Julius Nightingale? Not that Dillon would ever say anything, not in a million years. But that made it worse, not better.
He clenched his teeth. What was the point in behaving with loyalty to people, when they showed you none? He pulled off his wax jacket and put the kettle on. Was he the only person in the world who wasn’t a bloody hypocrite? Well, him and Alice, of course. If anyone was the innocent party in all of this, it was Alice.
Dillon sat and drank his tea, and as he drank, he came to a decision. He’d go to the hospital and see Alice. He didn’t need Sarah’s permission. If Alice didn’t want to see him, she could tell him herself.
—
Dillon had been to the emergency room often enough. As a gardener, it was an occupational hazard, and tetanus injections and stitches were par for the course. But he’d never been onto one of the wards. The hospital was a maze, of arrows to different floors and places with different color codes and letters, of lifts that went to different sections.
Eventually he found his way to the right area. He pushed open the double doors and asked for Alice at the nurses’ station. They pointed him toward a private room off the main ward.
He knocked gently and heard her voice. As he peeped round the door, his heart leaped as he saw her. She was bundled up in bed, her leg in a cast outside the sheets, her face bandaged up, the one eye he could see still black with bruising.
“Dillon!” There was no hiding her delight.
He came in and held out the Terry’s Chocolate Orange he’d brought her.
“I got you this.”
“My absolute favorite! Let’s open it right now.” She shuffled over and patted the bed next to her. “Come and sit down and tell me everything.”
He sat and started opening the box. He tapped the chocolate orange on the bedside table so it fell into segments, and fed them to her one by one as they talked.
“I’m so bored cooped up in here. I really want to go on a ward, so I’ve got people to talk to, but Hugh’s got me a private room—he feels so guilty even though I keep telling him it was just an accident, but he’s insisted on paying for it. It makes me feel as if people think I think I’m something special.”
“Well, you are,” said Dillon, smiling.
“No, I’m not. And there’s so much to do at Peasebrook—Mum refuses to let me know what’s going on and tells me not to worry, but I worry more not knowing. What is going on?”
“Everything’s under control, I think. Your mum’s doing a lot. And your dad, actually.”
Alice perked up as she had a sudden thought.
“Could you do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Could you bring in my laptop? So I can check up on everything? I’ve asked Mum but she keeps forgetting. Accidentally on purpose, I think.” Alice put her head to one side and looked at Dillon, eyes bright. “It’s in the estate office. The girls will know where it is. And don’t forget the cable.”
“Okay,” said Dillon, pleased he could do something for her. “But should you be worrying about work?”
“I can’t not worry. It’s impossible.”
“You should try. Or you won’t get better.”
“Honestly, you’re just like Mum. She’s worried I won’t get better in time for the wedding. To be honest, I’m starting to wonder if I should just cancel it. But if I do, I won’t be able to get married until next year, because Christmas will get in the way.”
“What’s wrong with waiting till next year?” Dillon felt a leap of hope. Given another year, Hugh might show his true colors.
“No. We’ve got plans in place. Hugh wants to give up his flat and move into the cottage as soon as possible. We’ll forge ahead.” She looked at her leg. “I’ve just got one more operation on this and then—then they’ve got a consultant coming to look at my face . . . They said it could be much worse. I could have lost my eye. So I’m lucky really. Aren’t I?”
She smiled at him, and he wanted to scoop her up in his arms because she was so brave, sitting there with her face all battered, thinking she was lucky. He didn’t know what to say. Yes, in a way she was lucky. He shuddered when he thought about what could have happened.
Alice pointed to a book on the bedside table.
“Read to me for a bit, would you?” she said, changing the subject. “Mum brought me this earlier. And I’m getting tired. That’s the thing that gets me. I feel all right and then I get exhausted.” She sighed.
“Snuggle down, then,” he told her. He picked up the book. Riders, by Jilly Cooper. It was huge. He flipped it open.
“I’m not a very good reader,” he warned her.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I almost know it off by heart. I’ve read it a
bout twenty times.”
“What’s the point of hearing it again, then?”
“It’s literally the best book in the world.” She managed a smile. “There are some rude bits, though. Really rude.”
He laughed, and began to read. He felt awkward at first, but he began to get into the story: a bunch of colorful characters vying for hearts and trophies. The room was warm, a bit stuffy, and after a while he could see Alice was falling asleep, so he stopped.
She opened her eyes.
“I’m not asleep.”
“Maybe you should go to sleep.” He patted her.
She closed her eyes again. “That’s who you remind me of,” she murmured.
“Who?”
“Jake Lovell. The gypsy boy. Everyone else at school loved Rupert Campbell-Black, but I always liked Jake best. You remind me of him.”
“Oh.” Dillon looked down, not sure if this was a compliment.
“It’s a good thing. Rupert was a beast. But Jake was lovely.” It was as if she was talking about real people. He closed the book and put it back on the bedside table.
“I better go,” he said. “Visiting time’s nearly over.”
“You’ll come again, won’t you?”
“Of course.” He wasn’t sure whether to kiss her good-bye. She put up her arms.
“Give me a hug. I need a big hug.”
He bent down and hugged her awkwardly. “You be good,” he replied and walked out of the room.
15
The morning room at Peasebrook Manor was the prettiest room Emilia had ever seen. It had primrose yellow walls and pale green silk curtains and two rose velvet sofas in front of the fireplace. Over the mantelpiece was a Victorian oil painting of a girl feeding cabbage leaves to a fat bunny rabbit. The girl, with her rosy cheeks and blond hair, reminded Emilia of Alice.
Emilia wondered what it was like to live in the Basildons’ world. Not that hers was gritty reality—she was only too aware it was rarefied—but this was quintessential country life at its most appealing. This was the room where Sarah took tea or coffee with her guests, and wrote letters and saw to her business. She thought of the back office at the shop and resolved to make it a more pleasant place to work. Her father had rarely spent time in there, just banished anything he didn’t want to look at into its depths. It was cold and dingy. It would have to change.
Sarah came in with a tray bearing tea: a proper china teapot, and dainty cups and saucers and a milk jug and sugar bowl. And a plate of shortbread, thick with caster sugar. She laid it on the table between the sofas.
“Milk?” she asked, and Emilia nodded.
Sarah somehow managed to look disheveled but devastatingly attractive. She must be in her fifties but looked far younger. She had on jeans and a faded Liberty lawn shirt and pale blue loafers. Her hair was a mixture of honey and gray that looked as if a top London hairdresser had painstakingly streaked it but was probably the result of Sarah not having been to have her roots done for months. Her hands were red and chapped from gardening, and her nails ragged, but the most enormous diamond glimmered on her ring finger: it was so large it almost couldn’t be real, but Sarah wasn’t the type to wear costume jewelry. She wore no makeup but a dab of pink lipstick hastily applied in the downstairs loo just before she answered the door. She was the archetypal English rose.
“I’ve just got back from visiting Alice,” she said as she poured the tea. “The traffic out of Oxford was awful.”
“How is she?”
Sarah sighed. “She’s in a lot of discomfort, poor thing. And of course all those painkillers make her so fuzzy. But she’s making progress.”
She sat down on the sofa opposite Emilia.
“I asked you here because I wanted to talk to you about something your father and I had been discussing for a while.”
Emilia nodded. Sarah clasped her hands. She seemed slightly nervous, not quite meeting Emilia’s eyes. She fiddled with the diamond ring. Her fingers were so slender it spun round and round.
“We had become quite good friends, your father and I. We spoke—met—often.” She lifted her gaze. “Ralph is not a great reader and it was good to have a decent conversation with someone about books. Julius was always so brilliant at recommending. He had a feeling for what I wanted to read, and I don’t think there was one book he suggested that I didn’t love. Sometimes he’d make me read things because they were good for me, and I always took something away from them. He widened my world . . .”
She drifted off, immersed in her eulogy.
“He was extraordinary,” she finished, and Emilia could see the glitter of tears in her navy blue eyes, as bright as the diamond on her ring.
“I know,” said Emilia.
For a moment, Sarah couldn’t speak. Emilia was touched. She could see how difficult Sarah was finding this. She was still astonished by how deep people’s feelings for her father ran. They still came up to her in the street or in the shop and told her how much he had meant to them.
“I’d love to do something. To remember him by. He often talked about organizing a literary festival. It was a dream of his and I’d suggested that we could do one here, at Peasebrook. We have so many rooms here that could be used. We were starting to think quite seriously about it when he became ill.”
Here, Sarah looked down at the floor. Emilia could see she was struggling.
“He did mention the idea to me once or twice,” Emilia said. “There are so many authors and celebrities within striking distance of Peasebrook, and we’re not so far from London. It could be a real draw. Especially in a setting like this.”
Sarah had recovered her composure. “Exactly! We felt we could attract a good caliber of speakers. The thing is, it was his dream, but it was starting to become a real possibility. We’re very well set up for putting on events here. And—and I think it would be a shame to let the opportunity slip. I thought about doing the festival in his name.” She swallowed. “The Nightingale Literary Festival.”
“Oh!” said Emilia. “That would be a wonderful tribute.”
“I would need your help, though. And the support of the shop. We’d need you to supply the books, of course. And advice on who to ask. I mean, there’s masses and masses to think about, but I wanted to see what you thought. Because I couldn’t do it without you. It would have to be a team effort.”
Emilia took a piece of shortbread and bit into it. It was a wonderful idea. She could see it all in her mind’s eye. Literary lions and lionesses holding forth in the ballroom, the audience hanging on their every word. A glittering program; the Glastonbury of book festivals. It would be a wonderful boost for the town, too—people attending the festival would want accommodation and would go into the pubs and restaurants. And they could get sponsorship from local businesses . . .
But she had to be cautious. She didn’t want to get Sarah’s hopes up. It was such an enchanting idea, but she couldn’t show too much enthusiasm.
“I love the idea,” she said, “but I’m afraid the shop’s not in very good shape financially. I’m struggling to cover my overheads. It needs a lot of money spent on it if it’s going to even begin to make a profit, so I can’t commit to a big project at the moment. I’ve got to put all my energy into keeping it afloat. I’ve got my staff to consider as well. They have to come first.”
Sarah looked concerned. “Julius never mentioned the shop being in trouble.”
The way she said it gave Emilia the impression they spoke often, and that Sarah was hurt by his omission.
She smiled. “I don’t think Dad quite saw that it was. It’s all a bit of a muddle. I’ve only scratched the surface. But he ran it by the seat of his pants, rather.”
“So was he in debt?”
“Nothing awful or to be ashamed of. But there are quite a few outstanding invoices. And various other muddles. My father’s famous line was �
�I don’t do numbers.’”
Sarah leaned forward. “Between you and me, I have rather more experience of getting out of hideous debt than you might imagine. A while ago now we nearly lost Peasebrook. I won’t go into it, but it was pretty frightening. So I understand how you feel. And if I can help at all . . .”
“I have Andrea, my accountant—I was at school with her. She’s like a walking calculator in Louboutins. She’s been wonderful. But even she can’t wave a magic wand. I’ve got some tough decisions to make. And it’s going to be hard work. Not that I’m afraid of that, of course . . .”
“It just goes to show you,” said Sarah, “that you can think you know someone, but you have no idea.” As she said it, her cheeks flushed pink. She put her face in her hands, and in that moment Emilia recognized that her father and Sarah must have been closer than she realized. She wasn’t sure how she felt about this realization. She liked Sarah very much, but there was no getting away from the fact that she was very firmly married to Ralph. Should she press Sarah for more detail? Did Sarah want her to realize? She thought that perhaps she did. She had more than hinted.
Maybe today wasn’t the day. Everything was still a bit raw. They were feeling their way with each other. If they went ahead with the festival, and worked together, maybe the whole story would come out at some point, when they were both ready.
“I think the festival is a wonderful idea,” she said finally. “And as soon as things are a bit more stable, we should talk about it. As you say, it would be a perfect memorial. My father would be proud.”
Sarah’s smile was a bit wobbly. “He would . . .”
There was a pause. Sarah was twisting her ring round again. Something unsaid was hanging in the air.
“Emilia—there’s something else I’d like to share with you. But it’s totally confidential. It can’t go any further.”
Emilia could see Sarah was struggling with what she was about to say.
“Is it about you and my father?” she asked gently.
There was a spot of color on each of Sarah’s cheeks. “I loved your father. Very much.”
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