The Little Teashop of Lost and Found

by Trisha Ashley

  And I did try to eat but my throat closed up, so I abandoned the attempt and crawled into bed. I’d thought I’d never fall asleep again, but the moment I lay down I sank fathoms deep into welcoming darkness, too far for dreams or nightmares to catch me.

  The moor was supposedly haunted by a giant black dog with blood-red eyes, so it was just as well I wasn’t the imaginative kind. The full moon cast strangely shaped shadows around me as I followed a sheep track round the base of the rocky outcrop and shoved the bundle deep into one of the many crevices, to join the debris of last summer’s picnickers. It struck me that that was bizarrely apt under the circumstances …

  I looked back only once and thought I could make out a glimpse of white, though it was probably just a bit of old fleece caught on the gorse, nothing out of the ordinary in that terrain.

  5

  Catatonia

  Next day I didn’t so much wake up as float about just below the surface of full consciousness. My senses felt muffled, as if I was buried in an avalanche.

  I couldn’t think – but that was all right, because I didn’t want to think. In fact, I didn’t want to do anything except lie there like a leaden log. Inertia weighed so heavily that I could hardly move my arms and legs. It was all very odd …

  In the other room my phone began to buzz spasmodically, like a dying fly. Then later there was an urgent tapping noise that might have been a woodpecker … or someone rapping at the door. I curled into the smallest possible ball and pulled the covers right over my head.

  Edie, discovering my near-catatonic state, called the doctor out, who diagnosed delayed shock and prescribed some pills, which she duly forced down me by sheer strength of will.

  I’d always hated popping pills and though they eventually set my feet on the path back from Catatonia, I seemed to have almost entirely mislaid April. There were fuzzy memories of the two kind sisters who were Edie’s live-in staff, taking turns to spend the nights on the sofa in the living room, and of William popping in with little delicacies with which he hoped to tempt my non-existent appetite, but that was about it.

  Even after I started to come out of the fog, my mind still tended to make sudden sideways darts down the nearest dark burrow, like some other Alice. I resisted, because there wasn’t much prospect of finding any kind of Wonderland down there, and anyway, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to climb back into the light again.

  When I mentioned the rabbit holes to the doctor, he changed my prescription to an antidepressant, instead of whatever he’d been dosing me with before.

  They seemed to do the trick … or at any rate, turned me into a fully functioning zombie, going through the motions of living and communicating in quite a lifelike manner, though with all the sharp emotional edges rubbed off.

  It certainly fooled Edie into thinking I was well on the road to recovery, but I knew Lola suspected there were still rats gnawing at my sanity, because in early May she made a flying visit north to see me, despite being so busy helping in the family herb-growing business, not to mention the burgeoning one she’d set up with her mum, under the trade name Dolly and Lola’s Perfectly Pickled and Preserved Company.

  They’d started off with their Jam Session line of traditional jams, curds and marmalade and had recently added a Get Pickled range of chutneys and relishes. Lola had commissioned small wooden display stands and several local shops were now stocking their products.

  Lola is quietly determined and makes you do things by stealth, so before she went home she’d prised me out of the cabin for a drive and several walks, since she said that although I was naturally pale, I’d started to look like a mushroom. Then she made me promise to answer my phone when she rang every day, since I couldn’t access the internet from my cabin.

  I suppose getting out did do me good, because after this I started to help out with the cakes and pastries in the hotel kitchen. William was a wonderful chef, but his puff pastry might as well have been shortcrust and his sponge cakes never looked as if they were about to float off the plate. Edie was still refusing to take any rent for my chalet, so I felt I was doing something in recompense.

  And it was thanks to Edie that I was to have a little nest egg in the bank, for she remembered what I’d said about finding Dan’s insurance policy and insisted on coming up to the cabin and unearthing the paperwork from the depths of a mixed box of my belongings.

  Reading through it, she made a discovery. ‘There are two policies here, Alice,’ she said. ‘There’s the one you mentioned, which appears to be part of Dan’s contract with the TV company, and a second policy, an annual one. Perhaps he needed life insurance to run his business leading groups of climbers?’

  ‘Yes, I expect he did,’ I agreed.

  ‘And whoever the beneficiary of the annual one was originally, it’s in your name now,’ she said bracingly. ‘I’m surprised the insurers for the TV programme haven’t contacted you already.’

  ‘They might have tried, but I still haven’t opened most of the post,’ I confessed. I’d left Jen the keys to the house and she’d been sending on any letters for me, which I’d simply dumped in a cardboard box. ‘And I haven’t checked my emails since I moved in, either.’

  ‘You’d better let me go through the mail and throw out the junk for you before you tackle the rest,’ she suggested.

  A thought suddenly struck me, which made a change, because I hadn’t been having a lot of those lately. ‘Edie, if there are two policies, does it mean I’m rich?’ I asked, though without an awful lot of interest. The riches I’d been seeking all my life hadn’t been that kind: you can only warm your hands on money if you set it on fire.

  ‘I think you’ll find you’ll be more than comfortably off,’ she said, scanning the end of the second document and then laying it down. ‘In fact, I think there should be plenty to buy a nice wee home of your own and more to spare. Perhaps even enough to purchase Climber’s Café, if you wanted to?’

  I shuddered. ‘No, there’s no going back. In fact, I seem destined never to belong anywhere, really. I’m the human equivalent of tumbleweed.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘You were found in Yorkshire, so you must have been born there, which makes you as much a Yorkshirewoman as I’m a Scot. That’s where your real roots are.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right, and I’ve always been fascinated by Haworth and the Brontës, because of all the fairy stories Dad used to spin me about my being found there, on the Parsonage steps. Even after I’d realized he’d made most of it up, I still assumed I’d been left somewhere in the village, but I had a feeling that going there would somehow break the spell. But then, of course, my mother shattered it anyway, when she told me I was actually abandoned up on the moors.’

  ‘That was wrong of her; she behaved very badly to you,’ Edie said disapprovingly.

  ‘It certainly made me resist the pull of the place, so I’ve never been there,’ I agreed. ‘Of course, by then I’d already read everything about the Brontës and Haworth that I could find. I like Emily best – she was so awful in company and preferred to be with her dogs on the moor, or baking in the kitchen. She was her own woman and a bit of an enigma … and I do love her poetry.’

  ‘You have a lot in common with her, then,’ Edie said drily. ‘I went to Haworth many years ago and it was very interesting. You can see the moors spreading out beyond it, where you must have been found – savage and wild, just like that Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.’

  ‘It’s lucky I don’t identify with him rather than Emily, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want to wreak vengeance on my birth mother and any family she might have, even if I found her, and I just want to forget all about my adoptive one.’

  ‘No, you’re not the vengeful type, Alice. And though your adoptive mother behaved very badly, I don’t expect your birth one was thinking in a rational way when she abandoned you, so you shouldn’t take it too much to heart.’

  ‘Dad thought she was probably very young and frightened, and that
when she came to her senses later and realized what she’d done, she must have been relieved to know I’d been found in time.’

  ‘Your dad sounds a lovely, warm man,’ Edie said, which brought the first tears to my eyes I’d shed since arriving at the chalet. Maybe Sleeping Beauty was starting to wake up?

  With her usual brisk efficiency, Edie insisted we contact the insurance companies right away, then downloaded, printed out and filled in all the endless forms, right up to the point where she put a pen in my hand and pointed to the boxes for me to sign.

  When she’d gone back to the hotel, I searched out a framed photograph of Dan from one of the boxes: he was standing quite casually on what looked like a stone springboard over a chasm, his blond hair sticking up in spikes and his blue eyes sparkling. And then, finally, I allowed myself to weep a river of tears for what we’d had and what might have been.

  It was lucky Edie had sorted out the insurance for me, because Mr Blackwell called shortly afterwards to tell me that Dan’s wife had finally asked about it.

  ‘I thought I’d better just check that the policy mentioned you by name,’ he said, in his warm, friendly voice, and I remembered how kind he’d been at the funeral.

  ‘Actually, there are two policies, both in my name. The friend I’m staying with helped me notify the insurance companies and put in the claims.’ I explained what we’d found.

  ‘Edie did most of it, because it was all beyond me. I still can’t seem to think straight,’ I found myself confessing, probably because he’d been so nice to me at the funeral that he’d felt like my favourite uncle … if I’d ever had any uncles. ‘But perhaps it’s the pills the doctor has put me on and I could stop them now. I hate taking pills anyway.’

  ‘Do trust his judgement and only stop taking them when he says you can,’ he advised me. ‘These things take time.’ Then he kindly said he’d always be happy to hear from me if I needed his assistance in future on any matter, and rang off.

  And as if by serendipity, only ten minutes later two texts from the insurance companies popped up, one after the other, saying my claims were being expedited. That sounded painful – they mustn’t have wanted to part with the money.

  Now I was emerging into the land of the living, I finally began working through the backlog of texts on my phone and then my overflowing email inbox.

  Among the junk in the latter I discovered several messages from Robbie, who, entirely oblivious to what had happened to me, was angsting about losing his latest leggy blonde beach babe in his usual self-obsessed fashion.

  I found it strangely refreshing. I’d only seen him once in the six or seven years since he moved out to Australia, when he was over to visit his parents, but I was still fond enough of him to hope a Great White Shark didn’t gobble him up on one of his surfing trips.

  I sent him a brief message back, saying I was staying with Edie for a bit, so he’d probably just assume I’d broken up with Dan.

  I deleted most of the rest of the emails unread: they were from so long ago no one would still be expecting a reply.

  It felt fairly cathartic and my brain was clearer. I thought I might even be able to return to my writing at some point soon – I’d left a novella half-finished on my laptop, but when I looked for it, I stumbled across a whole story I’d no recollection of writing at all. I vaguely remembered a nightmare I’d had while catatonic, but it seemed from the April date on the document that I’d actually got up and written it all down!

  It was a take on the story about a mermaid who falls in love with a mortal, then takes on human form by day so they can be together. At night, she goes back into the sea. But he jealously suspects she’s returning to a merman lover, so imprisons her in a lighthouse. He cuts off her long hair, too, so she can’t do a Rapunzel, but an albatross brings her a long strand of seaweed and she slides down that and escapes. The prince hears the pebbles on the beach murmuring her name as she hurries towards the sea, the damp salt air turning her skin scaly … and then, just as she’s about to dive under the waves, he grabs her. The tale ends with her pulling him under the water with her and, since he won’t release his grip, he drowns.

  It was dark, but not bad at all, and definitely my style. How odd to have written something and not remember doing it! All it needed was a polish and it was good to go.

  Feeling encouraged, I went up to the hotel again and checked the Amazon reviews for my e-books, and there was a really horrible one that made me feel quite sick. But it also made me so furious that I immediately wrote a story about an author who’d had such a vicious book review that she’d tracked down the perpetrator and unleashed on her a series of revenging goblins, boggarts, wicked fairies and other dark creatures, who all inflicted punishment on her in different and inventive ways.

  I felt so much better after that and it seemed to light a little spark of me-ness in my heart again … whoever I actually was.

  In my imagination I’d cast my infant self in many roles, so much more comforting than searching out the truth: I’d been Moses in the bulrushes, the baby princess abandoned in the forest to die, the child left as a sacrifice to the gods on a blasted heath … a Heathcliff heath.

  But I was none of those: I was me, Alice Rose, and for the first time I felt a real need to stop running away from the past and discover who I really was and where I came from. But to do that, I’d finally have to go to Haworth …

  The blackberry-dark sky had begun to lighten towards the east as I drove away. I thought I’d be safely home before anyone else was stirring, which made it all the more of a shock when I came round a sharp bend in the narrow, twisty lane and caught the briefest glimpse of a tall figure dragging a large dog on to the narrow verge, her pale face with eyes screwed shut against the sudden glare of my headlights.

  Even in that split second, I recognized who it was …

  6

  Agent of Change

  I woke up one morning in early June with the decision to stop taking the antidepressants already fixed in my mind.

  I hoped that I wasn’t also cutting the invisible umbilical cord to my sanity, but actually, once the drug had worked its way through my system, I felt instead that the world had shifted fully back into focus, that was all. Everything was brighter, louder, clearer.

  The breakdown seemed to have been cathartic, for though I still grieved for Dan and what might have been, I now felt strangely distanced, as if losing him had happened so long ago that I’d come to terms with it.

  Perhaps, too, it was partly because I now had a new obsession. What Edie had said about my belonging in Yorkshire had sparked off the idea of moving to Haworth and now I was consumed by it. I had a right to live there. I’d buy a cottage and, if there was enough insurance money left, I’d be able to eke out a living from my e-book sales. I loved baking, but I really didn’t want to work in someone else’s kitchen all my life.

  Once I was there, I’d try to trace my real mother. I even took the first step in that direction by ordering a copy of my birth registration document, though I had no idea what kind of information I’d find on it. I’d never bothered before, because since I’d been abandoned there wasn’t going to be any major clue as to who I actually was on it, was there? My parents must have had one, because I’d had a passport for school trips to France and Switzerland, but I’d never seen it.

  When I had a rough idea of how much money the insurance would be I spent hours in Edie’s small back office, surfing the internet to see what kind of property I could afford in the Haworth area.

  Lola looked too, when she had time, and sent me links to cottages she thought nice and also suggested we meet in Haworth for a couple of days to view anything suitable together.

  But actually, you can virtually tour most properties on the internet and … well, something was still holding me back from going there. It was a sort of spell, an evil enchantment that I knew would be broken the moment I bought my stake in the village. No frog required.

  The birth registration cer
tificate was a brief and not very illuminating document, giving the parish where I was born, which wasn’t a surprise, and my birthday as 2 March, the day I’d been found. I discovered I’d been registered as Alice Oldstone, but although I’d always been Alice, I had no idea where the Oldstone came from, unless it was the name of the person who found me, or something like that. It wasn’t my social worker, because she signed the certificate as Janine Parker. I suppose someone had to.

  Alice Oldstone … It sounded quite Cold Comfort Farm, unlike Alice Rose, which I’d always felt was a bit Victorian miss.

  They say good things come in threes and following hard on the heels of the insurance money came number two: an offer from a large and well-established publisher for my next full-length novel, and they also wanted to do a deal for my self-published e-book novel and the two novellas.

  After all those years of submitting adult horror fairy tales and being rejected, now they were actually asking me! I thought about it and felt it might work to my advantage. Also, I rather liked the idea of print books that I could hold in my hands.

  But I really needed the guidance of an agent and I’d been firmly rejected by a few of those in the past, too. Then I remembered that I’d once actually met one.

  I didn’t just read horror, supernatural and fairy stories; I liked a bit of historical romance, too, especially by my favourite author, Eleri Groves. Just before I moved up to Scotland I’d been lucky enough to win the prize of an afternoon tea with her at Framling’s Famous Tearoom in London, along with two other fans. I’d travelled up from Cornwall by train, feeling very nervous, but Eleri was a lovely, friendly and interesting person, and it had all been great fun.

  I’d also looked forward to seeing the swish Framling’s Tearoom, and it had certainly been quite an experience. Everything had seemed to sparkle: the light bounced off the pristine white tablecloths, the rose-pink china and the silvery teapots. And the food was wonderful, especially the cakes, although I was a little critical of the Battenburg. It should have been soft squares of vanilla yellow and pale pink, wrapped in a good layer of marzipan, not a garish chequerboard of primrose and cerise, the squares stuck together with thick red jam and then the whole wrapped in marzipan so thin you couldn’t taste it. Mine was definitely better.