Lacybourne Manor

by Kristen Ashley

  Then there was the way the girls looked.

  And that was all Marguerite’s fault.

  There was a reason stodgy, bookish Bertie Godwin fell for flamboyant Marguerite Den.

  He’d told her straight out one day, “You’re sex on legs, woman.”

  If Mags had been any other kind of woman, that might have been offensive. But considering the fact that she adored her red-haired (then), tall, straight-backed, thin, balding (now), brilliant, adorable husband, she found it the highest of compliments.

  Easy to feel complimented by your very own husband, much harder to deal with when all the men who looked at your daughters obviously felt the same way.

  If Bertie had hair, he would have lost it after years of tearing it out worrying about his daughters. Even though he was a pacifist (he couldn’t have married his hippy wife if he was not) and found all firearms distasteful, that didn’t mean he didn’t eventually resort to resting a shotgun by the side of his front door whenever one of his daughters was picked up for a date (desperate times, desperate measures, as it were).

  Both girls were elegantly tall but they were not slender.

  They were curvy.

  Very curvy.

  Sibyl had a tumble of shining, golden, thick, waving hair, warm hazel eyes and peaches and cream skin with freckles dancing across her nose. Scarlett had a mass of curly, equally thick, auburn hair, flashing blue eyes and freckles dancing everywhere.

  Scarlett had poured her big heart into medical school.

  Sibyl had poured her big heart into everything.

  Bertie worried fiercely about his first born. She seemed not to be able to find her calling and the longer she waited for her true love, the more restless she became.

  She’d graduated from university with a degree in languages, speaking three. She took this knowledge and went straight to work for Customs and Immigration, trying to help struggling, poverty stricken foreigners in their efforts to get into the country. Red tape, small minds and politics frustrated her out of that job.

  She’d gone back to school to become a social worker and quickly threw herself into a job helping victims of domestic violence. That job nearly tore her apart, literally, when she became personally involved in her caseload. She parted ways with the charity, able to see that she was incapable of establishing appropriate boundaries considering she wanted to fight everyone’s battles.

  Bertie didn’t even want to remember what happened with the people at the animal shelter.

  This carried on for years, until Sibyl finally walked into their home in Boulder and asked Bertie and Mags if she could move to Brightrose Cottage.

  Brightrose Cottage was where the Godwins would spend a goodly amount of their school holidays. The cottage was located in a small clearing of a dense wood that seemed somehow removed but was still very close to the small seaside town of Clevedon in the beautiful English county of North Somerset. Bertie had bought the house run down and derelict. Even though surrounded by trees, the clearing allowed cheerful shafts of sunlight to penetrate and warm the nearly ancient, ruin. Even in disrepair, Bertie had fallen in love with the place and its location and happily anticipated the work ahead of him in restoring it.

  While Scarlett and Mags trundled off to Glastonbury, Bristol or other hippy hot spots, Bertie, with Sibyl a constant at his side, got down to the business of bringing Brightrose back to its original charm.

  Under the creaking, warped stairwell they’d uncovered the arched remains of a window that dated back to the early 1400s and together they designed the stained glass that would be refit. They’d painstakingly refinished the wide-planked floors and Jacobean doors. They’d run the thick, coarse ropes up the stairs to act as period-fitting banisters. They’d fitted the heavy wrought iron sconces to the walls and chandelier over the huge, gleaming, round dining room table. They’d scrubbed years of dust, grime and soot off the stones of the inglenook fireplaces in the living room and the dining room and the vast hearth in the kitchen. In all the rooms they’d patched, primed and painted the plaster. On occasion, they uncovered and exposed secret alcoves, embedded beams and Somerset brick. They’d scoured the local antique stores and dragged back heavy pieces of furniture, carefully bringing them back to their former glory and positioning them perfectly around the house. They’d refitted the awkward kitchen to be a cook’s (or, Bertie’s, to be precise) dream and built a lovely Summer House in the garden for Mags’s potions and witch paraphernalia.

  In the end, Brightrose Cottage was lovingly, beautifully and meticulously restored and it showed in every inch of the home. It was cosy, quaint, warm and inviting. You didn’t live at Brightrose, you didn’t visit Brightrose, you experienced Brightrose.

  At Sibyl’s announcement that she wanted to move to England, Bertie demanded, “What on earth are you going to do there?”

  Unfortunately, no matter how much he loved her; there were limits to his patience when it came to his daughter’s flightiness. She was thirty-one years old; she had to find an anchor.

  This, Bertie felt, should come in the form of a man (although he would never dream of uttering this notion in front of his feminist wife).

  But Sibyl didn’t allow herself to get close to men. Bertie found himself having the most unusual wish that his elder daughter could treat his sex the way his younger daughter did, taking them (quite terrifyingly frequently in Bertie’s opinion) and then leaving them with nary a thought.

  Sibyl seemed, as with most anything, to find the most damaged men she could collect (quite terrifying infrequently in Mags’s opinion). Then she bent over backwards, turned herself inside and out and then twisted herself in knots to sort out all their troubles. And then, even though most of them would have probably laid down their lives for her, she scooted them on their way so some other woman could sort out their new problems of having lost the glory that was Sibyl.

  “I’ve no idea, Daddy,” she’d answered his irate question, her voice small, so small he kicked himself for his sharp tone. “But I feel I need to be there. It’s the only place I’ve ever been truly happy and at peace.”

  Now, how could a father argue with that?

  Especially when that peace had been found mostly in his company and he knew exactly what she was talking about when it came to Brightrose Cottage.

  They’d then argued about how, since there was no mortgage on the property, she could live there without paying. They’d won her over by explaining that Scarlett’s medical school would cost more than the house was even worth and they’d signed the deeds over to her.

  Mags and Bertie were thrilled when Sibyl had found a part-time job in a local community centre working with old people and children (how much trouble could old people and children get her into?). She supplemented this with a small but soon lucrative business selling handmade bath oils, salts, lotions, shampoos, conditioners and divinely scented candles to exclusive shops and boutiques around Somerset (oils, salts and lotions didn’t live and breathe or have angry ex-husbands, which they felt was a good thing).

  It seemed Sibyl was more at peace in England, but neither Bertie nor Mags could shake the feeling that their daughter still seemed restless.

  And they knew exactly why.

  For, as the weeks, months and years passed, it became more and more clear that Sibyl’s abiding belief that her one true love would walk in and shine his light on her life was not going to happen.

  * * * * *

  Throughout the telling of the dream, Marguerite muttered, “Oh my,” and a couple of times, the stronger, “Oh my goddess”.

  Sibyl, as usual with her mother, didn’t leave anything out, including an abbreviated version of the very passionate activities that preceded her dream lover’s grisly murder.

  Nor the belief that this lover was her lover, the man of her dreams, the man who would change her life forever.

  Which, of course, led to the distressing fact that at the end he’d been killed.

  “What do you think it means, Mom?�
� Sibyl knew her mother read tarot cards, runes, tea leaves and palms as well as dreams. She wasn’t really good at doing any of this but she tried very hard.

  “You say this man was vivid in your dream?” Mags asked.

  “I could draw you a picture, that is, if I could draw,” Sibyl answered.

  “Describe him,” Mags demanded.

  Sibyl did, in great detail, leaving nothing out.

  “Oh my,” Mags whispered.

  “Will you stop saying, ‘oh my’ and tell me what you think this means?” Sibyl was at her wit’s end.

  Mags sighed hugely. “Honey, it means you need a man.”

  Sibyl rolled her eyes. Even being a militant feminist, her mother often solved many serious issues with the words “you need a man”. Mags was very into the healing power of sex.

  Then again, Sibyl’s mother had been lucky enough to marry the love of her life, had a completely faithful marriage and an active sex life that continued to this very day (a fact that Sibyl unfortunately knew all too well).

  In order to get her emotion in check, Sibyl counted to ten. Bertie had taught her this tactic years ago when it seemed clear that Sibyl would never learn to control her fiery temper.

  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it, spectacularly, did not.

  Then Sibyl said, “I need to get some sleep, I’ve got to be at the Centre tomorrow.”

  “Where’s the cat?” Mags asked.

  Sibyl had no idea why her mother would want to know where Bran was. “He’s wandered back in the room somewhere, why?”

  “Because that damned dog of yours would probably make any murderous scoundrel a cup of tea if he had opposable thumbs. The cat would scratch his eyes out.”

  Sibyl couldn’t help but laugh because this was true.

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you too, baby. Get some sleep, go out on the prowl this weekend and find yourself a blessed man, for goddess’s sake. No woman should endure a year long dry spell.”

  “Thanks for the advice, Mom,” Sibyl uttered the expression of gratitude but her tone said very clearly she didn’t mean it.

  Mags, as usual, ignored her daughter’s tone. “I’m serious, Sibyl. Even if it is only sex, or companionship, everyone needs it.” Sibyl remained silent at Mags’s tender urging. Mags sighed and then said, “See you soon, my darling girl. It’ll be April before you know it.”

  Finally.

  The thought of seeing her parents in April did make Sibyl feel happy and relaxed.

  “I hope so.” Again, Sibyl’s tone said exactly how she felt.

  After hanging up the phone, Sibyl left the shutters open. She lay in bed thinking of the dream, or more to the point, the man in the dream. He was immensely handsome, dark and… well, hot. His touch set her on fire, it was fevered and insistent and nearly worshipful. Until she was ripped from the bed, his presence seemed the only thing in the universe. There was nothing else but him, his hands, his mouth, his body. He was her very essence (except a male), her other part, her completion.

  Mallory broke into her thoughts by lumbering onto the high bed and settling in squeezing poor Bran and Sibyl to the edge leaving them hanging on for dear life. Somehow, even in this awkward but familiar position, she was finally able to allow her mind to calm enough to go to sleep.

  Even if she did do so with the image of the handsome, hard-jawed, dark-haired man burned on the backs of her eyelids.

  Chapter Three

  Reunion

  “Oh for the love of the goddess, get out of the car, will you?”

  Sibyl was addressing her dog and cat, who both, somehow, managed to fit themselves into her old, red MG convertible.

  Sibyl didn’t know how she’d managed to get herself in this terrible snag nor did she know how she managed consistently to find herself in a variety of terrible snags, something which happened with disturbing frequency.

  Her day had not gone well. It was a busy day which included Bingo Afternoon at the Pensioners Club of the Day Centre and try outs for the kids’ Annual Talent Show in the Community Hall. Sibyl was responsible for running all the myriad community programmes put on in the Centre and Hall. The Day Centre and Community Hall comprised (along with a vast kitchen, several small offices, some storage rooms, a stage and narrow backstage area) an enormous, but dilapidated old building on a Council Estate in a deprived area of Weston-super-Mare, a small, seaside city in the West Country.

  Early afternoon, after a two-course lunch had been served to the pensioners and many of them had gone home on the minibus the Council provided the estate, Sibyl had pulled back the sliding doors and exited the smoky Day Centre. She heard the Bingo call, “One, one, eleven, legs eleven,” sounding behind her coming from Marianne, the Bingo caller’s, hoarse, cigarette-clogged throat.

  Sibyl entered the vast Community Hall, sliding the doors shut behind her to see Jemma, her dearest friend in England, sitting in an old, beat up plastic chair and staring in horrified fascination at the stage. Sibyl glanced toward the stage to see what held Jemma’s attention only to witness four very young girls dressed in alarmingly alluring outfits far older than their tender years, gyrating their hips and lip-syncing to a popular song.

  Sibyl dragged a chair over to her friend and sat down to watch as the children carried out their inappropriately suggestive performance.

  The song ended and both Jemma and Sibyl sat in stunned silence.

  “Hey Miss Sibyl,” one of the girls called.

  “Hi Flower,” Sibyl called back, her voice sounding strained.

  “How’m I going to handle this?” Jemma muttered, sotto voce. “This is a family show.”

  Sibyl felt for her friend and tried not to grin in amusement at her predicament. Jemma ran a small youth project out of a side office of the Community Hall. Sibyl volunteered for the project and co-ordinated its efforts in the Community Centre. The girls were going to have to be told that they should do something more age appropriate and considering the fact that age ten was the new eighteen that was not going to be an easy task.

  In an effort to help her friend, Sibyl called, “Girls, can you come down here for a word?”

  The girls clattered eagerly off the stage. They did this because Jemma Rashid and Sibyl Godwin were the shining lights of these young girls’ often unhappy, promiseless lives.

  Jemma, petite, dark-haired and chocolate-eyed, was a local girl who was devoted to her community and even more devoted to her family. This kind of devotion was not experienced by many of the children on the Council Estate where they lived and where the Community Centre was located. Many had well-meaning but hard-working parents. Others had thoughtless or even abusive, lazy, wastrel parents. Devotion to family and community was a rare concept and one to be savoured whenever it became available.

  Sibyl, on the other hand, was American, a fact in and of itself that made the girls think she was the coolest of the cool. However they loved her accent – they loved her style, her spirit and her incredible beauty more. She was nice to them, always, and she had the best smile – a smile that could warm you from the very top of your head straight down to the tips of your toes.

  The girls arrived to stand before their two idols and they shifted on their feet, twisting their ankles awkwardly, waiting for the opinion that meant everything in their small worlds.

  Jemma looked at Sibyl and Sibyl returned her friend’s look. Both were at a loss.

  Then Sibyl had an idea, it was a lame idea but it was, at least, an idea.

  “I love that song!” she exclaimed. “Who chose that song?”

  “It was me!” Flower cried.

  Even raised by a hippy, Sibyl felt for the girl who had such a terrible name, a name she knew (because she heard) other children used to make fun of her. Flower’s mother was even flakier than Sibyl and had four children by four different fathers and another one on the way. Flower’s mother was always out partying and never home. The care of the entire family rested on Flower’s ten year old shoulders, evi
denced by the fact that her three brothers were, at that very moment, fighting in the back corner of the hall.

  “Good call, Flower,” Sibyl enthused, lying through her teeth.

  Jemma turned to her friend, her eyes round and her brows raised.

  “Though, I hear it all the time on the radio. All the time,” Sibyl continued.

  “I know, it’s very popular,” Katie, another of the girls announced, thinking this was a selling point.

  Sibyl particularly liked Katie, a bright girl with a head on her shoulders. She had both parents at home, her mother owned a small cleaning business and her father was currently redundant, trying to find a job and was a recovering gambler. Sibyl knew this because Katie’s father ran the local Gambler’s Anonymous meetings on Tuesday nights in the Day Centre (but, of course, Sibyl would never tell a soul this information).

  Sibyl went on, but gently, “By the time of the Talent Show, do you think people might have heard it a bit too much? Even you girls might be tired of it by then.”

  The girls looked at each other, not at all convinced since it was their most favourite song of all time. How could they ever be tired of it? Not in a million years.

  “I know!” Jemma exclaimed as if a thought just occurred to her. “Why don’t you let Sibyl find a song for you? Something American.”

  This caught the girls’ attention and four pairs of enthusiastic eyes collectively swung to Sibyl.

  It was Sibyl’s turn to stare at her friend, her eyes round, her eyebrows raised.

  “And,” Jemma dug Sibyl’s hole deeper, “she’ll help you with outfits and dance steps and everything.”

  Sibyl made a choking noise but swiftly hid it and smiled warmly at the girls. She was going to kill Jem, or maim her for life, or, at least, never speak to her again. Jemma was very artistic, knew all the latest songs and was a natural at choreography. Sibyl loved music, loved to dance, but had always done it to the beat of her own drummer and wouldn’t know how to create a choreographed dance if someone was forcing her to do it by shooting at her feet with pistols.

  Nevertheless, the girls excitedly agreed to this new development, happy to spend more time with their American Goddess.