I stood still, sensing rather than hearing Susan come up behind me. There was no dream-like quality to the moment, no rosy-hued hope that someone would appear out of the drizzle to rescue me. But that is exactly what happened. A woman was coming down the lane. A tall woman with wild black and orange hair billowing out around her shoulders.
She moved with long strides, unencumbered by the rain cape that reached almost to her ankles.
“Shadow, where are you, Shadow?” she called, looking to the left and right and on reaching our gathering asked if we had seen a dog. “He’s a lanky beast, rather like a greyhound with long hair. I left him in the garden at the Old Rectory when I arrived there about half an hour ago. He must have jumped the wall.”
“He was over at my gate a short time back.” Tom jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Haven’t seen him since.”
“Could have cut over into the fields.” Susan came up from behind me to stand with her fellows.
“I’d get after him quick.” Frank sucked in his cheeks and tapped the ground with his stick. “Traffic’s busy on the main road this time of day and the man that farms over the way doesn’t take kindly to dogs in his fields.”
“Yes, I wouldn’t waste time.” Irene was barely polite.
The woman’s eyes met mine. They were a startling grass-green, the sort one only reads about in romance novels, and they were made even more remarkable by being set under straight black brows. Could this be the village witch? Given my situation I didn’t really care if she was the Archduke of Transylvania. She spelled safety. And beyond that I felt an inexplicable feeling of familiarity that came not with an electrical jolt but as in a warm whisper from somewhere in my everyday world.
“Are you all right?” she asked me.
“No, I’m not,” I shot glances right, left, and center. “These people seem to be in a muddle about who I am and what I’m doing in Knells.”
“But surely”—her voice made me think of hot chocolate—“you’ll be the one they’re expecting at the Old Rectory.”
“They told you they were expecting me?”
“You don’t sound as though you’re looking forward to the visit.” She pushed her black and orange hair off her brow with long purple fingernails and I found myself thinking that it wasn’t so surprising, perhaps—that feeling of recognition. She was younger than Mrs. Malloy by a decade or more, in her early fifties was my guess, and didn’t appear to lay on the makeup with such a heavy trowel, but they were both undeniably theatrical in appearance.
“It’s hard to look forward to meeting people who have told their neighbors up and down the street a whole bunch of nasty things about me.”
“Really?” She looked from Irene and Tom to Frank and Susan.
“And with good reason,” growled Mrs. Muscle Woman in a floral pinny. “Those dear good ladies at the Old Rectory have every reason for hating the idea of having Miss Amelia Chambers invade their home.”
“Who?” I had the feeling that light might be about to dawn, although not, perhaps, without a struggle.
“Don’t go talking daft.” Tom wiped away the sheen of rain from his face and hunched his shoulders so that his neck disappeared into the collar of his plaid shirt.
“It’s no good pretending you’re not that horrible woman.” Irene sounded as belligerent as ever; but her blue eyes looked a little uncertain.
“She’s not, you know.” The woman with the black and orange hair spoke out ahead of me. “Her name’s Giselle Haskell and she’s an old family connection of those three women you’re so hell-bent on protecting. Her grandmother was their very dear friend and they have asked her to come for a visit.”
Silence emanated from the cottagers. Trees stopped rustling, and the rain slowed to the occasional drip ... drop, before stopping entirely. The question as to the nature of Miss Chambers’s role in the scheme of things hung on my lips, but I couldn’t get the words out. But while I wilted, Susan rallied.
“It’s easy to see how you figured out who she was. You with your psychic powers!” The words were punctuated by a sniff. A dainty sound so unsuited to her that I wondered for a wildly ridiculous moment if it might have been dubbed. Were we all in fact actors trapped in some horribly intellectual foreign film that would keep replaying itself until someone figured out what it was about?
“I didn’t have to resort to mind reading,” the woman with the black and orange hair replied to Susan. “Rosemary Maywood not only told me she was expecting Mrs. Haskell in the early afternoon, she showed me a photograph. That made recognizing her easy. Especially”—the green eyes sparkled—“as Miss Maywood also painted me a very clear picture of Amelia Chambers, who is due at their house at about four o’clock.”
“Miss Sneaky Pants,” I supplied.
“That was Miss Maywood’s name for her. Apparently she has brown hair, might be described as good-looking by some, but is painfully thin. Barely a size six at best.”
“Can’t be you, then,” Irene mumbled, looking at me out the corner of one eye.
“Never could abide a skinny minny, that’s what I used to tell the wife when she’d talk about going on one of those diets.” Frank also avoided looking directly at me. Instead he poked at a pothole in the road with his stick. “Haven’t been the same since my Jessie passed on last Christmastime. Can’t live with a woman close on fifty years and not feel it. Doctor said I’d like as not crack up. Isn’t that right, Tom?”
“Said it in my hearing, he did,” came the quick response of a man who knew how to grab an excuse and run with it. “And me and Susan and Irene are worn down to the emotional nub, keeping on the lookout to make sure you don’t do something stupid, Frank, like sticking your head in the gas oven on a Sunday and ruining a perfectly good rump roast and Yorkshire. Very nice it is of Mrs. Pettinger to see to your weekend meals and it wouldn’t do to go upsetting her, now would it?” Tom actually inched his head around to look me in the eye. “Her and the other two—Miss Maywood and Miss Dobson—have enough to contend with without any further distractions.”
“What Frank and Tom are trying to get across, Mrs. Haskell,” Susan chimed in with the force of a grandfather clock, “is that we’ve all been horribly distracted of late, what with one thing and that Chambers woman. We’re sorry for the gaff—mistaking you for her and being so narky about it, but I’m sure when you sit down and talk with them at the Old Rectory you’ll understand why feelings are running high.”
“Edna Wilks is worried about those three ladies. Not a bad old stick, she isn’t,” proffered Tom. “Got a bugger of a husband, which means he’ll live to be ninety. That sort always does unless someone pushes them off the twig.”
“He means Edna that works at the Old Rectory.” Susan showed me a conciliatory row of National Health teeth. “There four days a week, she is. It’s her Ted that does the heavy digging in the garden and cleans out the gutters when needed—that sort of thing. Thora Dobson does most of the outdoor work herself. Put most men to shame, she would.”
“Miss Chambers?” I prompted.
“Works for an evil property giant, Mrs. Haskell. One of the richest men in Britain, he is. Though why he had to fix his nasty sights on Knells is the question that’s kept me awake more nights than I care to think about.”
“Crafty bugger!” Frank growled down at his walking stick. “He’s had this ticking over in his head from way back, he has. Started buying up houses round here some twenty years gone. And like a ruddy fool when the wife took sick I says to myself, why not sell and take her for a holiday on the continent, like she always wanted?”
“Don’t go blaming yourself, Frank, just because you were the last holdout next to them at the Old Rectory.” Irene patted his shoulder and fixed her blue eyes on me. “One of the first to sell was the couple that owned the corner shop just off High Street on Hawthorn Lane. Apparently a rumor went buzzing round that a supermarket was going up not half a mile down by Gallows Cross and they panicked. It was before I moved here. But surprise, surprise, it didn’t happen, not then and not later! If you ask me, it was Amelia Chambers’s wicked employer that spun the story.”
“I was taken in.” Susan wiped her massive hands down the front of her damp pinny and shifted her gooseberry gaze between me and the woman with black and orange hair. “So was them that used to own Irene and Tom’s cottages. That awful man always paid more—almost double sometimes what the properties would have brought from any other buyer. And to sweeten the pot we all got to stay on if we wished at a twopenny rent.” Her face worked itself into a series of doughy shapes, like a ball of day-old pastry being thumped about by a furious pair of hands. “It seemed too good to be true. And of course it was.”
“You never suspected that there was a scheme afoot to buy up the village for some commercial project?” I asked.
“We’re a trusting lot,” said Frank heavily. “But that don’t mean we’re complete fools. We had the town council get an assurance in writing that nothing like that was in the works. But turns out it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on; not when you get out your magnifying glass to read every word of the fine print.”
“Couched in very clever terms,” put in Irene. “With his millions that man could hire the very best lawyers, couldn’t he? While all we’ve got down here is a nice old bumpkin of a solicitor to check things over. Eighty if he’s a day and asleep at his desk, you might say.”
“Me and the wife wanted to buy,” Tom assured me. “We’ve always owned our own house, never thought of doing otherwise. But, like Susan says, the rent was so cheap, it was almost a joke. At first we thought we’d just stay for a year or two, save the lolly and when we found the right place move out to Upper or Lower Thaxstead.” He looked up and down the lane glistening with rain and spangled with a sudden burst of sunshine, then over to where the fields spread gently out to be bordered at their furthest edge by a satin ribbon of road. “Trouble is, there’s something about Knells that wraps itself around your heart.”
“This village has been here since the fourteenth century.” Frank now drew a handkerchief that looked as though it hadn’t been washed since before his Jessie died, and blew his nose hard. “I was born in that cottage, same as my pa was. I played as a lad in the old churchyard and of occasion, when the devil took us, me and the Bradley lads that used to live at Number Four would shin up the drainpipe to peek inside the window of the rector’s study.”
“The famous rector who took off for the Belgian Congo?” I asked, hoping to get more information.
“No. His father-in-law. The old rector—Reverend McNair. Not William Fitzsimons. He’s the one that was curate and went out as a missionary to force religion down people’s throats, before coming back here to drum the pulpit for thirty years.”
Fitzsimons, I thought. Here was additional information to what Gwen and Barney had told me. My cousin Vanessa was a Fitzsimons. Her father, Wyndom, had been my mother’s brother, but his visits to the flat in St. John’s Wood had been few and far between.
“Anyhow”—Frank had the look of a man talking into the distant past—“that was our Sunday-afternoon entertainment back then. Reggie and John and me, we’d flatten our noses against the windowpane hoping to catch the Reverend doing something he oughtn’t, picking his nose or the like, that we could have laughed about with the other boys in Sunday school. But all we ever caught him doing was sucking on those cherry cough drops of his. Except for that time we saw him emptying his teacup into the aspidistra pot.”
Susan responded with a gloomy laugh. “Gladys Bradley, Edna Wilks’s mother, as was the daily help in those days, couldn’t make a decent cup of tea to save her life. Gnat’s pee is what my mother called it. Too weak to come out of the pot. But then tea wasn’t Gladys’s drink. My father wouldn’t allow her in the house. Been a Methodist, he had, before coming over to the Church of England on marrying my mother. Same as your dad, Frank. Thought old McNair didn’t talk enough about the evils of the bottle in his sermons.”
Frank was back to reminiscing about his boyhood pranks. “Could have frightened the old geezer to death if he’d caught the lads and me. Or ourselves if we’d been at the window the afternoon he was found dead at his desk. Heart attack it was. Sixty-five years old. Same as I am now.”
“Just days before his poor little daughter’s wedding.” Susan completed the sorry picture. “Sophia was her name. Only seventeen. And a nice girl. Far too young to be married off to anyone, let alone a dry old stick like William Fitzsimons. The whole village was heartsick when they heard what had happened to her. Dying out there in the wilds of Borneo.”
“I thought it was the Belgian Congo,” inserted Tom.
“All much of a muchness.” Susan waved a hand the size of a ham. “All jungles and swamps from the sound of them. And hot enough to fry you like a pan of chips. No wonder Sophia didn’t last a year.”
“She was my grandmother,” I said.
“Is that right?” Irene got back into the conversation.
“So you’re Mina’s daughter,” Frank said. “Not more than two or three she wasn’t when her father brought her back to the Old Rectory.”
“A sad-eyed little sprite was Mina, you couldn’t call hers a happy childhood, not with that old sour face for a father.” Susan was now looking at me, her features somewhat softened. “Those that thought Reverend McNair didn’t do enough thundering from the pulpit on the evils of drink got enough of it when William Fitzsimons took over. Foam at the mouth, he would. It was his favorite topic next to the evils of wanton women.”
“Some men shouldn’t have children.” Tom’s hair bristled.
How strange, I thought, to be learning more about my mother from strangers standing in a street than I had ever gleaned from her while I was growing up. I could feel the woman with the black and orange hair studying me intently from several feet away, but she didn’t move and I couldn’t.
“No one was surprised when Mina ran off to London and never came back after marrying that third or fourth cousin of hers,” Susan went on. “Good riddance to Knells, is what she must have thought. It wasn’t like she even had friends of her own age here. Kept shut away like one of those Victorian children, she was. Schooled her at home himself did her father. The only times she got to go out was to her ballet classes over in Rilling.”