“But Brendan’s here, isn’t he?” Rebecca had asked anxiously. “Daddy, Brendan’s not missing as well!”
“We should be so lucky,” her father replied. “The whole family’s here. Like rats who won’t leave a sinking ship.”
“St. John,” his wife murmured.
“Get inside!”
“But people will see me,” Rebecca wailed. “They’ll see the bride.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Rebecca.” Townley-Young disappeared into the church for another, utterly freezing two minutes, and came back with the announcement, “You can wait in the bell tower,” before he set off again to locate the vicar.
So at the base of the bell tower they were waiting still, hidden from the wedding guests by a gate of walnut balusters that was covered by a dusty, foul-smelling red velvet curtain whose nap was so worn that they could see the lights from the church chandeliers shining through. They could hear the rising ripple of concern as it flowed through the crowd. They could hear the restless shuffling of feet. Hymnals opened and shut. The organist played. Beneath their feet in the crypt of the church, the heating system groaned like a mother giving birth.
At the thought, Cecily gazed speculatively at her cousin. She’d never believed Rebecca would find any man fool enough to marry her. While it was true that she stood to inherit a fortune and she’d already been given that ghoulish monstrosity Cotes Hall in which to retire in connubial ecstasy once the ring was on her finger and the register was signed, Cecily couldn’t imagine how the fortune itself—no matter how great—or the crumbling old Victorian mansion—no matter how distinct its potential for revival—would have induced any man to take on a lifetime of dealing with Rebecca. But now…She recalled her cousin just this morning in the loo, the noise of her retching, the sound of her shrill “Is it going to be like this every goddamned morning?” followed by her mother’s soothing “Rebecca. Please. We’ve guests in the house.” And then Rebecca’s “I don’t care about them. I don’t care about anything. Don’t touch me. Let me out of here.” A door slammed. Running footsteps pounded along the upstairs passage.
Preggers? Cecily wondered idly at the time as she carefully applied mascara and smoothed on some blusher. She marvelled at the idea that a man might actually have taken Rebecca to bed. Lord, if that was the case, anything was possible. She examined her cousin for telltale signs of the truth.
Rebecca didn’t exactly look like a woman fulfilled. If she was supposed to blossom with pregnancy, she was adrift somewhere in the prebudding stage, somewhat given to jowls, with eyes the size and shape of marbles and hair permed into a helmet on her head. To her credit, her skin was perfect, and her mouth was rather nice. But somehow, nothing really worked together, and Rebecca always ended up looking as if her individual features were at war with each other.
It wasn’t really her fault, Cecily thought. One ought to have at least a titbit of sympathy for someone so ill-favoured by looks. But every time Cecily tried to dig up one or two empathetic stirrings from her heart, Rebecca did something to quash them like bugs.
As she was doing now.
Rebecca paced the tiny enclosure below the church bells, furiously twisting her bouquet. The floor was filthy, but she did nothing to hold her dress or her train away from it. Her mother did this duty, following her from point A to point B and back again like a faithful dog, with satin and velvet clutched in her hands. Cecily stood to one side, surrounded by two tin pails, a coil of rope, a shovel, a broom, and a pile of rags. An old Hoover leaned against a stack of cartons near her, and she carefully hung her own bouquet from the metal hook that would otherwise have been used to accommodate its cord. She lifted her velvet dress from the floor. The air was fusty in the space beneath the bells, and one couldn’t move in any direction without touching something absolutely black with grime. But at least it was warm.
“I knew something like this would happen.” Rebecca’s hands strangled her bridal flowers. “It’s not going to come off. And they’re laughing at me, aren’t they? I can hear them laughing.”
Mrs. Townley-Young made a quarter turn as Rebecca did the same, bunching more of the satin train and the bottom of the gown into her arms. “No one’s laughing,” she said. “Don’t worry yourself, darling. There’s simply been some sort of unfortunate mistake. A misunderstanding. Your father will put things right straightaway.”
“How could there be a mistake? We saw Mr. Sage yesterday afternoon. The last thing he said was, ‘See you in the morning.’ And then he forgot? He went off somewhere?”
“Perhaps there’s been an emergency. Someone could be dying. Someone wishing to see—”
“But Brendan held back.” Rebecca stopped pacing. Eyes narrowing, she looked thoughtfully at the west wall of the bell tower, as if she could see through it to the vicarage across the street. “I’d gone to the car and he said he’d forgotten one last thing he’d wanted to ask Mr. Sage. He went back. He went inside. I waited for a minute. Two or three. And—” She whirled, began her pacing again. “He wasn’t talking to Mr. Sage at all. It’s that bitch. That witch! And she’s behind this, Mother. You know she is. By God, I’ll get her.”
Cecily found this an interesting twist in the morning’s events. It held out the tantalising promise of diversion. If she had to endure this day somehow in the name of the family and with one eye fixed on her uncle’s will, she decided she might as well do something to enjoy her act of sufferance. So she said, “Who?”
Mrs. Townley-Young said, “Cecily,” in a pleasant but determined-to-discipline voice.
But Cecily’s question had been enough. “Polly Yarkin.” Rebecca said the name through her teeth. “That miserable little sow at the vicarage.”
“Vicar’s housekeeper?” Cecily asked. This was a twist to be explored at length. Another woman already? All things considered, she couldn’t blame poor old Brendan, but she did think he might have set his sights a bit low. She continued the game. “Gosh, what’s she got to do with anything, Becky?”
“Cecily, dear.” Mrs. Townley-Young’s voice had a less pleasant ring.
“She pushes those dugs into every man’s face and just waits for him to react to the sight,” Rebecca said. “And he wants her. He does. He can’t hide it from me.”
“Brendan loves you, darling,” Mrs. Townley-Young said. “He’s marrying you.”
“He had a drink with her at Crofters Inn last week. Just a quick stop before he headed back to Clitheroe, he said. He didn’t even know she’d be there, he said. He couldn’t exactly pretend he didn’t recognise her, he said. It’s a village, after all. He couldn’t act like she was a stranger.”
“Darling, you’re working yourself up over nothing at all.”
“You think he’s in love with the vicar’s housekeeper?” Cecily asked, widening her eyes to wear the guise of naiveté. “But, Becky, then why is he marrying you?”
“Cecily!” her aunt hissed.
“He isn’t marrying me!” Rebecca cried out. “He isn’t marrying anyone! We haven’t got a vicar!”
Beyond them, a hush fell over the church. The organ had stopped playing for a moment, and Rebecca’s words seemed to echo from wall to wall. The organist quickly resumed, choosing “Crown with Love, Lord, This Glad Day.”
“Mercy,” Mrs. Townley-Young breathed.
Sharp footsteps sounded against the stone floor beyond them and a gloved hand shoved the red curtain aside. Rebecca’s father ducked through the gate.
“Nowhere.” He slapped the snow from his coat and shook it from his hat. “Not in the village. Not at the river. Not on the common. Nowhere. I’ll have his job for this.”
His wife reached out to him but didn’t make contact. “St. John, good Lord, what’ll we do? All these people. All that food at the house. And Rebecca’s condi—”
“I know the bloody details. I don’t need reminding.” Townley-Young flipped the curtain to one side and gazed into the church. “We’re going to be the butt of every joke for the next dec
ade.” He looked back at the women, at his daughter particularly. “You got yourself into this, Rebecca, and I damn well ought to let you get yourself out.”
“Daddy!” She said his name as a wail.
“Really, St. John…”
Cecily decided this was the moment to be helpful. Her father would no doubt be rumbling down the aisle to join them at any time—emotional disturbances were a special source of delectation to him—and if that was the case, her own purposes would best be served by demonstrating her ability to be at the forefront of solving a family crisis. He was, after all, still temporising on her request to spend the spring in Crete.
She said, “Perhaps we ought to phone someone, Uncle St. John. There must be another vicar not far.”
“I’ve spoken to the constable,” Townley-Young said.
“But he can’t marry them, St. John,” his wife protested. “We need to get a vicar. We need to have the wedding. The food’s waiting to be eaten. The guests are getting hungry. The—”
“I want Sage,” he said. “I want him here. I want him now. And if I have to drag that low church twit up to the altar myself, I’ll do it.”
“But if he’s been called out somewhere…” Mrs. Townley-Young was clearly trying to sound like the voice of perfect reason.
“He hasn’t. That Yarkin creature caught me up in the village. His bed hadn’t been slept in last night, she said. But his car’s in the garage. So he’s somewhere nearby. And I’ve no doubt at all as to what he’s been up to.”
“The vicar?” Cecily asked, achieving horror while feeling all the delight of an unfolding drama. A shotgun wedding performed by a fornicating vicar, featuring a reluctant bridegroom in love with the vicar’s housekeeper and a frothing bride hellbent on revenge. It was almost worth having to be chief bridesmaid just to be in the know. “No, Uncle St. John. Surely not the vicar. Heavens, what a scandal.”
Her uncle glanced her way sharply. He pointed a finger at her and was beginning to speak when the curtain was drawn to one side once more. They turned as one to see the local constable, his heavy jacket flaked with snow, his tortoiseshell spectacles spotted with moisture. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and his ginger hair wore a cap of white crystals. He shook them off, running a hand back over his head.
“Well?” Townley-Young demanded. “Have you found him, Shepherd?”
“I have,” the other man replied. “But he’s not going to be marrying anyone this morning.”
CHAPTER ONE
WHAT DID THAT SIGN SAY? DID YOU SEE it, Simon? It was some sort of placard at the edge of the road.” Deborah St. James slowed the car and looked back. They’d already rounded a bend, and the thick lattice of bare branches from the oaks and horse chestnuts hid both the road itself and the lichenous limestone wall that had been edging it. Where they were now, the roadside’s demarcation consisted of a skeletal hedge, denuded by winter and blackened by twilight. “It wasn’t a sign for the hotel, was it? Did you see a drive?”
Her husband shook off the reverie in which he’d spent much of the long drive from Manchester airport, half-admiring the winter landscape of Lancashire with its subdued blend of moorland russets and farmland sage, half-brooding over the possible identification of the tool which had cut a thick electrical wire prior to its being used to bind together the hands and the feet of a female body found last week in Surrey.
“A drive?” he asked. “There might have been one. I didn’t notice. But the sign was for palm reading and a psychic in residence.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not. Is that a feature of the hotel you’ve not told me about?”
“Not that I know.” She peered through the windscreen. The road began to slope upwards, and the lights from a village shimmered in the distance, perhaps a mile farther on. “I suppose we haven’t gone far enough.”
“What’s the place called?”
“Crofters Inn.”
“Decidedly, then, the sign didn’t say that. It must be an advertisement for someone’s line of employment. This is Lancashire, after all. I’m surprised the hotel isn’t called The Cauldron.”
“We wouldn’t have come had it been, my love. I’m becoming superstitious in my advancing years.”
“I see.” He smiled in the growing darkness. Her advancing years. She was only twenty-five. She had all the energy and the promise of her youth.
Still, she looked tired—he knew she hadn’t been sleeping well—and her face was wan. A few days in the country, long walks, and rest were what she needed. She’d been working too much in the past several months, working more than he, keeping late hours in the darkroom and going out far too early on assignments only marginally connected to her interests in the first place. I’m trying to broaden my horizons, she would say. Landscapes and portraits aren’t enough, Simon. I need to do more. I’m thinking of a multimedia approach, perhaps a new show of my work in the summer. I can’t get it ready if I don’t get out there and see what’s what and try new things and stretch myself and make some more contacts and…He didn’t argue or try to hold her back. He just waited for the crisis to pass. They’d weathered several during the first two years of their marriage. He always tried to remember that fact when he began to despair of their weathering this.
She pushed a tangle of coppery hair behind her ear, put the car back into gear, and said, “Let’s go on to the village, then, shall we?”
“Unless you’d like to have your palm read first.”
“For my future, you mean? I think not, thank you.”
He’d intended it as nothing. From the false brightness of her reply, he knew she hadn’t taken it that way. He said, “Deborah…”
She reached for his hand. Driving, her eyes on the road, she pressed his palm to her cheek. Her skin was cool. It was soft, like the dawn. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is our time together. Don’t let me mess it about.”
But she didn’t look at him. More and more, at tense moments she wasn’t meeting his eyes. It was as if she believed that the act of doing so would give him an advantage she did not want him to have, while all the time he felt every single advantage between them was hers.
He let the moment pass. He touched her hair. He rested his hand on her thigh. She drove on.
From the palm reader’s sign, it was little over a mile into the small village of Winslough, which was built along the acclivity of a hill. They passed the church first—a Norman structure with crenellation on its tower and along its roofline and a blue-faced clock permanently displaying the time as three twenty-two—then the primary school, then a row of terraced houses facing an open field. At the peak of the hill, in a Y where the Clitheroe Road met the west-east junctions leading to Lancaster or to Yorkshire, Crofters Inn sat.
Deborah idled the car at the junction. She wiped at some condensation on the windscreen, squinted at the building, and sighed. “Well. It’s not much to speak of, is it? I thought…I was hoping…It sounded so romantic in the brochure.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s from the fourteenth century. It’s got a great hall where they used to hold a Magistrate’s Court. The dining room’s got a timbered ceiling, and the bar hasn’t been changed in two hundred years. The brochure even said that—”
“It’s fine.”
“But I wanted it to be—”
“Deborah.” She finally looked at him. “The hotel’s not the point of our being here, is it?”
She looked back at the building. In spite of his words, she was seeing it through the lens of her camera, weighing each area of composition. How it was situated on its triangle of land, how it was placed in the village, how it was designed. She did it as a second-nature response, like breathing.
“No,” she said at last, although she sounded reluctant. “No. It’s not the point. I suppose.”
She drove through a gate at the inn’s west end and stopped in the car park behind it. Like all the other structures in the village, the building was a combination of the
county’s tan limestone and millstone grit. Even from behind, aside from white woodwork and green window boxes that were filled with a motley array of winter pansies, the inn bore no truly distinguishing features and no adornments. Its most significant distinction seemed to be an ominous portion of concaved slate roof that St. James earnestly hoped wasn’t over their room.
“Well,” Deborah said again with some resignation.
St. James leaned towards her, turned her to face him, and kissed her. “Did I mention I’ve been wanting to see Lancashire for years?”
She smiled at that. “In your dreams,” she replied and got out of the car.
He opened the door, feeling the cold, damp air lap against him like water, smelling woodsmoke and the peaty odours of wet earth and decomposing leaves. He lifted out his braced bad leg and thumped it to the cobbles. There was no snow on the ground, but frost rimed the lawn of what would otherwise be a seasonal beer garden. It was abandoned now, but he could imagine it filled with summertime tourists who came to walk on the moors, to climb the hills, and to fish in the river that he could hear but not see, coursing noisily some thirty yards away. A path led towards it—he could see this as well since its frosty flagstones reflected the lights at the rear of the inn—and although the inn’s property clearly did not include the river, a boundary wall had an access gate built into it. The gate was open and as he watched, a young girl hurried through it, stuffing a white plastic bag into the over-size anorak she was wearing. This was neon orange, and, despite the girl’s considerable height, it hung down to her knees and drew attention to her legs which were encased in enormous, muddy green Wellingtons.
She started when she saw Deborah and St. James. But rather than hurry by them, she marched right up and, without ceremony or introduction, grabbed the suitcase that St. James had lifted from the boot of the car. She peered inside and snatched up his crutches as well.
“Here you are,” she said, as if she’d been searching them out by the river. “Bit late, aren’t you? Didn’t the register say you’d be here by four?”