The storm hurled itself against the blurred contours of the house like an angry sea. Thunder roared, lightning flared, and the wind moaned, subsiding for a moment, then whooshing back with renewed ferocity. Clouds drifted across the bruised and bloated sky. It was early afternoon, but it might well have been the dead of night, fit only for human beasts of prey and the shadowy vigils of unholy spirits denied respite beneath a sanctified churchyard earth.
A tree branch brushed my arm with skeletal fingers as I scuttled across the courtyard after parking my car in the old stable. I screeched but did not panic, until a wildly flapping moon-colored thing made a dive for me as I neared the back door. Stumbling sideways, I still became entangled in its clammy folds. No bird this, but a shroud in search of a body. (Well… it could be I overreacted a little. My husband, Ben, claims I do that sometimes.) Having fought my way free, I reassessed the situation. Perhaps I was merely dealing with a sheet blown off the line. But a very nasty evil-minded sheet, for sure.
I was glad to step into my bright kitchen at Merlin’s Court. Setting down my handbag and packages, I peeled off my raincoat and hung it on a hook in the alcove, then shook out my damp hair before weaving it back into a plait. Living on our part of the English coast, with its cliffs and rocky shoreline, we are prone to ferocious storms. But I had stayed up late the previous evening devouring the final gripping chapters of The Night Visitor, so it wasn’t surprising that my imagination had started to run amuck on the drive home through the blinding rain.
Tobias the cat was seated on the broad window ledge, where he is never supposed to be. Typically, he looked at me as though I were the one about to get into trouble. Apart from his twitching whiskers there was no sign of life. All was neat and tidy, a kitchen on its best behavior. The copper pans hung in gleaming precision from their rack. Not a cup or saucer was out of place on the Welsh dresser. No stray crumbs on the quarry-tiled floor. No plastic horse tethered to the rocking chair. No sign or sound of husband or children. They had left for London in the Land Rover the previous morning with scarcely a backward wave. The twins, Tarn and Abbey, age seven, and five-year-old Rose were to spend the next fortnight with Ben’s parents. I didn’t expect him home till early evening. The unaccustomed quiet was unnerving. Even my household helper, Mrs. Malloy, was conspicuous by her absence. Either she was occupied somewhere else in the house or she had thrown in the duster and gone home. Tobias gave me a smug look from the windowsill, as if to say how pleasant it was just being the two of us. I made myself a cup of tea and poured him a saucer of milk. He was right. What could be cozier? A woman alone with her cat, a cup of tea, and a plate of digestive biscuits.
The rain was still hammering down in a most unsuitable way for July as I seated myself at the scrubbed wood table. When a few minutes had gone by without a disembodied voice asking me to pass the sugar, I forgave the weather and was glad I had paid the second-hand bookshop in the village a visit. Under the Covers is a great place to forage for out-of-print titles. I had even grown quite keen on the smell of mildew that assaults one on entering its quiet gloom.
That day I had been buying not only for myself but also for the thirteen-year-old daughter of Ben’s cousin Tom Hopkins. I’d only met young Ariel once, a couple of years previously, at my in-laws’ flat above their greengrocer’s shop in Tottenham. Ariel was in the company of her paternal grandmother. Oblivious to the tea tray with its assortment of jam tarts and iced cakes, she’d sat with feet and hands together, looking bored to rigor mortis. Seated next to her, I did my best to bridge the child-adult gap. Mercifully, just as I was ready to abandon all hope of drawing her out of the sulks and putting something like a smile on her face, she informed me somewhat fiercely-clearly daring me to approve-that she liked black-and-white movies: especially ones set in spooky old houses. I responded casually that I enjoyed them too and didn’t object to novels of the same sort. What followed was a pleasant half-hour chat. Ariel stopped curling her lip and asked me for names of authors and titles. By the time her grandmother intimated it was time to leave, I was quite sorry to say good-bye to the whey-faced girl and asked if she would like me to sort through my collection and send her a couple of the books we had discussed. Unless her parents would object, I added responsibly.
“It’ll be all right with Dad,” said Ariel.
“And your mother?”
“Betty’s my step.” A toss of the sandy pigtails. “She won’t care what you send me.”
Not particularly heartened by this information, I got the Hopkinses’ address from my mother-in-law and a few weeks later sent off a package of books, addressing it to Tom and Betty, with a letter enclosed. I never heard back from either of them. But Ariel wrote to thank me with an enthusiasm that suggested the genie had been let out of the ink bottle. On paper she was a different child, impish and insightful. She had loved The Curse of St. Crispin’s so much that she was dying-underlined three times-to read everything else by its author. That was the beginning of our correspondence, and it became an enjoyable one for me. Over the course of the next eighteen months, I sent Ariel several more books and always looked forward to discussing them with her in letters.
Then something earthshaking happened to the Hopkins family: Tom and Betty won the lottery. They sold their semidetached home in a London suburb and bought a huge house somewhere in the north. Ben and I learned this information from his mother, but even she was not privy to their new address. And Ariel’s grandmother, who would have been a likely source of this information, had died the previous year.
Now, on this day of storm, it was six months since I had heard from Ariel. I had been thinking about her quite a lot recently, wondering how she was adjusting to her new life. Given my favorite choice of reading matter, I knew all too well that the sudden acquisition of great wealth could be a murky matter, fraught with perils for the child heiress. Ben felt that if Tom and Betty did not want people to know their whereabouts, that was their prerogative. Even so, he had agreed to ask his mother, on his current visit, if she had any updated information on where the family of three had gone to earth.
There was always the chance, I had explained while looking fervently into his marvelous blue-green eyes, that Ariel was desperately hoping I would get back in touch with her. But I had not pressed the point. Ben isn’t much of a fiction reader. He prefers cookery books, which is understandable, seeing that he has written half a dozen of his own, in addition to owning and managing a restaurant named Abigail’s in our village of Chitterton Fells.
Pouring myself another cup of tea, I realized I’d finished all the biscuits. Time slips by so fast when one is Ellie Haskell; blissfully married to the handsomest man outside of a gothic novel, with three lively children and Tobias to round out the family. Having decided to take early retirement, Tobias is underfoot much of the day, meowing about how much better things were when he was young. As if on cue, he demanded a second saucer of milk.
“Don’t interrupt,” I told him sternly. “I am busy relaxing.”
And now came another distraction. Mrs. Malloy entered through the hall door, wafting a feather duster. She was looking her majestic best in a purple taffeta dress and an enormous pair of rhinestone earrings that would have done her proud at a cocktail party hosted by a royal duchess, had Chitterton Fells gone in for such swanky affairs. Her jet-black hairdo with its two inches of white roots is always her chief fashion statement. She also goes in for iridescent eye shadow, lashings of mascara, brick-red rouge, and purple-passion lipstick. That’s Mrs. Malloy. And, as I have said on occasion to Tobias, who admires her fondness for fur coats, all credit to her.
Nothing would induce Her Royal Personage to slop around as I was presently doing in an old green skirt and sweater and no makeup. She routinely takes me to task for not putting my best face forward, explaining that looking like a loaf of bread is no way to keep a husband when there are plenty of fancy cakes on little paper doilies out there. Regrettably, I always let this go in one ear and out the other, telling myself smugly that we can’t all be slaves to fashion. Not being clairvoyant, I did not foresee the danger of ignoring such pearls of wisdom. Oh, woe to the woman who sticks her nose in a book and forgets that real life is not always destined for Happily Ever After.
“I thought you’d left for the day,” I said, getting to my feet.
“What? Be drowned in that storm when no right-minded person would put a cat out in it?”
Tobias looked grateful. Had there been a saucer of milk handy, I am sure he would have offered her a slurp.
Her Mightiness began clattering around the kitchen in her six-inch heels, opening up cupboard doors as if hoping to surprise miniature burglars lurking behind the plates. The noise she made was not Beethoven to the ears, but then she has never been a woman to fade willingly into the next county.
Irritating as this can be, I’ve grown fond of her over the years. We’ve shared some good times and a number of adventures in which we have, more by luck than skill, managed to unmask evildoers bent on reducing England’s population one or two murder victims at a time. A recent escapade had found us on unauthorized assignment to a surly gumshoe named Milk Jugg. Our participation was the result of a silly mistake that could have happened to any pair of well-meaning busy-bodies. Milk had not been overwhelmingly grateful. We had, however, solved the murder and received a nice little mention in the local newspaper. Mrs. Malloy had sent a copy to George, her son by one of her husbands. (I couldn’t remember whether it was the third or the fourth-but then, neither could she.)
Now, mindful of my responsibilities as employer, I poured her a cup of tea and got out more biscuits.
“It’s good of you to stay so late this afternoon getting the house really shipshape.” I beamed my warmest smile.
“And nice of you, Mrs. H, to take the trouble to ignore me when I’ve been telling you the same thing twice over. Warms the cockles of me heart, it does, but then it never takes much to make me feel appreciated.” Mrs. Malloy teetered into full view on those stilt heels to strike a dramatic pose, one hand on her hip, the other still holding the feather duster aloft.
“I’m sorry. What have you been saying?”
“Nothing that important, Mrs. H.”
Now I felt guilty, something I do rather well. Had I been into nonfiction, I could have written a bestseller on female neuroses, to the accompaniment of a great many footnotes. Mrs. Malloy is devoted to the children, and it helps enormously to be able to leave them with her when Ben and I occasionally go out in the evening. My cousin Freddy, who lives in the cottage at the end of the drive and is second in command at Abigail’s, also helps out in this regard. Except when, as was currently the case, he is desperately in love with some hapless female who fails to grasp that he is already married to his motorcycle.
“I didn’t mean to ignore you,” I told Mrs. Malloy through a mouthful of digestive biscuit. “I was thinking about The Night Visitor and that ghost child, Oriole, tapping on the window when Miss Flinch was aching to be alone with thoughts of Sir Giles’s refusal to explain his avoidance of a certain corner of the shrubbery on the anniversary of his wife’s disappearance.”
It was the right ploy for making amends. Mrs. Malloy had recommended the book to me. She is every bit as keen on this sort of literary gem as are Ariel and I. Among our favorites are those set in Yorkshire, featuring-nine times out of ten-the orphaned heroine. A young woman who leaps at the chance to become a governess in a decaying mansion where Something Unspeakable is shut away in the north tower and melancholy music drifts up from the crypt. Her charge is frequently a plain child who has not been right in the head since taking a peep through the lepers’ squint and seeing Nanny stuff a body into the priest hole. Given these unhappy circumstances, along with the fact that he only inherited Darkwood Hall because his twin brother drowned in the hip bath, the master of the house tends to be somewhat morose. Sadly, this prevents him from telling the heroine (when first encountering her at dead of night on the secret staircase) that he adores her pale, prim face. Behind the masterful control of his emotions is a searing need. He yearns to explain that if she can overlook his limp, his missing ear, and the scar slashed across his right cheek, he will be willing to forget that his first wife died in childbirth and ravish her on the spot.
Setting the teacups on the kitchen table, I wondered if Lord Darkwood would have doted on the governess quite so passionately were she the one needing an immediate appointment with a plastic surgeon. Probably not. But never mind: there is something utterly beguiling about the image of a man tortured by the realization that he is unworthy of even a stray smile from the woman he adores. It is one of those vagaries of life that enable Ben to look fabulous in old blue jeans and a sweatshirt while I, a part-time interior designer dressed much the same way, look like an assortment of fabric swatches I would avoid using in my work.
Suddenly the air was rent by a piercing scream. It was only the kettle whistling. Mrs. Malloy, however, wilted into a chair as if she had received a mortal shock of her life, and only flickered back to life when I passed her a cuppa.
“I’m a bit unsettled today.” She smiled wanly up at me as she stirred in the third spoonful of sugar. “Yesterday evening I went on a journey… a long long journey.”
“Shopping in Pebble Beach?” I asked, receiving a scowl in return.
“It wasn’t that sort of journey. Something quite different. It’s what I was wanting to tell you from the moment you walked in, but it soon became clear you wasn’t listening.”
“Well, I am now.” Seating myself opposite her, I shifted the refilled plate of digestive biscuits her way. “Don’t keep me in suspense. You’re sounding delightfully mysterious.”
Mrs. Malloy mellowed visibly. “I went to see a psychic named Madam LaGrange. My friend Maisie from the Chitterton Fells Charwomen’s Association had been to her and said she was quite wonderful. Of course, she charges quite a bit…”
“Why of course?”
“She’s a specialist.”
“Not your ordinary general practitioner?” I was wondering if another digestive biscuit would cross my path in the near future. Mrs. Malloy had put a couple on her plate and then proceeded rudely to ignore them. Not that I was one to talk about good manners. If I’d paid attention when she was trying to talk to me earlier, I would already have the scoop on Madam La-Grange. Probably named Mrs. Smith when serving up hubby’s dinner instead of staring into her crystal ball.
“Oh, she does some standard fortune-telling, because that’s what most people want.” Mrs. M smirked disparagingly. “She told me, at no extra charge, to be careful of standing at bus stops when it’s thundering and lightning because she saw a woman with an umbrella take a tumble and go under a double-decker.”
“Cheerful!”
“She didn’t think it was me, more likely someone I knew or would meet in the future.”
That’s right, Madam LaGrange, I thought, keep it vague.
“She also said”-Mrs. Malloy pursed her butterfly lips and stared into space-“that a woman of my acquaintance whose first name begins with E should stop living in a dream world, seeing as her hubby’s old girlfriend is going to show up and this time around she’ll stop at nothing to get him.”
Suddenly, I wished that Madam had been a bit more vague. Did it make any difference that my name was really Giselle, although almost everyone called me Ellie?
“Or she may have said beginning with a 5.” Mrs. Malloy waved a negligent hand. “I can’t say as I was listening that close, being eager to get on with the journey back to one or more of me past lives.”
“Oh!” I stared at her, my momentary unease banished.
“That’s Madam LaGrange’s specialty. Transgression is what she calls it.”
“I thought the term was regression. Never mind. What do I know?” Truth be told, I was a little hurt. Mrs. Malloy and I are not joined at the hip, but we share more than a working relationship. She must have known I would be interested in discovering whether I’d ever hobnobbed with Cornish smugglers or queued up in a past life to get the Bronte sisters’ autographs. Unfortunately, being grown-up means having to rise above wounded feelings. “Tell me what happened. I’m dying of curiosity. Did Madam LaGrange hypnotize you?”
“ ’Course not! She told me I’d have to take a couple of trains and then a taxi the rest of the way!” Mrs. Malloy curled her purple lip, before settling back in her chair and sipping her tea.
“Thanks for the sarcasm. I meant, did it work? Did she succeed in putting you into a trance?”
“Madam LaGrange said I was a very good subject. I went all lovely and floaty, like I was made out of gossamer.”
“Weren’t you nervous?” I asked, inching the plate of biscuits toward me.
“Well, I was a bit at first, Mrs. H, sitting in that room with the curtains drawn and dance-of-the-seven-veils music piping up from the old-fashioned gramophone. But then I decided it was silly to get the willies over a little thing like being sent back in time. What’s the worst that could happen? That’s what I said to meself.”
“You could have found yourself stuck back in the eleventh century without your toothbrush or a change of underwear. What if Madam hadn’t been able to bring you back? I’m not sure it does to play around with this stuff.”
“Thought you might see it that way. It’s why I didn’t say anything when I got here this morning! Or could it be you’re jealous?” Mrs. Malloy stuck her nose in the air.
I felt myself blush. It was true. I’d always had a sneaking desire to discover if my interest in gothic romances sprang from having once been a Victorian damsel in distress. Had I glided down the turret stairs at dead of night with only the pale moon’s glance to light my way toward the priest hole in trembling hope of finding skeletal evidence of mayhem at the manor? Had I mustered the moral fortitude to spurn the master’s ardent advances and remind him that his invalid wife still clung to life on the edge of her chaise longue and he could never divorce her because he was a Roman Catholic and the scandal would kill his mother? Had I displayed the heroism of a Jane Eyre in refusing to become his mistress? That would depend, I supposed, on whether the darkly handsome master looked anything like Ben when he slowly removed his dressing gown. Would there be tears in his eyes and that wonderfully husky note of desperation in his voice when he begged me to let him set me up in a fabulously expensive apartment in Paris?
I was picturing the endless nights of forbidden passion, the crystal chandelier that cast its radiant glow over the Louis Quatorze bed, the tumbled silk sheets, and the dear little poodle on its monogrammed cushion when Mrs. Malloy intruded with blatant insensitivity into this most private of moments.
“You’re the one off in a trance, Mrs. H!”
“Just thinking your visit to Madam LaGrange must have been an interesting experience.” I poured us both another cup of tea. “Did you find out if you have lived before?”
“After she brought me out of the trance, Madam LaGrange told me I’d never stopped talking the whole time.”
“How much did you remember?”
“No need to sound suspicious, Mrs. H! The veil falls back into place. That’s the way it works. Anyway, it turns out I was in the circus in two previous lives. The first time I was married to one of the clowns and the mother of seven. So it didn’t leave much time for making it up the ladder-”
“To the trapeze?”
Mrs. Malloy eyed me coldly. “Put it that way if you like. The ladder of success is what I was getting at.”
Did the tattered remnants of disappointed ambition explain why she’d emphasized early in our relationship that she didn’t do any jobs that required going up stepladders with a bucket? “Seven children.” I sympathized. “No wonder George is your one and only this time around.”
“My second life in the circus was lots better. I had a thing going with the ringmaster and the man that trained the elephants, but mostly I fixed on me career as a tightrope walker.” Mrs. Malloy attempted, but failed, to look modest.
I visualized her walking the length of our clothesline in her ultra-high heels and a taffeta dress, not a hair out of place. The mind boggled.
“Any other lives in your resume?”
“Well, yes, so Madam LaGrange said, but I’m not so sure about the last one.” Mrs. M eyed me now with a mixture of awkwardness and defiance. “Leastways, not like I was about the first two.”
“The circus ones do sound completely credible.” I tried not to look at Tobias, who was clearly smirking behind the paw with which he was pretending to wash his face.
“I got the faintest suspicion that Madam LaGrange might be making up stories at the end.”
“No!” If a cat could guffaw, Tobias would have done so. I was truly shocked. Were Madam a fake, she might at least have had the integrity to appear genuine and not crush her client’s fantasies as they flourished. We all need a little escapism, even when completely content with our lives. I with my idyllic marriage and wonderful children was proof of that. And it hadn’t taken long after getting to know Mrs. Malloy to realize she hid the heart of a romantic within her taffeta bosom.
She now studied the hanging rack of copper pans. “It crossed me mind, Mrs. H, that Madam LaGrange could be working from bits and bobs of information I’d given her about meself when I rang up to make the appointment. Seeing that was last week, I couldn’t remember for certain what I’d said about this or that, but I’m almost sure I told her me maiden name.”
“Is that important?”
“I’m getting to that. There we was yesterday evening, sitting at the table with the shadows drifting about and that Taj Mahal music piping away like it wouldn’t stop even if you smashed the gramophone. All properly spine-tingling, I was thinking, Mrs. H, when it came to me that Madam LaGrange seemed a mite bored. Once or twice I caught her looking at her watch, and all at once she says that me last incarnation, before this one, was as a cat in the late eighteen hundreds.”
“A cat?” I reached yet again for the plate of biscuits. This required at least two digestives. “I suppose that would explain why you’re so fond of fur coats. What sort of cat? A pedigree or a regular old-” I was silenced by a baleful glare from Tobias.
“Old tabby? That’s what you was going to ask, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Malloy’s false eyelashes twitched.
“No, I wasn’t!” I said, through a splutter of crumbs. “Not that there is anything wrong with being a tabby. Tobias is one”-I shifted my chair away from him-“and he’s always thought he was the whiskers. I’ve known lots of other tabbies, wonderful people-I mean cats-all of them. Every one, without exception! But I am sure you were a pedigree, Mrs. Malloy. Probably a Persian. Or a Siamese?”
“Tabby was me maiden name.”
“Oh!”
Mrs. Malloy sighed deeply. “I think it’s one of the reasons I got married so many times, trying to put the sound of it as far behind me as possible. You’ve no idea, Mrs. H, what it’s like to have a name that makes you the butt of spiteful jokes.”
She was wrong about that. Being named Giselle is not conducive to happiness when you are a plump child completely lacking in grace and athletic ability. There had been no malice aforethought on my parents’ parts. It was understandable that my mother had hoped I would follow in her satin shoes and become a ballerina and that my father had naively assumed I would inherit her ethereal beauty rather than his portly build. Having soon realized their mistake, they had done their fond best to put matters right by adjusting to an Ellie who was not born to pirouette. Even so, there had been no getting away from my full name completely. It is impossible to keep dark secrets from your schoolmates, especially the ones whose mission in life is to make you wish your parents kept you prisoner on a diet of bread and water.
“I can’t count the times the other kiddies teased me, calling out, ‘Here, puss, puss! Come and have some Kittycat, puss!’ ” Mrs. Malloy sat staring into space. “But I’ve got to remember as how it’s been worse for me sister, not getting married even once and so being stuck with the name Tabby for life.”
Now I was the one to stare. Mrs. Malloy had never previously said peep to me about having a sister. “I thought you were an only child.”
“We don’t speak. Haven’t done for years.”
“A quarrel?” I was always good at suggesting the obvious.
“Me and Melody never did get on.”
“Melody?” I found this harder to grasp than the concept of Mrs. Malloy being a tightrope walker… or even a cat. There is that little matter of age appropriateness when it comes to names. Mrs. Malloy, although she would have denied it to the death, was in her early sixties. Presumably, her sister was of a similar age and should by rights have been a Barbara or a Joan or maybe a Margaret. A Melody is never supposed to be older than fifteen, either in books or in real life. It isn’t possible to believe there will ever be nursing homes peopled with residents named Tiffany, Megan, or Stacie.
“She’s older than me by a couple of years. But never no maturity. Our relationship went from bad to worse when we was teenagers. She accused me of stealing her boyfriend.”
“Did you?”
“’Course not!” Much affronted, Mrs. Malloy sat up straighter in her chair. “I borrowed him, is all. And only for an afternoon, at that. But you’d have thought when I gave him back it was with tea stains all over him. Such a carry-on I got. Miss Melody Dramatic, I called her.”
“If she was in love with him-”
“Nothing of the sort. I don’t think he’d ever washed his neck. He was just someone to get Melody’s mind off the other one.”
“Unsuitable?”
“A doomed relationship from the word go.”
“Oh, dear! A married man?”
“Mr. Rochester.”
“As in…?” I’d stuck my elbow in my saucer and toppled the cup, much to the chagrin of Tobias, who was sitting on my lap.
“That’s him. Edward Fairfax Rochester.”
The man against whom all other gothic heroes must be judged and the majority of them found wanting! The storm had picked up again. Thunder rolled and rumbled in the distance. Lightning flashed. Rain rattled against the kitchen windowpanes. When it ended, would we be left with a blighted oak on the grounds?
“Melody couldn’t think how to get Mr. R to leave Jane Eyre for her. She said no one else would ever come close.”
Some might think this a little odd, but having felt much the same way before meeting Ben, my heart went out to the unhappy Melody. I found myself wondering if it might not be possible for her to begin life again, even at this late date, as a primly garbed governess-after establishing, of course, that there was no mad wife in the attic.
“You shared a love of great romantic fiction. Doesn’t that count for something?” I asked Mrs. Malloy.
“After sobbing herself to sleep for five years, it seems Melody turned in her library card and vowed never again to darken the threshold of a bookshop. All her cooped-up passion went into learning to type. She’s worked for the last forty years as secretary to an accountant in Yorkshire, some small town not all that far from Haworth.”
“Home of Charlotte Bronte and the rest of her famous family! But why would your sister torture herself that way? Why not get as far away as possible from painful associations with the man of her dreams?”
“Never happy unless she’s miserable herself and depressing everyone around her. The boyfriend moved home and never again let go of his mother’s apron strings. I’ve not met her boss, but my guess is she’s done a number on him too.”
“That sounds unkind, Mrs. Malloy.” Tobias wandered off my lap onto hers.
“I suppose it does.” She had the grace to look shamefaced. “Truth be told, it bothers me the way I never could stand her. My chums in the Chitterton Fells Charwomen’s Association get on me all the time. ‘Your own sister,’ they say, ‘and the only contact you have with her is exchanging Christmas cards. Go and see her. Make up your differences!’”
“They’re right.”
“You would say that, Mrs. H! But there’s no explaining it even to meself. Just looking at Melody’s photo gets me hopping mad. That daft expression on her face! Like she’s afraid if she don’t smile just right the camera will zoom in and suck off her nose. I’m not saying as I’m proud of it, but I remember looking at her when she was two years old and thinking, You’re a miserable little cow, Melody Tabby, and always will be.”
I was doing some laborious arithmetic. “Wouldn’t you have been a newborn at the time? You said she was a couple of years older than you.”
“Did I?” The rouged cheeks turned a deeper brick-red. “Maybe it’s the other way round. Melody always seemed elderly. By the age of nine you’d have thought she’d started collecting her pension and going on coach rides to Margate with a bunch of gray-haired old biddies. Still, I knew girls at school like that and they didn’t drive me up the wall quite the same way. But then again, none of them was me own sister. I can see what you’re thinking, Mrs. H, but it wasn’t a case of having me nose put out of whack when she came along. This was something different, almost like…”
“Go on!” I urged.
“Well, almost like… I’d known her before.”
“Before what?”
Mrs. Malloy heaved a pained sigh that inflated her bosom and conveyed clearly that I was being even dimmer than usual. “Before we was born. Into this current lifetime is what I’m getting at. But maybe I was wrong.”
“No sign of Melody floating around the periphery of your trance?”
“Not a hint. Madam LaGrange didn’t mention her.”
Even Tobias looked sorry. And I wondered if I should invite her to spend the night. I pictured myself sitting up with her through the small hours, holding her hand to make sure she didn’t have the vapors or go into a decline. Doing so was something I wouldn’t begrudge, even though with the children gone I’d made other plans for an evening alone with Ben. These had included my sea-foam green nightgown, music from Phantom of the Opera playing in the background, and an atmospheric arrangement of chamomile-scented candles on my dressing table.
I reminded Mrs. Malloy that it was something to discover that she had been a person as exciting as a tightrope walker in a previous life. And a cat too, if one discounted the possibility of Madam LaGrange’s having made that part up. Come to notice it, in close proximity Mrs. Malloy and Tobias did bear a certain rememblance to each other, around the eyes and the twitch of their mouths.
“Go on, say it, Mrs. H; you think she’s a fraud.”
“But sincere about it,” I consoled. “It could be she’d do better in another specialty.”
“She did say she’s just finished a postdoctoral course on séances and is thinking about going into them full-time.”
“Well, there you are! Her heart wasn’t really in her session with you.”
“Still, I don’t think it’d be wise for me to dismiss that bit about her seeing a woman falling in front of a bus in the rain.” Mrs. Malloy’s pious gaze shifted to the windows, where the storm was still going at it, hammer and tongs. “Or that business about the old girlfriend showing up. That sort of thing can ruin the best marriage.”
“Possibly.”
“Take Mr. H, for starters.”
“Yes, do let’s.” Had Tobias presently been within reach, I would have thrown him at her.
“Not that I think he’d seriously misbehave himself.” Mrs. Malloy solemnly shook her head. “But there’s no getting around it, he’s a very attractive man, besides being able to cook like a dream at home as well as at work. An old girlfriend might go all out-plunging necklines, skirts up to her knickers-to win back the chance she’d missed. Of course, like I said, it wouldn’t come to anything in the end, but-”
“Interesting you should mention Ben’s culinary talent.” I got up to put the tea things in the sink. “His latest cookery book will be out next month. There’s a review of it, an excellent one, in the magazine Cuisine Anglaise that arrived in this morning’s post. But getting back to Melody, I think that having given Madam LaGrange a try you should attempt the more conventional approach. Go see your sister.”
“It wouldn’t do any good. There’s never been no talking to Melody when she’s in one of her snits.” Mrs. Malloy came up beside me with the teapot. “Like I told you, this one’s lasted close on forty years.”
“That’s nothing.” I added more washing-up liquid. “For Moses that was a walking tour in the desert, hardly enough time to get sunburn. And speaking of fresh air and relaxation, it occurs to me that you’re due for a holiday. Now don’t argue.” I held up a soapy hand. “With the children away at their grandparents’ and my not having any decorating jobs going at the moment, this would be the ideal time to reunite you with Melody.”
“There is that.” Mrs. M picked up a dish towel and stood with it draped over her arm as if auditioning for the part of a waiter. “And Madam LaGrange did say I was about to take a trip to foreign parts, which I suppose could be Yorkshire, seeing as the people there talk different from the way we do. Then again, I’m not so sure I want to spoil a nice long tiff with Melody by trying to make it up. Especially if it means having to go and see her on me own.”
I knew exactly where this was leading and I wasn’t having it. There would be no twanging on my heartstrings. My loving duty was to my husband, who I knew was desperate to be alone with me without fear of our three imps capering into the bedroom. As for a former girlfriend daring to show up, I wasn’t worried as I scrubbed the shine off a couple of plates. Hadn’t Ben assured me when he asked-begged-me to marry him that I was the only woman he had ever loved? And aren’t men always especially truthful at such glowing moments?
The answer, that all dark-browed romantic heroes have their secrets, should have stared me in the face. But, alas, I was as blindly foolish as any gothic miss descending the darkened staircase of a gloomy manor house at dead of night with only a candle’s frail flickering light to ward off the terrors awaiting her.