Doran Fairweather and her husband, ex-vicar Rodney Chelmarsh, are both secretly relieved when she decides to sublet a friend's London apartment for a while. Maybe the separation will put the spice back into their relationship.
But the flat is depressing, her maid is strangely intimidating, and the flat's owner is horribly murdered beside the Thames. Then, in a pre-Tudor house with a curse upon it--owned by a wonderful man who might have stepped out of Shakespeare--Doran discovers another world. There, an unbroken connection with the past is so compelling that an oath of revenge sworn when Richard III ruled England still exerts its evil power . . . even over Doran's innocent loved ones deep in the peaceful English countryside.
Release date:
June 30, 2010
Publisher:
Fawcett
Print pages:
228
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“You are showing signs of wear,” Doran said. “You could do with a complete overhaul—possibly cosmetic surgery. I’m totally bored with you.”
She ran a trickle of tepid water from the tap over the Chelsea-Derby figurine she was washing in the sink, from its delicate head coroneted with braids and tiny flowers to its sandaled feet, then lowered it to the padded mat beneath. It simpered at her, as did the lamb lying in its porcelain arms, as though grateful for this attention.
“Oh, come now.” Her husband, Rodney, had entered the kitchen bearing a coffee cup, half-full of cold liquid because Rodney could never keep his mind on anything but his writing while he worked. “I always rather liked that shepherdess or whatever she is. Not that I imagine shepherdesses ever looked as decorative as that—even Georgian ones.”
Doran’s ready blush, a girl’s blush still, mantled in her cheeks. “Actually I wasn’t talking to her—she is pretty, isn’t she, if only one could hope to look like that after two hundred plus years—except that one wouldn’t be here, of course. I was talking to myself, in fact. Thinking how one deteriorates even after forty—well, just nearly forty—years.”
It was Rodney’s cue to assure her gallantly that she hadn’t deteriorated at all, that her slender figure had only been improved by the birth of two children, that her soft curls flattered her small head in their new close cut, and her complexion was still as clear as though it, too, had been laid on not by Nature’s sweet and cunning hand, but by a Chelsea-Derby factory painter.
But, though he would once have said all these nice things, which were true, and bestowed a kiss on the nape of her neck, he was conscious that he ought to be getting back to the copy he was writing for a monthly magazine of immense importance to those interested in ancient churches, and he was also aware that he had just quoted Shakespeare, if only mentally. He had taken a vow, at Doran’s earnest request, to cure himself of a lifetime’s habit of quoting from his massively stocked memory. It was very difficult, but perhaps he could do it if he really tried …
Doran lifted the shepherdess out of her bath and replaced her with an ancient Bacchus whose vine-leaves, she noted, were chipped in several places, and some grapes missing. Her antiques shop was long gone, closed by impossibly high rates, and the once charming seaside town where it had been was reduced by property developers to a nasty mess of new offices and flats in already shabby high-rise buildings, interspersed with deserted, boarded-up properties, estate agents, and trashy souvenir shops for such tourists as had nothing better to do than wander about the debased streets, mainly in search of beefburgers.
But many of the objects that had been for sale in the shop called Fairweather Antiques had found their way to Doran’s home, Bell House, in the Kentish valley village of Abbotsbourne. And Abbotsbourne itself was changed from an untouched, quiet little place into a rather ordinary mini-town. The omnipresent beefburgers were here too, and charity shops which had replaced commercial ones. The Ross Inn had acquired a great deal of furniture and decoration that nobody could, or did, mistake for genuine antique, while extended licensing hours had attracted numbers of those whose pleasure was to sit outside all day with drinks on hideously uncomfortable benches.
And the church, St. Crispin’s, where Rodney had once been vicar: nothing could spoil its beauty, but his successor, the Reverend Edwin Dutton, had had a spirited try. The churchyard was unusually rich in old and historic stones, such as one to a lady-in-waiting of Queen Anne’s:
Who served her Sovrain with such zealous joy
As now she doth in Heavenly courts employ.
Edwin Dutton had obliterated this devoted lady’s memorial, and a great many others, with a building of architectural brutalism and lavatorial appearance, meant for the use of village children and their minders. So far the children had demonstrated their skill in graffiti-spraying on its potted-meat-pink walls, of such mindless obscenity that even Edwin Dutton had spent ratepayers’ money in having the inscriptions removed.
Not long ago the churchyard had housed the victim of a particularly cold-blooded murder, a young drug addict dressed in a parody of Victorian women’s clothes. Rodney said grimly that a future unhoused corpse might well be that of a clergyman of middle years and progressive outlook, slain in a fit of retributive rage by a previous incumbent—himself.
Doran stacked the washed china on a tray to dry, made more coffee, and joined Rodney in the living room. He was writing at the dining table as he always seemed to be these days, his silvered brown head bent over the pile of books that crowded round his word processor. It was strange to see him working at anything so technological, but he had learned to use it with surprising speed, and the whispering of its keys disturbed him less than the clatter of his old typewriter.
He was fifty-two, twelve years older than Doran. His thin, clever face was engraved with the lines brought by troubled years: the loss of his young first wife, of his crippled daughter, Helena, in her girlhood, of the long strife with a Church that no longer wanted a scholar-antiquarian putting seditious ideas into the heads of its flock. And the worrying inability of his wife to keep out of situations leading to dangerous investigation ending in murder. Not, so far, her own, but one never knew …
He gave her his illuminatingly sweet smile as she entered, pointing to a small figure curled up on the hearthrug, embracing an old, hairy dog blanket. It looked like a sleeping cherub, but was, in fact, their daughter, Armorel.
“Giving no trouble,” he said.
“When does she ever? Sometimes I think that child was born with sleeping sickness.”
“Well, she was playing with Boris, but he got bored and melted away. Leaving her his blanket for consolation.”
“Some consolation! It needs consigning to the flames, but he’d pine away with deprivation. For a foxhound, that creature gives a brilliant impression of a lapdog.”
“Crossed with a Saint Bernard. If Kit hadn’t saved him as a pup, he’d probably have ended up as dinner for his mates.”
“Chien en casserole, Doggydins deluxe.”
Rodney shuddered slightly, his eyes straying wistfully to his screen and what had been a promising dissertation on sculptured wall roods in eleventh-century churches. He hoped Doran had not come in merely to waste his time in idle chat. And she, conscious that she had done just that, guiltily wondered what was the matter with her. She glanced at the calendar on Rodney’s desk, which was there to remind him not only what day it was, but what year.
No, that wasn’t the answer to the restlessness that surged over her in waves. “You’ve got a perfect home,” she told herself, “a beloved husband and children, enough money as is good for you since that marvelous coup with the Rossetti drawings, good health and presentable looks, even if you do go on about them and do things like having your hair cut and layered, which you know Rodney doesn’t really care for. You aren’t pregnant; Armorel’s birth put paid to that.”
The arrival of her daughter had certainly been dramatic, even to its appropriate conclusion in the operating theatre. She supposed she had still been under the influence of drugs when she at once insisted on giving her child that fantastic name.
“Armorel,” she said dreamily through the fog that seemed to be swirling round her. “Call her that. Perfect.”
Rodney, who was finding it hard to believe that his wife and new daughter were both alive, could hardly speak but managed a sort of mew of protest.
“No such name. You dreamed it, darling.”
“Yes, there is. Well, there is now.”
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