The Rhyme of the Magpie Page 2

  When my sister, Bianca, was eleven, she went through a phase of betting on just about anything with our best friend, Stephen, ten at the time. I was nine and felt far older than the two of them—although it may be because I felt a bit left out. Bianca and Stephen would smirk and snigger as they placed ten-pence bets with each other over whether the next song on the radio would be U2. I don’t think I even knew who Bono was at that age. And I think they liked wagering not because of the money, but because “taking a flutter” sounded slightly naughty to them. Still, to this day Bianca will bet on the most absurd things—like the year she bet me five pounds that someone would wear a real wedding cake as a hat at Ascot. Wouldn’t you know the one time I take her up on a wager, I lose.

  —

  Vesta departed after lunch. She worked for me half-time and always acted as if she had someplace she needed to rush off to. Toward the end of the afternoon, I made myself a cup of tea and sought inspiration for a new visitors leaflet that would explain the history of the estate. “The Fotheringills,” I typed, “have a long association with Suffolk, and in fact, Hoggin Hall has been the family seat since the Jurassic period.” Delete. All right, perhaps it only seemed that long after a morning spent listening to Linus’s tales of his waggish ancestors and their shenanigans.

  —

  I stood at the door, locking up at the end of the day, and in the window’s reflection I caught a glimpse of something—a sight across the road that froze my blood. There, just beside the red post box at the corner—was it someone in a wide-brimmed field hat? I whipped round, but saw no one. Stop imagining things. I’d left my old life behind, and only Bianca knew where I lived.

  —

  Pipit Cottage sat in the middle of a row of former sixteenth-century flax workers’ lodgings. “It suits you,” Linus had said, almost shyly, when he showed me my lodgings, “with your flaxen hair”—my first clue that he might wish to think of me as more than an employee. The cottage was small, but I had distilled my life into its essence and needed little. I had a cozy sitting room with fireplace, a kitchen with all the essentials, a bedroom up a steep set of stairs, and a back garden that had been trimmed, mowed, fertilized, and sprayed to within a centimeter of its life before I moved in. Now in spring, I was allowing it to grow into what I wanted—disreputable, wild, full of birdsong.

  I let myself in as the road traffic began to thicken, flipped the switch on the kettle, and pulled off my heels to better climb the steep stairs. I stripped off my uniform and stretched, folded the thin wool cardigan, hung up the pencil skirt, and tossed the white blouse in a corner. We were nothing if not official, Vesta and I, in our navy-blue outfits. I pulled on denim trousers, a T-shirt, and a thick, woolly cardigan that reached almost to my knees. It had been my mum’s and everyone said the color, a warm chestnut, set off her golden-brown hair perfectly.

  The door knocker clattered, and I considered the short list of possible callers. Rosy from The Hair Strand telling me it’s time for a trim? It wouldn’t be Vesta—she knew where I lived, but we never called on each other. Linus—oh, let’s hope he hasn’t got so far that he’d drop by with a bottle of wine.

  But it was none of them. Instead, Rupert Lanchester stood on my doorstep.

  Chapter 2

  My dad, in his signature oak-leaf brown coat and wide-brimmed field hat that hid his ever-growing bald spot. Rusty-brown hair, threaded with silver, showed beneath its band. I’d once heard Mum call him “Indy.” Yes, he did look rather like Indiana Jones. We all thought so—and he never seemed to mind the mild teasing about it. A dashing outdoors sort of fellow. It’s no wonder he’d been named Britain’s Sexiest Man of the Year a decade ago.

  The one step between pavement and cottage put us at eye level. He looked tired, as if he’d been on the road for days—not possible, of course; Cambridge was only twenty miles away. I stuck my hands in my cardigan pockets.

  His face lit up. “You cut your hair,” he said.

  My hand flew up to my cold neck, and then I crossed my arms. Behind him, the line of cars in the high street didn’t move, everyone waiting for someone else to move first.

  “May I…?” he asked. I nodded him in, and stood awkwardly as he gave me a hug. “I’ve missed you.”

  I clenched my fists to keep from throwing my arms around him. Then I noticed the carefully chosen “I” and not “we.” My thoughts returned to their dark place.

  “Tea?” I asked. Tea was always the answer.

  He smiled, as if we’d reached some monumental milestone in recovering our relationship.

  I switched the kettle on for a quick reheat as he looked round the flat. “Do you have enough room here?”

  “I don’t need much room,” I said, getting the milk jug out of the fridge and scooting the sugar bowl behind the biscuit tin. I dropped tea bags into mugs and poured the water as Rupert opened the back door and surveyed the garden.

  “What’s happened here?” he asked.

  “Dreadful, isn’t it?” I said, despite my best efforts at staying aloof. “Look in the corner—someone chopped down a huge elder.”

  “Far too tidy, but you’ll soon put it to rights,” he said. We both held our breath as a chirpy, wheezy warble floated on the air. “You’ve a linnet?”

  I shrugged, as if too humble to accept the compliment. “In the tangle of hawthorn just over the wall. I’ve heard him for days now, but haven’t caught a glimpse.”

  We returned to the kitchen, and Rupert took another look round while I fished the tea bags out of our mugs.

  “You’ve no garage here? Where’ve you stashed your car?”

  “I have a lockup off the high street on Ham Lane. Just across from the back of Nuala’s Tea Room. It’s quite convenient. But I hardly ever drive it—it mostly just sits.” We settled at the table, and I found myself wanting to tell him more—about Vesta and Linus and my ideas for tourism.

  “Is there any sugar?” Rupert asked.

  “No, there isn’t,” I said, and he caught me smiling.

  “Jools, you didn’t have to leave.”

  A cutting reply perched on the tip of my tongue, but it was so nice to sit there drinking tea with him that I thought perhaps I could be generous. “It was time.” Long past time, according to my sister.

  “You could come back for a visit.”

  I pulled my cardigan closer to me like woolly armor. “I’m far too busy here to take any time off. We’ve loads of special events in the works, and the bookings are through the roof.”

  “Just dinner. A drink. A cup of tea. It isn’t as if you have far to go. We’d love to see you.”

  As quickly as the ice had begun to melt around my heart, it started to refreeze. “I…can’t.” I couldn’t look at him.

  “I want to talk with you about something—Beryl said you were the only one I could come to, and she’s right.”

  I shuddered with revulsion at the name. Beryl—my mum’s best friend, almost a second mother to me my whole life. Beryl—the replacement wife. She and my dad had married three months ago—not even six months after my mother died.

  “I’m sure the traffic has thinned now. You’ll have no trouble on the drive back.” I stood, pushed the sleeves up on my cardigan, and collected our mugs, still almost full.

  Rupert stood, too, and I thought, Good, please go. But he couldn’t leave it. “I see you’re wearing your mum’s cardigan. You know it started out as mine,” he said gently.

  “Do you want it back?” I asked, facing the sink. “Want to give it to Beryl next?”

  He sighed. “You believe what we’ve done is wrong, but it isn’t. How can you think that of me or of Beryl?” I heard that edge of determination in his voice.

  “It isn’t what I think, it’s what I saw. And no telling how long it had been going on—before Mum was gone, perhaps?” It was an evil thing to say, but it ate away at my insides every day, weakening me, and I couldn’t stop it from escaping.

  “You’ve no right to accuse me of betra
ying your mother—it isn’t true, and you know it isn’t. In your heart you know.” I had no heart, didn’t he realize that? “I could never replace Anne.”

  “Bugger off,” I muttered.

  “Is that any way to talk to your father?”

  I couldn’t look over my shoulder, afraid to see the pain I’d caused. I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “Bugger off, sir.”

  A moment of silence. “Well,” he said, sighing, “that’s more like it.” He walked to the door. “I love you, Jools.”

  —

  My hands shook as I made another mug of tea. I stepped out onto the small stone terrace, slipping my palm-sized copy of the 1937 The Observer’s Book of British Birds into a pocket, and rang my sister.

  Bianca should never leave her phone in reach of tiny hands.

  A string of nonstop, incomprehensible sounds came out of the phone. When there was a hairsbreadth of a pause, I dived in. “Hello, Emmet, it’s Auntie Julia. How are you, baby? Aren’t you a clever boy? Is Mummy there? Can you fetch her for me?”

  A shriek pierced my ear. I heard Bee make calming noises, while Emmet’s sobs faded into the background. “Jools? Sorry about that. He’s getting too quick for me, that boy.”

  “Bee, he is going to speak English someday, isn’t he?”

  “He’s only two—give him time. I’m glad it’s you. Listen, I was going to ring this evening.”

  “Congratulations—it’s a boy,” I said before she could get any further.

  “Sorry?” Her voice was wary.

  “I saw four magpies this morning. I know I’m not pregnant, so it must be you, and it must be a boy.”

  This should’ve been a video call, so I could see the gobsmacked expression on her face. But almost as good—I heard her utter a word she really shouldn’t be saying around a two-year-old. “Bloody birds, can’t they ever let me be the first to tell the news? And you don’t know for certain that it’s a boy.”

  “They haven’t been wrong yet, have they?”

  Score another for the magpies—I pumped my fist in the air. But my exultation was short-lived, because there was no one to share it with. I thought of the joyous occasions at home with Mum and Dad each time Bee discovered herself pregnant.

  “Bee, are you and Paul staying the course? What’ll it be—Ellery? Elvis?”

  “Paul doesn’t even know—he’s got an opening this evening.” Bee’s husband ran a modern art gallery in St. Ives, where art galleries outnumbered residents. “You haven’t told Dad, have you?” she asked.

  Bianca wouldn’t stop believing I would get over this. When Rupert and Beryl married, and I was practically incoherent with anger, my sister had said to me, “But, Jools, he’s so lonely, and Beryl’s been on her own for ages. Can’t you just be happy for them?” No, I couldn’t—I didn’t know how. The thought of Mum gone and my dad with Beryl, strangled me. But Bee’s life was full of children and husband and work and art, and so I didn’t blame her for her lack of outrage. I certainly had enough outrage for both of us.

  “Now that you mention it,” I said, “Rupert stopped by here today. How do you suppose he knew where to find me?”

  A moment of guilty silence from my sister. In the background, I heard Emelia shouting, “Emmet, no!”

  “Look, it isn’t as if you entered the witness protection program,” Bee said. “You moved twenty miles away from home and didn’t even change your name. Anybody can find you—you’re on the estate’s website. Dad’s really hurt by the things you said.”

  “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t the truth.”

  “You leap to conclusions without thinking—you always have.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “You do—remember the time you latched onto the idea that our new postman was Mel Gibson in disguise?”

  I snorted with laughter, and it felt good. That’s what Bianca does for me—she makes me laugh, and long-distance laughter is better than none at all. “I had hoped he was researching a role for a movie.”

  Bianca laughed, too. “You made a right fool of yourself, you did—a fifteen-year-old girl standing on the front step every day for a fortnight to collect the post in person.”

  “All right, I was wrong once.”

  “Once—you wish. And Dad’s upset about you quitting the show. They’ve had to delay the new season until he can get someone else trained as his assistant.”

  I heard a high, sweet trill from the mock orange along the side wall of my garden, and I dropped my voice to a whisper. “It’s just a hiatus. I’m sure they’ll be back filming this summer.”

  “Jools, I can barely hear you,” my sister replied.

  Now I could see movement in the shrub, brown amid the green, darting about the branches. “It’s my wren,” I whispered.

  “Your wren?” Bianca giggled. “Does he know you’ve claimed him?”

  There he went, flitting off to the hedgerow along the field that lay beyond the bottom of the garden. “Bee, I’m really settling in here. I didn’t think I would, but I actually like it. I believe the tourism industry is my true calling.”

  “Bollocks,” Bianca replied. “And how is Loverboy Linus?”

  “You mean my employer, Lord Fotheringill? He’s really quite sweet. Although I have to be careful not to encourage him.”

  “You can’t live like a nun, Jools—there must be someone in that village of yours.”

  “I’m all right,” I lied.

  “You’re lonely. And speaking of being alone, any word from the Birdman of St. Kilda?”

  Bee’s name for my ex, Nick Hawkins. He lived as far away from humanity as possible, studying vagrant birds in the Outer Hebrides. Nick and I had been a lark, and he didn’t see anything wrong with that, but I longed for what our parents have—had—that combination of romantic fling and deep, abiding commitment. I just didn’t have a hope in hell of ever finding it. “He’s in love, Bee—in love with his birds. They are his world, all he needs. He would marry them if he could—in fact, I expect a wedding invitation any day now.”

  I heard a crash, and Bianca called, “Enid?”

  “Love to Paul. Love to the children,” I said. “Pat your tummy and give little Ethelred my love, too.” I rang off and looked ahead to my evening alone.

  —

  We were caught off guard Saturday, as five people came into the TIC. Not all at once, thank God—they never would’ve fit—but two first and then a string of singles. They were all out from London and enjoying the spring air. Can we picnic at the abbey ruins? Yes, you are most welcome. Is there a pub in the village? We have two pubs—the Royal Oak and the Stoat and Hare. Is there free Wi-Fi anywhere? Lord Fotheringill plans to make the entire village a hot spot in the near future.

  Over tea before our five o’clock closing, the phone rang. Vesta answered and then held it out for me, covering the mouthpiece and whispering, “It’s for you.”

  “Who is it?” I mouthed.

  Vesta shrugged. “A woman.”

  I stared at the phone, an uneasy feeling sloshing around in the pit of my stomach. Vesta thrust the phone into my hand. I took a deep breath and put on my best tourist-information-manager voice.

  “Hello, Julia Lanchester.”

  “Julia, it’s Beryl.”

  My throat closed up, and my face turned cold. Vesta sat down again at the table, pulled over a week-old copy of the Bury Free Press, and pretended to read.

  “What do you want?”

  “I know you don’t want to talk with me, but please listen. It’s about your father.”

  I gasped and covered my mouth. I knew it—something terrible had happened and it was my fault, me and my stupid pride. Now I’d never be able to tell him how sorry I was for the horrible things I’d said since the moment he and Beryl had married. “What’s wrong?”

  Vesta dropped all pretense of reading and searched my face for information.

  “I don’t know if anything is wrong, it’s just that he hasn’t come home, and—it’s odd, that�
��s all.” Her voice held a note of desperation.

  “How long has he been gone?” I saw my dad yesterday—had he never made it back to Cambridge?

  “He left this morning while I was out shopping,” Beryl said.

  I breathed again, and wondered what she was playing at. “Aren’t you jumping the gun?” I replied. “It’s barely teatime.”

  “He doesn’t have his car—it’s in for repairs.”

  A niggle of worry crept under my skin. “Where did he go?”

  “Out. I don’t know.” I heard it in her voice—the doubt, the fear. It’s how my dad sounded the evening my mum didn’t come home from her walk. She’d been run down and killed a quarter mile away from home by a pensioner who couldn’t see in the dark and thought he’d hit a cat. She lay there for hours unseen. Where did she go? we asked each other. Why won’t she answer her phone?

  “Well, I’m sure he’s fine. Why don’t you just ring him, Beryl?”

  “Because he’s left his phone here. And he’d started a text on it—to you.”

  A cavernous silence. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  I rang off, stood up, and went for my coat. Vesta stayed seated, but swiveled around and watched me. “I’ll lock up,” she said. I could see questions scribbled all over her face, and I felt a rush of gratitude that she kept from asking them.

  “Thanks.” I fought with my buttons for a moment and gave up. “This is just…it’s a small…family thing.”

  I knew full well that Vesta had never heard me utter the word “family” even when pressed about Rupert. Her eyebrows jumped slightly, but she recovered. She stood up and adjusted the collar of my coat. “Julia, if you need anything, you let me know. No need to stand on pretense—you ask me for help, all right?”

  I gripped her hand for a moment and left.

  Chapter 3

  My sky-blue Fiat 500 lived neatly tucked away in its lockup behind Nuala’s Tea Room. The lockup had been someone’s workshop, but it had been cleaned out except for a few leftover short pieces of lumber on the floor and dried-up paint cans on the bench. I rarely went anywhere—I’d driven to the Waitrose in Bury to shop for food four times in the three months since I’d moved to Smeaton-under-Lyme, but I remembered to start the car up every few days, so I knew it would be ready for me. The ten-minute walk took me seven, my heels clattering on the pavement until I reached the corner of Ham Lane and accelerated into the curve at a run and came up breathless before the wooden doors.