Chocolate Wishes (5 page)

‘An angel,’ Poppy agreed positively.

‘But surely the churchyard is full of white marble angels?’ suggested Felix. ‘Two over-excited and tired little girls, late at night…the imagination does play tricks.’

‘The angel was moving and we could see her clearly even though it was a misty night – swirly mist, like in horror films, only this wasn’t frightening.’

‘Her face was a bit scary though,’ Poppy put in.

‘Scary?’

‘I didn’t really mean
scary
– just sort of beautiful, but remote,’ she explained. ‘And then Chloe’s granny heard us whispering and came in, and when we told her and looked for the angel, she had gone.’

‘There had to be a rational explanation,’ Felix said.

‘No, it was a holy sign,’ Poppy insisted. ‘We were going to stay up and watch for it again the next night, I remember, but your mum came home, Chloe, so we moved back into your room in the flat.’

‘You know, I’d forgotten that! And Granny said she didn’t think we would see it twice anyway.’

‘Oh well,’ Felix said good-naturedly, ‘I can see you both believe in it, so I’ll have to believe it too. But I see now why you have a thing about angels, Chloe.’

‘We all have guardian angels, Felix. I told you that when I read the oracle cards for you.’

He looked over his shoulder nervously, as if his might be standing right behind him. ‘Let’s have another drink,’ he suggested.

‘Not for me. I have to get back and type up some letters for Grumps, and then make a big batch of Wishes because my stock of hearts plummeted what with Valentine’s Day coming up – I had loads of orders this morning.’

‘And the blacksmith’s coming out any minute now,’ Poppy said. ‘Honeybun’s cast one of his shoes and it’s hardly worn, so I want to walk the paddock and try and find it before he gets there.’

‘I suppose I might as well go back and open the shop up then,’ Felix said. ‘I’m thinking of putting a sofa into the front room and a coffee machine to attract people in – what do you think?’

‘It’s a good idea. And you can leave out leaflets for Grumps’ museum when he opens, and we can have information about your bookshop on display,’ I said. ‘Mutual publicity.’

‘Oh, but just wait until Hebe finds out about the witchcraft museum!’ Poppy said, shuddering. ‘Sparks will fly!’

‘I sincerely hope you’re wrong,’ I replied. ‘I get enough of that with Jake and those firesticks he’s borrowed from a friend!’

Grumps
had
exchanged contracts, so life suddenly became very hectic and I wished he or Zillah had given me a bit more warning about the move.

My Angel card readings kept helpfully suggesting I spend a day at the seaside, or visit a garden to soothe my soul ready for a major but fortuitous change of direction, but there wasn’t time. My batteries would simply have to recharge themselves with solar power.

By some alchemy (or so he said), Grumps had managed to get the purchasers of our home to let us stay there for two weeks while the Old Smithy was cleaned and repainted inside and out. They were a pleasant pair of middle-aged American antique dealers and I wondered why on earth they had fallen in love with a shabby chunk of Victorian Gothic, situated right next to a graveyard. I didn’t want to rock the boat by asking them, though.

Felix recommended the painters and decorators he’d used when he moved Marked Pages from Merchester to Sticklepond a few years before, and he also suggested a local
cleaning firm called Dolly Mops. Grumps must have promised them each an enticing bonus if they finished in record time, because the work was well under way when I went back with Poppy only a couple of days after my initial visit, in order to measure for curtains.

Grumps did not revisit, but ordered everything from afar, choosing the interior paintwork colours from the gloomier end of the Farrow and Ball range and stipulating that all the original William Morris wallpaper was to remain. But Zillah had free range in the kitchen, her sitting room and her own bedroom suite, where a bold paper featuring an unlikely combination of giant red peonies against a blue trellis was destined to reign supreme.

It was lucky that Grumps’ new home was also Victorian Gothic, because it meant that most of the furniture and curtains he already had turned out to fit perfectly. Even his huge range of bookshelves could be accommodated in the room that was designated as his new study.

Our flat was a more recent addition, furnished with a mixture of the cheap modern stuff that my mother had favoured and bits and pieces I’d picked up in junk shops. Most of it just wouldn’t fit, and anyway, it was such a pretty little cottage that I yearned to go all chintzy and cabbage-rosy.

Of course, Jake wanted his new bedroom painted black, like his present one, and threw a teenage hissy fit when I said the whole house was going to be cream with touches of the old-rose purply-pink colour of the tiles in the sitting-room fireplace, or as near as I could get to it. But in the interests of fraternal harmony we compromised eventually: he was to have one wall painted purple, plus some new black and purple curtains and a matching bed throw – very
retro. It sounded vile, but could easily be fixed when he grew out of this phase…if he ever did.

Grumps had opted to have the removal men pack everything up, and then unpack again at the other end, but Jake and I decided to do our own. Jake, because he was at just that secretive age when your most treasured possessions might be misinterpreted by alien (or even sisterly) eyes, and me because I didn’t have a huge amount of stuff…apart from the Chocolate Wishes equipment and stock, about a million ornamental angels and dozens of potted geraniums. And I had to make arrangements to move the geraniums, the mini greenhouse and all the pots and tubs of plants in the courtyard myself, since the removal firm refused to take them.

‘Poppy and I found some rose-patterned Laura Ashley curtains for the cottage in a charity shop in Ormskirk yesterday,’ I told Grumps, when I went in to collect the latest chapter of
Satan’s Child
and a letter that seemed to consist of several pages of barely veiled but mysterious threats. It was addressed to a book reviewer who had dared to say rude things about his last novel,
The Desirous Devil
. ‘And a lovely coffee table – it’s a big brass tray on knobbly black wooden tripod legs.’

Grumps had generously given me a cheque to buy anything I needed for my new home, but I was making it stretch as far as possible. Anyway, it’s much more fun (and a lot more ecologically sound) to search out stuff from charity and junk shops, though there wasn’t much time. It was just as well Stirrups was quiet at this time of year, so Poppy could get away occasionally and help me.

I wasn’t really expecting Grumps to be terribly interested
in what I was saying, so I was surprised when he stopped scribbling on a bit of paper, looked up and said, ‘I seem to recall that there are one or two pieces of furniture stored in the attic. Perhaps there might be something you would want among them? In any case, someone should decide what is worth taking with us, or can be left for the Meerlings.’

‘Marlings,’ I corrected. ‘OK, I’ll sort that out, Grumps. And you’ve reminded me – that’s where I put Mum’s stuff, so I’d better go through it, hadn’t I? She isn’t going to want any of her clothes when she does come back now – they’ll be out of fashion – though I suppose I’ll have to keep her personal possessions.’

The day I put them up there was not a happy one. For some reason, Jake had been totally convinced Mum would turn up on the first anniversary of her disappearing trick and was correspondingly so deeply upset when she didn’t, in an angry, thirteen-year-old sort of way, that he took it out by trashing his bicycle with a tyre wrench and then vanishing for hours. In his absence I had shoved all her possessions into old suitcases and boxes, clearing the flat of any lingering trace of her presence, and I hadn’t thought about them since.

‘Label anything Lou might still want and it can be transferred to the attic of the new house,’ Grumps suggested.

‘OK. There shouldn’t be much.’ I paused. ‘Do you think she
will
ever come back? It’s been a long time.’

‘You would need to ask Zillah that, but I would much prefer she didn’t. Life is more tranquil without her, and Zillah assures me that she is alive and well.’ He held out the slip of paper he had been covering in his black, crabbed writing and added, ‘The ancient Mayan chocolate charm I gave you was, if you remember my saying so, incomplete.
I think I have managed to translate a little more with the help of my friend in Cordoba. He wrote to me this morning with some suggestions. You might want to add the additional lines when you are preparing your chocolate.’

‘Since the ancient Mayan people didn’t have a written language, I can’t imagine how they could pass down a charm for chocolate making anyway, Grumps!’

‘There is such a thing as oral history, you know, Chloe, and no reason why such a thing should not have been written down by one of the early Spanish
conquistadores
– as it was – and carried back to Spain.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Just have faith. The last version worked, to a certain extent, did it not? Business boomed.’

‘My sales
did
rise,’ I admitted, though I was sure that had more to do with the excellence of the chocolate and the novelty of the concept, rather than the brief incantation of some probably spurious spell over the tempering pot.

Just out of curiosity, when he had managed to decipher the whole thing I thought I should try a sort of blind chocolate tasting session, with Felix and Poppy as the guinea pigs, to see if they thought it made any difference to the taste.

I found one or two dust-sheeted gems among the rolls of moth-eaten carpet and broken furniture up in the attic – a white Lloyd Loom chair and matching small ottoman that would be lovely in my bedroom. I put them to one side and labelled them for the removal men, along with a small mirror that some long-gone Victorian miss had adorned with a frame of shells. A few were broken or missing, but I had an old sweet jar full of seaside treasures that Jake and I had collected when he was a little boy, so I could easily replace them.

Other than that, there was just a sad huddle of Mum’s stuff. There weren’t any books (like Zillah, she didn’t read anything except magazines) and not much paperwork, since when it became clear that she wasn’t coming back any time soon, Grumps had taken her bank and credit card statements so he could settle her affairs, though I was sure he was under no legal obligation to do that. We thought escaping her spiralling debts was part of the reason she took off in the first place.

I’d packed up what was left, together with her costume jewellery, makeup and beauty aids. Most of her extensive wardrobe I’d crammed into a huge cabin trunk that was already up here.

Now I opened the lid, releasing a wave of Je Reviens and a lot of unwanted memories of when I had been a small child, convinced it was my fault that my mother didn’t seem to love me very much…

I’d brought a roll of strong plastic bin bags with me and began to fill them with clothes. There were a lot of expensive labels in there, and even though they were out of date I could probably have made some money selling them on eBay. But there was not much time and, besides, I just wanted to clear as much of her out of our lives as possible. Time for Jake and me to have a whole, fresh new start.

As I filled the bags and repacked the old suitcases, I carried them all the way down to the front hall and stacked them ready to go to a local charity shop, so I was getting tired, hot and grubby by the time I reached the last couple of boxes. The first and largest one was full of bric-a-brac, teddy bears and various trashy holiday souvenirs, so I labelled that for the attic and moved it over with the furniture that was going to the new house.

Finally I was left with just a large shoebox of old letters. I hadn’t looked at them when I was packing her stuff up, but now I found myself sitting under the skylight on the Lloyd Loom chair with the contents spread across the top of the ottoman. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to read them; I didn’t really think they would suddenly illuminate some depths that my shallow and self-centred mother had kept hidden because I was sure she hadn’t got any. What you saw was what you got.

There wasn’t a huge collection, though some dated back to just before I was born. My mother had scrawled remarks on a couple of the envelopes like ‘Yes!!!’ and ‘Result!!!’ so I started with those – and hit pay dirt with the very first one. Then, with horrified illumination dawning, I went through all of the rest, finishing with a couple of notes in Mags’ distinctive handwriting.

After that, I just sat there unconscious of time passing, my lap full of secrets and lies, until I heard the unmistakable thumping of Jake’s big boots on the wooden attic stairs. Hastily bundling all the letters together, I thrust them back into the box and crammed on the lid, wishing what I had learned could be as neatly packed away and forgotten.

‘What on earth are you doing up here?’ Jake demanded, ducking his head to get through the low doorway. ‘The lights and radio are on in the flat, but Zillah hadn’t seen you for hours. I thought you’d vanished.’

‘Like Mum’ was the unspoken inference. I’m sure that’s why he had always got rid of my boyfriends – every time I’d gone out with one of them, he’d been afraid I wouldn’t come back.

‘Sorry, Jake. Grumps asked me to sort things out up here ready for the move, and I lost track of time.’

‘You look a bit pale.’

‘I’m tired, I’ve been up and down stairs with bags of stuff. But I’ve just about finished now and I found this lovely Lloyd Loom furniture for my bedroom. What do you think?’

‘It’s a bit
girly
,’ he commented, his attention clearly elsewhere. ‘But I like that huge trunk with all the travel stickers on it! Do you think Grumps would let me have it?’

‘It would take up an awful lot of floor space in your room, you know.’

‘Maybe, but I could store loads of stuff in it, so the rest of my room would actually be much tidier,’ he suggested cunningly.

‘I suppose it would fit at the foot of your bed, if you really wanted it, and Grumps won’t mind because he said I could have anything from the attic.’ I handed him the roll of labels. ‘Here, write “Cottage – front bedroom” on this and stick it on top.’

He did that and then I asked him to carry the last boxes and bags down to the hall.

‘OK,’ he said, grabbing two heavy bags in each hand as if they weighed practically nothing, ‘but I really came to find out what’s for dinner.’

I passed a weary hand across my forehead. ‘Oh, I don’t know…I haven’t thought about it yet.’

‘Zillah says she’s doing steak and kidney pudding, mushy peas and crinkly chips, but you have to say now if you want any, before she starts cooking.’

‘You have that, if you fancy it, Jake. I’m meeting Felix and Poppy this evening, and by the time I’ve showered all this filth off, there’ll only be time for a snack. What are you doing tonight?’

‘I promised Grumps I’d help him with something,’ he said mysteriously, and then laughed at my expression. ‘No, I’m not about to become part of the coven, cavorting about with a lot of wrinklies, or do anything else daft! He just wanted me to research someone called Digby Mann-Drake on the internet for him.’

‘Digby
Mandrake
? That sounds even more bogus than Gregory Warlock!’

‘Mann with a double “n” and it’s hyphenated. I expect he made the Mann bit up, since he seems a bit Aleister Crowley – all fancy robes and “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”,’ said Gregory Warlock’s grandson, casually knowledgeable. ‘In fact, he sounds a nasty piece of work altogether and he’s been sending veiled threats to Grumps, because he wanted to buy the Old Smithy, only he fell ill at the crucial moment.’

‘Opportune,’ I commented, thinking that this sounded awfully like the plot of
Satan’s Child
. Could this Mann-Drake possibly be the Secret Adversary, both of the novel and in real life? The man who had tried to prevent Grumps realising the significance of the Old Smithy’s magical position? The plot thickened. ‘Do they know each other, Jake?’

‘They were at Oxford at the same time, but I don’t think their paths have crossed since, until now. Grumps wants to probe Mann-Drake’s weak spots so he can protect us if he tries any mumbo jumbo,’ he said with cheerful irreverence. ‘That’s why he wanted the information. I’ll see you later.’

I carried the shoebox of letters down to my room, then dashed back up to the attic one last time in order to blast the inside of the cabin trunk with Jake’s very overpowering Lynx aftershave, which entirely vanquished the scent of Je
Reviens. There was no need for both of us to wallow in miserable memories.