here, though strangely enough I thought of you the day I came to look at the vicarage. I suppose it was because you once told me you lived in Merchester, which isn’t far away. And then, when I was in the church trying to make my mind up whether to come here or not, I remembered the way you always read the Tarot cards before doing anything important.’
‘I don’t read the Tarot any more, they never came right for me. Zillah does, though – she’s a relative who lives with us.’
‘I’ve met her. She let me in when I went to see your grandfather and then made me a cup of tea. Everywhere I go, they make me pots and pots of tea,’ he added, slightly despairingly.
‘Not like Zillah’s. Did you drink it?’
‘Yes, because she stood over me until I did, and then snatched it back as though she thought I was going to steal the china. Then your grandfather offered me a glass of some special herbal liqueur after that.’
Like a lamb to the slaughter, I thought. ‘You drank that too?’
‘Not after the tea, and anyway, I don’t actually drink much alcohol any more, apart from the odd pint of beer. But I think I could get addicted to this stuff,’ he said, taking another thoughtful sip of chocolate.
‘Do you feel all right?’ I demanded, and he looked up, surprised.
‘Fine. Why not?’
‘Oh, I just wondered…Grumps managed to upset Mr Merryman quite a bit.’
‘Grumps? Is that what you call him? No, we had a really interesting chat. He’s a very original and surprising man.’
‘He’s all of that,’ I agreed.
‘I’m fascinated by the way the early Christian Church in Britain absorbed the pagan rituals and festivals into their calendar and Mr Lyon told me that there will be quite a lot of information about that on display in the museum and in the guidebook.’
‘Yes, there is – I’ve proof-read it. One of the separate pamphlets he’s writing to sell in the museum deals with it too.’
‘Since he’s basically just exhibiting the history of witchcraft, rather than actively preaching paganism and the joys of Wicca, I can’t really see any problem in having the museum at all. I’ll have to try and persuade Miss Winter to see it that way too, though when I visited her this morning she seemed to be coming round to the idea herself anyway.’
‘Was she?’ I said, surprised. ‘Perhaps she’s now just more worried about the man who has moved into Badger’s Bolt, Digby Mann-Drake.’
‘Yes, she told me all about him, and so did your grandfather. I’d already heard of him in London and known one or two people who’ve fallen for all that black magic posturing and the secret rites stuff at his place in Devon – though actually, it’s just burned down.’
‘Burned down?’
‘That’s what your grandfather told me. According to him, the villagers burned it to the ground because he was corrupting the local youth, but I expect it was really only an electrical fault or something like that.’
‘Oh, so that’s why Mann-Drake told Felix he would be spending a lot more time here than he’d first expected…’ I mused. ‘Badger’s Bolt was supposed to be just a weekend cottage.’
‘He’s still got his house in London, so far as I know,’ Raffy said. ‘But I agree with Miss Winter and your grandfather that his influence is not one that we want in Sticklepond, even if we discount his alleged occult powers.’
He raised an eyebrow quizzically at me, presumably wondering on which side of the magical fence I fell these days, but I wasn’t about to try to explain my ambivalent feelings on the subject.
‘Clearly we will all have to join forces to combat him, not fight among ourselves, Chloe.’
‘I can’t see that happening any time soon,’ I said shortly, ‘and we seem to have strayed an awful long way from the subject of why you wanted to talk to me.’
‘That’s easy enough to answer: I was puzzled by why you seemed so angry and bitter at seeing me again,’ he said, to my complete astonishment.
‘You were puzzled by it?’
‘Of course!’ He opened his blue-green eyes wide. ‘Because if anything, it should have been the other way round! You were the one who broke things off and moved back here to live with an old boyfriend, after all.’
‘I did what?’ I gasped.
‘Come on, Chloe!’ His eyes took on a sudden stormier hue. ‘When I hotfooted it back to the university to find you at the start of the new term, your ex-roommate told me all about it.’
‘Rachel told you that I’d gone back to an old boyfriend?’ I repeated incredulously.
‘Yes.’ He got up and walked over to the fire, where he stood gazing down into the flames, his back to me. ‘It’s strange, but even then I couldn’t believe you’d do that to me, until she showed me part of a letter you’d sent her and there it was in your own handwriting.’
‘Saw what?’ I asked numbly. ‘What did it say?’
‘Oh, I remember every word! You said you weren’t coming back, because once you’d met up again with your old boyfriend, you realised you loved him and couldn’t bear to leave him again. His name was—’
He broke off and turned suddenly to look at me, his eyes widening.
‘Jake,’ I finished quietly. ‘My baby half-brother – that’s who I couldn’t bear to leave.’
I felt tears welling up in my eyes and slowly spilling, but I didn’t brush them away, just sat and looked at him.
‘Oh God,’ he said quietly, ‘Poppy told me you’d brought him up and I never made the connection. So, you mean there was no other man?’
‘No, there was just Jake. I realised as soon as I got home how much he’d missed me and that I couldn’t bear to leave him again.’ I looked at Raffy, trying to find a way of explaining the situation so he would understand.
‘My mother neglected him – she was forever off with a new lover – but I had the mad idea that perhaps if I wasn’t around to take over whenever she wanted me to, if I went away to university, she’d be forced into being a proper mother. But it didn’t work out like that, because the second I set out for home at the end of that first term, she dumped Jake with Zillah and took off.’
‘But couldn’t Zillah look after him?’
‘No, Zillah loved him but she isn’t good with babies – she’d forget him for hours and then when she remembered, feed him all the wrong things and drop fag ash over him. Besides, I felt really guilty that I’d hardly given Jake a thought once I’d met you, and he’d needed me. I explained everything in the letter I sent you, but you obviously didn’t read it.’
His head had been bent over his clasped hands, his long black hair hiding his face, but now he looked up quickly. ‘I didn’t get any letter!’
‘It was enclosed with the one to Rachel. She was supposed to give it to you when you turned up…And I was quite sure you would turn up,’ I added painfully.
‘I did, the very first chance I got. But Rachel never gave me the letter and she only showed me that bit of the one you sent her, to go with her story.’
‘So you just believed all her lies?’
‘I – well, it was in your writing,’ he said defensively, ‘and she was very convincing.’
‘So convincing that you never stopped to think if that was the sort of cruel thing I would do? Or tried to find out if it was the truth?’
My tears had dried and for a moment