Watch for Me by Moonlight

by Kirsty Ferry

  She wasn’t really surprised when nobody answered her.

  Chapter Ten

  When Elodie had opened that locket, Alex had no idea what to expect inside it. He’d wondered if there was perhaps a watercolour of Georgiana or pictures of her parents, or even some of those silhouettes that were very popular around that time.

  He had never imagined there would be two locks of hair plaited together, nor that one would be blonde and almost the identical shade of Elodie’s hair, and one would be dark. And he definitely hadn’t known they would be tied with red ribbon.

  So how on earth had he remembered handling those two locks of hair, and tying the ribbon around them?

  He somehow knew he’d taken a pair of scissors and cut a curl from underneath a girl’s loosened hair and the girl looked a hell of a lot like Elodie. And then he’d seen her take the scissors and lean into him with a smile on her face. He had felt the cold edge of the scissors against his neck and heard the quick snip as she took a piece of his hair and held it out to him to inspect.

  ‘Now, may I take your ribbon?’ he’d asked her, his eyes mischievous.

  ‘Of course.’ She pulled the red ribbon out of her hair and handed it to him.

  ‘And now the scissors again, please.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘What are we doing to do, you mean? Watch me.’ He grinned and straightened the ribbon out. ‘I’ll hold it taut, if you cut a piece off the end. And this is where I need your help. We need to plait them all together – the ribbon and our locks of hair. Bind them tightly, my love.’

  Georgiana giggled and between them, they twisted all three items together and he tied the final knot, raising it up and kissing it before handing it back to her.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ she asked, smiling.

  ‘So my love will always be entwined within it. It’s a love-knot, you see.’

  Her eyes sparkled and she handled the bundle tenderly. ‘I have the perfect place to store it.’ She drew a silver chain out of her bodice and, attached to the bottom of it, was a silver locket. ‘It will hide in here until I can tell the world I’m yours.’

  ‘My sweet Georgiana.’ He tilted her chin up and kissed her gently. ‘I would fear for you if our secret was discovered as we are now. I have some money put aside, and as soon as I have enough to help us disappear, I shall come and fetch you.’

  ‘Will you come for me under cover of the stars?’ she teased. ‘As you always do?’

  ‘I’ll come for you by moonlight. And I’ll lift you off your feet and seat you before me on Blaze. Then we’ll ride away together and nobody will ever find us.’

  ‘I can’t wait for that day.’ Georgiana moved towards him. ‘But until then I will at least have part of you close to my heart.’ She lifted the locket up and he opened it and placed the love-knot inside. It closed with a tiny snap and she covered his fingers with hers.

  ‘You don’t have part of me close to your heart,’ he whispered, ‘you have all of my heart.’

  ‘You have my heart too. And yet, I wish you had something tangible as well.’ She frowned, then smiled. ‘I know – here – take the rest of this ribbon and cut it in half. It’s more than long enough. Then you’ll have something to keep as well and I shall be happy knowing that part of me is travelling with you.’

  ‘Very well.’ There was a snip as the ribbon fell into two pieces. Georgiana reached up and fixed it in his hair, tying it back at the nape of his neck; his skin tingled with her touch and he could feel her soft breath as she came closer. ‘Let me do the same for you,’ he said.

  Georgiana moved closer to him, but instead of reaching behind her, he took her face in his hands, the ribbon dangling from his fingertips. He leaned down towards her and her hands snaked around his waist. She began to tug his shirt out of his breeches, and slipped her hands between the waistband and his skin, giggling softly against his kisses. Her hair was still loose, and the ribbon was soon forgotten by both of them …

  When things appeared to be getting very interesting, Alex found himself sitting at the breakfast bar, staring at Elodie, and both their hands were at the nape of their necks, as if they were feeling for a ribbon, or touching the part where a lock of hair had been cut away and plaited together over two hundred years ago.

  What the hell was that all about?

  Elodie had always been a bit – well, he wasn’t sure how best to describe her – weird? Strange? Psychic? All Alex knew, was that ever since they were children, she’d seen things that no one else had.

  She didn’t talk about it much. Even in a small village like Hartsford, there were bullies and kids who wanted to be unkind to others. Elodie very much wanted to avoid singling herself out for that one, already having the stigma of being best friends with the heir to Hartsford Hall. She had, very wisely, kept quiet most of the time. Alex only knew because she asked him once who the children were in the nursery, and why one of them wouldn’t play.

  They’d been about seven years old at the time and it had been about four o’clock in the afternoon, one dreary spring day when the sun wasn’t quite warm enough to tempt them out for too much longer. Elodie had fallen off her bicycle and grazed her knee. They were closer to the Hall than they were to Elodie’s parent’s cottage, so they’d gone inside the Hall to search out a sticking plaster. By the time they found one, it had, inevitably, started to rain and they decided to stay in.

  There was a selection of puzzles and games and books and things in the old nursery, as well as a scalextric track, a train set and Alex’s great-grandmother’s old dolls’ house. They had free rein throughout most of the house and automatically gravitated to that big, airy room at the top of the stairs.

  Elodie had pushed in front of Alex, but then she had come to a sudden halt in the doorway of the nursery room. She stood for a moment and tilted her head to one side as if she was watching something or listening to someone.

  Then she turned to Alex, her face full of fury. ‘Well I’m afraid I don’t think that’s fair, do you, Alex?’

  ‘Think what’s fair?’ He peered into the room over her shoulder.

  ‘That horrible girl playing with the dolls’ house and ignoring me. I’m afraid,’ she said, turning back to the room, ‘that Alex is here, and as he will own this house in the future, you have to let us play. It’s the law.’ There had been another pause, then she had nodded her head graciously. ‘Well that’s all right, then. I understand.’ She turned back to Alex. ‘The other children said we can play with them. They said that other little girl isn’t usually here and she mustn’t know you.’ She stepped to one side and pointed at him. ‘See? Everybody else here knows that this is Alex, don’t you? We can all play together nicely, can’t we?’

  Then she had ushered him in and he had skulked in a corner well away from the dolls’ house, hoping that “they” wouldn’t bother coming anywhere near him.

  So, knowing that and knowing that look on her face when they had been sitting together, Alex had no option but to assume that she had seen at least some of what he’d seen just now.

  It was either that, or God knows what kind of mushrooms she had put in that casserole.

  ‘So let me get this right,’ Cori said in her lovely Northumbrian accent. ‘You stole that painting from Alex’s attic and brought it down here to London under cover of darkness?’

  ‘I didn’t really steal it,’ Elodie defended herself, passing little Kitty some horribly garish toy. ‘Cassie knew, so that makes it okay.’ Kitty’s hair was as bright as Cori’s – that gorgeous shade somewhere between gold and auburn that people who have it hate and, people who don’t, want.

  Cori bent over to retrieve a ball and her hair tumbled in a beautiful red curtain over her shoulders, half-covering her face. Elodie had had her own hair bobbed to mark a new start when she moved back to Suffolk and had bitterly regretted it. It was shoulder length now, but it would be a little while before it would tumble like Cori’s again.

  Cori roll
ed the ball back across the floor to her daughter and sat up. She sank into a mound of cushions on her squashy sofa and picked up her coffee cup. Then she looked at Elodie and shook her head, trying not to laugh. ‘And may I ask why you stole it in the first place?’

  ‘I didn’t steal it! I wanted to get it restored as a surprise. The estate was a mess after the storm and I wanted to do something nice. I don’t mind how much it costs, but I thought Simon might …’ she trailed off, looking at Cori hopefully.

  ‘I’m sure Simon will, but I don’t know how long it’ll take him.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Elodie smiled and, matching Cori’s position, sank back into her own seat. Cori had a slight obsession with cushions and nothing in her enormous mews house in deepest Kensington had matched anything else for as long as Elodie had known her. But strangely, that seemed to suit her.

  ‘Are you staying down here for long, or was it a whistle-stop tour just to fence the goods?’ asked Cori.

  ‘Whistle-stop,’ she admitted. ‘I’m heading back now. I’m at work tomorrow.’ Elodie pulled a face. Delilah would know for sure there was something going on when she saw her the next day in the café. She often told Elodie she had “one of those faces”. ‘It’ll take about three hours to drive home, so I need to get off.’

  It was Cori’s turn to pull a face. ‘I don’t envy you the drive,’ she said, ‘and I don’t like you calling Suffolk “home”, either. I got too used to you being here. Do you think you’ll come back? I’m sure the theatre company would have you back like a shot.’

  ‘They would, but I don’t know if I’m ready to uproot myself again. I’m just getting established back in Suffolk, you know?’

  Cori nodded sagely. ‘After how long? Well, I’d like to ask what he’s called, but I won’t. You’ll tell me when you’re ready to. Though I suspect it begins with an “A”.’

  ‘Hmm,’ replied Elodie, noncommittally. She didn’t want anyone, even Cori, to know what was going on until she knew for certain herself. The thought of that broken and empty tomb was still haunting her, and not in a way she was used to.

  Elodie drove home to Suffolk via her old house near Wandsworth Common. Well, maybe it wasn’t technically on her way – in fact it was a long way out of her way – but she made it her business to ensure she went past it.

  The street was part of that wonderful grid that someone had imaginatively christened the Toast Rack. She’d loved it, but she didn’t miss it. She went slowly past the house, which she knew would be deserted at that time of day, and parked up opposite. She had never really known her neighbours that well. There were some stay at home Mummies and some workaholics and as she never fitted into either category, their paths tended not to cross. So she knew nobody would really recognise her, and her Range Rover was good enough to blend in with anything they had in the street visitor-wise.

  As she stared at the huge white house, Elodie couldn’t help but compare it with her cottage in Hartsford. The cottage might have fitted into the first two floors of the London house rather neatly and still have had room to spare. Elodie smiled at the memory of the ghostly old man who had drifted around the marital home and hoped that he was keeping Piers and his new girlfriend company.

  The worst part of sharing with the old man had been the fact that he used to move things around. Which wasn’t so bad for her – sometimes she saw him do it – but for Piers it would be terrifying and, she imagined, it would have been the same for whichever girl had moved in; because one of them would have done. Piers was no good at being alone and the girls he was ‘carrying on with’, as Margaret said, would have been desperate to live there. So Elodie sent a little thought message to the old man, wishing him well and telling him to keep up the good work. Then she smiled and thought again of her cottage at Hartsford. Suffolk really was home, despite Cori’s misgivings.

  She quashed the little part of her that felt like the idea of home might have something to do with Alex – after all, Cori had relocated to London from Northumbria and was happy to make her home there now. But she had found Simon, hadn’t she?

  Putting the Range Rover into gear, Elodie pulled away, just as she began to wonder if it really was Alex she was drawn to, or if it was Georgiana’s memory of Ben. Because that was the most confusing part.

  ‘There’s still a terrible mess in that church, so I hear,’ Delilah told Elodie the next day. Elodie was leaning against the counter in the café, lusting over the cakes she had just brought through from the kitchen. There was a spectacular three-layered concoction that had fluffy cream on the top and chocolate sprinkles which was, quite literally, making her drool.

  Delilah saw her looking at it and moved it out of her covetous reach. ‘Cappuccino cake. Chocolate and coffee and something special in the bottom layer.’ She winked and Elodie knew the something special probably involved alcohol. ‘And it’s to serve twelve people, all right? Not one Elodie. Twelve customers. Twelve paying customers,’ she continued as Elodie opened her mouth to protest that for four days a week she was, technically, a customer, rather than an employee.

  Elodie shut her mouth again and moved around to the coffee machine. She gave the milk nozzle a desultory wipe with the cloth and Delilah looked at her and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘You want to tell me what’s wrong?’ she asked, ‘because you’ve been moping around all morning.’

  ‘I’m not moping! I’m thinking. I’m thinking about what you said and the fact the church is a mess.’

  It was a lie of course, and Delilah picked her up on it straight away. ‘I only mentioned the church a few minutes ago. Try again.’

  By now, of course, the story of the missing body had flown around the village and Delilah had even had some tourists come in that morning and ask where the place was that the vampire had escaped from. Goodness only knew who was spreading that sort of tale and Elodie had a feeling Alex wouldn’t be very happy about it. Maybe if it was nearer Halloween, he could have capitalised on the story – but the middle of the summer didn’t do a great deal for the undead trade.

  Elodie sighed. ‘Well it’s not just the church. There were a few things we found in that tomb and we have no idea what relevance they have to Georgiana. There’s a locket with two lots of hair in and one of the locks might be Georgiana’s, but I’m struggling to see how it all fits together.’

  ‘Well maybe someone put them there so they would be found later on. Maybe somebody knew something nobody else did.’ Delilah straightened out the jam pots on the shelf. She made all her own jam.

  ‘Do you think that’s likely?’

  ‘Do you really think the body disappeared or do you think it was never there in the first place?’ Elodie couldn’t answer that one, and Delilah continued. ‘Was there anybody else who might have had access to it all? I’ve seen the picture of Georgiana’s father and I don’t think he looks like a pleasant man, whatever number Earl he was.’

  Elodie smiled, ready to tell Delilah the Earl’s full title, when the bell rang above the door and they both looked up. Her heart did a little lurch as Alex came through and paused before he stepped fully inside. Today, he was wearing a white tee-shirt that was very close-fitting and stretched across his chest in a way that did funny things to Elodie‘s insides. He stood there, filling the doorway and looking straight at her, his gorgeous hair dishevelled as usual and those intensely blue eyes mesmerising her.

  For one horrible moment, she thought he had discovered the painting was missing and he was coming here to accuse her of stealing it. Then she saw the dark shadows under his eyes, hidden a little by his tan, and the way he stared at her like he wanted to ask her something but didn’t know how to, and she couldn’t help herself; she stepped out into the tea room and walked up to him.

  ‘Is everything okay?’

  He stared at her for a moment and his arms came across his ribcage as he hugged himself. ‘No. I really think we need to talk. Don’t you?’

  Then he moved his hand and drew a locket out of his pocket
. It was of course the one from the tomb and her heart lurched again. She made a noise somewhere between a cough and the sound “hrmph” and then she couldn’t say any more.

  ‘I think we need to compare some information. Because I have a feeling this means more than we first thought.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Elodie was standing there, looking pale and twisting a pink cloth between her fingers.

  After a moment or two, she said: ‘It might be a good idea. But—’

  ‘I’m sure I can spare you for a little while.’ Delilah lifted the jug from beneath the coffee percolator and filled up two mugs. She pushed them across the counter and smiled. ‘Milk and sugar over there. Elodie knows where they are.’

  ‘Black is fine.’ Alex didn’t take his eyes away from Elodie.

  ‘Fine for me too.’ Elodie turned around, collected the mugs and handed one to Alex. ‘Tea garden?’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  Elodie nodded and led the way.

  Once they were outside, Elodie chose a table over in the far corner. It was in the shade of a weeping willow tree and had trellis after trellis nearby, covered in dainty pink roses and creamy golden honeysuckle. With the scents of the flowers and the lazy buzzing of the bees as they flitted from lavender bush to lavender bush, it was hard to imagine two days ago such a horrendous storm had hit the village.

  Elodie laid the pink cloth out neatly in front of her and began to fold it up into tinier and tinier squares – anything, it seemed, to avoid looking at Alex. He reached out and put his hand on top of hers. She jumped a little, but stopped twitching with the cloth.

  Her hand was cool and soft and Alex didn’t want to move his away from it.

  But he did and cradled the mug instead and decided that the best thing to do was just cut to the chase. ‘So are you going to tell me what you saw the other day, or do you want me to go first?’

  Her head bobbed up. ‘In the kitchen? With the locket? You saw it too?’