Anna Martin's British Boys Box Set: My Prince - The Impossible Boy - Cricket

by Anna Martin

  “Oh,” he said, surprised.

  “I know. You slept for at least six hours, maybe more,” Ryan teased. “Stella’s already up and about.”

  “She came in?”

  “No,” Ryan said, laughing now. “I can hear her chasing after Jack Jack, though.”

  “Oh.” Henry paused. “Good.”

  “She’ll be doing breakfast in a bit,” Ryan said. “You’ll want to get up for that.”

  Henry hummed again and buried his face farther into Ryan’s neck. “Not yet.”

  “Okay. Not yet.”

  In the end, it was the smell of Stella’s cooking that convinced not only Ryan and Henry to emerge from their tent, but most of the rest of the cricket team too. They were reliably informed by Jack that breakfast would be “bacon and eggs!” something that he seemed to like repeating over and over until someone told him “yes, bacon and eggs!”

  It was that and more. Stella had gone all out, setting up several barbecues in order to fry the now infamous bacon and eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, and baked beans, while Andy had a toaster set up in the camper van and was working on toasting two whole loaves of bread.

  They ate on paper plates with plastic knives and forks, huddled in sweatshirts until the sun got all the way up and started to warm the chilly sea air. There still weren’t enough seats for everyone, so people spilled out of cars, sat on bits of driftwood, or shared the folding deck chairs.

  “I almost don’t want to go home,” Henry sighed, tilting his head so it rested on Ryan’s knee. He was sitting on the dewy grass and was surprised at how little he cared.

  “Then let’s stay a few more days,” Ryan said.

  Henry laughed. “I wish.”

  “No, seriously,” Ryan said, tugging at Henry’s hair.

  “I don’t have any more clothes with me.”

  “We’ll go buy some more.”

  The temptation was huge, but he had a responsibility back in Cheddar. “I’d love to,” he said after some serious contemplation. “But I really don’t want to leave the builders on their own. Not this close to finishing the project.”

  “Okay,” Ryan said easily.

  “Don’t you try and tempt him away from that house,” Stella warned him. “He’s supposed to be planning my wedding as soon as it’s ready.”

  “Really?” Ryan said, his head turning comically between Stella and Henry. “You never told me that.”

  “I forgot,” Henry said. “I’m sorry. Do you have any objections to a winter wedding?”

  Stella rolled her eyes. “No. If you can push it back to late December, it could be fun to do it on New Year’s Eve.”

  “Ooh.” Henry’s eyes lit up. “We could make the theme all silver and sparkly. But tastefully silver and sparkly, of course.”

  “That works for me,” Stella said with a grin.

  “Don’t you want to be back in New York for New Year?” Ryan said, leaning in so no one else could overhear.

  “No,” Henry said. “I want to be wherever you are.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Back in the village, life returned to normal with depressing speed. The farm had been left in the capable hands of Ryan’s farmhands, but he still insisted on going over the whole twelve acres himself before he was satisfied that everything was okay and in working order. That much attention to detail took time. A lot of time.

  With Nell’s approval hanging over his head, the pressure to open the house to the public grew by the day, and Henry was suddenly thrust into the business of arranging employees to run the place. It was messy, involving agencies and newspapers and receiving resumes by e-mail, and he quickly learned why so many companies had departments dedicated to the entire process.

  The nature of his work forced him to do most of it from Ryan’s kitchen again, rather than at the house, with its limited Wi-Fi connections and no phone line. Being cooped up inside made him itchy and annoyed, shortening his already short temper.

  While the morning sunshine spilled into the kitchen and Henry fed Hulk scraps of Marmite on toast, his world shifted on its axis. He didn’t hear the phone ring at first, and ended up returning Shenal’s two missed calls.

  “Hey,” he said as soon as she answered the phone. “I was meaning to call you later, about going down the Dog for lunch in the week sometime. I’m free on Thursday, I think, but I’ve got an inspection Friday, so I can’t do then—”

  “Henry,” she interrupted, and he realised he hadn’t let her get a word in yet.

  “Sorry,” he said, laughing. “Go on.”

  “Henry.” She sounded terrible.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Henry… Nell died last night. I’m so sorry.”

  He took a deep breath and felt his stomach drop. “What?”

  “I got a call first thing. She passed away in her sleep. They only found her this morning when she didn’t go down for breakfast.”

  “No,” Henry said softly. “No, I’m supposed to be meeting her tomorrow. She was going to tell me more about the ballroom. We’re not done with the plans for the weddings, and she was going to tell me… she was going to tell me….”

  “I’m so sorry,” Shenal said again, and he could hear the tears in her throat. “Is Ryan there?”

  “He’s out on the farm somewhere,” Henry said. He tried to sort through the fog in his mind, to remember if Ryan had said where he was headed. He couldn’t remember.

  “Call him. You shouldn’t be alone.” Even while he nodded, Henry knew she couldn’t see the gesture, but his mind was still reeling. Nell couldn’t be gone. She just couldn’t. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  It didn’t make any sense. It shouldn’t have been a shock. The whole reason why he’d made the trip to Somerset in the first place was because Nell was dying. She’d said so from the very first time they’d met. Pancreatic cancer. It’s rotting me from the inside out. He’d known, but that wasn’t going to make it any easier. She wasn’t just a distant relative, she was… he slid to the floor in a boneless heap, the tears falling freely now.

  She was family.

  After he’d purged the first round of tears, Henry managed to send a text message to Ryan and hoped he’d get home soon. It didn’t take long, and Henry surmised he’d probably not gone much farther than the goats before turning back for the house. Hulk seemed to know that something was wrong and laid his furry head on Henry’s knee, allowing him to run his fingers through the soft down at the dog’s neck.

  “Oh God, what’s happened?” Ryan demanded as he stormed through the mud room and into the kitchen, not stopping to take his boots off.

  Henry looked up and swallowed. “Nell….” He cleared his throat. “Nell died last night.”

  Ryan’s face drained of colour, and he too sank to the floor, pulling Henry into his arms. “I’m sorry.”

  “Shenal called. She said sorry too, but it’s not like I didn’t know she was sick.”

  “Did they call a doctor for her?”

  “Apparently she died in her sleep. We still had so much to talk about, Ryan. It’s so unfair. I was just getting to know her, and now she’s gone, and she’s never coming back.”

  Ryan pulled him closer, and with each rattling intake of breath he could smell the mingled scent he was starting to associate with Ryan: dirt and mint and fabric softener and a hint of sweat. It was comforting. He didn’t mind crying into that smell.

  After a while, Henry gently pulled away and stood to put the kettle on to boil, assembled the things for tea, then came back to Ryan’s side to offer him a hand up.

  They sat opposite each other, each curling their hands around their stripey mugs and not saying anything, just waiting for something, whatever came next. It occurred to Henry that he should probably call his mom, or Gareth Swan, the lawyer who had corresponded with Shenal to get him here. But he didn’t want to talk to anyone from New York, not yet. They hadn’t known her. They wouldn’t understand.

  Whe
n his phone rang again, he jumped. Ryan did too and sloshed tea over the rim of his mug, scalding his hand.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Henry.”

  “Shenal,” Henry mouthed to Ryan, who nodded and reached for the biscuit tin.

  “So, I, um, I’ve been working through Nell’s will. There’s not a lot in there, to be honest. Most of it we’ve already discussed. I’ll need you to come down to the office at some point to sign some documents. There’s no rush, though. When you’re ready.”

  “Okay. Have you spoken to anyone at the home? Did they tell you any more?”

  “I spoke to Sandra,” Shenal said. “The doctor has confirmed that Nell passed away in her sleep. Her lights were off at eleven last night when the nurse on duty did her rounds, and she was normally very punctual for breakfast in the morning, so when she wasn’t there by seven thirty someone went to check and found her.”

  “I only talked to her two days ago,” Henry said. “She sounded fine.”

  “She would have,” Shenal said with a little sigh. “You know she wasn’t on chemotherapy or any treatment for the cancer. Her doctor was very good. He just prescribed painkillers and some aspirin. I don’t know if this is any consolation to you, Henry, but whenever she and I spoke about death, Nell always said that she wanted to go quietly in her sleep. She wasn’t in any kind of pain… it was just her time, sweetie.”

  It was, Henry decided, a comfort. The tea, Shenal’s words, and Ryan’s arms, when he was led through to the sitting room, onto a sofa and enveloped in them, went some way to smoothing a balm over the crack in his heart.

  For all the work he’d done on the house itself, Henry had never ventured into the gatekeeper’s cottage that had been Nell’s home for so much of her life. It felt like an intrusion of her privacy. Though he’d never been told so, he felt like he wasn’t welcome there unless he’d been invited in.

  Of course, after she was gone, there was little choice but for him to make his way in to go through her things and decide what to do with them.

  It still felt like a gross invasion of privacy, though.

  When he’d first arrived in Cheddar and met Shenal, she’d described the cottage as a “two up, two down.” He hadn’t really understood at the time, but assumed that it meant two rooms on the ground floor and two upstairs. That was exactly what he found.

  Henry stood in the late summer sunshine and looked up the well-kept path to the scrubbed front step and the two flower pots either side of the front door, which had been tended to while Nell had been living in the care home. The cottage had a thatched roof and sash windows that couldn’t have kept the heat in very well, but looked beautiful all the same.

  The door opened with a brass skeleton key, and Henry left the door open to let some air through the house. It had been locked up for a few months. He knew Shenal had her own key and came in to collect the odd letters that hadn’t been redirected, to water the plants, and to occasionally pick up something that Nell asked for. Still, the air smelled musty.

  Inside, the hallway was narrow and held only a small table, where he imagined the mail once sat. It held a vase with a blue paisley pattern and a shiny old-fashioned red telephone.

  The stairs were impossibly steep, considering his great-grandmother was in her nineties while still living here alone, but Henry bypassed them for the moment as he explored the ground floor.

  To the right of the front door was the living room, a surprisingly large space with a beautiful wood-burning fireplace. There was a sagging sofa and a well-stuffed armchair, the former having a crocheted blanket made in jewel tones—red and blue and green—folded carefully over the back.

  There were knickknacks on shelves built into the walls either side of the fireplace. Here too stood a few photographs that Nell hadn’t taken with her to the care home.

  His eye was drawn to three pictures that had been hung over the mantelpiece: one of the Queen, in the centre, the Sacred Heart of Jesus to the left, and the third, to the right, Barack Obama. For a moment, he puzzled this bizarre trinity. Then, despite his grief, he burst into laughter. He captured the image in his mind, determined to return to it if he ever got cocky enough to think that he ever, truly got to know Nell Richardson. The woman had a depth and soul and life so far beyond the precious few months he’d known her, and he was sure he’d spend the rest of his life remembering her over and over again.

  In the kitchen, Henry’s heart broke a little bit for the woman who had packed up her things, probably knowing she’d never return to her home. All her dishes were carefully wrapped up in newspaper and boxed, the cupboards bare of food and containers. Henry untucked the flaps of the nearest box and pulled out the top dinner plate. It was a beautiful blue-on-white willow pattern that he immediately decided could go on display in the house.

  Upstairs he found more of the same. The bathroom was bare of anything which could have suggested a personality, unless he counted the avocado-green tub, toilet, and sink. Henry decided not to. Despite the vile colour, the bathroom was spotlessly clean.

  At the door to the bedroom, Henry hesitated, the feeling of intrusion still hanging over him. But the door was open, allowing him to look in, and a moment later he found the courage to step over the threshold.

  The bed itself was black iron, wide and solid looking with a white lace coverlet tucked neatly over the edges. There were two nightstands, each with its own blue-and-white lamp, a small wardrobe, and a chest tucked under the window which looked out onto the garden at the back of the house.

  The wardrobe was empty of clothes. Only a few sheets remained tucked away on one of the shelves. Henry shut the doors carefully, aware they felt light and brittle.

  Opposite the window was a small ladies dressing table, complete with a triple mirror, the hinges on each side allowing it to stand on the white wood. Underneath, a tiny stool was tucked away.

  It was strange—so many of Nell’s personal things had been taken with her when she moved to the care home, and looking around the cottage now, she clearly didn’t expect to move back. But her personality was practically painted on the walls here, everything from the green bathroom suite to the lace doilies on the nightstands, the thick cream carpets and carefully stowed dinner service.

  They were all hers. It was all Nell, and he was flooded with a feeling he could only name as missing her.

  As the days passed, he contacted the care home, which had made arrangements for Nell’s clothes to be boxed and sent to Oxfam, who would deliver them to good causes. He was happy with that. Shenal had offered to collect Nell’s personal things and take them back to the cottage, so he didn’t have to deal with them, and she told him Nell had left fairly detailed instructions for the funeral she would like, as well as having set aside the money to pay for it herself.

  He felt strangely impotent, wanting to do something more, and one afternoon found himself sitting in the garden of the gatekeeper’s cottage, his pen spilling out words of a speech to give at the funeral. Nell had handfuls of friends, but he alone was her family here, and he wanted to do something for her.

  The sun shone brightly on the morning of her funeral, bright and crisp and cool, not unlike the woman herself. Henry had bought himself a new suit and spent an obscene amount of money on it, wanting something tailored and perfect. Ryan, of course, had dragged some old thing out of his closet, and Henry had whipped it away to be ironed before he allowed his boyfriend to dress.

  Henry hadn’t bothered calling his parents to let them know Nell had died. He already knew what their reactions would be: his mother would demand he return to New York immediately, and his father wouldn’t care. He wasn’t ready to face either of those options yet, and so he put off calling them for just a few more days, until all of this was over.

  He’d always hated funerals: the death, the procession, the ritual. Nell was to be cremated, her ashes buried in the little plot in the graveyard of the village church next to her parents and brothers and husband. Paul took the service.
Henry barely heard a word of it.

  Then he was summoned to the pulpit.

  “Nell Richardson was my great-grandmother,” Henry started, smoothing his paper out over the pulpit to remove any creases. “Many of you knew that already. Many more of you know a great deal more about her than I do—or ever will. Until a few months ago, I didn’t know I had family in England at all. I came here… I came here looking for an opportunity to change my life. I think I stayed for the opportunity to change hers.

  “From the moment I met her, I knew Nell was dying of cancer. She was terrifyingly frank about it and her own mortality. Despite that, she always gave off an air of such vibrancy and energy, it was easy to forget she was sick. The house was Nell’s last great project. With the knowledge of her illness, I know that she called me here to do what she couldn’t in restoring it to its former glory. I’d like to think she was proud of what we, together, accomplished.” He paused. “I know she was.

  “Nell Richardson will be remembered in this community. She’ll be remembered as an eccentric old lady, a rich old lady, a funny old lady. She was a person who loved greatly and deeply, and Cheddar was one of those great loves. I want to say thank you, truly, thank you, for coming here to show your respect today.”

  Henry allowed himself to look up for the first time. The church, which had seemed pretty busy before, was packed. There were men standing at the back, women sitting on prayer cushions in the aisles, more people standing in the gallery. The pews were packed so tightly he could see people’s shoulders hunched up.

  He laughed softly as he looked around. “She would have loved this.”

  The watery smiles of his friends told him all he needed to know.

  There would be a smaller ceremony later to bury her remains. He wasn’t ready to face that just yet. First there was a much bigger problem to address.

  Even though Stella had agreed that people could head back to the pub for the wake, he wasn’t really comfortable in holding it in the village “boozer.” Nell was far too classy to be subjected to that. He’d mentioned the idea to Ryan first—foolish, really, as he’d thought it a fantastic idea.