Creature Comforts

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘Wow! We’ll put it in the guidebook – I mean, we will if everyone agrees to my plan and there is a guidebook.’

  ‘If there’s going to be enough business, then I’d reopen the Victorian tea garden at the Old Mill and I’m sure our Shirley would love to move back and help me,’ Hannah Blackwell said. ‘Will the trail go up that far?’

  ‘It certainly will, because the next stop will be the Haunted Falls, up by Uncle Brandon’s alpine nursery,’ Lulu assured her.

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Brandon Benbow.

  ‘Which haunted falls?’ Debo asked, puzzled.

  ‘The little waterfall. Apparently, as well as being inundated with some kind of nasty imp things called boggarts, there’s the ghost of the Saxon warrior looking for the hoard he buried there just before he was killed,’ Lulu told her.

  ‘I’ve never heard about any Saxon hoard before today – or about the boggarts,’ said our kennelmaid, Sandy Lane, who was sitting next to her younger sister and her equally taciturn father, who was a farmer up the hill.

  ‘It was found way back in the nineteenth century,’ said Cameron’s voice, so he must have slipped in unnoticed at some point.

  ‘That’s so,’ confirmed Jonas. ‘I heard tell of that.’

  ‘It’s the reason why I called my gallery Hidden Hoards,’ Cam said. ‘You can see photos of what they found in the Middlemoss Folk Museum, but the gold is in the British Museum now. There wasn’t a lot, just a crumpled brooch and the inlaid handle of a dagger.’

  ‘We could have a display and souvenirs about the hoard in the nursery,’ Brandon suggested. ‘We’re already getting more visitors, ever since we turned one of the greenhouses into a bit of a garden shop and started selling stuff like wellies and gardening tools painted with flowers, the sort of tat that people seem to want these days.’

  ‘I quite like that kind of thing,’ Judy confessed. ‘Hedgehog boot scrapers and pink watering cans.’

  ‘I’ll do you a good discount if you want to come up, Judy,’ Brandon offered.

  ‘I’ll hold you to that,’ Judy said. ‘And if visitors are going to be walking near the Lodge, maybe we could have a collecting box and information board about Debo’s Desperate Dogs, too?’

  ‘Good thinking, Judy,’ said Debo. ‘We might even manage to rehome some of the dogs with visitors, you never know.’

  ‘Lulu, this really could revitalise the whole valley,’ I said admiringly.

  A thin, middle-aged woman with pale golden hair and no discernible chin stood up. ‘I’m Floriana Winthrop. You may have seen me in Cotton Common.’

  There was a small chorus of agreement, since the period soap was very popular locally. I’d watched it myself, because Judy was addicted, but I couldn’t remember seeing this woman in it.

  ‘Now I’ve heard your plans, I’m quite horrified!’ she continued. ‘We really don’t want the village to be overrun with tourists. I mean, I only moved here because my friends in the next cottage assured me it was totally quiet and otherworldly.’

  ‘It wasn’t always this quiet, as Lulu said,’ I remarked. ‘You only have to look at the photos to see that.’

  ‘That’s right, it was still a busy, bustling place when I was a small lad,’ said Jonas. ‘The blacksmith got all the carriage trade from the hotel and they used to turn their hand to anything – they even made those wrought-iron gates to Sweetwell, that would look a whole lot better if Dan stopped poncing about with a shotgun and painted them.’

  ‘Why should I? I’m not the handyman,’ Dan said angrily.

  ‘You’re not anything, so far as I can see, except a great streak of nowt,’ Jonas said scathingly.

  ‘I think we’ve strayed away from the point about not everyone welcoming lots of visitors,’ Lulu interrupted quickly.

  ‘But most of us would welcome more visitors spending their money locally, and it’s not exactly going to be like Blackpool on a bank holiday, is it?’ Brandon Benbow said.

  ‘It’s what most of us want,’ Tom agreed.

  Lulu flipped her chart again and revealed, ‘POINT THREE: PLANNING, MAPPING, SIGNPOSTS, LEAFLETS, INFORMATION BOARDS AND INTERNET PUBLICITY OPPORTUNITIES’.

  ‘These are some points to think about if we do go ahead with the scheme,’ she said. ‘We can do most of it ourselves, keeping costs to a minimum.’

  That appeared to be the end of the presentation, and we had a more general discussion, after which Tom called for a show of hands for those in favour of the scheme, which was almost everyone except the handful of newcomers, who voted against.

  ‘That seems almost unanimous,’ Lulu said. ‘So now I think we should have some tea and coffee – and Myra Graham’s famous marmalade cake.’

  It was no surprise to anyone that Jonas, despite his rheumatism, got to the marmalade cake first.

  ‘Everyone’s all for your plan,’ I said to Lulu, when we’d secured cups of coffee and paper plates of cake and biscuits. ‘There are some great new ideas, too.’

  ‘It’s just as well, because we’ll need the whole village to come together to sort out the route and clear paths, put up signs, get pamphlets and maps printed … all of that. There’s so much to do. And we need to find enough ghosts to keep the visitors happy!’

  ‘I think from the sound of it, there’ll be one for every square foot of Halfhidden,’ I said, grinning.

  ‘Except up at Sweetwell?’ suggested a familiar deep voice in my ear, making me jump. ‘Apart from having hordes of people traipsing across my land and visiting the Lady Spring, what’s in it for me?’

  ‘Oh, hi,’ Lulu said, looking up at him with big, innocent brown eyes, just as if she didn’t know he’d wrestled my half-naked self out of the Lady Spring pool earlier in the day. ‘You’re Rufus Carlyle, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He glanced at me with those unnerving light green eyes. ‘I see my fame has gone before me.’

  ‘If I’d known you’d already moved in, I’d have sent you an invite to the meeting. I’m glad you came, though, because if you’re running a garden antiques business from Sweetwell, then you must be interested in more customers?’

  ‘I’m not sure your ghost-hunting tourists will be in the market for garden antiques.’

  ‘Of course they will, and I could put you on the map and in the brochure. In fact, Howling Hetty was said to have been a servant at Sweetwell in the seventeenth century and it was rumoured she’d been killed by a son of the house after he got her pregnant, so you really ought to be on the ghost trail anyway.’

  ‘Why is Hetty howling?’ he asked. I don’t think that’s what he meant to say, he just couldn’t help himself.

  ‘I expect she’s looking for her head, but they found it years later and it’s behind the bar in the pub, displayed in a special alcove,’ Lulu explained.

  ‘Nice,’ he commented drily.

  ‘Well, they can’t move it, because it would bring terribly bad luck,’ she said reasonably. ‘So poor Hetty has to keep looking for it.’

  ‘Where’s the rest of her?’

  ‘No one knows. The skull was washed into the lower pool near the road below the Lady Spring.’

  ‘If there’s a pool below the Lady Spring, why does anyone pay to go to the other?’ Rufus asked.

  Jonas, who was passing by with an empty plate, presumably heading for more of his daughter’s cake, paused long enough to say with some surprise, ‘Eh, lad, you wouldn’t want to bathe in the same water what had run out of a pool a lot of diseased people had swum about in, would you?’

  There was a small silence, broken only by the sound of Lulu’s pencil writing something down in the bulging notebook.

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘I’ve made a few changes, so that now after the waterfall, the visitors will go back down to the Green and visit the ancient church of St Mary’s, one of the smallest in the country; then up the drive to Rufus Carlyle Garden Antiques and the stable block, where it was rumoured that Howling Hetty was a kitchen maid in the seventeenth
century.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have been a kitchen maid in the stable block,’ Rufus objected.

  ‘It incorporates an even older building that was once a separate kitchen,’ I told him. ‘They used to do that centuries ago, because so many burned down, so that way, the rest of the house wouldn’t burn with it.’

  ‘Isn’t it going to take them more than one day to do all this trail of yours?’ he asked Lulu.

  ‘Of course: I’m designing it as a complete circular trail, but I expect them to do it in bits. The garden antiques centre alone could probably happily occupy half a day.’

  ‘But I didn’t say I wanted …’ Rufus began, but Lulu had seen Hannah Blackwell trying to get her attention from the other side of the room and was off like a whirlwind.

  ‘I don’t see why you should object to a bit more business,’ I told Rufus, and he scowled down at me.

  ‘Holidaymakers aren’t going to do more than look around the place and take photographs. They won’t buy anything.’

  Then his attention shifted and focused elsewhere and I turned to see he was staring at Debo, who was in animated conversation with Will Ferris and his wife, Agnes, probably about the treatment of one of the dogs. She hadn’t bothered changing out of a ratty jumper and jeans, but she still looked as if she was posing for a glossy magazine.

  ‘Is that your aunt, Debo Dane? I’ve tried to talk to her a couple of times when I’ve been around, but she was always away. Or so the woman who opened the door said,’ he added darkly.

  ‘That was Judy Almond, my aunt’s friend who lives with us, and she was telling the truth: Debo still gets lots of modelling assignments, commercials and even some small film parts, so you just chose the wrong time. She has to take everything she’s offered, to keep the kennels going.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the kennels … and all those dogs,’ he said. ‘That’s mostly what I wanted to discuss with her.’

  ‘Shall I introduce you to Debo now? She’d really like to talk to you – especially since she found out that while she was away, your mother, Fliss Gambol, visited the Lodge with Dan Clew and told Judy you wanted all the kennels gone from your land as soon as possible – and if she didn’t do it quickly enough, they’d be bulldozed off,’ I said tartly.

  ‘She did?’ He frowned. ‘I knew my mother had called in to have a look at Sweetwell one day when she was visiting friends nearby, but – anyway, I need a serious talk with Debo, so tell her I’ll be round tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘That sounds ominous,’ I said, staring at him. ‘Baz was a great dog-lover and he never objected to the kennels, so—’ I broke off as I caught sight of Cam’s familiar, sensitive, thin face through the crowd and cried out, ‘Cam!’

  He headed over, grinning, lifted me off my feet and swung me round. He might look weedy, but he’s surprisingly strong.

  ‘Izzy!’ he said, giving me a hug and kiss, before putting me down again, and I’d just remembered Rufus and started to introduce them, when I realised that he was no longer there. I could see his dark head and broad shoulders above most of the crowd as he made his way out of the hall, not stopping to talk to anyone else.

  ‘That was Rufus Carlyle, Cam – and he didn’t even try Myra’s marmalade cake!’

  ‘Aunt Myra usually makes two at a time, so perhaps he’ll get some at home,’ he said. ‘Meeting go OK? I missed most of it.’

  ‘Yes, it seemed to go down a storm with practically everyone, and it looks like Lulu’s just going to call it to order again and round things off.’

  Lulu, flushed and looking excited and rather pretty, tapped her spoon on the side of her cup and called, ‘Attention! Could anyone who’d like to be on the Halfhidden Regeneration Committee stay behind? We’ll need a group to keep things moving, though we’ll post information up on the village noticeboard as we go. And we’d better start up a fund to pay for things like trail leaflets, new signs and information boards.’

  Those who stayed behind because they had volunteered for the committee – or were volunteered without being asked – consisted of me, Cam, Lulu, the Tompions and Jonas, who said he had nothing much better to do these days and could get across the Green, whether his rheumatism was playing him up or not.

  ‘Good,’ said Lulu, ‘because you have all the best stories about Halfhidden.’

  ‘Yes, Granddad, and on the drive back from Ormskirk tonight I remembered one you told me when I was a little boy,’ Cameron said. ‘I don’t think Lulu’s heard it – the one about the Sweetwell Worm?’

  ‘Worm?’ I echoed.

  ‘Ah, yes, the Worm,’ Jonas exclaimed. ‘Damned if I hadn’t gone and forgotten that one, till you reminded me!’

  ‘I’m not sure a story about a worm—’ Lulu began doubtfully.

  ‘You mean as in a serpent or dragon?’ put in Rita Tompion, interested. ‘I’ve heard an old legend about the Lambton Worm.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s right. When I was a tiny lad, my great-grandfather told me about the dangerous Worm that lived in that rocky outcrop up in the woods above Sweetwell, where the moorland starts.’

  ‘Oh, a dragon!’ enthused Lulu. ‘That’s more like it!’

  ‘It’s not a nice story, really,’ Jonas said, frowning as he tried to remember it. ‘The local people – this would be a long, long time ago, when they were all heathens – used to choose one young lass every year as a sacrifice to the Worm and leave her tied to a tree near the rocks.’

  ‘I suppose it was a sacrifice to good harvests and fertility, really,’ Cam suggested.

  ‘The serpent would come out and eat the poor girl, and then leave them alone till the next spring,’ Jonas said. ‘But eventually St George came riding by and found the maiden tied to the tree, rescued her and took her home. The Worm came rampaging down the hill, breathing flames and stinking of sulphur. But it was all right in the end, because St George killed it.’

  ‘Well, that’s very exciting … and something like that happens up at the Little Mumming Revels every year, doesn’t it? They act out a St George and the Dragon scene,’ Rita said. ‘Perhaps the serpent went over that side and wanted an annual maiden from them, too?’

  ‘You’re right. One wouldn’t keep a serpent going for a year,’ agreed Cameron.

  ‘Where’s that Rufus bloke got to?’ asked Lulu. ‘He should know he’s got a Worm as well as Howling Hetty on his land.’

  ‘He left suddenly and I don’t think he was that enthusiastic about your plans,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should start the annual sacrifice up again and make him the first?’

  ‘Or Dan,’ Lulu said. ‘It’s got to be someone we can spare easily.’

  ‘Ho, ho,’ said Dan, who had lingered behind unnoticed, probably, since he was a greedy man, to snaffle the last leftover biscuits, for he was shoving something wrapped in a paper napkin into his trouser pocket as he left.

  ‘Did you ever see that film The Wicker Man?’ I asked Lulu, and she giggled.

  ‘Oh, don’t tempt me!’

  Then we helped the Tompions put the chairs away and clear up, before we went outside onto the twilit Green.

  ‘I’ll be spending all tomorrow working on my gallery,’ Cameron said to me and Lulu. ‘Why don’t you both come round for a good catch-up – and lunch? You two bring it,’ he added, cunningly.

  Chapter 9: Disconnected

  ‘I really can’t, Harry,’ I said regretfully, because this was the first time he’d asked me to join him and his friends. Perhaps he’d finally noticed I’d grown up?

  He’d always been carelessly kind to me, in an older-brother sort of way, and only the week before he’d let me get behind the wheel of the Range Rover a couple of times and take it up and down the long, bumpy Sweetwell drive, his hand warmly over mine on the gearstick …

  It had been another long and eventful day, ending with Judy belatedly remembering to tell me that Kieran had rung just after I’d left for the Hut.

  ‘He couldn’t get an answer from your mobile.’

  ‘I’d l
eft it recharging in my room, but he hadn’t left any messages on it. So … what did he say?’

  ‘He seemed surprised you hadn’t rung him, but I said he could hardly expect you to, in the circumstances! Then the connection suddenly went dead.’

  ‘Judy’s sure he put the phone down on purpose,’ said Debo, and I thought she was probably quite right. It seemed to be getting a habit with him, whenever he was hearing something he didn’t like.

  By then I was too tired to ring or text him back even if I’d wanted to, which I can’t say I did, because by now it felt as if he was on another continent and it was slowly drifting away. There might still be the narrowest isthmus of land bridging the ocean between us, much as a silver filament had once connected me to my body when I was in Heaven, but if so, I didn’t think there was a lot of twang left in it.

  I didn’t wake up next morning until I heard Judy come back from walking the dogs and make a start on cooking breakfast … or maybe it was the smell of bacon frying that woke me.

  Knowing Daisy Silver to be an early riser, I rang her before going downstairs and told her about the dreams I’d been having since I got home.

  ‘It’s basically the recurring dream I’ve always had, only it’s as if it’s suddenly been brought into sharp focus and there are all kinds of details and bits of conversation I hadn’t recalled before.’

  ‘And you remember it all when you wake up?’

  ‘Yes, clear as crystal, and they feel like new memories coming to the surface.’

  ‘Does it move forward beyond the point of your last memory of that evening?’ she asked.

  ‘No …’ I admitted reluctantly. ‘And I haven’t dreamed of being in the back of the car again … So maybe that was a figment of my imagination.’

  ‘I expect you’d been in the back of the car before that night?’ she suggested.

  ‘Yes, several times,’ I agreed. Then something occurred to me. ‘In fact, Harry had given me and Cam a lift back up to the village from the pub only a few days before and everyone was singing then, too. So … that might simply be a memory from that night.’