Chocolate Wishes

by Trisha Ashley

‘No, if Mr Mann-Drake is styling himself somewhere between Aleister Crowley and Sir Francis Dashwood, I don’t think he’ll be swayed by a bit of a chat with the vicar, even if he is Raffy Sinclair.’

  ‘I hope Mann-Drake isn’t going to hold orgies at Badger’s Bolt,’ she said earnestly. ‘Apparently he’s converting the cowshed into some kind of big room, very oddly decorated.’

  We couldn’t say any more then, because Jake and Kat came in and, since it was dark enough, Jake offered to demonstrate his firestick technique to Poppy before she left.

  ‘Stay for dinner?’ I offered. ‘Kat is, and we’re having pizza and ice cream in front of the TV tonight.’

  ‘I suppose I could. Mum was going out later and the work experience girl is there to help her at the moment, so I don’t suppose she’ll mind – if she notices at all.’

  She went into the garden with Jake and Kat while I lingered behind and rifled the battered leather rucksack that does duty as Poppy’s handbag, removing a tiny bottle of viscous fluid from the junk at the bottom. ‘To induce love in the eyes of another’ it said, in a small spiky hand on the label: ‘Two drops to happiness.’

  She’d seemed sincere about not falling for Raffy, but he didn’t appear to have lost much, if any, of his considerable charisma, so if there was even the slightest risk of her succumbing to it, then I needed to divert her attentions elsewhere.

  Of course, this stuff probably wouldn’t work, any more than Grumps’ magical efforts ever did, but I would lose nothing by giving it a go as soon as I got her and Felix together and had the opportunity…

  The revelation that Raphael Sinclair was the new vicar of Sticklepond appeared in the local paper and spread like wildfire around the further reaches of the district, relegating the news about the lido and tennis courts to second place, though in the village people were still seething about that, of course.

  It didn’t seem that I could go anywhere without hearing Raffy’s name, and even dropping in for coffee with Felix meant I had to listen to a lecture on being grown-up and moving on, and how great it was that someone like Raffy should deign to come and lord it over our lowly little village!

  ‘Though the whole thing will probably be a seven-day wonder, because of course he’s been out of the public eye for years now, even if his music hasn’t,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose any of the younger people will be very excited, it will be just us oldies.’

  ‘Jake is,’ I said, wondering gloomily if I now ranked with the oldies.

  ‘Jake’s different. And I’ve told Raffy that if he wants to join us at the Falling Star tonight – or any other night – he’s welcome,’ he said, slightly defiantly.

  I stared at him. ‘I certainly won’t be going if he does! What were you thinking of? It’s always been just the three of us!’

  ‘There’s no reason why it can’t sometimes now be four, is there? I didn’t think you’d mind. You said you would have to get used to seeing him about.’

  ‘Yes, but seeing him walking about in the village is one thing,’ I said (I turned tail and fled whenever I glimpsed him in the distance), ‘but having him sitting opposite me in the snug at the Star is another!’

  Felix was looking at me with unwonted criticism. ‘Raffy said you might still feel like that, and he wouldn’t come unless you said you didn’t mind.’

  ‘Well, I do mind having my personal space and my social life – what there is of it – invaded! My forgiveness doesn’t stretch that far yet.’

  ‘Aren’t you being a bit petty?’

  ‘I don’t think so – and I thought you understood how I felt,’ I said, and after that we came as close to an argument as we’d ever got in our whole lives.

  That was all Raffy’s fault, too.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Darker Past Midnight

  When I went to collect Grumps’ chapter on Saturday morning (all days of the week being equal, as far as Grumps and I were concerned) Zillah, who was sitting at the kitchen table shuffling the Tarot with practised skill, told me he had gone out.

  ‘Out? But he hardly ever goes out in the mornings!’

  ‘Another change. That Hebe Winter came to see him yesterday – you could have knocked me down with a feather when I found her on the doorstep, looking down her long nose at me. And then there’s a phone call and off he goes up to Winter’s End right after breakfast. Drove himself too, and he doesn’t often do that, either.’

  ‘His sciatica wasn’t bothering him any more, then?’

  ‘Cleared up completely.’

  Grumps’ visiting seemed very odd, but I supposed they were discussing ways of defeating the encroachments of Digby Mann-Drake, for which an alliance of sorts evidently needed to be forged. He hadn’t looked as if he could do anything more exciting than pull a rabbit out of a hat, but appearances can be deceptive.

  Zillah, pushing aside the remains of her breakfast, had begun to lay out the cards into a familiar pattern, but she looked up and added, ‘He said the latest chapter was on his desk.’

  I was sure this book was twice as long as any of his others. And was it my imagination, or had his writing taken a darker turn? I only hoped his hero was up to the challenge!

  Grumps returned in an expansive mood and when I took his printed chapter back he informed me that Hebe Winter had invited him to attend an emergency meeting of the Parish Council on Tuesday, in an advisory capacity.

  ‘But they had a meeting only on Thursday!’

  ‘Events regarding Mann-Drake have taken yet another turn since then, and there is no time to be lost, Chloe. I knew of his plan to close down the tennis club and some picnic field or other, but now he is trying to levy a charge on the householders living along the edge of the Green, simply for driving across a strip of grass to their property.’

  ‘How on earth can he do that?’

  ‘He is trying to resurrect some obsolete ancient right conferred with the Lord of the Manor title. Six houses are affected, and each has received solicitor’s letters demanding either a one-off payment of fifteen per cent of the house’s value, or a very steep annual rental fee. It is, as they say, money for old rope.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing, but I would have thought they needed a good lawyer, rather than a warlock,’ I suggested, and he gave me a stern look.

  ‘Fortunately, the vicar is more far-sighted than you, for it was he who suggested consulting me about Mann-Drake. I find myself quite liking him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far, but I absolve him from everything in the past except stupidity and self-centredness. I hear your sciatica has magically disappeared, by the way, Grumps?’

  ‘Quite vanished,’ he agreed. ‘A momentary twinge…or three.’

  Felix said he couldn’t meet us in the Falling Star that evening, because he was going to play darts with Raffy and the gardeners from Winter’s End in the Green Man instead. He did do this sometimes, only not on a night when he usually met us, so I supposed he was still sulking over our spat.

  But at least it meant that Poppy and I could have a good girls-together session, when she told me all over again about the things she was looking for in a man. It was a fairly modest list really, and all the qualities and assets were possessed by Felix, such as not living with his mother (he rarely even sees Mags and has never lived with her) and having his own hair and teeth.

  ‘I’m even starting to feel desperate enough to try the lonely hearts columns one more time,’ she confessed, so it was a pity Felix wasn’t there, so I could have tipped the love potion straight into his drink – and probably hers too, for good measure – then maybe banged their heads together. It was so blindingly obvious to me now that they were made for each other, that I didn’t see why they hadn’t realised it.

  ‘Don’t do anything hasty,’ I counselled.

  ‘But the time is slipping by faster and faster and I would really love to have children,’ she said sadly. ‘I can’t leave it too late and right now I’m starting to think I’d settle for a Mr
OK, never mind Mr Right!’

  ‘Give it just a little more time,’ I suggested. ‘Remember what the cards said about patience paying off in the long run?’

  ‘Yes, only I’m running out of patience. But what about you?’ she asked, then said Jake had confided in her the other night that he was afraid I was falling for David all over again.

  ‘I suppose he could be your Mr OK, if you wanted to settle down,’ she said doubtfully. ‘But you keep saying you don’t want to get married or have children.’

  ‘No, I don’t. David may have some thought of us getting back together – I’m not sure – but he’s forever talking about a woman called Mel Christopher, so on the whole, I think not. Do you know her?’

  ‘Yes, she rides a grey horse and she has the worst seat in the county. She was widowed a couple of years ago and then married Hebe Winter’s great-nephew, Jack Lewis, but it was a brief mistake and they’re getting divorced. Or perhaps they are divorced by now? I don’t know. She’s beautiful, though, with blonde hair and brown eyes.’

  ‘That rings a bell. I think I may have seen her about.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought she’d want to marry again so quickly, so perhaps it is you that David’s interested in. Aren’t you seeing him again tomorrow?’

  I nodded. ‘We’re going to look at a couple of properties a bit further towards Appleby Bridge. But it isn’t like a date or anything. I’ve made it plain I’m happy on my own, I only want friendship.’

  ‘Well, you know how stupid men are at picking up signals, Chloe. You practically have to hammer bulletins into their heads to get the message through.’

  Raffy must have managed to pick some of my messages up, though, because now he seemed to be doing his best to stay out of my way.

  Whenever I caught sight of him in the distance, I only had to blink and he’d vanished again: now you see him, now you don’t.

  On Raffy’s first Sunday the church was packed to the rafters at both services. Most of the villagers turned out, right down to the Catholics and Methodists, while the curious from further afield crowded into the aisles, so that according to Poppy they were packed in like sardines and if anyone had fainted from the massed body heat they would still have stayed upright.

  Felix was there, Janey went with Mags, and had my own mother been around, I expect she would have gone too, brazen sinner or not. Even Jake went, with Kat – he’d flirted with the Church briefly at junior school and got himself baptised, so he didn’t see why he shouldn’t.

  Mr Lees played them all in with a favourite fugue, though to everyone’s astonishment at the end he broke into a lively rendition of ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’. Something must have come over him, probably Raffy.

  After the Sunday morning service Jake and Kat lingered behind to look round the church, which may have seemed odd of them, but they are both keen on history and it is very old. Apparently there’s an almost unique very early sixteenth-century Heaven and Hell window and lots of interesting monuments.

  Raffy came back in and chatted to them, then invited them over to the vicarage for coffee while he waited for Maria Minchin to finish burning his lunch. He showed them round the house too, and I’m ashamed to say that I pumped Jake for all the details he could remember.

  ‘Well, it’s not as huge as I thought it would be from the front, because it’s long rather than deep,’ he said. ‘There’s an enormous drawing room and a dining room at the back with a door onto the terrace, which he’s going to make into a sort of den, I think. He’s turned part of the cloakroom into a mini-kitchen, so he can make a drink or snack without disturbing the Minchins.’

  ‘That might be vital, if Maria Minchin’s cooking is as bad as they say. Go on, what else is there?’

  ‘Only a library in that turrety thing at the end, plus four or five bedrooms upstairs. The workmen have just about finished and the decorators moved in, so his furniture is all piled in the middle of the floors, covered in dustsheets, but he says he hasn’t got enough yet, most of the stuff from his flat in Notting Hill wouldn’t have looked right.’

  ‘So he’s still living in what was the servants’ hall?’

  ‘Yes, but he’ll be able to move into part of the main house by next week and then the Minchins can spread themselves out a bit more. He says their flat is quite cramped. That’s about it, he hadn’t got time to show us the garden, though he talked about it quite a bit.’

  He evidently intended doing most of the gardening himself once the jungle had been tamed, even growing his own fruit and vegetables, which wasn’t quite the rock-and-roll lifestyle Jake had envisaged, though he was still enthusiastic about Raffy Sinclair.

  Everyone was, except me.

  ‘I told him I knew he’d been out with you when you were young,’ Jake confessed. ‘But of course, since it was forever ago, I knew you must have practically forgotten about each other until you met again.’

  ‘Yes, our romance had completely faded into the realms of ancient history,’ I agreed.

  ‘That’s pretty much what Raffy said. Me and Kat are joining the tennis club when it starts up in spring, by the way. The vicarage court should be ready by then.’

  ‘You don’t play tennis!’

  ‘I play squash and there’s no reason why I can’t play tennis too, is there? Kat plays tennis.’

  I supposed there were a lot worse things he could be doing.

  By this time we were late for Sunday lunch, which we have with Grumps and Zillah, but luckily she was running late with the roast duck, petits pois and crunchy roast potatoes.

  There was lemon syllabub afterwards, possibly my most favourite pudding, so I was so stuffed that I could barely drag myself out of the house and into David’s car to go house-hunting afterwards, and certainly couldn’t eat a thing when we stopped for tea.

  It was odd how I never used to notice how much he talked about himself, but now I could see that we didn’t have conversations, it was all monologues! And I didn’t know if he was sizing me up for a possible resumption of our engagement or not, but I took Poppy’s advice when the current monologue veered round to which houses were suitable for raising families in, and reminded him that I had decided never to marry or have children, because I was perfectly happy with my lifestyle.

  He laughed at that as though I’d made a joke, and for one moment I thought he was going to pat me on the head and tell me he knew what I needed better than I did, in which case I would probably have bitten his hand.

  I was starting to realise what a very narrow escape I had had six years ago – what had I been thinking? I would probably have been arrested for murder by now, had the marriage gone ahead.

  Apart from the night following my revelatory conversation with Raffy, when sheer emotional exhaustion overcame me, I had not been sleeping well. Whenever I closed my eyes the past came back to haunt me in inglorious Technicolor. The only good parts were when I imagined what I would do to Rachel if I could lay my hands on her, scenarios generally involving boiling oil and thumbscrews.

  Instead of sleeping I’d spent large portions of the night hours making Chocolate Wishes in the workshop, with the radio on for company. The quiet sound of the melted chocolate being churned about in the Bath was quite soothing, as was the rich scent that filled the air. I’d been making and eating an awful lot of truffles too – my bill for cream was astronomical.

  I’d printed out the updated version of the chocolate charm that Grumps gave me, and could now say the whole of it over the chocolate while I was tempering it. Not that I thought it would have any effect, but I invoked it more from gratitude for the kind thought and sheer force of habit, than anything.

  Jake kept wandering downstairs in the middle of the night to check on me: I was sure he was worried, but he didn’t say anything.

  Meanwhile, I was stockpiling an awful lot of Wishes!

  I hadn’t called at Felix’s shop on my way back from the post office since our little spat, but then on Monday he came to the cottage
to see me and tendered a very handsome apology for his lack of understanding, which I accepted, though it was subsequently slightly soured by discovering that I owed it to Raffy. He’d told Felix that he quite understood if I couldn’t yet bear to see him among my friends, but hoped that one day I would change my mind.

  Magnanimous of him. And it had the effect of making me look like the petulant child and him the grown-up!

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Pax

  Hebe Winter collected Grumps in her white Mini car and took him to the emergency Parish Council meeting. Afterwards Poppy brought him back and dropped him off at the house, before coming through the museum to the cottage. I was just clearing up after a chocolate-making session and had to stop her absently eating the couverture chocolate drops from the open sack, like sweets.

  ‘How did it go?’ I asked, firmly closing the sack up again and putting it away.

  ‘Oh, fine, though Miss Winter, Effie and Laurence were in Elizabethan dress ready for the Re-enactment Society later, and what with that and your grandfather’s strange outfit, it all seemed a bit surreal somehow.’

  ‘You should try living with him and Zillah: my whole life seems surreal. Was the emergency about this right-of-way thing?’

  ‘Yes, though I can’t see why it couldn’t wait until the ordinary meeting on Thursday, because there isn’t a lot we can do about it yet. Miss Winter seems to be calling extra meetings whenever she wants to get something off her chest, lately! But Laurence has found some similar cases on the internet and Miss Winter’s solicitor is going to look into it and report back. And we are awaiting a reply to the letter she sent to Mann-Drake about the lido and tennis courts, but he’s still in London.’

  ‘Mann-Drake has really stirred up a wasps’ nest in Stickle-pond with all his money-making plans,’ I said. ‘The latest move may only affect half a dozen houses, but everyone is wondering what he will do next, and there’s a lot of anger.’

  ‘Yes, Hebe Winter not only looked like Elizabeth the First today, but I thought she was also going to launch into the “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king” speech and then lead us out to battle! She asked your grandfather to give us his opinion of Mann-Drake and it was pretty much the same as Raffy’s, apart from more of an emphasis on his magic powers and how Mann-Drake only wanted to buy a house in the village because of its powerful position on the ley lines.’