Chocolate Wishes

by Trisha Ashley

  He didn’t seem interested in how I was feeling. ‘My chief concern, as it has always been, is that my wife and daughters don’t hear about this.’ He began to pace up and down, as if he was about to give birth to a Shakespearian monologue. ‘But Chas Wilde and your vicar here both assure me that you don’t want anything from me, either money or recognition?’

  Raffy put his hand over mine, where it lay on his arm, and squeezed it reassuringly.

  ‘No,’ I said steadily, ‘I have a very good business of my own and a loving family. I certainly don’t want to upset your apple cart, just because my mother caught you in a weak moment and I was the result.’

  ‘We were staying in the same hotel one night,’ he explained abruptly. ‘We met in the bar and I’d had a drink or two – it was just one of those things.’

  ‘That’s pretty much how I thought it must have been.’

  ‘So, what do you want?’ he demanded testily.

  ‘Nothing!’ I replied, surprised. ‘Chas said you wanted this meeting!’

  ‘He told me that you wanted to see me!’

  ‘Chas has clearly engineered this meeting with the best of intentions, trying to bring you two together,’ Raffy said.

  ‘Well, if you don’t want anything except to satisfy your curiosity, then the whole thing seems pointless,’ Carr Blackstock said coldly. ‘You didn’t expect me to have any fatherly feelings for you, at this late stage, I suppose?’

  ‘No, certainly not. In fact, I wish I could pay back the money you gave my mother!’

  ‘Since you turned out to be my mistake, I suppose it was right that I should pay for it, after all,’ he said with a shrug.

  ‘Then look on the bright side: at least you’ll never have to see your mistake again,’ I said tartly, and he looked a bit shame-faced.

  ‘Before you go,’ Raffy said, ‘perhaps Chloe would like to hear if there are any hereditary health problems she should know about?’

  Carr Blackstock looked insulted. ‘Absolutely none! Healthy stock on both sides.’

  ‘Then I think that’s all we need to say to each other,’ I said. ‘You’re nothing to me, or me to you, except for an accident of conception, so there’s no reason why our paths should ever cross again.’

  ‘That suits me very well!’ he said. He seemed furious, but I suppose guilt takes some men that way.

  I was certainly glad to see the back of him and I could hear Raffy talking as he showed him out, though I couldn’t imagine what he was saying.

  By the time he returned, I’d found a bottle of Armagnac in his drinks cabinet and swiftly sunk the very large snifter that was burning its way right down into my empty stomach and doing something to dispel the cold shakiness that must have been a delayed reaction to the tension.

  ‘For someone who doesn’t drink, you keep a pretty good stock of booze,’ I said, trying to sound normal, but he wasn’t fooled.

  ‘Chloe, I’m so sorry it turned out like that!’ he said, giving me a comforting hug and it was only then that I realised that there were tears running down my face.

  ‘I can’t imagine why I’m crying, because I’m angry more than anything else! I know finding out I really was his daughter wasn’t a welcome surprise, but it wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘I know,’ he said softly, his arms encircling me as I leaned against him. ‘I’d hoped he would be nicer about it all, but unfortunately he seems a very self-centred and meanspirited sort of man. He doesn’t deserve a daughter like you, and I told him so.’

  ‘I bet that went down well,’ I said, ‘but I think I’m starting to get over it. Could I have another brandy? It seems to be helping.’

  He held me away slightly and looked down at me with some concern. ‘Do you think you should? It might be better if we went out and had something to eat first, before you start on the spirits.’

  ‘I’m still not hungry, but maybe we could have something sent in later?’ I suggested and, my legs going a bit wobbly, sank down onto the sofa while he fetched me a more modest slug of brandy – in fact, it was more of a damp glass. He sat down with one arm around me, in a brotherly sort of way, and I put my head on his shoulder and sighed. ‘I’m so glad you were there, Raffy!’

  ‘And I’m glad I was there for you, too. I’ll always be there for you, now that I’ve found you again – even if you marry that stupid David Billinge!’

  I turned my head and stared at him a little fuzzily, since the second glass of brandy had gone to my head, rather than my stomach. Alcohol can be so perverse. ‘You’re quite mad! I’m not even going out with him – he was just a mistake from the past.’

  ‘Like me?’

  ‘You’re not so much a mistake, more like unfinished business,’ I said, and then, I’m not quite sure how, suddenly we were in each other’s arms and locked in a long, long kiss.

  Finally he drew back and started to say, ‘Chloe, this is really not a good idea—’

  But I didn’t even let him finish the sentence, just wrapped myself more firmly around him, running my hands up his back under his black T-shirt, and kissed him again…

  After a while we transferred our activities to the spare room, though I’m sure at that stage he intended doing the honourable thing and leaving me there alone, while he found some food to soak up the brandy.

  But since I had an unbreakable grip on him and most of his reservations seemed to have been discarded along with his clerical T-shirt, he came down onto the bed with me where, in some respects, he proved to be very much the old Raffy…

  I slept right through to early next morning and woke feeling truly awful: my head ached and my stomach howled like a banshee. Then memories of the previous day all rushed in at once, like a very mixed bag of unwelcome visitors.

  There was no sign of Raffy, but someone was clashing things about in the kitchen and a few minutes later he appeared with a tray of coffee, toast and orange juice. And aspirin, I was happy to see. His eyes were anxious and he was frowning, but he set the tray across my knees carefully, when I dragged myself up a bit, then stepped back.

  I wasn’t wearing anything, so I tucked the edge of the duvet around myself to preserve any modesty that might have escaped last night’s conflagration.

  ‘I feel like grim death,’ I groaned.

  ‘Yes, I know, but I thought you’d feel better if you ate something, so I went out to the local shop. Don’t take the aspirin until you’ve at least had some toast.’

  Someone – most definitely not me – had picked up yesterday’s clothes and folded them carefully over a chair, and I wondered just how long Raffy had been awake. Going by his expression, long enough to get himself back into his vicar T-shirt and his coat of many scruples, at least.

  Sipping strong coffee between the hammer blows of my headache, I realised that the pain I was feeling wasn’t entirely physical. Last night had shown me that I still loved him – I suppose I always had, and always would. But even if he felt the same way about me, which I was pretty sure he didn’t, it was never going to work out.

  ‘Last night…’ he began, while I winced at the sound the toast made when I crunched it, like a whole platoon of soldiers marching over gravel.

  ‘I know – you were just comforting me. It’s all right. I was too full of brandy to think straight.’

  ‘But I feel I took advantage of you when you were upset,’ he said guiltily.

  ‘No,’ I said, feeling a rosy blush spreading upwards from the duvet, ‘I think actually it was the other way round. Don’t give it another thought. We’ll pretend it never happened.’

  ‘But, Chloe—’

  I managed a smile, probably not a terribly convincing one, but a smile. ‘No, really, I’m fine. I just grabbed at you for comfort…though maybe I should take one of those morning-after pills?’ I added, suddenly remembering that unscheduled actions can sometimes have unexpected outcomes. You’d think I would have learned that lesson the hard way.

  Raffy went white, which was interesting, since he’s natu
rally pale anyway. ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘Tut, tut, aren’t you taking the name of the Lord in vain?’ I said, dipping my toast into the coffee to see if it was quieter to eat that way.

  He ran both hands through his hair distractedly. ‘Yes, but…I never even gave it a thought, Chloe – and I was the sober and presumably sensible one!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, giving up on the rest of my breakfast and lying back with my eyes closed. ‘I don’t take after my mother.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to blackmail me into anything. I’d marry you tomorrow!’

  ‘That’s kind of you, but I couldn’t even if I wanted to,’ I said firmly, still feeling like grim death and in no mood to deal tactfully with fits of gallantry and guilty conscience. I pushed the tray away and leaned back, closing my eyes again. ‘Have you forgotten? You’re a vicar and I’m the daughter of Gregory Warlock, author of sensational occult fiction and the proprietor of a museum dedicated to paganism and witchcraft: does jumping the broomstick with me really sound like something your bishop would favour?’

  That was a pretty unanswerable question, because even if he had loved me back, it was clearly impossible: it would be a marriage if not made in hell, still destined to descend there pretty quickly – so I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t reply.

  When I opened my eyes, he had quietly vanished with the tray, presumably back to the kitchen and his own breakfast.

  We had a fairly silent journey back. Raffy was remote and tight-lipped at the wheel whereas I was just tight, the effects of the brandy not having quite worn off. My headache had now reached aspirin-defying proportions.

  He dropped me off at home at about midday and I crawled straight into bed, instead of checking for urgent Chocolate Wishes orders among the avalanche that awaited me on the computer: poor business technique. Poor anything technique.

  Zillah must have come in at some point while I slept, because when I woke up a couple of hours later, there was a note on the kitchen table and a hotpot with a pastry crust sitting in the fridge.

  By then, I was suddenly ravenous, and by the time I’d eaten that and a good wedge of crumbly Lancashire cheese, I felt like a new woman. Not a particularly good one, but definitely new.

  This was just as well, because Poppy called in.

  ‘I can’t stay long – we switched the Parish Council meeting to today, because of Maundy Thursday being busy for Raffy,’ she said. ‘I only hope he’s remembered it! I’ll have to go straight home afterwards – the vet’s coming out – so I thought I’d look in on you now to see how things went in London…and actually,’ she added, taking stock of the way I looked, which was probably worse than I felt now I was on the mend, ‘clearly it didn’t go well!’

  ‘Parts of it went with a bang,’ I said wryly, and told her all about the meeting with Carr Blackstock.

  ‘So that’s that: I didn’t feel a thing for him or he for me. All he could think about was himself, and how it would affect him if the news got out. But his coldness did upset me quite a bit…In fact, so much that afterwards I took advantage of Raffy.’

  Her blue eyes went round. ‘You what?’

  ‘Oh, he thinks he took advantage of me, so he’s all full of honour and scruples now and even offered to marry me! But he hadn’t thought it through: I mean, he’s a man of God and I’m Gregory Warlock’s daughter – I ask you!’

  ‘Perhaps he loves you, that’s why he asked you?’ she suggested, the incurable romantic.

  ‘No, he was just comforting me and it got a bit out of hand. I got a bit out of hand, to be truthful. The marriage bit was just an impulse when I said I ought to take a morning-after pill.’

  ‘Oh gosh, so you should!’

  ‘I was going to, but I’m well past the age where you get pregnant at the drop of a condom,’ I said, trying to be flippant, ‘so I’ll spare my body the chemicals – I’ve already nearly poisoned it with brandy.’

  ‘But it is still a risk, and you keep saying you don’t want children. What if you are pregnant?’

  ‘I don’t know…I was sure up to this morning that I didn’t want a baby, but now…I find I do want Raffy’s, just like I did the first time. So I’d keep it, but I think I’d have to move somewhere else, for his sake.’

  Poppy was looking at me with dawning realisation. ‘You still love him, don’t you? Despite everything?’

  I sighed. ‘Yes, but even if he loved me back it wouldn’t work out, so I’ll just have to try and put last night’s mistake out of my head and settle for friendship: Onward Christian Bloody Soldiers.’

  ‘I suppose you aren’t exactly ideal vicar’s wife material,’ she admitted. ‘Gosh, I won’t know how to look him in the face, now I know what you’ve been up to! You don’t think of your vicar as a man, somehow.’

  ‘I think you’ll find that most of the other women around here don’t have a problem with that,’ I told her drily. ‘And what about you and Felix?’

  She went scarlet. ‘What about me and Felix?’

  ‘Ever since my birthday you seem to be constantly together, and I suspect your feelings towards him have changed.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose they have: I suddenly seemed to see him entirely differently – not like a brother at all. It was really odd.’

  ‘But he obviously feels the same way about you too, Poppy – it’s love, love, love! Why aren’t either of you doing anything about it?’

  ‘Because you’re wrong and I’m sure he doesn’t love me that way, we’ve just become even better friends than before.’

  Actually, that sounded like a description of the best kind of love to me, but who am I to judge? And maybe pushing them together was now best left to the gods, or the magical Mayan chocolate, or Hebe Winter’s love potion, or whichever was in charge of that department.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Proposals

  Being incurably kind-hearted, Poppy phoned me to see how I was as soon as she got home, while waiting for the vet.

  ‘Raffy did remember we’d changed the Parish Council meeting to today, but he looked a bit pale and distracted…but then, he is naturally pale, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘And Holy Week is bound to be busy. But I was terrified he would catch my eye and then he would know that I knew what you two got up to in London!’

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  ‘No, thank goodness. And funnily enough, no one else mentioned about you two going off together overnight like that at all – isn’t that strange?’

  ‘Perhaps because they’re all gossiping like mad behind our backs instead?’ I suggested.

  ‘Well, perhaps,’ she agreed. ‘Anyway, the good news is that Mann-Drake has put Badger’s Bolt up for sale again – Conrad told me. Only now the sluice gates up at the Winter’s End water gardens have been repaired, the water supply is dodgy, to say the least. Plus Mr Ormerod, the farmer next door, has put a gate across the lane at the road end. He says it belongs to him and he can do what he likes with it.’

  ‘That’s going to make the property really hard to sell, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very, and the lido field and tennis courts are now pretty worthless, so the money Effie Yatton had collected to buy them might be enough. Miss Winter is going to get her nephew, who is some kind of property developer, to put in an offer for them, because she says he’s good at getting bargain property. In fact, I seem to remember there was a bit of a scandal a year or two ago, because one of those rogue dealer programmes caught him out on camera buying properties from elderly people at knockdown prices and then developing them at a huge profit.’

  ‘Oh? Well, he should be able to get them for a song, then!’

  ‘Yes, everything is turning out really well, isn’t it and—’ she broke off. ‘Sorry, Chloe,’ she said contritely. ‘I forgot that things aren’t going too well for you.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said, more stoically than I felt.

  I was now suddenly finding I could no more keep away from Raffy than Poppy could bear to be parted long f
rom Felix. We were obviously both in a bad way, though at least there was hope for Poppy, because I could tell that Felix reciprocated the feeling, even if she couldn’t.

  So, despite it being only a matter of hours since Raffy dropped me off at the cottage, I found myself slipping into the back of the church when he was saying evening prayers. Luckily the door was left ajar so people could come and go silently, and I was sure he didn’t see me, because I hid behind the carved screen at the back. It had a handy eye-level hole in the pattern, like a leper’s squint, which seemed appropriate: I think I might be a moral leper after sleeping with the vicar.

  I sneaked out later when his back was turned, picking up a list of the Easter services on my way. He was certainly going to be busy, starting with Holy Communion on Maundy Thursday evening. On Good Friday there was an early family service, then a long mid-afternoon service – after which I expected he would go and say evening prayers as usual! It all kept going pretty well non-stop until Sunday evening. I hadn’t realised quite how energetic the clergy were, it was a real eye-opener.

  I didn’t see where he would fit collecting the Easter eggs for the hunt into that schedule, so when it was starting to get dark, I put them in a big wicker basket and set out to deliver them…And, OK, I admit that it was an excuse because I really just wanted to talk to him again, so there was clearly no hope for me.

  Off I went along Angel Lane with my basket of goodies like Little Red Riding Hood, and up the back drive to the vicarage, past the newly revamped tennis courts. I didn’t want to risk another run-in with Maria Minchin, if I could help it.

  You have to go up steps to the terrace at the back of the house and there was a light in the room that Raffy had taken me to when I delivered the chocolate angel.

  Through the glass door I could see him, his head bent over a guitar, and hear him singing softly, but I’d actually lifted my hand to tap on the french door before I realised what the song was – ‘Darker Past Midnight’!

  Tears suddenly welled and I was filled with an overwhelming sense of desolation at the futility of my rekindled love. My hand fell back down to my side and I took a quick step back into the darkness.