by Clare Naylor
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
About the Author
Also by Clare Naylor
Copyright Page
And above all, watch with glittering eyes the world around you. Because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who do not believe in magic will never find it.
—Roald Dahl
Chapter One
Kate Disney was having sex with her ex when the legendary Mirabelle Moncur first came into her life. Actually she came into the wooden garden shed that Kate called home just as Jake’s naked bottom appeared over the top of the sheets in anticipation of his last few enthusiastic thrusts. It was the moment that Kate had been waiting for since she and Jake had broken up a month ago. Since that Sunday night she’d existed in a fathomless abyss of pain, memories of Jake, and tears. Until about an hour ago, when Jake, in answer to her prayers and a good deal of amateur witchcraft, had shown up on her doorstep on his way home from a night out.
“Hello, angel, I’ve missed you.” It was three in the afternoon and he smelled of whiskey and cigarette smoke, his shirt was half unbuttoned, and his jacket was torn.
“Jake.” Kate had been cleaning her paintbrushes when she’d heard the tap on the shed door. She’d wiped her hands down her old T-shirt and unbolted it. Jake was the first and last person she expected to see standing there.
“It was my birthday yesterday,” he told her, and propped himself up in the door frame. “And the only present I really wanted was you.”
“Jake, you’re drunk,” Kate said. Though she knew he wasn’t.
“You’ve got paint in your hair.” He leaned forward to touch her bangs. Kate shrank back but knew that she’d already lost the battle. She knew that she was going to let Jake in. “You look terrible,” she lied.
“Don’t I even get a birthday kiss?”
“You’re lucky I haven’t punched you.”
“I love you.” Jake looked at Kate and she felt her will dissolve. Maybe he really meant it this time. Because even though she and Jake had been together on and off for almost three years, he had told her that he loved her only once before, the same night that he’d been signed to a small record label. And that night he really had been drunk.
“We’re only going to talk,” she said, and stood back to let him through the door.
“I know.” Jake pretended to believe her.
“I’ll make some tea.” Kate turned her back on him and with shaking hands filled the kettle in the large butler’s sink in the corner. This wasn’t how she’d imagined it would happen—Jake coming back to her. And she had imagined it—night and day, waking and sleeping. She’d hoped that it would be a bigger moment—that it would involve a declaration and a diamond rather than a cup of tea at the end of a long night out. But then after three years with Jake, Kate was accustomed to being underwhelmed. Thankfully the sex wasn’t underwhelming. It was fabulous. It was even more fabulous right now because they hadn’t so much as laid eyes on one another for a month. And as Jake kissed her neck and Kate trailed her fingers down his freckled brown back, she forgot about the underwhelmingness, and about the note he’d written to her, telling her that it was over because he had nothing left to give; she’d even forgotten that it was Jake’s fault that she was living in her boss’s garden shed. Well, not strictly his fault, but she and Jake had been saving for a place together and she’d agreed to give up her overpriced studio flat so that they could buy somewhere quicker and be together. But Kate forgot all these things and bit hard into Jake’s shoulder and let bygones be bygones. Until Mirabelle Moncur walked in and ruined everything.
“Kate Disney?” she demanded, without so much as a knock on the door or a polite cough to announce herself first. Jake, who was submerged somewhere in the vicinity of Kate’s left breast at that moment, completely lost his stride and practically gave himself whiplash as he turned to see who was behind him. Kate gave a cry of pain as Jake crushed her right leg.
“Who the bloody hell are you?” Jake asked the intruder as he ungraciously wrestled the sheet from Kate’s grasp to cover himself up. Kate suddenly remembered why he was her ex. Apart from the fact that he’d dumped her. He always put himself first. He was completely self-absorbed, not to mention, she noticed in the late-afternoon sunlight streaming in through the shed window, a bit on the fat side.
“Oh, you don’t need to cover up.” At the foot of Kate’s bed stood a strikingly attractive woman, possibly in her late fifties, with disheveled blond hair, the sort of cheekbones that hold a beauty together no matter how far south her face gravitates, and deep green eyes that at this moment in time were locked on Jake’s crotch. “You have absolutely nothing to hide.” And with that she glanced the tip of her Gitane cigarette with a lighter and raised an unimpressed eyebrow. Jake turned beet red and looked uncomfortable.
“Yes, who the bloody hell are you?” Kate demanded as she reached for an old nightdress that was lying on the floor to cover herself with and clambered from her bed.
“I’m Mirabelle Moncur,” the woman said in a French accent as thick as nightclub smoke as she looked around the shed. “Do you actually live here?”
“I’m sorry, do I know you?” Kate demanded crossly. Knowing full well that she didn’t. Though there was something familiar about Mirabelle Moncur.
“I want you to come and work for me,” the woman said and watched unabashed while Jake stumbled into his boxer shorts, one leg at a time. Kate had never seen him so ruffled.
“Well, you could have knocked first,” he muttered under his breath.
“Look, I don’t know who you are, or how you got in, but this is actually a private residence and if you want me to work for you then you’ll have to make an appointment and come back.”
Mirabelle sniffed the air in a way that told Kate that she didn’t believe this to be a residence of any sort. Let alone a private one worth knocking at. She walked over to where a few of Kate’s canvases were stacked up against the wall and began glancing through them. “These are your paintings?”
“Yes, and as I’ve said, you can make an appointment to come back later and see them. But right now, as you can probably see, I’m busy.”
“They’re a little old-fashioned but I suppose you’ll do,” the woman said. “I want you to paint Bébé for me. He’s very beautiful, so I suppose it’ll be easy to do. Even for someone like you.”
“Who the hell is Bébé?” Jake asked, not, Kate noticed, leaping to defend her work, which he’d never complained about when it was funding his cigarette habit, paying for recording studio time, and keeping him in whiskey and the cashmere socks he absolutely had to wear or his feet got too hot, for the past three years.
“Bébé is my pussy. He arrives tomorrow morning from Mozambique and you can begin work in the afternoon,” Mirabelle Moncur filled in. Jake looked staggered.
“Right, well, I’m sure we can discuss my old-fashioned paintings late
r. And whether I’m prepared to paint your . . . pussy. But for now would you mind leaving me and my . . .” Kate always hesitated to call Jake her boyfriend, even before they’d split up, lest he get nervous and feel like she was trying to tie him down and put him under pressure. She turned to look at the man who was sitting on the corner of her bed waiting for her to deal with their intruder so that he could get on with the birthday treat. “. . . my friend alone.”
“I’ll come back later, if you prefer,” Mirabelle Moncur said as she dropped a glowing cigarette butt on top of a yellow canister of fertilizer with a skull and crossbones on the lid. “There’s nothing worth hanging around here for.” She looked at Jake with a sneer and walked out the door, without closing it behind her, leaving Kate to pick up the burning Gitane or risk being blown up.
“Who on earth was she?” Kate asked as she went to the window and watched the woman disappear down the garden path.
“Mirabelle Moncur. Rings a bell,” Jake said. “Now, sweetheart, cute as you look in that little nightie, I prefer you without it.”
“You do?” Kate laughed girlishly and went in a pair of old sneakers to Jake’s side. He pulled the white cotton slip over her head and began to kiss her stomach.
“Mmmhhhmmm,” he said. “I’d forgotten what a great body you had.” Kate smiled inside and ran her hands through Jake’s hair. She, in her turn, forgot how ungracious he’d been with the sheet when that weird woman had barged through the door. Amnesia was a requirement with Jake as a boyfriend. If you remembered all the bad stuff, you’d have to wonder what had happened to your mind. Because you certainly weren’t in possession of it. Kate chose to concentrate on her body instead, and how good it was feeling right now.
Chapter Two
Kate made her way toward the enormous, rambling house at the end of the garden path. If you followed it from the shed, past the cherry trees, and over the patio, you landed at Leonard’s back door. Leonard, as his name might suggest to even the most obtuse of strangers, was a raving queen. He was also Kate’s boss who owned both the house and the shed. Leonard was one of the smoothest, kindest, and most successful antiques dealers in London, and Kate was widely regarded (well, at least by the London Evening Standard) as one of the best young painters of animals in the country. And as Leonard had at least a hundred clients with animals whose whiskers and wet noses and tabby stripes they wanted to preserve for posterity, Leonard and Kate had teamed up to become a match made in heaven. Or at least Primrose Hill.
Kate had known Leonard since she was five years old when her father and he had been friends and business acquaintances. Harry Disney had been a taxidermist—where Kate painted live animals, Harry stuffed dead ones. He’d been one of the last practitioners of this dying art—“no pun intended,” he used to cheerfully say as often as possible when asked about his unusual line of work—and their home was always filled with stuffed Pekingese and Manx cats and the usual parade of pets taken on commission to pay for the school fees. There was also a sideline of distinctly uncommon creatures that, when Kate was growing up, were as familiar to her as coffee tables and porcelain shepherdesses were to other children. These included Ernest the eleven-foot-long crocodile who greeted guests in the hallway of their Georgian town house; Cecilia the wild boar, named after Harry’s mother-in-law, who occupied a seat by the window of their drawing room; not to mention a brown bear at the foot of the stairs, a penguin on the mantelpiece, and an ever-rotating zoo of zebras on the landing, stoats on armchairs, and bison on the top floor, which had officially been Harry’s workshop before it ceased to be big enough to accommodate more wildlife than the Serengeti Plain.
It was this exposure to fur at such a young age that helped fuel Kate’s passion for animals, both living and dead. And with her first packet of color crayons she drew yellow squiggles of otters and scrawls of Ernest, which would mature into the vast, vivid canvases that now hung in smart private collections in country houses and old ladies’ bedrooms; one had even put in an appearance at an exhibition at the Royal Academy last winter. All of which made Kate Disney a fairly successful artist at the age of twenty-eight.
She, however, saw things rather differently—she thought her work was pedestrian, uninspired, and dull. She believed that anyone could capture a likeness of an animal. The real challenge, which she never attempted for fear of failure, were portraits of people. So whenever she was fêted by Leonard or her clients for miraculously conveying the haughtiness of a pony or the curmudgeonly nature of a Yorkshire terrier, she simply thought it nonsense. People projected what they wanted to see onto an image; it had nothing to do with her talent, in Kate’s opinion. Still, her commissions paid the bills, and they helped add to her house-buying fund, which had been occasionally laid low when she’d had to dip into it and hand out a thousand pounds for Jake’s costs.
Jake was a musician, and studio time didn’t come as cheap as paintbrushes, unfortunately. In Kate’s eyes Jake’s career was much more important than her own. He was the one with the genius, the one on track for fame and glory. Jake’s songs were going to be the soundtrack for a whole generation, just as soon as they got heard. His lyrics were heartbreakingly beautiful, his voice raw and anguished. Kate could listen to him all day, if only one of his songs would be playlisted on the radio—that was all it would take to break him. Kate knew the day would come. Just as she knew that the day would come when he’d settle down and they would be together properly—have a house and babies and a recording studio in the basement and Kate wouldn’t have to wonder every time she saw Jake whether it was going to be the last. Whether she’d scared him away by being too conventional, too needy, too difficult. Luckily for Jake she never stopped to wonder what she saw in him. She was too busy wondering what he could possibly see in her. Still, this late-spring morning, as she made her way in a pair of old sneakers and combat pants past the beds of white flowers humming with bees, over the dewy grass toward Leonard’s house, Kate wasn’t burdened by anything much. Jake had left last night with a promise to call her this morning to fix up a proper reconciliation dinner, so she was as close to euphoric as she had been for as long as she could remember. She’d even taken the bold step of putting her box of tissues back in the bathroom cabinet, safe in the knowledge that she’d be dry-eyed for a while to come.
As Kate wandered down the side of the house and out into the front garden on her way to buy a pint of milk and the newspaper, she didn’t even mind the fact that she lived in a shed. It was spring, she was back together with the man she loved, and she got to hang out with Leonard, who had become as close to her as a father since Harry Disney died six years ago. It had been Leonard who had persuaded her to leave her job as a gallery girl in Cork Street and pursue the marginally more lucrative path of painting. And when she’d come to him a few months ago and explained that she wanted to rent his, admittedly very smart, garden shed because she was saving up to move in with Jake, Leonard hadn’t bleated a word about the fact that Jake was still living in a plush flat belonging to his aunt in Chelsea so why should she downsize—he’d simply handed over the keys; helped her move out the lawn mower, build a shower, and install a sink; and filled the place with ancient rugs and a fairy-tale iron bed when she wasn’t there to protest that he was spoiling her. Similarly Kate was always happy to be roped in to hand around canapés at his swish champagne parties. And since Leonard had no children of his own and his long-term lover, Phillippe, had died around the same time as Kate’s dad, Leonard and Kate were as inseparable a pair as a couple of Ming vases.
Kate looked out for the canary-yellow corduroy trousers that were Leonard’s trademark as she wandered through the overgrown front garden toward the gate. But Leonard wasn’t anywhere to be seen. He was probably in some auction room in Sussex already, outbidding everyone on a Biedermeier dresser. But there was nothing that couldn’t wait. She could tell him all about Jake’s return later this afternoon over tea.
“There’s someone coming out,” a man called out as Kate
unlocked the tall, wooden garden gate.
“It’ll be her,” someone else said, and there was a flurry of noise and scurrying feet in the street outside. Kate pushed open the gate and put her head around, only to be greeted by what appeared to be a firework display of popping, exploding lights. As a crowd of about twenty men came crashing toward her wielding enormous, cumbersome cameras, she slammed the gate shut again and caught her breath.
“Mirri. Oy Mirri,” they were shouting, in a chorus of cockney accents. “Just one picture, come on, love.” Kate peeked through a crack in the wood and saw the men, roused into action, poised on the other side of the gate with cameras obscuring their faces. All of them pointing in Kate’s direction. What on earth was going on? She looked back toward the house to see if there was any sign of Leonard. But nobody was stirring. The only thing that could be construed as out of the ordinary was that the curtains were drawn on the third story of the house and the windows were closed. Normally on a bright spring morning they’d be open—Leonard was a stickler for fresh air. Kate slid the latch on the gate and hid behind the wall as the men hammered away.
“Come on, darlin’,” she could hear an out-of-breath man heaving on the street, “just one picture and we’ll leave you alone. That’s all we want.”
“Who do you want?” Kate asked, convinced that these men, who must be paparazzi, were at the wrong gate. They must have been here to capture an off-guard snap of one of the countless hip young actors or rock stars who lived in Primrose Hill. Though Kate never saw any of them—not the boys from Oasis, not the cool supermodels, not Jude Law—she had read in the Sunday supplements that this leafy, expensive, and pretty part of London was the only place for any self-respecting superstar to settle with his or her Egyptian cotton sheets and pool tables.
“Mirri, is that you?” the heavy-breathing paparazzo asked through the slats in the wood.
“Who are you trying to photograph?” Kate asked, and remained glued to the mossy garden wall, which she hoped they wouldn’t be bold enough to climb.
