Farm Fatale

by Wendy Holden

  "For Christ's sake, this is a great opportunity for me, Rosie," Mark had exploded defensively. "I can't expect to be paid a fortune as well."

  "It certainly is a great opportunity," Rosie returned hotly. "For the paper to set a record low in freelance rates."

  That it was Mark's big break, she was less sure. The column was actually showing alarming signs of becoming his big breakdown. It had not escaped her notice that he seemed to be having problems getting material together. Yet none of the subjects she suggested— Duffy, the Womersleys, the Barley Mow, all apparently bursting with rural color and humor—seemed to interest him.

  "I'll decide what goes in my column," he would snap. "Anyway, isn't it time you started drumming up some work of your own? You're spending far too much time—let alone money—in that bloody garden."

  Rosie, heavyhearted, pulled some weeds from around the base of the lavender. Still, at least the Womersleys appreciated her efforts. Both devoted to their own pristine patch, they were delighted at Rosie's attempts to improve the scruffy plot of land behind Number 2 and had started slipping cuttings from their own garden over the wall to her. "Here," Mrs. Womersley would say, thrusting a plant in a plastic pot at Rosie. "Have one of these."

  The key to Mrs. Womersley's gardening success, Rosie had discovered, was relatively simple. "Slug pellets."

  "But isn't that a bit cruel? I mean, shouldn't you use beer traps and eggshells and things?"

  "Cruel?" The old lady's eyes were steely. "Ever seen what they can do to a garden?"

  Mr. Womersley, meanwhile, was a passionate vegetable grower. "These is my prize-winning onions," he yelled at her one day, brandishing a white-skinned bulb of frightening proportions over the fence at her.

  Rosie remembered the village show notices pinned up around the bar at the Barley Mow. "Of course. And didn't you win the potato class as well?"

  "Taters?" Mr. Womersley looked disgusted. "I'd never grow taters, not as long as I live." Rosie, who had not realized she was casting aspersions, racked her brain for a soothing remark. But it was too late. Anxious to distance himself from what he plainly considered the lowest root vegetable of the low, Mr. Womersley had plenty more to say on the matter. "Do y'know," he added contemptuously, "some tater folk have special tater boxes built, so they can carry their prize specimens around with them? Ridiculous, I call it."

  "You really should put the Womersleys in the column," Rosie urged Mark, having repeated the story over the pasta and pesto that now comprised the evening meal with such alarming frequency that she was seriously beginning to wonder about scurvy.

  Her hopes rose when, instead of dismissing her out of hand as usual, Mark looked thoughtful. "I was thinking of something I could do with them," he admitted.

  "Really?"

  "Yes, they could be in my syndicate."

  "What's a syndicate?" Rosie asked. Was Mark considering the national lottery as a way out of their problems? "They don't seem the betting kind," she hazarded.

  "Not a betting syndicate, a news syndicate," Mark said impatiently. "You know," he added as Rosie continued to look blank, "where you get together and take it in turns to go to the newsagent's to collect and deliver everyone's papers. Syndicates work really well. There's a flourishing one in the Lake District apparently."

  "But…" It was hard to imagine Mrs. Womersley agreeing to go all the way to the nearest newsagent's—as far away as the next village, as Mark had discovered to his disgust—and staggering back, presumably on the infrequent local bus, with the entire pile of nationals that constituted Mark's Sunday reading. Rosie sighed. Would an ever-rising tower of yellowing broadsheets be as permanent a feature of their new home as it had been of their old? Apparently not: Rosie tried to disguise her relief—as well as her amusement—when Mark returned the next morning from making over-the-wall representations with the news that the old lady got all the information she wanted from the village newsletter and a good deal that she didn't from the postman.

  ***

  As Rosie reluctantly scattered the most merciful slug pellets the garden center could offer sparingly under her newly planted gooseberry bushes (oh, the pies, crumble, and jam she planned!), the back door suddenly opened and Mark blinked into the wintry sunlight. Rosie quailed, expecting just the furious speech about the neighbors she had come out here to avoid. But he merely said, "Phone for you."

  She slowly followed him in, crossing her fingers that it wasn't the bank manager again. Still worse, the building society.

  Five minutes later she bounced ecstatically back into the kitchen. "Remember that illustrated book those publishers were talking to me about?"

  Mark shook his head. His eyes did not move from his laptop screen.

  "Remember that 'Let Me Entertain Ewe' card I did a while ago? That spinoff book? Well, its finally come off. They were just waiting to get a writer, it turns out, and now it's got the go-ahead. They want it to be about a globe-trotting sheep, called A Ewe in New York…" Rosie paused. Mark was not reacting. "They're, um, offering quite a bit of money as well. We can do the roof."

  Even the determinedly optimistic picture the building society surveyor had painted of Number 2 Cinder Lane hadn't quite been able to ignore the fact that when you poked your head through the loft opening in the bedroom ceiling, it looked like the black night sky scattered with vast and brilliant stars. Each star being the most enormous hole. In addition, the wind whistling through the gaps resulted in large quantities of roof grit being deposited into the room below. Rosie and Mark were now used to waking to find their hair and pillows full of debris; brushing the bed before they got in was as much of a nighttime ritual as brushing their teeth.

  "The only thing is," Rosie said musingly, "I'll need some more animals to base the characters on. Cows and sheep to sketch and so on. What I need is a friendly farmer."

  "No such thing, is there?" grumbled Mark.

  "Let's go to the Barley Mow to celebrate," Rosie suggested. Now that money was on the horizon, they could afford a variation in diet. Ann's fish pie, for example. And the pub would be a good place to start inquiring who might have sketchworthy sheep and cattle.

  "Been away, have you?" Alan hailed them as they walked through the door. Rosie shook her head and smiled, reluctant to admit to the whole pub that it had been penury and not Portofino that accounted for their absence.

  "Oops. 'Scuse me," Alan said, diving to answer the ringing phone in the kitchen. "Yes, on today," Rosie heard him assuring someone.

  "These two old ladies," he explained, returning to the bar, "ring up on Wednesdays, regular as clockwork, to check that we've got liver on the menu. Addicted to the stuff, they are. Me and Ann call 'em the Liver Birds."

  "Hate liver, I do," interrupted the man with the white beard, arriving at the bar with a man with a very long, very red, and very wet-looking nose. "Vile stuff. Couldn't eat it. Not even with gravy."

  "Met someone called Vile once, I did," Alan chipped in. "'Vile by name and vile by nature I am,' she told me. She was about twenty stone and said she hadn't taken her makeup off for two years. Mind you, she thought she was gorgeous. Said the bloke next door was a Peeping Tom who'd drilled a hole in the fence so he could look at her legs when she walked down to the outside toilet."

  There was an impressed silence at this. The man with the long nose sniffed. "Your nose is running," said the man with the white beard. "You'd best wipe it."

  "You wipe it," said Long Nose. "You're nearer."

  Shoulders shaking, Rosie nudged Mark. He had missed the whole bizarre exchange. At least he was very obviously not listening to it.

  "Do you know any friendly farmers?" Rosie asked Alan as, some time later, he deposited a huge and delicious-smelling mound of fish pie on the table in front of her.

  "Now there's a leading question," said Alan, eyes twinkling. "I know some pretty strange ones, that's for sure."

  "You bloody would," muttered Mark under his breath.

  "There's some who run a farm two villa
ges away," continued Alan in his quick, high voice. "Family of eight brothers and sisters, who no one ever sees. Avoid people, they do. They're very shy."

  "How do you mean?" Rosie's eyes were round with curiosity. She spoke emphatically to alert Mark to a possible story. Mark, however, positively radiated indifference.

  "Put it this way." Alan pulled up a bar stool. "When the postman tried to deliver a parcel there recently, they wouldn't even open the door."

  "Very sensible of them," interjected Mark sourly.

  "He looked through the letterbox and saw eight pairs of shoes crouched under the kitchen table," continued Alan, unabashed. "Well, I say shoes, but they were pretty strange shoes. Sort of medieval. They wear what their remote ancestors wore, you see. Sort of medieval jerkins and hats as well."

  "Sounds familiar," said Mark bitterly. He was, Rosie knew, thinking of Cinder Lane.

  "And they haven't been to bed for sixty years," Alan added, clearly getting into his stride. Mark made a strangled noise of disbelief.

  "Impossible," said Rosie.

  "Not if you live on Cinder Lane, it bloody isn't," muttered Mark.

  "No, they all sleep upright in armchairs, you see," Alan explained. "Keep the same hours as their cattle. And their dogs sleep in a tree. And the last time one of the sisters appeared in public, she was walking backward down the village street, strangling a rat in a bucket."

  Rosie looked eagerly at Mark. If this wasn't color, she didn't know what was.

  "I think," Mark said, seizing his plate of liver and mash and standing up abruptly, "that I'll finish my lunch outside."

  They walked back to the cottage in silence. Rosie escaped immediately into the garden and went to admire the cattle over the back wall. Gold, white, and auburn backs swaying together, they presented a timeless picture. Looking at their noble heads bowed contentedly to the hillside grass, Rosie felt soothed.

  "Margaret says if you take your trousers down she'll do it," came Mrs. Womersley's voice, high and sudden, from the garden next door. "Says she'll put that new zip in, I mean," Mrs. Womersley added crossly, as if something altogether more exciting had occurred to her spouse.

  "Sorry to interrupt you, Mrs. Womersley," Rosie said, jerked out of her bovine contemplation as an idea occurred to her. "But you know you mentioned your nephew the farmer…?"

  Chapter Eleven

  Illyria. Bloody odd name, thought Samantha, pulling up outside Dame Nancy's house. Bloody odd place too. Her gaze dwelt with great satisfaction on the shabby Georgian building less than half the size and definitely less than a third of the value of The Bottoms. A mud-spattered Peugeot lurked at the side of the house. Samantha lost no time in parking the gleaming Jaguar right next to it.

  So far, so satisfactory. Samantha was confident that the air of galloping decay about Dame Nancy's house accurately reflected the dilapidated state of its owner. The only puzzle was the dame bit. Possibly, Samantha thought, the reward for a lifetime's dedication to Meals on Wheels or for embroidering a record number of church kneelers for the diocese. In which case, persuading her to relinquish the reins of thespian power would be like taking candy from a baby. She would probably never have met a proper actress before. Let alone a celebrity.

  The days of the Eight Mile Bottom Amateur Dramatic Society were numbered. Standing in the wings and fidgeting with impatience were…cue drum roll…the Samantha Villiers Players. Forget Gilbert and Sullivan. Forget Half a bloody Sixpence. She'd have them doing Pinter and Ayckbourn before you could say Tom Stoppard.

  Samantha swung her legs elegantly out of the Jaguar and admired her sleek kneecaps with satisfaction. She pointed the key fob at the car. The reassuring beep was, however, drowned by a disconcerting squawk. Looking down in panic, Samantha saw with horror that a large bird with blue-black feathers was staring at her ankles with mean little eyes. Fear mounted within her as it stabbed the ground near her ankle with its beak. Huge, gleaming, and with intimidatinglooking red wobbly bits all over its face, it looked, she thought, like a vicious creature. Like a pheasant crossed with an eagle. Or maybe even a vulture.

  "Fuck off!" Samantha flapped furiously at the bird. Squawking indignantly, it retreated to join a number of others pecking about the dusty corners of Illyria's moldering portico. As she stood rooted to the spot, the peeling front door flew open to reveal a woman wearing an apron and holding a cerise feather duster.

  "What are you laughing at, you naughty things?" she demanded to the birds bobbing and pecking about her feet. As Samantha watched in disgust, she swooped down, grabbed the largest, and held it in her arms. "Oh, so sorry," she said, spotting Samantha. "I do hope they didn't startle you. They are rather curious, I'm afraid."

  "Very curious," Samantha said shortly, looking at the feather duster and wondering if this was Dame Nancy's cleaner.

  "Adorable, aren't they?" The woman smiled. Samantha couldn't help noticing that she was rather glamorous for a cleaner. As well as possessing an unexpectedly deep and sexy voice—unexpected for a home help, that was—the woman was tall and straight-shouldered, with white-blond hair framing an elegant, high-cheekboned face. "Larry and Judi are Black Orpingtons, but Denholm and Dirk here are Buffs," she was saying. "And in the back we've got Vanessa and Prunella, a couple of Brahmas…"

  Samantha smiled, eager to get the upper hand. "Orpingtons. Oh, I thought so. Knew they weren't hens, at any rate."

  The cleaner, who, for some reason, looked vaguely familiar, was now staring in amazement at Samantha. "But they are hens. Apart from Larry, who's a cockerel, of course. And they're all very fast— they always do terribly well in the Barley Mow hen races."

  Samantha gaped. Hen races? What on earth was the woman talking about? "I've come to see your mistress," she said haughtily.

  "Mistress?" A slight frown creased the suspiciously miraculous smoothness of a brow of at least fifty summers. Dame Nancy was paying her cleaner far too much if she could afford Botox injections, Samantha smiled. The old woman was obviously even battier than she had imagined.

  "Dame Nancy. Of the Amateur Dramatic Society."

  The cleaner laughed huskily. "That's me."

  Samantha could not have been more shocked if she had plunged her steel stiletto heel into an electrical socket. Thank God, she thought, that her acting training allowed her to appear glacially composed despite any amount of inner turmoil.

  "You look rather surprised," observed an amused Dame Nancy. She made a long-fingered, elegant gesture at her apron. Which, Samantha now noticed, was tied to a splendid, statuesque figure. "Sorry if I look a fright. Been doing a spot of housework. What can I do for you, anyway?"

  "I'm your new neighbor, and—"

  "Oh!" Dame Nancy clasped her hands rapturously to an exceptionally shapely bosom. "From The Bottoms? How wonderful. We've all been dying to meet you. We've heard all about you."

  Samantha's smile tightened. Not from that bloody postman, she hoped. It was hard not to be flattered, however.

  Dame Nancy was practically hopping from foot to foot in excitement.

  "Do come in, please," she urged. "Larry will lead the way. He really is very proprietorial." She kissed the top of the cockerel's head, put him on the ground, and followed him as he scurried into the house. "Have to carry this everywhere in case he poos," she explained, whisking a cloth out of her apron pocket. "But chicken poo isn't too bad. Dries quite quickly."

  Suddenly feeling as if she were about to throw up, Samantha followed her hostess into a shabby but elegant hallway. She looked nervously behind her at the following hens. Would they poo on her Armani? How could this bizarre woman even think about having them in the house? But the place was hardly a palace, Samantha thought with satisfaction, noting an ancient and thin-legged chair covered in extremely tatty fabric. Dame Nancy must really be up against it to have furniture like this.

  Noticing her looking closely at the chair, Dame Nancy tapped the back of its delicate frame. "Louis Seize. You can sit on it though."

  Sama
ntha looked at her uncomprehendingly. Who was Lewie and why had he said that?

  Dame Nancy smiled at her. "This calls for a celebration. Martini? Bit naughty, I know, but it's not too far off lunchtime after all."

  "Perfect," said Samantha, flattered. Obviously, she wouldn't dream of jumping to conclusions, but doubtless Dame Nancy, knowing of her immense fame as an actress, was merely assuming that this was a celebrated film star's drink of choice. Samantha watched the elegant, tanned fingers, apparently complete strangers to tapestry needles, selecting the bottles on an amazingly well-stocked drinks tray. The many large rings clinked against the glass. "Shaken not stirred," Samantha added. It would do no harm to impress Dame Nancy with her scintillating wit.