The Little Teashop of Lost and Found

by Trisha Ashley

  Also at the tea had been Eleri’s agent, Senga McWhirter – a name so odd that it had stuck in my head – so I thought I’d try her first, reminding her that we’d once met. The slight connection seemed like a good omen and I was always keen on signs and portents. She’d had a liltingly familiar Scottish accent that had made me feel relaxed in her company, but she struck me as a tough cookie under her soft baby-blue cashmere twinset, which I suspected was exactly what you needed in a literary agent.

  I contacted her via her website and within hours she rang me and talked at length in that persuasive voice. She wanted me to go down and see her until I explained the circumstances … and then somehow it appeared that I’d agreed terms with her and she was to send me a contract to sign in the post.

  In return, I was to email her all my published backlist e-books and my new novel as soon as I’d finished it.

  ‘What’s it about?’ she asked, obviously assuming I was in the middle of writing it.

  ‘About?’ I repeated blankly. ‘I … well, it’s about Sleeping Beauty – when she wakes up, her bower’s been transported to the middle of a run-down housing estate and she mistakes one of the locals for her prince,’ I gabbled.

  Now, where the hell did that idea come from?

  ‘Wonderful,’ she enthused. ‘I’ll look forward to reading that very soon.’

  I realized I’d sold my agent a fairy tale, so now I’d have to put my money where my mouth was and write it!

  Once business matters had been settled to her satisfaction, we chatted a little about the time we met, and Eleri Groves’ amazing Brontë find: the previous year she’d discovered a formerly unknown mention of Charlotte Brontë in the diary of a school friend, revealing she’d frequently walked out on to the moors in the hope of seeing a certain farmer, who inspired her to create Mr Rochester. Eleri, when researching the novel she’d based on this, met and married a descendant of that farmer and settled there, near Haworth. It had been in all the papers around the time of the book launch, which was held at the farm’s teashop.

  ‘It’s quite a coincidence, because I’m hoping to move to Haworth myself soon,’ I told Senga.

  ‘Great idea! I sometimes travel up to see Eleri and I’ll be able to kill two birds with one stone,’ she enthused. ‘She’s holding the second Tea with Mr Rochester book launch at her husband’s farm in September and I’ll be there for that – perhaps you could get a ticket?’

  ‘I’m sure they sold out long ago – probably the moment they were released,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps, but I’ll tell Eleri to squeeze you in.’

  ‘No – please don’t,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s only a couple of months away and I may not have moved by then. Perhaps next year, though.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said, then broke off to hum a little of ‘We’ll Keep a Welcome in the Hillside’, before saying she’d be in touch soon and ringing off.

  Edie, when I told her about Senga, said I’d done a sensible thing and was predisposed to think that a Scot would naturally be the best kind of agent to have.

  ‘I hadn’t realized your books were doing so well, dear,’ she added.

  ‘I was surprised when they took off too, really,’ I admitted. ‘Lola always said they were a bit of a niche market, so I’m going to ring her and tell her the niche is about to get a lot bigger.’

  I soon discovered that Fear of Agent overcomes creative inertia. Idea sparks flew around my mind until they coalesced and the glimmering of a story formed around the dark heart of the Sleeping Beauty.

  ‘I could remove the evil spell that makes you so spiteful and vile-tongued,’ suggested the fairy. ‘Just give me a little sweet cake to eat and a drop of honey wine first.’

  ‘Bugger off,’ said Princess Beauty. ‘I’ve hated you and all your kind ever since I was cursed in my cradle, and there’s no cake or wine here for you.’

  ‘Your stupidity would appear to be a natural curse, but perhaps I should add a little something to remember me by?’ the fairy mused, then spun herself into a ball of bright sparks, before vanishing through the window.

  The cursed princess congratulated herself on getting rid of her unwelcome visitor until, on looking in the mirror, she saw that where once her forehead had been as smooth as silk, now something was pushing up in the centre … and even as she watched, a fine spiral horn emerged and grew, until the tip touched the surface of the mirror and she fell back with a dreadful scream.

  Luckily, it turned out to be a twenty-four-hour spell, but it reminded her that it never paid to be rude to a fairy.

  I didn’t immediately tell Edie or Lola about the third lucky thing that happened soon after, but instead hugged it to myself.

  For by another seemingly fortuitous stroke of good fortune, I’d stumbled across Mrs Muswell’s online advertisement for the Branwell Café, just off the main street in Haworth, and fallen in love with the place.

  We chatted via email and exchanged Facebook messages, and then she sent me photographs of the café, which also had a flat over it … And I don’t know what came over me, because I bought it, sight unseen, despite the warnings of Mr Blackwell, when I asked him to act for me, and the disapproval of Edie, once the cat was out of the bag.

  It seemed a great bargain, even though I hadn’t been looking for a business – but there was living accommodation too and, after all, I did know about cafés.

  I can’t have been totally rational, even though at the time I thought I was, because I ignored everyone’s warnings and carried on with the purchase regardless, taking everything Mrs Muswell said at face value.

  From her Facebook photo I could see she was a fat, jolly-looking woman with a glinting smile and even more glinting huge hooped gold earrings. She informed me that the café opened seasonally and, since she was based in Spain, was run when she was absent by a manageress. It had just closed early for the winter for updating and redecorating, after which she’d intended increasing the price, so I was getting a bargain by buying it now. Anyway, from the pictures I could see it looked fine, if a little old-fashioned.

  The bare minimum of searches and surveys that my solicitor insisted I needed were soon done, showing nothing of any great moment. The café fronted a small dead-end alleyway, a little cobbled backwater off the main street, but there was parking behind the premises and the sale included all fixtures, fittings and catering equipment.

  Mrs Muswell even promised to come across and meet me there once the sale was completed, to show me the books (though she said there was lots of potential to increase the profits), tell me about local suppliers and introduce me to her seasonal staff.

  It all sounded almost too good to be true, much like my own fairy stories … and so it was.

  All I can say is, never surf property for sale when you have a huge insurance cheque in your bank account.

  The first cloud on the horizon was an email from Mrs Muswell as soon as the purchase had been completed, saying she couldn’t come over after all, due to family circumstances. However, the deeds, keys, accounts and any other useful paperwork would be at her solicitors in Keighley, waiting for me.

  But then she suddenly vanished into the ether. I could no longer see her Facebook profile and all my emails bounced. I contacted her solicitor’s office, but they wouldn’t divulge any information or contact details for her, though they did confirm they had the keys and a folder of paperwork for me.

  ‘I did say perhaps you weren’t wise to buy a property sight unseen,’ Mr Blackwell said mildly, when I told him. ‘However, the café is now in your possession and you must let me know how you get on.’

  Edie was more forthright. ‘I smell a rat and there must be something wrong with the place,’ she declared. ‘Buying a property that way was a silly idea, as I’d have told you if you hadn’t turned all secretive on me till the deed was done!’

  ‘I know – I wasn’t thinking straight and I expect I knew you’d stop me,’ I agreed.

  I was worried, though I consoled my
self that however odd Mrs Muswell’s behaviour was, the property did actually exist and was now mine – and I’d seen the photos so I knew there couldn’t be anything too awful to find out.

  ‘If it’s dreadful, mind – infested with vermin, or falling into one of those sink holes, say – then put it straight back on the market, cut your losses and return here,’ Edie said, still fretting. ‘There’s always a place for you at Lochside House.’

  ‘I know – and you’ve been so kind to me always,’ I said gratefully, and kissed her wrinkled cheek.

  ‘Och, away with you, you great daftie,’ she said, but affectionately, even though I was pretty sure that that was her exact opinion of me, now I’d bought a place I’d never seen.

  There was no going back: I’d broken the spell and was now as eager to see my new home as I’d been reluctant to visit Haworth in the past.

  Yet still, I’d recognized something that resonated with me in Emily Brontë and I’d reread Wuthering Heights so often that I knew passages of it by heart. This simply had to be the place where I could put down roots at last.

  When I’d left my hysterical mother she’d been dosing herself with tranquillizers and sleeping tablets, so I knew she’d be out for the count for hours. Probably just as well.

  Luckily our house was right at the edge of the village, the last on the road up to Blackdog Moor, so I didn’t have to pass through it, risking being seen. I remember I was shaking when I finally turned the car into the gravelled drive, but from cold, exhaustion and relief, nothing more. I closed the metal gates behind me with finality.

  7

  Alice in Brontëland

  The first Wednesday in September found me travelling down to Yorkshire by train, which was not the way I’d envisaged embarking on my new life.

  My car had been in the local garage since dying on the drive the day I arrived. The owner’s son, Rory, happened to be a vintage Beetle enthusiast, so had been carefully and slowly restoring it in his spare time. It had become such a labour of love that it seemed as if he’d never stop tinkering and get it back on the road. Now, apparently, he wanted to put the finishing touches to it before driving it down to Haworth himself, to see how it ran.

  I strongly suspected he’d been put up to this by Edie, who didn’t think I was yet ready for the long drive, but since she’d insisted on paying the garage bill as a leaving present, I didn’t feel I could really argue.

  I took one wheeled suitcase and an overnight bag with me and Edie assured me that she and Rory would pack my worldly goods back into the Beetle and he’d follow me down on Sunday. I couldn’t even wait and travel with him, since there simply wouldn’t be room. I’d only managed to get all my possessions into it when I’d arrived at Edie’s by utilizing every inch of space except the driver’s seat.

  Anyway, the second I’d exchanged contracts on the café, it was as if every restraint that had held me back from going to Haworth before had suddenly snapped, so that now I couldn’t wait another single moment to get there.

  It was a long journey and I arrived late and had to spend the night in a small hotel in Keighley near the station, waking to a rain-washed morning with a faint rainbow in the sky. I hoped that was a good sign.

  The solicitor’s office was only a short walk away and I got there as soon as they opened, eager to collect the keys. They handed over a bundle of papers relating to the property too, but though I asked if I could have Mrs Muswell’s contact details in case I had any queries regarding the café, they wouldn’t divulge them. I didn’t even see an actual solicitor, just a secretary, and she was so close-lipped she strongly resembled a bearded clam.

  I collected my suitcase, which had the small overnight bag strapped to the top of it, and set off for Haworth in a taxi. At the very moment that I closed the taxi door the weather reneged on its earlier half-hearted promise. The sky glowered blackly and cascades of water fell on to the roof of the car, a frantic drumming that echoed my thoughts.

  Reality had finally and belatedly set in and I wondered what on earth I’d done. Was this sudden Stygian gloom an omen? Was the churning in my stomach panic, fear, excitement, anticipation or an indigestible mixture of all four?

  The heavenly carwash was still in action when the taxi driver halted with a sudden jerk that set the eye-watering pine air freshener attached to the rear-view mirror swinging. I knew exactly where I was, because Haworth was so familiar from books and documentaries: we were near the bottom of the cobbled road that led up towards the church and Brontë Parsonage.

  ‘Why have you stopped here?’ I asked the driver. ‘I want Doorknocker’s Row, not the main street.’

  ‘Aye, I know,’ he said, then pointed to the entrance of an alleyway so narrow that I hadn’t noticed it until that moment.

  ‘It’s a few steps up t’ ginnel,’ he said, laconically.

  ‘But I thought you could drive right up to it? I know it’s got parking.’

  ‘Not at the front, it hasn’t,’ he said. ‘See for yourself – nowt but a motorbike would fit down there.’

  He didn’t offer to get out and help me with my luggage, but stayed snug and dry while I struggled to extricate my suitcase and overnight bag, which was now weighed down with the bundle of documents as well as my laptop. I paid him, but without a tip, and he gave me a look that was even blacker than the sky and drove off in a cloud of spray.

  There didn’t seem to be anyone else about, which was hardly surprising. I scuttled into the shelter of the passageway, a sliver of slippery cobbles between the steep sides of two substantial buildings.

  I’d have been certain the taxi driver had brought me to the wrong address, had it not been for the street sign on the wall above my head, so I dragged my suitcase along and discovered that beyond the narrow entrance, Doorknocker’s Row opened up into a bottle shape.

  Through the curtain of rain I could just make out a forlornly flapping café sign to my left, but if this was the Branwell Café, then the photos I’d seen must have been taken using trick photography! Either that, or they’d been of an entirely different place, for there was no wide expanse of cobbles fronting it and the tubs of bright flowers had turned into two rotting half-barrels bursting their metal hoops and containing no hint of life.

  It appeared that some bad fairy had cast a blight over the place – and my dreams. Story of my life in a nutshell, really.

  Still, there was no going back, so I fished out my keys, one of which was helpfully labelled ‘Café door’, before trundling my baggage across at a run. I fumbled the key into the lock, huddled under the inadequate shelter of a trellis-sided wooden porch. The gutters, unable to cope with the sheer volume of water, overflowed in cascades on either side.

  Maybe I should have bought an ark, instead of a café?

  The key turned easily once my wet fingers managed to insert it and the door swung inwards so suddenly that I stumbled forward down an unexpected step into the gloomy interior. Recovering my balance with an effort, I pulled my case inside and shut the door. The deafening waterfall noise abruptly quietened to a murmur. That was a mercy.

  I fished out the torch I kept in the bottom of my handbag and took a good look around me. There was a light switch, which didn’t work, but by then I wasn’t altogether surprised to find the power had been cut off.

  I shone the torch beam around the long, narrow room, which had a counter at the furthest end, backed by a mirror in which my pale face floated like an apparition. There was a door to the left, which presumably led to the kitchen premises, and steps to the customer conveniences vanishing down into the darkness on the other side.

  Apart from having a wooden floor, the room bore little resemblance to the old-fashioned pine, chintz and polished brass cosiness of the pictures sent to me by Mrs Muswell, for it was instead furnished with speckled Formica tabletops and tubular chairs with pale blue plastic seats, some ripped and leaking grey stuffing.

  There was the gleam of a glass cake display cabinet on the counter and the outlin
e of a hatch through to the kitchen behind it … unless the rear premises had magically vanished into one of the sink holes that Edie had been so worried about.

  I’d have said the café had been abandoned years ago, except that even by torchlight I could see that it was as clean as a whistle, for every surface, however cheap and shoddy, shone.

  I supposed that was something … and when I went through the swinging door into the kitchen, that was spick and span, too. It was outdated, the work surfaces and flooring worn, and I spotted immediately that there were spaces where equipment had been taken out. Now I was getting Mrs Muswell’s full measure, I was fairly positive they would be items she’d included in the sale, though I’d have to unpack the list of what she said she’d leave to be sure.

  I hung my wet raincoat on the back of a chair, dumped my bag on the wooden table and went to explore further.

  There was a cubbyhole of a windowless office, with built-in desk and wooden shelves, and a utility room through an arch where, to my relief, I found that the big fridge, freezer and chiller cabinet were still there, turned off and with the doors slightly open to air. Like the one in the kitchen, the Belfast sink was scrubbed a spotless white, too. It was as though someone had done their best to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, and I was certain it wasn’t Mrs Muswell. On one wall was fitted the obligatory staff hand-washing basin, and next to it a floor-to-ceiling cupboard was full of cleaning materials.

  The back door was in a little hallway, but whatever was outside could wait until the end of the apocalypse, if it ever came. There was another flight of steps vanishing down into darkness in there, too, but I’d seen too many horror films to go exploring the basement with a torch. I didn’t remember any mention of a cellar in the details.