Lots of Love (69 page)

‘He’s moved into the manor – his parents won’t let him stay in the flat above the kennels in case he tries to creep off to see you. They have him under close arrest, poor sod.’ He offered her a swig from his hip flask

Ellen refused. ‘But he can come and go when he’s with you at the yard?’

‘Not likely.’ He took a gulp, then screwed the lid back on. ‘She’s a canny old bat, Bell – always popping by to check on him, sending all her cronies to me for lessons, telling her chums in the village to keep an eye out for him. Every time we hack past the Old Vicarage, Marjory Whittaker logs it in a notepad, then makes a call to HQ.’

‘HQ?’

‘The manor.’ Rory pocketed the flask. ‘Aunt Bell’s done everything short of having him electronically tagged. The only reason he got away today was because he borrowed Sharrie’s old mackintosh and bush hat, along with about ten of my sweaters to make him look fat. He was sweating like a pig.’

Ellen, who couldn’t stop shaking, wished she had had a few jumpers when she’d stumbled along the path.

‘I must say, you took your time coming up here.’ Rory followed her, fuelled by the vodka. ‘Spurs has been falling apart all week.’

‘I did try,’ Ellen explained, ‘but there was a surprising amount of agricultural traffic blocking my way.’ She glanced back at him. ‘And forgive me for not persisting, but last time we spoke he gave me the distinct impression that he’s marrying Godspell Gates.’

‘Yeah, and you have to help him out,’ Rory pointed out, making it sound as simple as persuading him not to wear an unflattering hat.

‘He chose the devil over the deep blue sea,’ she muttered.

‘You can work something out.’ He grabbed her arm. ‘If you don’t help him through this, I think he’ll crash and burn big-time.’

‘I am
not
helping him.’ Ellen glared at him. His silver eyes were so like Spurs’ that she felt her arteries rattle under the pressure of pumping blood. ‘I can’t help him. If he truly loved me, he wouldn’t do this.’

Rory pulled back. ‘You have no idea, do you? Of course he loves you. He fucking adores you. He talks about nothing else – it’s driving me nuts.’

‘So why side with his mother?’

He reached for his hip flask again without answering.

And then Ellen remembered Hell’s Bells telling Spurs that hers would not be the first unhappy death he had caused. She grabbed the flask from Rory and downed a long, dribbling draught.

‘Tell me about the boy who died. The one Spurs is supposed to have killed.’

‘How the—’ Rory backed away.

‘Tell me, Rory.’

He backed further away. ‘You mustn’t talk about that. No one talks about that.’

So Spurs had kept his darkest secret from her all along. Murderer – that’s what Ely had called him. Murderer. She watched the word flash up behind her closed eyes, garish red-top headlines, graffiti on walls, accusations on lips. She turned her face to the wind and tried to wash the love from her veins, scour the blind forgiveness from her heart, bleach the besotted trust from her head. Murderer. You can’t love a murderer.

But her mind chanted its hypnotic mantra. I can forgive him anything. Anything. Anything. I love him. I love him. I love him.

When she opened her eyes again, Rory had gone. She spun round, disorientated, but he had disappeared – doing a bunk for fear of being interrogated, she thought. She still held his flask in her hand – a battered silver one bearing the Constantine crest. Ellen drained its contents and tried not to gag as the vodka burned her throat. Then she almost jumped out of her skin as she heard a strangled howl just beyond the thick bramble hedge. Tripping over Snorkel, who was cowering at her feet, Ellen ran to the open gateway ahead of her and found Rory perching on a stile.

‘What is it?’ she gasped, almost too terrified to look.

But when he pointed into the valley, he was smiling widely. ‘Now tell me he doesn’t love you, you stupid cow.’

Ellen climbed on to the stile beside him. The rain was lashing the far ridge of the valley now, and a circle of blue sky had opened up above Oddlode, letting out great rays of sunlight. Ely Gates’s halo, she thought bitterly, as she strained her eyes for signs of movement lower down the path.

And then she saw what Rory was pointing at. In the huge cornfield beyond Devil’s Marsh, an intricate series of crop circles had been carved, forming words in the ripening wheat,
I LOVE YOU. FORGIVE ME.

Rory patted her shoulder, jumping from the stile. ‘And I thought I was having a hard time getting Dilly on a second date.’ He loped away.

Ellen clasped a hand to her mouth, laughing and sobbing.

‘I love him. I can forgive him anything,’ she said, scrambled off the stile and ran as fast as she could.

She raced along the bridleway, her lactic-acid-filled legs cramping as she sprinted towards the cornfield. Breathless and almost demented with excitement, she danced around the words, flying between avenues of wheat as she ran from ‘
I
’, through
‘LOVE’,
around
‘YOU’,
up
‘FORGIVE’
and down
‘ME’.
Standing in the final leg of the E, she spun round and called Spurs’ name.

But he didn’t answer.

Ellen paced around
‘ME’,
getting her breath back and running her hands though her hair. The sun, blasting between bustling clouds, lit up the wet crop like a sheet of pale gold.

After ten minutes, she walked back through the hollow words and hurried along the path towards home, her tired body kept going by a faint hope that he would be waiting for her there.

But then, as she passed the River Folly, she heard a flint strike.

Camouflaged by nettles, goosegrass and brambles, he was sitting between two pillars, his face as white as the clouds circling overhead.

Ellen went straight into his arms, not caring that bramble barbs ripped at her legs and nettles burned her ankles.

The moment their lips touched, it was a silent pact. Spurs clutched Ellen as though he would never let go and she clung to him in return. They were fused together like molten solder. They kissed on and on, unable to stop, think, pause for breath, words or laughter.

At last, starved of oxygen, they pulled apart.

‘I have to do it.’ He took her hands in his. ‘But it doesn’t change anything. I want you to stay. You
have
to stay. I can’t live without you.’

‘Come away with me. We can get away from here.’

He pressed his forehead into the crook of her neck. ‘You don’t understand. I must do this. It’s the only way to make things right again.’

‘There’s nothing right about what you’re doing, Spurs. It’s all wrong.’

‘Ely is prepared to forgive me.’

‘No, he isn’t.’ She pulled his head up, forcing him to look at her. ‘He says you’re a murderer. Don’t you see that he can never forgive you?’

His head jerked back as though she’d applied a cattle-prod to his temples and he stumbled away, crashing into the brambles.

‘You know,’ he breathed, staring up at the sky. ‘You fucking know.’

Ellen hugged herself tightly. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

‘You—’ He stopped, brows furrowed. ‘What?’

‘I’d trust you with my life,’ she sobbed. ‘I love you too much to care what you’ve done in the past. It doesn’t matter.’
I
trust you with my life.’

‘Even though Ely told you I’m a murderer?’

She nodded. ‘I get to choose where I put my belief, Spurs. And it’s not in God, duty, justice or village scandal. It’s in this great pumping lump in my chest. That’s what tells me never to doubt you, and I’ll believe that until it stops beating.’

He stared at her, the silver eyes so wide that they seemed to take up most of his face. ‘But Ely was telling you the truth.’

She didn’t move, not even daring to breathe.

‘I killed his nephew,’ he whispered. ‘I was the reason Bevis never made it to his eighteenth birthday.’

Ellen’s vision tunnelled and twisted as she leant against a column for support. She could hear herself speaking before she even realised what she was saying. ‘Bevis Aspinall?’

‘Ely must have told you.’ He looked up sharply.

‘I sit on the bench that’s dedicated to him. I talk to him sometimes. We were born on the same day.’ She trapped the palm of her hand against her forehead trying to force her thoughts to settle. ‘Christ. Oh, Christ.’

Spurs crashed back through the undergrowth, leaped straight over the ledge that Ellen was sitting on and went into the folly.

His voice was distorted by the strange acoustics, words tumbling out and rattling around the domed ceiling. ‘Bevis was my best friend in the village – we’d known each other since we were toddlers. His mother is Ely’s sister Grace, who looked like Greta Garbo. He was something else – Ely worshipped him, and so did I. He was the golden boy – funny, clever, good-looking, a bit soppy and shy sometimes, but the girls always fell for him. He kept me sane – like you do.’ He looked at her over his shoulder. ‘I gave him hell, but I’d have cut my heart out for him.

‘He died during the Devil’s Marsh race,’ he told her, his voice echoing in the stony chamber as he paced from wall to wall, caged by his guilt. ‘His horse stumbled on the riverbank and he fell in. It was very high that year, like this – there had been storms all summer. I went after him. I thought he was drowning – pulled him out, tried to revive him. But what I did killed him. I didn’t realise he’d broken his neck. A splinter of vertebra had entered his spinal cord. By dragging him on to the bank so quickly, I caused it to lodge right in and kill him. I killed him.’

‘But it was an accident!’ Ellen scrambled round to face him. ‘You were trying to save him.’

‘Ely called me a murderer and the village believed him.’ He looked away. ‘There was an inquest, of course. Accidental death, although nobody cared to accept it. They all blamed me and they were right. That day, I’d wished him dead in front of everybody.’ He clamped his wrists to his head as he remembered. ‘I wished him dead – and then he fucking died on me. He went ahead and died, the idiot.’ He slumped against a wall in the shadows, engulfed in barbed brambles.

‘That summer, we’d argued for the first time.’ He was speaking in little more than a whisper now. ‘He fell for the only girl who couldn’t care less about him. She was from another planet, but he couldn’t see that. He was besotted. He was such a romantic fool that he would have slain a dragon for the tiniest little bit of her, but of course he just made a fool of himself. I even set them up, knowing she wasn’t interested – I thought I was helping, but he accused me of ruining everything. So did she.’

Ellen held her breath, suddenly knowing who he was talking about.

‘I guess I loved her too.’ He stared at his hands. ‘And I thought I was being so noble – offering to share her like a bloody chocolate bar. Shows how much I knew about women then.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Bevis knew a hell of a lot more and he couldn’t forgive me for hurting her. It was a huge falling-out. We were barely speaking by the day of the race. And then I said the dumbest thing of my entire life. I stood up in my stirrups at the start and wished him dead. But I still loved the fucking idiot. He should have known that. Instead he went ahead and granted my wish.

‘After he died I was sent to Coventry. I got hate letters and was beaten up. Even my parents thought I was to blame for his death.’

‘Was that why you caused so much chaos around here?’

He looked up from the shadows. ‘I was causing chaos before then, but I upped the ante. I just didn’t care any more. I could hold my hand over a flame and not feel the pain. I left before I was tempted to hold anybody else’s hands over it.’

‘And that’s when you started forging stuff?’

He moved one cheek around with his tongue. ‘Pretty pathetic, huh?’

‘Yes.’

He snorted, pulling a flower from a bramble and shedding its petals. ‘You really share Bevis’s birthday? That figures.’ The petals scattered on the floor. ‘Christ! If Ely has summoned the forces of good and evil to try me for murder, he’s done a damn fine job, I’ll give him that. He couldn’t have found somebody that I’d love more.’

‘This isn’t a medieval morality play,’ she gasped. ‘This is life.’

‘Is it?’ He looked up, haunted by ghosts. ‘In that case, I’ll lay mine down for you. All you have to do is wait for me to make sense of it. And I can only do that by going through with this. I can’t break my word.’

‘Do you really think marrying Ely’s daughter will make up for Bevis’s death?’

‘Of course not.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘That’s the whole point. Marrying the princess and uniting the kingdoms of Oddlode is just the first of my tasks. Ely has issued a far more difficult challenge and he’s banking on the fact that I won’t succeed.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I ride in the Devil’s Marsh race, remember? And by all accounts Ely’s paid an army of locals to try to ride me into the river. Most of the field aren’t racing for the cup at all – a grand is nothing compared to the pay-off they’ll get if I’m despatched.’

She clasped her spinning head. ‘Are you saying he wants to kill you?’

‘Conveniently crippled would be better. It’s in his interests to have the marriage last longer than half an hour, after all. Godspell will doubtless exercise rights over the estate if it’s left heirless so soon after we marry, but it would be better to wait until the ink’s dry on our paper anniversary. I’m sure Ely’s taken
very
good advice from Giles.’

Ellen stared at him, not understanding, her heart racing so fast that she had to clutch a lichen-crusted pillar to stop herself passing out.

‘There’s been a change of plan,’ he spelled it out flatly. ‘Ely’s not just announcing Godspell and my engagement at his party. We’re getting married.’

‘No!’