The Love Letter (10 page)

‘You have no idea how I feel!’ Legs protested hotly.

‘I so do!’ The cucumber struck a worksurface with a splat. ‘I know, Legs, because I feel exactly the same way a lot of the time.’

‘About what?’

‘About stealing your sister’s husband.’

Legs gasped in surprise. ‘You mean you want to go back in time and hand him back?’

‘Of course not!’ Daisy glanced at Grace and Eva in their high-chairs, lowering her voice. ‘Will’s the best thing that ever happened to me. But it doesn’t make the guilt go away, the need to repent and the wish that it could have happened differently, with more dignity and less pain. I think you’d like to take it one stage further, and that a part of you wishes you and Francis were still together.’

‘That’s not what this trip is about! I’m with Conrad now. And you said it yourself, Francis is “practically” engaged.’ She winced as the words physically hurt to say out loud each time. ‘This is just business and, hopefully, friendship.’

Daisy gave her that age-old wise look before turning to chop up the cucumber. ‘Friendship
is
important, Legs. Friendship and family; you mustn’t abuse them.’

‘They’re everything to me.’

‘Good.’ She looked over her shoulder, and they shared an appeasing smile, although both knew that there was a lot being left unsaid.

Their deep bond of friendship had lasted well into adulthood despite the severest of tests. It sat comfortably beneath them, a cushion on which they both relied, which still worked better out of London, particularly away from Ros and the reminders of Legs’ divided loyalty. It also worked better away from Francis. It always had. For the first few years of their friendship, the girls had known nothing about the only son of the man they thought of as their king. They hadn’t even known his name.

Then the king had returned to his castle, and his heir made
himself apparent. The princesses’ friendship had been tested ever since.

Throughout lunch, the knot of anxiety in Legs’ stomach at the prospect of seeing Francis again tightened, seeming to pull all her entrails around it like a tight ball of wool. Speaking with Daisy had just opened up a Pandora’s box of emotions that she’d been blissfully unaware of, and which now writhed like snakes around that knotted ball. Soon indigestion was raging.

‘Not another faddy diet?’ Will observed her picking her bread roll into small chunks without eating them. He gave her a gappy-toothed smile across the table as Nico speared up the ham on his aunt’s plate.

She shook her head, suddenly fighting an urge to head back to London instead of continuing her journey west. She must have put on half a stone since she last saw Francis, and now it felt as though every ounce was in that churning lump in her belly.

‘Aunt Legs is buff,’ Nico offered sportingly, matching his father’s smile.

Daisy almost choked on her mouthful. ‘Since when did you start using phrases like “buff”?’

‘Since Legs taught me to say it.’

‘Nico!’ She threw a little dough ball at him. ‘I did no such thing!’

‘So have you got a girlfriend at the moment, Nico?’ Daisy asked, making him blush to his roots and stutter about not liking girls.

Still distracted, Legs held in her stomach and looked down to see how pot-bellied it was. While nothing on Daisy’s pregnant bulge, it was definitely not very flat. She made a mental note to change into Magic Pants as soon as she got to Spywood Cottage.

Her iPhone was buzzing in her pocket. She pulled it out and peered at it discreetly beneath the table rim.

Gordon says he is not prepared to compromise on a bath or pet friendly accommodation, and definitely not on red car.

She looked up, wondering whether to share the joke, but
suspected the confidentiality agreement she’d signed precluded it. Will had a journalist’s nose after all and, for all his assertions that he’d turned his back on the newsroom for literary pursuits, he needed the cash.

All around her, the chattering, giggling, joyful family tableau felt at total odds with the life she now had, careering through London, living alone in her basement beneath Ros’s super-organised life, which revolved around Nico and church, just as her own revolved around Conrad and work.

She could see how relaxed Nico was here. He loved the easygoing routine at Inkpot, the laughter, lack of pressure and the free-range existence. She felt the same.

It made her think about Farcombe again, the memories so acute that she could almost smell and taste them. Family holidays there had been such fun. It was where she had first learned about love. She craved it again.

Fingers moving beneath the table, she typed:
Cannot guarantee anything, regrettably. Will try my best, but this could be very tricky to steer.

Again, the reply was almost immediate.
Gordon says that is because you drive a red car. Suggests you trade in for safer colour.

She jumped as Will waved a hand in front of her face. ‘Hello? Legs?’ I said what’s hot off the shelves right now? Still Grit Lit and Cruci Fiction?’ He’d loved drilling her about the publishing market ever since he began toiling on the great debut novel that he would let nobody read until it was finished, and which he’d only thus far described as being ‘vaguely brilliant’.

‘Parent Thrillers.’

‘Kitchen-sink violence, you mean?’

She shook her head. ‘Think
Sophie’s Choice
set amid Cath Kidston accessories, Ocado deliveries and the school run. Picture a lovely but stressed professional family: by the end of
chapter one
, one child (preferably under the age of five) will be held hostage in a nursery-school siege, or abducted by someone planning to keep
them in a cellar for twenty years, or be found to be the only matching donor that can save the life of their estranged, imprisoned rapist father, or be brutally disfigured and blinded in a house fire while holding the secret to the arsonist. Mother and father then face great personal sacrifice, a race against time, an impossible decision or all of the above.’

‘Oh, I love books like that,’ Daisy sighed. ‘I cry as soon as I read the blurb.’

‘The “blub” then.’ Will looked sceptical. ‘And they’re hot in literary London?’

‘Conrad sold one by a complete unknown just last month; six figures for two books; film rights have already gone, it’s been chosen as
Book at Bedtime
and is tipped for a certain famous couple’s book club.’

‘In that case I’ll kill a child,’ he said firmly, earning a nervous look from Nico.

‘Just make sure the family have at least one spare sibling as compensation,’ she warned him.

‘You two are
so
cynical,’ Daisy scoffed. ‘We all know you prefer a huge body count somewhere scenic, Legs. She had a five-a-week Agatha Christie habit at your age,’ she told Nico.

‘You can’t beat a classic formula,’ she sighed.

‘Perhaps you should persuade Gordon Lapis to feature an idyllic village with a mass murderer on the loose in the next Ptolemy Finch?’ Will teased. ‘A career in criminal profiling awaits our young, winged soothsayer,’ he predicted in a movie trailer voice.

‘Already on the case,’ she beamed. ‘I’m doing some research for him in Farcombe for
Ptolemy Finch and the Seagull Strangler.’

‘As long as you’re not researching
Ptolemy Finch and the Sentimental Shag,’
Daisy muttered darkly.

‘A shag is a type of bird,’ Will told Nico, who nodded, having followed the conversation with bright-eyed interest. ‘Very like a cormorant.’

‘Legs has promised to get me a personally signed copy of
Ptolemy Finch and the Raven’s Curse
when it comes out,’ he told them. ‘She and Gordon are like that now.’ He pinched his fingers together closely. ‘I think he probably wants to give her a shag.’ He smiled sweetly. ‘Or perhaps a cormorant?’

On cue, Legs’ phone flashed with a message from Gordon:
Julie Ocean investigating a crime that took place more than twenty years ago; she uncovers corruption at the heart of a highly respected institution. They will close ranks on her. How does she feel? What does she do?

At least he seemed to be talking to her again, she realised with relief, replying:
Alone. Calls Jimmy for back-up.

Too deep undercover; fears he’s corrupt too.

Tempted to type ‘take annual leave?’, she wrote,
Goes direct to Chief Super.

Trust nobody.
He signed off without further explanation.

Every familiar twist and turn on the journey to Farcombe made Legs’ heart race faster and her spirits lift. She was going through the back of the holiday wardrobe of memories. Clouds scudded over the sun, flashing intermittent blinding light onto her bug-flecked windscreen as she weaved the curling miles towards the Hartland Peninsula. When the Farcombe turn came into view, her car indicator ticked in time with her thudding heart as she turned between the two wind-bent white-beam trees that stood sentinel on its high Devonshire banks.

The sunken lane climbed over the ridge that hid the sea from the main road and Legs blinked to adjust to the emerald dark as the familiar high-banked wooded tunnel enveloped her, still revealing nothing of the dramatic coastline ahead. She tucked the Honda into passing places as cars approached, tourists with sunburned
noses who had spent the day in Farcombe, meandering along the steep, cobbled lanes of the fishing village, poddling along the harbour, visiting the craft shops and cafes, walking the cliff path to the beach at Fargoe Bay.

To the left were the tall stone gate pillars of Farcombe Hall, topped with their rearing unicorns which the family had nicknamed Balios and Xanthus after the horses who drew Achilles’ chariot, guarding the high, wrought-iron gates. Despite its grandeur, this was not the main entrance to the estate, which was on the main coast road, with matching gatehouses shouldering a grand archway with a pinnacle in the shape of a huge-winged griffin.

Legs couldn’t resist slowing as she passed, peering along the driveway, which curled away out of sight, its tall rhododendron hedges hiding all that lay beyond. The last time she’d been here, over a year ago, the fallen red and blue petals that carpeted the driveway had been turning mulchy brown, like boiled sweets caramelising in a pan; this year they were already just faint black liquorish strings running through the cobbles, pulped and rotted by the recent storms. The little sunken brook that ran in front of the gateposts was fierce as she’d ever known it. As small children, Daisy and Legs had floated folded paper message boats on it and sent them downstream, before hurtling along the lane on racing, chubby legs, pushing and shoving as they marked their crafts to see whose joined the river stream first before launching out to sea.

Legs turned down the volume on the radio and opened the window, able to hear the stream bubble and smell the sappy tang of the wooded cliffs, cut through with sea salt. It was delicious.

She put the car back in gear and hurried along the lane, passing the public car park on the right. Here the lane narrowed dramatically, with its peeling ‘Private Road’ sign declaring that it was the Farcombe Hall Estate, with no public access to the harbour or beach.

Dropping through the trees to the river fork, Legs felt her
stomach go weightless as though whizzing downward on a Ferris wheel. Then she took the familiar left bend, past more ‘Private – Farcombe Estate’ signs, and began to climb again, the sea glinting through the trees on her right. To her left, the woodland thinned again and the estate’s parkland stretched up, still coyly hiding its jewel.

Another fork known as Gull Cross marked the point where the road threaded down through coastal heath and craggy stone outcrops to the private cove at Eascombe, a tunnel from which led directly to the main house. Steering away from the sea instead, Legs drove uphill on a bumpy unmade track, and into more woods, her own precious forest where every gnarled trunk was familiar, where she’d once played Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks with Daisy, hosting teddy bears’ picnics and making dens, and later conducted midnight ghost walks and camped in hammocks between the trees. Somewhere the two Barbie dolls were buried beneath one of the old rowans, along with a time capsule created by the Foulkes and North children as instructed by the
Blue Peter
team, containing various coins, newspaper cuttings, postcards, toy cars and a retaining brace that Legs had sneaked in and then claimed to have lost.

Here in her enchanted wood, there were many trees with her initials carved in them – AN – some sharing hearts with FP, others proclaimed rather shamefully that she and DF ‘woz here’. There was one tree in particular that held a special secret, which meant she loved it more than any other, and couldn’t wait to lie in the deep hollow where its trunk divided into two outstretched arms.

But first she raced on to Spywood Cottage, hidden deep within the darkness, along its own small pitted track that had wrecked many an axle of the Norths’ family cars. Once a gamekeeper’s cottage, the thatched cob dwelling was pretty enough to reduce first-time guests to tears with one glimpse at its higgledly-piggledy perfection over the five-barred gate, nestled in its own fairy glade clearing of bottle green grass, ferns, wild strawberries and wood
anemones, with a cluster of oaks and rowans at the end of the garden, beyond which was a sheer drop to the North Devon coast. The sound of the waves crashing against the stony outcrops could be so loud in the cottage at times that they would have to raise their voices to be heard. When the children were little, Lucy had been terrified that they would fall to their deaths, but although a few games of truth or dare had led to some terrifying cliffhanger moments over the years, and many a ball had been accidentally kicked over the lip to spin fifty feet down onto the sharp rocks below, Spywood had proved a safe haven to all who stayed there, and they felt as though they had a secret fairytale cottage in a cloud.