The Love Letter (32 page)

Legs lay down her fork, food sticking in her throat as she realised what Poppy was doing. This was machine gun fire self-defence. But Byrne, despite his reddened face, said nothing.

‘I fell in love with Hector out of survival instinct, knowing he had the intellect, wealth and strength of character to rebuild me. It was that or almost certain death.’

She left a dramatic pause. To her right, Vin continued devouring his lamb with audible appreciation, now sounding like a bloodhound with a mutton bone.

Legs was watching Byrne worriedly. Again, he had pushed his plate away without touching his food, and his red face was starting to swell. He really looked quite ill. Whatever was killing him could be staging an untimely coup, she thought in fear. Surely he should say something?

But at that moment his puffy eyes met hers and he gave her daggers, warning her off.

‘Hector begged me to leave Brooke and I resisted every time,’ Poppy continued, ‘but I was so frail he eventually forced the situation, taking me away for a weekend and proposing. We returned to break the news to his family first – at his insistence. But then I went back to the farmhouse and found Brooke and Jamie gone, with just a note left, saying I would never find them.’

She had to break off once more to mop her eyes. Imee discreetly filled wine glasses during the pause.

Looking at Byrne, Legs saw his face was like a huge red Edam cheese, his eyes barely visible. Again they managed to seek her
out and warn her off. But this time, she had to mouth ‘Are you ill?’

He shook his big red head firmly and waved her away.

Her eyes reluctantly jumped to Francis, still poker-backed and facing forwards like a stone statue, although he had made good headway into the lamb, she noted. Sensing her gaze, he returned it with such bright blue, police-light intensity that she lost her breath.

‘I love you,’ he mouthed, damson streaks touching his cheeks, blue eyes deepening to ripe sloes. ‘I love you, Legs.’

Legs glanced instantly and guiltily to Kizzy. But her chair was empty.

She must have slipped out of the room unnoticed. As she’d been sitting beside Byrne, Legs could only hope that she was fetching much-needed medical supplies. He looked close to passing out.

Poppy’s bass deep, emotion-infused voice broke across the table again, ‘I tried everything to find my baby, my boy.’ Her eyes filled with tears and she pressed her bony fingers over her ears, which was presumably why she couldn’t hear her baby gasping for breath beyond the flower arrangement at the far end of the table. ‘But he seemed to have gone for ever, along with his father. I thought I’d never see them again. And now, like a miracle, here he is.’ She tilted her head and gestured dramatically to the alliums, turban shooting forwards to reverse the facelift effect, instantly rendering Poppy’s face like a Shar Pei dog, creases pressing down over her luminous eyes.

Unable to see much at all now, Poppy was totally unaware of her son’s deteriorating state, and everybody else was too intimidated by her high emotion to point it out.

As Imee whisked in, clearing plates and shyly promising guests that the praline, yam and pecan cheesecake would be with them in just a few minutes, Legs could clearly hear Byrne fighting for breath.

She pushed back her chair in horror, amazed at the polite calm
around her as Poppy’s guests listened to her describing how her sculptures had always been ‘a repressed cry for help’.

‘Sit down, Legs,’ Francis muttered across the table.

She ignored him. ‘Can’t you see he’s ill?’

‘Hector has never appreciated the pain behind my art!’ Poppy was proclaiming.

It was a long time since Legs had passed her First Aid course, but she remembered the basic ABC – Airway, Breathing and Circulation.

Byrne was clutching at his chest.

‘I channel my inner child through my art!’ Poppy asserted behind the alliums.

Legs tried to pull him out of his chair in order to settle him in the recovery position on the cool slate floor beside one of Poppy’s amoeba sculptures, but he gripped tightly onto the arms with swollen fingers, wheezing ‘shot’.

‘You’ve been shot?’ she gasped.

At the head of the table, hidden from view behind the alliums, Poppy suddenly launched into an outburst against Hector of such volume and passion, her guests sat mute and fearful, torn between the action at either end. Only Vin continued to chomp noisily on a third helping of lamb.

Under Legs’ ministrations, Byrne let out an angry groan, still grasping at his chest, swollen hand clutching at his jacket. As she pressed her ear to his mouth, at the same time feeling his wrist for a pulse, she heard him gasp out a few words.

‘What?’ She pressed her ear closer.

‘Adrenaline shot,’ he croaked. ‘In my inside pocket. Looks like a pen.’

Anaphylactic shock, Legs recognised with sudden clarity, feeling urgently inside his jacket for the medication.

‘Where do I do this?’ she asked in a panic as she uncapped it.

Unable to immediately answer, Byrne slumped forwards, struggling ever more to breathe.

Legs yanked his shirt out from the back of his trousers and found an expanse of smooth, tanned skin at the base of his back, revealing the tops of heavenly spheres of paler buttock cheek rising from his jeans’ belt.

Muttering a quiet apology for causing any pain, she plunged the little hypodermic pen into the first sphere.

‘I feeel paiiiin!’ came a wail, and it was a moment before Legs realised that it was Poppy who had let out the cry, not Byrne. And she was in fact completely oblivious to her son’s discomfort, her focus remaining on her own angst, ‘When I carve stone, I sometimes feel like I am cutting at my own flesh to reveal the bloodied truth beneath!’

The effect of the adrenalin was almost instant. Byrne was already trying to sit up, looking red-faced and groggy.

‘Thank you,’ he muttered breathlessly. ‘I should be OK now.’

She slipped into Kizzy’s vacant chair and stared at him in shock. The swelling was already dissipating and the redness fading, but he still looked dreadful, his eyes half closed and his breath shallow.

‘Shouldn’t we call an ambulance?’ she checked anxiously.

‘I’ll be fine. Just give me time.’

‘If you’re sure?’

‘You’d better get back to your place.’ He looked past her to Francis, who was listening intently to his stepmother and ignoring the medical crisis completely, although the damson streaks in his cheeks had deepened, the muscles there quilted as tightly as a fisherman’s knots.

She handed him back his adrenaline pen. As he took it, she felt his fingers hold hers for a moment.

‘Thank you, Heavenly Pony,’ he breathed in an undertone.

‘Any time,’ she said, then felt stupid because it sounded so banal.

Returning to her place, she found a great slab of cheesecake waiting there, and Howard still eager to talk about his future
literary career. ‘Do you think I should write under a pen name?’ He asked, now extremely tight and falling over his words.

‘Well Howard Hawkes might get confused with the filmmaker,’ she said distractedly, still watching Byrne who looked agitated but was recovering fast.

‘I was thinking of Jean Pool?’ he suggested breathlessly. ‘It’s what I call myself when I dress as a woman.’

Legs reached nervously for her wine and checked on Byrne again.

The rest of the dinner guests seemed perfectly happy to carry on as though nothing untoward had happened. Apart from a few ‘Feeling better Jamie?’ enquiries, the incident was politely ignored. At Farcombe Hall, even kitchen sups were decorous enough to mean that ill health at the table was not acknowledged unless one was bleeding so profusely it threatened the napiery.

Poppy was far too short-sighted and had been far too busy talking to notice her prodigal son’s allergic dice with death beyond the alliums, and was now holding forth about the festival and how hellish Hector was being: ‘He’s gone quite mad. We had an emergency committee meeting today, and when I threatened to cancel the whole event, he just laughed. He couldn’t give a stuff about the Ptolemy Finch thing, as long as he can play his bassoon as usual. I’m thinking of getting him certified. That or dipping his reeds in cyanide.’

‘Told you there’d be a death soon,’ muttered Édith, licking cheesecake from her spoon before admiring her reflection in it. ‘Imee really does make the most delicious puds.’

‘The only thing getting killed around here is our family’s reputation,’ Francis snapped, now under direct assault from Poppy.

‘It’s your fault all this happened,’ she boomed. ‘Hector was fine until you lost control of Legs!’

‘I’m getting confused,’ Gayle was whispering to Jax. ‘I thought it was her first husband who lost the use of his legs?’

Leaning sideways to get full sight of her stepson, turban over
one ear, Poppy rampaged on at Francis through the alliums: ‘Well you can tell your father he has burned his boats as far as I am concerned!’ she was shouting, hands slamming down on the table as she addressed everyone. ‘You can all tell Hector not to come back – I have a new man in my life!’ She staggered to her feet and raised her glass above the alliums to Byrne, who managed a vague nod in return. ‘Are you all right?’ She squinted. ‘You look very red.’

‘I’m fine,’ he insisted. ‘This evening has been most enlightening.’

Édith lent behind a half-asleep Howard Hawkes to whisper to Legs over his chair back: ‘Someone’s obviously tried to poison Jamie already, and Kizzy is still missing, have you noticed? There’ll be none of us left by petits fours.’ Her eyes glowed luminously.

Legs felt her skin chill. She was rapidly losing enthusiasm for detective work in the wake of tonight’s cross-currents and high drama.

Then Imee stepped between them to discreetly hand a note to Édith.

Legs’ skin felt as though it had iced over as she watched the expression on her fine-boned face change from amusement to horror. ‘What is it?’

Édith folded the note with shaking hands. ‘It’s from Kizzy.’

‘What does she say?’

‘I need to speak with Francis.’ Her voice was tight with emotion as she pushed back her chair and rushed around the table to take Kizzy’s empty space and whisper urgently with her brother.

To Legs’ surprise, he started laughing. Édith looked as though she might hit him and when he demanded to read the note, she ripped it to shreds, voice rising so that Legs distinctly heard the words ‘ruin us!’. Francis stopped laughing and went very pale.

But she had no time to study them further as Howard woke up from his doze with a start and put his arm around her. ‘Would you like to meet Jean Pool, my dear? She loves entertaining pretty girls and sharing make-up tips.’

Rescue came from Poppy, peering myopically over the alliums again as she announced loudly that they would all take coffee in the green drawing room.

While Francis and Édith trailed behind the others deep in a hushed, intense conversation, Legs shook off Howard and tried to hang back to listen in, but Byrne foiled her with a firm hand on her back, propelling her towards the cloisters. ‘Join me for a cigarette.’

‘I don’t smoke.’

‘Neither do I, but Fink likes a quick drag.’

‘Don’t tell that to Howard Hawkes,’ she muttered as she was marched at speed through the Moroccan corridors, shadowed by a loyal basset.

The storm was drawing ever-closer, the wind rustling madly through the rhododendrons, thunder engaged in cannon battle beyond the Fargoe headland.

Hair lifting off his forehead, Byrne was back to his old self, disapproving and furnace eyed, his cheeks showing just a hint of puffiness, like Russell Crowe between movies. ‘I thought you were going to leave Farcombe?’

‘
You
told me to leave.’

‘It was good advice.’

Despite the fact she wanted to leave quite badly right now, she resented being bullied. ‘A very good friend of mine says that red cars are unlucky, and my car is red, so I think it best not to travel.’

He gave her a withering smile, but his eyes remained restless. ‘It’s a lot more dangerous sticking around here.’

‘Christ, don’t tell me you think there’ll be a murder too?’

His dark brows shot up. ‘Why would I think that?’

She gave a nervous little hum by way of an answer, already feeling silly. The approaching storm and all this talk of danger, death and disappearance was making her hopelessly on edge, added to which being alone with Byrne was causing her heart to beat so hard that she was convinced it would soon start propelling her around the cloisters like a washing machine with an uneven load.
When a cough behind them made them both jump, Legs added a shriek of such heart-lurching overreaction that Fink, who was cocking his leg against the base of a column, let out a gruff bark of alarm and fell over.

Francis stepped through the arches, clipped voice reverting to Ivy League preppy as it always did when he was annoyed. ‘There you are, darling. Your coffee’s going cold.’

Behind him, Édith was looking more ravishingly willowy and predatory than ever as she carried out two crystal brandy balloons and a bottle of Armagnac. ‘Jamie, let’s have a little chat, you and I.’ Her voice was a seductive purr.