Free Last of the Great Romantics by Claudia Carroll

have got yourself a husband by now.'
'Where is she?' asked Daisy furiously, the riding crop in her left hand starting to twitch dangerously. Not just at her mother's customary lack of tact, she was well used to that, but at the fact that she appeared to have been won over with so little effort on Shelley-Marie's part.
'Well, the Mauve Suite was free so I've put her in there. Portia almost had a fit because she wants to keep it ready for proper paying guests, but I told her to get lost. I mean, now that the opening night freeloaders have all buggered off, they're not exactly battering the door down to come and stay here, are they? Anyway, Shelley-Marie is family now, whether you bloody well like it or not. Perfectly lovely girl. And let's face it, anyone who'd go and marry your bollocks of a father without a gun being put to her head deserves sainthood.'
Poor Father Finnegan, parish priest at Ballyroan for over thirty years, had never seen a memorial service like it. Quite apart from the low turnout (aside from the family, only a dozen or so people had turned up to pay their last respects, most of whom had got the date confused and thought they were coming to parish bingo) there was the delicate question of who the chief mourner was going to be.
It was unprecedented, certainly in Ballyroan, for the widow of the deceased to be accompanied by his considerably younger second wife, especially as it seemed that the ink was barely dry on the marriage licence. Most irregular, he thought, although he knew the Davenports to be, well, an eccentric family to put it mildly. They certainly weren't regular churchgoers, that was for certain. And if Father Finnegan had one pet hate, it was parishioners who didn't show their faces inside the tiny church of Saint Claire from one end of a decade to another, until they wanted a religious service on demand, be it a wedding, a christening, or in this case, a memorial service. True, he had married Portia Davenport himself the year before last, but she was such a gentle, lovely person, always so friendly and warm-hearted, that it was hard for him to refuse her. Her mother Lucasta was quite another story though.
He could still recall the time, years ago now, when she set up a rival church in the grounds of Davenport Hall. The Temple of Isis she had called it, although it was really just a fancy word for paganism as far as he could see. There was a lot of nudity involved and cavorting in Loch Moluag on the estate and, pretty soon, a whole load of undesirable types had descended on Ballyroan, new-age hippies who were systematically destroying the peaceful calm of the town. They all seemed to have tattoos and drove dirty great camper vans that smelt of marijuana. Then there were the women who openly breastfed in public as they signed on for social welfare in the tiny village post office, which did little to impress the more conservative element of the parish. Word had quickly got back to his bishop in Kildare who demanded that poor Father Finnegan put a stop to this lunatic debauchery once and for all. However, it took a brave man to talk sense to Lucasta Davenport, he reflected, a braver man than him. She'd unceremoniously thrown him out of the Hall in language no lady should ever use.
'You'll be looking for tithes next, you narrow-minded fascist bastard!' she'd screeched at him as his Fiat Panda backfired its way down the driveway. 'As far as I'm concerned, my tithes are something that are attached to my buttocks.'
And now here she was standing outside the tiny church with her family waiting for the service to begin. 'Now look here,' she'd said to him imperiously, as if she were doing him a great favour in gracing the church with her presence, instead of it being the other way around. 'It's all very straightforward really. This is my husband's wife, simple as that,' she said, waving at Shelley-Marie who was hovering by her side like Mrs Danvers. 'I know, I know, it would have been a lot easier if