Free The Widow's Club by Dorothy Cannell Page A

was unlucky I looked back over my shoulder. The dark morass of humanity around thenewly dug grave was separating into forlorn shadows. Something squeezed inside me. Tonight, the widow would go home to her empty house, empty bed … The bike vibrated and we were off. Flung vertical, we zoomed onto the narrow, bumpy road.
    “By gum, this is the life,” bawled Freddy over his shoulder.
    Soaring like a seagull on airwaves of terror. Below us, the waves seethed against the jagged rocks. Think happy thoughts, Ellie! Do not focus on that Mr. Woolpack who had driven over the cliff edge one foggy night last spring. What would it take, a pebble in the wrong place at the wrong time, to send us in Mr. Woolpack’s flight path? I fear I almost gouged out Freddy’s appendix. Life was rather meaningful to me right now.
    Through the wrought-iron gateway of Merlin’s Court we blasted. The motorbike hit a blemish on the surface of the drive, leapt two feet in the air, and flew like Mary Poppins onto the narrow moat bridge and under the portcullis.
    “Aint much, but it’s home, right, El? The place has class—ivy-encrusted walls, turrets and battlements galore, whence the lovelorn can hurl themselves, and never forget the gargoyle doorbell. All mod cons, really! Except a comfy dungeon or two.”
    “No house has everything,” I said stiffly. Ours was but a small-scale, nineteenth-century repro of a castle, but the dearth of dungeons with manacled skeletons crumbling to dust was rather a sore point with me.
    “Ellie”—Freddy lurched to a stop—“how about spotting me a few quid so I can take Jill out tonight for a bang-up tofu dinner?”
    “What’s a few?” I was struggling to flounce out my dress.
    “A hundred?”
    “Freddy.” Taking his arm, I moved us to the door. “Why don’t you get a job? A proper job instead of pinging a triangle in that dismal band.”
    “Work?” He looked aghast. “The way I see it, cousin, if you have to be paid to do something, can’t be much fun, can it?”
    “Wrong. Some people love their jobs. I do, and Ben can’t wait to begin another cookery book and open his restaurant in the village.”
    Freddy reached for the doorknob. “My heart bleeds!Inventing new ways to fry bacon. My! My! I’ll wager that when Ben opens that restaurant, he won’t lift his pinky to crack an egg. Eh, but it makes a chap glad to be born shiftless. About that two hundred nicker, Ellie?”
    “After the wedding cake, I’ll look and see what I’ve got stashed under the mattress.”
    Simultaneously, Freddy released the brass knob and I grasped it; the iron-studded door flung inward, almost sending me sprawling.
    After these many months in residence, I still experienced a sense of embrace on entering Merlin’s Court. “Thank you, Benefactress Ellie,” the house would whisper, “for everything—these gorgeous Turkish carpets on the flagstone hall floor, the peacock and rose elegance of the drawing room, the Indian Tree china in the blackened oak dresser in the dining room. And, especially, thank you for loving me as passionately as Abigail Grantham once did.” But on this most venerable day, I didn’t get that sort of greeting.
    A complete stranger stood beyond the threshold—a stocky man with a sallow-skinned pug face and an oversized mop of glossy black curls. He held a half-filled wineglass and his expression was one of extreme disappointment, like someone expecting the postman and finding a policeman on the step instead. The man started to close the door with his foot as Freddy and I stepped inside.
    He tapped the wineglass to his forehead in a mea culpa of embarrassment. Wine slopped out. “A thousand pardons. For the minute I didn’t recognise you, Mrs. Haskell.”
    Oh well, when a man used the two most beautiful words in the English language, I had to smile at him. “It’s the veil,” I said. “We brides all look alike.”
    The man with the black curls and eyes like ripe olives was graciously