Free Narrow Escape by Marie Browne Page A

wrong, I hope I am.” She grinned down at her husband who was having problems fitting his fingers into the right holes in his gloves. “I think we’d better be off before my best beloved decides it’s time for a song.”
    Drew, coming from a robust Scottish family, was well known for falling into a giggling heap from time to time. The first time I’d met him we’d been attending a re-enactment show. I’d threatened to do him actual bodily harm if he didn’t stop singing outside my tent. Sam had been about three months old at the time and I’d just managed to get him to sleep, it was four o’clock in the morning, and I hadn’t slept at all.
    Unlike a lot of people, Drew doesn’t get aggressive when he’s had a little too much. He smiles, wants to be everyone’s friend, then he falls over and starts singing. It was all rather sweet and predictable.
    We waved them off and watched them go up the steps and along the rise toward their own boat parked two down from ours. As I turned, the lilting sound of some Scottish drinking song could just be heard echoing back on the wind. I laughed and shut it out. “Do you think she’s right?”
    Geoff had sprawled out on the sofa and was yawning hugely; it had been a long day. “No.” He shook his head and then, closing his eyes, settled himself back on the cushions. “I can’t see any reason why they’d get rid of all the boaters … some of them, maybe. Not all of us though, we’re an easy source of income.”
    As his snores, and those of Mortimer, filled the boat I began looking for something to make dinner out of. I hoped he was right but there was just this little nagging voice that told me, this time, he was wrong

Chapter Three:
Hooray It’s March, The Sun Is Back. Beware Of Duckling Sneak Attacks.
    Boaters, it has to be said, are a lot more like gophers than we would care to admit.
    The first sunny day of March had everyone out and about. People we hadn’t seen since the previous autumn suddenly decided to take a sunshine-filled constitutional. In little groups they wandered along the top of the river bank in an attempt to get some vitamin D and presumably to check that everyone was still where they’d last seen them and not at the bottom of the river.
    All along the bank spring cleaning suddenly began. Various people decided to throw out clutter that they’d been refusing to acknowledge in the cold dark days of winter and small piles of grot began to grow outside each boat. It was quite sweet that there seemed to be a fair amount of grot-swapping going on. I had no doubt that the same would happen in the summer when the next round of cleaning out cupboards began.
    Donna and Steve, tanned and relaxed from spending a winter in Thailand, arrived home and probably wondered why we were all a little grumpy. They had only had a couple of weeks of the new order before they’d, very sensibly, hightailed it out of the country and had settled in the sun while the rest of us had battled snow, ice, and various other trials and tribulations.
    Donna, normally small, dark-haired, and pale-skinned, seemed to have become a negative of herself. The woman grinning at me from across the fence was almost blonde, and her skin had turned a glorious coffee colour. For just a moment I was tempted to dump her in the river, I was so jealous.
    â€œSo, how was the holiday?” I leaned on the woodpile and winced as she shivered in a huge woolly jumper. “You should have been here, it’s been wonderful,” I said. “You missed all the snow, the cars that wouldn’t start, the mud, the coal runs, and the frozen water systems.” I gave her a big grin. “I just don’t know how you could have let yourself miss all that.”
    Donna laughed. “I swapped it all for empty beaches and long swims in warm seas.” She spent the next ten minutes telling me about