Free Robbie's Wife by Russell Hill Page B

things.
    I kept thinking about how much of my life was accidental. I drank with the Stryker brothers and ended up in Maggie’s house. I could just as easily have stopped at the next village. I could have stopped at the second beer and left Glastonbury, gone on to London and, even now, I would be in Los Angeles in a rented room rather than walking a country lane thinking of Maggie. Or, the cottage at White Church Farm could have been warm and cozy and I would have stayed and written the script about the coast-watcher and it would have been competent and perhaps would have brought a small option and I would have drifted back to Los Angeles, like flotsam washed up on the beach at Santa Monica. But it hadn’t happened that way. I would not reflect on those events until it was too late.
    I was tired and my legs ached when I came to Sheepheaven Farm and turned into the farmyard. Robbie’s Land Rover was there and the lights were on in the house. I came to the back door, opened it and stepped inside. It was warm and inviting and Terry was at the kitchen table, bent over his copybook. Robbie was next to him, cupping a mug of tea with his hands. He looked up at me and grinned.
    “Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned?”
    “Horatio, there, was supposed to say ‘Look my lord, it comes,’” I replied, nodding toward Terry. Terry didn’t look up.
    “Jesus, Jack, you impress me. I thought Americans only knew the lyrics to pop tunes.”
    “Then I won’t say anything about English farmers who quote Shakespeare,” I said.
    “Maggie! The ghost of Hamlet’s father needs a towel. He’s dripping all over your floor. And he needs a cup of tea.”
    Maggie came into the kitchen with a towel and handed it to me wordlessly.
    “So, Jack,” Robbie said, “where have you been off to? Not the pub and the Stryker brothers again?”
    “No. Up on the hill near a woods where there were some old buses. Some sort of encampment. Strange place with a nice old Mercedes in the middle of it.”
    “Travelers. Best to stay out of there, Jack.”
    “Who are they?”
    “Gypsies. They’ve been up in that copse most of the year. The police let them alone as long as they don’t nick anything around here and they’re clever enough not to foul their own nest. Still, they’re not to be trusted and you’d best give them a wide berth.”
    “Real gypsies?”
    “As real as they get around here. Sometimes you’ll see a cart and a horse but mostly they trade autos and live like you saw up in the copse. I had one put a curse on me last year. She came to the door and asked if she could get the mistletoe from the oak trees up the field. They sell it at Christmas. I said no, I didn’t want her climbing around up there, break her fool neck. Once you let them in, they’ll take advantage, be here for water, things go missing, so I told her no and she pointed her finger at me and said, ‘A curse on you!’ and she spat on my shoe and that winter I got laid up with a bad back, twisted something and got so I had to lie on the floor to get any relief and Maggie here said it was the curse. Right Mag?”
    Maggie, who had been bustling around the stove didn’t turn, just said, “Served you right, you skinflint. You didn’t plant any mistletoe in those trees, it just grew there.”
    Robbie grinned at me, reached back and slapped Maggie on her thigh.
    “Watch yourself,” Maggie said, still not turning.
    Supper, or tea as the Barlows called it, was a salmon pie, chunks of canned salmon in a pie crust with slices of hard-boiled eggs and some sort of cream sauce, and it was good, fragrant, with spices I couldn’t identify. Robbie said that the talk in market was of the news that foot-and-mouth disease had surfaced in the North, the army was already in and destroying animals, burning cows and sheep and pigs in huge pyres in the field. “Some arse of a pig farmer fed slops to his pigs and there was diseased meat