‘Marc, I can’t accept-’
‘Don’t be so hasty. Unwrap it and have a look, before you turn it down,’ he said.
Unwilling to be churlish, she tore off the wrapping. Inside, the present was packed in tissue paper. She slid out a slim hardback book, with gold lettering on the front and spine. The title was Hidden Depths, the author D.B. Kind.
‘Is this by Daniel?’ she asked. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’
‘You won’t find Hidden Depths mentioned in his bibliography. I think he prefers to forget about it, but he’s too modest. It’s a collection of poetry that he published when he was a student. Not exactly Coleridge, but definitely not McGonagall, either. Quite a few of the verses deal with rifts between parent and child — read into that what you will. Maybe he needed to put it down in black and white to get the bad stuff out of his system. And writing poetry doesn’t pay the rent — you can see why he gave it up for popular history.’
She opened the book. ‘A first edition?’
‘Yep, it was never reprinted.’ He gave the engaging grin she’d always liked. ‘The publishers went out of business shortly afterwards, but I’m sure it wasn’t Daniel’s fault.’
‘You shouldn’t give this to me.’
‘This copy took a hell of a lot of finding, trust me. I tracked it down to Manitoba. After all that effort, you have to accept it. No way am I planning to flog it on the Internet.’
She shook her head.
‘Peace offering,’ he said. ‘No strings.’
‘Whenever anyone says there are no strings, there are strings.’
‘Put it in your bag, Hannah.’
She considered him. He was pleased with his coup, and it would be childish to spurn the gift. He’d been riven by jealousy, first of Ben, later of Nick, finally of Daniel, and people didn’t change. But he’d striven for generosity, and the little book was worth more than any protestations that the leopard had changed spots.
‘Thank you.’
Again the grin. This was more like the old Marc — low-fat spread wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Hannah pictured her oldest friend, Terri, a self-certified expert on the opposite sex, warning her it wouldn’t last — it never did. Terri ought to know, after three marriages and half a lifetime deluding herself that she could transform some of the most unsuitable men in Cumbria, possibly in the western hemisphere, into a cross between Mr Darcy and George Clooney.
Time to seize back the initiative.
‘So what about you and Leigh?’ she asked.
‘Nothing to tell. She made it very clear when she put up the money, it’s an investment, because she believes we can make it work. Books and food, nourishment for brain and body, a magical combination. We’re partners, sure, but it’s only in business.’
The cynic in Hannah wondered if that meant Leigh had rebuffed his overtures. Whatever, their teaming up didn’t offer her an easy escape route.
Time to look him in the eye.
‘I don’t want us to get back together again,’ she said.
‘I know.’
She’d steeled herself for a protest, perhaps an eruption of fury.
‘So, there are things to decide. Arrangements to be made.’
‘Hey, not so fast. We’re not married, remember?’
‘I haven’t forgotten,’ she snapped.
‘Well, then. There’s no question of a divorce. No legal stuff. We can take our time.’
‘Marc, it’s more than six months already.’
He leant across the table, putting his face close to hers.
‘I’ve counted the days. I can give you the calculation in minutes and seconds if you like.’
‘That won’t be necessary.’
Her cheeks tingled. The two old women had stopped talking. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw them studying her with thrilled curiosity.
‘Half a year of numbness,’ he muttered. ‘What happened was terrible, it was bound to take an age for us to get over it.’
‘I’m over it,’ she said. ‘I’ve moved on.’
‘Bollocks,’ he hissed. ‘You need more time.’
‘The great healer?’
She meant to strike a sardonic note, but her voice sounded scratchy and she felt embarrassed. The old women were loving this. Lunch in the sun, with free reality entertainment thrown in. Who needed daytime TV?
‘I’ll give you all the space you want,’ he said. ‘There’s no rush.’
She was about to say: forget it, I won’t change my mind. But the words stuck in her throat. How could she be so sure?
He bent forward, and brushed his lips against hers. As her body tingled, he sprang to his feet. Crushing his paper napkin in his fist, he hurled it into the bin on the edge of the decking. His eye was good, it was a perfect shot. She wondered that their audience didn’t break out into applause.
‘What we have is precious,’ he said. ‘Don’t be in such a hurry to chuck it away like a piece of litter.’
With the same lithe ease that so often set her pulse racing in their early days together, he moved past her, and disappeared down the stairs and into the darkness of his shop.
As she stood up to go, her eyes met those of one of the elderly women. She waved towards Hannah’s table.
‘Don’t forget your book!’
CHAPTER THREE
Daniel Kind swung off the lane at the entrance lodge. On either side of the narrow drive, oak trees spread branches to form a tunnel with a roof of green. Daniel slowed the car to walking pace. It felt like passing through a portal into a different world. He loved travelling back in time, even if only in his head; for a historian, the past was a perfect destination. The drive curved, and through the thick leaves, he glimpsed the mysterious bulk of his destination.
The magic of the extraordinary building lifted his spirits. In his imagination he was transported to fifteenth-century France, approaching a strange chateau, hiding place of treasures and countless dark secrets. St Herbert’s was constructed of freestone, tinted a greenish grey that seemed dour even on the brightest morning. The slate roofs were dark and austere, the design eccentric. The architect had let rip with flights of Gothic fancy, a confection of steep mansards and conical turrets jostling on the skyline with the parapets of a huge square tower. Above the tower’s battlements, a wrought-iron balustrade ran around the cut-off top of a roof in the shape of a pyramid. In the middle of the front elevation, a carriage porch had been elaborated into a two-storey gatehouse flanked by octagonal pilasters, with an oriel window jutting out above the arch. This was a residence fit for a marquis, viscount or duke.
A grubby white delivery van shattered the illusion, tyres screeching as it hurtled around the building from the loading bay by the kitchens. It headed past him to its next drop-off in the real world, and Daniel spotted a slogan scrawled in the muck on the rear doors: I wish my girlfriend was as dirty as this. Not the level of literary sophistication associated with St Herbert’s Residential Library, but it brought him down to earth. Appearances were deceptive; this wasn’t the Loire Valley — St Herbert’s was English, through and through. The freestone came from Low Furness and the slate from Westmorland quarries.
Daniel reversed into a marked space at the end of a row of parked cars. No sign of Orla Payne’s rusty old banger. Taking a second day off work in succession, by the look of things. Had she mustered the courage to speak to Hannah Scarlett? God, he hoped so. If anyone could make sense of Orla’s ramblings about her lost brother, it was Hannah.
Lifting his laptop case from the passenger seat, he flicked the remote fob to lock the car. The Mercedes was a new toy; he’d treated himself after his agent sold translation rights to his next book throughout Europe. All he needed to do now was to finish writing it. Deadline only three weeks away. Fifteen thousand words and who-knew-how-much revision to go.
As he’d sweated over the manuscript, he found it suited him to work at St Herbert’s. He was writing a study of Thomas De Quincey’s influence upon the history of murder. The library kept a small archive of De Quincey’s correspondence from his time living in Dove Cottage, together with a collection of nineteenth-century manuscripts so obscure that the online monoliths had neglected to digitise them. Each time he came here, Daniel found himself not wanting to pack up as darkness fell and set off home to Brackdale. St Herbert’s possessed a unique charm, a residential library where you could read by day, sleep by night, and then wake to stroll through gardens boasting some of the finest views in Britain. He’d stayed over a couple of times, sharing Laphroaig and conversation with the principal in front of a log fire in the drawing room before resuming work until the small hours.