Eleven Pipers Piping (6 page)

“Nick is building a home security business—a point of conversational interest,” Will added, frowning as his brother-in-law shook his empty glass in his face. “And Tom, of course, is the incumbent at St. Nicholas’s. The Reverend Tom Christmas.”

“Father Christmas? Oy, where’s my prezzie, Father Christmas? I asked for a shiny new shotgun and never got it.”

“Nick, shut it.”

“Just bring the bottle over, Will. There’s a good lad,” Nick called as the kilted figure departed towards a sideboard, then muttered darkly, “misery guts.” The hard grin snapped back. “You’ll want topping up, too, Father Christmas.”

“I wouldn’t want to slur the Selkirk Grace,” Tom demurred. So this, he thought with a spurt of envy, was Nick Stanhope, paired for a spell—said wagging tongues—with Màiri White, the village bobby (more properly known as the Police Community Support Officer) who materialized in the village at intervals on her electric bicycle, a caution to those contemplating anti-social behaviour but a temptation to Tom contemplating the privations of his widowhood. He felt an unaccountable skip in his veins if, say, he glimpsed her outside Pattimore’s shop holding one of her informal “surgeries” about village issues. There would go his silly bloody feet, carrying him witlessly down Poynton Shute when his appointment was in the other direction, past PCSO White, all for the chance to exchange a smile and a greeting and have a glimpse of her open, attractive face under her regulation bowler hat. Giddy teenagers had more poise.

He thought he sensed a reciprocal heed on her part—her smile seemed awfully warm—but he felt constrained, even after ten months in Thornford, to make some sort of overture. In part, he wasn’t sure he was ready to let his heart be vulnerable a second time,
expose it to a chance of breaking. Before he had been called to priesthood, before he met Lisbeth, his heart had been a buoyant sort of thing, quick to bounce back from failed affairs. But his love for Lisbeth had been swift, sudden, surprising, and all-consuming, and it had been his shield through the years against cassock-chasers, more even than the clerical collar banding his neck. His fingers strayed to its surface, starched and ironed at Madrun’s hand. He was a man in holy orders and yet, without a wife, he was a man lingering, uncertain, on the shores of some sea of romance. Others might set sail in pursuit of love untroubled; few were as formally constrained as he.

“Ever get hot under the collar?” Nick smirked, gesturing towards Tom’s neck, splashing a drop of whisky on his Prince Charlie jacket.

“Only when I bathe,” Tom responded dryly, having entertained the hackneyed question more than once. What, he was beginning to wonder, had Màiri found so winning about Nick Stanhope? “That must be an ancestor of yours.” Tom gestured towards a large, gilt-framed oil portrait over the mantelpiece of a solidly prosperous Victorian gentleman in a frock coat and high collar nudging long side-whiskers. Shared with Nick was the generously curved mouth with its hint of petulance and the short fringe of jet-black hair, glossy as an animal’s, combed forwards to cover the incipient widow’s peak. Shared, too, was the faintly bumptious gaze.

Nick turned to look. “I haven’t a clue.”

“It’s your …” Will had reappeared with a crystal decanter and was holding it over Nick’s glass. “Great-great-grandfather Josiah Stanhope. The son of the man who had Thorn Court built. It was painted by William Gush.”

“Worth anything?”

“It doesn’t matter what it’s worth, Nick. We’re not selling it.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, have a drink, Will.”

“And it’s firmly affixed to the wall, too, so don’t get any—”

“What do you take me for?” Nick said through his teeth. His neck bulged over his black bow tie. “Let me remind you again, brother-in-law, that you owe me—”

“Gentlemen,” Tom interrupted in a low voice. “Perhaps another time …?”

Will turned to him, his mouth a grim line. “I’m sorry, Tom.”

“If you think you’ve landed in the middle of a family row, Vicar, you have.” Nick trained his laser eyes on him.

“Nick, for God’s sake!”

“Caro and Will forget that I didn’t grow up here in this sodding pile so why would I be sentimentally attached to it? Great-Great-Grandfather Josiah can go fuck himself. There, I’ve said my piece, and I’m not saying any more on the subject tonight.” Nick snatched the decanter from Will’s hands, splashing scotch on the Axminster. “Give me that. You don’t seem to be drinking anyway.” He pasted back on his hail-fellow-well-met grin. “We’re going to enjoy ourselves this evening, Vicar, depend on it. Now, let’s see who else needs a drink.”

Tom flicked a glance at Will. His face, under the shock of straw-coloured hair, bore the marks of strain: pallid skin stretched tightly over the strong sharp bones, smudging in the hollow of the eyes.

“I’m sorry, Tom,” Will said again.

“Is there anything I can do?” Tom responded reflexively.

Will shook his head and smiled wanly. “Happy families, eh?”

Tom returned a sympathetic smile. “All alike, according to Tolstoy.” Then, before he could think, the rest of the quotation slipped from his lips:
“Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The skin below Will’s right eye twitched suddenly. “Yes, I … I think he’s probably right.” He turned to look over the room. Tom followed his gaze. When Thorn Court was the private residence of the Stanhopes, he thought this might well have been the drawing room. The proportions were agreeable—the space was neither grand
nor boxy—and the predominant colour was equally agreeable—a gentle sage-green wash over the walls, setting off the gold and dark red chintz of the upholstery. With the sconces turned low, the draperies closed, and the fire blazing, the room seemed to pulse and glow, like a cocoon lit from within.

Will turned back to Tom. “Caroline and I foolishly involved Nick financially in the business when we purchased Thorn Court. He was content to let us run things when he was in the army, but since he was … discharged two years ago … anyway, he’s not happy about us renovating.”

“I must say, Will, in this light the room looks very handsome.”

“Good, though I can’t really tell. It all looks more or less brown to me. Thank God for Caroline’s good taste.” To Tom’s puzzled frown, he added, “I’m colour-blind, didn’t you know?”

“Sorry, I did. Cricket ball to the head was the culprit, wasn’t it?” His eyes, roaming helplessly over Will’s head looking for a dent, landed on his broken nose.

“It was to the back of the head,” Will explained. “I’ve been hit more than once. Anyway, we had the reception rooms redone five years ago, when we took over. They’re fine. No, it’s the bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs that need upgrading. Some of the plumbing is from the early sixties, when Caroline’s grandfather had the house converted to a hotel.”

“Enterprising of him.”

“It was. I have to admire the old bugger. Most characters like old Arthur Stanhope—”

“Caroline’s grandfather?”

Will nodded. “—were driven to paralysis by the new tax regime after the war. Running a hotel’s expensive and complex, though, but Caroline loves it. It’s like she was born to it.”

“I thought she was, in a way.”

“True.” Will permitted a short laugh. “She spent the first ten years of her life here, and it always remained a kind of …”

“Eden?”

“When we were in Australia and Adam was very small, she would describe it to him as though it—and Thornford—were something out of some old children’s story.
Swallows and Amazons
. Enid Blyton. Anyway—”

Will’s attention was caught by the sight of two bluff men entering the room, rubbing their hands from cold, brushings of snow falling from their outerwear.

“Gentlemen,” he called, moving to greet them, “there’s a coat tree in the lobby.”

The two were unknown to Tom, but he wasn’t surprised. Having lived less than a year in Thornford, he still found many villagers were unfamiliar to him. At times, he rather wished that folk would wear those little sticky
HELLO, MY NAME IS ____
badges for a season, so he could get caught up. Several of the other band members, all of them clad in Devon tartan green kilts and black Prince Charlie jackets, he did know. He had talked briefly with two of them—Jago Prowse, Madrun’s younger brother and owner of Thorn Cross Garage, and Mark Tucker, his new treasurer on the parochial church council. Victor Kaif he could see slouching by the brass guard at the fireplace, the light from the crackling fire bronzing his attenuated, tawny features. His glass held no translucent liquid. Orange juice, Tom suspected, and wondered if Victor, being a homeopath, took no alcohol. He was in conversation with a man whose back was to Tom, but he recognised in the broad shoulders and the black hair shot with grey the figure of John Copeland, sidesman at St. Nicholas’s, a man like himself both an adopted child and a widower. Well, he thought, at least one member of the Thistle But Mostly Rose besides Nick had braved the weather. John was gamekeeper and shoot manager at the Noze Lydiard Estate, ten miles north of Thornford.

His hand hovered over an oatcake with smoked salmon and what tasted, from the previous two he’d eaten, like crème fraîche.
Would it be piggy to have yet another one? he wondered, mindful of the dreaded meal to come. Roger joined him at that moment, frowning at his watch and then glancing at the carriage clock over the mantel.

“Tut,” he said, lifting an appetizer from the platter. “You’ll spoil your supper.”

“And what would you be doing?” Tom watched him pop the entire morsel into his mouth.

“This is my first one! I’ve been seeing everything’s all right in the kitchen.”

“I believe your sporran is ringing.”

“Bless!” Roger fumbled with the leather pouch at his crotch and pulled out his mobile. “Olly!” he shouted heartily, then frowned. “Well,” he sighed, snapping the phone shut, “that’s the last one reporting in. How disappointing. We don’t have the numbers we should, and we have so much food.”

“How many, then?”

“Let’s see. We have no drummers. We have”—he glanced around the room and counted on his fingers—“eleven pipers. And we have you. That makes twelve.”

“That’s all right, then. Thirteen at a dinner is said to be bad luck.”

“Perhaps we should seat you in the middle, like the Last Supper.”

“If you’re thinking of da Vinci’s picture, then we’d all be sitting on one side, which might be a bit odd.”

“Bless, it’ll be more like the Mad Hatter’s tea party, with all of us crowded at one end. Perhaps I should suggest to Will that Kerra remove a number of the place settings.”

“Or, when we want a clean plate, we could all simply shift down one.”

“If you recall the story, Tom, only the first person had the advantage of a clean plate. Everyone else was lumbered with someone else’s dirty one.”

“You’re quite right.” He wasn’t sure if it was hunger or the whisky or the effect of the whisky on an empty stomach that had enjoyed little more than a finger of pizza in the last several hours, but he was starting to feel a bit giddy. “When does the show begin?”

This time Roger looked from the clock, the big hand of which nudged seven thirty, to his watch.

“Shortly,” he said. “I’ll just have a word with Will.”

“Some hae meat and canna eat,”
Tom recited.
“And some wad eat that want it.”
He had practised his accent for the Selkirk Grace with Màiri, who happened to be a Scot. They had met by chance in the snaking returns queue at M&S in Torquay the day after Boxing Day, he returning a shirt a size too embarrassingly tight, which his mothers had bought him for Christmas (Madrun’s cuisine was ruining his boyish waistline, which retreated spinewards the moment he espied Màiri), she returning an electric underblanket (she already had one). They had whiled the time rolling
r
’s and adding epenthetic vowels until Tom impetuously suggested a coffee afterwards at the shop’s café and Màiri declined, as she had a briefing with her sergeant. He should have known. She was wearing her uniform.

“But we hae meat and we can eat,”
he continued, banishing Màiri from his mind, larding the line with an enthusiasm he didn’t feel for the haggis to come.

“Sae let the Lord be thankit.”

A murmur of amens arose from around the table. If reciting four lines was singing for your supper, Tom decided, sitting back down in his chair, then he might take more bookings.

“Very good, Vicar,” said a voice to his left, as the rumble of male voices in Thorn Court’s private dining room rose in scattered conversation.

Tom was distracted momentarily by the sight of Kerra Prowse,
smartly dressed in a black skirt and blouse, appearing from the door leading from the kitchen, and walking past the unpeopled end of the table where place settings for those absent had been removed. Under her upraised palm was a very large, laden tray.
Real food at last!
he thought, taking a deep breath, seeking some satisfying aroma in the atmosphere. And oddly, the aroma
was
satisfying, quite satisfying. He thought he caught a whiff of … but, no, it couldn’t be, he reconsidered, as Kerra removed a plated soup bowl from her tray and placed it in front of him.