Read Online The Christmas Angel by Marcia Willett - Free Book Online Page B

‘I suppose it might work. The snow’s drifted across the barn doors again. It’ll be hell’s own delight shifting it.’ But when he turns to look at her, his face is bright with intent; concentrated with purpose. ‘All right, Mo?’ he asks – and she smiles as she nods her ‘yes’ to the old familiar question. He’s asked it all their lives together: speeding along in his Austin Healey Sprite; racing before the wind in sailing boats; walking on the cliffs; lying on beaches in the sun. At all the crucial moments, birth and death and celebration, there has been the look and the question: ‘All right, Mo?’ like an arm around the shoulder, an embrace.
    John the Baptist gets up and goes to him, tail wagging, and she looks at them both with love and sudden gut-wrenching panic: how would she possibly manage without them? She pushes the quilt aside and swings her legs rather painfully over the side of the bed.
    ‘Well, dress up warmly,’ she says. ‘Is Dossie up yet?’
    He shakes his head. ‘Lucky we’ve got plenty of supplies in. Good old Dossie. She’d have made a first-rate purser. She can sleep in and I’ll cook the breakfast.’
    But Dossie is not asleep. For once the snow has not had its usual effect upon her. She is neither delighted by its magical transforming qualities nor excited in a childish way by the white stuff. She is quite simply irritated by it: she will not now be able to keep her lunch date. She’s exchanged several emails with the amusing Rupert French, whose holiday properties are mainly to the south of Truro, and it seems a natural progression to meet him for lunch.
    ‘I buy a run-down old cottage or a barn with planning permission,’ he told her, ‘and live in it or in a caravan while I do it up. Then I move on to the next one. My wife and I used to do it together but now … well, now I’m working on my own.’
    His voice changed when he said that. He sounded rather bleak and she didn’t like to ask him whether his wife had died or whether they were divorced.
    Chris at Penharrow is pretty certain that she died. ‘I heard some rumour that she was very ill and that she went upcountry for treatment. Bristol, I think it was. It was a while ago now. I really don’t know him all that well, only through the trade. He’s based more on the south coast. But he sounded quite cheerful when he phoned to ask about your new scheme.’
    Huddled in her duvet, Dossie wonders why she feels so disappointed that they won’t be able to meet up as they’ve planned. After all, a phone call and a few emails are nothing to go by, though she knows that he’s rather dishy. There is a photograph of him on his website with some of his clients outside one of his cottages and she’s studied it closely. He is laughing into the camera and he looks quite tough and rather fun. In one of the emails he wrote:
    I’m not that far away from you at the moment, working on a little cottage up near the edge of the moor. The first one I’ve bought outside my usual area and it’s still in a bit of a state. A cross between a builders’ merchant’s and a squat! I haven’t had the telephone connected yet and I have to go up to the village hall to send emails. We must meet up some time and talk all this through. I’ve got a lot of clients I know will be really keen to try it out. How about a pub lunch?
    And so it was arranged and they exchanged the numbers of their mobiles in case of some emergency, though he warned her that the signal was very patchy. Dossie wonders how he is faring, up on Bodmin Moor, and reaches for her mobile phone on the bedside table: no message. She’ll get up and check her emails. Sitting up, pulling the duvet higher, she texts quickly to Clem: Snowed in. Hope u r ok? xx
    Clem and Jakey will be quite safe at Chi-Meur: they are so self-sufficient and she knows that the freezer is well stocked up. Pulling on her dressing gown, she slips next door into her study and switches on her laptop: no