might see us through this crisis, but what about the next one?’ Izzy said. ‘We need to increase our donor base and find new sponsors, so we can get some kind of regular income coming in. Otherwise, we’re just putting our fingers in the dyke.’
Maddie knew her friend meant well. Izzy and Bitsy loved every blade of grass, every stone and split-rail fence of the sanctuary as much as she did. Like her, they considered it their second home. They’d been at the sanctuary even longer than she had and she’d known them since she’d first started mucking out stables there as a teenager. It was Izzy who’d suggested a degree in animal welfare when her mother had insisted she go to college, and Bitsy who’d encouraged her to buy the sanctuary when the vets could no longer manage it, promising to stay on at the stables as long as Maddie needed her. Izzy had even given Lucas a couple of riding lessons, before they’d concluded, by mutual assent, that horses weren’t for him. She and Bitsy had organised Maddie’s hen weekend on the Isle of Wight with Jayne and Lucas’s younger sister, Candace, where they’d all got outrageously drunk. Sixty-two-year-old Bitsy had been arrested for indecent exposure after she’d dropped her trousers and peed behind a postbox; somehow, Candace had sweet-talked the arresting officer, a baby-faced policeman barely out of his teens and a full head shorter than she, into dropping the charges in return for her phone number. Bitsy and Izzy were her family. They knew the sanctuary meant the world to her, as it did to them. Losing even a part of it would break all their hearts.
Izzy would rather cut off her own arm than sell the lower meadow. If she was suggesting it now, they must be in real trouble.
Maddie leafed through the bills on her desk after Izzy had left. Overdue. Three months in arrears. Immediate payment is required.
Izzy was right. They couldn’t go on like this. Lucas had told her the same thing. And he didn’t just want her to sell the lower meadow; he’d actually asked her to consider selling the sanctuary itself.
She understood his reasoning: the sanctuary was a financial black hole that had long since swallowed every bit of her legacy, and more besides. As Izzy said, she hadn’t paid herself in more than a year. If she sold the land to a developer, she’d make enough for Lucas to buy into a partnership with his architectural firm and enable him to take on some of the projects he longed to do which were currently no more than a pipe dream.
But the sanctuary wasn’t just a hobby or even a good cause, not to her. Maddie felt hurt that Lucas could even ask her to sell it. The horses were her family. She loved Finn second only to Lucas and the children. Of course she didn’t want to stamp on Lucas’s dreams, but closing the sanctuary to facilitate them was inconceivable. It’d be like selling Noah to a baby trader!
She’d sacrifice a kidney rather than let one single horse go.
Maddie’s hair smelled of vomit, and her jeans of urine. She’d already changed her T-shirt three times before giving up and accepting the noxious stains as the scars of battle. Her nails were caked in pink calamine lotion, and she strongly suspected the suspicious marks on her socks had something to do with Jacob’s foul-smelling nappy earlier.
‘Of course it’s not a bad time,’ she lied, opening the front door wider. ‘Please, come in.’
Candace thrust a Tupperware box at her as she came in. ‘I made scones. They’re a bit burnt, but you can kind of scrape that off.’
‘Sorry about the mess,’ Maddie apologised, clearing a heap of dirty washing off a kitchen chair so Candace could sit down.
‘You should see my place,’ Candace said cheerfully, lobbing a pair of dirty knickers onto the pile in Maddie’s arms. ‘Lucas told me Jacob’s come down with the pox, too. I thought you might need some moral support.’
Maddie shoved the dirty clothes into the washing machine and jammed the door shut. ‘You have no idea. Your brother practically ran screaming from the room when Emily came out in spots. You know what he’s like about getting sick. I’m amazed he hasn’t made us fumigate the place.’
Candace picked up a piece of leftover Marmite toast from one of the kid’s plates and took a huge bite. ‘I was a bit surprised when Lucas’s office said he was home today,’ she said through a mouthful of crumbs. ‘I thought maybe you’d gone down with it too, that’s why I came round.’
‘That’s sweet of you, but I’m fine. I’ve already had it.’ Maddie looked puzzled. ‘I don’t know who you spoke to at his office, but they’ve got their wires crossed. Lucas has a meeting in Poole today, and then a late work dinner. He won’t be back till tomorrow morning.’
Candace snorted. ‘That sounds more like my brother. If you were relying on him for the “in sickness” bit of things, you’re out of luck.’ She took another bite of toast. ‘Are you all right, Mads? You look exhausted.’
‘So everyone keeps telling me.’
‘Sorry, darling. But you do look a bit ropey.’
‘That’s nothing to how I feel.’ Maddie collapsed onto a chair. ‘Thank God Noah hasn’t gone down with it yet, though it’s probably only a matter of time. Jacob’s been throwing up all day – this is the third set of laundry I’ve done today.’
‘How’s Emily?’
‘Fine, apart from the itching. I had to cut her nails right back to stop her scratching.’
‘The older you are when you get chickenpox, the worse it is,’ Candace shuddered. ‘I was only five when I had it, and I was hardly ill at all, but Lucas was fourteen and he had an awful time. I remember Aunt Dot had to tie mittens on him in the end to stop him scratching himself to pieces.’ She lowered her voice and grinned conspiratorially. ‘Apparently he even had spots on his willy.’
Maddie laughed. She loved Candace; she might be a little tactless at times, but she didn’t have a mean bone in her body. At thirty-one, she was only a year younger than Maddie, but she seemed to have settled into a happy spinster groove, content to play the eccentric maiden aunt to her niece and nephews. It was unfortunate: the same strong, masculine features that made Lucas so ruggedly handsome were significantly less flattering on his sister. She must have been six feet and was built like a rugby prop forward. But beneath it all, she was emotionally fragile. She’d never managed to maintain a serious relationship and Maddie wondered if it was another legacy from the terrible tragedy that had shaped Candace’s childhood: the fear of letting anyone get too close.
Lucas had introduced her to his sister just a couple of weeks after they’d started dating. The three of them had met at a rooftop bar in London overlooking St Paul’s, near where Candace worked as an IT consultant, and Maddie remembered feeling sick with nerves as she’d got into the lift with him, terrified that if Candace didn’t like her, it would be the end of everything. Lucas himself had been uncharacteristically subdued and Maddie had assumed it was because he, too, was anxious she met with his sister’s approval. It was only later she’d found out he’d been far more worried what she’d think of Candace.
The evening had gone well, although she’d been a little taken aback by quite how much vodka Candace had managed to put away. But it’d
