I can get that sucker off.” Finally, a problem she could fix.
A groan of thunder tumbled toward them as the edge of the forest retreated into darkness. How had she failed to notice the towering storm cloud banked over the upper canopy? The sky exploded with a boom that rattled through the window casements and through Tilly. She jerked back into spider thread, the kind you never saw, and then blam! You were wrapped in goo, snared by a teeny-tiny, almost invisible, arachnid.
* * *
An arm slipped around her waist, breath tickled her neck and familiar fingers teased the sensitive spot above her hipbone. The blades of the fan sliced through the bedroom air, and tree frogs serenaded with the noises of the night. “I love you,” David whispered in the soft mid-Atlantic accent that masked his Brooklyn roots.
Tilly tried to turn and touch the ridge of scar on his right cheek, but her limbs remained weighted to the mattress. The mockingbird shrilled from its nest, and David’s arms retreated.
Don’t go, my love, don’t go. It can’t hurt you. It’s just a bird.
Tilly jolted upright in bed, her heart thumping. She glanced at the ceiling, but there was no creak from the room above to suggest that Isaac, who slept on the edge of his bed in deference to his plush lizards and snakes, had, yet again, fallen out.
Dawn was creeping around the blinds, sneaking into her bedroom with a fresh reminder that she was welcoming another day as a widow. And her phone was ringing at—she squinted toward David’s space-age alarm clock—6:00 a.m.? It better not be James Nealy again, unless…dear God, no. No. Her breath quickened; her mind swirled in memories. Was it four o’clock on a black November morning with rain pounding the deck, the air crackling with a late-season thunderstorm, and her mother’s voice, quiet but solid, “Your father’s fading. Come home”? Or was it 12:01 on a balmy May night with spring peepers jingling in the forest and one of David’s inner-circle graduate students crying as she whispered, “David’s been rushed to hospital”? Why did life boil down to phone calls in the middle of the night? Who this time? Her mother, one of her sisters, Rowena?
Tilly yanked the phone from its base. “Yes?” Her voice raced out with her breath.
“Oh, you’re there. Thank the Lord.”
“Mum? Why are you calling at this hour?”
“I woke you, didn’t I? I’m terribly sorry, darling.” This was not the voice of a woman who had spent forty years drilling English history into teenage girls at a small private school. Nor was it the voice of a woman who had lost two babies to crib death, but scuppered fear and grief to see two more pregnancies to term. This was the voice of a woman who, the summer after her husband died, hid in a family heirloom.
The nearly forgotten image stirred: her mother crouched against grief in the Victorian wardrobe, refusing to come out for anyone but Tilly, the daughter who lived an ocean away.
“Wake me?” Tilly rubbed her eyes. “You know me, up with the larks. Bright and chirpy at—” she glanced at the clock again. Six bloody a.m.? “—six a.m.”
“Darling, is something wrong?”
“Shouldn’t I be asking that question?”
Tilly scooted across David’s side of the bed and swung her legs to the hardwood floor. She used to dream of a rug in the bedroom, but David liked his floors smooth, bare and refinished every three years. Maybe this winter she would splurge, buy a rug. Or maybe not.
“Bit out of sorts,” her mother said. “Fancied a chat.”
Tilly gnawed off a hangnail. “Did something happen, Mum?”
Half a day away, her mother heaved out the biggest sigh Tilly had ever heard.
“Mum? You’re scaring me.” Tilly twisted the phone cord around her wrist, then untwisted it. Oh God, was her mother’s voice muffled? Was she hiding in the wardrobe again? Tilly drummed her toes on the floor. Where were her flip-flops? Where?
“Now you’re not to fuss. I’m absolutely fine. I’ve had a bit of a fall and broken my leg. Of all the ridiculous things. And I have five stitches in my left hand. Where Monty bit me.”
“He what?” Tilly shot up. Her mother’s springer spaniel, named after a British World War II general, was a wack job.
“Don’t yell, darling. It was an accident. He was aiming for the hedgehog.”
“Hedgehog?”
“It’s all rather embarrassing.”
“I’m coming home, right now.” As soon as I find my flip-flops. Tilly dived under the bed. Well, lookie here—the overdue library books and the breast health pamphlet she’d been searching for. And wow, how about all those dust bunnies?
“Don’t be ridiculous. You are not coming home.” Thank God, her mother was using her teacher’s voice, the one that had enforced zero tolerance in the classroom long before American educators adopted the phrase. “I’m perfectly fine. Feeling a tad foolish is all. I called to commiserate, not cause worry. It’s perfect gardening weather, and I’m confined to the drawing room with my feet up. My list for today included tying back the sweet peas.”
Typical, her mother was upset by the disruption, not the accident. Apart from the summer of her breakdown, Mrs. Virginia Haddington lived a neat life, greeting each day with a list written in specially ordered blue fountain pen ink. Oh God. In the ten years since her father’s death, Tilly had been the gatekeeper of her mother’s mental health, making sure she was taking time to garden, to read, to enjoy a social life. But in all those years, Tilly had never once worried about her mother’s physical well-being. Sure, she was only seventy, but her mother had never broken a bone before.
Mrs. Haddington gave a sniff. “It’s that blasted muntjac’s fault, the one that treats my vegetable garden as an all-night buffet. I’m at my wit’s end, Tilly. My broad beans are gone. Simply gone. When I was up at the Hall the other day, trying to persuade Rowena to join the rota for the church flowers—”
Tilly snorted. Her mother had to be joking. Rowena could barely tell the difference between a stinging nettle and a rose. And she had no interest in learning otherwise.
Her mother ignored the interruption and kept going. “I bumped into the gamekeeper and asked if I could borrow his shotgun, but the blighter refused to lend it to me.”
Tilly rolled her eyes. Her mother had known the gamekeeper for thirty years, but still refused to call him John. Of course, the only person in the village who used his real name was Rowena, his boss. The Roxtons, Rowena’s family, had owned and managed the three thousand acres of woods and farmland surrounding the village for generations. But on Rowena’s thirtieth birthday, Lord and Lady Roxton gifted the property to their only child and skipped off to a new life on Crete. A dumbfounded Rowena, left only with a vague reassurance that she wouldn’t be clobbered with inheritance tax provided Lord Roxton outlived the gift by seven years, had quit a successful career in the London art world to save her ailing inheritance: the Bramwell Chase estate and Bramwell Hall. As the new lady of the manor, she had hired contract farmers, financed a roof for her crumbling historic mansion by renting it to a movie crew, and had just scraped past the seven-year marker. Considering she was mining a financial dinosaur, Ro was holding her own, but no thanks to her parents.
“Wait
