suppose I might as well go back and open the shop up then,’ Felix said. ‘I’m thinking of putting a sofa into the front room and a coffee machine to attract people in – what do you think?’
‘It’s a good idea. And you can leave out leaflets for Grumps’ museum when he opens, and we can have information about your bookshop on display,’ I said. ‘Mutual publicity.’
‘Oh, but just wait until Hebe finds out about the witchcraft museum!’ Poppy said, shuddering. ‘Sparks will fly!’
‘I sincerely hope you’re wrong,’ I replied. ‘I get enough of that with Jake and those firesticks he’s borrowed from a friend!’
Grumps had exchanged contracts, so life suddenly became very hectic and I wished he or Zillah had given me a bit more warning about the move.
My Angel card readings kept helpfully suggesting I spend a day at the seaside, or visit a garden to soothe my soul ready for a major but fortuitous change of direction, but there wasn’t time. My batteries would simply have to recharge themselves with solar power.
By some alchemy (or so he said), Grumps had managed to get the purchasers of our home to let us stay there for two weeks while the Old Smithy was cleaned and repainted inside and out. They were a pleasant pair of middle-aged American antique dealers and I wondered why on earth they had fallen in love with a shabby chunk of Victorian Gothic, situated right next to a graveyard. I didn’t want to rock the boat by asking them, though.
Felix recommended the painters and decorators he’d used when he moved Marked Pages from Merchester to Sticklepond a few years before, and he also suggested a local cleaning firm called Dolly Mops. Grumps must have promised them each an enticing bonus if they finished in record time, because the work was well under way when I went back with Poppy only a couple of days after my initial visit, in order to measure for curtains.
Grumps did not revisit, but ordered everything from afar, choosing the interior paintwork colours from the gloomier end of the Farrow and Ball range and stipulating that all the original William Morris wallpaper was to remain. But Zillah had free range in the kitchen, her sitting room and her own bedroom suite, where a bold paper featuring an unlikely combination of giant red peonies against a blue trellis was destined to reign supreme.
It was lucky that Grumps’ new home was also Victorian Gothic, because it meant that most of the furniture and curtains he already had turned out to fit perfectly. Even his huge range of bookshelves could be accommodated in the room that was designated as his new study.
Our flat was a more recent addition, furnished with a mixture of the cheap modern stuff that my mother had favoured and bits and pieces I’d picked up in junk shops. Most of it just wouldn’t fit, and anyway, it was such a pretty little cottage that I yearned to go all chintzy and cabbage-rosy.
Of course, Jake wanted his new bedroom painted black, like his present one, and threw a teenage hissy fit when I said the whole house was going to be cream with touches of the old-rose purply-pink colour of the tiles in the sitting-room fireplace, or as near as I could get to it. But in the interests of fraternal harmony we compromised eventually: he was to have one wall painted purple, plus some new black and purple curtains and a matching bed throw – very retro. It sounded vile, but could easily be fixed when he grew out of this phase…if he ever did.
Grumps had opted to have the removal men pack everything up, and then unpack again at the other end, but Jake and I decided to do our own. Jake, because he was at just that secretive age when your most treasured possessions might be misinterpreted by alien (or even sisterly) eyes, and me because I didn’t have a huge amount of stuff…apart from the Chocolate Wishes equipment and stock, about a million ornamental angels and dozens of potted geraniums. And I had to make arrangements to move the geraniums, the mini greenhouse and all the pots and tubs of plants in the courtyard myself, since the removal firm refused to take them.
‘Poppy and I found some rose-patterned Laura Ashley curtains for the cottage in a charity shop in Ormskirk yesterday,’ I told Grumps, when I went in to collect the latest chapter of Satan’s Child and a letter that seemed to consist of several pages of barely veiled but mysterious threats. It was addressed to a book reviewer who had dared to say rude things about his last novel, The Desirous Devil. ‘And a lovely coffee table – it’s a big brass tray on knobbly black wooden tripod legs.’
Grumps had generously given me a cheque to buy anything I needed for my new home, but I was making it stretch as far as possible. Anyway, it’s much more fun (and a lot more ecologically sound) to search out stuff from charity and junk shops, though there wasn’t much time. It was just as well Stirrups was quiet at this time of year, so Poppy could get away occasionally and help me.
I wasn’t really expecting Grumps to be terribly interested in what I was saying, so I was surprised when he stopped scribbling on a bit of paper, looked up and said, ‘I seem to recall that there are one or two pieces of furniture stored in the attic. Perhaps there might be something you would want among them? In any case, someone should decide what is worth taking with us, or can be left for the Meerlings.’
‘Marlings,’ I corrected. ‘OK, I’ll sort that out, Grumps. And you’ve reminded me – that’s where I put Mum’s stuff, so I’d better go through it, hadn’t I? She isn’t going to want any of her clothes when she does come back now – they’ll be out of fashion – though I suppose I’ll have to keep her personal possessions.’
The day I put them up there was not a happy one. For some reason, Jake had been totally convinced Mum would turn up on the first anniversary of her disappearing trick and was correspondingly so deeply upset when she didn’t, in an angry, thirteen-year-old sort of way, that he took it out by trashing his bicycle with a tyre wrench and then vanishing for hours. In his absence I had shoved all her possessions into old suitcases and boxes, clearing the flat of any lingering trace of her presence, and I hadn’t thought about them since.
‘Label anything Lou might still want and it can be transferred to the attic of the new house,’ Grumps suggested.
‘OK. There shouldn’t be much.’ I paused. ‘Do you think she will ever come back? It’s been a long time.’
‘You would need to ask Zillah that, but I would much prefer she didn’t. Life is more tranquil without her, and Zillah assures me that she is alive and well.’ He held out the slip of paper he had been covering in his black, crabbed writing and added, ‘The ancient Mayan chocolate charm I gave you was, if you remember my saying so, incomplete. I think I have managed to translate a little more with the help of my friend in Cordoba. He wrote to me this morning with some suggestions. You might want to add the additional lines when you are preparing your chocolate.’
‘Since the ancient Mayan people didn’t have a written language, I can’t imagine how they could pass down a charm for chocolate making anyway, Grumps!’
‘There is such a thing as oral history, you know, Chloe, and no reason why such a thing should not have been written down by one of the early Spanish conquistadores – as it was – and carried back to Spain.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Just have faith. The last version worked, to a certain extent, did it not? Business boomed.’
‘My sales did rise,’ I admitted, though I was sure
