and Grumps if I had gone back to university.’
‘Survived, but not turned out so well, even if you could have brought yourself to leave him. And I’m sure he’d have gone off the rails at some point if you’d abandoned him like his mother did.’
‘Perhaps,’ I admitted. ‘He’s turned out quite well, hasn’t he?’
‘He’s a lovely boy,’ she said warmly. ‘By the way, have you heard anything from Chas about that DNA test?’
‘Only an email saying he’ll be calling in soon when he’s up in the north on business, so he can’t have got the result yet. It’ll be odd seeing him and not knowing…’ I sighed. ‘It’s just another damn issue to resolve, isn’t it? But I really do hope Chas is my father, because at least he cares a little for me and I’m fond of him.’
‘I think if you could find out the truth about who your father was and come to terms with that, manage to forgive your mother for being so useless and then, finally, forgive Raffy for letting you down all those years ago, then you’d probably feel like a whole, fresh new person!’
‘That’s a bit of a tall order! I think I’d have to be a different person,’ I said with a wry smile, not mentioning that the Angel cards were in at least partial agreement with her, since they kept coming up with the unambiguous message that I should forgive Raffy. I couldn’t read it any other way.
‘You could do it,’ she said encouragingly, ‘and then perhaps we could both look for nice men, before they’re all gone. There must be two left on the shelf still, don’t you think?’
‘Of course there are – like Felix,’ I suggested sneakily.
‘Well…yes, I suppose so, because he’s single and there’s nothing wrong with him, is there?’
‘Absolutely not. But I don’t want a man. I’ve had enough of them. Or children either, because Jake was enough. No, I love my little groove of pub, chocolate, friends and a lovely garden to play with.’
Seeing her face fall I added quickly, ‘But we could go further afield occasionally, or even join something, so we would meet new people?’
‘They do have afternoon and evening classes at the village hall,’ she suggested doubtfully, ‘but they seem to be things like napkin folding and paper flower making.’
‘I don’t think either of us has quite reached those levels of desperation yet, have we?’ I asked.
Zillah, having decided that we needed Raffy, took the matter of reconciliation into her own hands.
The following day she knocked on the inner door that led to the museum, stuck her head in and announced loudly, ‘Gentleman caller!’
Then she pushed Raffy into the room and shut the door firmly behind him.
‘Sorry to disturb you,’ he said, looking at once startled and entirely unsure of his welcome, as well he might. ‘I can see you’re busy and I didn’t mean to come in. I called in to leave something for you with Zillah, but she insisted—’
I’d got over the first heart-jarring shock of his unexpected appearance by now, so I said evenly, ‘It’s all right, there’s no point in resisting Zillah if she decides you should do something. I don’t make chocolate every day and at the moment I’m only cutting out the Wishes to go inside.’
Seeing he wasn’t about to be immediately ejected, he came over to look.
‘I get them printed on sheets of this thin, shiny paper and cut them out myself,’ I explained. ‘There are lots of different ones, so no two boxes of Chocolate Wishes are identical. I make a random selection.’
‘So, how do you get them inside the chocolate shell?’
‘I mould the shapes in two halves, then I put the Wish in one and stick on the top with a little melted chocolate.’
‘Easy when you know how.’
‘Yes, though you have to use tempered chocolate, or a white line could develop around the join and spoil the look of it.’ I was talking slightly too fast, unnerved by his nearness. I’d forgotten quite how tall he was too, until he was inches away, looking down at me…‘I sell them in boxes of six or twelve.’
‘Felix says you shift them by the bushel-load so you have to go to the post office with parcels every day.’
‘Yes, the number of orders snowballed after my Chocolate Wishes got a mention in an article in Country at Heart magazine and I’ve been advertising in it ever since. You have to keep on top of them, even when they’re not urgent, and I usually call on Felix on the way back – it’s the lure of his new coffee machine.’
‘I know, I’m getting into the habit of doing the same, only earlier, after I’ve said morning prayers in the church.’
‘Do you have to say prayers every day, morning and evening?’
‘I don’t have to, I want to; it’s different,’ he said with a smile. ‘By the way, did Jake tell you he’d been round to the vicarage with that nice girlfriend of his?’
‘Yes, and he said you were about to move back into the main house.’
‘I already have, into one bedroom and a small downstairs room at the back, while the decorators finish the rest. Jake’s an interesting young man – lively, intelligent and outgoing. You’ve done a good job with him, because he can’t have been easy.’
‘No, he certainly wasn’t that,’ I agreed.
‘Felix told me some of the tricks he used to play – very inventive!’
I reflected that Felix seemed to have been telling him way too much! ‘He’s grown out of them now and he’ll be going to university in the autumn, assuming he ever puts any revision in for his exams and gets the grades. But luckily his girlfriend’s keen on studying. They’re applying to the same universities, but I don’t know how that will work out.’
Raffy had now caught sight of the chocolate spell stuck to the cupboard door next to him and was reading it. ‘Interesting!’
‘According to Grumps, that’s some sort of magical incantation that the Mayans used when they were making their chocolate, and it was brought back by the conquistadores. He has a Spanish archivist chum who’s cataloguing the books and papers of an ancient, titled family and he found the manuscript among them. He and Grumps have deciphered most of it between them and now he insists I say it over every batch of chocolate I make, to improve it.’
‘And do you?’
‘Yes, though I don’t see how it could have any effect. They’re working on the last part now, though that may be a later addition. I only hope they don’t find any more after that, or I’ll be muttering like a witch over the cauldron for hours every time I make a new batch.’
Raffy laughed deep in his throat. I’d forgotten the way he did that but it made my heart do the flippy thing again. I realised I’d slowly relaxed while we were talking, and there was a pile of snipped, shiny Wishes in front of me that I
