Farm Fatale Read online

  "You were slated, definitely," Russ assured her, which had seemed a weird sort of explanation. And his pre-audition good-luck message, "Break everything," had not, in retrospect, been particularly encouraging. She was, Samantha thought crossly, pressing her foot on the accelerator, better off without him.

  Suddenly, and most unexpectedly, a large, heavily decorated sign of the cross appeared in the center of her windshield. Samantha let out a prolonged shriek of terror. How much more of this could she stand? The Amityville Horror had become The Omen; expecting unscheduled decapitation any minute, Samantha's hand flew to her neck. A second later she realized the cross was actually the top of a spire and she was driving up to the church.

  Enlightenment dawned. Who better to rid a house of ghosts than a man of the cloth? Double-parking the car with a screech, Samantha dashed out and headed through the church door.

  ***

  "But something must have happened," Mark insisted desperately. "Gothic multiple murders, that sort of thing?"

  "Not really, sir," said the duty sergeant at Slapton Police Station. "We don't get that sort of thing round here. Most trouble in this area is usually down to the Four Ds."

  "The Four Dees?" Mark frowned. And who the hell might they be?

  "Drugs, Drink, DIY, and Domestics," intoned the constable. "Oh, and the occasional bit of knicker-sniffing."

  Slamming the receiver down in disgust, Mark returned to his laptop. His stomach ran cold with dread at the thought of emailing the editor to report that his column's investigations into rural crime had proved even more fruitless than Rosie's snail-ravaged gooseberry bushes. He dragged his fingers hard through his hair and reached for an unopened package of chocolate chip cookies.

  Still, hopefully the editor would be merciful. Crashing and grinding the cookies in his teeth was a relief of sorts. Reaching for another, Mark heard the now-familiar screech of wheels followed by the slither of envelopes across the sitting-room floor.

  "Better get that red bill paid," shouted Duffy. "They'll be cutting you off if you're not careful. Takes ages to get reconnected as well. Mrs. Sidebottom hasn't had it for months—-mind you, that's no surprise to anyone." As the postman leaped back into his van, Mark returned to the silent kitchen and the empty screen of his laptop. Was the problem that he had promised the editor too much? Too late, he had realized the genius of Househusband had been to keep editorial expectations as low as possible. Genius and Househusband—two words he had never imagined it possible to use in the same sentence. An indication of how low he had fallen.

  Pacing back into the sitting room, Mark was shaken out of brooding by the sight of a pair of naked and shapely breasts walking past the open front door. Dungarees was taking the lunchtime air, or as much of it as she could given the cigarette plugged into her mouth and the large baby clamped to her left nipple. Even to Mark's inexpert eye, it was definitely too old to be breast-fed; this, as well as other darker thoughts, were obviously going through the mind of Mrs. Womersley as she looked up from weeding her daffodils to give Dungarees a disgusted stare. Her expression didn't change much when it switched to Mark, now hanging out of the front door. Swiftly, he went back inside to his laptop. There was something sinister about that old bag next door.

  Mark had typed no more than two words before the familiar thudding sound began on the cottage's front wall. Walking over to the window, Mark saw the Muzzles' cheeky-faced eldest boy Satchel kicking his large black soccer ball hard against the front of Number 2, aided and abetted by Blathnat. Mark glared murderously at them through the grubby old glass, then he raced across the sitting-room floor and almost ripped the front stable door off its hinges.

  "Just shut up, will you, aaarrgggh," he yelled, as the top half swung back, as usual, and crushed his fingers. "I'm trying to bloody work in there. If you two don't stop making all that bloody noise," Mark snarled, shaking his hand to relieve the pain, "I'll tear off both your arms and beat you with the soggy ends." One of his masters at school, he remembered, had used this threat to great effect.

  "Hey, hey, hey. Hang on right there just one minute. Whoo!" Dennis the Menace was loping toward him down the street, shaking his head and waving his arms. "Hey, hey, hey. Don't ruin the vibes, man. We don't shout at the kids round here."

  "Well, that's pretty bloody obvious," snapped Mark, catching the insolent eye of Satchel. Satchel. That was a laugh. Bloody kid obviously never went near a classroom. Making "calm down" gestures with his hands, Dennis retreated back up the lane, the wind billowing through his rainbow-colored tie-dye trousers whose crotch was on a level with his knees.

  As the hated children began kicking the hated ball noisily about the street again, Mark resisted the overwhelming urge to run away and never come back. Hands rammed violently into his pockets, he walked slowly back into the cottage, glancing at the bottom of Cinder Lane as he did so. He was amazed to notice a gleaming Jaguar XK9 double-parked alongside the Muzzles' rusting vehicles. Surely not the vicar's? The vicar was a sight better off than the usual pastoral padre if that car was anything to go by.

  A thought struck Mark with the force of a thunderclap. Hell, the vicar might even make a story. He rushed into the church and started clearing his throat exaggeratedly to announce his presence. It had instant results. A figure came hurtling out of the gloom of one of the side chapels. As it passed a stained-glass window, Mark saw with surprise that it was a woman. It was a lady vicar then. With long red hair, a very short skirt, high heels, and what, even from this distance, looked like a definite case of TT. Terrific Tits. Mark's heart soared. The editor was going to love this. A sexy woman vicar with a Jag. No doubt about it, this was definitely a story.

  "I'm so glad to see you," Samantha exclaimed dramatically. "I need your help desperately."

  "You do?" Mark asked, gratified.

  "Yes," Samantha gasped huskily. "I need someone who knows about black balls of hate."

  Mark's mind flew immediately to Satchel's football, which, at this very moment, was being slammed against the cottage wall with destructive regularity. "I'm your man," he said.

  ***

  "They're called Jennifer and Britney?" Rosie echoed as Jack introduced her to his two favorite cows.

  "That's right. After Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears," Jack admitted, not without a certain reddening of the ears. Rosie was also embarrassed—to think that someone who had spent half his life in a cowshed seemed better versed in popular culture than she was. Yet Jack, it turned out, liked nothing better than plowing late at night with the radio on full-blast in his tractor. Just like his uncle, Rosie thought, remembering the first time she had encountered the Womersleys.

  "Both naughty girls. Jennifer likes to snatch my hat off in the winter, and Britney always gives me a shove when she passes."

  Yet after this promising start to the day, Rosie was disappointed when Jack kept out of her way all morning. Was he regretting their charged encounter of the day before? Perhaps he was, after all, embroiled in a relationship somewhere. Although where and with whom he was embroiled Rosie couldn't imagine. There was no sign of any embroiling on the farm.

  In his absence, however, she made some of her best animal sketches ever of the cows in the upper field. Jennifer and Britney in particular turned out to be natural models. Coquettish, selfconscious, they pranced obligingly around for her, turning with a skittish flick of their tails. Samantha's wholesale destruction of all her early sketches became increasingly insignificant as Rosie, her pencil flying across the pad, improved on what had gone before. By the end of the morning, the character of Camilla the theater-producing cow, complete with a necklace of fat golden dandelions, had sprung exuberantly if improbably to life.

  The smooth and lichened rock on which Rosie sat was at the summit of the highest hill on Jack's farm, commanding a view not only of Eight Mile Bottom but of the receding hills and valleys beyond it. Rib after rib of rolling green stretched away to the sharply defined horizon, their vibrancy of color almost audible i
n the still air. Two hills in particular caught her attention. They looked, she thought, like sharks' fins jutting from a grassy sea. Or like two crumpled dragons that had collapsed in combat centuries ago.

  It was a sparkling blue and green spring day. From within a square foot of where she sat, Rosie could count nine different types of leaves, in colors ranging from emerald to brilliant lime. Flowers too—daisies led away in paths over the sheep-cropped turf, while the trails of brilliant yellow blazed by the dandelions were visible for miles. The sky seemed filled with competing birdsong—one a clear, glassy plink, another a piercing soprano fizz, rising, falling, and rising again.

  Her back to the field, Rosie did not see the tall figure approaching. But she felt the something cold and wet that suddenly thrust itself into her hand.

  "Kate! Bloody hell." As her hammering heart subsided, Rosie patted the dog gingerly.

  "Sorry," said Jack. "Didn't mean to make you jump. But Kate and I wondered if you might like to join us for lunch. It's past two o'clock, and we don't do starving artists on this farm." He set down a battered rucksack on the grass, while Kate sniffed and nudged Rosie's paintboxes and brushes.

  "Thought you might enjoy trying a few of the local delicacies." Jack produced two brown bottles of beer, a round loaf of crusty bread, and a couple of wax-paper-wrapped parcels.

  "Ooh, yes." Thinking of her unvarying diet of pasta and pesto, Rosie looked at the parcels with longing. Then fear flexed its icy fingers and snatched at her heart. What was in those parcels?

  "It's not…is it?" she stammered, unable to frame the dreaded word.

  "Meat?" Jack looked at her. Rosie gazed pleadingly back and nodded.

  His teeth flashed in a grin. "'Course it isn't. Matter of fact, it's cheese. Made in a local dairy with the milk from these very artists' models here." He waved his broad hand at the cows tearing at the grass, their tufty coats shining in the sun. His tone was light. He did not seem to be about to add any depressing statistics about the milk fetching eight pence a pint while the cheese cost £4 a pound.

  Rosie brightened. Her stomach rumbled as she realized how hungry she was. Mark had eaten the last of the Weetabix that morning, using up all the milk in the process.

  "The Bottom Blue is particularly good." Jack cut open the packets with a wood-handled knife.

  Rosie imagined the explosion of salty curds on her tongue. "I adore blue cheese. It's always delicious."

  "Isn't it? Particularly when it's been maturing for a while, like this one."

  Rosie swallowed.

  "Because then it's really special," Jack continued airily.

  "Is it?" Rosie's salivary glands were working overtime.

  "Yes. It's then that you get the maggotty bit at the bottom. We locals like to dip our bread in it."

  Rosie, feeling as if she were about to be sick, tried to stop her face from contorting in a rictus of disgust. Then she noticed the corners of Jack's mouth quivering and realized he was joking.

  Jack finally liberated the cheese, opened the two bottles of beer, and passed her one. The ale was deliciously cool and nutty. As he drank, Rosie watched the muscles in his strong throat work the liquid down.

  Rosie demolished a hunk of bread and cheese and sighed happily. "This is wonderful," she said, beaming at him. "Thank you so much."

  Jack did not reply. His eyes had flicked upward.

  "Listen." Jack spoke suddenly. "The lark. Can you hear it?"

  It was the high, sweet sound she had heard earlier. "I've never heard one before," she confessed, entranced by the rising and descending notes.

  "Don't hear them that often these days. It's just up there, look. Tiny black dot, over to the left."

  As Jack pointed into the sky, Rosie squinted desperately, scanning the blue without result. Suddenly, her eyes seemed full of dots: floating contact lens debris, transparent worms, and hazy blotches drifting past like plankton. None of them seemed much like larks.

  "Can you see it?"

  With a surge of relief Rosie finally spotted the tiny creature pulsing upward into the sun. They watched until it finally disappeared and the distant hum of a plane replaced the fizzing song.

  "I never get tired of this view," Jack said after a pause. "Even though I've seen it every day for the last thirty years."

  "It's magical." Rosie raised herself on her elbow. "I've been looking at those hills over there," she added quickly. "Very odd shapes." She stopped short of telling him she had compared them to sharks' fins and collapsed dragons. No doubt he would think that just the kind of absurd romantic fantasy typical of a city dweller. Did she not realize these hills were working hills?

  Jack nodded. "Strange, aren't they? Amazing knobbly spines. I know it sounds mad"—he shot her a shy look—"but I've always thought they looked like dragons or something. Sort of collapsed. As if they'd been fighting each other."

  Their eyes locked in a smile.

  As he leaned over to kiss her, Rosie's pelvis melted into liquid fire. Liquid everything, as Jack, sliding a pleasingly confident hand between her legs, eventually attested. Pushing up her shirt, he brushed his glistening forefinger over her hardening nipple and covered it with his lips.

  It felt like wrenching herself from quicksand.

  "I've got a boyfriend," Rosie muttered, turning her head away and addressing a clump of cowslips that nodded understandingly in a sudden breeze. Surely Jack must know about Mark? Even if Mrs. Womersley hadn't filled him in, it was impossible that Duffy had passed on the opportunity to do so.

  Jack sat up abruptly, his arms hanging over his knees, and tore at the head of a dandelion.

  "I can't leave Mark," Rosie said gently. "We gave up everything we had in London to come here…been together for years…he couldn't afford the cottage by himself…" Even to her own ears, her voice rang hollow. Who, after all, was she trying to convince? And yet…

  Jack nodded, his mouth a set line. "Well, I have to respect that, I suppose." He paused, as if struggling with what to say next. "At least you're not one of those women who ride roughshod over relationships. Stringing two blokes along at the same time and all that."

  "No." Rosie twisted a blade of grass nervously around her fingers. "I've never been very good at that femme fatale thing."

  "I'm glad to hear it." Though he was muttering to his knees, he seemed to be doing so with feeling. Was he speaking from experience?

  "But we can still be friends, can't we?" Rosie ventured. "I mean, I can still come up here? I'd like to…"

  Jack nodded slowly. "Of course. Besides…"

  "Yes?" she looked at him apprehensively.

  "You might change your mind."

  Rosie reddened, his wry smile tugging at her heart.

  "I'll be here if you do," Jack said.

  ***

  The evening sun was gilding the fields in a filter of yellow light as Rosie walked slowly home. Her brain ground like a pestle against the mortar of her skull. She had regretted spurning Jack's advances the second the Spitewinter gate had closed behind her. For what, after all, had she spurned them? Spiteful, carping, explosively badtempered Mark…Well, she'd had enough of that, Rosie decided as she approached the cottage. The worm had turned. From now on, she would fight fire with fire. Any displays of bad temper would be more than matched. Then, at least, she would not have turned down Jack for nothing. To her amazement, however, she arrived at the cottage to find Mark positively skipping round the sitting room.

  "Amazing church," he said.

  "You were in church?" Rosie's feeling of guilt intensified. Unprecedented though it was, Mark had spent the afternoon in the house of the Lord, while she, harlot that she was, had spent the afternoon on the verge of contravening the Ten Commandments. Nevertheless, she looked at him with concern. Had things gotten so bad that he had sought divine help with "Green-er Pastures"?

  Mark nodded. "The vicar was showing me round. Pretty bloody old, some of it. There's a tomb of some medieval bloke who fought against Joan of Arc…
What's that bloody awful burning smell?" Rosie fled to the kitchen, where the toast Mark was making sat incinerated in its racks, the smell drifting in a dense cloud round the room.

  "So you were looking around out of interest?" Rosie asked. Odd that the tomb of a fourteenth-century knight could form the centerpiece of the column when all other aspects of the village had failed.