Page 54 of Short Stack 3

I snap my fingers. “Milly, give me your bonnet.”

“You’re using it to catch sick? Good luck getting me back in it tomorrow.”

“As if that was happening. I’ve heard more complaints about bonnet strings today than a full-time milliner. Hand it over. He can upchuck in your hat. That’s surely deserving of a good review from him.”

“If someone had told me that all my degrees would lead me here, I honestly don’t think I’d have believed them,” Darcy points out.

I smile at him. “I’ve just realised something.”

“Yes?” he asks with an understandable note of caution.

“Even if we don’t win the tour competition, I’ve already won first prize.”

His eyes twinkle. “What have you won?”

I step closer to him. “You.”

Brian’s snore stutters, and he opens bleary eyes. Then he blinks, and a panicked look comes over his face. “Who thefuckare you?” He clutches the pillow tight as he looks us up and down. “Oh my god, have I time-travelled?”

I consider playing along for a wild second, but I’m forestalled when Darcy shakes his head reprovingly at me. “For shame,” he whispers. He leans over our drunken customer. “We’re wearing historical costumes, Brian. You’re on the Jane Austen coach tour. Don’t you remember?”

“Who’s Jane Austen? Does she own the coach company?”

“I don’t know why I bother,” I say loudly. “I might just as well have madeCountdownmy specialist subject. Your wife’s on her way back, so we’ll leave you to it, Brian.” I pat his head. “I do have some good news to make your evening better. I’m moving in with my boyfriend.”

He gapes at me like a drunken owl. “Congratulations,” he offers with a question in his voice.

“Ah, as Jane Austen once wrote, ‘Nobody minds having what is too good for them’. Don’t you think that’s true?”

“Erm, probably.”

“But then Jane never had to carry a drunken guest through a hotel while he sang rugby songs.” I give a happy sigh. “I guess we’re just lucky, Darcy.”

His smile is broad and bright enough to light up the dim room. “We really are, Freddie.”

Barnaby and Cosmo

On a Midnight Clear

A Honeysuckle Interlude

A new short story that’s set after the events ofOn a Midnight Clear.

A Honeysuckle Interludewas inspired by a visit to Chatsworth House. I wandered through their kitchen gardens and saw a bed of pretty violas, and the story came to me. There’s a little shed in the gardens just like the one I describe, and I actually wrote some of this story sitting on the veranda of that shed.

Barnaby

“Michael, have you seen Cosmo?”

My butler stops his walk across the hall. “No, Master Barnaby. I can’t say as I have. Is he not in the sculpture room?”

“No, that was the first place I looked for him.”

“I’ve never seen a man so happy amongst statues.”

“Well, you know how it is.”

I sincerely hope he doesn’t.

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