Page 55 of Wild About You

‘If I message you the picture,’ I said, ‘will you show Jamie? I know he’d want to see this.’

He took out his vape. ‘You send it to him, Anna.’

‘No, it’s fine, he wants everything channelled through you.’

I glanced at his face, returned to its normal serenity.

‘You did this,’ he said, and inhaled. ‘He should see it from you.’

I went back to the office carrying my phone as though it held the co-ordinates for a treasure chest, or that week’s lottery numbers. I kept opening the album and staring at that tangle of wood. I didn’t know how I was going to share it with Jamie. For now, it was my secret.

‘Tally!’ As I entered the office, Fi’s voice pierced the quiet with unusual impatience. ‘What are youdoing?’

‘Just printing a sample of the MacRae Ancient tartan,’ Tally replied, a slight whine in her voice. ‘I’m on a mission for Lucinda, okay?’ There was a desperate look on her face.

‘You’re using all the ink up! You do know that ink costs more than gold and saffron combined?’ Fi stamped over and stared as dense squares of red checked with blue and green slowly edged their way out of the printer. ‘What is it for, anyway?’

As I turned my computer on, I glanced up and saw that Tally was biting her lip. ‘It’s a secret,’ she said eventually, looking as though she might burst.

‘In that case, you’d better tell me right now,’ said Fi, in a tone that brooked no argument. ‘And it had better not be anything to do with a bloody reindeer.’

‘What?’ Tally said. ‘No! We’re going to have a ball.’ She sounded huffy. ‘That’sall. Keep it to yourselves. Lucinda will kill me if she finds out I’ve told anyone before she’s persuaded Jamie.’

‘A ball?’ Fi sounded decidedly irritated, probably envisaging the amount of organising she’d have to do and remembering the huge black hole in the diary the fete had been. ‘I hope this doesn’t mean you’ll be working as Lucinda’s unofficial event planner, Tally. I don’t want to have to do your job as well as mine for the next three months. I do have a baby to grow, you know.’

‘I don’t know how I managed to get tangled up in all of this,’ Tally said, fanning herself with a piece of paper. She looked at her phone. ‘Oh, hang on,’ she prodded at the screen laboriously. ‘Lucinda says we’re good to go, it’s going ahead. So it’s fine that you know, I suppose.’ She looked as though she might faint with the stress of it.

‘It doesn’t mean we have to do all of the work,’ I said, trying to be reassuring.

Tally sucked the air over her teeth in her usual precursor to a lecture. ‘Anna, you need to understand. Lucinda is most likely going to be our new countess. I think we all need to do our bit to make sure she feels positively towards us, as her staff.’ She closed her lips in a hard little line to indicate this feeling was non-negotiable. It was enough to make me want to headbutt the desk.

Fi picked up her phone and dialled an internal extension number, stabbing out the four digits. ‘Can I come andspeak with you?’ she barked. Jamie must have replied in the affirmative, because within a minute or two she was gone.

Tally began to hum as she continued work on her mood board. I downloaded the image of the beaver lodge and set it as my screensaver. Then I attached it to an email.

Hi Jamie,

Congratulations on your new residents.

Best, Anna.

CHAPTER 17

The fact that a ball was following so hard on the heels of a fete was deeply exciting to Stonemore village. Despite Tally’s attempt at discretion, by the time Fi had stamped upstairs to speak to Jamie, half the house knew. At the same time, Fi broke news of her pregnancy to Jamie so he decided to hire some extra admin support to ensure she wasn’t run off her feet.

Slightly mollified, Fi returned to her desk and I watched as she demolished a handful of ginger biscuits.

‘Honestly, she’s a menace,’ she said, looking darkly at Tally’s empty desk (she’d gone to the haberdashery to get some swatches for bunting). ‘Jamie knows we’re meant to be saving money, not spending it. We need to put money aside to see to the drains next year. Never mind the roof.’

When I’d first come to Stonemore, I hadn’t realised that managing the house was such a struggle. Apart from Jamie’s flat, the upper rooms were dust-sheeted, with their radiatorsset to frost setting. Most houses of Stonemore’s size would have had a housekeeper and an army of paid staff; instead the small staff did as much as we could, aided by the volunteers, and a contracted group of cleaners came in before opening hours. It wasn’t uncommon to see Fi or Keith running with a bucket for a new leak when it was raining, or to see Jamie carefully cleaning a picture frame with a watercolour paintbrush, or inspecting brickwork on a ladder so tall it made me dizzy just looking at it. There was something about the quiet, uncomplaining way in which he did such work that had made me start to understand his role was a job as well as a privilege. I hadn’t made a joke about poshness since our phone conversation.

Tally professed herself surprised when Jamie announced that he would be charging for entrance to the ball. Staff and volunteers could attendgratis, but he slapped a healthy price on tickets for other attendees.

‘And he wants acoldbuffet,’ she moaned.

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. By this time, Fi had taken to completely ignoring her when she kicked off, on the grounds that getting stressed wouldn’t be good for the little bun she had in the oven. ‘People want cold food when it’s a dance.’

‘They should have theoptionthough,’ she wailed. ‘Lucinda and I are as one on this.’

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