Page 37 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
My heart sank when I saw it wasthe proofs of my next novel,Shock to the Spirits, because whenever I was getting really into the new novel, the last epic kept turning up in some ghastly resurrection shuffle; first for a bit of rewriting, then copy-editing, then for proof-checking like now.
It just wouldn’t give up and go away.
Still, this should be the last of it, and then hopefully it would march its denizens of the undeadinto bookshops all across the country with no further help from me.
After another long, hot shower I felt almost human myself, and settled down to do the proofreading so as to get rid of the damned thing fast and return toLover, Come Back to Me. I just couldn’t wait to get to grips with my new character, Vladimir: all bite and no bark.
I read through the proofs ofShock to the Spiritstwice,then repacked it and sent it on its way just before the post office shut.
Westery post office was also Emlyn’s garage, hardware, and twenty-four-hour shop, having expanded to cater for all things as the village businesses vanished one by one, to be replaced by entirely useless antique shops such as Jason’s.
Emlyn had a prime position right by the village green and Haunted Well, which was in thegarden of Orla’s big Victorian house. That day, instead of tourists, clusters of daffodils were standing brazenly about on the green, but it was early in the season yet.
Westery was one of those villages on the Welsh border that was not so much a destination as a stopping-off place en route to somewhere more interesting. There was a nice old church, the pub, five antique shops, one second-handbookshop, and Orla’s Haunted Well B&B, and that was about it.
Emlyn’s Dutch wife, Clara, was serving behind the till of the supermarket section, and we had a nice chat while I bought a pizza (chorizo with black olives), which I heated and ate as soon as I got home.
Then I settled down to some hard work onLover, Come Back to Me, which went very well once I realized that Vlad’s crucial mistakewas biting Keturah just as the sun began to rise, because the whole vampire-transformation thing wasn’t nearly completed when he had to make a bolt for home in his flashy black sports car.
Keturah was now not quite human and not quite vampire, and a whole lot more interesting.
Go, girl.
Orla rang, very late and not quite sober, to say that she’d just had a drink with a gorgeous man, and allhe wanted to talk about was me.
‘I don’t know any gorgeous men,’ I said vaguely, whatmental faculties I possessed still focused on the alternative universe inhabited by Vlad, Keturah and Sylvanus. ‘Apart from Max, and he’s in America.’
‘Not Max, idiot!Hispatina may be authentic, but his veneer’s crackled.’
‘You’ve been hanging around Jason too much, Orla. Or drinking. Or both.’
‘Both. ButI’m sober enough to recognize a good thing when it walks into the pub and strikes up a conversation with me. This man is years younger than Max – younger than either of us, come to that – and he said he bumped into you last night, and he understood you were some kind of writer. Tall, slim, longish floppy dark hair, and sort of greeny-blue eyes.’
‘Ohhim,’ I said shortly, with a sudden weird feelingin the pit of my stomach, compounded of panic, guilt and embarrassment. ‘He’s not gorgeous, he’s got a huge beak of a nose!’
‘Aquiline, and just the right size. And I love those hollow cheekbones, and the way his lips are so straight they make a sort of arrow shape when he smiles.’
‘He cansmile?’
‘Are we talking about the same man?’ Orla demanded. ‘He says he’s the new owner of Kedge Hall,but his name’s not Kedge, it’s Gabriel something.’
‘Dante Chase?’ I suggested dubiously.
‘That’s it.’
‘But that’s nothing like Gabriel!’
‘Yes it is – I knew it was something to do with Rossetti.’
‘He’s nothing to do with Rossetti.’
‘You know, the Dante Gabriel bit – don’t be obtuse. He looked familiar, too, and after he’d gone I remembered where from: he was in the news about eighteen monthsago, because he was a hostage somewhere or other. South America, I think, but I’m going to look him up on the internet.’
‘So, did you give him the Orla Third Degree interrogation?’
‘No, because he wasn’t there long, and he made most of the conversational running, bringing the subject back to you all the time. He wanted to know if you were married or anything, so I told him you were in a committedlong-term relationship.’
‘You did?’
