Page 55 of The Secret House of Honey and Hope

“Keep it between us, will you? I’m going to take her to Paris and propose there. Then we want to come back and tell Hedge. You see…” He fades for a moment, lost in a private thought. “Hedge’s sort of responsible.”

“Responsible for what?”

At my shocked expression his grin widens. “Do you know about the plough festival?”

I shake my head.

“It’s a folk tradition with a matrimonial…side-effect,” he says. “You’ll have to go when they hold it next year. One of my favourite memories. Even now it makes the hairs stand on my skin.” He runs a hand over his forearm. “Lying on the ground at midnight watching the stars. A huge fire behind us and Hedge playing sweet mournful folk music.”

“Hedge?” That angry crusading old man is a romantic? And pigs fly all the time.

“Pizzas for breakfast?” Gabriel suddenly calls out.

Elodie is walking down to the garden gate, weighed down with shopping bags that she won’t let anyone help her carry.

“I’ll bake a couple to snack on while we work, but Myles de la Cour is bringing us fish and chips tonight.” She glances at me when she says this, and there is a question in her eyes.

“Fish and chips sounds wonderful,” I answer.

“He’ll be here at half-six.” She’s still looking at me as if there’s something I’m missing.

Not sure what she expects, I simply say, “Sounds good.”

After a little hesitation, she smiles, not her usual care-free happy one but a smile all the same, and we go in to start work.

Painting the rest of the floor goes much faster today because everyone knows what to do by now.

Elodie consults a notebook, the same one she had at the public meeting, or its identical twin. There’s a long list, but she reads silently and flips pages without telling us anything. This is her usual reluctance to ask for help, so I hold out my hand. “Can I see?”

Her eyes dart from me to the page then back, she tucks her hair behind her ear.

The tension from before is still here, or perhaps not tension, a wariness, as if she’s not sure about something. Perhaps caused by my own hostility over the stones and wood. More than ever, remorse bites at me for adding to her stress when she has so much to do. I resolve to be a much nicer man today.

“It’s alright.” I hold my hand out once more. “Unless you’ve written this in isiZulu, I should be able to read it.”

She inhales, as if taking a huge risk and hands it over.

It’s just as I suspected, an endless list. Curtains, tiny vases for herbs, pictures and branded shopping bags are all beyond my skills range.

“Shop counter,” I read out some of the things I can actually help with. “Shelves for general display. Something for featured products. Table for tastings and demonstrations. Ledge at each window for displays that can be seen from outside. Shop sign.”

“Don’t worry, I know we don’t have wood to make any of this.” She tugs at the ends of her hair nervously. “I’ve reconciled myself to displaying things in boxes with maybe a few jars on top of each box.” She pushes her hair back behind her ear.

She has a tendency to mess with her hair whenever she feels uncertain; it makes me want to do something, anything, to calm her down.

I leave her fretting and go outside to look at the pile of donated stuff.

“It’s mostly junk,” she says, following me, sounding apologetic.

She’s right about the junk, I pull out a wooden vegetable crate, one of twenty. “Some shop must have jumped at the chance to get rid of their rubbish.” I turn it around. “If you can place them upside down, they might work as temporary shelves. I can just smooth them with the sander.”

“Oh, wait.” She takes it from me and examines it and some of the other crates in the pile. Gradually, a spark begins to glow in her eyes and her face breaks into a dreamy grin.

“I can paint them, a watered-down lavender or green or orange…” She’s talking to herself, now. “Very watered-down paints, so you can still see the rough grain…stack them up like cubes and display things on top.”

Her idea takes hold on Pierre too who comes to crouch beside her. “We can even draw on them.” Pierre suggests.

“Yes, yes, yes. Sprigs of whatever plant the honey comes from.”

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