Chocolate Wishes
Trisha Ashley

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Trisha Ashley 2010

Trisha Ashley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9781847561145

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780007365722

Version: 2018-06-20

I think it is time my wonderful agent had a dedication all to herself, so this one is for Judith Murdoch, with love and thanks.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue Mortal Ruin

Chapter One There Must Be an Angel

Chapter Two Satan’s Child

Chapter Three Chocolate Wishes

Chapter Four Falling Star

Chapter Five Pay Dirt

Chapter Six Stupid Cupid

Chapter Seven Brief Encounters

Chapter Eight Good Libations

Chapter Nine Drawing the Lines

Chapter Ten Comparative Evils

Chapter Eleven Birthday Wishes

Chapter Twelve Desperate Dates

Chapter Thirteen Ashes of Roses

Chapter Fourteen Fairy Dust

Chapter Fifteen Welcome Gifts

Chapter Sixteen Dead as My Love

Chapter Seventeen Written on the Cards

Chapter Eighteen Charm

Chapter Nineteen In the Mix

Chapter Twenty Fallen Angels

Chapter Twenty-one Garnish

Chapter Twenty-two Darker Past Midnight

Chapter Twenty-three Pax

Chapter Twenty-four Gift Bag

Chapter Twenty-five Mixed Bag

Chapter Twenty-six High Maintenance

Chapter Twenty-seven Pure Criollo

Chapter Twenty-eight Home Alone

Chapter Twenty-nine Rites

Chapter Thirty Grave Concerns

Chapter Thirty-one Party Animals

Chapter Thirty-two Delivering Angels

Chapter Thirty-three Candy-Coated

Chapter Thirty-four Melting Moments

Chapter Thirty-five Proposals

Chapter Thirty-six Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Chapter Thirty-seven Gran Couva!

Acknowledgements

Excerpt from Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues

Chapter 1: Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues

Chapter 2:Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues

About the Author

By the same author:

About the Publisher

Prologue Mortal Ruin

When the normally innocuous radio station she always listened to while she was working suddenly started pumping out Mortal Ruin’s first big hit, ‘Dead as My Love’, Chloe Lyon was in the kitchen area of her small flat, carefully brushing a thick coating of richly scented dark criollo couverture chocolate into moulds, to make the last batch of hollow angels before Christmas.

That seemed pretty appropriate, because a hollow angel was what Raffy Sinclair had proved himself to be, but it meant that it was a couple of minutes before she had a hand free to reach across and snap down the off button. By then they’d moved on to Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears in Heaven’, so it was becoming obvious that the guest on Desert Island Discs (she’d missed the start) had much happier memories of 1992 than Chloe did. In fact, she’d take a bet on the next song being Whitney Houston and ‘I Will Always Love You’, and that really would finish her off.

But the music carried on playing in her head even after the radio was silenced and it was already too late to suppress the memories. The dark, viciously searing tide of anger and pain at Raffy’s betrayal was rushing in as sharply as if it had all happened yesterday and she was once again that love-struck nineteen-year-old, thinking she’d found a kind of magic more potent than any of her grandfather’s chants, charms and incantations.

She’d loved that Clapton song, though Raffy’d teased her that it was mawkish. But then, as well as being keen on Nirvana, he’d had a worrying penchant for Megadeath and older bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Black Sabbath, all of which influenced the lyrics he wrote for his own band, Mortal Ruin. This obsession with the dark side was part of the reason why she’d never mentioned her grandfather to him – he might have been too interested had he known about her connection with Gregory Warlock.

But actually, there had simply not been enough time to explore their family and backgrounds, since they’d met and fallen in love at the start of her first university term and those few weeks spent intently engrossed in each other encompassed the whole span of their relationship.

It wasn’t surprising that she’d loved him at first sight – he was tall and handsome, with long black curling hair, a pale, translucent skin and eyes the greeny-blue of the Caribbean Sea in a holiday brochure – but he’d seemed as transfixed as she was…And anyway, the Tarot cards, when she consulted them, had told her that change was coming and she would meet her soul mate, so she’d naturally assumed he was the one.

Big mistake.

She hadn’t believed it was the end, even after that final argument on the last night of term, when he’d told her he and the other three Mortal Ruin band members had decided to gamble their futures on a recording contract and he’d asked her to go with him, rather than head home for the holidays as she’d intended. She hadn’t explained why she absolutely had to go home either, though she might have done if she hadn’t been so angry – or if he had been capable of talking about anything other than Mortal Ruin by that point.

If only she’d known she wouldn’t be going back for the next term…If only they hadn’t had that final, bitter argument, so she never even gave him her home address…There was a whole series of ifs, but they probably wouldn’t have made any difference in the end, because he turned out to be so not the man she’d thought he was.

A hollow angel: dark and handsome on the outside, an emotional void within. A Lucifer echoing with false promises.

Of course, she hadn’t known that then. Looking after Jake, her baby half-brother, while waiting for her mother to come back from her latest fling, she’d had plenty of time to worry about what would happen when Raffy finally got her letter. She’d sent it via her former roommate, Rachel, to hand to him when he came to his senses and went back to look for her. Because, despite their last argument, she’d been quite sure of his love and that somehow they would find a way of being together, of working things out. He’d told her he loved her often enough…

Even in her darkest moments she’d believed that, right up to the day she received the note from Rachel, telling her that Raffy had returned briefly at the start of the new term and she had given him the letter, but after reading it he’d simply crumpled it up and shoved it in his pocket without comment.

She hadn’t needed the tear-stained confession on the next page to know how easily and quickly he had replaced her, or how little she meant to him. Out of sight, out of mind.

It was not so easy for her to forget him, when his music seemed to be out there everywhere, assailing her at unexpected moments, but eventually her searing anger had cauterised the wounds and given her a certain measure of immunity.

So why now was she sitting at the kitchen table weeping hot, scalding tears?

Saltwater and chocolate are never a good combination.

Chapter One There Must Be an Angel

You know those routines most people have, the ones they fall into automatically when they wake up? Well, until a few years ago, my morning rota had ‘read Tarot cards’ neatly sandwiched between ‘brush teeth’ and ‘breakfast’.

It was just the way I was brought up, and nothing to do with magic – or not the sort my grandfather practises, where the effects of his rites are so hit-and-miss that most positive results are probably sheer coincidence, like the way the sales of my Chocolate Wishes went stratospheric right after he gave me part of an ancient Mayan charm to say over the melting pot. Fluke…I thought. I have to confess that I’ve never been entirely sure.

But really, apart from the novelty value of the concept, my success was probably more the result of my having finally perfected both my technique and the quality of my moulded chocolate, mostly by trial, error and experimentation – and the really good thing about working with chocolate is that you can eat your mistakes.

What originally sparked the whole thing off was coming across a two-part metal Easter egg mould at a jumble sale when my half-brother, Jake, was a small boy. I made lots of little chocolate eggs and put messages inside them from the Easter Bunny, then hid them all over the flat and courtyard for him and his friends to find.

And while I was making them I started thinking about fortune cookies, which are fun, but not really that good to eat. And from there it was just a short bunny hop to creating a line of hollow chocolate shapes containing ‘Wishes’ as an after-dinner novelty and selling them in boxes of six or twelve.

The ‘Wishes’ are encouraging thoughts or suggestions, inspired by the Angel card readings that have replaced my earlier devotion to the Tarot, and I’m positive that each person will automatically pick the appropriate Chocolate Wish from the box – their own guardian angel will see to that!

It was all very amateur at first, but now the Wishes come in printed sheets and the boxes are also specially made to hold and protect the chocolates in transit, because most of my orders come through the internet, via my website, or by word of mouth.

Nowadays I favour mainly criollo couverture chocolate, the best and most expensive kind, which not only tastes delicious but has a superior gloss and good ‘snap’. I temper it in the machine Jake christened the Bath and then, with an outsize pastry brush, coat specially made polycarbon moulds in the shape of angels or winged hearts until I have a thick enough shell. When they’re cold, I ‘glue’ the two halves together with a little more chocolate – but before I do that, I put in the ‘Wish’.

And I am so much happier since I began to read the Angel cards instead of the Tarot! They never seemed to come out right when I read them for myself and I often wonder if my future would have been different if I hadn’t always looked for signs and portents before I did anything. Do we make our own futures, or do our futures make us?

Granny, who was of gypsy descent and taught me how to read the cards in the first place, said they only showed what might be the future, should the present course be held to; but I’m not so sure. She would have approved of the Angel cards, though, which is more than my grandfather (whom Jake and I call Grumps, for obvious reasons) and Zillah, who is Granny’s cousin, do.

But I truly believe in angels and have done from being a small child when Granny, who despite her Tarot reading was deeply religious, assured me that the winged figure I glimpsed one night really was a celestial visitor, rather than a figment of my imagination. (And my friend Poppy saw it too, I do have a witness!)

Why an angel should appear to an unbaptised and ungodly child of sin is anyone’s guess, unless it was my own personal guardian angel making an early appearance in my life, to counter Grumps’ influence and set my feet on the right path. But if so, she hasn’t visited me since in that form, though sometimes I can hear the soft susurration of wings and feel a comforting presence that is almost, but not quite, visible. And the Angel cards…maybe she guided me to those too?

Granny died when I was twelve, but she too did her best to counter Grumps’ influence, flatly forbidding any kind of baptismal ceremony involving his coven, or involvement in its rites until I had reached the age where I could make a considered decision for myself – a resounding ‘No way!’ She had already done the same for my mother, though unfortunately without instilling in her any alternative moral code.

That February morning, when I shuffled the pack of silky smooth Angel cards and laid them out on the kitchen table, they predicted change, but at least they also assured me that everything would work out all right in the end, which was a great improvement on coming face to face with the Hanging Man or Death over the breakfast cereal and trying to interpret the reading as something a little less doom-laden than the initial impression.

Rituals completed, I went to wake Jake up, which took quite some effort since, at eighteen, he could sleep for Britain. I made sure he ate something before he set off for sixth form college, dressed all in black, from dyed hair to big, metal-studded boots, a cheery sight for his teachers on a Monday morning.

When he’d gone – with a cheeky ‘Goodbye, Mum!’ just to wind me up – I checked my emails for incoming Chocolate Wishes orders and printed them out, before going through to the main part of the house to see what Grumps was up to. Our flat was over the garages, so the door led onto the upper landing, and was rarely shut, unless Jake was playing loud music.

In the kitchen Zillah was sitting at the table over the remnants of her breakfast, drinking loose-leaf Yorkshire tea and smoking a thin, lumpy, roll-up cigarette. As usual, she was dressed in a bunchy skirt, two layers of cardigans with the bottom one worn back to front, a huge flowered pinny over the whole ensemble and her hair tied up in a clashing scarf, turban-fashion. Grumps says she was bitten by Carmen Miranda in her youth and after I Googled the name, I suspect he is right. Today’s dangly red earrings made her look as if she had hooked a pair of cherries over each ear, so the fruit motif was definitely there.

She looked up – small, dark, with skin not so much wrinkled as folded around her black, bird-bright eyes – and smiled, revealing several glinting gold teeth. ‘Read your tea leaves?’ she offered hospitably.

‘No, thanks, Zillah, not just now. I’m running late, it took me ages to get Jake up and on his way. But I’ve brought you another jar of my chocolate and ginger spread, because yesterday you said you’d almost run out.’

‘Extra sweet?’

‘Extra sweet,’ I agreed, putting the jar down on the table.

It’s really just a ganache of grated cacao and boiled double cream, with a little finely chopped preserved ginger added for zing. It doesn’t keep long, though the way Zillah lards it onto her toast means it doesn’t have to.

Zillah turned up on the doorstep the day after Granny died. She’d read the news in the cards and come to burn her cousin’s caravan – metaphorically speaking, anyway, because she’d had to make do with burning Granny’s clothes and personal possessions on the garden bonfire instead.

Grumps seemed unsurprised by Zillah’s sudden appearance, as if he’d been expecting her, which maybe he had, and his purported magical skills aren’t a complete figment of his imagination. She’d never given any suggestion of remaining with us permanently, yet here she still was several years later, cooking, cleaning and caring for us, in her slapdash way.

She handed me the fresh cup of tea she’d just poured out, put two Jammie Dodger biscuits on the saucer and said, ‘Take this in to the Wizard of Oz then, will you, love?’

‘Grumps is up to something, isn’t he?’ I asked, accepting the cup, because although he is taciturn and secretive at the best of times, I could still tell. I only hoped he wasn’t about to try some great summoning ceremony with his coven, because on past form all they were likely to call up was double pneumonia.

Zillah tapped the side of her nose with the fingers holding her cigarette and a thin snake of ash fell into her empty cup. I hoped it wouldn’t muddle her future.

In the study Grumps was indeed sitting at his desk over a grimoire open at a particularly juicy spell, which he was probably considering trying out when the weather improved. (The coven practised their rites in an oak grove, skyclad, and none of them was getting any younger.)

His long, silver hair was parted in the middle and a circlet held it off a face notable for a pair of piercing grey eyes and a hawk-like nose. His midnight-blue velvet robe was rubbed on the elbows, so that he bore more resemblance to a down-at-heel John Dee than a Gandalf, but it was a look that went down well with the readers of the beyond Dennis Wheatley novels he wrote as Gregory Warlock. Sales had been in the doldrums for many years, apart from a small band of devotees, but they were suddenly having a renewed vogue and his entire backlist was about to be reprinted in their original, very lurid covers.

Grumps is one of those annoying people who need very little sleep, so that by the time I pop in to see him in the mornings, he usually has achieved quite a heap of handwritten manuscript. There are often lots of letters too, because he corresponds with equally nutty people all over the globe, and since his handwriting is appalling I take everything away and type it up on my computer.

When I was younger there was a time when I thought Grumps was a complete charlatan. You can imagine what it was like growing up in a small town like Merchester, with a relative who both looked and proclaimed himself with every utterance to be totally, barking mad. For example, his eccentric clothing, the ghastly novels and his definitive book on the magical significance of ley lines. (Leys are straight lines that link landmarks and sites of historical and magical importance.) Add to all that the rumours of secret and risqué rites in remote woodland, and you will begin to see my point.

Yet as I grew older I came to realise that he believed completely in what and who he was and then it ceased to bother me any more: if he wasn’t embarrassed by it, then neither was I.

Now I picked my way towards the desk through a sea of unfurled maps that covered the carpet, each crisscrossed with red and blue lines showing both established and possible new ley lines. The crackling noise as I inadvertently trod on one drew Grumps’ attention to my presence.

‘Ah, Chloe – I believe I have found the solution to my financial problems,’ he announced in his plummy, public-school-educated voice, looking distinctly pleased with himself. He is distantly related to lots of terribly grand people, none of whom has spoken to him since he chose his bride from a fortune-telling booth at the end of a Lancashire pier, at a time when one simply didn’t do that kind of thing.

‘Oh, good,’ I said encouragingly, putting his tea down on the one empty spot among the clutter on his desk.

‘Yes, it came to me and I acted upon it, once the clouds of confusion sent by Another to conceal it from my knowledge were suddenly dispelled.’

Grumps has a private income, but he’d settled Mum’s huge debts six years before, after her last, permanent, vanishing trick. Besides, his investments weren’t paying out in the way they used to and even the recent four-book contract his agent had secured wouldn’t be enough to cover the bills and still enable him to purchase rare books and artefacts in the manner he seemed to think was his birthright. Even now his desk was littered with auction catalogues sporting bright Post-it notes marking things that interested him.

‘Great,’ I said cautiously, because Grumps’ good ideas, like his spells, have a marked tendency to backfire or fizzle to nothing. ‘Did Zillah read the cards for you and spot something nice?’

‘She did, and foresaw change.’

‘She always does. You’d think we lived in a sort of psychic whirlpool.’

‘Well, change there certainly will be, because I am selling the house and we are moving to Sticklepond.’

I’d started gathering up the loose sheets of paper inscribed in a sloping hand, which were the latest chapter of Satan’s Child. Now I stopped and stared at him. ‘We’re moving? But how can that help?’ Then the penny dropped. ‘Oh, I see. You mean you and Zillah are downsizing to a small cottage? That’s a good idea, because now that sales of Chocolate Wishes have taken off in a big way through the internet, I can easily afford to make a home for Jake on my own.’

‘No, no,’ he said impatiently, ‘I am not downsizing – the opposite, in fact – and there will be room for us all. An estate agent recently approached me with an advantageous offer for this house from someone who has taken a fancy to it, just at the very moment when I happened upon an advertisement for the Old Smithy in Sticklepond, which a friend had sent me, and which had somehow got mixed up among some other papers. It became apparent to me that this was a sign, and I therefore moved quickly.’

He pushed the grimoire aside and handed me a leaflet that had been underneath. It pictured a low, barn-like building, set longways onto the road, with a small ancient cottage at one side and a larger Victorian house at the other, like mismatched bookends.

‘It’s Miss Frinton’s Doll Museum!’ I said, recognising it instantly, because it’s not only just up the road from Marked Pages, the second-hand bookshop run by my friend Felix, but almost opposite the pub where I meet up with him and Poppy two or three times a week.

‘It was, though of course not for some time – it has lain empty. I knew it was for sale prior to this, of course, I just hadn’t realised its significance.’ He indicated the larger house with a bony finger adorned with a substantial and oddly designed silver ring. ‘This is the main residence, where the Misses Frinton lived. There would be abundant room for my library and for Zillah to have her own sitting room, as she has here. The front room of the small cottage at the other end of the building was the doll’s hospital – and I thought it would be ideal for your chocolate business, with enough room for you and Jake to live behind it, although it needs a little updating.’

‘When estate agents say that, it usually means it’s semi-derelict.’ I wished there were photographs of the interior of the cottage as well as the house in the leaflet.

‘Not derelict, just neglected. It used to be rented out, so there is a kitchen extension with a bathroom over it and two bedrooms. It is larger than your current accommodation.’

‘It could hardly be smaller,’ I said, though of course without Mum we had more space, especially since I’d packed up all her belongings and stacked the boxes in Grumps’ attic on the first anniversary of her disappearance. But since Chocolate Wishes had taken off, I really needed a separate workshop.

‘The cottage also has a walled garden behind it,’ he added slyly, because he knew I longed for a garden of my own. Here we just had a gravelled courtyard and although I did grow lots of things in tubs and pots and in my tiny greenhouse, including herbs both for cooking and for Grumps’ rites, salad vegetables, strawberries and a small fig tree, there were limitations…especially for my cherished and constantly growing collection of scented geraniums, currently over-wintering on every available windowledge in the flat.

I was sold.

‘The cottage is linked to the main house via the Smithy Barn, the former doll museum, and my intention is to open a museum of my own there,’ Grumps explained, ‘one dedicated to the study of witchcraft and paganism. I will be able to display my collection and increase my income, thus killing two birds with one stone.’

‘Well, goodness knows, you have enough artefacts to stock ten museums, Grumps!’ I exclaimed. ‘But you surely wouldn’t run it yourself? I can’t see you selling tickets to a stream of visitors!’

‘I fail to see why not,’ he said testily. ‘I will open only in the afternoons, from two till four, and can have my desk in one corner and let visitors roam freely, while I get on with my work. Zillah has said she will also take a hand.’

‘But if you don’t keep an eye on the visitors, half your collection will vanish!’

‘Oh, I think not: I will put up placards pointing out that any thieves will be cursed. In fact, I might have it printed on the back of the tickets.’

‘That should go down well,’ I said drily.

‘It will serve: they will ignore the warning at their peril. I shall have signed copies of my books for sale too, of course, both fiction and non-fiction.’

After my first surprise, the idea began to grow on me. ‘Do you know, I think you might be right and it would be quite a money-spinner, because since that Shakespeare connection was discovered at Winter’s End, hordes of tourists come to Sticklepond. At least one café and a couple of gift shops have opened in the village lately, and passing trade at Felix’s bookshop is much better. There’s a strong witchcraft history in the area too.’

‘Precisely! And besides,’ he added as a clincher, ‘the Old Smithy is on the junction of two important ley lines; that was what was so cunningly obscured from my vision by the malevolence of Another. There may even be a third – I am working on it.’

‘I expect the conjunction of the ley lines was a major selling point the estate agents managed to miss,’ I said, ignoring the second mention of a mysterious and malevolent opponent, which was probably just a figment of his imagination.

He gave me a severe look over the top of his half-moon glasses. ‘Its unique position imbues it with magical energy, my dear Chloe, and since the museum area is large, my coven may meet there with no diminution of power. Rheumatism has affected one or two of them,’ he added more prosaically, ‘and they have suggested we move to an indoor venue.’

‘Yes, I can see that the museum would be ideal, provided you put up good, thick curtains,’ I agreed absently, still turning over the whole idea of the move in my mind. ‘What about Jake, though? He has to be able to get to sixth form college and he isn’t going to want to move away from his friends, is he?’

Though now I came to think of it, a fresh start in a new village might be a good idea for my horribly lively brother. He’s outgrown his childish pranks, but will still forever be ‘that imp of Satan’ to those inhabitants of Merchester who’ve been his victims.

‘Jake may borrow my car and drive himself to school until he has taken his final examinations, and then of course he will be off to university,’ Grumps said. ‘He likes the old Saab for some reason. In the holidays, he can help me in the museum and I will pay him.’

Grumps seemed to have it all thought out.

I looked down again at the leaflet. A cottage of my own with a garden, separated from my grandfather by the width of a museum, and with room for my Chocolate Wishes business, sounded like bliss…

‘So, have you actually seen the property and made an offer for it, Grumps?’

‘Yes, of course – and the people who want to buy this house have also been to view it, though you were out at the time. I thought I would wait until everything was signed and sealed before I told you.’

‘I certainly didn’t see this coming!’

‘If you will read Angel cards instead of the Tarot…Angel cards – pah!’

‘They seem to work for me, Grumps.’

‘Not, apparently, very well: Zillah saw the changes coming and she has already decided on her rooms in the new house.’

If Zillah knew and approved, then really, there was no more to be said: it looked like the Lyons were on the move.

A thought struck me. ‘When Mum finally decides to stop playing dead and comes back, how will she find us?’

‘Like a bad penny,’ he said bleakly.

Chapter Two Satan’s Child

On the way back to the flat, with a lot to think about and a chapter of Satan’s Child and three letters to type up, I found Zillah still in the kitchen stirring something savoury-smelling in a large pot. The cat, Tabitha, was draped around her neck like a black fur wrap, her tail practically in the stew.

Hygiene was possibly not Zillah’s strong point but neither she nor Grumps (nor even Tabitha) ever seemed to suffer ill effects. Nor did Jake and I, come to that, because although I did some of our own cooking in the flat, we shared quite a lot of meals. We must all have been immune.

‘Zillah, if you have time, maybe you had better read my cards,’ I suggested. ‘Grumps just told me that we’re on the move.’

Zillah silently turned down the heat and put a lid on the pot, then fetched her Tarot pack and handed the cards to me to shuffle. Under my fingers they felt cool, snakily smooth and almost alive.

‘You could read them yourself,’ she grumbled as I gave them back, but she began to lay them out in a familiar pattern on the table. The cat, bored, disentwined herself and stalked off, holding up a tail like a bottlebrush that has seen better days.

‘You know I’ve given up reading them, especially for myself, because there never seemed to be good news. I simply don’t think I could bear it if I saw yet another dark stranger scheduled to enter my life bringing change, because it never turns out well,’ I added gloomily.

It would have been really useful if the cards had ever given me some helpful hints about whether the changes would be good or bad too, especially regarding my ex-fiancé, David.

‘It’s all in the reading and how you interpret it, Chloe, you know that,’ Zillah said. ‘You don’t have to make a self-fulfilling prophecy.’

While I puzzled over that one, she looked at the cards that showed what was currently going on in my life.

‘Hmm…no surprises there, or in what will happen if you continue on your current course.’ She turned over more cards and pondered.

‘But my course is about to be changed, isn’t it? Not only are we moving, but Jake will be off to university later this year.’

I’d had the maternal role for my half-brother thrust upon me and I’d done my best, torn between love and resentment, but although I adore Jake, I couldn’t say I wasn’t relishing the idea of being my own woman again.

That my own childhood had been a happy and secure one was entirely due to Granny but, though kindly and affectionate, Zillah seemed to have been born without a maternal gene and could not take her place. That hadn’t stopped Mum from thinking Zillah could quite easily assume Granny’s role as mother substitute when she was off with her latest lover, though – but then, she didn’t have the maternal gene either.

At least Zillah loved us in her own unique way, even if, like Grumps, she didn’t find children terribly interesting until they were capable of holding a conversation.

‘It doesn’t say anything about Mum turning up again, does it?’ I asked, following this train of thought. ‘Only it would be just like her to walk back in, now there aren’t any responsibilities for her to shoulder, what with Grumps having paid her bills and Jake an adult.’

My mother had spent less and less time at the flat until she had finally vanished altogether from a Caribbean cruise six years previously and was currently presumed by everyone except the family to be dead. We presumed her to be fornicating in sunnier climes, even if this time her absence had been inordinately prolonged. Her disappearance had coincided with David jilting me, too: cause and effect.

Zillah ignored me, turning over the cards showing what was happening with my relationships, which was not a lot apart from a platonic and fraternal one with my old friend Felix Hemmings, the bookseller of Sticklepond.

Through the thin spiral of smoke from her latest cigarette I automatically began to read the meanings upside down, and groaned. ‘Oh, no, please don’t tell me another man really is coming into my life? I can’t bear it!’

‘Maybe more than one person,’ she said, frowning. ‘Perhaps there’s unfinished business with someone you knew before?’

‘No way! Now I’ve realised I’m stuck in some endless Groundhog Day cycle of love and rejection, I’m not even going to look at another man.’

‘You can’t call two failed relationships an endless cycle, Chloe.’

‘Two? Have you forgotten Cal, or Simon or—’ I stopped, unable to remember the faces, let alone the names, of some of my more fleeting boyfriends.

‘I did not mention men, but in any case they were obviously unmemorable. And can we help ourselves if love strikes?’ She thoughtfully fingered the card depicting a tower struck by lightning.

‘We can if it strikes twice,’ I snapped. ‘But even if I’d been tempted to take any boyfriend seriously after David jilted me, they weren’t prepared to take on Jake too. He’s the ultimate love deterrent.’

I shuddered, recalling some of the hideous pranks my inventive half-brother had got up to over the years in order to get rid of my boyfriends. I was sure Grumps had had a hand in some of the more fiendish tricks.

‘He was, but he’s now an adult, and once he’s at university he’ll have other things to think about.’

‘So he will…and it seems like only five minutes since I went off to university, too,’ I said with a sad sigh, for that had been my one, abortive bid for independence, the year after Jake was born. It had been all too easy for Mum to absent herself for longer and longer periods, leaving me literally holding the baby, but I’d thought if she didn’t have me to fall back on, then she would be forced to stay at home and behave like other mothers.

How wrong I was! I got back at the end of the first term to find she had dumped the baby in Zillah’s unwilling hands, leaving me a scribbled note with no idea of when she would return. Jake was touchingly happy to see me, making me guilty that I had been so engrossed in my love affair with Raffy that I had hardly thought of him for weeks. Grumps and Zillah were also happy to have me back, in their way, but I was the one who could have done with a mother’s tender care just then, rather than have to take on the role myself.

But surprisingly, in the end, Zillah proved to be a tower of strength when I most needed one…

I looked at the spread of cards again and asked hopefully, ‘Can the future be altered, Zillah?’

‘People can change, and then the future also changes. Or perhaps the true future remains fixed, the other is merely a warning to put us on the right path to our fate.’ Her gnarled hand reached out and flipped over the final cards. ‘Your future has interesting possibilities.’

‘What, you mean interesting in the Chinese curse sort of way?’

‘Well, what are the angels telling you?’ she asked acerbically.

‘That change is coming, but it will all turn out right in the end.’

‘Whatever “right” means, Chloe.’ She swept the cards together, tapped them briskly three times and wrapped them up in a piece of dark silk.

Back in the flat I felt unsettled, which was hardly surprising when a positive Pandora’s Box of painful recollections kept escaping from where I thought I’d had them safely locked away. Memories not only of my first love, Raffy, which even after so many years evoked feelings of loss and betrayal far too painful to dwell on again, but also of my ex-fiancé, David.

We met in Merchester’s one upmarket wine bar and he had seemed so different from any of my other, short-lived boyfriends. He was several years older, for a start, solid and dependable. Maybe I was looking for a father figure, having never had one? He was a partner in a firm of architects, so more than comfortably off, and even Jake’s attempts to get rid of him (culminating in the plague of glowing green mice in David’s flat – I have no idea how he worked that one) just made him go all quiet and forbearing. He said Jake would grow out of it – which he had, only not until David’s presence in our lives was history.

And Jake had been the sticking point in the end. It was odd how I had remained completely blind to the fact that David was so jealous of my close relationship with my half-brother until that last day, only a couple of weeks before our wedding. I’d also assumed he understood that whenever my mother was away, Jake would stay with us after we were married, for the first few years at least. But as Zillah often says, men don’t understand anything unless it is spelled out for them in very plain language.

‘Jake could live with your grandfather and his housekeeper,’ David had suggested when Jake was twelve and my mother had performed her latest vanishing trick.

I let the ‘housekeeper’ bit go, since although Zillah certainly wasn’t that, her role in our lives defied definition. ‘Hardly, David! Social Services aren’t going to take kindly to a twelve-year-old living with a warlock, are they?’

‘Now, Chloe, don’t exaggerate, when you know that’s just a nom de plume he adopts for his books. He may be a little eccentric, but the whole persona…’ He smiled indulgently, his teeth very white against his tanned, handsome face. ‘It’s a publicity thing, isn’t it?’

‘No, it’s how he is. I keep telling you.’

‘You’ll be saying your mother is a witch next, Chloe, and has simply flown off on her broomstick.’

‘Oh, no, she never showed any inclinations that way and although Jake is interested in witchcraft, luckily it’s only from a historical point of view. It’s just a pity Granny isn’t still around to help me bring him up, but he isn’t a bad boy really, just lively.’

David shuddered.

‘What? You like him, you said so!’

‘Yes, of course I do, but that doesn’t mean I want to live with him. And there’s no reason why you should have to sacrifice your entire life to bringing up your half-brother, is there? Fostering might be the making of him.’

‘Fostering? I can’t believe you would even suggest that!’ I stared at him with new eyes. ‘Anyway, it’s going to be only for a few weeks at most, until Mum comes back. The longest she’s ever been away is three months.’

David’s expression softened and he came and put his arms around me. ‘Darling, you have to accept that she isn’t coming back this time – she’s dead. I know it’s hard, but look at the facts.’

The facts, as Mum’s friend Mags had reported them, were that Mum had simply vanished into thin air one night from the cruise ship taking them between Caribbean islands (a holiday won by Mags, who was ace at making up advertising slogans).

‘Mags was lying and she isn’t dead,’ I explained. ‘She’s probably somewhere in Jamaica with a man, and when she gets tired of that, she’ll come back again. She has a very low boredom threshold.’

‘Look, darling, she was seen on the ship the evening after it left Jamaica, wasn’t she?’

‘Someone wearing one of her more flamboyant dresses and with dark hair was seen, but I suspect it was Mags.’

‘But your mother’s friend is blonde – and why on earth should she go to so much trouble anyway?’

‘A wig? My mother often wore one when her hair looked ratty. And they were in the habit of covering up for each other.’

‘Come on, Chloe! Look, it’s been several weeks now, and I think, however hard it is, you’ll have to accept that she had too much to drink – which you know was one of her failings – and went over the side in the small hours without anyone noticing. This time she isn’t going to reappear as if nothing has happened. Which brings us back to what to do about Jake.’

‘Nothing, because you’re wrong. I expect she’ll be back in time for our wedding, but if she isn’t, then Jake can come and live with us, can’t he? I mean, you always realised he would have to do that whenever Mum was away, didn’t you?’

David was slow to answer, probably imagining the chaos one very lively boy could cause to his immaculately ordered life and minimalist white flat. I had already unintentionally caused enough of that while cooking chicken with a dark cacao mole sauce in his kitchen: chocolate does seem to get everywhere…And evidently he hadn’t understood the strength of the bond between Jake and me.

‘I’d like it to be just the two of us, for a while at least, darling,’ he said eventually. ‘You have to accept she’s not coming back and that other, permanent arrangements need to be made. I mean, your grandfather’s got a private income, hasn’t he? He could send Jake to boarding school.’

‘I don’t think his private income would stretch that far and anyway, Jake would hate it. He’s always seen me as more of a mother figure than Mum. I’m the security in his life, and so it would simply be another betrayal. And his friends are all here in Merchester.’

‘Then he’d hate being transposed to a city flat, wouldn’t he?’ David said quickly.

‘Yes, but we did say we’d find a house in the country, one you could commute from. That could be somewhere round here, couldn’t it?’

‘I meant much later, when we want a family. I’d like to have you to myself for a bit. Anyway,’ he added with a wry smile on his handsome face, ‘I’m starting to think I’m allergic to the country because I come out in this damned rash every time I visit Merchester.’

‘You can’t really call Merchester country,’ I objected, but it was true about the mysterious rash, because even now an angry redness was creeping up from the collar of his shirt.

I reminded myself to speak to Grumps about that…He and David had not really taken to each other, mainly because David spoke to him like an adult humouring a child: big mistake. He tended to take that tone with Jake too, and according to most of the locals, he’d never been any kind of child at all, but an imp of Satan.

‘Look, Chloe, I really can’t live with your brother. It isn’t fair to ask me.’ He ran his fingers through his ordered dark chestnut locks in a distracted way that showed me just how perturbed he was. He even loosened his silk tie – good grief!

‘You’ll have to find some other solution,’ he announced with finality.

‘I keep telling you Mum isn’t dead!’ I snapped, losing patience. ‘She bolts all the time, but she’ll be back eventually: I’ve read the cards and I know I’m right. What’s more, so has Zillah.’

But although they had told us that Mum was alive, they couldn’t, of course, show us where she was or how long she would be gone.

‘It’s Jake or me,’ he said quietly.

‘But, David—’

‘Do you love me?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said, which I did, even if not with the searing passion of my first love. ‘But—’

‘Me, or Jake,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t want to be hard-hearted, but it simply won’t work having him to live with us – and I’m certainly not moving here, which I’m sure you were about to suggest next.’

‘Well, yes, but it would be only until Mum comes back.’

He sighed long-sufferingly. ‘Which she isn’t going to do.’

He put on his jacket, which had been hanging neatly over the back of a chair in the chaotic kitchen area of the flat, where the paraphernalia of my budding Chocolate Wishes business covered every surface. In fact, there was a glossy smear of tempered couverture down one immaculate sleeve, which I decided not to point out.

‘The wedding’s in less than a fortnight, so you had better make your mind up fast, Chloe, hadn’t you?’

‘You can’t really mean you’d end it all over this, David?’

‘Yes, I do. Make other arrangements for Jake or you can call off the wedding.’

I still didn’t really think he meant it and I might have tried to soften him up a little, but I was distracted at that moment by catching sight of the imp of Satan himself through the window. He seemed to be closing the bonnet of David’s car…But no, David was always careful to lock it, so how could Jake…?

The door slammed behind David and he strode across the gravel and got into his sports car without, so far as I could see, a word or look at Jake, who was standing innocently by with his hands behind his back.

The engine roared into life and then coughed a bit, before the car sputtered off down the lane. It sounded pretty ropey; I’d be surprised if it got him home without breaking down.

It hadn’t, either. He’d phoned me when he finally got back, incandescent with rage. ‘That child did it – and that’s the last straw, Chloe, I mean it. Make other arrangements for him, or this is the last you’ll ever hear from me.’

So that was it, and though I was heartbroken, I was also relieved that I had discovered how jealous he was of my love for Jake before we got married. I’d already known he resented my closeness to my old friends Felix and Poppy, but thought he would get over that. Funny how you can be so blind, isn’t it?

I called off the wedding, which was both expensive and difficult at that late stage, and, resigning myself to perpetual spinsterhood, settled back into my life as before.

Except that this time, Mum didn’t come back. And the awful thing was, none of us missed her.

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