The Honey Queen (38 page)

‘Mother,’ said Liz in a deathly cool voice, ‘the only person here who thinks like that is
you
. Everyone else is enjoying a wedding of two people who love each other. I love Brian and I love his family and the way they’ve welcomed me. I told Brian that I was worried you’d try to ruin today and he kept saying I was being silly. But I’m not. He just doesn’t know you the way I do. You are cold and heartless. All you care about is the way things
look.
There’s more to life than that. I’m ashamed of you, Mother. Ashamed.’

With that, she turned and left the room.

Brian was waiting for her outside.

‘Is she OK?’ he asked anxiously.

Liz buried her face in his shoulder. ‘She’s not OK, and I doubt she ever will be. You won’t believe what she said, and what your poor dad overheard her saying …’

‘Hush.’ Brian silenced her with a soft kiss. ‘Your mother is not ruining our day, right? Let’s go down and dance our hearts out. Whatever’s wrong with her is her problem.’

He produced a hanky and mopped up his new wife’s tears.

‘Come on – Dad wants a dance with you.’

‘But what she said was horrible.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Brian said simply. ‘If she ruins the atmosphere, then she wins. That’s not going to happen.’

Liz nodded, sniffling now.

‘She said mean things about Redstone too. I love it. I want us to buy a house there.’

Brian grinned. ‘Let’s tell that to Mum and Dad – that will finish off their day beautifully.’

Inside the bedroom, Miranda could hear their voices but couldn’t make out what they were saying. She looked down at her hands and saw that she was shaking. All she’d done was say the truth.

She remembered years ago going out with a lovely guy, handsome, looked like that George Clooney, and she’d dumped him because he came from the wrong side of town.

Some of her friends had teased her about him.

‘Are you teaching him to talk posh, Miranda?’ they’d joked.

And embarrassed, she’d finished with him.

‘I thought you were different, Miranda,’ he’d said to her bitterly. ‘I thought class and where you came from didn’t matter to you.’

‘It doesn’t,’ she begged, suddenly sorry, suddenly seeing that her so-called friends had been jealous.

But it was too late.

He was gone.

She’d regretted that for years and now she’d gone and made the same mistake again: judged people for the wrong things. If only Elizabeth would forgive her. She hadn’t meant to ruin the day. But sitting in the bedroom on her own, with the sounds of merriment all around her, Miranda began to think that it might be a long time before her daughter forgot Miranda’s cruelty today.

‘You look miserable,’ Freya said to David an hour later, as they whirled to a slow song. It wasn’t like her cousin to be so down. He was instinctively a merry person, saw the best in everyone and brought humour into every room. Freya marvelled that Meredith could be his sister.

She wanted to broach the subject of Meredith but wasn’t sure if tonight was the occasion for it, especially now that she could see the misery in her cousin’s eyes.

‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing,’ he said.

Freya stood on his toes on purpose.

‘Don’t lie,’ she said. ‘I am a human lie-detector, you know.’

‘All I know is that you’ve got a very painful stamp for a shrimp of a girl,’ he grumbled.

‘It’s a woman, isn’t it?’

‘OK, it’s a woman,’ David said. ‘But it doesn’t matter because it’s long over and she made it pretty clear that it was over for good.’

Even talking about Peggy hurt. She’d felt so right to him in every way. He’d been crazy about her, and it hadn’t been a one-night, several-beers-induced craziness, either. How could one woman turn your whole life upside down in just a week?

After all this time, it was still as if he could think of nothing else but Peggy. He’d even driven slowly past the shop a few times. He wondered if she’d seen him, if she thought he was some weird stalker. He wasn’t. He simply had the strangest feeling that there was something Peggy wasn’t telling him. Some reason why she’d broken up with him, something entirely unconnected to him. But she’d clearly been frightened of him that morning in the shop and that, David felt, was part of the mystery. He didn’t want to scare her but he wanted to see her again to find out what was troubling her.

Freya said nothing. From a personality point of view, she couldn’t imagine anyone not falling in love with David. Physically, she couldn’t judge. He was her cousin and you never looked at a cousin that way.

Kaz reckoned he was a fine thing and she wouldn’t mind, thank you very much. At this point, Freya had feigned throwing up.

‘He’s my
family
! Stop.’

‘He’s not mine, though, is he? You just see Mr Nice Guy, but I see a great body, hot face and someone who doesn’t have spots.’

Kaz was down in the dumps because the last three people who’d asked her out had acne, while the guy she wanted to ask her out – and was blemish-free – was currently dating the part-time model from the fifth year in their school.

‘He’s too old for you,’ Freya had pointed out. ‘You’re jail-bait for someone his age – a one-way ticket to prison.’

‘He might be waiting till I’m old enough to declare his love for me,’ sighed Kaz in a most uncharacteristic way.

‘You’ve been reading Mills and Boon again, haven’t you?’ Freya said.

Still shuffling around the dance floor with David, Freya decided she needed to know who this woman was. Anyone who hurt the Byrne family hurt Freya too.

‘What’s her name?’ she asked idly.

‘No, my little killer cousin,’ David chuckled in her ear. ‘I am not telling you who she is in case you abseil down the side of her house and tell her she is dead meat if she doesn’t go out with me instantly.’

Freya laughed. ‘What makes you think I’d do something like that?’ she demanded, all injured innocence.

‘Because I have you figured out,’ David said. ‘You’re the best, you know that? But I am big enough to look after myself.’

And with that, Freya had to be content.

Six miles away, Peggy sat on the hideous orange couch that she’d threatened to cover with a throw millions of time and still hadn’t, and read another of the pregnancy books she’d bought.

She’d gone to a shop in town to buy them because Redstone was so small that if she went to the tiny independent bookshop down near the mini-mart, somebody was bound to tell somebody else. The local secret-distribution system made James Bond look like an amateur. Five minutes in the mother-and-baby section of Redstone Books, and she might as well walk around with a sign inscribed:
Yes, I’m pregnant.

She felt lonely and yet not lonely at the same time. She loved the feeling of her baby growing inside her. But there was no getting away from it: she wasn’t doing the right thing. David deserved to know about it.

She didn’t want money from him or anything, but he was a nice guy. Her baby deserved a father.

But how could she possibly tell him now?

Royal Jelly is the name given to the nutritional substance that queen bee larvae feed on. This wonderful food helps the queen develop, but the entire colony receive a little at some time. Early beekeepers called it family food, because it enhances the lives of all the bees. Royal Jelly is used in Chinese traditional medicine and for a whole range of healing products and balms.

The Gentle Beekeeper
, Iseult Cloud

O
vernight it seemed to Meredith that she’d become afraid of big glossy buildings, the sort of places she had once felt entirely at home. She used to accompany Sally-Anne on trips to corporations to discuss where they might hang the latest giant oils they’d just bought from the Alexander Byrne Gallery. Now, gazing up at the sheeny monolith that housed her lawyer’s practice, she felt like a mouse who’d strayed into the territory of a gang of cats by mistake.

Even her clothes felt wrong. She’d finally unpacked all her bin-bags of clothes so that she could decide which items to sell off, but even so, she couldn’t find anything to wear. What exactly did you wear for a meeting with your criminal lawyer? She’d sold her car to write the cheque for the first tranche of James’s fees. She’d borrowed David’s car today to come into town to meet James and his team to discuss what was happening with the case against Alexander Byrne.

To get to James’s office she had to walk past the waiting area of the conveyancing department, which was full of happy-looking clients clutching house details. Some were sharing cups of coffee with lawyers or celebrating the conclusion of the deal. She wished she was one of them and not herself. What a sad mess she’d made of everything.

James was all business. Time is money, Meredith thought grimly.

‘They’re still looking for Sally-Anne, but the pace of the investigation seems to have slowed down a little. She’s no longer public enemy number one.’ He gave her a cynical smile. ‘There’s always somebody else to catch, another crook who’s making bigger headlines.’

‘OK,’ said Meredith, ‘but where does that leave me?’

‘Waiting,’ said James. ‘Waiting. These cases are all about waiting.’ James hadn’t asked her very much about her involvement. He’d just wanted all the documentation that Meredith said she had which proved her absolute innocence in all of this.

‘The fact that they’ve freed up your bank accounts and allowed you to sell your car is a good sign,’ he told her. ‘It proves they don’t think you’re involved. But that could change. There are a lot of people out there with no money, and they want a scapegoat.’

Meredith left the offices feeling sadder and lower than ever. No one had offered her a cup of coffee or smiled warmly at her. She was in a different part of the legal system now.

When she’d had money, Meredith had occasionally shopped for vintage clothes. Not often – she didn’t really care for the idea of wearing someone else’s cast-offs – but enough that she knew the right place to go to sell her things.
The
place to buy vintage was not so much a shop but an emporium, where rich people discreetly got rid of bits and bobs they no longer wanted or purchased new bits and bobs. The owner, an exquisitely beautiful former model called Angelique, ran it almost as a hobby and Meredith had been in there a couple of time with Sally-Anne, who had seemed totally at home among shelves filled with crocodile Hermès handbags and furs with little fox faces staring up at you. Meredith had shuddered when she’d seen these. She’d never understood wearing fur. It seemed to her a bit like wearing your pet around your neck, your dead pet.

Today though, she didn’t care what was on sale in Angelique’s: she just needed to get rid of her own stuff. She’d deliberately tried to go at a quiet time, mid-afternoon, when the wealthier women might be picking up children from school or getting ready for dinner, when there’d be nobody there to see her shame. There was no point pretending otherwise, it did feel like shame, particularly since the clothes were packed in three large black plastic sacks.

Angelique opened the door herself, a slender woman in her sixties with rippling silver-white hair tied up in a knot. She wore almost no make-up apart from carmine lipstick on her full lips and looked effortlessly glamorous in a long 1930s tea-gown.

‘Hello,’ she said warmly, smiling at Meredith and glancing at the bin-bags. ‘It looks as though you’ve got a marvellous haul for me, sweetie. Do come in.’

She picked up one of the bags and half-carried, half-dragged it along the marble floor while Meredith struggled in with the other two.

‘Now,’ said Angelique, beaming kindly, as if her beautiful antique-laden house hadn’t been invaded by three bin-bags, ‘you look absolutely shattered. Would you like a cup of tea in the kitchen? I have shortbread biscuits.’

It was the kindness that was Meredith’s undoing. She’d been so careful to keep away from the people she knew from the past, despite all their desperate phone calls. Everyone seemed to think she was either in on Sally-Anne and Keith’s scheme or that she was a complete idiot not to have known about it.

And now here was Angelique, doyenne of vintage shops, someone reputedly with blue blood and ancestry she could trace back hundreds of years, and she was being kind. Meredith burst into tears.

‘Oh, you poor love,’ said Angelique, putting an arm around her shoulders. She led Meredith down some small stairs into a large, airy kitchen with a conservatory attached. ‘You have been through the mill, haven’t you?’

‘Yes,’ sobbed Meredith.

It was quite plain that Angelique knew exactly who she was – something that would have once thrilled Meredith, seeming to suggest that she had
arrived
. Now it was merely a sign that her face was familiar from the newspapers.

‘You’re being so kind and I’m … I’m so sorry, I don’t mean to cry but …’

‘It’s absolutely fine.’ Angelique showed her to a big fat armchair covered in an old floral throw with a selection of well-worn tapestry cushions on it. ‘Make yourself comfortable there,’ she said. ‘The cats will come and sit on you in a minute – they’re very comforting.’

‘I thought you had a dog,’ said Meredith, remembering an article in a glossy magazine about Angelique’s wonderful life. Angelique’s smile dimmed.

‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘Pumpkin, love of my life. The dogs were always more loyal than the men, I found.’

Meredith hiccupped and half laughed at the same time.

‘I shouldn’t be giving you my warped view on life,’ Angelique continued, with a certain merriness in her voice. ‘Pumpkin was my familiar, old and wise and very beautiful, but he had to go. Petit mal seizures, the vet said. It’s the hardest thing, isn’t it, to hurt the thing you love, but sometimes we have to do it.’

‘Yes,’ sobbed Meredith even harder.

She didn’t know why, but all of a sudden she thought of her father and mother and how
she’d
hurt them so much and they so were loving and loyal, not that she was comparing them to Pumpkin …

‘You cry if you want to, pet,’ Angelique said.