The Winter Ground (41 page)

Gilverton

2nd October, 1924

Dear Alec,

Remember my engagement yesterday? The annual duty luncheon for the Reverend Mr Tait from which and whom I expected only boredom? I could hardly have been more wrong, Alec dear, and I am this minute packing to follow the Reverend home to his manse in Fife, there to attend a meeting of the Rural Women’s Institute. Hardly a house party at which one would usually leap, I grant you, but not only is the man himself a perfect darling – imagine Father Christmas shaved clean and draped in tweed – but his parish, it seems, heaves with more violent passions than a Buenos Aires bordello. A stranger, you see, is roaming the night and pouncing on the ladies of the Rural. At least that’s the tale they’re telling and the one that Mr Tait told me, but since half the village think he’s a figment and he only ever strikes at the full moon, I cannot help but wonder if there’s something even odder going on …

Much love and remember me fondly if the dark stranger gets me,

Dandy xx

‘Dan Brown meets Barbara Pym … Dandy is brisk, baffled, heroic, kindly, scandalised and – above all – very funny’