Page 67 of Crazy Spooky Love
My heart trips a beat for him, and another for Priscilla, whoever she was, because the look on Isaac’s face isthatlook—the faraway one my mother has whenever she speaks of my father, the one my gran has when she refers to my grandpa. It’s the look of big, extravagant love, and I cross my fingers as I drop down on the dusty chair opposite him, hoping hard that he’s going to reveal something that helps me unravel the long-held secrets of Scarborough House.
Chapter
Nineteen
Isaac takes me back to Autumn 1910, to the aftermath of Douglas’s murder. Thrown out of the family, he fled the Midlands without any real plan and ended up finding work as a dock-laborer in Hull. It was from there he volunteered himself for the army, early on during the First World War, and it was to the Naval infirmary in Hull he returned afterward, one of many injured soldiers from the Great War.
“Priscilla was one of the nursing sisters,” he says, that faraway smile evident again when he mentions her name. He tells me how she’d tended to his broken leg and shrapnel-fractured shoulder, and how she always found the time to read the newspaper to him at the end of her shift each day.
“I knew,” Isaac says, leaning his head back against the chair as he wanders down memory lane. “I knew she was the one for me, soon as I opened my eyes and found her standing next to my bed when I woke that very first day. Holding my hand, she was, although she always maintained she was taking my pulse.” He laughs softly. “An angel in a nurse’s uniform.”
He grew stronger and they grew closer, and in time Isaac and Priscilla became engaged to be married. But as the date drew nearer, he just couldn’t find the words to tell her about his family, about the filthy slur of the unproven murder accusation hanging over his head. He wanted to tell her, desperately so, but when she fell unexpectedly pregnant a month before the wedding, he saw the situation for what it truly was: hopeless.
“I was a selfish man, Melody. I let myself pretend I could have a normal life, but what kind of a man saddles his wife and child with a weight that heavy?”
He’d realized that to marry Priscilla would be to condemn her to a life as a suspected murderer’s wife, and their child would be forced to grow up beneath the same black cloud. It would catch up with them eventually and tarnish them all and, God forbid, they might believe it and turn their backs on him too.
“I expect she thought I didn’t love them enough in the end.” Isaac speaks so quietly I have to lean in to catch his words. “Wasn’t true though. I left because I loved them too much.”
“Priscilla Elizabeth Henson,” I sayCharles’s mother’s name for about the hundredth time since we got back to the office. “All we know is that she would have been a nurse in Hull after the First World War, and that she gave birth to Charles Frederick, presumably Henson, on June 22, 1920.”
“My mum loves this stuff,” Artie muses. “She’s well into it; she’s traced my grandpa’s line all the way back to the 1300s, or something like that. It’s on the wall in our hallway.”
Marina and I look up at him slowly. We don’t really have a clue where to start, but it seems that Artie is sitting on an ancestral mastermind.
“My great-great-great-great-great-uncle, Cuthbert, died of the Black Death,” he goes on with grave authority. “That’s why Mum lets me feed rats to Pandora.”
I shudder. “Pandora the Python, I presume?”
He nods. “Dad named her after Pandora fromAdrian Molebecause she was his first crush.”
I don’t get the reference, but I’ve learned that sometimes in life it’s best to just nod, and this is one of those times. I glance up at the clock and close my laptop. “It’s gone five, folks. Artie, do you think your mum would have a look and see if she can dig up anything? She sounds as if she’ll know the best places to start.”
He nods, excited. “Mum loves a bit of sleuthing.”
They bang the door noisily behind them as they clatter off to Marina’s car, leaving me alone with Lestat.
“Just you and me again,” I say to him, and he moseys off and disappears around the back of the sofa. When he emerges from the other end, he’s carrying one of Nonna Malone’s cucidati cookies. I throw a pencil at him in disgust, but as he settles down to eat it I quietly acknowledge he’s more like me than I thought.
I’m not a big drinker,but I feel the need for brandy before I hit the pillow tonight. I’m unsettled in almost every damn element of my life, and I hope that the alcohol will calm my thoughts enough to at least let me get some proper rest. My dreams, when they come, are full of wartime heroes and superheroes, facts jumbled with fiction, fantasy sliced through with desolation. I can’t remember the details, but I wake with damp cheeks, and it’s nothing to do with the fact that Lestat is licking my face because he needs to pee.
“Right, so let’s get thisTuesday morning off to a good start,” I say, swiveling my seat to point my finger at Artie over by the fridge, who freezes with the milk bottle in his hand. “Artie, give us some good news on the family research front.”
I watched an early-morning rerun ofThe Apprenticeand I’mrunning things Girl Boss–style this morning. Well, I mean I’m not going to fire anyone, but I’m super aware the buck stops with me. This agency is mine to build, and there’s no way I’m going to be cowed into sharing my success with Leo Dark.
Artie looks horrified at being put on the spot and scratches nervously at his neck.
“Err, she had to go out last night,” he says. “But she’s doing it today. Probably right now as we speak,” he assures me, and the wobble in his voice makes me wonder if I came on a bit too strong with my Girl Boss thing. I didn’t mean to scare him witless, and his mother isn’t even on my payroll.
“Loving the sound of that, Artie,” I say. “Top work.” He sags with relief and sloshes milk into the drink he’s just made.
“Marina?” I swing to face her and see no trace of fear in her eyes. I’m not surprised, Marina is scared of pretty much nothing and no one, least of all me in megalomaniac mode.
“Melody.” She lifts her eyebrows into her dark fringe and then reaches into her bag and pulls out Nonna’s tin. “I asked Nonna to make another batch of cucidati cookies.”
God, she’s good, she plays me like a piano. I swallow hard as she lifts the lid and shows me the double layer of iced fig biscuits. Lestat’s flat face starts to twitch, and he scuttles past me toward Marina. I grab for his collar but he’s a slippery customer on a mission. Not that he’s successful; Marina snaps the lid on smartly and wags her finger at him until he slumps forlornly on her shoes.
“Not this time, puppy dog.”
