Preview
Little Teashop of Horrors
Jane Lovering

Chapter One

Amy

The last customer of the day had drained the last of their tea, the last moistened finger had dabbed the remains of a scone into an eager mouth, and I’d squirted my last buttercream flower, when we heard the sound we’d been dreading. The heavy crunch of a large car, sweeping up the gravel drive to Monkpark Hall and drawing up at the main front doors. My heart thumped uncomfortably under my Edwardian outfit. What if the new boss decides to change things? What if he decides on a shake-up of the estate? What if—

‘He’s here.’ Julia threw me a clean apron. ‘Quick, get this on, Ames, you look like you’ve spent the afternoon face down in the European scone mountain.’

‘And who died and made you Mary Berry?’ I muttered, but rebellion was pointless with Julia. She could have ignored the Jacobites. ‘Anyway, is there a scone mountain?’ I discarded my butter-stained overall and threaded my arms through the new one. ‘I mean, there’s EU directives for scone storage, and a mountain would contravene hygiene regulations, you’d have Brian Blessed going up the North Face before you could say “clotted cream”. And why should we have to change, just because some new guy is taking over the management of the big house? We’re not going to be expected to line the steps as he comes in, are we? Like bloody Downton Abbey, all curtseying and rolling our eyes at the footmen. Which we don’t have, and I am not rolling anything at Artichoke Sam, he is odd enough without encouragement.’ I was talking to cover my nervousness, and Julia knew it. Or didn’t know it, but didn’t care why I was babbling.

‘Shut up.’ Brushing off my petty little mutiny, Julia pulled off her mob cap, smoothed her hair down and retied her ponytail. ‘This is no time to start getting all socialist. If new guy reports back to the Heritage Trust that we didn’t sufficiently doff whatever we’re supposed to doff, we could find ourselves out of a job and our lovely cafe being taken over by a couple of maiden aunts who believe in jam pot covers and white supremacy, so get that apron on and round to the front, double time.’

She disappeared into the back room, muttering about mascara, and I stuffed the loose bits of hair back under my cap. It was supremely unflattering and made me look as though I was about to dive into the sea circa 1880, but then I wasn’t really worried about the way I looked, not like Julia was, anyway. She worried so much about her appearance that I was surprised she had a worry surplus, but clearly she was concerned with ‘standards’ today, in the face of the arrival of what was, technically, our new boss.

I checked my reflection in the cake cover. Yup. I still looked like the Human Cannonball in a daft hat, but, short of a fairy godmother with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Clinique products and a robust approach to corsetry, that wasn’t going to change any time soon. A momentary wash of powerlessness swept over my linen-capped head. I needed this job, more than just about anyone else employed by Monkpark, I needed to stay. Yet I was the one nobody noticed – the one with the gritted teeth, carrying out the everyday tasks behind the scenes to keep the cafe running smoothly, cooking, serving, cleaning up – relied upon; as necessary as a Hoover, and given about as much attention. Although, I thought, adjusting my cap – although I didn’t really know why because nobody would notice whether I doffed or didn’t doff – my wheels were less likely to come off. I wasn’t even going to think about whether I sucked more than the average Hoover.

I was steeling myself to go out and meet the newcomer, and scolding myself internally for wondering whether ‘doff’ was strictly a verb, when the doors at the far end of the tearoom opened and Josh shambled in, shedding feathers like a werebudgie mid-change.

‘Any sign of Bane?’ I asked.

‘Mmm?’ Josh looked around and finally saw me. He’d clearly been lost in his own, quite bird-specific world, as usual. ‘Oh. Not yet. I’ve checked all round the estate, no sign. But she’s got a tracker on, I’m going to go and get the equipment and find her …’ He trailed off, once more subsumed into a place where falcons making off into the wide blue yonder was far more important than the arrival of some bloke, picked up a leftover muffin from the counter, and continued his amble out through the door by the kitchen. His hair was half on end, he hadn’t shaved for a while and his shirt was untucked at the back and flopped over the seat of his jeans like a gold-prospector’s ‘escape hatch’, but that was typical Josh. Nothing mattered but the birds. I didn’t think he’d ever actually looked me in the face since he’d arrived at the Hall in the winter, but I liked him. He didn’t leer past me at Jules, like a lot of the men who worked here – which always made me want to stand right in front of them, waving – or talk to my, admittedly robust, chest. There was something gentle about him, something that made me think of the old china we had on the dresser in the cafe. Faded and fragile and a bit chipped around the edges.

I finally joined Julia in the gloriously oak-panelled Library. She was whispering conspiratorially with Wendy, who did admin and usually only worked mornings, and the motley collection of other people who worked at Monkpark Hall were milling around and making free with the Heritage Trust-provided glasses of celebratory wine that stood on side tables near the door. Clearly our new boss didn’t know much about his potential workforce or he would have kept it to chilled mineral water. Monkpark stood alone amidst its acres with no civilisation for seven miles – and for ‘no civilisation’ read ‘no pub’. The gardeners had already pinched a bottle and we were only moments away from having to fish them out of the verbena. James, who was in charge of the outside staff at the Hall, was turning a blind eye. In fact, he looked as though he might also have had more than one glass, and I was sure I could see a bulge in the pocket of his donkey jacket that might be a bottle ‘for later’.

‘Ahem.’ A cleared throat from the stairs that led up to the gallery. ‘Attention, please, everyone.’

‘Prat,’ muttered Julia from beside me, but with her mouth carefully tilted down into her wine glass, presumably in case our esteemed employer had ‘lip reading’ as one of his skills.

‘Boss prat though, Jules.’ I nodded towards the speaker being gradually revealed during his process down the polished oak of the staircase. He was very obviously someone whose previous exposure to the countryside had come from county shows and the odd point-to-point, judging from his clothing. Instead of warm, practical sweaters over rip-stop trousers he was wearing a beautifully cut hacking jacket, dark green moleskin chinos and the shiniest shoes I’d ever seen on someone not recently released from prison. His blond hair was immaculately cut into a short back and sides that my grandfather would have appreciated, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses, which emphasised fair-lashed eyes. He looked as if he’d walked off the cover of one of those magazines for people who like the idea of living in the country but can’t cope with the lack of broadband, rubbish mobile signals and mice in the larder.

At Monkpark you were lucky if it was just mice in the larder. I’d once had to eject a full-grown deer that had been at the spuds.

‘Plus, hot prat.’ Julia was looking him over now too and I gave her a jab in the ribs. Julia’s ‘types’ included everything from Richard Armitage down to the lean young work-experience boy who trimmed the hedges, so her fancying our new boss wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it was going to make life awkward. Jules had a tendency to go off in full pursuit of any man that took her fancy like a whippet after a sausage. I was usually recruited to ride shotgun on these quests, providing advice, reassurance, tissues and, occasionally, sandwiches, if it looked like being a long job. It was a role I’d been born to. Next to Julia – oh, all right, even without Julia – I was the kind of girl that men’s eyes just seemed to slide off. Nondescript. Chunky, serviceable body, brownish hair, blueish eyes … if anyone had ever had to produce a ‘Wanted’ poster featuring me, they could have used ‘ish’ as my main descriptive factor.

‘Mind on the job, Jules.’

‘I’m sure you will all have been expecting me before now, but it turns out that the vagaries of North Yorkshire roads are beyond the reach of satnav.’ Pause for laughter, some of which was a little raucous because of the free wine … ‘My name is Edmund Evershott and I’m here to take over management of Monkpark Hall on behalf of the Heritage Trust.’

New Boss began giving a speech about how he hoped this would usher in a new era in customer service and an increase in visitor numbers – the usual sort of talk you get when someone takes on an enterprise and wants to Make Their Mark. To be honest, I was too busy keeping an eye on Julia, who was using the speech-time to hitch her Edwardian skirt up to reveal her ankles, to really listen to his words, until he rounded off with ‘and I hope we’ll all work together very smoothly’, which I only heard because I’d stopped looking at her and was looking at the slowly opening door under the staircase, which led into the Library from the hallway beyond. The door creaked wide, and Josh came through, the errant Bane, now hooded, on his fist. Josh walked into the crowd of wine drinkers, hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and walked on, causing New Boss’s final words to stammer off into silence as he stared at the falconer and his bird wandering through the assembled throng towards the opposite door.

‘Excuse me?’ Edmund raised his voice, beautifully modulated, to carry across. ‘Why are you walking through the Library?’

Josh didn’t even slow down. He just raised his arm a little higher, to indicate the falcon perched on it and said, ‘Short cut, mate,’ then closed the door behind him without turning round. Everyone was so used to Josh and his vagaries that nobody reacted, because nobody else thought this was strange behaviour, apart from New Boss Edmund, who took off his glasses and stared at the door, then raised an eyebrow.

‘Ooh, the eyebrow thing,’ Julia whispered. ‘Deeply sexy, that is.’

I gripped her elbow. ‘It’s only sexy when Mr Spock does it.’

I looked around the Library so as not to have to watch Jules doing her ‘soft, interested smile, catch eye, bigger smile, head toss’ routine. I’d been watching it in action since we were fourteen, when she’d made me start sitting behind her on the school bus so that the seat alongside was empty for her latest conquest. I hadn’t minded as much as you might think, the school was a three quarters of an hour bus ride away, and I used to get a phenomenal amount of homework done on the journey, plus having it driven home to me on a daily basis how impossibly superficial XY chromosomes seemed to make you.

‘Could Miss Amy Knowles and Miss Julia Neville stay behind please, everyone else, you are dismissed.’ Edmund came down from his ‘addressing the crowd’ position on the staircase, slowly descending the polished oak treads as though he was going for maximum impact. There was a kind of smugness about him, as if he was used to having women follow him with their eyes, and their mouths going droopily slack. Jules was illustrating his point nicely, in fact.

People began milling around near the doors, everyone trying to head home without leaving any wine surplus so there were little knots of congestion in the doorways as glasses were emptied, sometimes repeatedly.

Julia’s eyes had widened. ‘Wow. Singled out already, Ames, we are good.’

But I’d already felt the conflict tightening in my chest, pulling me away. ‘It’s nearly six. You know I can’t stay, the agreement is that I work until six and I never do overtime without prior arrangement …’ My voice was rising in panic. Even the thought of leaving Julia unattended in the vicinity of someone who signed our pay cheques wasn’t enough to sever the tie that dragged at my heart, coupled me up between the cafe and home as though the weight of obligation and love hauled the two buildings together like a stone on a rubber sheet. ‘We work in a teashop. There shouldn’t be overtime. Once the scones are gone, it’s lights out, goodnight Vienna.’

‘What?’

‘Just an expression that Gran … never mind. And I had to walk up this morning ’cos the bike had a puncture, so I have to get off or I’ll be late.’

Julia pulled the ‘sensible one’ trick, a move so rare that it was probably endangered. ‘Look. It’s not six yet. Give him a couple of minutes, he may only want to check us out – well, we can hope, can’t we? Or maybe he wants our “insider perspective” into working at Monkpark, but either way, just hang around a bit, Ames.’ Then, hitting home, ‘We both need the job, we can’t afford to go upsetting the new boss at this stage, can we?’

I closed my eyes for a second. Played the alternative scenarios in my head. ‘Okay, you’re right, I can’t just disappear, but please, don’t keep him talking.’

She was already heading across the polished wooden floor towards Edmund. Her heels clattered over the waxed and shiny boards, attracting his attention to our approach, while my sensible flats squealed and squeaked like distressed hamsters. ‘Oh, don’t worry so much,’ she muttered over her shoulder. ‘You are sooo boring sometimes, Ames.’

I bit my lip so as not to remind her that she knew exactly why I was ‘boring’, but she was already drawing up in front of Edmund, who’d replaced his glasses and was consulting an iPad, so she’d wasted the head tossing and the catwalk stride she’d used across the wooden floor. But, then again, in our Edwardian maid costumes, she’d looked less like Zooey Deschanel and more like a Dalek given a hearty shove. ‘Ah. You would be …’

‘Julia Neville.’ She didn’t bother to introduce me, but then I suppose someone who can’t work things out from a process of deduction on a list of two isn’t really management potential. ‘How can we help you …’ Toying with the idea of using his first name, but even Julia, with her blonde hair and long legs, couldn’t be quite sure of a conquest. ‘… Mister Evershott?’

I fidgeted and looked down at my feet. The elastic of my cap was loosening, I could feel the whole thing beginning to ride up my head and preparing to sit on the top of my hair like a knotted hanky on the beach.

‘You two run the cafe on behalf of the Heritage Trust?’ He had pale blue eyes behind those thin-rimmed glasses, and a slightly chilly expression that made them look paler still, like bluebells in a frost. ‘And the premises are part of Monkpark Hall …’

Julia launched into an explanation of how we’d set up the cafe in the old stable block when the Heritage Trust had restored the building six years ago, how we baked all our own produce on site, how she and I lived in the estate village … she stopped short of giving him her bra size and phone number, but I had the feeling it was only his slightly cool reaction to her spiel that prevented her.

‘Hmm.’ Edmund tilted back his chin and looked at us down his cheekbones like someone sighting down a rifle. ‘Well, this is just a friendly warning then … I’m thinking of giving up the cafe and turning the stables into an education room.’

As he finished speaking I heard the dread sound of the clock on the top of the old coachhouse begin its pre-chime whirring sound, and the first strike of six o’clock rang its hollow tone out across the sheep-dotted Monkpark acres. ‘I’m sorry, I have to go …’

I was already turning, my rubber soles announcing my intentions to the room. ‘But, Miss Knowles, we need to discuss—’

‘I’m sorry, I have to.’ I broke into a run and, as I did so, my Edwardian maid’s cap gave up the last of its pretence of elasticity and pinged off my head, flying off to land somewhere behind me. I didn’t bother to go back for it; instead I careered out of the main house doors and out along the gravelled driveway like a cheap Cinderella with time management issues, my shoes now crunching my departure as I fled towards home.