Two Weddings and a Baby (12 page)

A door closed somewhere in the distance and Tamsyn realised that by dawdling she had lost Rory, her guide, and she had no idea where she was supposed to be staying. Mum had told her to take the turret stairs, but she had not been specific about which ones – and there were six turrets on Castle House, not arranged nice and neatly at the corners of the walls, as a person might expect from a castle, but rising up from the main house at varying heights and angles. It was much more like a Disney idea of a castle than anything bearing a resemblance to historical fact. From this main upper gallery, spiral staircases seemed to peel off left, right and centre and her family could be at the top of any one of them. Tamsyn listened for the familiar shrieks of her nephews, but the house was eerily quiet, considering the number of people it was housing tonight, and for one fanciful moment Tamsyn wondered if she’d slipped into a long-ago, ghostly version of the building, one where ladies in silk dresses still powdered their hair. And then she told herself that she really needed to get some sleep and stop being ridiculous.

‘Rory?’ she called out, but her voice sounded too loud in the silent corridor. ‘Well, Mo,’ Tamsyn said to the baby, who stirred in her arms. ‘We are lost in a faux Victorian castle. Still, it’s not the worst thing that’s happened to us. Rory must be around here somewhere; we’re looking for the Red Room …’

As Tamsyn padded in her socked feet down the hallway, she was halted abruptly by a ghostly image in a very old and very foxed mirror. The blood drained from her face as she took in what she was looking at, something much scarier than the legend of the Blue Lady.

Her own reflection.

Tamsyn barely recognised herself; her dark hair frizzed wildly around her narrow, pale face, Lucy’s borrowed – and certainly not best – pale pink fluffy jumper giving her a distinctly mumsy look that her sister Keira would have been proud of, and finally, in her arms the one accessory that she had never planned on sporting – a baby. Who was this wild woman staring back at her from the mirror? What had happened to the polished sophisticate who had stepped off the plane only yesterday? It was as if she’d gone feral and no one had thought to mention it.

‘Oh, God, I need some moisturiser and a pair of straighteners, stat,’ Tamsyn told her little charge, not that Mo seemed the slightest bit interested. ‘If Bernard could see me now, he would certainly fire me, and throw up at exactly the same time!’

‘Sue’s got an iron,’ Jed said, striding down the corridor towards her. ‘If you’re prepared to risk your ears you could try that, although I have to admit I prefer the natural look. You look sort of ethereal, like a wood nymph. I like it.’

‘You do, do you?’ Tamsyn eyed him suspiciously, remembering her new theory that he had to be the father of the baby.

‘What does that mean?’ Jed asked her, surprised.

‘What do you mean, “What does that mean?”?’ Tamsyn narrowed her eyes at him.

‘I
think
it means that you are overtired and rambling,’ Jed said. ‘And that maybe you need to get some sleep. Mo’s been pretty good until now, but who knows when she might decide to wake up and stay up for the foreseeable? Babies do have a habit of doing that.’

‘Well, we are joint carers, aren’t we?’ Tamsyn said, scrutinising his face and then the baby’s for any shared genetic traits. Mo had her own particular kind of charm, but she didn’t have the vicar’s hair – or much hair at all, to be fair – or indeed high cheekbones (or any cheekbones that Tamsyn could identify), and while her mouth was a sweet little pursed ruby rosebud, it bore no resemblance to the generous curves of the vicar’s firm lips. Maybe there could have been something about the eyes that looked a bit like Jed, but that might be because both Jed and Mo were watching her with a distinct air of scepticism at that very moment.

‘Of course,’ Jed offered, holding out his arms. ‘I had a good scrub down after getting Catriona back to her room, so I should be all right to take her. Would you mind helping Rory with the commode?’

‘Well …’ Tamsyn glanced back at herself in the mirror and made eye contact with the woman who looked like she’d been raised by wolves in a branch of Primark. The idea of shifting about a primeval Portaloo was even less appealing, ‘No, it’s OK. I’ll take her. You help Rory with the toilet.’

There was an awkward silence for a moment, the two of them really not sure what should happen next after that groundbreaking sentence in the world of small talk.

‘So you didn’t find any possible secret mothers when you talked to the girls in the hall?’ Jed asked her after a moment.

‘No,’ Tamsyn said. ‘If anything, they were at great pains to point out to me that they would never be so silly as to get pregnant, and that if they did, they certainly wouldn’t be leaving their offspring on church doorsteps. Although there was one girl, a bit of loner … but I don’t know, she didn’t seem to care about anything.’

‘Kirsten.’ Jed recognised the description at once.

‘Yes, she said you had something to do with the hostel she lived in?’

‘A very little. I got the diocese to buy the pub, when it was about to be turned into flats, but the rest is about fundraising. It has its own committee now. Catriona is on it, and I help where I can. There are four self-contained bedsits, one occupied at all times by a youth worker. And downstairs there is a non-alcoholic bar, where the kids go for discos and such. It’s a good little fundraiser.’

‘So this seventeen-year-old girl lives there on her own with two men?’ Tamsyn asked.

‘No, the youth worker is a woman, and the other tenant, he’s a young man. I was just talking to him. He’s a nice boy, transformed from the kid that got excluded from every school he went to. Kirsten, though, she had a hard time when her mum got a new boyfriend, had a baby. Went off the rails a bit. She couldn’t stay at home, and then soon after she left, the mother got into drugs, the brother went into care. It’s no wonder she seems a little distant. I suppose she’s lost all of the people she loves.’

‘Hmmm,’ Tamsyn wondered. Would it be possible for a child who’d been through so much just to detach herself from something like having a secret baby? It could happen. But then there were those little teddy buttons. Buttons that seemed to tell much more about Mo’s mother than she could imagine.

‘Well, there were no likely candidates amongst the boys I spoke to, either,’ Jed said. ‘Although a lot of them were extremely good at World of Warcraft. Well, it was worth a try; tomorrow is another day, and all that.’

Whatever her thoughts were about Kirsten, Tamsyn decided to keep them to herself for now. If she was Mo’s mother, she seemed in good health, she wasn’t harmed or in danger. Much better just to see how things went over the next few hours than charge in like a bull in a china shop, as the worst possible thing that could happen would be to scare the girl away.

‘Do you think it means something that they left Mo at your church?’ Tamsyn asked him. ‘I mean, the teens had a point. Who leaves a baby at a church these days? Almost no one thinks it wrong to be a single mother any more, and while it might be a tad old-fashioned, Poldore is one of the most tolerant places on earth. A baby out of wedlock, well – it would have to be a certain sort of person to be ashamed enough of it to leave their child in a church porch.’

Jed thought for a moment, and Tamsyn could see a look of concern cloud his face.

‘So you think it’s someone who comes to church regularly?’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Someone very …’

‘Religious,’ Tamsyn prompted him.

‘Traditional, with traditional values,’ Jed said. ‘But then, that sort of person wouldn’t be running around and getting pregnant, especially as the first four or five names of my most dedicated parishioners are all members of the over-sixties club.’

‘Well, perhaps the mother is the daughter or granddaughter of someone who attends your church. Or someone with something to hide, maybe,’ Tamsyn added. ‘Someone who thinks that if anyone finds out they have had a baby it will lead to a scandal, or disaster, the like of which Poldore has never seen!’

Jed smiled at her. ‘You certainly have a talent for the dramatic, Tamsyn.’

‘Well, I work in fashion, darling. We tend to get giddy even about zip positions.’ Tamsyn blushed a little; somehow calling the vicar ‘darling’ seemed a bit more daring than she’d anticipated.

‘So, who?’ Jed asked. ‘Who would think that the world would come crashing down around them if they were discovered to have had a baby out of wedlock?’

‘There is one obvious candidate,’ Tamsyn said, lowering her gaze to Mo, who looked like she was taking her sleep very seriously indeed.

‘Is there?’ Jed looked troubled. ‘Who? Cordelia?’

‘No, you idiot. I think it’s you! Or at least, someone who got pregnant by you, the vicar!’ Tamsyn said, before she had even had a chance to think about what she was saying, or if it was an awfully good idea to say the words out loud. The trouble was that Jed was so unusually easy to talk to that she seemed to have trouble
not
talking to him, even when it was about him, and not particularly flattering at that. Now she had gone and done it.

Jed was silent for a long moment, and then something unexpected happened. He started laughing – not just a chuckle or a giggle, but actual guffaws – breath-stealing, side-splitting guffaws that made him bend over and grab his knees.

‘Me?’ He managed to splutter the word out between ragged breaths.

‘It’s not funny.’ Tamsyn felt indignant. ‘Abusing your position as a moral compass to seduce some poor young woman is not cause for hilarity!’

‘I am not Mo’s father,’ Jed managed to say eventually, shaking his head as he looked at her, laughter still shaking his shoulders. ‘If I was, I’d be so incredibly proud, I’d be shouting it from the rooftops. I certainly wouldn’t ever put myself in a situation where a child of mine ended up being left in the porch of a church. Sadly, I am not Mo’s father.’

‘How can you be sure?’ Tamsyn said, her confidence wavering as she looked into Jed’s cool, clear eyes.

‘Because, Tamsyn Thorne,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been with a woman that way in a very long time. Several years, in fact, if you are so determined to know. And despite my job, I consider pregnancies that aren’t preceded by sex something of a rarity.’

‘Oh,’ Tamsyn said, her voice now ever so tiny and small. ‘Well. OK, then.’

‘Not that it is any of your business,’ Jed reminded her gently. ‘But for the record, I would only have sex with someone that I really loved, and it would only happen after we were married.’

‘Because you’re a vicar?’ Tamsyn asked him.

‘Because I believe in the sanctity of marriage.’ Jed nodded.

‘But you said … you implied that you have “been” with a woman before,’ Tamsyn stumbled on, aware that she was being incredibly crass, and utterly uncertain as to why she couldn’t simply withdraw from the conversation with what little tatters of dignity she had left, except that the information still seemed to be vitally pertinent to her.

‘I wasn’t always a vicar,’ Jed said. ‘I wasn’t ordained until I was twenty-four. Now, is there anything else you’d like to know about my personal life? Times and dates, telephone numbers of old girlfriends, maybe a DNA sample?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tamsyn said. ‘You must think me very rude.’

‘Not rude,’ Jed said. ‘Not that. It’s just that you don’t seem to understand that what I do is not just my job, that happens to come with a nice house, outdated uniform and a great big ancient shed I need to keep raising funds for to have the roof fixed. This is my life, Tamsyn. My life, that I have dedicated to God. I take my faith seriously, and I would never,
ever
leave a woman in a situation where she had to abandon a child of mine on a doorstep. I’m not that man, and I have to say, given that our acquaintance is only a few hours old, for you to even hazard a guess at what sort of man I am is actually rather insulting.’

‘But I wasn’t … It’s not that …’

‘I don’t suppose …’ Rory’s head appeared around a door at the end of the corridor. ‘Ah Vicar, good. It’s a great big lump of furniture, this; any chance you could give me a hand?’

‘Of course,’ Jed said, nodding politely at Tamsyn. ‘Your family is at the top of the tall turret,’ he said curtly. ‘The central spiral staircase to the left of the Blue Lady.’

‘Thank you,’ Tamsyn said. ‘And, Jed, I’m …’

She had been about to say sorry, but he had already disappeared after Rory, into the depths of the Red Room.

‘There you are,’ Laura said, as Tamsyn shouldered open the vaulted turret door. The room that the Thorne women had been allocated was semicircular, with four single beds, three of which were camp beds, forming a sort of star in the middle of the room. This was usually Cordelia’s room when she was sleeping over at Castle House on nanny duty, as it was at the top of the tallest turret where Sue Montaigne housed her children, for maximum noise-containment purposes – one floor above Meadow and opposite the boys. Sue had been known to joke that she’d have put the nursery in the dungeon if only she’d had one.

‘Any noise coming from the pit?’ Cordelia nodded at the boys’ bedroom. ‘I looked in twenty minutes ago and it was like a CBeebies production of Armageddon.’

‘No, completely quiet,’ Tamsyn said.

‘Ominous,’ Cordelia said. ‘The only time they are ever completely quiet is if there is some sort of arson-related activity going on. I’d better go and take a peek. There’s wine; you’d better not have too much, though. Don’t want you getting drunk in charge of a baby.’

‘Again,’ Keira said pointedly.

‘I wasn’t drunk, and I wasn’t in charge of them and they were
three
,’ Tamsyn said, referring to the one time she had been left to babysit the twins, on a rare visit to Suffolk. ‘And I told you not to go out and leave me with them; I warned you.’

‘I just didn’t expect you to actually let them glue their Lego to the sofa,’ Keira said. ‘And then draw a city all around it in permanent marker.’

‘They were being creative!’ Tamsyn used the same defence every time the Lego sofa/permanent marker incident came up. ‘And anyway, I bought you a new sofa, and to be frank it was much nicer than the old one. Not to mention more washable.’