Mrs Hart's Marriage Bureau by Sheena Wilkinson

Author:Sheena Wilkinson [Wilkinson, Sheena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2023-01-30T17:00:00+00:00

Twenty-two

It worked out even better than she could have imagined. Jennifer Dunn found herself very well suited to teaching Prudence, and Fabian was delighted with her.

‘Even Prue thinks she’s the cat’s pyjamas,’ Felicity reported. April had had to tell Felicity and Fabian how she had discovered Miss Dunn, but they were sworn to secrecy. Fabian said he knew she would come up trumps. Felicity said she was an evil genius and seemed to regard her with new respect. This evening she had asked April to share her dinner, some kind of dumpling stew with sausages, and absolutely delicious, though Felicity assured her it was terribly cheap. They were eating at the kitchen table and Felicity produced a bottle of German wine.

‘I brought it back with me,’ Felicity said. ‘There aren’t many bottles left, so let’s enjoy this one. Or would you prefer something drier?’

April shook her head. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said. But remembering the whisky she had drunk with Johnson, she sipped it very cautiously. Strange to think this bottle had come all the way from Germany. She did not let herself think, as she breathed in the herby, doughy smell of the dumplings, of those men marching and chanting. She banished them to the part of her mind where she kept Johnson, and Daddy’s death, and Evelyn not bothering to write. It was getting a wee bit crowded in there.

‘What does Fabian say?’

‘That she’s bright and cultured, and very nice to have around.’ Felicity salted her stew and passed the salt cellar to April.

‘Och, well, she was at Cambridge,’ April said, ‘so she’s bound to be bright and cultured. Fair play to her.’

One day in the middle of May, Jennifer called to the office as April was leaving. April, putting her hat on at the door, thinking that she must do something about her hair, heard the distinctive halting tread on the stairs and pulled the door open. Jennifer was almost hidden behind a huge bunch of bluebells, but her face shone out brightly above them.

‘Miss McVey?’ she said. ‘Oh, I am glad I caught you. I came to say thank you.’

She thrust the flowers at April, and April buried her face in them in delight. Bluebells grew in abundance on the banks of the Blackwater at home, and the sweet heady scent made her nostalgic for that purple haze.

‘Thank me for what? These are wonderful.’ It was like the time when Sybil Postlethwaite had arrived with the daffodils, and April prepared herself for the same news: that Fabian had fallen for Jennifer already and she was coming to thank April for bringing them together. And she’d be delighted! She’d count it towards one of her matches even if Jennifer had never actually gone on the books. She and Martha had grown quite competitive about their respective targets. Felicity would be thrilled, and presumably Prudence wouldn’t mind too much if she considered her prospective stepmother the cat’s pyjamas.

‘You saved me from making an idiotic mistake,’ Jennifer said. ‘I didn’t really want to marry.

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