The Wish List by Sophia Money-Coutts

Author:Sophia Money-Coutts
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780008370558
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-08-06T03:00:00+00:00

The printer wasn’t my only challenge that week. On Friday evening, I traipsed along Harley Street, walked up four floors and knocked on Gwendolyn’s door.

I waited for her summoning.

Nothing.

I knocked again.

Nothing.

I knocked for a third time and cracked the door open. I didn’t want to interrupt any poor, embarrassed soul lying on the sofa while they had a spell put on them.

But instead of anybody lying on the sofa, I was greeted by the sight of Gwendolyn dancing around the room in a pair of large pink headphones, wafting a bunch of burning twigs over her head. I wrinkled my nose at the smell of very strong sweet tea.

‘Gwendolyn?’

She didn’t hear me.

‘Gwendolyn?’

‘Oh girls, they wanna have fu-hunnnnn…’ she sang, still with her back to me. She side-stepped into the corner, her bottom swinging side to side as she waved the twigs like a rhythmic gymnast twirling a ribbon in the air.

‘GWENDOLYN!’

The bottom froze and she frowned over her shoulder, then tugged her headphones off.

‘Florence, hello, you’re very early.’

I looked at my watch. It was 6.32 p.m., which meant I was two minutes late.

‘No, it’s, er, gone six thirty.’

‘Has it?’ Gwendolyn squinted at her watch as if I was lying to her. ‘Goodness me, so it has. Right, let me just sort myself out and we’ll get cracking.’

She unclipped an old Walkman from the waistband of her patchwork trousers, then dropped the twigs into a small ceramic bowl on the coffee table.

‘What is that?’ I asked. The room smelled like a hippie’s armpit.

‘Sage. I had a very troubled client before you, poor man’s wife has just left him, so I needed to purify the room, to dispel all the negative energy.’ Gwendolyn sat down on the armchair opposite me and briefly closed her eyes. ‘Mmm, it’s helped.’ She opened her eyes. ‘Did you know, Florence, that the Latin for sage, salvia, means to heal?’

‘Er, no, I didn’t.’

‘So when you burn it, it releases negative ions which neutralize the space around us. But let’s not dwell on poor Mr Nicopoulous and his runaway wife. How are you? Is your romance still blossoming like a cherry tree in April? I do hope so.’

‘It is,’ I said slowly. ‘I think so. I went to stay with his parents at the weekend.’

She clapped her hands with delight. ‘You did? And how was his mother? You wanted someone with a nice mother, did you not?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, and she was nice. Although his fath—’

Gwendolyn interrupted by clicking her finger and thumb several times and shaking her head.

‘What?’

‘Always this negativity, Florence. Have you noticed it? It’s a very pernicious habit of yours, almost as if you can’t allow anything to be going well.’

‘No, it is going well, it’s just that his father was a bit weird. And he’s got this old friend called Octavia who told me something strange.’

She sighed as if I was making this up. ‘What was it? Tell me.’

I twisted my mouth into a tight knot before answering. ‘She just said he was looking for a wife.

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