Wicked Autumn by G. M. Malliet

Author:G. M. Malliet
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Published: 2011-09-13T13:15:19+00:00

CHAPTER 17

At Home

The death of Wanda Batton-Smythe affected everyone in the village, some more than others. Lily Iverson, expecting to feel something like relief, found her life surprisingly unchanged. There was always something to worry about, after all. Wanda was just one less thing.

Lily lived just outside the village proper in a farmhouse she’d inherited from her uncle—an old farmhouse fallen into disrepair that she had proceeded, in nearly miraculous fashion, to rescue from ruin. The ground floor, where she sat watching the news, was really one large room, with a kitchen occupying one end; at the other end she’d marked out a large living area with a colorful rug, a sectional sofa, a large square coffee table, and a refectory table she used as both dining table and desk.

A typical man of his generation, Lily’s uncle had taken one look at her knobby-kneed, wiry-haired self, aged twelve, and privately predicted she would never marry unless a female-targeting plague killed off every other woman on the planet. Untypically for a man of his generation, he felt no contempt for a woman of single status, and set out to ensure she would at least have a roof over her head for her lifetime. That the roof in question leaked sporadically did not detract from the kind intent behind the bequest.

Lily gradually had turned the ramshackle farmhouse into something resembling a cozy and welcoming home—in the hours not filled to capacity by her burgeoning business. She had paved the narrow dirt track leading to the building, replaced mean little windows with larger ones to allow the sun to spill onto the old wooden floorboards, and generally applied a coat of paint to everything until the whole place shone like a showcase.

Upstairs were two bedrooms, one holding Lily’s double but virginal bed, headed by a brass Victorian bedstead purchased from Noah’s Ark; the other held a double walnut bed for guests that never arrived. (Lily’s uncle, long a widower, had been her last living relative, and she had few ties to her old life in London.) Both beds were covered in knitted bedclothes of colorful and wondrous design, and appliquéd with flowers and animals, starbursts and sunbursts. Between the rooms, down a narrow hallway, Lily had had installed a bathroom gleaming with modern fittings. When she had arrived, the only convenience had been an outhouse, the only source of water an old hand pump at the kitchen’s stone sink.

Between the kitchen and living area on the ground floor, where Lily spent much of her days, were an old spinning wheel and a loom she had found in the attic—objects that had once belonged to her aunt. Necessity being the mother of discovery (for Lily had been underemployed most of her life, and even living rent-free she needed spending money), in playing around with the equipment, Lily had come to realize that her real talent was to take wool and make from it uniquely beautiful creations in a riot of design and frill and color.

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