The Honey Queen. Cathy Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ Chapter Three

      Sitting at the scarred wooden desk in front of the small window of her eyrie on St Brigid’s Terrace, Freya Bryne was smiling. She was reading an email from a sweet foreign gentleman – from Nairobi this time – who had a few million dollars to invest in her country and wanted her to assist him.

      He was a prince, and due to problems in his country, and the fact that his father, the king, was under threat, he couldn’t invest it himself. But she could help …

      She really did have the worst spam filter on the planet, Freya decided. No matter what she did, genuine emails ended up in her junk box and funny ones from people pretending to be investors or proclaiming that she’d won a lottery and all that was needed were her bank details and passport number, were forever popping into her inbox. She started to type a reply:

      OMG, I can’t believe I’m writing to a real prince!!!! Mom is going to be, like, aced out! You have no idea how good a time this would be for us to have friends in new places – and a prince! Wow, as we say in Headache Drive. Mom hasn’t had a proper holiday since that incident with the airline company. She needed two seats and we thought that had been made plain from the start but no, she only got one and that sweet guy beside her – well, the feeling did come back into his arms a day later but it was very stressful for all concerned. Now, obviously, we have to visit before we work on this million-dollar deal – again, what LUCK! Mom has maxed out her credit card trying to buy the scratch card with the £25 million ticket and she needs a holiday. If you can get a hold of the royal plane, that would be perfect. Just remember: NO SUGAR ON BOARD. She might get her hands on some and … well, the less said about that time in the chocolate shop the better. We settled out of court, which was good for all concerned. But she is very partial to that South African creamy drink. Four bottles ought to cover it. We can stay in a nice hotel if you have recommendations, but from a financial point of view, do you have spare rooms in the palace? And any brothers? Mom is worried about marrying again but I read her tarot cards for her online today and by an AMAZING COINCIDENCE, it said she’d meet someone new …

      ‘Freya, lovie, it’s nearly eight,’ yelled her aunt Opal from downstairs. ‘I have scrambled eggs on …’

      Opal’s voice trailed off. She was always trying to stuff Freya with protein in the mornings, while Freya was more of a coffee and a sliver of toast kind of person.

      Poor Opal didn’t understand. Apparently, at breakfast every morning the three boys had wolfed down food as if they hadn’t eaten for a week and now she felt that this was the correct way to feed Freya.

      Desperate as she was not to hurt her aunt’s feelings, the thought of an egg in the morning turned Freya’s stomach.

      She finished her email with a quick:

      Reply soonest. We’ll start packing. Mom does tend to overpack but I am assuming this won’t be a problem on the royal plane, right? Hugs,

      Cathleen Ni Houlihan

      Freya grinned as she clicked send.

      If only she could fly through the Internet like her email and perch on the computer of the man receiving it, to see his astonished face as he read it.

      Just outside her window, she could see the blossom on the apple tree in the postage-stamp garden below. Behind the fence her uncle Ned had painted pale green the summer before, the council had started turning a scrap of deserted land into a proper park. The adjacent allotments would stay the way they were, despite the plans for the park, which was wonderful. Uncle Ned would have died if he couldn’t go to his allotment every day. She could see some of the plain but sturdy sheds from the window and the neatly planted allotments themselves. Ned grew tomatoes, strawberries, potatoes and all manner of salad greens on his. In the distance Freya could make out the spires and towers of the city, but it seemed a long way away, giving the sense that Redstone was out in the country instead of being part of town.

      All in all, Freya felt that the view from the third-floor bedroom of the narrow house more than made up for the tininess of the room.

      ‘You’re sure it’s not too small?’ Aunt Opal had said anxiously four years ago when Freya had come to live with them. ‘Meredith wouldn’t have this room – she said it was a spiders’ paradise up here in the attic. Mind you, Steve was happy enough in here.’

      ‘I love it,’ Freya had replied. She wasn’t in the slightest bit scared of spiders for she had spent years taking them gently out of the bath for her mother and releasing them back into the wild. Now the bedroom had a DIY bookcase on one wall, and Freya’s own artwork on another. She’d painted the old wardrobe so it looked like part of Opal and Ned’s colourful garden down below, although Opal didn’t have any enquiring and abnormally large caterpillars on her flowers, or indeed, a Venus fly trap with a shy smile.

      Freya checked her watch. Eight o’clock. Time to grab some toast and leave for school.

      She clicked off her inbox, unplugged her phone and picked up her schoolbag. This rucksack contained her life, although it hardly looked the part: a greying canvas thing inherited from her cousin David, she’d decorated it with butterflies interspersed with gothic, dangerous-looking faerie creatures, all painstakingly coloured in – often in lessons – with felt-tip pens. She skimmed down the narrow stairs, light on her feet, racing past the second floor where her cousins’ old bedrooms were. Opal and Ned’s bedroom was the biggest, but it was still small compared to Freya’s old home. Not that she cared. Twenty-one St Brigid’s Terrace might be cramped and shabby, but the difference was that in this home she felt loved. Beloved. Something she hadn’t felt for a long time with Mum.

      Opal was standing at the cooker in the kitchen that she, Ned and Freya had painted Florida sunshine yellow last Christmas.

      ‘Too bright?’ Opal had said doubtfully in the paint shop, as the three of them had looked at the colour chart.

      Freya hated to see even the faintest hint of worry in her darling Opal’s face.

      ‘No such thing!’ she reassured her with a hug. ‘Yellow makes people happy, you know.’

      And Opal, who would have done anything to make Freya happy, was satisfied.

      The tiles on the kitchen splashback were a riot of citrus fruits far too fat to be normal and Opal herself had run up a pair of yellow gingham curtains on her old sewing machine.

      ‘Freya, love, good morning,’ said Opal now, her face creasing up in a smile as her niece flew into the kitchen. A small, plump woman with a cloud of silvery, highlighted hair, Opal had one of those faces that made everyone want to smile back at her. It didn’t matter that, as she neared sixty, her face was wreathed in wrinkles or that she didn’t walk as fast as she used to because of her arthritis. She was still the same Opal.

      Freya had long since decided that her aunt was one of life’s golden people: someone from whom goodness shone like light from a storm lantern on a dark night. Someone who brought the best out in everyone.

      ‘Morning, Opal,’ Freya said and bent over to give her aunt a kiss on the cheek.

      Freya wasn’t tall herself but Opal was really tiny.

      Foxglove the cat, a black-and-white scrap that Freya had rescued near the allotments two years ago, sat on the radiator licking her paws. Freya gave her a quick stroke, which Foxglove ignored as usual.

      Almost СКАЧАТЬ