Book Club Reads: 3-Book Collection: Yesterday’s Sun, The Sea Sisters, Someone to Watch Over Me. Amanda Brooke

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      Holly self-consciously put her hand to her face. ‘Minor accident,’ she explained dismissively before convincing Jocelyn that a cream tea would be more than enough. When it arrived it was clear that she had been treated to extra helpings. Jocelyn took the seat opposite her.

      ‘I’ll just rest my legs for five minutes. Lisa can cope on her own for a while.’

      ‘It’s a lovely teashop. You’ve done well here.’

      ‘It wasn’t all down to me. My sister Beatrice ran the shop originally. When I left Harry, she was good enough to give me a job, not to mention the flat upstairs. Eventually we became partners and when she died six years ago, God rest her soul, her daughter Lisa took over her share. I love this place, it gave me my life back and I want to carry on working here till my dying day.’

      ‘Is your son involved in the family business?’

      ‘Paul? Oh no,’ laughed Jocelyn, the thought obviously tickling her. ‘He’s in the army. I don’t think he’d quite suit a pinny.’

      ‘You must be very proud of him.’

      ‘Oh, I am, I am. He’s done so well for himself and things could have been so different.’ Jocelyn’s eyes seemed to dim, as if a shadow from the past had been cast over her.

      ‘Different in what way?’

      Jocelyn waved a hand dismissively as if wafting the shadow away. ‘Oh, nothing. He didn’t have it easy, that’s all. His father was a fervent disciplinarian. Taking Paul away from his influence was the best thing I could have done for him.’

      ‘I’m sorry you didn’t have a better life in our house.’

      ‘Well, don’t you worry about me, it was a long time ago. Your lives will be happier there, I’m sure of it.’

      ‘Do you think so?’ Holly asked, still unsettled by her vision of the future.

      ‘I know so,’ confirmed Jocelyn, with a smile that made Holly feel safe and her future secure. ‘So how’s Billy getting on with your studio?’

      ‘You need to ask? I thought he’d be keeping the whole village informed of his progress.’

      ‘He can be a terrible gossip,’ agreed Jocelyn, ‘but he knows better than to do it around me. I’d give him a clip around the ear if I caught him. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not so much the gossip I object to, he just never gets it right, mainly because he’s always too busy talking to actually listen.’

      Jocelyn and Holly shared a few more jokes at Billy’s expense before Jocelyn had to return to work for the teatime rush. Holly attempted to pay for her tea but Jocelyn stubbornly refused, and she was not a woman to be argued with.

      ‘Thank you, Jocelyn, you’ve been a real tonic. You’ll have to let me return the favour and come over to mine one day.’

      ‘Well, don’t feel you have to. I don’t want to take up your time now that you’ve got your sculpture to make,’ offered Jocelyn, even though her eyes were pleading with Holly not to withdraw the offer.

      ‘I insist.’

      Jocelyn smiled gleefully. ‘I get every other weekend off and I’ve not got anything planned, so how about a week on Sunday for brunch?’

      ‘It’s a date,’ agreed Holly. ‘At last I’ve got something to look forward to other than Tom coming home.’

      It didn’t take long for Holly’s curiosity to get the better of her. The very next morning her sketchbook and pencils had been carefully laid out on the kitchen table but Holly was nowhere to be seen. She had taken her steaming mug of coffee into Tom’s study and was waiting impatiently for his computer to whir into life. She wasn’t exactly a technophobe, but she didn’t particularly see the attraction of the virtual world that the Internet offered. She preferred to interact with a world she could experience with all her senses, but still, needs must, and she hoped the World Wide Web would succeed where the library had failed.

      She carefully typed the name of the moon goddess into the search engine and was immediately presented with pages of hyperlinks, some of which provided immediate dead ends, others only tiny snippets of information. It was only when she added Charles Hardmonton’s name to the search that she hit pay dirt. She found a research site which not only gave more detail about Lord Hardmonton’s last expedition, but it also disclosed information about his fall from grace, information that would have been seen as libellous in its day and wouldn’t be found in any textbook.

      Lord Hardmonton’s last recorded expedition had indeed been in search of the temple of Coyolxauhqui in Central Mexico. He had been a principled explorer and these principles had led to a major dispute with his fellow adventurers and more importantly his sponsors back in England. When they found the temple to the moon goddess, Lord Hardmonton had wanted to preserve it in situ, but he was under pressure from his sponsors to strip the temple of its contents and dispatch them to England. Under the threat of legal action for breach of contract, Lord Hardmonton had reluctantly taken part in what amounted to the ransacking of the site.

      Holly couldn’t help admiring this nineteenth-century explorer, but his adventures still provided no link to the moondial. She sighed as she scrolled down the page. Further dispute had arisen when Lord Hardmonton arrived back in England. There had been an extensive inventory taken of their hoard, but at some point one of the relics had disappeared in transit. Despite his noble reputation, the finger of suspicion pointed towards Charles Hardmonton. The missing item was never recovered and he was never able to raise the necessary support to finance any further expeditions. He became a recluse and lived out the rest of his life in Hardmonton Hall.

      Having drawn a blank, Holly sipped her coffee and stared at the screen. The link between a missing relic from the temple and the moondial was a tenuous one, but Holly wasn’t ready to give up just yet. She tried another combination of words, this time adding ‘inventory’ to the search. To Holly’s amazement, one of the first links led to an actual photocopy of the original inventory. The missing item had been highlighted and recorded as the Moon Stone and there were footnotes describing the treasure in greater detail. It was a large ceremonial stone, made from an unspecified grey quartz. The stone was the centrepiece of the temple and was rumoured to be the fabled Moon Stone, used to worship the moon goddess, Coyolxauhqui. The reference also suggested that, rather than being used for sacrifices, this stone was used to invoke visions.

      In her haste to reach over and switch off the computer Holly slopped her coffee over the keyboard. She didn’t want to read any more. She looked at the mess she’d made with her spilt coffee, which was now dripping off the keyboard and trickling towards some of Tom’s papers. With a good excuse to bring her research to an end, Holly jumped up and raced to the kitchen for a cloth. She grabbed a dishcloth from the kitchen sink, but before she turned back towards the study, she glanced out of the window and her body froze. She was staring at the moondial.

      She had so far refused to allow her mind to confront directly the idea that the dial had played any role whatsoever in the vision she had seen other than simply being the very hard surface she had hit her head on. Now, she hadn’t only found a link to the moondial’s past life, she had, if her mind allowed it, found a link to the vision of the future she had foreseen.

      The spilt coffee was left to dry of its own accord as Holly did her best to convince herself that she was simply jumping to conclusions; irrational conclusions, at that. Her vision of the future СКАЧАТЬ