“Has Jack said anything interesting?” Bill asked the tea urn’s guardians.
“He told us a pretty good joke before he was swept away,” said Dick, “but he hasn’t been able to get a word in edgewise since then.”
“Your nippers are having a high old time of it,” Henry observed. “They’re like baby birds catching the crumbs falling from Jack’s plate.”
“Except that, in this case, the crumbs are macaroons, meringues, and brandy snaps,” said Grant.
Visions of sugar shock danced in my head. I promptly abandoned Bill and scurried across the room to pull Will and Rob from the scrum surrounding their idol. After wiping powdered sugar from the boys’ chins and whipped cream from their sticky fingers, I sent them straight home with their father. Bill didn’t object to the prospect of being stuck in the cottage on a rainy day with a pair of hyperglycemic eight-year-olds because he knew it would be pointless. Nothing short of a burst appendix would pry me away from what promised to be the main topic of conversation in Finch for months, if not years, to come.
“Enough is enough,” Lilian murmured. “The poor boy will be crushed to death if we don’t rescue him.” Raising her voice to be heard above the din, she called, “Ladies and gentleman!”
The babble of voices ceased.
“Shall we give our honored guest a chance to breathe?”
Before anyone could reply, Lilian marched across the room, and gently but firmly extracted Jack from his legion of admirers. She then tucked his free hand into the crook of her elbow and guided him to a chair in a corner of the room. The vicar and I promptly slid into the chairs flanking Jack’s and Lilian pulled one over to face his.
The legion, realizing that it had wasted a golden opportunity to question the newcomer, surveyed our defensive perimeter crossly and began to sidle slowly in our direction.
Jack brushed cake, cookie, and bread crumbs from his rumpled blue pullover and smiled gratefully at Henry Cook, who’d brought him a cup of tea.
“Eat up,” said Lilian. “You must be famished.”
“I could eat a horse and chase the jockey,” Jack acknowledged. “Haven’t had a decent bite since Bangkok.”
He tried to balance his overladen plate on his knee, but finally gave up and placed it on the floor. We allowed him to wolf down a ham sandwich, three sausage rolls, a bacon butty, and a gargantuan hunk of Sally Pyne’s Madeira cake before we got down to business.
“You must be tired after your long journey,” the vicar began. “To come all the way from Bangkok—”
“I came all the way from Sydney,” Jack corrected him. “Bangkok was a layover.”
“Do you live in Sydney?” Lilian asked.
“Sometimes,” Jack replied, “but I was born in Malua Bay—about 300 k’s south of Sydney.”
“Do your parents still live there?” I inquired. Behind the question lay several others: Were Jack’s parents alive? If so, why hadn’t they come to the funeral? Had there been a rift in the family? Was that why Mr. Huggins had lived in England while his closest blood relations lived in Australia? And so on.
Sadly, Jack answered only the question I’d actually asked.
“You couldn’t pry my parents away from Malua Bay with a crowbar. It’s their little slice of paradise.” Jack drank his tea, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and regarded me quizzically. “I can give you their phone number, if you want to check up on me.”
I blushed, but Lilian chuckled.
“You must forgive our curiosity, Jack,” she said. “Your late uncle never spoke of his family, and his solicitor failed to inform us of your plans to attend the funeral. If we’d known you were coming, we would have postponed it for another day, to allow you time to arrive at your leisure.”
“No worries,” said Jack. “I didn’t know I was coming until a few days ago. It was all a bit of a rush. Aldous Winterbottom—”
“Your uncle’s solicitor,” the vicar interjected.
“Right,” said Jack. “Old Aldous tottered out to meet me at Heathrow with the keys to Uncle Hector’s digs and a pile of papers. He can vouch for me.” He plunged a hand into a pocket in his cargo shorts. “I’ve got his number here somewhere.”
“I have Mr. Winterbottom’s telephone number,” the vicar assured him, “but I feel no compulsion to ring him. You wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to be here if you weren’t who you say you are.”
“Have you a place to stay this evening?” Lilian inquired. “If not, you’re more than welcome to spend the night with Teddy and me at the vicarage. We have bedrooms to spare.”