CHAPTER ONE
WINNIE
Mum: Winnie, I got back from the shops and found the note you stuck to the telly. I can’t believe you just left for the countryside without even saying goodbye! If you’d told me in person, I could have shown you the lovely sundresses I picked up for you at the charity shop. I think you’d look very fetching in this sunflower one. Perhaps if you had the dress, a man could be taking it off you right now. Think on that.
“I’ll have gin in an IV,” I mutter to the bartender as I slide into a seat, water dribbling off the end of my nose onto the pristine wooden bar. I roll up my sleeve and present her with my wrist.
She flashes me a sympathetic smile. “I’m clean out of IVs, sorry. How about with ice and tonic?”
“That’ll have to do.” I brush my ruined, sodden hair out of my face. When I lean on my elbows, my best lightweight wool coat squelches.
“Bad day?” The bartender raises a perfectly tweezed eyebrow asshe fixes my drink.
“I don’t know what gave you that idea. Today’s been wonderful. I thought I’d try the new Supersize Baptism over at your local church.” I point out the window to the white Presbyterian steeple towering over the flooding village green. “I figured you can never have enough of the god juice.”
I drop my ruined leather tote on the floor at my feet, wedge my purple suitcase in the corner of the bar, and drape my cashmere scarf over the top of it. Maybe if I lay it out nicely, it won’t dry all misshapen.
I notice the bartender adding a double shot to my drink. She slides it across the bar to me. “At least if you’re doused in holy water, you’ll repel any vampires in the vicinity.”
“Honestly, bring on the vampires. An eternal bite sounds brilliant right about now.” I tug down the neck of my shirt. “This drink is excellent. I shall have another. And a plate of something unhealthy and delicious, ideally with cheese.”
“Cheese does make everything better. Another G&T and a basket of loaded wedges, coming up.”
She goes off to the other end of the bar to put in my order, while I drink my G&T far too quickly and curse my own stupidity. Today’s disaster is entirely my fault. I’m always the responsible one, the one with the checklist and the Instagram-famous organisation system. I never mess up.
But I’ve been messing up everything lately.
I’ve spent the last two hours waiting in sideways rain at the train station in Argleton, Loamshire for my new client to pick me up. It was only after I checked my phone for the gazillionth time and pulled up the email from Reginald, Lord Valerian’s personal secretary, that I realised I got the date wrong. Somehow, I, Winnie Preston – the woman who gets paid to clean up other people’s chaotic lives – showed up for my new job a whole day early and was waiting in the pouring rain for a client who wasn’t expecting to pick me up until tomorrow.
How did I get it so wrong? I studied Reginald’s emailed instructions a hundred times. I wrote the dates in my calendar. I colour-coded them according to the ClutterQueens colour chart.
If I’m being honest with myself, my head’s been filled with cotton wool ever since Patrick. And Claire. And my mother and her terrifying sundresses don’t help – in the photos she sent me, I could see that one was covered in red splotches, more a crime scene photograph than a fashion choice. The other had bright yellow flowers with terrifying beady eyes in the centres. They were awful, and I think that she knows that.
The sundresses will join the two breadmakers and the antique apothecary cabinet she bought me yesterday, and the twenty-two pairs of men’s socks from the day before.
No matter how many times I tell her not to, she still buys me these “gifts”. Nothing I say or do will stop her, so I will accept the breadmakers and the creepy sundresses and the apothecary cabinet and the socks and I will throw them away, and the ordeal will begin again next week.
I stare at her text message as raindrops continue to roll off the end of my nose. I had initially debated hopping on the next train and heading back to London. I’d be too late to find a hotel, so I’d have to crash at Mum’s, but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad this time, and then I could flat hunt in the morning before catching the train I wassupposedto catch …
But some defiant part of me whispered, “You escaped, Winnie. You escaped London and that cursed house and all those horrible memories. Don’t go back now.”
So I did what any self-respecting girl would do in my position. I squared my jaw, smoothed down my frizzy hair, and headed for the pub.
Which is where I find myself now, staring at the bottom of a G&T glass. How did that get empty so fast?
The bartender places a new drink beside it.
“You deserve a knighthood. Is there a B&B or hotel nearby?” I say, as I take a sip. I nearly choke. She made this one even stronger than the last.
This girl’s got my back.
“We have a couple of rooms upstairs.” She pulls apint for a customer further down the bar. “Nothing fancy, mind, but the pillows aren’t lumpy and we throw in a roast dinner.”
“Sold.” I glance around the pub. It is just on dinner time, and the place is starting to fill up. It’s a typical country pub, with a community noticeboard, quiz team draws and sepia-toned photographs of horses on the walls, and paper coasters advertising a locally-brewed cider. It’s a far cry from the glitzy cocktail bars I used to go to with Claire, where we’d yell gossip to each other over pounding music and try to get Claire laid.
By contrast, all the alcohol I’ve consumed in the last three months has been done in my empty flat while lying on my IKEA rug and raging along with the angry music pounding out of my speakers until my downstairs neighbour bangs on the ceiling.
And now I can’t even do that.
