Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 2: The House on Willow Street, The Honey Queen, Christmas Magic, plus bonus short story: The Perfect Holiday

The driver came to a fork in the road and turned right, as Cashel had instructed. There were two ways into Avalon from this direction: the winding road along the coast, and the road that came over the hill. Cashel preferred the hill road with its view of the town, spread out like a cloak, and the beauty of the horseshoe bay with its white gleaming sands shining up at them. In the distance, on the hill, was the old De Paor estate and the beautiful woods surrounding Avalon House.

Cashel gazed at it for a few minutes. He didn’t know who was living there now, who owned it, who’d renovated it. He knew nothing. He didn’t want to know. His mother had known better than to raise the subject and then, in the last few years, she hadn’t been able to. What did he care about Avalon House anyway? What did he care about the bloody Powers? Suki and Tess, who between them had managed to rip his heart out all those years ago. No, he didn’t give a damn who lived there. That house was bad luck, bad luck to anyone who had anything to do with it.

Chapter Eight (#ulink_b014f455-4da2-5221-8a77-3f47483a8067)

Tess slipped into the back of the church quietly, not wanting Cashel to see her. She had spoken to Riach on the phone the day before and he had assured her it was all right for her to come to his mother’s funeral.

‘And Cashel knows about it?’ Tess said, hesitantly.

‘He knows,’ was all Riach would say. And Tess could read what she wanted into those words.

That Cashel no longer cared, that Cashel was so grief-stricken it was immaterial, that Cashel had forgotten her …

The church was full, with people standing at the back. Tess made her way a little to one side so she could see Anna’s coffin, which was covered in white flowers. Before the dementia had taken her, Anna had loved flowers and her garden. She and old Mrs Maguire, who used to run the butcher’s shop, had both been avid gardeners; Tess had often found them discussing plants and cuttings together in Lorena’s Café.

The whole of Avalon was in St Mary’s church. Danae, resplendent in black velvet with a sombre hat upon her long, tortoiseshell hair. Belle from the hotel, doing her best to look funereal but failing because really Belle always looked as though she had stepped off the stage. Even Dessie from the pub was there, which was unusual because funerals meant extra business and he’d be busy behind the bar, getting everything ready for the mourners to pour and cheer themselves up with a few stiff ones as soon as the service was over. A feed of pints seemed to help so many people get over the pain of death, Dessie would cheerfully tell anyone who’d listen.

Tess was tall enough to see the Reilly brothers seated in the front pew. They towered over everyone else. Riach’s head was dark and Cashel’s … well, Cashel’s was almost the same as she remembered from all those years ago: dark, but now with a scattering of grey. It was strange, looking at the back of his head from this distance instead of being beside him, touching him.

So many years had passed, but for a moment Tess felt again like the young girl she’d been when she’d fallen in love with him for the first time. She reached in her pocket for a tissue and found nothing.

‘Here,’ said someone, thrusting a bit of tissue into her hand. ‘You need this. It’s a terrible day, isn’t it? But, sure, it’s a mercy that the Lord’s finally taken her, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose it is,’ said Tess.

And it was a mercy. Anna Reilly was not the sort of woman who’d have wanted to be trapped in a body with her mind somewhere else. It was a sad end for such a vibrant, bright woman.

Father Liam was conducting the Mass and Tess rather thought that her old friend would have preferred the sweet Nigerian, Father Olumbuko, to conduct proceedings. Anna had never been conservative. She’d have liked the tall African priest with his gentle eyes, but she’d never known him, not properly. For the past three years, she hadn’t known anyone, including Tess.

Funerals always made Tess think of other funerals, in the same way that weddings made her think of other weddings. Today, in the grand old church, she thought back to her father’s funeral in St Ethelred’s, up the road. To outsiders, Irish funerals must have seemed strange, with their enormous crowds. Funerals were done differently in other countries, with only invited guests and nobody daring to go to the graveside. But here in Avalon, everyone wanted to turn up to pay their respects, and graveyards were generally full of mourners, teetering on gravesides, wondering if it was terrible to walk across the actual graves or should they stand on the edges?

Death was a part of Irish life as much as birth was. The cycle of birth, death and rebirth was part of a pre-Christian, pre-Celtic Ireland that had lived on through the centuries. The rituals might have changed but the crowds remained constant.

Her father was so well loved that the whole town had turned out for his funeral, like today. Tess could remember her sister sobbing in the front pew as she knelt on one of the old embroidered kneelers. Suki had cried and sobbed and yet managed to check her mascara in the funeral car mirror as they drove back to the house, where tea, drinks and sandwiches were laid out.

‘Dad loved a party,’ Suki had said. ‘He’d love this one. Did you buy enough drink, Tess? I might make us pink gins, wouldn’t that be lovely? Dad would like that.’

At the time, Tess had been so grief-stricken that she’d simply gaped open-mouthed at her sister and said nothing. How could she think of making pink gins when their father was dead? Darling, darling Dad. But then that was Suki all over: try and find the fun element to everything. The fun element meant you could avoid thinking about the actual sadness.

For years, this had annoyed Tess beyond measure. Now, Tess felt sorry for her older sister. She didn’t think Suki had ever mourned their father properly; had ever mourned anything, for that matter. Suki didn’t do the past, she was too busy rushing towards the future with both hands held out, like a child about to receive a birthday present.

Tess looked round the church today, at the couples and families who had come to pay their respects. She had nobody with her.

A soprano launched into ‘Panis Angelicus’ and Tess felt the tears well up inside. Music did that to her, grabbed her heart and twisted it. She had to stop thinking like this. It was stupid, futile. She’d think instead of Kitty and Zach. She’d hugged Zach this morning before he’d gone to school and he hadn’t pulled away and said, ‘Oh, Ma,’ the way he sometimes did. It was as if he knew she was sadder than she should have been over the death of an old lady with dementia.

Seventeen-year-olds were supposed to be totally self-absorbed, and Zach could be that way at times. Yet he was remarkably intuitive. She’d never told him about Cashel or why Anna Reilly was a special link with the past, but somehow, she thought he understood. He was a wise old soul, as Suki liked to say. Pity Suki hadn’t been to see them for so long, then, Tess thought crossly.

Finally, the funeral was over and the priests, the coffin and the chief mourners were coming down the church. Tess tried to hide behind the crowd of people because she didn’t want Cashel to see her. She’d come to pay her respects to his mother, nothing more. The tradition at local funerals was for people to throng around the bereaved and offer their sympathies after the coffin was loaded into the hearse. Today, there were hundreds of people in a big crowd around the entrance of the church and it took Tess quite a while to emerge. She had no plan to go to the graveyard. Instead she was going to head back to the shop, which she’d shut for the morning. That was on her mind as she finally made it outside and looked instinctively towards the hearse where Cashel and Riach stood. At that instant, Cashel saw her.

Tess was in the middle of a group of people pushing out of the chapel and yet she still felt as if she was all alone with Cashel’s harsh gaze upon her. Nobody else had ever looked at her the way he’d looked that last time, with revulsion in his eyes. And that was the way he looked at her now. Instinctively she winced as if she’d been struck.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ she muttered, as she tried to escape the group of people coming down the steps towards Cashel and Riach. But the crowd was moving as one and Tess was carried inexorably towards the two brothers. Catching sight of her, Riach smiled sadly, before realizing that his brother was standing like a piece of granite beside him. Riach reached out for her, leaning past the crowd of mourners. Tess clasped his hands in sympathy, but she was too aware of Cashel beside him, glaring at her, and she pulled away quickly without saying anything.

Turning back into the crowd, she jostled her way towards the steps of the church, where she could see an escape route. Her heart was pounding and she knew her face was red and flushed. She shouldn’t have come. It had been a mistake. She could have mourned at Anna’s grave another time.

Riach might have told Cashel she was coming, but that didn’t mean she was welcome.

Tess barely saw the people she bumped into in her haste to disappear, until one of them spoke to her.

‘Tess, how are you?’ ventured Danae, having noticed her flushed skin and shocked expression. ‘You look a little unwell.’

‘I’m fine,’ stammered Tess, even though she knew she was anything but fine.

She couldn’t stop now. If only she could make it to the shop. Silkie would be waiting for her, she could hold her tight and sob her heart out, then she would be fine. Right now all she needed was to be as far away from Cashel Reilly as possible.

Cashel had often wondered what he’d do if he saw Tess Power again after all these years. He’d thought about it many, many times, wondering what he’d say to her. He simply hadn’t thought he’d see her at his mother’s funeral.

And in that instant, that electric glance had told him that it wasn’t all over, that he’d never, ever forget.

He wasn’t sure what he’d thought she’d look like: older, dried out, maybe. That’s what he’d wanted. For her to have diminished for having turned him down. And yet she was none of those things. Tess Power looked older, naturally, but despite the black clothes in honour of his mother, she had a glow about her. Her fair hair curled as wildly as ever, but it was short now, probably some chic salon’s work, a messy look that cost a fortune.

She looked strangely more like her sister Suki than she used to, a little like the photographs of their long-dead mother, despite the Power colouring. When they were kids, she’d always looked different, softer than other girls, and she still did, but there was no mistaking those cheekbones, the full lips. Being older suited her: her face had lost the puppy fat of youth, enhancing the elegant beauty that had been there all along.

He’d watched, stunned, as she’d come towards the group of people surrounding him and Riach. He had to hand it to her: Tess Power had guts.

That morning, Riach had muttered about everyone in the town coming, including ‘all the old pals from school …’

Now, Cashel realized what that phrase had meant: Tess.

Mechanically, he shook hands and accepted condolences from the hordes of people lined up to talk to him.

‘I knew your mother, she was a wonderful woman,’ they all said.

‘She’ll be sadly missed in the village.’

‘It’s a mercy really, Cashel, she wasn’t herself.’

He let the words flow over him. People did their best in times of pain, they tried to find the right things to say, but when you were hurting it was all so meaningless.

He remembered Tess and what it had been like all those years ago and the things his mother and Riach had said. They’d done their best to console him, but that too had been meaningless.

‘You’ve clearly made your mind up, so go. I suppose you’ll forget her,’ Riach had said nineteen years ago, none too confidently.

His mother had been more prosaic. ‘If you want to go off and leave Tess this way, Cashel, then you must do it. Remember that I’m here for you. Avalon is here for you. Wherever you go, you can always come back. And wherever you are, you’ll always have our love.’

That love was being buried today.

The funeral director, recognizing who was in charge, gave Cashel a nod to signal that it was time they left for the graveyard.