Chapter 31: A Year On

I took them on.

I took that pack on, and then the one after it, and the one after that.

By the next Midsummer, Lakeside Ledgers had eleven packs on its books.

There were three in Devon and two in Dorset.

There was a river pack in Somerset that kept its accounts in a biscuit tin, which I respected.

Coldwater, at the old Luna's insistence. Night Whispers, at Paul's, every quarter, because he said he didn't trust himself with a calculator.

Four were packs from Clive's red book.

The council had given them back their quarry, their farm, their meadows and their cliff houses.

They wanted somebody to make sure nobody ever took them again.

Two of the young Trevail wolves worked for me in the office over the harbour.

One of them had wanted to bite Clive on the quay, and now he did reconciliations and loved it.

The Burnt Quay was in shops.

It went to Truro first, and then Exeter.

Then a department store in London rang for five hundred bottles, and asked if we could make them a bit more burnt.

The cellars had a new roof. The copper still had been scrubbed, by hand, by both packs, over three weekends, and it shone.

The old Luna got her first dividend in December. Four hundred pounds on share number one.

She rang me when it arrived.

"Is that all, pet?"

"It's eight percent."

"Hm." A pause. "Clive would've charged forty."

"Clive's not on the council's list for parole for another eleven years."

"Then I'll take my eight percent," she said, "and be glad of it."

In July I drove north for her ninety-second birthday.

On my own, in the MG, because Jago was bottling and the van had died again.

I went by the lake first, to drop Paul his quarterly accounts.

On the road back out, a mile short of Hexham, a warning light came on in the dashboard.

I pulled into the first garage in town.

It was a small human place on a back street, two bays, a radio on, a calendar from a tyre company.

A mechanic in blue overalls slid out from under a Ford on a creeper board.

He wiped his hands on a rag and stood up.

It was Duncan.

He'd got leaner, with grease in the lines of his knuckles.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Eclipsed Life of Luna Mischa from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.