Black Lake by Johanna Lane Page B

been studying him as he drank, and he had the horrible feeling that the man could tell what he was thinking. He had felt more comfortable in the larger meetings, more of a businessman drawing up a deal than someone in need of financial assistance from the government. He and Foyle were partners, two Donegal men, fighting for the good of a local treasure, against the city bureaucrats. But that feeling was gone now. The passage of this year had broken him down. He remembered his early dealings with Frank Foyle. John was the man from the big house, from a family who had remained prosperous for centuries, a family who had given work to local men in the post-Famine years. But John needed the government now, more than they needed him, and he had seen the click of recognition when they realized. With that, he had felt as if he were evaporating, as if he was somehow diminished with each meeting, so that now he was weak and had been weakened for good.
    Outside the office, he stopped to collect himself.
    A voice behind him said, “Mr. Campbell, how are you keeping?”
    It was Mrs. Baskin, the chemist. She was always very well turned out, even when she served in the shop. Marianne had drawn his attention to this one day, after filling a prescription for Kate. She mused that Mrs. Baskin could have done better. “Better than what?” John had wondered. Marianne was still relatively new to Dulough then and he hadn’t dared to ask whether she meant “better than here.”
    “So you’ll be opening those gates to the tourists then?”
    Surely the posters couldn’t be up already, John thought.
    “It was only that Mary was in the other day,” she added.
    So it had been Mrs. Connolly. There was no point in getting het up about it, the news would be out soon anyway.
    “I might come up and have a look at the place myself—if I can get someone to mind the shop. I mean if it’s all right with you, but if the tourists…”
    Her voice trailed off. John saw that it was his job now to be polite. “Yes, yes. Of course. Please do. You’d be very welcome.” He’d better get used to this.
    Twenty minutes later, as he swung the car into the muddy driveway outside the new cottage, he was surprised that instinct had not made him drive up to the big house. Through the window, he could see his son sitting at the table. Philip looked around expectantly when he heard the door open and watched in silence as his father took off his coat and hung it on the hook behind the door. John was taken aback by Philip’s appearance; he seemed to have grown younger in the past few days. His feet knocked against the chair legs without reaching the floor and he was impossibly thin, his skin almost transparent, the veins traceable rivers in his arms. Between tentative bites of a cold roast beef sandwich, he told John that Marianne was upset because government men were digging up the garden. John tried to remember if there had been anything in the contracts about preserving the lawn.
    “Where’s Mummy now?”
    “Gone for a walk.” Philip handed him the note Marianne had written in his geography copybook. He read the looping scrawl of his wife’s handwriting. It was clearer than usual, a little more carefully written, as a concession to her son. John had been bending down to understand better what Philip was saying and now his muscles hurt as he stood. “Try to eat that up, we’ll have something nice tomorrow.”
    He drove the half mile or so up to the big house. Parking the car at the back, on the patch of grass in front of the barn, he took a shortcut through the scullery door. In the kitchen, the chessboard tiles had just been washed, so he walked on his tiptoes across them, leaving a crescent trail behind. He unlocked the front door and deliberately left it swinging open behind him. He would have to talk to Murphy about this. Dulough was never locked.
    First he would take a look at the grass. They had indeed dug up the lovely old stone path, and remnants of