Tiger Ragtime by Catrin Collier

father who live together. As you were,’ he reminded her strongly.
    ‘So do I, Micah, but it’s my life we’re talking about.’ She was furious with him for even thinking that she would consider otherwise. ‘As for the people around here, where else would they buy their bread? There isn’t another decent baker in the Bay.’
    ‘You’re changing the subject again, Edyth, as you always do when I try to talk to you about us.’ Micah finished his beer, rose from his chair and pushed it back under the table.
    Edyth had known Micah less than a year but she could tell when he was angry. Unlike most people he became quieter, more softly spoken, something she found difficult to adjust to after the emotional explosions of her four sisters while they were growing up together in Pontypridd.
    ‘Shall I see you tomorrow, on the Escape?’ she asked in an effort to appease him. They had met every Sunday afternoon on his boat since they had begun their affair. They also frequently stole a few hours during the late afternoons and early evenings in the week.
    ‘It’s where I practise my saxophone after services every Sunday,’ he said shortly. ‘We’ll talk then.’
    He picked up his saxophone case. ‘Micah …’
    ‘There could still be strangers lurking around the Bay. Best lock up behind me.’ He stepped outside and closed the door behind him without giving her his customary goodnight kiss.
    She thrust the bolt home and leaned against the wall. She really was too tired to think. But as she climbed the stairs she wondered why it was so difficult for a married woman to run a business or work outside the home. Her mother had managed it. But then she had worked in Harry’s business and she’d had their dedicated and loving housekeeper to run the house and look after the family in her absence.
    Even if she found the money to employ a housekeeper to carry out her domestic and family chores – and at the moment she hadn’t a halfpenny to spare – where, in this modern day and age, would she find a woman willing to sacrifice her own life to that of an employer’s?
    David Ellis had never slept in a room with the curtains drawn. Not even when he had shared a bedroom with his younger brother. Since birth he had followed the farmers’ dictate of rising with the sun and if not exactly going to bed when it set, sitting up no more than an hour or two after dark, especially during the long winter nights. More would have been considered a waste of coal and candles and although his family no longer had to practise the stringent economies they had been forced to adhere to before his sister had married Harry, old habits died hard. Despite his late night after the carnival, David left his bed the moment the first cold grey fingers of light highlighted the summits of the eastern hills that towered over the reservoir below the farmhouse. He stood at the window in his pyjama trousers, staring at the view that was so familiar to him he had long since taken it for granted. The Ellis Estate’s eighteenth-century farmhouse and outbuildings had been built in a square that enclosed the farmyard. Situated just below the crest of a hill so the top could shelter it from the worst of the winter snowstorms that swept the Brecon Beacons, the house was as large and substantial as any manor in Wales.
    For six months of the year it was a cold, bleak, and cruel place. But in spring and summer it was easy to forget the deep snowdrifts and heavy frosts that blocked the road and killed the weaker animals. Below him, sheep he had watched grow from frisky gambolling lambs to stolid maturity cropped the grassy slopes that tumbled down to the valley floor. Rabbits popped in and out of burrows and half a dozen wild ducks swam peacefully among the reeds at the water’s edge of the reservoir that flooded the valley floor. A pair of kites circled lazily on the same level as his window. It was a quiet, peaceful scene – too peaceful for a man who loved a