A Village in Jeopardy (Turnham Malpas 16) by Rebecca Shaw Page A

live?’
    ‘Somewhere Bristol way, I think.’
    ‘You don’t know any more than that? Do you think Sylvia might know?’
    ‘She might, but I doubt it. The Fosketts have always bred like rabbits. Dottie once added up how many cousins she had and when she got to eighteen she had to stop, but she said there were many more.’
    ‘When Sylvia comes home I’ll ask her. We’ve got to find her; I can’t bear her to be sad. I’m surprised at you, Willie, saying something about her past life to her. You should be ashamed.’ Beth sat down to wait, saddened by her lack of progress, and Willie reluctantly had to decide that she had grown up since she’d gone to Cambridge, and he came to the conclusion she wouldn’t be wanting a game of Ludo, not no more. He sighed for past happiness.
    Sylvia didn’t know where Dottie might have gone either. ‘You see, love, it all happened so quick. She just went. I’m real sorry about what Willie said. Will you forgive him? He doesn’t want to be at odds with you, nor Alex for that matter.’
    ‘We can’t do nothing; we’ve got to try to find her. You’ve no idea how she helped me, when I came back from Africa in such a state, more than any other person except Dad. Only Dottie could talk to me without tiptoeing round me as if I was a piece of Royal Worcester; I needed her and it’s the least I can do after what she did for me. So, I’ll be back.’
    ‘Right, Beth, but remember me and Willie love you no matter what. I sat with you either side of the Aga in your Mum’s kitchen feeding you, and your Mum feeding Alex, or vice versa, when you were hardly big enough to have left the hospital and I love you as if you were my own. Don’t fall out permanent, will you?’
    Beth turned back to smile at her, whispered ‘Thanks,’ and went home.
    It was just as she was getting into bed that night she remembered once Dottie being without her phone at home due to the lines coming down at the bottom end of the village in a storm, so she’d asked Caroline to ring her cousin to tell her she’d no phone. Caroline had put the cousin’s number in her phone and promised to ring when she had a minute at the surgery. Beth decided she’d check her mum’s phone first thing in the morning. By the time she woke, however, Caroline had already gone to the village hall to help organise the coffee morning so Beth had to wait.
     
    The most ecstatic person in the crowd at the coffee morning was Alice, because at eight fifteen that very morning the postman had delivered a letter postmarked Rio de Janeiro through Alice’s door.
    She thrust the envelope open and began to read, her eyes filling with tears. ‘My dear Alice’ it began. Her heart missed a beat.
     
I am a fool to run away from the very beat of my heart and come back to meaningless, stupidly endless, mind-numbing work in an office that revolts me with its plush, excessively expensive furnishings and assistants behaving more like slaves than real people. It is all so sickening to me since I met you. Somehow while living near you my values have undergone an almighty change. I no longer revere the extravagant lifestyle I had before I met you. I long to come back to you. I left because I could not believe that someone wanted me only for myself and not my wealth and position. All my life I have lived amongst moneyed people, and it is hard to find someone so genuine that they love you for yourself and not for your status and what your personal wealth can do for them. I’d heard those very same words of yours before several times, and I didn’t believe you meant them. It felt like a well-repeated old story .
But now I know it wasn’t. You are the most genuine person I know and realise, with your high principles about marriage and fidelity, what it cost you to say what you did. If you say yes to a proposal of marriage from me I shall come back to Turnham Malpas immediately and make a life for the two of us. To marry in the church where my ancestors