Rose Leopard by Richard Yaxley Page A

what happened.’
    â€˜Probably dysentery.’ The church had unsettled me; I was feeling gloomy. ‘Or TB. A bad head cold. Fell off a horse. Who cares?’
    â€˜Oh Vince.’ Kaz grabbed my arm, snuggled against me. ‘Come on, grumble-bum. You can do better than that. Tell me a story. Come on, tell me what happened to Alice Margaret Driscoll.’
    I sighed, looked at her glorious hands on my stained jacket.
    We sat together on a grassy knoll beneath the lengthening shadows of the elms.
    â€˜Alice Margaret Driscoll,’ I told her, ‘was an unremarkable child in every way except one. She lived in the quaint English village of Cheltingham, her father was a … a shopkeeper with a bad beard, and her mother bottled elderberry jam. She had two brothers named Jack and, um, Eugene, and she went to school and got most of her sums right. All pretty ordinary and predictable.’
    â€˜But?’
    â€˜But she had one remarkable trait. One thing that set her apart from the local yokels, one thing that gave her the chance to rise above the mundane and entirely predictable future that had been mapped out for her at birth.’
    â€˜You’re stalling’
    â€˜No, I’m scene-setting. Creating suspense, like a good storyteller should. Now, like all remarkable traits, this gift that Alice had could be used for good — or alternatively, it could be used for evil. It all depended upon her character, the inherent self. This was the big question: what sort of person was Alice Margaret Driscoll … really?’
    The English sun dipped further into the horizon, created a thin golden line and occasional splatters of amber. Kaz moved closer, sought my body-warmth.
    â€˜What gift, Vince?’
    â€˜Well, when she was young it only happened every so often. She had to teach herself to use the gift, which she did by the time she was … oh, around fourteen or fifteen.’
    â€˜What gift?’
    â€˜Haven’t I said yet? Sorry. Alice Margaret Driscoll could see other people’s thoughts.’
    â€˜She was a mind-reader.’
    â€˜No — a thought-reader. There’s a difference. Kaz, the mind is a vast unintelligible mass of gobbledygook. Mind-readers have a lot of bogus territory to negotiate. They walk through huge swamps to find the key to the castle. Individual thoughts, however, are more tangible, more considered. More dangerous in the wrong hands, methinks.’
    â€˜Okay, point taken. She was a thought-reader. What happened?’
    Pause for reflection, a quick pan of the surroundings. Old graveyards, I thought, are delightfully disorganised. Why is it that new graveyards and crematoriums have to be so planned? Rectangular memories, slots for the deceased — economic rationalism, even there?
    The random strike of death should always be reflected by disorder.
    â€˜Nothing much, initially.’ I leaned my head onto Kaz’s shoulder, drank in her aromas like a bee sucking pollen. ‘A little blackmail amongst friends. Did you know that Jean Arthurs likes Peter Ponsonby? Or that Angus Brute wants to do it behind the barn with Jezabel Smithers? Or that Will Hornboy-Taylor has done it behind the barn with a rather accommodating sheep? Pretty harmless stuff — until she thought-read her mother.’
    â€˜And?’
    â€˜And discovered a closet overloaded with skeletons, each one of them vigorously rattling the door.’
    Kaz grinned, moved our hands together, locked our fingers.
    â€˜Go on then. Rattle away,’ she said.
    â€˜Right. As it happens, Mrs Driscoll was not really Mrs Driscoll. Her real name was Fanny May, former servant to the real Mrs D. When Alice hopped blithely into her mind, she’d been remembering years before — a hotter-than-Hades lustfest with Mr D, a.k.a. Geoffrey Brian.’
    â€˜So Fanny May and Fanny did?’
    â€˜Exactly. Ah, the winsome folly of youth. Anyway, Alice fossicked around