The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,123

sure it’s in there somewhere, but it’s an old story and we all know it.’

‘It must have been a lovely thing for the congregation to look at during services. I’m not surprised that that little girl imagined an angel at the falls rather than a fairy, if she’d grown up seeing this one.’

I looked up at the window again. ‘The jolly little angels at the top look a lot more fun than Gabriel.’

‘Oh, I don’t know … The corners of his mouth look as if they’re curving up and he’s about to smile.’

We walked round the graveyard to look at Nathaniel’s stone and I wasn’t surprised to see a sailing ship carved on it. He lay under a lichened table tomb, surrounded by his descendants.

The older Grace tomb was half-hidden by grass and bushes near the back wall, evidently unused for a very long time and never visited.

Other than that, there seemed to be several local names represented, like Toller and Posset and even Vane – and a few Verdis, too.

‘I think the original Verdis who founded the café were Roman Catholic, but the nearest church would have been Great Mumming, so they must have come over to the Church of England, instead,’ Ned said.

We drove on into the very large village of Thorstane, which had shops, including a small supermarket, a Chinese takeaway and the horrible redbrick church Ned had described.

‘It’s the worst of Victorian Gothic, but over the moors there’s a house in that style that’s truly amazing, even if it is totally over the top: the Red House, where Clara Mayhem Doome and her family live.’

‘I’d like to have a look at that.’

‘It’s in Starstone Edge, which is a nice place to visit in late spring, or summer. It’s much higher than Thorstane and gets much more extreme weather in winter, though.’

He paused at the side of the road a bit further on and indicated a barn-like building opposite. ‘That used to be where the Strange Brethren held their blood-and-thunder meetings.’

I couldn’t imagine that the building ever looked church-like, but now there were cheery-looking posters on a board outside and the doors were painted bright red.

‘It fell into disuse well before my time, when the last of the old Brethren died off and the new generation didn’t take to the idea so much,’ he said. ‘But now, as the community centre, it’s the heart of the village and all sort of things go on in there.’

Then he looked at his watch and said he was hungry and why didn’t we go and have something to eat?

‘There’s a pub up on the edge of the moors, on the Starstone Edge road, where they do a good lunch, the Pike with Two Heads.’

‘OK,’ I agreed. ‘But why on earth is it called the Pike with Two Heads? Is it some sort of heraldic thing?’

‘You’ll see,’ he said mysteriously, and soon we’d left the last straggling cottages behind us and were driving up a single-track lane, to where a large, low old building stood alone, like an escapee from a Daphne du Maurier film, the sign painted with a two-headed fish flapping to and fro in the wind.

The pub took on a more modern and less creepy aspect as we approached, having added a new restaurant extension on one side of the old building, like that of the Devil’s Cauldron.

A row of what were probably once stables had been turned into motel rooms.

The car park was surprisingly full and so was the pub, when we went inside. Ned insisted we detour en route to the restaurant, so he could show me the original of the pub sign: a huge and ancient-looking mutant fish in a glass case, which did indeed have two heads. It was not a thing of beauty.

‘It looks fed up to the gills,’ I observed.

‘So would you if you’d been stuffed and varnished,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s see if we can get a table.’

A waitress found us a table for two by the window overlooking a stretch of gloomy moors under hurrying pewter clouds. I’m sure when we got out of the car, the temperature was several degrees lower than it had been even at St Gabriel’s church.

We ordered food. I chose carrot and coriander soup with a tuna melt toastie, while Ned went the whole hog and had an enormous plateful of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, three kinds of vegetables and thick gravy.

‘If I stoke up now, I’ll only need something light tonight,’