13 - The Midsummer Rose Read Free Page A

and occasionally cursing under her breath as her shoes slithered on the wet stretch of rock separating the ‘murder’ house from the river. Just before I passed out yet again, I wondered where the third person, the man, was. Then I remembered the bulk and girth of the dead seafarer. It would need some strength to shift his carcass.
    This time my dreams took me back inside the house, where I found myself locked in the parlour with two enormous horses, maddened by the storm raging outside. Just as one reared up on its hind legs, its evil-looking hooves flailing above me, the window flew open and I was drenched in water.
    But that, at least, was no dream. I surfaced just as the two women were rolling me into the Avon. And I saw the muddy waters close over my head as I lost consciousness for the final time. I remember thinking desperately of Adela. This was it, then. This was the end. I was drowning.

Two
    I raised my eyelids just far enough to see the motes of dust dancing in the sunlight streaming through the open window. The heat lay as heavy as a fur across my knees. I was dry, warm and floating on a cloud somewhere between sleeping and waking. I suspected I must have died and gone straight to heaven …
    But as my other senses began to revive, I realized that heaven could never smell like the Bristol streets on a hot summer’s day. (And if it did, I didn’t want to go there.) Nor would angels, playing their celestial harps, sound like street traders raucously vying with one another for customers. I therefore had to be at home in Small Street, in my own bedchamber, in my own bed.
    Why I should find this idea so strange gradually became clear to me as unwelcome memories started to return, waving at me like discoloured rags from the corners of my mind. The house at Rownham Passage … The storm … The blow to my head … The sickness and nausea … The murder of the Irishman, whose name I could no longer remember … Above all, the two women, one in brown sarcenet, the other in blue brocade, who had tried to drown me in the river …
    Something landed on my chest with all the force of a cartload of turnips hitting a brick wall. I yelled, afraid I was being attacked again. Then my face was licked by a wet, enthusiastic tongue, and breath that could knock a grown man senseless at a dozen paces assaulted the back of my nose, making me sneeze.
    My dog, Hercules.
    I was definitely at home and I wasn’t dreaming. But how I had survived my watery grave and how I had got here were questions that I was unable either to answer or to cope with just at present. I lifted an arm that felt like lead and stroked Hercules’s scruffy little head.
    ‘Hello, lad. All right! All right! I’m as pleased to see you as you are to see me. But just shift a bit, will you? You smell as though you’ve been eating fly-infested meat.’ (Which he probably had, from the drain in the middle of the street. Gnawing at putrefying carcasses was one of his less endearing habits, but also one of the greatest pleasures of his doggy existence.)
    Hercules was not to be deterred, however, and at the sound of my voice grew even more excited, farting loudly to demonstrate his happiness at seeing me again.
    The bedchamber door burst open and Adela came in, flour streaking her forehead, hands still partially caked with dough. She had obviously been in the middle of baking, and wiped them in a hurry. Her beautiful brown eyes, overflowing with anxiety, fixed themselves on me.
    ‘Roger?’ she asked in a whisper of painful intensity. ‘Was that you calling out? Are you properly awake at last?’
    I grinned weakly at her. ‘You’re not looking at a ghost.’
    She threw herself on her knees beside the bed, pushing an indignant Hercules to the floor and embracing me in an all-enveloping hug. Her tears trickled down my face, mingling with my own. I managed, after a great deal of effort, to get both arms around her. This time it was like moving two dead weights.
    How