The Reaper Read Free Page B

Frome, where it was soon invisible under a layer of mud.
    Then he cycled home.

two
    CHOCOLATE CAKES WERE IN heavy demand at the Fox-ford Church fete, held in the rectory garden. The devil's food, Black Forest, death by chocolate, brownies, chocolate fudge and chocolate orange sold in the first hectic ten minutes, before anyone bought coffee or lemon. Apple cake was almost as popular. In fact, anything with fresh fruit in it, cheesecake, pies and tarts included, sold easily. Rich fruit cakes, being more of a winter treat, were slower to go, but they found customers in the first hour.
    Rachel Jansen was assisting. She would have been better on the garden stall, because she knew as much about plants as anyone in the village, but a local nurseryman had an arrangement with the organisers and sold his own produce, giving a percentage to the fete profits. The honour of running the cake stall went to Cynthia Haydenhall, the Chair of the Women's Institute, who behaved as if she had cooked them all herself. Rachel enjoyed Cynthia's company in the way she enjoyed rum truffles and Bette Midler: in small delicious amounts. Cyn was fun and the source of wonderful gossip, and she liked to dominate. Her improbably black hair was scraped back, bunched and fixed with Spanish combs, suggesting that when things went quiet she might climb on the trestle table, clap her hands and perform a noisy flamenco over the cakes. There was no chance of people ignoring her. She had made it clear at the beginning that she would run the show, price the cakes, sell them and handle the money. Fine. Rachel was content to set out, wrap and keep things tidy. To be fair, the system worked. They reached the point when the only cakes left were a slab of Madeira as solid as cheese, some weary-looking coconut pyramids and Miss Cumberbatch's toffee crispies, steadily congealing into a solid mass attracting wasps.
    "Should we cover these?" Rachel suggested to Cynthia, knowing it was unwise to do anything without asking.
    "The toffee dreadfuls? I don't know what with, amigo. We've only got this roll of kitchen towel, and that will stick to them."
    "They won't be saleable if we let the wasps crawl all over them."
    "It's an open question if they ever were saleable. Is Miss Cumberbatch still here?"
    "Over by the bottle stall, with her brother."
    "Right." With that decision made, Cynthia dipped below the table for a cake tin. "In here, while madam has her back turned. I'll dispose of them later."
    "We can do the same with the others. They're never going to sell now."
    Rachel should have known better than to make two suggestions in the space of a minute.
    "Oh, yes they will," Cynthia informed her. "The rector hasn't been round yet. Last year at the end of the fete he bought everything off the stall just so that no one's feelings were hurt."
    They looked across the lawn to where the Reverend Otis Joy was trying the coconut shy. On this warm afternoon not many had bothered with it. His throw missed the coconuts by a mile, perhaps on purpose. The rector wasn't supposed to win things.
    "So he gets the cakes nobody wants," Rachel said. "Poor guy. He deserves better. We should have saved something he can eat."
    "We don't know what his taste is."
    "I bet he likes chocolate. Devil's food cake. All men go for that."
    Cynthia vibrated her lips at the idea. "You can't offer devil's food to a bible-basher."
    "He'd see the joke. He's got a sense of humour."
    "In spades," Cynthia agreed. "He could tour the clubs with his sermons."
    "As a stand-up?"
    Their eyes met and each of them stifled a giggle.
    "And he's so relaxed about everything."
    "Not a bad looker, either," said Cynthia.
    "Generous, too. He'd give you the shirt off his back," said Rachel, her thoughts returning, as they had more than once, to the afternoon when she'd called for the Help the Aged sack. The rector in his apron was sharp in her memory. The crop of silky dark hair across his chest had been a revelation.
    "That's what