An hour or so later, having exhausted what passed for reading material in the Ives household—a copy of the Daily Mail, a well-thumbed Farmer’s Almanac and a couple of tattered issues of the Union Jack, containing a Sexton Blake serial with the last episode missing—Arthur decided that perhaps it would be polite to show his face in the bar. After all, he didn’t want to appear stand-offish.
Arthur descended the stairs, past walls hung with grotesquely misshapen corn dollies he supposed to have been the handiwork of the Ives children. As he pushed open the door to the tap room, the noise of the regulars hit him like the slap in the face Letitia Hamilton had favoured him with one otherwise rather dull evening over a year earlier. It had been all Mary’s fault. Boredom always brought out her mis
