The Disenchanted Widow by Christina McKenna

day.
    One fateful morning, his shocked gardener discovered his lifeless body, clad in nothing more than a bra and matching panties, dangling from the landing chandelier. The year was 1938.
    The house was shut up after that. It lay vacant for several years. Rumors abounded that ill luck would befall anyone who dared enter through its linteled doors—until Ned Grant showed up. Joylessly wed and down on his luck, he saw the opportunity to take advantage of the silly rumor and bought the house for a pittance. The locals resented him for his fearlessness, and he disdained them for the pack of superstitious duffers they surely were.
    “God, what’s keepin’ her the day?”
    Ned’s nephew, Gusty Grant, sat by the turret window in what had once been the ill-fated viscount’s dressing room. The mechanic, in his oil-stained overalls and hobnail lace-ups, could have been a hog in a harem, so gloriously feminine and grand was the chamber.
    Gilt-crested mirrors reflected what once had been an opulence of furnishings and fabrics, dusty and faded now. The theme was pink, the mood flirtatious—lavish drapes, frilled pelmets, and damask armchairs with heart-shaped cushions. There were satinwood closets and lacquered chests sporting swan-neck handles of ebony and glass. A chandelier dripped crystal from the ceiling. Twofat cherubs blowing fatly on trumpets flanked a three-mirrored dressing table raised on bun feet.
    Gusty, backside sunk in an armchair, one foot resting on a velveteen gout stool, was training his binoculars on Rosehip Cottage. He was hoping to get a close-up of Mrs. Hailstone in her nightdress—or better still, out of it—but wasn’t having very much luck so far.
    At his feet lay his pet piglet, Veronica, snorting in porcine slumber.
    He’d chosen this particular room, which he seldom ventured into, because it afforded the best view of the cottage.
    From the moment Mrs. Hailstone drove into Gusty’s life in her battered Morris Traveller, he knew he wanted to look at her for a wee while longer than the few minutes allowed for the fill-up of petrol. That worn fan belt was a godsend. Hadn’t it all worked out so well? Because now she was caught in his sights, quite literally, and what a grand specimen she was!
    On the armrest of the chair a copy of Reader’s Digest lay open at an article about crop circles. Evidence of an alien invasion in East Surrey, or the Devil doing a spot of midnight mowing, who was to say? The mechanic was looking forward to getting stuck into his next article, a study of the eating habits of the twenty-two-tentacled star-nosed mole, but was loath to start it, in case he missed something on the hill.
    He rotated the focus wheel on the binoculars and panned around the rear of the cottage. Her car was parked under the big ash, where she’d left it the day before. But where was she?
    It hadn’t taken him long to learn her routine. She’d go to bed around midnight and was usually up by eight thirty. She’d draw back the curtains in the bedroom at that hour. On three occasions, she’d come out the back in her nightdress to smoke a cigarette. She had two nightdresses: a pink frilly one and a red shiny one with alow-cut neckline. He liked the red one in particular and imagined her in Aunt Dora’s bed thus attired, a fantasy that made his heart hammer and his knees shake.
    Still no sign. Disappointed, he set the binoculars down on the floor beside him, knowing that any minute he’d be hearing a twin thump from the room below.
    The thumper, his Uncle Ned, a onetime farmer who’d survived two world wars and served in one—flat feet and rickets having kept him out of the second—spent most of his time in bed with his bad legs and dodgy chest, nursing his war wounds and listening to the wireless. Gusty, the illicit fruit of a graceless encounter between Ned’s late brother, Eustace, and a washerwoman, did double duty as caregiver and handyman. Along with his brief stints bartending at the