The Stained Glass Heart: A Love…Maybe Valentine eShort

Copyright

Avon

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2015

Copyright © Kat French 2015

Kat French asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780008136277

Version: 2015–01–23

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Epilogue

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

For my lovely mum and fellow book lover,with lots of love xx

Chapter One

‘No way. It’s this house or me, Helen. I’m not even joking.’

Ian looked around the old house in disgust, his eyes lingering on the old-fashioned wiring, the yesteryear decor, the dusty light fittings. Helen watched him, taking in the brow that furrowed too often, the eyes that mocked more than they loved, and the spiteful curl of his lip, which now she came to really look at it, was a little on the thin side. Ian had mean features. They really ought to have served as more of an early warning system.

How could he not look at this place and see potential in its high ceilings, its deep skirting boards, and that grand sweeping staircase in the centre of the chequer-board tiled hall? How could he not yearn to paint the peeling walls, wax the unloved boards, flood the place with light and warmth from those huge picture windows?

Ian turned his irritated blue eyes to her, and she met his gaze head on.

‘I choose the house, Ian. And I’m not even joking.’

*

The moment she said the words, a weight drifted off Helen’s shoulders. She felt it go, floating up through the three floors of the house and out through the long unused chimney in the small attic bedroom. Well goodbye, and good riddance. She’d buy this house alone, thank you very much.

Helen didn’t know it at the time, but she wasn’t the first woman to be relieved of a lover by number seventeen Delaney Street. There hadn’t been a man living successfully under that roof in the last hundred and thirty-eight years.

As she left, she stroked a hand over the doorframe, admiring the way the sun caught the old stained glass inlaid above the entrance. Squinting at it, she tried to make out what lay beneath the dust … words of some kind, maybe? Cleaning that would be one of the first things she’d do. She’d love to see what lay beneath the dirt.

*

The sale went through like a dream, and with almost indecent haste the house belonged to Helen. Her friends and family thought she’d lost her mind buying the big old house on Delaney Street alone, but she held firm. Never in her life had she been so sure of anything.

Chapter Two

‘I still think you were a little hasty, Xanthe,’ Alice said, sprinkling diamond heart’s-ease dust along the cracks in the bedroom floorboards from Xanthe’s tiny, old glass vial. ‘He might have actually loved her, given time.’

Xanthe perched on Helen’s new bed that had been delivered to seventeen Delaney Street earlier that day and shrugged her delicate shoulders, thoroughly unrepentant. Her floor-sweeping, simple empire line black dress rippled as she moved.

‘Poppycock. He was no Clark Gable,’ she said.

Alice got on her knees and blew the pale, glittery dust into the cracks, her pencil-skirted backside balanced over her stiletto heels.

‘Clark Gable,’ she muttered, loading her tone purposefully with sarcasm. ‘You might be a witch, Xanthe, but you’re so out of touch.’

‘Well, excuse me for dying eighty-three years ago,’ Xanthe said archly. ‘They just don’t make men like they did in my day.’

Alice swivelled around. ‘Yes they do, and I was having a good time with several of them until you sodding killed me.’

The air around Xanthe turned yellow with mirth. ‘It was your own fault. If you hadn’t insisted on bringing home a different man every week I’d have let you live to a ripe old age. It was wearing me out having to get rid of them all.’

‘Have you never heard of fun, old woman?’ It was an insult Alice threw whenever she wanted to hit Xanthe where it hurt. Even though she’d chosen her twenty-five-year-old self to reside in as a ghost, Xanthe had been almost eighty years old when she’d died alone in the house on Delaney Street.

Xanthe’s shimmering yellow aura turned abruptly red. ‘Men aren’t fun, and love isn’t a joke, Alice. I learned that lesson for all of us. I saved you from yourself.’

‘Did it never occur to you that I didn’t want saving?’ Alice chided, standing up and smoothing her hands down her slender, once gym-toned hips. They’d had this conversation many times over the two years since Alice’s lifeless, fifty-two-year-old body had been spotted at the foot of the stairs by the postman peering through the letterbox.

‘Look at me. I’m foxy,’ she went on, indignant. ‘I was having the time of my life until you bloody ended it.’

‘You should be thanking me,’ Xanthe said, glancing up as Sarah, the other ghost of Delaney Street, slid into the room.

‘Don’t tell me. I should be thanking you too,’ Sarah said, rolling her round blue eyes as she smoothed a hand over her perfectly flicked-out blonde bob, every inch the perfect Fifties sweetheart. If there was such a thing as a spooks am-dram society, she’d have been a shoo-in for Sandy in Grease.

‘Thank you, Xanthe,’ Sarah continued in a bored tone. ‘Thank you for murdering my husband, and then seeing off any other man who ever came near me.’

Sarah and her husband Dennis had bought the house on Delaney Street as newlyweds after Xanthe died in 1933, unaware they’d inherited a ghostly resident even as Xanthe hurled Dennis out of a second floor window when he’d leaned out to watch a shapely neighbour sashay out of view. Unbeknownst to Sarah, Dennis had been indulging in not one but two extra-marital affairs, but Xanthe had sussed him easily and dispatched him without remorse.

‘Biggest favour I ever did you,’ Xanthe said, standing up and clapping her bejewelled hands. ‘Now ladies, enough grumbling. Helen arrives tomorrow. A new start. We have work to do downstairs.’

They melted away, three generations of ethereal women, all tied by a common thread to number seventeen Delaney Street: in their entire earthly lives, none of them had ever known true love.

Chapter Three

Helen arrived alone the next morning, purposefully so. She’d turned down all offers of help, wanting to savour her first day in the house alone, a successful young girl-about-town with the key to her own front door. And what a door it was too. Solid and old, its once smart red coat of paint was starting to peel, but that was easily remedied.

Dragging her suitcase over the threshold, she banged the door closed behind her and stood there for a few moments drinking in the silence. Home. Now where to start? Glancing upwards, her eyes settled on the stained glass over the entrance. There

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