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pots of earthenware everywhere. But one wall had been transformed into an ultra-modern and terribly antiseptic kitchen workstation.
    ‘It’s Health and Safety. Even little home cake businesses like mine need to be checked over and meet standards. There are all sorts of rules and regulations! It’s not like the days when I knocked out a few cakes and some jam on the kitchen table andsold them at the WI Markets,’ I said regretfully. ‘Once things took off, it seemed easier to convert part of the kitchen to a sort of production line.’
    ‘So, the bride cake business is booming?’
    I nodded. ‘It
really
took off last year when I was asked to design a cake for the Pharamond wedding, over at Middlemoss, and there was loads of publicity. It was a bit of a challenge, what with him being a well-known chef and cookery writer and Lizzie a keen cook too. They could easily have made their own, except they couldn’t agree which of them was going to do it.’
    ‘Didn’t she write those
Perseverance Cottage Chronicles
that you used to love reading, all grow-your-own and recipes?’
    ‘Yes, she still does. It was her books that really inspired me and Ben to try and live as self-sufficiently as possible. The cake was quite easy, three tiers in the form of apple pies.’
    ‘Weird. Why apple pies?’
    ‘I don’t know, except that she and her husband had some long-running feud about who made the best one. The cake featured in the wedding pictures in
Lancashire Life
, and so did the one I did earlier this year, when Sophy Winter over at Sticklepond married her gardener. That was trickier—one big square cake with knot gardens in the corners, and a circular maze in the middle, with a bust of Shakespeare at the centre. I told you all about the discovery of a link between the family and the Bard, didn’t I? Secret documents in a hidden compartment seeming to infer that the Winters were descended from Shakespeare? It was all a bit Da Vinci code!’
    ‘I could hardly have missed the story! But it seems very unlikely to me and it’s still not proven, is it?’
    ‘No, I expect they’ll be arguing about it for years, but Sophy has built a whole business out of it. They get loads of visitors to the house and garden now.’
    ‘You know her?’
    ‘Yes, we got friendly while working out the design for the cake.She’s really nice, and so is her daughter, Lucy. Which reminds me, how is my lovely goddaughter these days? And
where
is she?’
    Pia, christened Philippa, is Libby’s daughter by her brief first marriage. Her second husband, Joe Cazzini, adopted the infant and doted on her, despite already having grown-up children and grandchildren of his own, but her relationship with Libby became increasingly stormy once she hit the terrible teens. Libby tended to be a bit strict with her and I expect having a young-looking, beautiful and glamorous mother around becomes a liability rather than an asset at a certain age. You could hardly have called Gloria Martin a good role model for acquiring parenting skills, either, but Libby did her best.
    ‘God knows where she is,’ she said gloomily now. ‘I text her all the time, but if I get a reply, it’s just something like, “AM OK”, which she would say anyway, whether she was or not. I thought you might know—she tells you things she doesn’t tell me, sometimes.’
    ‘No, I haven’t had an email for a few weeks now…and I have a feeling then that she said she was somewhere in the Caribbean, on an island.’
    ‘The Caribbean is all islands.’
    ‘No, I meant a
little
island, belonging to someone.’
    ‘Possibly. Once she came into her trust fund at eighteen and I lost all control over her, she could be anywhere. Joe must have been mad, doing that!’
    ‘Well, remember what we were like at that age? We thought we knew it all! You finished your art foundation year and blagged your way onto a fashion course in London, and I horrified poor Granny by often staying overnight with Ben in