By the North Door

by Meg Elizabeth Atkins

Published 1 January 1975
Lucy was thirty-eight, plump and disorganized. And her mother kept nagging her. "If I hadn't gone away," her mother said, "none of this would have happened. I've never heard of anything like it. You can't marry a man you've known only five minutes. You can't." "Yes, I can," Lucy said. "And it's not five minutes." But her mind asked, "How can he love me? A man like Roland?" They'd met at the Marleigh Festival and, different though they seemed to be, they knew they would continue to meet. Roland drove a Jaguar and lived in a beautiful old house called Nine Maidens. His father had been sixty when he had been born and no-one had wanted to discuss him. Gradually, Lucy learned that he was said to have been a powerful witch and Roland's strange sister appeared. It might all have been too much for Lucy to handle, but then Inspector Henry Beaumont came into the picture...