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In the Shadow of Winter: A gripping historical novel with murder, secrets and forbidden love
Lorna Gray
‘Absorbing and chilling, yet tempered with echoes of a lost romance…this story is one of the best I've read this year for its imagery and originality’ Jane Hunt ReviewsSet in the bleak winter of 1947, you will love this compelling drama if you love historical dramas.The Cotswolds, 1947A relentless winter holds post-war Britain in its deadly grip, and Eleanor Phillips rides out from her beleaguered Cotswold farm to rescue a stranger lost in the storm. But the near-dead man is no stranger and when she recognises Matthew Croft, the old ties of a failed romance tug deeply. Her sweetheart has returned from the war.Suspicion, the police and the panicked flight of a desperate man beat a path to her door. With a wanted man hidden in her home and stealing back into her heart, Eleanor must be on her guard – for the net is closing in on them both and enemies are all around…Praise for In the Shadow of Winter:‘An enchanting debut’ Romance Junkies‘I now have another author to add to my ever growing list of excellent historical fiction writers!’ BitsnBooks‘I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed reading this book…sweet, provocatively steamy, and absolutely swoony’ Feminist Reflections
In the Shadow of Winter
LORNA GRAY
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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2015
Copyright © Lorna Gray 2015
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Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover design by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Lorna Gray asserts the moral right
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A catalogue record for 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.
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Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780008122720
Version 2015-02-20
For Mary Stewart
Contents
Cover (#ua8a5b71a-8a20-5870-8e56-e4c4be0e840f)
Title Page (#u099f261c-4442-574a-95e8-ed658094d090)
Copyright (#u06716d1b-bae7-582a-a649-bc14d6b1220c)
Dedication (#uf6654938-136a-5c1c-9717-57835998004e)
Chapter 1 (#u271219f1-1ee6-5325-b4d5-99351483d735)
Chapter 2 (#ube0d2186-5e99-59e7-8ac1-75b040a371d0)
Chapter 3 (#ud23d8a40-cfdd-5caa-9460-a08c46289d86)
Chapter 4 (#u3cfc96c7-fcc4-5d31-8377-09c3af7dc351)
Chapter 5 (#u1b1d5e72-13ee-5c6b-acd2-15bca2295060)
Chapter 6 (#u8c051a57-9f13-5116-b4e1-6cea9ce7bbbe)
Chapter 7 (#ua92de63e-3938-5851-b9af-63ebd85ea6a3)
Chapter 8 (#ueab6a605-8a3b-5302-8964-0701ea161d9d)
Chapter 9 (#u7aa7e75b-3e45-5e33-a6f1-c8efd6cee297)
Chapter 10 (#u458270fb-e9a5-5f6e-b7ec-2922d46733ac)
Chapter 11 (#ue4f8cad0-2340-513e-8a53-ddb0e322d6b1)
Chapter 12 (#ub0facbc1-6742-5c14-9a89-bf4aa23d4988)
Chapter 13 (#uc96429a2-1ffd-5501-9738-d9499f60d397)
Chapter 14 (#u6bcabe42-ab2d-57be-a730-68aff463a7dc)
Chapter 15 (#u106353de-f333-5a2c-90ad-f19ab436b199)
Chapter 16 (#u9b9d9bad-1092-5d37-a031-a3964ab3a8a9)
Chapter 17 (#u0dee9b28-007d-505c-b476-9c5ea7f0e247)
Chapter 18 (#u06a4d8b0-ec8b-5a57-b963-8e2d64a7c4d8)
Chapter 19 (#u3fc9b16d-cfe0-5877-81bc-2798a1e93df4)
Chapter 20 (#u54a59f58-7f32-5679-81e5-007af0aa0f44)
Chapter 21 (#ud5dfb93d-88fc-5c37-9b39-8c5a8a8ca53d)
Chapter 22 (#u68d1f3d9-4a1a-57e5-a449-48c8ff6464fe)
Chapter 23 (#u4d16c13f-b7cd-5878-a19a-e3d7b0f459bc)
Chapter 24 (#ufb177ac2-693a-52ba-a069-c5b410e341fc)
Chapter 25 (#u04cdc808-21ec-5d90-b284-c5d2635f5252)
Chapter 26 (#u277a5bf1-5391-5c39-bdf9-f2ab273eda28)
Chapter 27 (#u5850e314-3086-56e9-8011-0914f69ab8fe)
Chapter 28 (#u47b83377-3c7c-5a85-b9cc-55f1e10f1d3e)
Chapter 29 (#ua2fc8287-30e8-5e71-a8a6-94b9ac8a9d51)
Chapter 30 (#u7b87c019-9e69-53b3-87b9-b87a17c12ea3)
Chapter 31 (#ucfdef45c-b2e3-586e-ae10-70acf61dc512)
Chapter 32 (#u23746087-e2e6-54c7-8e4d-7869dd0dbc67)
Chapter 33 (#u9a834679-60eb-5377-b6e3-8269bbadcee0)
Chapter 34 (#u8dd6daa4-f528-5b2b-a0af-9656447fe6ce)
Chapter 35 (#u2708d825-c848-5004-a3cf-35fcc1aacccd)
Chapter 36 (#u0ddbd95d-5e78-50ac-b61c-e8b9ac3b900b)
Chapter 37 (#u5ef0b1dc-790a-5994-9a3f-b0ef9463336f)
Acknowledgements (#ud6832879-ba04-5f06-a5de-d8a54e8b2166)
Lorna Gray (#u9ee3ab36-fbeb-53a2-ba9b-cd074bb8aba2)
About HarperImpulse (#u03db017b-4dd5-579b-b617-2001cb68ace2)
About the Publisher (#u26858556-a11c-5aa5-ad6c-21b4317edb4e)
Chapter 1 (#u4bb5bd47-b43f-5dbe-a687-54a6210f5569)
The Cotswolds, England. 1947
I suspect that my impression of the past is something akin to a soldier’s image of his homeland – all improbable blue skies and greenery like a treasured souvenir postcard where the colours have been painted in. That being so, I can only sympathise with all those war-wearied men who, instead of returning to find the picture held dear in their imagination, discovered a land brown with the stain of bombed-out buildings, plain rationed clothing and the soot of struggling industry.
Not that the land was brown at present, admittedly. If snow was good for something, it could be said that it was at least clean.
Right on cue, the first hard spikes of a fresh storm flung themselves against my cheek. Reaching for the last two buckets, I hurried, or at least hurried as much as a person can in a foot or more of drifted snow, across to the house before Freddy could return. It only felt like a moment ago that we had put the poor ponies out to wade about in the valley but it appeared to have been a pattern of the past two months that the hours of every day would vanish in a blur of turning ponies out or bringing them in again, mucking them out and feeding them. Although, just for a change, the last hour in particular had been filled with endlessly lugging water across the treacherous roadway.
It is tempting here to launch into an explanation of the past weeks of hardship and isolation, and the conditions of our ceaseless battle against the bitter wind but I have never yet heard anyone describe this unnatural winter, a year into peace, without making it seem exaggerated or even simply downright invented. What I will say however, is that entire crops of winter vegetables were frozen uselessly into barns and with animals dying in herds at a time from cold and malnutrition on the whitened hillsides, these hard facts do perhaps begin to paint the right kind of picture. I know of at least one local farmer who, defying regulations, butchered his own sheep to feed his stranded neighbours.
For me, it was the addition of water to this list of deprivations that formed my most immediate difficulty. Like most of the Cotswolds, we had no mains water but the trusty hilltop spring, which normally supplied my hairy menagerie, was buried several feet beneath a hard cap of snow and ice and now only the rustic pipes that some former landowner had laid deep underground from pond to house could still be relied on to flow. It did seem particularly perverse that wherever I went I should be surrounded by great powdery heaps of the stuff.
I had actually finished the present watery mission however, and brought in everyone from the upper slopes before I finally caught the rough sound of Freddy's return. The ponies were blowing hard and hurrying out of the narrow valley when they ought to have been walking and, instantly dropping whatever I was doing, I stepped quickly across the yard to meet whichever miniature disaster had happened to the boy this time. It was beyond me to guess how he had somehow managed to turn even this mundane task into yet another adventure but there he was, fiddling about with the valley gate and standing at the centre of a sweating and excited cluster of tossing manes; bothered, overheated, but perfectly unharmed.
Getting him to speak was the next challenge. The boy was so excited and so agitated, and so very desperate to tell me about it that his words kept coming out in the wrong order, and sometimes even the letters too. Only then he finally managed it and any habitual urge to scold him abruptly evaporated.
His tale must have demonstrated every one of the usual inconsistencies inspired by his wonderfully overactive imagination but it would have taken a harder woman than me to ignore the underlying thread of genuine alarm. Even then, I probably could still have dismissed it as fantasy and, thanks to his appalling lack of self-confidence, he almost certainly would have believed me. But his description of the moment of spotting someone floundering on the furthermost slopes with its madcap image of that same foolish soul trying to force their way uphill through deep shifting powder was inescapable and, in the end, I found it unavoidably convincing too.
And so that was how I found myself first prising a pony from its hay to reluctantly accompany me out into the disorientating amber light of a thickening snowstorm. Then, with the dark shadow of a hedge as my only guide, why I set about blindly tracing a path along the ridge top until yards felt like miles. And why now, nearly an hour later, I was standing cold and painfully breathless while the wind carved white spirals around me, dispassionately staring. At a dead man.
He was sitting unnaturally slumped and motionless in the lee of an old dry-stone wall and with wind-driven drifts already beginning to claim his silent body, he was rapidly becoming nothing more than a misshapen extension to the shade. If I had been any later I might never have seen him at all. Everything about him was adding weight to the appearance of habitual vagrancy and where his head had sunk down onto his chest, I found that I could see very little of his face beneath the tattered and filthy remains of a scarf that may once have been patterned. His stained coat had a gaping tear to the seam of one sleeve and, lying half-propped against the hard frozen support of the tumbled stones, he had one hand jammed into the buttons near his chest, presumably in a useless quest for warmth. The other, just visible as white lifeless fingers within the swathes of a fraying cuff, had slipped from his lap to rest among the exposed stones by his side. It seemed to me that he must have made that same cruel mistake experienced by many other homeless people before and, having failed to beg his way into the cover of a dry barn and a hot meal, had chosen to pause and catch his breath for a while in the comparative shelter of this old stone wall. And then, with energy and resources at their lowest ebb, he must simply have, tragically but inevitably, expired.
So it came as a surprise when the pale frozen hand suddenly tightened gruesomely upon the rock by his side to thrust him awkwardly to his feet.
I had been creeping closer with that macabre curiosity of one who needs to at least be sure before turning for home so it only took one staggering plunge forwards in a search for balance for him to crash blindly into me. I gave a yelp, mainly at finding a corpse becoming suddenly very much not a corpse, but he, poor man, found the shock of impact infinitely worse. Meeting someone at all in a whiteout was obviously utterly unexpected, and to find them standing silently and unmoving just above him was quite simply far too much. His strangled cry echoed back off the swirling barrier of icy wind; the momentum, which had carried him so suddenly and forcefully to his feet, made him rebound off me again and he stumbled, flailing backwards until he was brought crashing painfully down once more onto the hard frozen ground.
There was a brief moment of silence while I recovered my balance and my poise and the poor tramp simply lay there. He was as still and as silent as he had been before and I wondered if I really had killed him this time. But then in the next moment I saw him breathe and I was suddenly kneeling in the rubble by his side, putting a reassuring hand on his ragged sleeve and gabbling apologies and explanations like an anxious idiot.
He hadn’t moved from his crumpled heap, head concealed in the curve of his arm and a liberal dusting of windblown snow. In fact, he seemed completely insensible to my jumbled words and I was just mumbling something along the lines of “sorry, sorry. I’m so sorry” when all of a sudden he moved again. As before it was entirely unexpected and again he made me yelp and flinch away but this time, instead of plunging to his feet, he twisted round onto his back and took hold of the hand that had been steadily giving his shoulder a little shake.
For a man on the edge of existence his grip was surprisingly firm but what was more startling was the speed with which he snatched aside my other hand. It had instinctively reached to push at his chest so that I would not topple forwards onto him, I think – not hard, in spite of the sharply muttered exclamation it had drawn from him – and my mind was just beginning to make the first uncertain move from confusion into alarm when all of a sudden, quite simply, it just froze.
The hoarse voice was mumbling something up at me, a garbled torrent attempting to form an angry accusation. It sounded like he was questioning my morality and made absolutely no sense whatsoever, but I was not listening to that. All I could think of was the numbing discovery that this was no strange vagrant.
The man’s weary tones were curt and altered, and it had been a long time since I had last heard him speak, either in irritation or in friendship. But regardless, the voice was inexplicably, indisputably familiar – I knew him.
In an instant the urge to draw back evaporated. “Matthew?”
My enquiry was as hesitant as it was incredulous and it had to be repeated five or six times before my words finally filtered through his rage enough to at least silence his ranting. In defiance of his evidential fury, my voice was astoundingly steady as I persevered:
“Matthew? It’s me … Eleanor.”
The dark eyes that were marked and shadowed by the hollow strain of exhaustion wavered for a moment before abruptly focusing to fix upon mine. They were staring at me from behind the tattered mask of the scarf and I could see where the fabric was moving in and out over his mouth to the draw of his rapid breathing.
“Matthew?” I repeated, trying not to give in to the appalling rush of concern that had accompanied that first wild unrecognizing glare. I believe I even tried to smile.
His breathing checked.
Suddenly he moved again. It was with that same uncontrolled urgency that had startled me before. I flinched aside, raising an arm instinctively as he leapt to his feet only to realise even as I did so that he must have let me go. There was a sharp crunch of snow behind me and a rapid scattering of loose flakes. Then, irregular and stumbling, the uneven steps accelerated and diminished.
In an instant and without so much as pausing for thought, I had twisted to my feet. I could still make out the weaving shadow of the departing figure and, racing over to the sulkily waiting pony to snatch up his rope before dragging the reluctant creature after me, I set off again across the field in pursuit of the hurrying man.
Even with the handicap of a stubbornly protesting animal, I was still able to gain on him before we had travelled many yards and as I drew alongside and then began to pass him, it was easy to see why. His head was down as he forced himself onwards and it seemed to me that he was only managing to do so at all by drawing on some last deep reserves that had nothing to do with muscle or physical strength. The tatty scarf had fallen away to expose a grimy unshaven jaw and his breath was coming in short laboured puffs that misted in the air around him before being swept away by the ceaselessly bitter wind. He was clearly floundering but I didn’t dare touch him again and he seemed to have no intention of stopping until either snow or exhaustion forced it.
In desperation I dragged the pony round to partially bar his path and cried, “Matthew! You’re going the wrong way!”
For a moment I thought he might try to break his way past but then, with a short agitated cry that seemed to come from somewhere between impatience and despair, he abruptly stopped and stood before me, swaying gently.
Then he lifted his head once more and where the shadowed eyes stared watchfully out at me from beneath frosted brows, I was startled to realise that his dirtied cheeks were actually streaked with tears.
“You were going the wrong way, Matthew,” I repeated gently, by way of an explanation.
There was a very, very long silence when I thought he had not heard. But then, in a voice that was so faint that it almost seemed to be coming from somewhere else entirely, he finally whispered, “The wrong … way?”
The question was vague and flooded with uncomprehending weariness, and it made my heart ache. “My home is that way.” My voice was soft and steady like a parent talking to a frightened child and, being careful not to startle him, I lifted a hand in an imprecise indication of its direction.
His gaze wavered briefly as he unwittingly turned to look, not that we could see more than twenty yards from our feet let alone all the way down to the farmhouse. But then his gaze snapped suspiciously back to my face, filled with hard distrust in case I had moved, only for the expression to fade again to guilty abstraction as he remembered who I was.
“Your home?”
“Home,” I said firmly and then, in the manner of a casual afterthought, added; “Would you like to come?”
Chapter 2 (#u4bb5bd47-b43f-5dbe-a687-54a6210f5569)
It was lucky that I had thought to bring the pony; I would never have got Matthew back on my own. It was almost as if in that instant of deciding to accept my help, however reluctantly, all of his remaining strength had been spent and for a few horrible long minutes I had feared that even maintaining a grip on the pony’s mane as it towed him steadily along was going to be a demand too far.
If I had thought that task difficult however, getting him to relinquish it for an arm about my shoulders and from there steering him into my house proved even more of a challenge. He had neither spoken nor moved from his hunched position since we had started for home and as I set about tugging him along the path, it became horribly apparent that he must have been wandering about out there for far longer than just a few hours. In truth he was barely conscious and although he was obviously trying to spare me as much as he could, he very nearly crushed me when we finally attempted to coordinate a sort of crabwise shuffle into the house.
Freddy, however, was utterly amazing. The boy had already appeared noisily by my side before I could have possibly expected him and, as soon as Matthew and I had set off on our unsteady way, had whisked the tired pony away to hay and a dry stable, only to rush to the door before we had even made it around the side of the house, still talking ceaselessly. He was there now, ahead of us, pushing the door open and dragging it wide so that we could slowly shuffle our way into the short passage by the kitchen.
Even with the boy’s help, the doorway was still very narrow and it took some manoeuvring to ease us both through. I suppose if I had thought, I could have got Freddy to run and open the more impressive – and therefore much wider – front door but as with all farmhouses, the kitchen door was the one that we used on a daily basis and I wasn’t even sure if the thick ancient bolts could be drawn back on the other.
It had been my intention to cross the wider space from kitchen to stairs, and from there take Matthew up to a bedroom where he could rest and recover in relative comfort but Matthew himself forced me to swiftly abandon that idea. I had managed to get him this far by taking his right arm heavily across my shoulders while his other groped drunkenly from handhold to handhold but whether it was from the blaze of unaccustomed heat or the unexpected realisation that his ordeal was nearly over I do not know, but all of a sudden his remaining ability to support himself abruptly vanished. Entirely without warning, his fingers fell short from their reach towards the tabletop and then his head drooped. He had already been testing me pretty near to my limit but this sudden collapse took me far beyond tolerance and we were very lucky that I even managed to get him as far as the living room settee, let alone all the way upstairs to my bed.
A peculiar pause followed this where, after my abrupt release from such a heavy burden, the sensation of being airborne was so strange that the force of it nearly finished what Matthew’s weight had begun. My face burned from exertion and, added to the heat of the fire at my back, it seemed to take an eternity before my aching lungs could adjust to breathing warm air. But then, in the next instant, normality reasserted itself and I had time to wonder that it was Matthew Croft of all people who had been found lost in a snowstorm. And then to notice almost immediately afterwards that the voluble enthusiasm, which had been an almost constant backdrop to our journey across the kitchen, had faded sharply to silence.
Freddy’s delight at his part in an apparently heroic rescue ought to have been inexhaustible; I quickly turned with a smile and encouragement so that the boy would be protected from understanding the full urgency of getting the object of his adventure warm but he wasn’t looking at me. Freddy was staring with eyes fixed wide at the man who was sitting slumped before us and blinking blearily at the threadbare carpet by our feet.
I took a steadying breath. “Freddy, will you fetch some of my father’s old clothes? We’d better get him into something dry.” My voice was bright and carefully filled with that lively tone of artificial cheer that was usually the reserve of matronly housekeepers but I might as well have said nothing for all the notice he took.
“Freddy,” I said sharply, “did you hear what I said?”
Then I turned my head and followed his gaze.
Matthew was still sitting exactly where he had landed when I had clumsily surrendered him to the settee except that now he was making an ineffectual attempt at unfastening the buttons of his soaked jacket. Finally able to see it properly, the jacket looked like it was made from a kind of stylish brown wool and would have originally been better suited to a walk through town towards his office than across country in the snow. Whatever it had once been however, now it was only disgustingly grimy and the torn seam on his sleeve that had been noted before had since parted even further so that it was now exposing a large expanse of lining.
I suppose it was because of this obvious damage to one shoulder that I had not noticed what had happened to the other.
The stain had spread from his collar down towards the elbow of his left sleeve and it was entirely different to the multitude of scuffs and scrapes of mud and filth that coloured the fabric elsewhere.
“Here, let me.” The quickly delivered request was tinged with disbelief as I leant down and reached for the sodden jacket.
His numbed fingers surrendered the task of fumbling with the buttons readily enough and then in a few short seconds I was pulling the icy flaps apart.
“Oh, good God.”
Blood had soaked through the shirt onto his woollen jumper and from there spread in an ugly stain across his chest, and it was very clear to me now that there could be no ordinary explanation for what I had found out in the snow.
“Good God, Matthew!” I said again. “What has happened to you?”
He looked up at that and gave me a faintly blurry smile. “Pay no man, isn’t that what they say? No, hang on, that isn’t it – what’s the saying…?” He was speaking with the careful enunciation of one who was not in nearly as much control of himself as he would have liked to have been. He blinked and then added, “Ah yes, owe no man. But that isn’t fair; I don’t think he can have meant for it to turn out like that…”
Then his expression clouded as if he knew he was wandering and, with an obvious effort, he bit off whatever else might have followed.
Freddy must have moved behind my shoulder because Matthew’s eyes suddenly snapped past me. He stared up at the boy for a moment, the heavily shadowed eyes widening in alarm before travelling jerkily back to my face. Then, with a blur of movement that was startlingly reminiscent of the precision I had seen out in the snow, he reached out and took a tight hold of my hand.
“Don’t tell them.” His voice rose anxiously as the draw on my arm forced me to bend awkwardly down towards him. “You won’t tell them about me, will you? Please?”
I shook my head, trying to discreetly prise my wrist free only to feel a cold stab of apprehension as he begged again, “Please!”
“I won’t, Matthew,” I said, not really knowing to what I was promising.
He gave me one long hard look and seemed to believe me. Releasing my hand, he blinked from me to Freddy and back to me again. Then, letting out his breath in a long gentle sigh, he slowly and with about as much grace as a bad actor playing a part, crumpled backwards onto the soft panels of the settee.
I stared down at his prone form for a moment before my brain clicked into gear.
“Right Freddy,” I said crisply. “Fetch my scissors, the medical kit – the horse one I mean, we’re going to need more than plasters – and some blankets. I’ll get some water on the boil.”
Freddy looked at me with big scared eyes. “Is he dead?” he whispered.
“No Freddy, he’s not,” I said firmly. “Now off you go, quickly please!”
When the boy had finished that little task, I would strategically send him on another lengthier errand, this time to the hay barn.
If I had been determined to protect Freddy from further shock and the subsequent bad dreams, I only wish I could have extended the same courtesy to myself. Patching up the various wounds that the horses have presented over the years may have trained me in all the practical skills, but nothing could have prepared me for the emotional horror of having to cut away his shirt and examine the twelve or so shotgun pellet wounds that had splattered across his upper arm and chest. None of them had gone deep, he must have been hit at the very edge of the gun’s range, but blood still oozed sickeningly from the wounds as I carefully eased the pellets free.
Blessedly, he was still unconscious as I dressed the wounds with iodine solution and gauze; it seemed to take forever to strap it all firmly into place with the thick rolls of bandage when I had to deal with the leaden weight of his body on my own. But then at long last it was finished and I could place bandages, wounds and everything safely out of sight under the great stack of blankets which would slowly but surely bring him back to vital warmth, and pause a while to gather my thoughts.
Many hours later though, and after all that bustle and urgency it was suddenly feeling very much like I was being given rather too much time in which to think. Freddy had been fed and dispatched off to bed long ago and with the wind outside picking up little gusts of ice and sending them in a distant rattle against the glass, I was actually for the first time in my life finding the house slightly eerie. The rhythmic hiss and creak of the door beneath the stairs made it sound like I was catching the stealthy betrayal of someone’s passing footsteps and with very little else to do now but sit and wait, I found myself wishing very fervently that the back room was not so draughty and my imagination not quite so alive.
Like our water supply, this little corner of the Cotswolds had never been connected to mains electricity either, so the room was merely lit by the inky amber of an oil lamp and the formerly companionable glow of the hearth. This scene was not unique to my household; on the assumption that others were keeping the same late hours, and hopefully for considerably more ordinary reasons than mine, their homes too must be chasing away the shadows with mild lamp light. Across the country, main roads and railways were closed by impossibly deep drifts and after a month when only a few coal trains had managed to reach the power stations, urban homes and even the factories that had managed to labour for years under the most fearsome bombardment had no choice now but to at long last fall silent. Here was another reminder that the weather had the power to do what the war had not.
Admittedly, I could not exactly claim this particular shortage for myself or my little rural farmstead, having never had any electric heaters, refrigerators or lighting to worry about. But at this precise moment the background hum from a little domestic machinery might well have made all the difference to the windblown whispers which were presently stalking me across the room.
Matthew’s head moved on the arm of the settee and I tensed, thinking that he was awake, but his eyes remained closed. His sleep must have been punctuated by nightmares because every once in a while his breathing would jerk and catch in his throat, and occasionally I caught the low murmur of words uttered in an agitated undertone, but he said nothing I could make any sense of. I put the back of my hand lightly to his forehead; it was warm but not alarmingly hot.
I sat back in my chair and settled to watch as he slept. It was strange to find myself so unexpectedly maintaining this late night vigil over a man I had not seen for years, and who now lay restlessly sleeping on my settee. Earlier, my confusion had fixed itself upon flimsy theories of wandering too far in deteriorating weather, but it was impossible to continue this pretence, especially when I remembered that even in a whiteout Matthew would have known these fields and byways as well as I did, if not better.
He stirred again, uneasily. The features of his face were being drawn into sharp relief by the sooty smear of light from the lamp behind me and beneath the tangle of sandy hair which had been thick with dirt and burrs, I could see scratches on his cheek that were days old. His chest was marked by a darkening smudge of fresh bruises and earlier, while I had been dressing his shoulder, I had noted that there were scars too, a jagged series of lines running lightly across his ribs, whitened with age, which must have been from the war.
I shivered suddenly in spite of the fierce heat from the nearby fire and, tucking my legs up under myself, I turned my head aside to fix instead upon the shredded remains of clothing which were laid out on the hearth beside me. Most would be burnt as soon as they were dry enough and only his boots and trousers had been cleaned and hung out with more care. Torn and battered though they were, I suspected he would be too tall for my father’s old clothes and with no hope of getting more from elsewhere, I could not possibly discard them.
His breathing changed and I did not need to see the eyelashes flutter on his cheek to know that he was awake. Silently, I slipped across to the fireside hotplate where I had set some broth to warm and, tipping some into a bowl, I slowly turned back to face him once more. His eyes were glinting in the firelight, following me as I carefully drifted closer. Although they ought to have been a dark hazel with flecks of deeper brown, under the light fever of exhaustion they were paler, almost amber.
“Are you hungry?” I asked. He didn’t answer and just lay there, staring at me.
“Come on, let’s get some of this into you,” I said brightly and, firmly ignoring the foolishness that tried to make me clumsy, knelt by the settee before helping him to spoon some of the warming liquid into his mouth.
For a little while he gulped it down hungrily but then, unexpectedly and with surprising force, he pushed my hand away as if the thin meal suddenly disgusted him. He must have noticed my flinch because he quickly apologised.
“Thank you,” he said softly, allowing his head to fall back onto the cushions. His voice was weak and quiet as though the effort of speaking was almost too much for him but I was relieved to note that there was more colour in his pallid cheeks.
“Don’t mention it,” I replied lightly.
He shut his eyes, “I’ll be on my way again in the morning.”
“I’m sure you will.” He looked like the idea of even sitting up was beyond him.
He gave me a little smile, eyes still closed, and suddenly looked more like the man I knew.
“How did this happen to you?” I asked gently as I climbed to my feet. When I looked back, he was staring at me with an expression strongly reminiscent of the one I had first seen in the snow, but I was determined not to let the opportunity pass this time. “Who did this to you, Matthew?”
His head moved awkwardly on the arm of the chair and I thought for a moment he was going to try to get up. “I don’t … I can’t seem to remember,” he whispered helplessly.
“It’s all right,” I said quickly, guiltily covering the rush of concern that filled me. “It’ll keep until morning I’m sure.”
“You won’t tell them I’m here, will you?” His fingers clutched at the blankets and my heart tightened painfully as that same hunted expression beat a return to his pale haggard face.
“I won’t tell them, Matthew. Don’t worry.”
“He … I didn’t mean to … They’re …” He spoke agitatedly, seeming to be talking more to himself than to me, and I stepped back as he tried to sit up, feeling suddenly nervous as that wild urge to bolt altered his eyes again. His strength failed him however, and slowly he sank back down onto the settee, looking grey and utterly exhausted.
After a while he seemed to fall helplessly into an unmoving slumber and finally I was able to unclench my fingers from the bowl enough to set it down on the kitchen table. His agitation disturbed me and as I gazed down at his averted face from the comparative distance of the other end of the settee, I wondered just what sort of explanation I was expecting him to give, when the morning came.
Would he even be glad when he finally regained his senses, to discover that it was me that had patched and bathed his wounds? So far his reactions had ranged from gentle recognition to horrified aversion, and I really wasn’t sure which emotion I could expect to prevail when daylight and lucid reasoning made their return at last.
“Oh, stop it,” I muttered to myself, crossly avoiding working this up into a larger complication than it deserved. There were, I was sure, any number of more pressing concerns in the mind of a man who had very nearly died than whether or not the person that had helped him was feeling suitably thanked.
Armed with this fresh conviction, I slipped silently back to my station in the armchair and prepared to watch once more. I was just beginning to doze myself when he spoke again;
“What is your name? I’ve forgotten it, I’m sorry.” His head moved on the cushion as he tried to twist round to look at me but his shoulder must have hurt him because he gave a short hiss of pain before allowing his head to fall back again.
“Eleanor,” I said softly from my armchair.
“Oh.” There was a long pause and I thought that he had fallen asleep but then he added, “I knew an Eleanor once, but that was a long time ago; before I went away.”
I said nothing and just watched the fire as it flickered gently in the grate.
“She was a lot like you, but younger. And possibly a little shorter, although that could just be because you’re thinner than she was.” His voice was faint as he mumbled dozily and I realised that he didn’t know where he was. “Her father died you know. I meant to write and tell her how sorry I was but somehow I just couldn’t find the words.”
There was another long pause and then I saw his body tauten. “I’m not making sense, am I, Eleanor?”
“You’re fine,” I replied soothingly. “Just go to sleep.”
For a while I thought he had, but then in a stronger voice he asked, “What did he die of?” He turned his head to look at me and I saw that this time he knew who I was.
“Something with a long unpronounceable name, but basically it was his breathing again,” I said quietly. “He lasted a long time, much longer than the doctors said he could. But he went peacefully, and at least it wasn’t a shock.”
“And you nursed him to the end.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes,” I said quietly.
“No wonder you look so …” He stopped.
“So what exactly? My weather-beaten exterior is confusing you,” I supplied lightly.
I think he might have even given a faint chuckle, “I was going to say careworn, but weather-beaten will do.”
For some unfathomable reason, given that I had started it, his evident amusement irritated me and I really didn’t want to think about why. “Go to sleep.” I spoke firmly.
“Yes ma’am,” he said with a faint hint of the wry humour that had once so typified him. He didn’t speak again.
Chapter 3 (#u4bb5bd47-b43f-5dbe-a687-54a6210f5569)
After a night of dozing fitfully in the armchair, it was hard to gingerly ease my aching joints out of their cramped position, but he was sleeping more soundly now and finally I dared leave him long enough to go about my morning chores.
Yesterday’s fresh bout of snow had not ceased with the dawn and it was still falling thickly on the yard. It had long since filled in the areas I had laboriously cleared a few days previously and the barbed wind was picking it up, tossing it about so that flakes curled around me in little flurries as I sleepily scrunched my way across to the stables. The inmates must have only managed about two hours of escape before the weather had put an end to their liberty once more but judging by the chorus of whickering that met me as soon as I began rattling about in the feed bins, they were all contented enough with their return to confinement, particularly when it meant they got breakfast.
Leaving my assortment of horses and ponies happily munching their meal, I trudged with a relative contentment of my own across the yard and ducked into the goat house. This odd little building had probably had a previous incarnation as a bull house back in the days when this had been a dairy farm, but now it was simply a rough tin roof set on thick stone walls with a small improvised pen area so that they could exercise when the weather was better.
Three cheerful faces greeted me before trotting eagerly over the rough cobbled floor of their house to perform a little boisterous tap-dance about my feet as I tipped out their feed. Laughing, I swept up the small amount of mess they had made and then fetched a milk pail while they ate. Myrtle was a good goat and very docile, and she did not even pause in her steady chewing as I relieved her of her burden of milk. If I had time, I would make butter later.
There was just one animal in my collection that did not inspire quite the same degree of affection and this was the cockerel. He, being a very brave sort of creature, had a habit of feigning indifference until the very moment that my back was turned only to then, with a flurry of feathers, make a wild dive for my ankles. It was always a remarkable coincidence how as soon as I turned back again, he would be intently pecking at the dirt as if nothing had happened. Today, however, he must have wisely read that confrontation would rapidly lead to a close encounter with a cooking pot and as I carefully carried the precious milk back to the chilly gloom of the dairy, he chose to simply fix his beady eye upon me in a disdainful glare before losing all of his sophistication and joining the girls in a frenzied pecking of the kitchen scraps from their feeder.
Freddy was up and making a pot of tea when I reappeared in the kitchen, kicking the snow off my boots and trying to breathe some warmth back into my hands. He looked sleepy but nothing compared to how shattered I felt.
“Eggs for breakfast?” I asked only to smile as he nodded enthusiastically. Clearly there was no need to worry that the upset of the previous day’s events would have affected his appetite. “All right then, what sort? Fried, poached, scrambled or boiled? We’ve got a bit of bread left from yesterday for toast.”
Freddy thought for a moment. “Scrambled, I think.”
“Right, scrambled it is.” I cheerfully returned his grin and it almost seemed for a moment that we could forget the other silent presence in my home. My memories of the past day seemed so unlikely now that it felt as if I had simply experienced an exceptionally bad night with an exceptionally bad dream, and had it not been for the long absent figure from my past currently deeply asleep on my settee, I would not have been able to convince myself that any of it had really happened at all.
Freddy set the table and poured the tea while I juggled eggs and toast, which respectively tried to weld themselves to the pan or spontaneously combust. Finally, however, we were able to sit down and eat and, despite a certain hint of carbon, it was delicious. It was a relief to feel little warming tendrils of energy begin at long last to make their return to my weary limbs.
“Do you think I could have some of that?”
A faint voice from the fireside made us both jump. Feeling strangely guilty again, I looked over to see that Matthew had managed to shuffle himself up to be sitting propped against the arm of the settee. His face was deathly pale and with his dishevelled hair and the scruffs and scrapes on his skin he could still have convincingly passed as a vagrant, and not, as he actually was, a reasonably well-to-do local man. But although his cheeks were sunken and he looked very fragile under the scruffy fuzz of growth on his jaw, the eyes that were cautiously smiling at me from beneath the mask of pain and weariness were calm and disconcertingly familiar, and it was hard to believe now that he was the same person that had been found stumbling about in that blind manner across my land.
He gave me a warmer smile as I abandoned my breakfast to pour him a cup of tea, putting several spoonfuls of sugar in it to help him regain his strength. I was feeling an odd sensation that could best be described as cheerful uncertainty as I approached to hand him the cup and I was relieved to find that I was able to greet him quite easily after all; only to ruin the effect by flinching stupidly as his fingers accidentally pressed over mine. He blinked in surprise, but said nothing.
“What do you want to eat?” I asked, more sharply than I intended.
“Toast?” he said hopefully.
His quick grin was so easy and relaxed that the momentary tension evaporated abruptly, and I couldn’t help breaking into a smile myself as I dragged a table over to him and set a plate down by his side. It was a relief to have him so swiftly establish the tenor of our renewed acquaintance, and still more of a relief to see him reach eagerly for the toast. I had feared that his wounds allied with the extreme exhaustion would have brought on a fever but he seemed well enough, or at least not in any great danger.
He managed to eat most of the plain breakfast before grimacing suddenly and thrusting the plate rather quickly back onto the table. In an attempt to suppress the urge to fuss, I had been trying to concentrate on the remains of my own meal but I heard his pained sigh as he settled back against the arm once more, and I could not help watching as he tucked the blankets up under his chin to cover his bandaged chest in what was a very telling mark of vulnerability.
He unexpectedly looked up to catch me staring and I felt myself jump again, flushing as I quickly looked away. It was impossible to know what to say, particularly when I had to wrestle with an overwhelming impulse to gabble idiotic nothings at him, but he must have misunderstood my meaning because I heard him draw a little breath before saying rather hurriedly, “I’m sorry to put upon you like this. It’s very good of you to have taken me in.”
I did look up at him then, shyness instantly being replaced by a sort of offended irritation as I wondered exactly what else he would have expected me to do. My mouth curled into a brief impression of a smile.
“What actually has happened to you?”
It came out like an accusation and even I was appalled by my own lack of grace. My thoughts might well have been occupied by very little else for the past day but even so, I had still intended to start by asking him how he was feeling or by making one of the many other commonplace social niceties that might have done in the present situation. I certainly had never meant to fling his experience at him quite like this.
Equally certainly, he hadn’t been expecting it either. He glanced quickly from me to Freddy and the gentle grin that had appeared in response to mine darkened abruptly to that same unspeakable tension that was so unlike him.
“I … er …” he began and then stopped. I waited but he didn’t continue.
“Look, you don’t need to tell me anything if you don’t want to,” I said hastily as my embarrassment increased. “It doesn’t matter, but it might help if I understand a little of what’s been happening. Just a very little…?”
“Eleanor … I … I don’t think that I should…You…” He faltered.
My intense shame clouded to puzzlement then. The contractions of his mouth had already betrayed the pattern of his emotions from surprise through to discomfort and onwards, not entirely unreasonably, to impatience. But in this last awkward hesitation, I thought I saw another expression flicker briefly across his face. It was so swiftly suppressed that it barely registered, but just for a moment, only a brief fleeting instant, I thought I saw guilt.
I watched him run a hand over his face and it shook a little. He tried again, “It’s difficult. You’re…”
Then his eyes flicked up to catch mine, crucially, before dropping quickly away again.
“Oh,” I said with that odd note of sharpness back in my voice. It could not have been made plainer if he had tried. “Of course. You can’t tell me.”
He didn’t contradict me.
“Right,” I said in a strangled croak and ignored the pathetically appeasing smile he attempted.
It was a shock to be so emphatically rebuffed. I know that I had been half expecting something like this but somehow the wise thoughts of three o’clock in the morning were no consolation now that it was daylight and he very clearly had not lost his mind.
I turned abruptly away to crash the breakfast things into the sink, setting about scrubbing the dishes as if the boiling water from the pan on the stove could cleanse me of the strain of his unwelcome presence. After all the worry I had expended in the night on his behalf, I had thought that, at the very least, he would owe me a little basic honesty. But instead it appeared that I was to be roughly abandoned to the thin logic of my imagination, understanding nothing except the very bitter sting of his rejection. And knowing all the while that it ought to have been for me to shun him.
Apparently, however, this last little truth was not allowed to matter. Instead, infuriatingly trapped within a straitjacket of compassion, I could do little else but maintain an icy silence while the day passed into a blur of keeping him fed, keeping him warm, making him tea; providing, in fact, any one of the many little things that were essential to his ongoing comfort and recovery. He didn’t even seem to register the insult contained within his unthinking acceptance of my continued care.
It might have been a little easier if I could have continued my chores in some other room. Unfortunately, however, there were no fires laid in any other part of the house and while I could still remember a time when there had been a wall between kitchen and living room, my father had removed it years ago so that my mother could have one of the new Calor gas stoves that were suddenly all the rage. Her lively presence and divine cooking had left us for higher things in my early teens but the gas oven still lived on and the only boundary that could separate me now from the presence on my settee was the thin join between the red-tinted tiles in the kitchen and the fraying carpet of the living room floor.
For his part, Matthew, in his brief moments of full wakefulness seemed fixed upon giving me glimpses of that same bright meaningless smile which had irritated me before. This was apparently an attempt to conceal the darker moments of being caught looking broodingly thoughtful and intensely fierce but the improbability of a civilised man such as him even bearing such an expression was unsettling enough.
Added to his continued silence, this obvious secrecy was actually making my own show of frosty distance seem absurdly irrelevant and with the acknowledged flaw in my living arrangements to deal with as well, I was forced in the end to spend the rest of the day attempting to take myself as far away from him as possible. In weather such as ours, however, there was only so long that I could bear it and by about eight o’clock I was shattered, slumping defeated in the armchair by the fire, unable to pretend any longer that I was anything but utterly wearied of this act. I would have dearly liked to have abandoned it, but the only thing I could think of was to scream at Matthew to explain what had happened to him. But he had already made it clear that he had no intention of letting me understand anything about his business and so I held my tongue, and kept my stare fixed upon the crackling flames.
“Eleanor?”
“Um?” I responded sleepily, blinking myself out of my stupor.
“You didn’t get a doctor, did you? Last night I mean.” Matthew had turned slightly awkwardly against the arm of his settee to look back at me.
“Er…?” My brain was struggling to get into gear.
“These bandages,” he gestured to his chest, “did you fetch someone to do them?”
I glowered at him, “No, Matthew, I didn’t. It was snowing in case you’ve forgotten and we’re cut off again for the moment; I did them with my own fair hands. I’m sorry if they’re not up to scratch.”
“No, no,” he corrected hastily, “they’re very good.” He paused, “So no one knows I’m here?”
“No, Matthew, no one knows you’re here,” I said tiredly, concealing the shiver as I realised that his fears had not just been a symptom of his confused ramblings in the night.
I climbed stiffly to my feet without looking at him, concentrating instead on straightening the cushions of my chair; “Do you want anything else? Only I’m going to bed now.”
“No, nothing, thank you,” he said, but then, as I opened the door to the stairs, added; “Eleanor?”
“Yes?” I demanded curtly.
“Just …” A pause. “Thank you,” he finished gently.
As if to compound my exhausted frustration, the handle to my bedroom door decided this was the ideal moment to come off in my hand. Crossly, I slapped it down on the dresser and as I bent to wedge the door shut with a small pile of books, I had to wonder whether the house had it in for me too.
Very wearily, I peeled off the five or so layers of clothing that were my defence against winter. My fingers were stiff as I fumbled with the buttons and then, as I gave in and drew the shirt off over my head, I suddenly realised that my wrists were aching with far more than just tiredness.
I looked down and it was with a kind of fascinated horror that I observed dark marks encircling each one. They were ugly and tender and I had to spend some minutes just sitting on the edge of my bed. Somehow in the preoccupation of being offended by his determined silence, the whole shocking truth of my discovery out in the snow had faded in my memory to become nothing more than a product of my uneasy imagination. But the bruises were indisputable and, allied with his refusal to make any kind of explanation, I found that as I finally slipped into bed, I was actually trembling.
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Lorna Gray
‘Absorbing and chilling, yet tempered with echoes of a lost romance…this story is one of the best I've read this year for its imagery and originality’ Jane Hunt ReviewsSet in the bleak winter of 1947, you will love this compelling drama if you love historical dramas.The Cotswolds, 1947A relentless winter holds post-war Britain in its deadly grip, and Eleanor Phillips rides out from her beleaguered Cotswold farm to rescue a stranger lost in the storm. But the near-dead man is no stranger and when she recognises Matthew Croft, the old ties of a failed romance tug deeply. Her sweetheart has returned from the war.Suspicion, the police and the panicked flight of a desperate man beat a path to her door. With a wanted man hidden in her home and stealing back into her heart, Eleanor must be on her guard – for the net is closing in on them both and enemies are all around…Praise for In the Shadow of Winter:‘An enchanting debut’ Romance Junkies‘I now have another author to add to my ever growing list of excellent historical fiction writers!’ BitsnBooks‘I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed reading this book…sweet, provocatively steamy, and absolutely swoony’ Feminist Reflections
In the Shadow of Winter
LORNA GRAY
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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2015
Copyright © Lorna Gray 2015
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Cover design by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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available from the British Library
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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.
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Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780008122720
Version 2015-02-20
For Mary Stewart
Contents
Cover (#ua8a5b71a-8a20-5870-8e56-e4c4be0e840f)
Title Page (#u099f261c-4442-574a-95e8-ed658094d090)
Copyright (#u06716d1b-bae7-582a-a649-bc14d6b1220c)
Dedication (#uf6654938-136a-5c1c-9717-57835998004e)
Chapter 1 (#u271219f1-1ee6-5325-b4d5-99351483d735)
Chapter 2 (#ube0d2186-5e99-59e7-8ac1-75b040a371d0)
Chapter 3 (#ud23d8a40-cfdd-5caa-9460-a08c46289d86)
Chapter 4 (#u3cfc96c7-fcc4-5d31-8377-09c3af7dc351)
Chapter 5 (#u1b1d5e72-13ee-5c6b-acd2-15bca2295060)
Chapter 6 (#u8c051a57-9f13-5116-b4e1-6cea9ce7bbbe)
Chapter 7 (#ua92de63e-3938-5851-b9af-63ebd85ea6a3)
Chapter 8 (#ueab6a605-8a3b-5302-8964-0701ea161d9d)
Chapter 9 (#u7aa7e75b-3e45-5e33-a6f1-c8efd6cee297)
Chapter 10 (#u458270fb-e9a5-5f6e-b7ec-2922d46733ac)
Chapter 11 (#ue4f8cad0-2340-513e-8a53-ddb0e322d6b1)
Chapter 12 (#ub0facbc1-6742-5c14-9a89-bf4aa23d4988)
Chapter 13 (#uc96429a2-1ffd-5501-9738-d9499f60d397)
Chapter 14 (#u6bcabe42-ab2d-57be-a730-68aff463a7dc)
Chapter 15 (#u106353de-f333-5a2c-90ad-f19ab436b199)
Chapter 16 (#u9b9d9bad-1092-5d37-a031-a3964ab3a8a9)
Chapter 17 (#u0dee9b28-007d-505c-b476-9c5ea7f0e247)
Chapter 18 (#u06a4d8b0-ec8b-5a57-b963-8e2d64a7c4d8)
Chapter 19 (#u3fc9b16d-cfe0-5877-81bc-2798a1e93df4)
Chapter 20 (#u54a59f58-7f32-5679-81e5-007af0aa0f44)
Chapter 21 (#ud5dfb93d-88fc-5c37-9b39-8c5a8a8ca53d)
Chapter 22 (#u68d1f3d9-4a1a-57e5-a449-48c8ff6464fe)
Chapter 23 (#u4d16c13f-b7cd-5878-a19a-e3d7b0f459bc)
Chapter 24 (#ufb177ac2-693a-52ba-a069-c5b410e341fc)
Chapter 25 (#u04cdc808-21ec-5d90-b284-c5d2635f5252)
Chapter 26 (#u277a5bf1-5391-5c39-bdf9-f2ab273eda28)
Chapter 27 (#u5850e314-3086-56e9-8011-0914f69ab8fe)
Chapter 28 (#u47b83377-3c7c-5a85-b9cc-55f1e10f1d3e)
Chapter 29 (#ua2fc8287-30e8-5e71-a8a6-94b9ac8a9d51)
Chapter 30 (#u7b87c019-9e69-53b3-87b9-b87a17c12ea3)
Chapter 31 (#ucfdef45c-b2e3-586e-ae10-70acf61dc512)
Chapter 32 (#u23746087-e2e6-54c7-8e4d-7869dd0dbc67)
Chapter 33 (#u9a834679-60eb-5377-b6e3-8269bbadcee0)
Chapter 34 (#u8dd6daa4-f528-5b2b-a0af-9656447fe6ce)
Chapter 35 (#u2708d825-c848-5004-a3cf-35fcc1aacccd)
Chapter 36 (#u0ddbd95d-5e78-50ac-b61c-e8b9ac3b900b)
Chapter 37 (#u5ef0b1dc-790a-5994-9a3f-b0ef9463336f)
Acknowledgements (#ud6832879-ba04-5f06-a5de-d8a54e8b2166)
Lorna Gray (#u9ee3ab36-fbeb-53a2-ba9b-cd074bb8aba2)
About HarperImpulse (#u03db017b-4dd5-579b-b617-2001cb68ace2)
About the Publisher (#u26858556-a11c-5aa5-ad6c-21b4317edb4e)
Chapter 1 (#u4bb5bd47-b43f-5dbe-a687-54a6210f5569)
The Cotswolds, England. 1947
I suspect that my impression of the past is something akin to a soldier’s image of his homeland – all improbable blue skies and greenery like a treasured souvenir postcard where the colours have been painted in. That being so, I can only sympathise with all those war-wearied men who, instead of returning to find the picture held dear in their imagination, discovered a land brown with the stain of bombed-out buildings, plain rationed clothing and the soot of struggling industry.
Not that the land was brown at present, admittedly. If snow was good for something, it could be said that it was at least clean.
Right on cue, the first hard spikes of a fresh storm flung themselves against my cheek. Reaching for the last two buckets, I hurried, or at least hurried as much as a person can in a foot or more of drifted snow, across to the house before Freddy could return. It only felt like a moment ago that we had put the poor ponies out to wade about in the valley but it appeared to have been a pattern of the past two months that the hours of every day would vanish in a blur of turning ponies out or bringing them in again, mucking them out and feeding them. Although, just for a change, the last hour in particular had been filled with endlessly lugging water across the treacherous roadway.
It is tempting here to launch into an explanation of the past weeks of hardship and isolation, and the conditions of our ceaseless battle against the bitter wind but I have never yet heard anyone describe this unnatural winter, a year into peace, without making it seem exaggerated or even simply downright invented. What I will say however, is that entire crops of winter vegetables were frozen uselessly into barns and with animals dying in herds at a time from cold and malnutrition on the whitened hillsides, these hard facts do perhaps begin to paint the right kind of picture. I know of at least one local farmer who, defying regulations, butchered his own sheep to feed his stranded neighbours.
For me, it was the addition of water to this list of deprivations that formed my most immediate difficulty. Like most of the Cotswolds, we had no mains water but the trusty hilltop spring, which normally supplied my hairy menagerie, was buried several feet beneath a hard cap of snow and ice and now only the rustic pipes that some former landowner had laid deep underground from pond to house could still be relied on to flow. It did seem particularly perverse that wherever I went I should be surrounded by great powdery heaps of the stuff.
I had actually finished the present watery mission however, and brought in everyone from the upper slopes before I finally caught the rough sound of Freddy's return. The ponies were blowing hard and hurrying out of the narrow valley when they ought to have been walking and, instantly dropping whatever I was doing, I stepped quickly across the yard to meet whichever miniature disaster had happened to the boy this time. It was beyond me to guess how he had somehow managed to turn even this mundane task into yet another adventure but there he was, fiddling about with the valley gate and standing at the centre of a sweating and excited cluster of tossing manes; bothered, overheated, but perfectly unharmed.
Getting him to speak was the next challenge. The boy was so excited and so agitated, and so very desperate to tell me about it that his words kept coming out in the wrong order, and sometimes even the letters too. Only then he finally managed it and any habitual urge to scold him abruptly evaporated.
His tale must have demonstrated every one of the usual inconsistencies inspired by his wonderfully overactive imagination but it would have taken a harder woman than me to ignore the underlying thread of genuine alarm. Even then, I probably could still have dismissed it as fantasy and, thanks to his appalling lack of self-confidence, he almost certainly would have believed me. But his description of the moment of spotting someone floundering on the furthermost slopes with its madcap image of that same foolish soul trying to force their way uphill through deep shifting powder was inescapable and, in the end, I found it unavoidably convincing too.
And so that was how I found myself first prising a pony from its hay to reluctantly accompany me out into the disorientating amber light of a thickening snowstorm. Then, with the dark shadow of a hedge as my only guide, why I set about blindly tracing a path along the ridge top until yards felt like miles. And why now, nearly an hour later, I was standing cold and painfully breathless while the wind carved white spirals around me, dispassionately staring. At a dead man.
He was sitting unnaturally slumped and motionless in the lee of an old dry-stone wall and with wind-driven drifts already beginning to claim his silent body, he was rapidly becoming nothing more than a misshapen extension to the shade. If I had been any later I might never have seen him at all. Everything about him was adding weight to the appearance of habitual vagrancy and where his head had sunk down onto his chest, I found that I could see very little of his face beneath the tattered and filthy remains of a scarf that may once have been patterned. His stained coat had a gaping tear to the seam of one sleeve and, lying half-propped against the hard frozen support of the tumbled stones, he had one hand jammed into the buttons near his chest, presumably in a useless quest for warmth. The other, just visible as white lifeless fingers within the swathes of a fraying cuff, had slipped from his lap to rest among the exposed stones by his side. It seemed to me that he must have made that same cruel mistake experienced by many other homeless people before and, having failed to beg his way into the cover of a dry barn and a hot meal, had chosen to pause and catch his breath for a while in the comparative shelter of this old stone wall. And then, with energy and resources at their lowest ebb, he must simply have, tragically but inevitably, expired.
So it came as a surprise when the pale frozen hand suddenly tightened gruesomely upon the rock by his side to thrust him awkwardly to his feet.
I had been creeping closer with that macabre curiosity of one who needs to at least be sure before turning for home so it only took one staggering plunge forwards in a search for balance for him to crash blindly into me. I gave a yelp, mainly at finding a corpse becoming suddenly very much not a corpse, but he, poor man, found the shock of impact infinitely worse. Meeting someone at all in a whiteout was obviously utterly unexpected, and to find them standing silently and unmoving just above him was quite simply far too much. His strangled cry echoed back off the swirling barrier of icy wind; the momentum, which had carried him so suddenly and forcefully to his feet, made him rebound off me again and he stumbled, flailing backwards until he was brought crashing painfully down once more onto the hard frozen ground.
There was a brief moment of silence while I recovered my balance and my poise and the poor tramp simply lay there. He was as still and as silent as he had been before and I wondered if I really had killed him this time. But then in the next moment I saw him breathe and I was suddenly kneeling in the rubble by his side, putting a reassuring hand on his ragged sleeve and gabbling apologies and explanations like an anxious idiot.
He hadn’t moved from his crumpled heap, head concealed in the curve of his arm and a liberal dusting of windblown snow. In fact, he seemed completely insensible to my jumbled words and I was just mumbling something along the lines of “sorry, sorry. I’m so sorry” when all of a sudden he moved again. As before it was entirely unexpected and again he made me yelp and flinch away but this time, instead of plunging to his feet, he twisted round onto his back and took hold of the hand that had been steadily giving his shoulder a little shake.
For a man on the edge of existence his grip was surprisingly firm but what was more startling was the speed with which he snatched aside my other hand. It had instinctively reached to push at his chest so that I would not topple forwards onto him, I think – not hard, in spite of the sharply muttered exclamation it had drawn from him – and my mind was just beginning to make the first uncertain move from confusion into alarm when all of a sudden, quite simply, it just froze.
The hoarse voice was mumbling something up at me, a garbled torrent attempting to form an angry accusation. It sounded like he was questioning my morality and made absolutely no sense whatsoever, but I was not listening to that. All I could think of was the numbing discovery that this was no strange vagrant.
The man’s weary tones were curt and altered, and it had been a long time since I had last heard him speak, either in irritation or in friendship. But regardless, the voice was inexplicably, indisputably familiar – I knew him.
In an instant the urge to draw back evaporated. “Matthew?”
My enquiry was as hesitant as it was incredulous and it had to be repeated five or six times before my words finally filtered through his rage enough to at least silence his ranting. In defiance of his evidential fury, my voice was astoundingly steady as I persevered:
“Matthew? It’s me … Eleanor.”
The dark eyes that were marked and shadowed by the hollow strain of exhaustion wavered for a moment before abruptly focusing to fix upon mine. They were staring at me from behind the tattered mask of the scarf and I could see where the fabric was moving in and out over his mouth to the draw of his rapid breathing.
“Matthew?” I repeated, trying not to give in to the appalling rush of concern that had accompanied that first wild unrecognizing glare. I believe I even tried to smile.
His breathing checked.
Suddenly he moved again. It was with that same uncontrolled urgency that had startled me before. I flinched aside, raising an arm instinctively as he leapt to his feet only to realise even as I did so that he must have let me go. There was a sharp crunch of snow behind me and a rapid scattering of loose flakes. Then, irregular and stumbling, the uneven steps accelerated and diminished.
In an instant and without so much as pausing for thought, I had twisted to my feet. I could still make out the weaving shadow of the departing figure and, racing over to the sulkily waiting pony to snatch up his rope before dragging the reluctant creature after me, I set off again across the field in pursuit of the hurrying man.
Even with the handicap of a stubbornly protesting animal, I was still able to gain on him before we had travelled many yards and as I drew alongside and then began to pass him, it was easy to see why. His head was down as he forced himself onwards and it seemed to me that he was only managing to do so at all by drawing on some last deep reserves that had nothing to do with muscle or physical strength. The tatty scarf had fallen away to expose a grimy unshaven jaw and his breath was coming in short laboured puffs that misted in the air around him before being swept away by the ceaselessly bitter wind. He was clearly floundering but I didn’t dare touch him again and he seemed to have no intention of stopping until either snow or exhaustion forced it.
In desperation I dragged the pony round to partially bar his path and cried, “Matthew! You’re going the wrong way!”
For a moment I thought he might try to break his way past but then, with a short agitated cry that seemed to come from somewhere between impatience and despair, he abruptly stopped and stood before me, swaying gently.
Then he lifted his head once more and where the shadowed eyes stared watchfully out at me from beneath frosted brows, I was startled to realise that his dirtied cheeks were actually streaked with tears.
“You were going the wrong way, Matthew,” I repeated gently, by way of an explanation.
There was a very, very long silence when I thought he had not heard. But then, in a voice that was so faint that it almost seemed to be coming from somewhere else entirely, he finally whispered, “The wrong … way?”
The question was vague and flooded with uncomprehending weariness, and it made my heart ache. “My home is that way.” My voice was soft and steady like a parent talking to a frightened child and, being careful not to startle him, I lifted a hand in an imprecise indication of its direction.
His gaze wavered briefly as he unwittingly turned to look, not that we could see more than twenty yards from our feet let alone all the way down to the farmhouse. But then his gaze snapped suspiciously back to my face, filled with hard distrust in case I had moved, only for the expression to fade again to guilty abstraction as he remembered who I was.
“Your home?”
“Home,” I said firmly and then, in the manner of a casual afterthought, added; “Would you like to come?”
Chapter 2 (#u4bb5bd47-b43f-5dbe-a687-54a6210f5569)
It was lucky that I had thought to bring the pony; I would never have got Matthew back on my own. It was almost as if in that instant of deciding to accept my help, however reluctantly, all of his remaining strength had been spent and for a few horrible long minutes I had feared that even maintaining a grip on the pony’s mane as it towed him steadily along was going to be a demand too far.
If I had thought that task difficult however, getting him to relinquish it for an arm about my shoulders and from there steering him into my house proved even more of a challenge. He had neither spoken nor moved from his hunched position since we had started for home and as I set about tugging him along the path, it became horribly apparent that he must have been wandering about out there for far longer than just a few hours. In truth he was barely conscious and although he was obviously trying to spare me as much as he could, he very nearly crushed me when we finally attempted to coordinate a sort of crabwise shuffle into the house.
Freddy, however, was utterly amazing. The boy had already appeared noisily by my side before I could have possibly expected him and, as soon as Matthew and I had set off on our unsteady way, had whisked the tired pony away to hay and a dry stable, only to rush to the door before we had even made it around the side of the house, still talking ceaselessly. He was there now, ahead of us, pushing the door open and dragging it wide so that we could slowly shuffle our way into the short passage by the kitchen.
Even with the boy’s help, the doorway was still very narrow and it took some manoeuvring to ease us both through. I suppose if I had thought, I could have got Freddy to run and open the more impressive – and therefore much wider – front door but as with all farmhouses, the kitchen door was the one that we used on a daily basis and I wasn’t even sure if the thick ancient bolts could be drawn back on the other.
It had been my intention to cross the wider space from kitchen to stairs, and from there take Matthew up to a bedroom where he could rest and recover in relative comfort but Matthew himself forced me to swiftly abandon that idea. I had managed to get him this far by taking his right arm heavily across my shoulders while his other groped drunkenly from handhold to handhold but whether it was from the blaze of unaccustomed heat or the unexpected realisation that his ordeal was nearly over I do not know, but all of a sudden his remaining ability to support himself abruptly vanished. Entirely without warning, his fingers fell short from their reach towards the tabletop and then his head drooped. He had already been testing me pretty near to my limit but this sudden collapse took me far beyond tolerance and we were very lucky that I even managed to get him as far as the living room settee, let alone all the way upstairs to my bed.
A peculiar pause followed this where, after my abrupt release from such a heavy burden, the sensation of being airborne was so strange that the force of it nearly finished what Matthew’s weight had begun. My face burned from exertion and, added to the heat of the fire at my back, it seemed to take an eternity before my aching lungs could adjust to breathing warm air. But then, in the next instant, normality reasserted itself and I had time to wonder that it was Matthew Croft of all people who had been found lost in a snowstorm. And then to notice almost immediately afterwards that the voluble enthusiasm, which had been an almost constant backdrop to our journey across the kitchen, had faded sharply to silence.
Freddy’s delight at his part in an apparently heroic rescue ought to have been inexhaustible; I quickly turned with a smile and encouragement so that the boy would be protected from understanding the full urgency of getting the object of his adventure warm but he wasn’t looking at me. Freddy was staring with eyes fixed wide at the man who was sitting slumped before us and blinking blearily at the threadbare carpet by our feet.
I took a steadying breath. “Freddy, will you fetch some of my father’s old clothes? We’d better get him into something dry.” My voice was bright and carefully filled with that lively tone of artificial cheer that was usually the reserve of matronly housekeepers but I might as well have said nothing for all the notice he took.
“Freddy,” I said sharply, “did you hear what I said?”
Then I turned my head and followed his gaze.
Matthew was still sitting exactly where he had landed when I had clumsily surrendered him to the settee except that now he was making an ineffectual attempt at unfastening the buttons of his soaked jacket. Finally able to see it properly, the jacket looked like it was made from a kind of stylish brown wool and would have originally been better suited to a walk through town towards his office than across country in the snow. Whatever it had once been however, now it was only disgustingly grimy and the torn seam on his sleeve that had been noted before had since parted even further so that it was now exposing a large expanse of lining.
I suppose it was because of this obvious damage to one shoulder that I had not noticed what had happened to the other.
The stain had spread from his collar down towards the elbow of his left sleeve and it was entirely different to the multitude of scuffs and scrapes of mud and filth that coloured the fabric elsewhere.
“Here, let me.” The quickly delivered request was tinged with disbelief as I leant down and reached for the sodden jacket.
His numbed fingers surrendered the task of fumbling with the buttons readily enough and then in a few short seconds I was pulling the icy flaps apart.
“Oh, good God.”
Blood had soaked through the shirt onto his woollen jumper and from there spread in an ugly stain across his chest, and it was very clear to me now that there could be no ordinary explanation for what I had found out in the snow.
“Good God, Matthew!” I said again. “What has happened to you?”
He looked up at that and gave me a faintly blurry smile. “Pay no man, isn’t that what they say? No, hang on, that isn’t it – what’s the saying…?” He was speaking with the careful enunciation of one who was not in nearly as much control of himself as he would have liked to have been. He blinked and then added, “Ah yes, owe no man. But that isn’t fair; I don’t think he can have meant for it to turn out like that…”
Then his expression clouded as if he knew he was wandering and, with an obvious effort, he bit off whatever else might have followed.
Freddy must have moved behind my shoulder because Matthew’s eyes suddenly snapped past me. He stared up at the boy for a moment, the heavily shadowed eyes widening in alarm before travelling jerkily back to my face. Then, with a blur of movement that was startlingly reminiscent of the precision I had seen out in the snow, he reached out and took a tight hold of my hand.
“Don’t tell them.” His voice rose anxiously as the draw on my arm forced me to bend awkwardly down towards him. “You won’t tell them about me, will you? Please?”
I shook my head, trying to discreetly prise my wrist free only to feel a cold stab of apprehension as he begged again, “Please!”
“I won’t, Matthew,” I said, not really knowing to what I was promising.
He gave me one long hard look and seemed to believe me. Releasing my hand, he blinked from me to Freddy and back to me again. Then, letting out his breath in a long gentle sigh, he slowly and with about as much grace as a bad actor playing a part, crumpled backwards onto the soft panels of the settee.
I stared down at his prone form for a moment before my brain clicked into gear.
“Right Freddy,” I said crisply. “Fetch my scissors, the medical kit – the horse one I mean, we’re going to need more than plasters – and some blankets. I’ll get some water on the boil.”
Freddy looked at me with big scared eyes. “Is he dead?” he whispered.
“No Freddy, he’s not,” I said firmly. “Now off you go, quickly please!”
When the boy had finished that little task, I would strategically send him on another lengthier errand, this time to the hay barn.
If I had been determined to protect Freddy from further shock and the subsequent bad dreams, I only wish I could have extended the same courtesy to myself. Patching up the various wounds that the horses have presented over the years may have trained me in all the practical skills, but nothing could have prepared me for the emotional horror of having to cut away his shirt and examine the twelve or so shotgun pellet wounds that had splattered across his upper arm and chest. None of them had gone deep, he must have been hit at the very edge of the gun’s range, but blood still oozed sickeningly from the wounds as I carefully eased the pellets free.
Blessedly, he was still unconscious as I dressed the wounds with iodine solution and gauze; it seemed to take forever to strap it all firmly into place with the thick rolls of bandage when I had to deal with the leaden weight of his body on my own. But then at long last it was finished and I could place bandages, wounds and everything safely out of sight under the great stack of blankets which would slowly but surely bring him back to vital warmth, and pause a while to gather my thoughts.
Many hours later though, and after all that bustle and urgency it was suddenly feeling very much like I was being given rather too much time in which to think. Freddy had been fed and dispatched off to bed long ago and with the wind outside picking up little gusts of ice and sending them in a distant rattle against the glass, I was actually for the first time in my life finding the house slightly eerie. The rhythmic hiss and creak of the door beneath the stairs made it sound like I was catching the stealthy betrayal of someone’s passing footsteps and with very little else to do now but sit and wait, I found myself wishing very fervently that the back room was not so draughty and my imagination not quite so alive.
Like our water supply, this little corner of the Cotswolds had never been connected to mains electricity either, so the room was merely lit by the inky amber of an oil lamp and the formerly companionable glow of the hearth. This scene was not unique to my household; on the assumption that others were keeping the same late hours, and hopefully for considerably more ordinary reasons than mine, their homes too must be chasing away the shadows with mild lamp light. Across the country, main roads and railways were closed by impossibly deep drifts and after a month when only a few coal trains had managed to reach the power stations, urban homes and even the factories that had managed to labour for years under the most fearsome bombardment had no choice now but to at long last fall silent. Here was another reminder that the weather had the power to do what the war had not.
Admittedly, I could not exactly claim this particular shortage for myself or my little rural farmstead, having never had any electric heaters, refrigerators or lighting to worry about. But at this precise moment the background hum from a little domestic machinery might well have made all the difference to the windblown whispers which were presently stalking me across the room.
Matthew’s head moved on the arm of the settee and I tensed, thinking that he was awake, but his eyes remained closed. His sleep must have been punctuated by nightmares because every once in a while his breathing would jerk and catch in his throat, and occasionally I caught the low murmur of words uttered in an agitated undertone, but he said nothing I could make any sense of. I put the back of my hand lightly to his forehead; it was warm but not alarmingly hot.
I sat back in my chair and settled to watch as he slept. It was strange to find myself so unexpectedly maintaining this late night vigil over a man I had not seen for years, and who now lay restlessly sleeping on my settee. Earlier, my confusion had fixed itself upon flimsy theories of wandering too far in deteriorating weather, but it was impossible to continue this pretence, especially when I remembered that even in a whiteout Matthew would have known these fields and byways as well as I did, if not better.
He stirred again, uneasily. The features of his face were being drawn into sharp relief by the sooty smear of light from the lamp behind me and beneath the tangle of sandy hair which had been thick with dirt and burrs, I could see scratches on his cheek that were days old. His chest was marked by a darkening smudge of fresh bruises and earlier, while I had been dressing his shoulder, I had noted that there were scars too, a jagged series of lines running lightly across his ribs, whitened with age, which must have been from the war.
I shivered suddenly in spite of the fierce heat from the nearby fire and, tucking my legs up under myself, I turned my head aside to fix instead upon the shredded remains of clothing which were laid out on the hearth beside me. Most would be burnt as soon as they were dry enough and only his boots and trousers had been cleaned and hung out with more care. Torn and battered though they were, I suspected he would be too tall for my father’s old clothes and with no hope of getting more from elsewhere, I could not possibly discard them.
His breathing changed and I did not need to see the eyelashes flutter on his cheek to know that he was awake. Silently, I slipped across to the fireside hotplate where I had set some broth to warm and, tipping some into a bowl, I slowly turned back to face him once more. His eyes were glinting in the firelight, following me as I carefully drifted closer. Although they ought to have been a dark hazel with flecks of deeper brown, under the light fever of exhaustion they were paler, almost amber.
“Are you hungry?” I asked. He didn’t answer and just lay there, staring at me.
“Come on, let’s get some of this into you,” I said brightly and, firmly ignoring the foolishness that tried to make me clumsy, knelt by the settee before helping him to spoon some of the warming liquid into his mouth.
For a little while he gulped it down hungrily but then, unexpectedly and with surprising force, he pushed my hand away as if the thin meal suddenly disgusted him. He must have noticed my flinch because he quickly apologised.
“Thank you,” he said softly, allowing his head to fall back onto the cushions. His voice was weak and quiet as though the effort of speaking was almost too much for him but I was relieved to note that there was more colour in his pallid cheeks.
“Don’t mention it,” I replied lightly.
He shut his eyes, “I’ll be on my way again in the morning.”
“I’m sure you will.” He looked like the idea of even sitting up was beyond him.
He gave me a little smile, eyes still closed, and suddenly looked more like the man I knew.
“How did this happen to you?” I asked gently as I climbed to my feet. When I looked back, he was staring at me with an expression strongly reminiscent of the one I had first seen in the snow, but I was determined not to let the opportunity pass this time. “Who did this to you, Matthew?”
His head moved awkwardly on the arm of the chair and I thought for a moment he was going to try to get up. “I don’t … I can’t seem to remember,” he whispered helplessly.
“It’s all right,” I said quickly, guiltily covering the rush of concern that filled me. “It’ll keep until morning I’m sure.”
“You won’t tell them I’m here, will you?” His fingers clutched at the blankets and my heart tightened painfully as that same hunted expression beat a return to his pale haggard face.
“I won’t tell them, Matthew. Don’t worry.”
“He … I didn’t mean to … They’re …” He spoke agitatedly, seeming to be talking more to himself than to me, and I stepped back as he tried to sit up, feeling suddenly nervous as that wild urge to bolt altered his eyes again. His strength failed him however, and slowly he sank back down onto the settee, looking grey and utterly exhausted.
After a while he seemed to fall helplessly into an unmoving slumber and finally I was able to unclench my fingers from the bowl enough to set it down on the kitchen table. His agitation disturbed me and as I gazed down at his averted face from the comparative distance of the other end of the settee, I wondered just what sort of explanation I was expecting him to give, when the morning came.
Would he even be glad when he finally regained his senses, to discover that it was me that had patched and bathed his wounds? So far his reactions had ranged from gentle recognition to horrified aversion, and I really wasn’t sure which emotion I could expect to prevail when daylight and lucid reasoning made their return at last.
“Oh, stop it,” I muttered to myself, crossly avoiding working this up into a larger complication than it deserved. There were, I was sure, any number of more pressing concerns in the mind of a man who had very nearly died than whether or not the person that had helped him was feeling suitably thanked.
Armed with this fresh conviction, I slipped silently back to my station in the armchair and prepared to watch once more. I was just beginning to doze myself when he spoke again;
“What is your name? I’ve forgotten it, I’m sorry.” His head moved on the cushion as he tried to twist round to look at me but his shoulder must have hurt him because he gave a short hiss of pain before allowing his head to fall back again.
“Eleanor,” I said softly from my armchair.
“Oh.” There was a long pause and I thought that he had fallen asleep but then he added, “I knew an Eleanor once, but that was a long time ago; before I went away.”
I said nothing and just watched the fire as it flickered gently in the grate.
“She was a lot like you, but younger. And possibly a little shorter, although that could just be because you’re thinner than she was.” His voice was faint as he mumbled dozily and I realised that he didn’t know where he was. “Her father died you know. I meant to write and tell her how sorry I was but somehow I just couldn’t find the words.”
There was another long pause and then I saw his body tauten. “I’m not making sense, am I, Eleanor?”
“You’re fine,” I replied soothingly. “Just go to sleep.”
For a while I thought he had, but then in a stronger voice he asked, “What did he die of?” He turned his head to look at me and I saw that this time he knew who I was.
“Something with a long unpronounceable name, but basically it was his breathing again,” I said quietly. “He lasted a long time, much longer than the doctors said he could. But he went peacefully, and at least it wasn’t a shock.”
“And you nursed him to the end.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes,” I said quietly.
“No wonder you look so …” He stopped.
“So what exactly? My weather-beaten exterior is confusing you,” I supplied lightly.
I think he might have even given a faint chuckle, “I was going to say careworn, but weather-beaten will do.”
For some unfathomable reason, given that I had started it, his evident amusement irritated me and I really didn’t want to think about why. “Go to sleep.” I spoke firmly.
“Yes ma’am,” he said with a faint hint of the wry humour that had once so typified him. He didn’t speak again.
Chapter 3 (#u4bb5bd47-b43f-5dbe-a687-54a6210f5569)
After a night of dozing fitfully in the armchair, it was hard to gingerly ease my aching joints out of their cramped position, but he was sleeping more soundly now and finally I dared leave him long enough to go about my morning chores.
Yesterday’s fresh bout of snow had not ceased with the dawn and it was still falling thickly on the yard. It had long since filled in the areas I had laboriously cleared a few days previously and the barbed wind was picking it up, tossing it about so that flakes curled around me in little flurries as I sleepily scrunched my way across to the stables. The inmates must have only managed about two hours of escape before the weather had put an end to their liberty once more but judging by the chorus of whickering that met me as soon as I began rattling about in the feed bins, they were all contented enough with their return to confinement, particularly when it meant they got breakfast.
Leaving my assortment of horses and ponies happily munching their meal, I trudged with a relative contentment of my own across the yard and ducked into the goat house. This odd little building had probably had a previous incarnation as a bull house back in the days when this had been a dairy farm, but now it was simply a rough tin roof set on thick stone walls with a small improvised pen area so that they could exercise when the weather was better.
Three cheerful faces greeted me before trotting eagerly over the rough cobbled floor of their house to perform a little boisterous tap-dance about my feet as I tipped out their feed. Laughing, I swept up the small amount of mess they had made and then fetched a milk pail while they ate. Myrtle was a good goat and very docile, and she did not even pause in her steady chewing as I relieved her of her burden of milk. If I had time, I would make butter later.
There was just one animal in my collection that did not inspire quite the same degree of affection and this was the cockerel. He, being a very brave sort of creature, had a habit of feigning indifference until the very moment that my back was turned only to then, with a flurry of feathers, make a wild dive for my ankles. It was always a remarkable coincidence how as soon as I turned back again, he would be intently pecking at the dirt as if nothing had happened. Today, however, he must have wisely read that confrontation would rapidly lead to a close encounter with a cooking pot and as I carefully carried the precious milk back to the chilly gloom of the dairy, he chose to simply fix his beady eye upon me in a disdainful glare before losing all of his sophistication and joining the girls in a frenzied pecking of the kitchen scraps from their feeder.
Freddy was up and making a pot of tea when I reappeared in the kitchen, kicking the snow off my boots and trying to breathe some warmth back into my hands. He looked sleepy but nothing compared to how shattered I felt.
“Eggs for breakfast?” I asked only to smile as he nodded enthusiastically. Clearly there was no need to worry that the upset of the previous day’s events would have affected his appetite. “All right then, what sort? Fried, poached, scrambled or boiled? We’ve got a bit of bread left from yesterday for toast.”
Freddy thought for a moment. “Scrambled, I think.”
“Right, scrambled it is.” I cheerfully returned his grin and it almost seemed for a moment that we could forget the other silent presence in my home. My memories of the past day seemed so unlikely now that it felt as if I had simply experienced an exceptionally bad night with an exceptionally bad dream, and had it not been for the long absent figure from my past currently deeply asleep on my settee, I would not have been able to convince myself that any of it had really happened at all.
Freddy set the table and poured the tea while I juggled eggs and toast, which respectively tried to weld themselves to the pan or spontaneously combust. Finally, however, we were able to sit down and eat and, despite a certain hint of carbon, it was delicious. It was a relief to feel little warming tendrils of energy begin at long last to make their return to my weary limbs.
“Do you think I could have some of that?”
A faint voice from the fireside made us both jump. Feeling strangely guilty again, I looked over to see that Matthew had managed to shuffle himself up to be sitting propped against the arm of the settee. His face was deathly pale and with his dishevelled hair and the scruffs and scrapes on his skin he could still have convincingly passed as a vagrant, and not, as he actually was, a reasonably well-to-do local man. But although his cheeks were sunken and he looked very fragile under the scruffy fuzz of growth on his jaw, the eyes that were cautiously smiling at me from beneath the mask of pain and weariness were calm and disconcertingly familiar, and it was hard to believe now that he was the same person that had been found stumbling about in that blind manner across my land.
He gave me a warmer smile as I abandoned my breakfast to pour him a cup of tea, putting several spoonfuls of sugar in it to help him regain his strength. I was feeling an odd sensation that could best be described as cheerful uncertainty as I approached to hand him the cup and I was relieved to find that I was able to greet him quite easily after all; only to ruin the effect by flinching stupidly as his fingers accidentally pressed over mine. He blinked in surprise, but said nothing.
“What do you want to eat?” I asked, more sharply than I intended.
“Toast?” he said hopefully.
His quick grin was so easy and relaxed that the momentary tension evaporated abruptly, and I couldn’t help breaking into a smile myself as I dragged a table over to him and set a plate down by his side. It was a relief to have him so swiftly establish the tenor of our renewed acquaintance, and still more of a relief to see him reach eagerly for the toast. I had feared that his wounds allied with the extreme exhaustion would have brought on a fever but he seemed well enough, or at least not in any great danger.
He managed to eat most of the plain breakfast before grimacing suddenly and thrusting the plate rather quickly back onto the table. In an attempt to suppress the urge to fuss, I had been trying to concentrate on the remains of my own meal but I heard his pained sigh as he settled back against the arm once more, and I could not help watching as he tucked the blankets up under his chin to cover his bandaged chest in what was a very telling mark of vulnerability.
He unexpectedly looked up to catch me staring and I felt myself jump again, flushing as I quickly looked away. It was impossible to know what to say, particularly when I had to wrestle with an overwhelming impulse to gabble idiotic nothings at him, but he must have misunderstood my meaning because I heard him draw a little breath before saying rather hurriedly, “I’m sorry to put upon you like this. It’s very good of you to have taken me in.”
I did look up at him then, shyness instantly being replaced by a sort of offended irritation as I wondered exactly what else he would have expected me to do. My mouth curled into a brief impression of a smile.
“What actually has happened to you?”
It came out like an accusation and even I was appalled by my own lack of grace. My thoughts might well have been occupied by very little else for the past day but even so, I had still intended to start by asking him how he was feeling or by making one of the many other commonplace social niceties that might have done in the present situation. I certainly had never meant to fling his experience at him quite like this.
Equally certainly, he hadn’t been expecting it either. He glanced quickly from me to Freddy and the gentle grin that had appeared in response to mine darkened abruptly to that same unspeakable tension that was so unlike him.
“I … er …” he began and then stopped. I waited but he didn’t continue.
“Look, you don’t need to tell me anything if you don’t want to,” I said hastily as my embarrassment increased. “It doesn’t matter, but it might help if I understand a little of what’s been happening. Just a very little…?”
“Eleanor … I … I don’t think that I should…You…” He faltered.
My intense shame clouded to puzzlement then. The contractions of his mouth had already betrayed the pattern of his emotions from surprise through to discomfort and onwards, not entirely unreasonably, to impatience. But in this last awkward hesitation, I thought I saw another expression flicker briefly across his face. It was so swiftly suppressed that it barely registered, but just for a moment, only a brief fleeting instant, I thought I saw guilt.
I watched him run a hand over his face and it shook a little. He tried again, “It’s difficult. You’re…”
Then his eyes flicked up to catch mine, crucially, before dropping quickly away again.
“Oh,” I said with that odd note of sharpness back in my voice. It could not have been made plainer if he had tried. “Of course. You can’t tell me.”
He didn’t contradict me.
“Right,” I said in a strangled croak and ignored the pathetically appeasing smile he attempted.
It was a shock to be so emphatically rebuffed. I know that I had been half expecting something like this but somehow the wise thoughts of three o’clock in the morning were no consolation now that it was daylight and he very clearly had not lost his mind.
I turned abruptly away to crash the breakfast things into the sink, setting about scrubbing the dishes as if the boiling water from the pan on the stove could cleanse me of the strain of his unwelcome presence. After all the worry I had expended in the night on his behalf, I had thought that, at the very least, he would owe me a little basic honesty. But instead it appeared that I was to be roughly abandoned to the thin logic of my imagination, understanding nothing except the very bitter sting of his rejection. And knowing all the while that it ought to have been for me to shun him.
Apparently, however, this last little truth was not allowed to matter. Instead, infuriatingly trapped within a straitjacket of compassion, I could do little else but maintain an icy silence while the day passed into a blur of keeping him fed, keeping him warm, making him tea; providing, in fact, any one of the many little things that were essential to his ongoing comfort and recovery. He didn’t even seem to register the insult contained within his unthinking acceptance of my continued care.
It might have been a little easier if I could have continued my chores in some other room. Unfortunately, however, there were no fires laid in any other part of the house and while I could still remember a time when there had been a wall between kitchen and living room, my father had removed it years ago so that my mother could have one of the new Calor gas stoves that were suddenly all the rage. Her lively presence and divine cooking had left us for higher things in my early teens but the gas oven still lived on and the only boundary that could separate me now from the presence on my settee was the thin join between the red-tinted tiles in the kitchen and the fraying carpet of the living room floor.
For his part, Matthew, in his brief moments of full wakefulness seemed fixed upon giving me glimpses of that same bright meaningless smile which had irritated me before. This was apparently an attempt to conceal the darker moments of being caught looking broodingly thoughtful and intensely fierce but the improbability of a civilised man such as him even bearing such an expression was unsettling enough.
Added to his continued silence, this obvious secrecy was actually making my own show of frosty distance seem absurdly irrelevant and with the acknowledged flaw in my living arrangements to deal with as well, I was forced in the end to spend the rest of the day attempting to take myself as far away from him as possible. In weather such as ours, however, there was only so long that I could bear it and by about eight o’clock I was shattered, slumping defeated in the armchair by the fire, unable to pretend any longer that I was anything but utterly wearied of this act. I would have dearly liked to have abandoned it, but the only thing I could think of was to scream at Matthew to explain what had happened to him. But he had already made it clear that he had no intention of letting me understand anything about his business and so I held my tongue, and kept my stare fixed upon the crackling flames.
“Eleanor?”
“Um?” I responded sleepily, blinking myself out of my stupor.
“You didn’t get a doctor, did you? Last night I mean.” Matthew had turned slightly awkwardly against the arm of his settee to look back at me.
“Er…?” My brain was struggling to get into gear.
“These bandages,” he gestured to his chest, “did you fetch someone to do them?”
I glowered at him, “No, Matthew, I didn’t. It was snowing in case you’ve forgotten and we’re cut off again for the moment; I did them with my own fair hands. I’m sorry if they’re not up to scratch.”
“No, no,” he corrected hastily, “they’re very good.” He paused, “So no one knows I’m here?”
“No, Matthew, no one knows you’re here,” I said tiredly, concealing the shiver as I realised that his fears had not just been a symptom of his confused ramblings in the night.
I climbed stiffly to my feet without looking at him, concentrating instead on straightening the cushions of my chair; “Do you want anything else? Only I’m going to bed now.”
“No, nothing, thank you,” he said, but then, as I opened the door to the stairs, added; “Eleanor?”
“Yes?” I demanded curtly.
“Just …” A pause. “Thank you,” he finished gently.
As if to compound my exhausted frustration, the handle to my bedroom door decided this was the ideal moment to come off in my hand. Crossly, I slapped it down on the dresser and as I bent to wedge the door shut with a small pile of books, I had to wonder whether the house had it in for me too.
Very wearily, I peeled off the five or so layers of clothing that were my defence against winter. My fingers were stiff as I fumbled with the buttons and then, as I gave in and drew the shirt off over my head, I suddenly realised that my wrists were aching with far more than just tiredness.
I looked down and it was with a kind of fascinated horror that I observed dark marks encircling each one. They were ugly and tender and I had to spend some minutes just sitting on the edge of my bed. Somehow in the preoccupation of being offended by his determined silence, the whole shocking truth of my discovery out in the snow had faded in my memory to become nothing more than a product of my uneasy imagination. But the bruises were indisputable and, allied with his refusal to make any kind of explanation, I found that as I finally slipped into bed, I was actually trembling.
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