LITMIR.BIZ

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it wasn’t as late as I’d thought. I supposed escape might feel like that. The large house that stood on the opposite side of the triangle was still touched to warmth by the last of the day’s colour. It wasn’t the one that was ringing. That was coming from the other side of the village; in the space after the church but before the turn where the lane coursed away downhill. This grand house was the steward’s house and it was where my cousin had lived and grown until her father had died and her mother had retired to the cottage. I’d only visited these parts once as a child and that had been when I was eight. I barely remembered it but I did remember the village boys who had waged cheerful war with my cousin’s older brothers while my cousin scolded and I trailed about behind the lot of them like a pathetic undersized shadow. It was possible that Danny Hannis had been one of them.

      The house seemed to be a boarding house for farm workers now. There was a steady stream of them passing between the steward’s house and what I’d taken earlier to be a derelict farmyard, only now it was flooded with light and crowded with men and tired carthorses. This, suddenly, was the bustle I was used to. Here the crowds took the form of dusty males ranging along the lines of various low stone walls, smoking and drinking weak beer. The farmhands were all, to a man, tanned and wiry. None of them wore a pale summer jacket. I suspected that most weren’t wealthy enough to own one.

      Freddy didn’t own one either. He caught up with me before I’d even reached the point where the track veered to the right, downhill to my cousin’s cottage, or left around the lower limit of the churchyard and towards that telephone. He grinned at me as he fell into step beside me. He was all limbs and amiableness. ‘I don’t mind walking with you, Miss.’

      The boy matched my sense of escape. He was on that cusp between childhood and manhood. He was aged perhaps fifteen and his face had the unsymmetrical structure of a teenage boy whose features were just beginning to settle into the mould of the man he would become. He wasn’t tall. He was perhaps my height and no more, but he had an endearing air of doubtful friendliness; warm and cheerful because it was in his nature to be so, but doubtful because perhaps other people didn’t always welcome it.

      A certain sense of this boy’s niceness after that room full of adult complications made me protective but perhaps less tactful than I ought to have been. I remarked, ‘I’m going to answer that telephone. But I’ll be very glad of your company if you can explain to me precisely how it happens that there is so much danger tonight that I must let you escort me about the place, and yet somehow once I’m home I’m supposed to be perfectly happy to send you merrily onwards to your own home alone.’

      He wasn’t offended. He told me simply, ‘My home isn’t just downstream from the turbine house Mr Winstone mentioned.’

       Ah.

      I confessed sheepishly, ‘That’s my cousin’s nearest neighbour. I thought that little brick hovel was somebody’s cottage.’

      I made Freddy laugh. ‘Absolutely it is. And did you notice that it comes complete with running water laid on beneath the floorboards? You should be careful who you say that to. The turbine house is a matter for local pride. It gives light to the farmyard and the Manor. And it would give power to the steward’s house too if we had a man in there at the moment. We’re as modern as you like here.’

      But not so modern, I thought, that anyone thought to mind the traditional distinction between the luxuries experienced by the land-owner compared to those of his tenants.

      Then Freddy added doubtfully, ‘Did you say you were going to answer that? It’s in the Manor. Someone should be there.’

      That told me what dwelling had the boldness to possess a telephone in this humble place. Its busy farmyard yawned in the gloom beneath us, where life hummed from every ancient stone and sagging roof, and stables for carthorses nestled against the rear wall of a massive stone barn. Below, the trackway descended into stillness. So did the cobbled surface that curved along the front of the enormous barn and veered left at the corner of another. There was no farmhouse attached to this enclosed run of buildings. There was no reassuring glow from watchful windows to oversee either route. Moths and shadows were the only traffic on this trackway. And the memory of Mrs Abbey’s summoning of ghosts and odd strangers, which to these people was also the correct description for me.

      I dithered and spoke before I’d thought. ‘You’d think that Mr Winstone would be able to name this man if he’d ever met him before, wouldn’t you?’

      Freddy only said politely, ‘Miss?’

      The real worry burst out and it matched the blazing colour that still just touched the sky behind the darkened curve of the opposing valley hillside. I said bitterly, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t hear anything. I must have been at home when it happened. I was outside, sitting on my cousin’s front step. The turbine house would have been just out of sight around the bend of the track and I heard nothing. I must have followed them almost step for step up the hill and yet I saw nothing. There was nothing at all except the endless murmur of that telephone.’

      I turned suddenly and chose the lane above the barn. I could hear my old friend that telephone still, but rather less insistently against the muffle of that great stone barn. Now it was a forlorn note of neglect. The farmhands were all going home for the night and not one of them thought he should answer it. I knew why. It was someone else’s job and, besides, after the tension I’d encountered in that room after the mention of the Colonel’s son, I could guess that none of them would dare.

      I wondered if Danny might. Only he wasn’t likely to be released from his care of his stepfather for a while yet.

      The Manor stood a little aloof from the village. We scurried along the frontage of that vast stone threshing barn and passed its gaping void of a vacant doorway. The cobbled drive rose past the stone barn to nose onto a narrow yard that was lined to our left by another older, rougher barn and on our right by the beginnings of parched garden terraces. No beans or cabbages were tended here. Above all this towered the Manor, a building that thrust up old weathered Cotswold gables all along its western face. Mullioned windows studded three floors and hundreds of tiny diamond panes of glass were each turned crimson by the last glimmer of daylight. It was all at once bleak and the most beautiful house I had ever seen.

      A sudden doubt made me ask, ‘Freddy? Where is the doctor’s house?’

      Freddy didn’t know I was thinking about that man again. The one who had been supposed to be going to fetch help. The boy told me innocently, ‘They’ve gone to the next village along. A place called Winstone.’ He caught my look. He grinned. ‘Mr Winstone’s kin took the name when they travelled into Somerset sometime around the dawn of the universe and in the time since, nature and work have conspired to carry him back again. Him and Mrs Winstone have been married for nearly twenty years, I think.’

      Freddy was also unaware that part of this determination to answer the telephone was the tantalising idea that the Manor might be about to gift me the opportunity to speak to my cousin. I might be able to ask her advice before consigning myself to the silence of a solitary night in her cottage. The invitation was certainly lingering there in the air.

      The kitchen door was unlocked in a manner that implied someone ought to be at home. I hallooed as one was meant to upon trespassing into a private house, but then I stepped in and found the light switch. Its garish yellow glare revealed a cavernous void that showed very little sign of regular use. The whole place confirmed Mrs Abbey’s statement that the Colonel was spending his bereavement elsewhere.

      It made me say to the boy, ‘Didn’t you say someone still lived here?’

      He was looking pale in the harsh electric light. I made him come inside so that I could shut the door before all the summer insects could swarm in after us. This little piece of practicality made him muster the words to reply, ‘The housekeeper.’

      His voice was very small. His wide eyes were taking in the clean surfaces and empty stores. The farmyard might not have been as derelict as I had supposed, but here the abandonment was real. It was not, however, so old that dust was yet filming the bare surfaces and still that wonderful beacon of life was justifying

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