In the Shadow of Winter: A gripping historical novel with murder, secrets and forbidden love
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
Lorna Gray asserts the moral right
to be identified as the author of this work.
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
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Acknowledgements
Lorna Gray
About HarperImpulse
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
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
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.