ELIZABETH ELGIN
One Summer at Deer’s Leap

Dedication

Gratefully to Patricia Parkin, Caroline Sheldon and Nancy Webber

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Dragonfly Morning

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

One Summer At Deer’s Leap Part Two

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One

Chapter One

I suppose it was to be expected that someone with a name like mine should one day do something a bit out of the ordinary, like deciding to be a novelist.

I do things by numbers. I’d finished my fifth novel – the other four had been rejected out of hand – and sending it out one last, despairing time was as far as I was prepared to go. One more rejection, and that was the end of Cassie Johns, novelist!

‘You’ll turn her head with a fancy name like that,’ Dad had said when I was born because he wanted me called after his sister Jane, and Mum, who had been wavering and half prepared to agree with him, dug her heels in with uncharacteristic ferocity. And Aunt Jane, bless her, sided with Mum and said that Cassandra would do very nicely, to her way of thinking!

Dear, lovely Aunt Jane was the reason I was here now, a novelist at last, driving my own car and smiling foolishly at a passing clump of silver birches and the foxgloves that grew beneath them, and so stupidly smug and self-satisfied I didn’t notice the revs had dropped to a warning judder and I was being overtaken by a farm tractor.

‘Don’t give in, Cassie,’ Aunt Jane had urged. ‘Just one more try to please your old auntie?’

So instead of giving in and doing the rounds of the universities as Dad had always supposed I would when I got three decent A levels, I wrote Till Hell Freezes Over with a kind of despairing acceptance that my father had been right all along. After working for four years – and four useless novels – on the marketing side of Dad’s horticultural business (selling vegetables and flowers at the top of the lane in summer and working in the propagating houses in winter) I posted off the novel for the fifth time, then settled down to accept defeat. And university, if I was lucky.

My last-stand novel was unbelievably, wonderfully, gloriously accepted. One or two changes were needed, said the publishing lady to whom I spoke an hour after receiving the letter. A little editing – perhaps a different title? Could I go to London and talk to her? Would tomorrow be convenient? I’d asked breathlessly.

It was to be two weeks later that I eventually met my editor, because after a do in the local and everybody in the village having a knees-up to celebrate the emergence of an author in their midst, Aunt Jane died in her sleep that same night.

The milkman became concerned because she didn’t answer to his knock, and came at once to tell us. We found her curled up under her patchwork quilt with such a look of contentment on her face that we knew her going had been gentle.

Had she been thinking of the three sherries of the night before, or her niece’s success? Whatever the reason for that smile, we could only be sorry for ourselves because there hadn’t been a last goodbye. For Jane Johns there was only relief that she had gone the way most people would like: peacefully, in her sleep.

She left her cottage to Dad, the contents to me and sufficient money in her bankbook to pay for a good funeral with a decent knife-and-fork tea to follow. And to Mum’s surprise and consternation – because Aunt Jane had never been one to gamble – she also left me two thousand pounds in Premium Bonds.

I’m still sad that she didn’t live to see my novel, with an eye-catching jacket and its title changed to Ice Maiden, hit the bookshelves, and sorrier still she wasn’t there the Sunday it made the lists, albeit at the bottom. I wondered if, with a first novel, I hadn’t been just a bit too lucky and wouldn’t I walk under a bus the very next time I crossed the road, because of it? Then I got all weepy inside and went to the churchyard to tell the one person who really mattered – at least as far as Ice Maiden was concerned. And Aunt Jane chuckled and said that with a name like Cassandra she’d always known I’d be famous one day, and how about writing a real hot number next, so I could be infamous?

‘And isn’t it about time you cashed those Premium Bonds,’ she said, ‘and bought yourself a little car?’

Aunt Jane and I could talk to each other, not with words, but with our minds, because truth known she and I both were kind of psychic.

‘I’ll have to cash them – when I get them,’ I told her. ‘The solicitor said that Premium Bonds aren’t transferable.’

‘Well then, that’s settled, Cassie girl. You deserve a car.’

I bought a second-hand Mini with Aunt Jane’s money: one careful owner, 20,000 miles on the clock. The bodywork was immaculate, as if the careful owner had spent more time polishing it than driving it. But it was the colour that finally clinched it. Bright red. Aunt Jane would have approved. Even so, Dad felt duty-bound to say, ‘You don’t get something that looks as good as that thing for two grand. There’s a catch.’

I agreed to have the AA send a man to look it over. The little red car had nothing at all wrong with it except that it needed new tyres. It was coming up to three years old and would never pass its MOT with tyres like that, he said.

Something maternal and protective welled up inside me. Mini wasn’t an it or a thing. Red Mini epitomized Aunt Jane’s faith in me. If I’d been inclined to give it a name, I’d have called it Jane.

‘New tyres it is then.’ I glared at Dad, who asked me if I knew what a set of new tyres cost.

‘Is it a deal, then?’ Defiantly I avoided Dad’s eyes.

The one careful owner took my hand, patted the car with a polishing movement and said it was and in that moment I knew that no matter how famous – or infamous – or how rich I became, I would never part with my first car. Not even if I kept it in one of Dad’s outhouses with a tarpaulin over it for ever!

As soon as Dad had got a lady from the village to look after the stall, I’d taken to writing full time. At first I’d wallowed in the luxury of a new word processor and being able to write when I wanted to and not in snatched half-hours at odd times of the day.

True, the novelty soon wore off and I had to discipline myself to work office hours, and even when the words didn’t come properly, I typed stoically on. Mind, there were bonus days when the words flowed. At such times I kidded myself I was a genius, even though the flow days were few and far between.

On the whole, though, I was content. With a contract in my pocket for book two – the make-or-break book, had I known it – my own car and just enough in the bank to keep me afloat until Ice Maiden came up with some royalties, I’d felt justified in giving up my daytime job and only helping Dad out at busy times.

So after being overtaken by the tractor, I pulled the car onto the grass at the side of the road and reached for the carefully written, beautifully illustrated directions. Winding down the window I breathed in deeply, then studied the map. Half a mile back I had passed a clump of oak trees; now I must look out for the crossroads, turn right, and after 200 yards on what was described as little more than a dirt road, I would be there.

‘It’s my sister’s place,’ said my editor, Jeannie, of whom I’d become extremely fond. ‘There’s a bit of a do on next weekend and I’m invited. Why don’t you tag along, too? You don’t live all that far away and it’s Welcome Hall at Deer’s Leap. Bring fancy dress, if you have one.’

I didn’t have fancy dress, and had said so; said too that not all that far on her map was all of fifty-two miles in reality and that Yorkshire was a very large county.

‘Oh, c’mon, Cassie. A break from words will do you good,’ she’d urged, then went on to remind me that the rather clingy, low-cut green sheath dress I’d worn to Harrier Books’ Christmas party would fit the bill nicely. ‘Stick a lily behind your ear and you’ve cracked it. Come as a lily of the field. Nobody’s going to mind when they see your cleavage.’

So I’d checked that my green sheath still fitted, then bought two silk arum lilies, one to be worn as suggested, the other stuck down my cleavage. Thus, hopefully, I would pass for a lily of the field that toiled not, neither did she spin and hoped I wouldn’t look too ordinary against Cleopatra, Elizabeth Tudor and Isadora Duncan.

I took a peek in the rear mirror. Considering my outdoor upbringing, I wasn’t all that bad to look at. My complexion had remained fair in spite of northern winters; my hair was genuine carrot, though Mum called it russet, and my eyes, by far my best asset, were very blue. I wasn’t one bit like Mum or Dad or Aunt Jane, and not for the first time did I wonder who had bestowed my looks. Some long-ago Viking, had it been, on the rampage in northern England? Or was I a changeling?

I laughed out loud. I was on holiday. I was going to a house called Deer’s Leap and Jeannie would be there when I arrived. To add to my blessings, book two was at chapter seven and with Aunt Jane in mind was becoming something of a hot number. I shouldn’t have a care in the world. I didn’t have a care in the world except that maybe my love life was not all it should be.

‘Why are you going to a weekend party?’ Piers had demanded when I’d told him on the phone.

‘Because I need a break.’

‘Then hadn’t it occurred to you that maybe I’d be glad to see you? Why can’t you come to London?’

‘You said you were frantically busy,’ I’d hedged.

‘Never too busy for you, darling. Come to my place, instead?’

Why didn’t he and I shack up down there, he’d said, throwing the two-can-live-as-cheaply-as-one cliché at me.

And iron shirts and do the cooking, I’d thought, and be back to writing odd half-hours again. Besides, Piers wasn’t my soulmate. I didn’t see us ever making a proper go of it. If my ego hadn’t balked at being manless our relationship could well have ended ages ago.

We’d made love, of course. Piers was good to look at; dark and lean and somehow always tanned. His designer stubble suited him, too, though I wished sometimes it wasn’t so hard on my face – afterwards.

And that was something else about him and me: the afterwards bit. It never felt quite right for me. When it was over I found myself not liking him as much as I ought to, and to love a man you’ve got to like him – afterwards. Even I knew that.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ I’d said. ‘I can’t call it off now, and anyway my editor will be there. It isn’t just a weekend party; it’s business.’ Sometimes I tell lies to Piers. ‘More to the point, when are you coming north to see me?’

I’d thrown the ball back into his court and he was just coming up with a perfectly reasonable excuse when I heard his bell chimes, quite clearly.

‘OK, Cassie. Some other time? Soon?’

He’d put the phone down then and I wondered whose fingertip had pressed his doorbell and wasn’t surprised to find I didn’t much care.

‘Forget Piers for two days and get some living in,’ I said to the girl in the rear-view mirror. No time like tonight for dipping a toe in the water, I thought, and to hell with the lily-down-the-cleavage bit!

I wound up the window and set out, smiling, on my way again. Above me the sky was blue, with only little puffs of very white cloud. Around me, and as far as I could see, were fields and hedgerows and grass verges that really had wild flowers growing in them. I was going to a party tonight and I would be a lily of the field and have a wicked time. I wasn’t in any hurry to settle down because I’d already decided there would be all the time in the world, after the third novel. And wouldn’t I know when I met the right man; the man I would love and like – afterwards?

Oh, concentrate, Cassandra! The crossroads, then a couple of hundred yards and Jeannie will be there at the front gate of Deer’s Leap, wondering where you’ve got to!

The engine revs changed from their usual sweet-natured purr to an agitated growl so I dropped a gear, put my foot down and concentrated on the lane ahead. I was just beginning to wonder how the house had got its name when I saw a man ahead. He was smiling, his thumb jutted and he was in fancy dress.

All the things Dad dinned into me about never stopping for anyone, much less for a man, went out of my head. He was undoubtedly a fellow guest, who for some reason was standing at the side of the lane and in need of a lift. I slowed and stopped, then leaned over to slip the nearside door catch.

‘Want a lift?’

‘Please. Could you? I’ve got to get to Deer’s Leap.’

‘Hop in!’

He arranged himself in the passenger seat, one long leg at a time. Then he pulled his knees almost up to his chin and balanced his khaki bag on them.

‘You can push the seat back.’ I lifted the catch to my left. ‘Shove with your feet.’

The seat slipped backwards and he stretched his legs, relief on his face. Well, six foot two at least, isn’t Mini size.

‘That’s a World War Two respirator, isn’t it?’ I envied his fancy dress. So real-looking.

‘They’re usually called gas masks,’ he smiled, and that smile was really something across a crowded Mini.

‘You already dressed for tonight, then?’ I turned the key in the ignition.

‘We-e-ll, sort of,’ he shrugged, ‘and anyway, I’m only on standby.’

‘Damn!’ A slow-moving flock of sheep ahead put paid to the question, ‘What’s standby?’

I slowed to keep well back. The lambs were well grown; almost as big as the ewes and obviously not used to being driven. If one of them panicked in the narrow road, we’d all be in trouble.

My passenger stared ahead, intent on the sheep and the black and white sheepdog that watched and nosed and slunk behind and to the side of them, and I was able to get a good look at him.

Fair, rather thin. His hands lay still on his lap though his fingers moved constantly. He’d had his hair cut short, too, just as if he’d been the pilot whose uniform he wore. Three stripes on his sleeve; wings above his top left-hand pocket. His shoes were altogether of another era.

The sheep were behaving. I hoped they would turn left at the crossroads. He was still watching them intently so I read the number stamped in black on the flap of his gas mask and thought my lily of the field would look a bit botched alongside his authentic uniform. He’d obviously gone to a lot of trouble, so with future fancy dress parties in mind I asked where he’d got it.

‘Oh – the usual place. They throw them at you …’

‘Really? I’d have thought that get-up would’ve been difficult to get hold of.’

‘Only the wings,’ he said absently, his eyes still on the sheep.

I realized he wasn’t going to be very forthcoming and hoped for better luck tonight when my lily-gilded cleavage might just get me noticed.

I looked at his gas mask again. On the underside of the webbing strap were the initials S. S. and a tiny heart, and I wondered who had put them there. The original long-ago owner, I supposed, the author in me supplying Sydney Snow, Stefan Stravinsky, Sam Snodgrass.

‘I’m Cassandra,’ I said. ‘Cassie.’

‘John,’ he smiled, ‘but I usually get Jack.’

The flock began to push and surge to the left. The dog nipped the leg of a ewe that wanted to turn right and it got the message.

‘Soon be there. Been here before?’ We’d turned right onto what really was a dirt road.

‘Mm. Quite a bit …’

The lane was rutted and I slowed, driving carefully, eyes fixed ahead for potholes.

‘There it is.’ He pointed to the tiles of a roof above a row of beeches.

‘Seems a nice place …’ Bigger than I’d expected and not so northernly rugged.

‘It’s very nice. Look – mind if I get out here? I usually go in the back way.’ He seemed in a hurry, his hand already on the door handle. ‘Thanks for the lift. See you.’

He swung his legs out first, then gripped the side to heave himself clear. Then he straightened his jacket with a sharp downward pull, slung his gas mask on his left shoulder and straightened his cap.

‘Bye, Jack. See you tonight.’

‘Y-yes. Hope so.’ He crossed his fingers, smiled, then made for a rusted iron kissing gate that squeaked as he pushed through it.

He knew his way around, had obviously been to Deer’s Leap before. I too crossed my fingers for tonight because he really interested me.

I wondered if there would be music at the party. He’d be good to dance with – dance properly with, I mean. None of your standing six feet apart, sending signals with your elbows and hips, but moving closely to smoochy music.

I started the car, drove another hundred yards to a set of open white gates with Jeannie leaning against them, waving frantically. I tooted the horn, then drove in past her.

‘Lovely to see you again. Had a good journey? Lovely day for it,’ she said when I’d got out and stretched my back, then kissed her.

‘Fine!’ I grinned. It had been a very interesting journey. I unlocked the boot and took out my case. ‘I’ll tell you about it later, but right now I’d kill for a cup of tea!’

She took my case and I followed with my grip and the large sheaf of flowers I’d brought for her sister. Coals to Newcastle, I thought, looking at the gorgeous garden. Then I thought again about Jack and smiled smugly because already my psychic bits knew he could dance. Beautifully.

‘Where is your sister?’ I asked when we were seated at the kitchen table, drinking tea. Already I was a little in love with Deer’s Leap and its huge kitchen and pantry, and the narrow little back stairs from it that led to my room above. And what I had seen of the hall and its wide, almost-black oak staircase and the sitting room, glimpsed through an open door, were exactly what I had known they would be.

‘Beth and Danny’ll be back any time now. They’ve taken the kids to the village hall. Brownies and Cubs on a weekend camp. That’s why they’re throwing the party this weekend. Not soft, my sister,’ she grinned. ‘Now do you want to unpack or would you like to have a look round?’

I said I wanted to see the house, if that would be all right with Beth, and the outside too. All of it.

‘It’s wonderful,’ I breathed. ‘The air is so – so – well, you can almost taste it!’

‘Mm. After London I always think of it as golden,’ she said. ‘It does something to my lungs that makes me want to puke when I get back to the smoke. Let’s go outside first, then you can stand back from it – get an idea of the layout.

‘Mind, it wasn’t always so roomy. Once, I think, it must have belonged to a yeoman type of farmer, then later owners joined the outbuildings to the house. They connect with a rather modern conservatory. Don’t think it would be allowed now by the planning people, this being a listed house. I reckon even the farm buildings would be listed these days.’

‘It isn’t a farm, then?’

‘Not any more. They’ve only got a paddock now. The rest of the land has been sold off over the years, mostly for grazing. At least some of the farm buildings were saved; Danny uses them as garages now. You can shift your car inside later.’

She closed the kitchen door behind us and I noticed she didn’t bother to lock it.

‘I envy your sister this place,’ I said dreamily. ‘I feel comfortable here already. Sort of déjà vu …’

‘Mm. Beth feels the same way. Pity they’ve got to give it up.’

‘Selling!’ I squeaked, wondering who in her right mind could even think of leaving such a house.

‘No, not them. The lease runs out at the end of the year and the owner is selling. I suppose they could buy but they won’t. The children, you see. They’re a long way from a school. All very well in summer, but in winter this place can be cut off for weeks. Nothing moves: no cars in or out; no mail, and sometimes electricity lines down in high winds. The kids are weekly boarders in Lancaster in winter – come home Friday nights – but even in summer it’s a five-days-a-week job for Beth, getting them to school and back again.

‘She’s cut up about it – they both are – but I reckon she’ll be glad to live nearer a school. Beth has to plan her life round the kids’ comings and goings. She adores Deer’s Leap; she’d transport it stone by stone to somewhere less out of the way if she could. This coming Christmas will be their last here, I’m sorry to say.’

I felt sorry, too, and I’d spent less than an hour in the place. There was something about it that made me feel welcome and wanted. Even the old windows seemed to smile in the morning sun.

We were standing at the white gates when Jeannie said, ‘Let’s go round the back way. The land rises a bit and if you go to the top of the paddock, there’s a lovely view …’

She pushed open the kissing gate, slipping through, waiting for me to do the same, but I just stood there gawping.

‘Is there another gate like this one?’ I frowned. ‘One that squeaks?’

‘No. This is the only one. Why do you ask?’

‘Because I’d have bet good money that this one was in need of a coat of paint and a drop or two of oil.’

‘You sure, Cas?’

I was perfectly sure. It had squeaked not so long ago when Jack pushed through it, I’d swear it had. Yet now it was newly painted and swung so smoothly on its pivot that I knew I could have pushed it open with my little finger.

‘But, Jeannie, I don’t understand it …’ I stammered.

‘Listen, m’dear. This gate was painted about two months ago and to the best of my knowledge it has never squeaked.’

Then she went on to argue that one kissing gate looked much the same as the other, and wasn’t I getting this one mixed up with some other gate? She said it in such reasonable tones that I knew she was humouring me, so I said no more. But tonight, when the airman showed, I was determined to mention it again. I was just about to ask where the other guest was when a car swept into the drive.

‘Thanks be! They’ve got away – eventually – and if you offered me a hundred quid I wouldn’t take that lot of screaming dervishes out for a Sunday afternoon walk, let alone endure them for two days and nights!’ Beth advanced on me, arms outspread. ‘You’ll be Cassie,’ she beamed, then, having introduced Danny, demanded to know if the sun was over the yardarm yet because she was in dire need of a G and T. A large one, she said, because it was probably the last she’d get before the do started tonight!

So when the Labrador that came snuffling up had had its water bowl filled and Danny, bless the dear man, had placed gin and tonics on handy little tables beside us, I said, with the airman in mind, of course, ‘When do you expect everyone to start arriving – and do they all know the way here?’

Danny said of course they did and they all knew to arrive not one minute before seven or Beth would blow her top and how was my second novel coming along?

‘No book talk, Dan!’ Jeannie warned.

‘But we don’t often get a famous author at Deer’s Leap. Come to think of it, apart from a long-haired youth that Jeannie once dragged in, we haven’t had an author at all!’

‘I’m not famous,’ I said very earnestly. ‘I’m what’s known as a one-book author. I was lucky with the first one; Jeannie says it’s only if the next one is any good that people will start taking notice of me.’

‘People as in publishers,’ Jeannie supplied. ‘And they will! But no more book talk, either to Cassie or me. And isn’t the weather just glorious? In summer there’s nowhere to beat these parts.’

‘Jeannie says you’re thinking of moving on,’ I ventured, not knowing what else to say and still feeling a mite stupid over the kissing gate.

‘Sadly, yes.’

‘But it’s so beautiful, Beth. I don’t know how you can leave it.’

‘Come winter when we’ll have to go it’ll be just about bearable, but on days like this I feel lousy about it. Why don’t you buy it with the loot from your next book, Cassie? It’s fine if you don’t have kids – or can afford boarding school fees.’

‘I’ll need to have at least three books behind me before I even begin to think of buying a little place of my own – let alone a house this size,’ I laughed. ‘But I’m going to dislike whoever buys it when you’ve gone.’

‘Me, too,’ Beth sighed, draining her glass. ‘Now, have you unpacked, Cassie? No? Then as soon as you have you can help me with the vol-au-vents. They’re resting in the fridge, ready to go in the oven. As soon as they’re done, you can stick the fillings in for me. And did I hear you say you were doing the dips, Sis?’

‘You didn’t, but I think I’m about to. But let’s get Cassie settled in, then we’ll report for duty.’ She gave me a long, slow wink. ‘My sister’s quite human, really, but at times like this she gets a bit bossy.’

I followed Jeannie up the narrow staircase that led off the kitchen, feeling distinctly light-headed – and it was nothing to do with the gin either. It was all to do with the lovely summer day, a peculiar kissing gate, a guest who seemed to be keeping out of the way until seven, and an old house that held me enchanted.

‘I’ve got a feeling,’ I said as I unlocked my case, ‘that this is going to be one heck of a weekend!’

My green dress lay on the bed with the silk lilies; on the floor my flat, bronze kid sandals. Everything was ready. Food lay on the kitchen table, covered with tea towels, and the second-best glasses were polished and placed upside down on a table on the terrace. Danny had seen to the summer punch, then humped furniture and dotted ashtrays about the conservatory.

‘It’s great now that smoking is antisocial,’ Beth had said as we’d filled the vol-au-vents. ‘If anyone wants to light up there’s only one place they can do it!’

‘And the plants won’t mind.’ I’d dipped into my store of horticultural knowledge. ‘The nicotine in the smoke actually kills certain greenhouse pests.’

‘Really?’ Beth had looked impressed, I thought now as I lay in the bath, the water brackish but soft as silk.

I lathered the baby soap I always use into a froth, stroking it down my legs, my arms, cupping my shoulders, sliding my fingertips over my breasts. I was in the mood for something to happen tonight. I didn’t know what, but a little pulse beat behind my nose whenever I thought about it. Beth had invited eighteen guests and catered for thirty. Surely out of all that number there would be someone interesting.

But did I want that? Didn’t I just want to flirt a little and forget Piers for the time being?

Deer’s Leap got its name, Danny thought, because just above the paddock there was once a little brook and when deer and wolves roamed the area, the shallow curve was where the deer – and maybe predators – crossed. It made sense, I supposed. It was a pretty name and that was all that mattered.

I thought again about the awful person who would be living here next summer and wished it might be me, knowing it wouldn’t be, couldn’t be. So instead, I thought about my novel and whether the publishers would like it when it was finished, reminding myself that an author is only as good as her last novel, vowing to work extra hard when I got home to justify this weekend away.

I told myself that on the count of four I would get out of the bath, drape myself in a towel, then dry my hair – in that order – yet even as I stood at the open window, hairdryer poised, little wayward pulses of excitement at the prospect of the party still beat insistently inside me.

‘Grow up, Cassandra!’ I hissed. ‘Nothing is going to happen tonight – nothing out of the ordinary, anyway! For Pete’s sake, why should it?’

‘Because you want it to!’ came the ready answer.

Beth was testing the summer punch when I got downstairs, ten minutes before seven. She was dressed in layers of lace curtain and muslin and said that later she would put on her yashmak.

‘I’m the Dance of the Seven Veils,’ she grinned, explaining it was the best and coolest way to cover up her avoirdupois, which any day now she intended to do something about.

‘Sorry about my two lilies,’ I said, thinking I should have tried harder. ‘I’m a lily of the field, actually …’

‘You look all right to me!’ Danny, in the costume of a Roman soldier, handed me a glass of punch. ‘This get-up isn’t too revealing, is it? It was all I could borrow from the amateur dramatics that fitted.’

‘I think you look very manly.’

‘You’ve got quite decent legs, Danny.’ Jeannie, in a long robe borrowed from the same source and with a terracotta jug balanced on one bare shoulder, said she was a vestal virgin and the first one to make a snide remark was in for trouble!

Beth said she wasn’t at all sure about the punch, and helped herself to another glass just as the first car arrived, followed closely by four more in convoy – sort of as if they’d all been waiting at the crossroads until seven.

The table with the upturned glasses began to fill up with assorted bottles; there were shouts of laughter and snorts of derision at the various costumes. Someone who was old enough to know better said I could come into his field any time I liked!

Danny put on a Clayderman tape and said there’d be music for smooching later, when everybody had had one or two. Jeannie put down her jug and floated around with trays of food. I followed behind with plates and folded paper serviettes, looking for a pilot with short fair hair by the name of John or Jack. He wasn’t there.

‘He wasn’t there,’ I said later when everyone had gone and we were sitting on the terrace, saying what a great party it had been. ‘He didn’t show …’

‘Who didn’t show?’ Danny held a glass of red wine up to the light, saying it was a decent vintage and wondering who had brought it.

‘The man I gave a lift to,’ I said. ‘He thanked me, then disappeared through the kissing gate.’

‘When?’ Danny took a sip from his glass, and then another.

‘This morning, on my way here. He wanted a lift to Deer’s Leap.’

‘What was he like?’ Beth was looking at me kind of peculiar.

‘Tall. Fair. Young,’ I shrugged. ‘I remember wondering at the time if he could dance. His name was John, he said, though mostly people called him Jack.’

‘He actually spoke to you?’

‘Why shouldn’t he, Beth? He looked so authentic that I asked him where he got the uniform from.’ I slid my eyes from one to the other. They had put their glasses down and were still giving me peculiar looks. ‘Listen – what’s so strange about giving a man a lift?’

‘In a country lane?’ Jeannie blustered.

‘Now see here,’ I said, because something wasn’t quite right – the expressions on their faces for one thing. ‘I’m a big girl now. I can look after myself.’

‘No one is saying you can’t,’ Beth soothed.

‘Then are you trying to say I imagined it – that I was driving under the influence? For Pete’s sake, I’ve just told you I spoke to the man!’

‘Then you’re the first one who has. Most people round these parts don’t stop – quite the opposite. They get the hell out of it if they think they might have seen him.’

‘So he is real? Other people have seen him?’

‘We-e-ll, the hard-headed people around here wouldn’t admit it if they had; don’t want to be made a laughing stock. He’s a ghost, you see, Cassie.’

‘A ghost! You can’t be serious! He was as real as you or me! Have you seen him, Beth?’

‘Yes. I think I might have.’

There was an awful silence and I felt sorry for spoiling what had been a smashing party. But my mouth had gone dry and my heart was thumping because I knew Beth meant what she was saying.

‘I see. And rather than be thought a nutter, you said nothing?’

‘Yes – we-e-ll, I only told Danny. But the airman is dead. That much I do know, Cassie, and he should be left alone to rest in peace!’

‘But he obviously isn’t at peace! You think if you ignore him he’ll go away – is that it?’

‘Are you a psychic?’ Danny asked.

‘I think I might be, but I don’t dabble.’

‘Then in that case you’d attract him, wouldn’t you? All we know is that his name was John – or Jack – Hunter, and his plane crashed in 1944, about the time of the Normandy landings. The Parish Council put the names of the crew on the local war memorial. You probably passed it on your way here.’

‘Go on …’ I looked from him to Beth, and she nodded.

‘Seems he was a Lancaster bomber pilot. There was an airfield near here once – that much we did find out – but people are reluctant to talk about it.’

‘Then they shouldn’t be! Can’t they see he needs help?’

‘You said you didn’t dabble,’ Jeannie said softly. ‘Now isn’t a good time to start. Leave it, Cassie.’

‘I don’t believe any of this!’ My voice sounded strange. I felt strange. I really didn’t believe they could be so offhand about it.

‘Good. Then just keep telling yourself that and there’ll be nothing to worry about, will there? No one wants a fuss,’ Beth said gently. ‘Imagine the tabloids getting hold of it! There’d be no peace around here for anybody!’

‘It certainly seems there’s to be no peace for Jack Hunter. What did he do?’

‘Nobody seems to know. All I could find out was that he was close to a girl who once lived here.’

‘And he’s still looking for her,’ I persisted. ‘Then don’t you think it’s about time someone helped him to find her?’

‘Cassie love!’ Danny put an arm round my shoulders. ‘Have a nightcap, uh? How is he to find her when nobody knows her name, or anything about her?’

‘But that’s ridiculous! There must be someone in the village who remembers who lived in this house during the war!’

‘If there is, they haven’t said. And the war was a long time ago. The girl might be dead, even …’

‘And she’ll no longer be a girl if she isn’t,’ Beth said coaxingly.

‘OK. I’ll accept that. But someone should find out and tell Jack Hunter, because he doesn’t know he’s dead. It happens, sometimes, when someone dies suddenly or violently. He’s a lost soul, Beth!’

‘And you mean you’d try to get on his wavelength again,’ Jeannie said incredulously, ‘if you could winkle out the girl he’s still looking for?’

‘I don’t see why not.’ By now I’d got a hold on my feelings. ‘She’d be easy enough to trace without a lot of publicity. Have you ever thought to look at Deer’s Leap’s deeds? Whoever lived here in 1944 will show there.’

‘We’ve never seen the deeds,’ Danny said, offering me a glass of wine. ‘We don’t own this house, remember. And I know what it’s like for you writers, Cassie.’

‘What do you mean, we writers?’ I accepted the glass to show there wasn’t any ill feeling, then took a gulp from it. ‘Surely you don’t think I want to go sniffing around because I think it might make a good story? Book number three, is that it, Jeannie?’

‘Not at all!’ Now Jeannie was using her soothing voice. ‘What Danny means is that he thinks writers are a bit imaginative, sort of.’

‘We are, I suppose, though I wouldn’t go playing around with someone’s love life, even if it happened more than fifty years ago. But if you’re prepared to admit that I saw something – or someone – and that I’m not going out of my tiny mind, then I’ll take your advice and let it drop.’

‘I think you saw him,’ Beth said softly. ‘We all do. But like you said, Cassie, he’s a lost soul and there isn’t a lot anyone can do about it.’

‘You’re right. Mind, I wouldn’t want him exorcized,’ I said hastily.

‘He won’t be, I’m sure of it, if we don’t go stirring things.’

‘Right, then.’ I lifted my glass. ‘Bless you for having me, both of you. It’s been great. And if you have a wake before you leave, will you invite me, please, because I do so love this house?’

‘What a great idea,’ Beth laughed, her relief obvious. ‘We’ll have a goodbye party for Deer’s Leap whilst the Christmas decorations are still up – if we aren’t snowed up, that is!’

They’d believed I’d let it drop, I thought as I lay in bed that night, and I knew it was sneaky of me and deceitful because they were smashing people who had made me welcome and were prepared to ask me back at Christmas. But there was a young man looking for his girl and who needed my help. Besides which, I’d found him attractive; had wanted him to be at the party. OK – so he was in love with someone else, but I’d have given that girl at Deer’s Leap a run for her money if I’d been around fifty years ago! And I knew, too, that I would never let Piers make love to me again.

‘Sorry, Piers,’ I whispered, feeling almost relieved.

And then I said a silent sorry to Danny and Beth, because I knew too that I would try to find Jack Hunter again, but secretly, so no one would know – especially Beth and Danny. How I’d go about it I hadn’t a clue, but if the pilot really wanted to be in touch again, then I’d find a way.

Or he would!

Chapter Two

We left Deer’s Leap at six the following evening; three cars, in convoy, sort of. Me to pick up the A59, Beth to take Jeannie to Preston station in an ancient Beetle that was worth a bomb, did she but know it, and Danny in the estate car to pick up the children and their gear down in Acton Carey.

I drove with Danny in front going far too fast for the narrow lane and Beth driving much too close behind. I knew what they were up to. I was being hustled into the village so that if the airman appeared again, I wouldn’t be able to stop.

We got there without incident and Danny flagged us down. Then he and Beth and Jeannie gave me a hug and a kiss through my open window and said I really must visit over the Christmas break – if not before – and how lovely it had been to have me.

‘Let me have a look at the book, uh, as soon as you can.’ The holiday was over. Jeannie was wearing her editorial hat again. ‘When you get to chapter ten, run me off a copy; I’d like to see how it’s going.’

‘Of course. Want to make sure I don’t start mucking about with the storyline,’ I grinned; ‘introduce a good-looking ghost?’

‘Now, Cassie,’ she said quite sternly, ‘I thought we’d forgotten all that. You said you’d keep shtoom about it.’

‘And I will. Not a word to the parents when I get home. Promise.’

Mum and Dad didn’t believe in ghosts anyway; only in things they could touch and see and smell – and in Dad’s case, drink from a pint pot.

‘That’s all right, then,’ Beth beamed. ‘Mind how you go, Cassie. See you!’

Waving, I pulled out, yet before I’d gone a couple of miles I was planning how I could get to drive past that place again without Beth and Danny getting wind of it.

I concentrated on the winding, tree-lined road that dropped slowly down to Clitheroe, then rose sharply at the crossing of a river bridge. Not far away was Pendle Hill; somewhere not too distant was Downham. Witch country, without a doubt, with wild, lonely tracts of land where ghosts and witches could roam free; one ghost in particular, looking for a girl who once lived at Deer’s Leap. A young man who didn’t realize he was dead.

Jack Hunter. He had flown, I shouldn’t wonder, from the airfield that was probably called RAF Acton Carey. The coming of bombers to that little village must have caused quite a stir, yet now all traces of the base had gone. Even the track that ran round the perimeter of the airfield had grassed over and could only be picked out, Danny said, in an exceptionally dry summer when the grass on it browned and died. You could trace the outline of it then, he said, and wonder about those too-young men who trundled their huge bombers around it before takeoff.

Jack had been one of them, though I’d thought it politic not to ask Danny specifically about him in view of what had happened. He’d looked about my age. I frowned. I couldn’t imagine those nervous fingers grasping whatever it was they had to pull back to get that great, death-loaded plane into the air. Lancasters, they’d been. A Lancaster bomber and a Spitfire and a Hurricane flew over London during the Victory in Europe celebrations, fifty years on, yet Jack Hunter was still twenty-four.

A great choke of tears rose in my throat and in that moment I didn’t care about broken promises, nor letting well alone nor even about snoopers from the tabloids upsetting the peace of Acton Carey if news of a World War Two ghost leaked out. As far as I was concerned it was, and would remain, between me and Jack Hunter and the girl it seemed he was looking for.

How I would go about it, where I would begin, I didn’t know. But I liked doing research; could pretend I was setting my next novel in the countryside around Deer’s Leap; might even be able to poke around there if the house stood too long empty and for sale after Beth and Danny had left.

Yet they weren’t leaving for six months and I couldn’t wait that long.

I noticed I was passing the Golf Balls at Menwith and decided to think about Jack Hunter tomorrow and concentrate instead on the roundabout ahead at which I would turn left to bypass Harrogate, a pretty run through Guy Fawkes country.

I indicated left, then closed my mind to everything save getting home before dark. Home to Greenleas Market Garden, Rowbeck. Safe and sound and ordinary.

Rowbeck is very small. Everyone knows everyone else and their parentage. We’ve been lucky, with only one weekender in the place. She’s a teacher who intends living in the village when she retires, so she has been made welcome and the neighbourhood watch keeps an eye on her cottage when she isn’t there.

Rowbeck is on the Plain of York where the earth is rich and black and bounteous. Distantly we can see the tops – the hills of Herriot country – where winters can be vicious and shepherds work hard to make a living.

There’s a Broad into Rowbeck, which runs round the green in a circular sweep, then out again by the same road; a sort of circumnavigation that takes all of forty seconds, driving slowly.

The only other way out of the village is by a narrow lane at the top end of the green by the church. That’s where we live. Half a mile further on the lane becomes little more than a track, then peters out. Only the odd farm tractor passes. It’s a nice place to live if you like the back of beyond – which I do.

Dad was doing the evening rounds of the glasshouses when I got back and putting down a saucer of food for the hedgehog that lives in the garden and eats slugs and is worth its weight in gold. Mum said did I want a cup of tea and could I unpack tonight and put out my dirty washing? Mum always washes on Mondays and bakes on Fridays, no matter what. She runs the house like clockwork, with a place for everything and everything in its place. It’s because her star sign is Virgo and she can’t help it. She’s inclined to cuddly plumpness and hasn’t a wrinkle on her face.

Dad came in and remarked that the first of the early spray chrysanths should be ready for cutting in about a week, though we could do with a drop of rain. Only when Mum had poured and we were sitting at the kitchen table did he ask if I’d had a nice weekend.

‘Dad! That house is just beautiful! I’d kill for it!’

‘Out of the way is it, like this place?’

‘Greenleas is secluded; Deer’s Leap is isolated. They get snowed up in winter, but in summer it’s magic. You can look out into forever from the upstairs windows. I’ve never seen such a view. It’s in the Trough of Bowland.’

Dad said he’d never heard of it and I said I wasn’t surprised; that it was as if the people who lived there had conspired through the ages to keep it a secret and out of the reach of incomers. Foreigners, I meant, as in Yorkshire folk and people from further north. ‘You look over to Beacon Fell and Parlick Pike and Fair Oak Fell and it isn’t far from witch country.’

‘There’s no such thing as witches.’ Mum pushed a plate of parkin in my direction.

‘I know that, but it’s so beautiful; sort of breathtaking. Jeannie’s sister is leaving there at the end of the year. It would break my heart if it were me.’

‘Seems as if it’s made an impression on you. You haven’t gone over to the Lancastrians, have you?’

Dad looked a bit put out. The Wars of the Roses may be long over, but in Lancashire and Yorkshire they still keep the feud going, if only over The Cricket.

‘Of course I haven’t, but I’d love to go there again, just for another look. Beth – that’s Jeannie’s sister – has invited me for a goodbye party, sort of. Christmas in a house like that would be wonderful.’

‘So what’s this precious Deer’s Leap like, then?’ Mum sounded a bit piqued because I was making such a fuss over a house I mightn’t even see again and because, I suppose, I could even consider spending Christmas anywhere else but Greenleas.

‘We-e-ll, it’s stone, and tile-roofed. One end of it has a gable end that’s V-shaped and it has three rooms and an attic in it. The middle bit has a huge sitting room, with a terrace outside, and two bedrooms. Then there’s an end bit with a big kitchen and dairy and pantry, and a narrow little staircase off it to three rooms above. I suppose the workers slept up there when it was a farm and they wouldn’t have been allowed to use the main staircase. The windows are stone-mullioned, and all shapes and sizes. From the front it looks as if it’s still in the sixteenth century, though it’s been tarted up at the back. It’s a smaller version of Roughlee Hall, Danny says.’

‘Never heard of that place, either,’ Dad shrugged.

‘Of course you have! Surely you’ve heard of the Pendle Witches. Alice Nutter lived at Roughlee. She was a gentle-woman and how she got mixed up in witchcraft, nobody seems to know. She was hanged on Lancaster Moor in 1612.’

‘And you believe such nonsense?’ Mum clucked. ‘All that stuff is a fairy tale, like Robin Hood.’

‘They don’t seem to think so around those parts.’

‘If they believe that, they’ll believe anything!’ Mum had the last word on witches. ‘And I forgot – Piers rang.’

‘What about?’

‘He didn’t say and I didn’t ask!’

‘Well, he’ll ring again, if it’s important.’

‘Aren’t you going to call him back?’

‘Don’t think so.’ As from this weekend, I’d stopped jumping when Piers snapped his fingers.

Mum put mugs and plates on a tray, wearing her button mouth. She placed great hopes on Piers. He was Yorkshire-born, which was a mark in his favour, and even if he had defected to parts south of the River Trent and was earning a living amongst Londoners, she considered it high time we were married.

‘Think I’ll go and unpack. Then I’ll write to thank Beth. By the way, she was really pleased with the flowers.’

‘So she should be! Your dad grew them!’

‘Won’t be long,’ I smiled. Long enough, though, to let Mum get over whatever wasn’t pleasing her.

I hung the green dress on a hanger, then wondered what to do with the two silk arum lilies, because even to say the words ‘artificial flowers’ is blasphemy in our house. So I stuck them in a drawer because they were a part of the weekend, and I couldn’t bear to throw them away.

I sat back on my heels. To open my case was to let out Deer’s Leap and Jack Hunter and the promise I’d made to Beth and Jeannie to forget him. Yet I couldn’t, because somehow he was a part of that house; was connected to Deer’s Leap in some way, and I had to know how.

Common sense told me to leave it, that ghosts didn’t exist. But Beth had half admitted that maybe they did in the very real, very solid form of a World War Two pilot whose plane had crashed more than fifty years ago. A very attractive man and Piers’s exact opposite.

Piers. I hoped he wouldn’t ring tonight when the spell of Deer’s Leap was still on me. Just to hear him say ‘Cassandra?’ very throatily – he rarely calls me Cassie – would intrude on the magic. For bewitched I was, with the enchantment wrapping me round like a thread of gossamer that couldn’t be broken. One gentle tug on that thread would pull me back there whether I wanted to go or not.

And I wanted to go.

By Monday morning I’d sorted out my priorities. All thoughts of the weekend were banned until after I switched off my word processor. I have to set myself targets. The contract said that Harrier Books wanted the manuscript by the end of December, so it couldn’t be delivered any later than the first week in January, even allowing for the New Year holiday.

I write in my bedroom. There’s a deep alcove in one corner that is big enough to accommodate my desk. My latest extravagance was to hang a curtain over it so that when I’d finished for the day I could pull it across and shut out my work. What I couldn’t see, I figured, I couldn’t worry about. The curtain has proved to be a good idea.

I had just finished reading last Friday’s work and got my mind into gear, when the extension phone on my desk rang. It would, of course, be Jeannie. People had got the message now that up until four in the afternoon it was best not to ring. Only my editor was allowed to disturb my thoughts.

‘Hi!’ I said brightly. ‘You made it home OK, then?’

‘Cassandra?’ a voice said throatily.

‘Piers! Why are you ringing at this time?’

‘Do I need a chit from the Holy Ghost to ring my girl?’

‘I – I – Well, what I mean is that it’s the expensive time. You usually ring after six …’ I closed my eyes, sucked in my breath and warned myself to watch it.

‘I rang yesterday. Didn’t your mother tell you?’

‘Of course she did.’ My voice was sharper than I intended.

‘You didn’t ring me back.’

‘I was late getting home – the traffic. I was tired …’ I tell lies too, Piers.

‘So how did the weekend go?’ It seemed I was forgiven.

‘It was nice.’

‘Only nice, Cassandra?’

‘Very nice. Jeannie’s family are lovely, though I didn’t meet the children,’ I babbled. ‘They were away at camp and –’

‘You sound guilty. Did you have an extraordinarily nice time?’

‘Piers! I’m not feeling guilty because I have nothing to feel guilty about! If I sound a bit befuddled it’s because I had a whole paragraph in my head and now it’s gone!’

‘You’ll have to think it out again then, won’t you?’

‘It isn’t that easy! Once it’s gone you never get it back again – not as good, anyway.’

‘Oh dear! I’ll ring again tonight if you tell me you love me.’

‘Why should I, at ten o’clock in the morning?’

‘Cassandra – what’s the matter?’ The smooth talking was over. He actually sounded curious.

‘Nothing’s the matter. I’m working, that’s all. If I were a typist in an office I probably wouldn’t be allowed private calls and I certainly couldn’t yell that I loved you over the phone for everyone to hear!’

‘You don’t yell it. “I love you” has to be said softly …’

‘Yes, and secretly for preference.’

‘Then say it softly and secretly from your bedroom.’

‘Piers …’ I said in my this-is-your-last-warning voice. ‘I am busy!’

‘OK! Pax, darling. I’ll ring tonight! Get on with your scribbling.’

I sat back, part of my make-believe world once more, reading from the screen, searching my mind for the lost paragraph.

But it didn’t come. All I could think was that for once, in all the four years of our on and off affair, I’d challenged Piers and almost won!

‘Pop out and get me a few tomatoes, there’s a good girl. And tell your dad it’ll be on the table in five minutes!’

Once I got back in my stride, and sorted the wayward paragraph, the words had come well; it was going to be a word-flow day, I’d known it. I’d just come to the end of a page when my stomach told me it was lunchtime and my mind told me it needed a break.

I saw Dad at the end of the garden, so I waved and yelled, ‘Five minutes!’ then went into the tomato house, sniffing in the green growing smell, loving the moistness of it and the lush, tall plants heavy with red trusses. A few tomatoes, at our house, meant a bowlful and not half a pound in a plastic bag. I bit into one, marvelling that half the country didn’t know what a fresh tomato was.

I felt very relaxed. Once I’d got into my stride again, nothing intruded on the make-believe world at my fingertips. I had forgiven Piers, I realized, for ringing when he shouldn’t have done and I had not thought once about the kissing gate through which a World War Two pilot had disappeared.

Now my thoughts were free to roam again, my self-discipline on hold, and I wondered how I should go about finding the name of the family who lived at Deer’s Leap before the Air Force took it and they had to find somewhere else to live.

They might have moved to Acton Carey or further afield. They may even, since losing their acres under a runway of concrete and seeing their trees felled and hedges ripped out, have given up farming in disgust.

It was best I began the search in Acton Carey, but this would be risky, as Danny or Beth would be bound to hear of me doing it. I could not, I realized, visit locally without calling on them and if Lancashire villages were like Yorkshire villages, they would soon discover that a red-haired foreigner had been asking questions in the pub. Villagers close ranks at such times, and mention of anything remotely concerned with the ghost they wanted to sweep under the mat would be sidestepped at once! I would be taken for a journalist, no doubt, and that would be the end of that.

Of course, I could drive past the spot as near to the same time as possible, and I told myself I was a fool for not knowing when it had been. Yet had I known something so weird and wonderful was going to happen, I’d have noted the time exactly and had my tape recorder at the ready! But just a glimpse of a furtive redhead in a bright red Mini on that lonely lane would be worthy of note. I knew how it was at Greenleas if a strange car – obviously lost – drove past.

‘I said dinner in five minutes! What are you doing, Cassie?’ Mum stood in the doorway, flush-cheeked. ‘Composing another chapter?’

I said I was sorry, and pushed the remainder of the tomato into my mouth so I couldn’t talk. Composition was the furthest thing from my mind, so I was glad it’s bad manners to speak with your mouth full. That way, I couldn’t tell any lies.

‘Good job it’s only cold cut and salad,’ Mum grumbled, ‘or it would be spoiled by now.’

Monday, being washday, it was always leftovers from Sunday dinner, because that was the way it had been for the twenty-five years of my parents’ marriage. It was one of the things I loved especially about Mum – the way nothing changed.

A flood of affection touched me from head to toes and I put my arm round her and said, ‘The sky would fall, Mum, if it wasn’t – cold cut and salad, I mean!’

She threw me an old-fashioned look, which turned into an answering smile, then said, ‘Did I hear you on the phone, this morning?’

‘Yes. Piers.’

‘And what did he have to say?’ She chose to ignore my brevity.

‘Not a lot. He didn’t get the chance. I tore him off a strip for ringing during working hours.’

‘Then you shouldn’t have! You’re never going to get a husband, Cassie, if you carry on like that. Men don’t like career women!’

‘Men are going to have to put up with it till I’ve done my third novel. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, Mum, nor two! Anyway, I sometimes think me and Piers aren’t cut out for one another.’

‘Oh?’ Mum’s jaw dropped visibly, which was understandable since to her way of thinking I was as good as off the shelf. ‘Then all I can say, miss, is that it won’t end at a third book. You’ll want to be famous, and before you know it you’ll have left it too late! I think Piers is very nice indeed, if you want my opinion.’

‘Mum!’ I stopped, put my hands on her shoulders and turned her to face me. ‘I like Piers – very much. And yes, I know you watched him grow up, more or less, and he’s considered a good catch around these parts.’

‘He went to university!’ Mum said huffily.

‘Yes, and he’s doing well. But he hasn’t asked me to marry him, yet.’

‘He hasn’t?’

‘No. And if he did, I wouldn’t know what to say. Maybe I ought to have gone to live with him in London like he wanted, but I didn’t fancy being an unpaid servant and a mistress to boot!’

‘A mistress, Cassie! Then I’m glad you told him no! Clever of you, that was. Men never run after a bus once they’ve caught it!’

‘I know. I didn’t come down with the last fall of snow!’ We were getting on dangerous ground, especially about the mistress bit. ‘But I want to be married, I promise you.’

‘Your dad would like a grandson, you know.’

‘I’m sure he would. I want children, too, and after book three I shall think very seriously about getting married.’

‘To Piers?’

‘Probably to the first man who asks me, Mum!’

With that she seemed happy and we walked in silent contentment to the back door where Dad was washing his hands in the water butt.

‘Now then, our lass!’ He gave Mum a smack on her bottom and she went very red and told him to stop carrying on in the middle of the day.

It stopped her thinking about her unmarried daughter, for all that, and the grandchildren she was desperate to have about the place. I gave her a conspiratorial wink, and peace reigned at Greenleas.

Jeannie phoned just as I’d pulled the curtain across my workspace, pleased with a fair day’s work.

‘Hi! How’s it going, then?’

‘Great!’ It could only refer to the current novel. ‘I must spend the weekend partying more often!’

‘Well, Beth meant it when she asked you up there for Christmas. I think she quite took to you!’

‘I’d love to go, Jeannie. I keep thinking about Deer’s Leap and being sad for Beth that she’s got to leave.’

‘She doesn’t have to, but it’s best all round they don’t ask for the lease to be renewed. The twins will start senior school in September. A good state school will be high on her list of priorities. Boarding in winter costs a lot of dosh, you know.’

I said I was sure it must.

‘Meantime, Cassie, you might get to stay there again in exchange for baby-sitting the place. Beth and Danny have hired a caravan in Cornwall for a few weeks in the summer. It’ll be the first decent holiday they’ve had in years. Beth’s a bit worried about leaving the house, though. She wouldn’t want to come back and find squatters in it.’

‘Yes, and there’s the dog and the cats to think about, I suppose.’

‘Kennels and catteries cost money, I agree. So would you baby-sit the house, Cassie? Wouldn’t you be a bit afraid on your own?’

‘You mean you’re really offering?’ I gasped.

‘You’d get a lot of work done, that’s for sure, with nothing and no one to distract you. With luck you could do a fair bit of wordage.’

‘I don’t think I would be afraid – especially with a dog there, but why didn’t Beth say anything about it at the weekend?’

‘Because I’ve only just thought about it. Are you really interested, Cas? I could come and join you, weekends. Shall I mention it to Beth?’

‘She might think me pushy. And what if she doesn’t like the idea of a stranger in her home?’

‘You aren’t a stranger. I told you, she likes you.’

I wondered – just for a second – what Mum would make of the idea.

‘We-e-ll, if Beth agrees …’ I said.

‘She’ll agree. She’s sure to worry about the animals and the houseplants, and we could cut the grass between us. I might be able to fix it so I could stay over until Mondays – get some reading done in peace and quiet.’

‘Mm …’ Jeannie has to read a lot of manuscripts.

‘Well then?’

‘If you’re sure, Jeannie?’

‘I can but ask. I bet they’ll both jump at the chance. It would have to be unpaid, of course.’

My heart had started to thump again, just to think of a whole month there. Deer’s Leap in the summer. I could write and write and only stop when I was hungry.

‘OK, then. I’m game …’

I thought, as I put the phone down, that I was stark, raving mad. For one thing, Mum and Dad wouldn’t like the idea and for another, it wasn’t very bright of me to go there. Not because I’d be afraid on my own – Deer’s Leap would take good care of me – but because I’d be heading straight into trouble. For the past two days I’d been looking for an excuse to get back there without Beth or Danny knowing; to drive down the long lane that led to their house and hope to find the airman again, thumbing a lift. Yet now it seemed it could be handed to me on a plate. I could drive up and down the lane as often as I wanted; could open the kissing gate and find where the path led – and to whom. I could even do a bit of gentle nosing in the village, because once they knew I was living at Deer’s Leap they’d treat me like Beth and Danny and the twins – one of themselves.

The thumping was getting worse and a persistent little pulse behind my nose had joined in. I knew if I had one iota of sense I should be praying that Beth wouldn’t want me there.

Yet I knew I would go back, because Deer’s Leap had me hogtied and besides, there was a pilot who needed my help – not only to find his girl but to be gently told he was a name on a war memorial.

Then the phone rang again and I knew it was Piers.

Oh, damn, damn, damn!

Chapter Three

Piers was quite loving on the phone. Not very loving – that isn’t his style. Piers prefers a hands-on, eyes smouldering approach, which doesn’t come over too well on a telephone. But he was very nice, asking if I’d had a good day workwise, and when was he to be allowed to come up and see me – since it didn’t seem I was in all that much of a hurry to go and see him!

Then he said that of course he understood that I was a working woman and must be given my own space. He didn’t mean one word of it – I can tell when he’s talking tongue in cheek – but at least he’d got this morning’s message.

‘You do want to see me, Cassandra?’ he persisted. ‘I’ve got a few days owing; could pop up north any time next month.’

I said of course I wanted to see him and that next month would be fine; by then I’d have finished chapter ten and sent off a copy to Jeannie, I added, and probably caught up with myself. I was a little behind schedule, he’d understand, on the deadline date.

I would also, with a bit of luck, have removed myself to Deer’s Leap, and out of his reach. It wasn’t that I was being devious or two-faced, I was merely keeping one jump ahead of him, and if I had to tell a few lies it wasn’t entirely my fault since Piers is a chauvinist. He always has been, come to think of it. Looking back, the signs were there even when he was at the spotty stage, long before he went to university.

‘I can tell your mind is miles away, so tell me you love me and I’ll leave you in peace,’ he said, throatily indulgent.

‘You know I do,’ I hedged, putting the phone down gently, marvelling that twice in one day I’d had the last word. Then I forgot him completely because of far more importance was telling Mum that I might be about to baby-sit a house in the back of beyond, and didn’t she agree it was a smashing idea?

Mum didn’t think it was a good idea at all.

‘You said that house is isolated, Cassie! How can you even begin to think of spending a month there alone?’

‘For one thing, I’d have no interruptions and –’

‘You can say that again, miss! And you could be lying dead in a pool of blood and no one any the wiser!’

‘Mother!’ I always seem to call her that when she lays it on a bit thick. ‘Of course I couldn’t! I can look after myself!’

‘Famous last words!’ Her cheeks had gone very red.

‘Mum! Please listen? I want to go to Deer’s Leap. I love the place, but if you want a better reason, then I need time alone. This book I’m on with now is the important one, and I want it to be better than Ice Maiden. I’d have a whole month to myself. I could even get the first draft finished and after that, editing it would be a doddle!’

‘And you’re sure you wouldn’t be nervous, alone?’

‘No, Mum! Of course not! And Jeannie will almost certainly be there at weekends; from Friday evening to Monday afternoon, actually. That gives me almost four days to write like mad and I’d be safer at Deer’s Leap on my own than I would in the middle of Leeds or Liverpool – or London! Mum – you know it makes sense. And you could ring me and I’d ring you …’

‘We-e-ll – I’ll have to see what your dad has to say about it …’

She was weakening, so I didn’t say another word.

After that I hovered over the downstairs phone, then over the phone on my desk, willing either to ring, willing it to be Jeannie. I was so exhausted willing and hovering that when it finally shifted itself I stood mesmerized, looking at it.

‘Jeannie?’ I whispered.

‘How did you know it was me?’

‘Have you spoken to Beth?’ I begged the question. ‘What did she say?’

‘She’s quite taken with the idea. They both are – with reservations, of course.’

‘Like what?’

‘She’s a bit anxious about you being nervous, but I told her you wouldn’t be.’

‘Is Beth nervous alone there during the day?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘There you are then. Is it on, Jeannie?’

‘If you’re sure – then yes, it is. I’m looking forward to a few weekends there.’

‘It’s going to be quite a thrash, all the way from London. Will you drive up?’

‘No way. I’ll get the train, then I can work. Lord only knows how much reading I’ve got to do. Could you pick me up at Preston station?’

‘No problem.’ The thudding had started again, and the little fluttery pulse behind my nose. ‘It’s going to be wonderful. I’ll be able to get loads of work done too. As it is, I aim to send you the first ten chapters before I see you.’

‘Fine. Beth will be getting in touch later. I gave her your phone number. She said it might be a good idea if you were to arrive the day before they go – get to know the geography of the place.’

‘Like …?’

‘Oh, when the bread van calls and the egg lady. And they’ve got a water softener. You’ll have to know about that. No problem at all, but it recharges itself so she’ll explain about the gurgling noises you might hear every fourth night in the small hours. Sure you’re still keen, Cassie? If you’ve changed your mind, now’s the time to say so.’

‘I want to go. Deer’s Leap is magic. I’ll be there!’

‘That was Jeannie,’ I said to Mum, who was expecting to be told. ‘Beth and Danny are pleased about my going. And I forgot to tell you, the bread van calls, and the egg lady.’

I thought it best not to mention that I already knew that Beth left notes and money for them in a large, lidded box at the end of the dirt road near the crossroads.

‘Hm.’ Mum was getting used to the idea, I could tell. ‘I’ve never met your Miss McFadden, except on the phone.’

‘Then you should. Why don’t you and Dad drive up there one Sunday? Surely you can leave the place for a day? Jeannie would love to meet you both.’

Holidays together for market gardeners and their spouses are few and far between. It’s like being a dairy farmer, I suppose: a seven-days-a-week job.

‘Hm,’ she said again, obviously liking the idea. ‘When will you be going?’

‘Not for a couple of weeks. Beth is really looking forward to a break. They haven’t had a proper holiday for ages, Jeannie said.’

‘I know exactly how she feels,’ Mum said fervently.

‘Then a day out would be good for you both. Just pick your time and arrive when you feel like it – preferably when Jeannie’s there.’

I wasn’t being devious, getting Mum interested and on my side. As soon as she saw the house she would love it every bit as much as I did and see for herself how safe and snug it was.

‘I just might take you up on that,’ she said, filling the kettle.

That was when I had my first big panic. What if, in the entire month I was there, I didn’t see Jack Hunter? What if he only appeared once a year? His bomber had crashed not long after the Normandy landings; probably about the time I’d seen him.

The panic was gone as quickly as it came, because I knew he would be there. He and I were on the same wavelength, and he had something to tell me.

The birds awoke me at five on the morning of my departure. I focused my eyes on the bright blur behind the curtains, then yawned, stretched and snuggled under the quilt again to think about – oh, everything! About my route; where I would stop to eat my sandwiches; about leaving the A59 and driving to Acton Carey on Broads, so I could dawdle and look around me and think about the four weeks ahead.

I had no plan in my mind about discovering who lived at Deer’s Leap before the Air Force took it in the war. Nor had I the faintest idea how I would set about finding where they had gone when their home and land were requisitioned without the right of appeal.

Things would work out in their own good time. It stood to reason I’d been meant to drive along a narrow road one summer morning because a lost soul wanted a lift to Deer’s Leap. Thoughts of the supernatural didn’t worry me at all. I knew no fear except that perhaps Jack Hunter would not be able to tell me what I wanted to know.

How deeply, despairingly had he and his girl loved? Very deeply, my mind supplied, or why should the need of her, fifty years on, be the cause of such unrest? Perhaps they had not said a proper goodbye and her heartbreak had been terrible when she knew she would never see him again. All at once I was glad I had not lived during those times, nor known the fear that each kiss might be the last between me and –

Between me and whom? Not Piers, that was certain. If Piers were to walk out of my life tomorrow I was as sure as I could be that only my pride would be hurt. He and I did not, nor ever would, love like that long-ago couple. I didn’t even know her name, yet I was sure of the passion between them. Their lives had become a part of me, and until I could discover what caused such devotion from beyond the grave, I would never be free – if I wanted to be free, that was …

I sighed, and leaned over to pull back a curtain. The early morning was bright, but not too bright. Mornings too brilliant too early are weather breeders. I pushed aside the quilt, and swung my feet to the floor. Best I get up. The sooner I did, the sooner it could all begin.

By the time I got to the clump of oak trees at the start of the final mile, my mouth had gone dry. The day was warm and sunny and I drove with the windows down. My hair was all over the place, but my short, bitty style can be tamed with a few flicks of my fingers.

I could feel my cheeks burning, whether from the heat, or driving, or from the triumph that sang through me, I didn’t know. Perhaps it was a bit of all three, with a dash of anticipation thrown in.

I slowed as I neared the place, coughing nervously. I was almost there; about a hundred yards to go. I remembered that first time taking my eyes off the road for a second, then looking up to see the airman there.

I glanced to my right, then gazed ahead. He wasn’t there and soon I would have driven past the place. I looked at my watch. I had timed my journey so as to be in the same spot at what I thought was about the same time. I’d gone over and over the previous journey in my mind and decided that the encounter had happened a few minutes before eleven o’clock.

The time now was ten fifty-six and I had passed the place without seeing him or sensing that he was around. He wasn’t coming; not today, that was. People like him, I supposed, couldn’t materialize to order, but even so, I looked in the rear-view mirror, then in the overtaking mirror, to be sure he wasn’t behind me.

But he would come. Sooner or later he would appear, I knew it. If I really was psychic, then the vibes I’d been sending out for the past fifteen minutes would have got to him good and strong. I would have to be patient. Didn’t I have plenty more days? I smiled, pressed my foot down, and made for the crossroads and the dirt road off it. This time, the road ahead was clear of sheep.

I slowed instinctively when I came to the dirt road, glancing ahead for a first view of Deer’s Leap. When I got to the kissing gate I almost stopped, noting as I passed it that its black paint shone brightly.

‘She’s here!’

Beth’s children were waiting at the white-painted gate. Hamish and Elspeth were exactly as Jeannie had described them.

‘Hi!’ I called. ‘Been waiting long?’

‘Hours,’ Hamish said.

‘About fifteen minutes,’ his twin corrected primly.

‘Have you met Hector, Miss Johns ?’ The Labrador lolloped up, barking furiously.

‘Cassie! And yes, I have – the weekend you two were at camp.’

I’d seen little of the dog, actually; he’d been shut in an outhouse because of his dislike of strange men.

I got out of the car and squatted so Hector and I were at eye level, then held out my left hand. He sniffed it, licked, then allowed me to pat his head.

‘He likes you,’ Elspeth said. ‘We’ll help you with your things.’

I smiled at her. She was a half-pint edition of Jeannie, not her mother. Hamish was fair and blue-eyed, like Danny.

‘Beth’s in the bath.’ Danny arrived to give me a smacking kiss, then heaved my big case from the boot.

Carefully I manoeuvred my word processor from the back seat, handing the keyboard to Hamish. His sister took my grip and soapbag; I carried the monitor.

‘How on earth did you get all this in that?’ Danny looked disbelievingly at my little red car. ‘Looks as if you’ve come prepared for business.’

‘I shall write and write and write,’ I said without so much as a blush.

Beth arrived in a bathrobe with a towel round her hair. Her smile was broad, her arms wide. I love the way she makes people welcome.

It felt as if I had just come home.

When they left, waving and tooting at seven next morning, I watched them out of sight then carefully closed the white gate, turning to look at Deer’s Leap and the beautiful garden. It was a defiant glare of colour: vivid red poppies; delphiniums of all shades of blue; lavender with swelling flower buds and climbs of every kind of rose under the sun. They covered arches and walls, rioted up the trunks of trees and tangled with honeysuckle. In the exact centre, in a circular bed, was the herb garden; a pear tree leaned on the wall of the V-shaped gable end.

Uneven paths wound into dead ends; there were no straight lines anywhere. The garden, for all I knew, had changed little since witches cast spells hereabouts, and Old Chattox, Demdike and Mistress Nutter fell foul of the witch-hunter.

For a couple of foolish minutes I pretended that everything between the white gate and the stone wall at the top of the paddock belonged to me. I began rearranging Beth’s furniture, deciding which of the bedrooms would be my workroom when I had become famous and a servile bank manager offered me a huge mortgage on the place. Hector lay at my feet; Tommy, the ugliest of cat you ever did see, rubbed himself against my leg, purring loudly. Lotus, a snooty Persian, pinked up the path to indicate it was high time they were all fed. I felt a surge of utter love for the place, followed by one of abysmal despair. I wished I had never seen Deer’s Leap; was grateful beyond measure that for four weeks it was mine.

‘All right, you lot!’ I said to the animals, determined not to start talking to myself. First I would feed them, and then myself. Then I would make my bed and wash the dishes I had insisted Beth leave on the draining board. After that, I would start work.

The kitchen table was huge and I planned to set up my word processor at one end of it. I had decided to live and work in the kitchen and only when I had done a decent day’s work would I allow myself the reward of the sitting room, or of watching a wild sunset from the terrace outside it – with a glass of sherry at my side.

I smiled tremulously at Deer’s Leap and it smiled back with every one of its windows. Already the sky was high and near cloudless, and the early sun cast long shadows. I thought of Beth, and wondered if they had reached the M6 yet. Then I thought of Jeannie.

My route to Preston station had been painstakingly illustrated by Danny so I could find my way there without bother to meet her train at nine tonight. I felt a contentment that even my Yorkshire common sense couldn’t dispel. I had even decided not to drive down the lane to The Place, near the clump of oaks; that I wouldn’t hassle Jack Hunter nor feel disappointment if he didn’t turn up – or was it materialize? Today would be given to settling in, settling down and getting used to being mistress of Deer’s Leap.

Tomorrow, if I could, I would find an excuse to drive into Acton Carey alone. I am a writer, so surely between now and then I could come up with a believable excuse. After all, the pilot and I had met on a Saturday, so it was worth a try.

I sighed blissfully. I would potter until ten, when I would start work. Not until four o’clock would I prepare the salad to eat with the home-cooked ham Beth had left for us. Only then would I make myself presentable and meet Jeannie’s train. I felt so lucky, so utterly contented, that I wondered when the skies would open and jealous gods hurl down anger against me.

I crossed my fingers, whistled, then rummaged in a drawer for the tin opener. First the cats; then Hector’s biscuits and water as set out on the list on the kitchen windowsill. It was all so lovely and unreal that I wanted to laugh out loud.

‘That’s enough, Cassandra!’ I said in my mother’s it’ll-end-in-tears-before-bedtime-if-you-get-too-excited voice. ‘Just take every hour as it comes – then sit back and let things happen!

And happen they would, if I had anything to do with it!

Jeannie’s train arrived on time.

‘Hi!’ she said. ‘Good of you to pick me up.’

‘No bother. I like meeting trains.’ I do, actually. ‘Good to see you.’

‘How’s everything going? Got settled in?’

‘All set up and working. I’ve had a good day. Did you eat on the train?’

‘No, and I’m famished.’

‘Well, there’s ham salad and crusty bread and some rather special ice cream for pudding. There’s a bottle of white wine on the slate slab in the dairy, too.’

‘I’m ready for this weekend.’ Jeannie shoved her grip on the back seat of the car. ‘It’s been a swine this week at work. Nothing but meetings and interruptions and a pile of manuscripts a mile high to be seen to. I’ve brought a couple with me.’

‘You’re not spending your time reading!’

‘No. I can usually tell if a book is going to be any good by the end of the third chapter. Now, first of all I must tell you how pleased I am with the chapters you sent me. You’re on to a winner if the rest of the book is as good. You seem to be writing with more confidence.’

‘I am. It’s going well and I’ve covered quite a bit of wordage today. Beth’s kitchen is a lovely place to work in. They got away all right this morning. Beth says she needs a holiday to help set her up for the bother ahead.’

‘You mean leaving Deer’s Leap and finding another house.’

‘Mm. She tells me she’ll be thinking, once she’s left, about the woman who’ll be cooking in her kitchen and cutting flowers from her garden and –’

‘And shovelling six feet of snow from her back door to the wood shed! Have you been behaving yourself, Cassie?’

‘Of course I have! I’m well out of temptation’s way there.’

‘Not that kind of trouble! You know what I mean. No ghost hunting, or anything?’

‘Positively not!’ I met her eyes briefly and was glad to be able to tell the truth. ‘What really interests me, though, is the family who lived at Beth’s place in the war and got emptied out by the RAF. I’d have been spitting feathers if they’d done it to me.’

‘Me too. But I believe it was different then. There was a war on, so no one made too much fuss. It wouldn’t have been patriotic to complain. I remember talking to Bill Jarvis – lives in the village – once about the war. You wouldn’t believe what people put up with, according to him.’

‘Probably he was romancing a bit,’ I said carefully. ‘He’ll be getting on a bit now?’

‘Told me he’s nearer eighty than seventy, but he’s as bright as a button for all that.’

‘And he’s always lived in Acton Carey?’ Again the casual approach.

‘In the Glebe Cottages, by the church. I once spent an interesting couple of hours with him. He opens up after a few pints.’

‘Ale-talk,’ I said, making a note that Bill Jarvis lived near the church and liked his beer. ‘Not far to go now. Think I’m hungry too. I’m going to enjoy this weekend, y’know. Will you be able to make it next week?’

‘I most certainly will! Get some decent air into my lungs and a bit of peace and quiet. Don’t wake me in the morning, there’s a good girl – not even with a cup of tea.’

I said I wouldn’t, then concentrated on the road ahead – both sides of it – because we had just passed the clump of oaks.

We reached Deer’s Leap, though, without incident or encounter, and I can’t say I was all that disappointed. Already I had pinned my hopes on tomorrow, if I could get out alone.

‘Why don’t you sleep in, tomorrow morning?’ I said, sort of offhand. ‘I’m going down to the village anyway. There’s a post office I hope?’

‘Yes. Next door but one to the pub. What do you want with a post office?’

‘Phone cards,’ I said promptly. ‘I’m not using Beth’s phone to ring home. Is there a phone box, too?’

‘Outside the post office.’

‘Fine.’ I didn’t press the point. ‘Be a love and open the gate, will you?’

I felt very pleased with myself. I’d hit on an alibi for tomorrow morning and discovered a World War Two veteran ready and able to talk. Or he would be, once I’d established I was from Deer’s Leap and had bought him a pint!

We sat on the terrace long after the sun had gone down, me with a glass of sherry beside me, Jeannie with a gin and tonic. We had piled the dishes in the sink and left them. Evenings such as this were not to be wasted on things banal. It was almost dark, but still warm. A softly shaded lamp in the room behind us lit us rosily as distant outlines had blurred and turned from purple to deepest grey.

Somewhere below us, the headlights of a car briefly lit trees as it passed them. Someone was making for the village, I supposed, which was a scatter of pinprick lights far over to our left.

The birds had stopped singing. Tommy’s loud purring was almost hypnotic; Hector snuffled and yawned. He was lying across my feet and to shift him would be to break the spell. Lotus, a night owl, had long ago disappeared over the paddock wall.

‘If there’s a heaven, Jeannie,’ I said softly, ‘I want it to be like this.’

‘Mm.’ She tilted her glass, draining it. ‘Look – I’m feeling cold, all of a sudden. Tired, I suppose. Would you mind if I shoved off to bed?’

‘Of course not.’ I got to my feet and the dog awoke with a surprised snuffle. ‘I’ll see to the animals and do the rounds of the house.’

‘Bless you. Night, love.’ She kissed my cheek, then patted the dog. ‘D’you know, I haven’t unpacked, yet …?’

‘Tomorrow is another day. And I won’t wake you in the morning – when I go to the village, I mean.’

‘Don’t dare!’

She climbed the stairs slowly, followed by Tommy, who had already, I supposed, decided to spend the night on her bed.

Beth had found him at the side of the lane with a bleeding paw and fed him. By the time it was healed, he had purred his way into the family’s affections. He followed people around, grateful for his new, cushy lifestyle. Jeannie’s bedroom door closed with a thud and I wondered if the animal had managed to slip in behind her.

Reluctantly I locked and bolted the French windows and removed the key. I’d already decided to wash the supper things because I didn’t want to go to bed yet. Even washing up here was a joy. I squirted liquid into the bowl and idly swished it into suds.

I was happy; indecently happy. It was as if I was establishing a rapport with the house so it would stay unoccupied until I could afford it.

‘Grow up, Cassie!’ Until fishes flew and forests walked again! In my dreams! I would never get Deer’s Leap. Some rich bitch would snap it up as a summer retreat. All at once I was glad I was a bit psychic and wondered if people like me could ill-wish. An awful sadness washed me from nose to toes and I wished that I’d never seen the place. I wanted to weep with frustration, then thought about tomorrow instead.

And about the airman.

Chapter Four

The post office at Acton Carey was well stocked and I bought two phone cards, postcards of local views, stamps, a bag of toffees and a bottle of sherry. I shoved it all in the boot, then rang Mum from the phone box. Almost the first thing she asked was if anyone had called – as in visited.

‘Jeannie arrived last night. I left her still sleeping. She plans to come next Friday too.’

I could almost hear Mum’s sigh of relief.

‘Has Piers phoned, Cassie? He rang here to see if you’d got off all right. He said you’d forgotten to give him your phone number, so I let him have it.’

‘I’ll ring him tomorrow maybe. How’s Dad?’

‘Same as always. He says that if we come up to see you it’ll probably be midweek. The traffic, you see …’

‘Fine by me.’ Dad has a thing about weekend drivers. ‘Just as long as you come. I’d love you to see the place. Tell Dad the natives are friendly!’

We chatted comfortably on about things in general and nothing in particular – you know the way it is when you phone your mum – until the card began to run out. I said I’d ring in the week and sent my love to Dad. She told me to look after myself and be sure to check the doors at night.

I called, ‘Bye, Mum. Love you!’ just as the line went dead.

Then I looked up at the church clock and realized I had half an hour to kill. If I left at about ten forty-five, I’d figured, I should be at The Place a little before eleven. I decided to walk the length of the village and back, gawping at the pub and the village green as if I were a tourist.

The pub was called the Red Rose, which figured. It looked old and, from the outside, friendly. The village green was ordinary, but the grass was cut short and the flowerbeds either side of an oak seat were well kept. There wasn’t a scrap of litter about.

I sat down to waste a few minutes, looking about me, liking what I saw. Sheets blew on a line, very white against a very blue sky; a lady in a pinafore came out to wash her front windows. The Post Office van was making the morning delivery. I supposed that Deer’s Leap would be its next stop and wondered if there would be any letters in the lidded box at the crossroads end of the dirt road when I returned. There would certainly be milk and a brown loaf, because I’d left a note there this morning.

There was nothing else to think about now except being at The Place at about four minutes to eleven, even though the airman wouldn’t be there; how could he be, just because I wanted it? On the other hand, I had thought about him so much that surely some of my vibes had reached him.

Jack Hunter. A young man with old eyes, piloting a bomb-loaded Lancaster. Young men of my own generation were still kids at his age, fussing over their first car, pulling girls. Once, the Red Rose would have been filled with men from the airfield nearby; women too, because they had had to go to war. I wondered how people could have been so obedient, doing as they were ordered in the name of patriotism. I supposed they’d had little choice.

Would Piers have flown bombers or fighters? Somehow, with his dark, brooding looks, I think he would have been more likely to have been a paratrooper; a swash-buckling type with a gun at the ready.

I pushed him from my mind. There was no place for him in my life for the next four weeks. Correction. There was no place for him, if I faced facts, in my life at all! Piers had served his purpose, satisfied my curiosity. He was nice enough to have around, but in small doses.

I wondered what it would be like to be in love – desperately in love – with a man who might any night be killed. I jumped to my feet as I remembered the war memorial, realizing I hadn’t seen it yet.

I found it on a triangle of grass outside the church gates. It was in simple stone and on the front were the names of men who had died in the First World War. I counted them, horrified that from so small a village, twelve young men had been killed.

Underneath it, three more names were chiselled; dead from a later war. It made me feel grateful those men had given their lives and then I knew I’d got it wrong. They hadn’t given anything! Their young lives had been taken, stolen, squandered!

I looked to the side to see the names of seven airmen in alphabetical order and the simple inscription, In Grateful Memory. 8.6.1944.

I saw the name J. J. Hunter and reached to touch it with my fingertips.

‘Please be there,’ I whispered.

The tingling began at the clump of oaks. Until I reached them I had managed to keep my feelings in check. But beyond those trees anything could happen and I was hoping desperately that it would.

Strangely, I was more excited than afraid, because deep down I was telling myself he wouldn’t be there. In fact, if Beth and Danny hadn’t told me to leave it, if Beth hadn’t half-heartedly admitted she might have seen the airman and told me the people in the village didn’t want the press all over the place, I might have convinced myself he was all in my mind. But Jack Hunter was as real as you or me.

I wound down my window. Then I stopped to lean over and slip the nearside door catch.

‘Hop in,’ I’d say. ‘It’s open …’

Almost eleven. I started the car and crawled past the spot I’d first met him, trying to look both sides and straight ahead at the same time. I looked in the rear-view mirror, but he wasn’t behind me, either.

‘Aren’t you coming, Jack Hunter?’

My voice sounded strange, then I let go a snort of annoyance because talking to a ghost that wasn’t there was worse than talking to myself!

‘That’s yer lot!’ This was a load of nonsense and he’d had his last chance! If he wasn’t interested, then neither was I! He could find his own damn way to Deer’s Leap! I’d come here to look after a house and two cats and a dog; to write in peace and quiet and when Jeannie went back on Monday, that was what I would do!

‘Men are a flaming nuisance,’ I said out loud, and that included ghosts!

I began to laugh. A very real Hector would come bouncing up, followed by a loudly purring cat, when I got out of the car. All very neat and normal. Only Cassie Johns was out of step!

I realized I had slowed, because I was looking for a flock of sheep, wondering if I’d imagined them too. The crossroads was ahead, and the signpost. I turned right, then slowed so I could take the pot-holed dirt road easily.

I could see the roof of the house above the trees. Jeannie was up, because the white gate ahead was open, and I’d left it closed. In front, to my left, was the kissing gate and, oh, my God! He was there! Walking through it! I saw him clearly, and the gas mask slung on his left shoulder.

I slammed on the brake, the engine coughed and stalled. I yelled, ‘Jack Hunter!’ then flung open the door as he pulled the gate shut behind him. When I got there, he had gone. The path, which led to the farm buildings, was empty. I ran down it as far as the conservatory, but there was no sign he had ever been there.

Then I turned, and stood stock-still, gawping in disbelief at the iron gate. Now it was black again with shiny paint, yet when I’d opened it I’d swear it had been rusty! And what was more I had heard its grinding squeak as he closed it behind him! I walked up to it, touching it with my finger, and it swung smoothly and silently on well-oiled pivots.

Yet he’d been there. He had! He was still around. It was just that this morning we’d missed each other by seconds – and fifty-odd years!

Jeannie and I ate a lunch of soup and sandwiches, then lazed on the terrace, gazing for miles, soaking up the August sun, breathing deeply on the air.

‘Y’know, this shouldn’t be allowed. It’s positively antisocial to have a view like this all to yourself. I wonder what they’ll ask for this place, once it goes on the market?’

‘Haven’t a clue. I’m used to London prices,’ Jeannie shrugged. ‘But I suppose that even though it mightn’t be everybody’s cup of tea, it won’t go cheap. Like you say, the view is really something and position counts for a lot.’

‘If you like out-of-the-way places,’ I said.

‘The old ones knew where to build, didn’t they?’

‘Before planning permission came in, you mean, when they could choose their plot and just start building?’

‘Sort of, but they’d have to do their homework first. The most important thing when Deer’s Leap was built would be the availability of water, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Danny said there was once a stream, just beyond the paddock wall.’

‘Well, that would’ve been all right for livestock and clothes washing, but they’d have needed drinking water too. Mind, that ornamental well at the back near the conservatory was once the real thing. I believe they only got mains water here after the war. And they still don’t have sewers. That’s why we shouldn’t use too many disinfectants and upset the natural workings of the septic tank.’

‘They were very self-sufficient, though.’ My mind jumped the centuries to the man and woman who built this house. Their initials were above the front door: W. D. & M. D. 1592. ‘Do you realize Elizabeth Tudor was still alive when W. D. brought his bride here? Wonder what they were called – and how many children they had.’

‘William and Mary Doe,’ Jeannie said, off the top of her head, ‘and they probably had ten children and would count themselves lucky to rear half of them!’

‘A bit nearer home,’ I said cautiously, ‘I wonder who lived here in the war, and how they managed. Petrol was rationed, I believe. How did they get about?’

‘On bikes, most likely. Or maybe they’d go shopping once a week on the farm tractor. Who knows? And anyway, who’s interested?’

‘Me, for one.’ I looked straight ahead, pretending it didn’t really matter. ‘Well – I’m an author. I can’t help being curious and it would all be grist to the mill – if we found out, that is …’

‘If it’s so important, why don’t we go down to the Rose, tonight? They don’t get a lot in there, especially since drink-drive came in. I could introduce you to Bill Jarvis, if he’s in. Bill knows most people’s business around here, past and present. Maybe he could tell you.’

‘It isn’t that important,’ I hedged. ‘It’s just that I keep wondering what it was like here when it was a working farm and before somebody tarted up the buildings at the back, and when there were animals around the place, and manure heaps.’

‘Then we’ll go to the village, like I said. The beer is good there. The further north you get from London, people say, the better the ale. I fancy a couple of pints!’

‘So who’s going to drive?’

‘You, Cassie. It’s your car.’

‘And drink Coke and orange juice all night?’

‘OK! There are loads of bikes in the stable. What say we pick out a couple, put some air in the tyres, and go supping in style?’

‘Can you get done for being drunk in charge of a bike?’ I giggled.

‘I don’t know. It depends how well you can ride one, I suppose.’

We decided to have an early tea. Fresh brown eggs, boiled, and crusty bread, then a huge dollop of the home-baked parkin Mum had slipped into the boot just as I was leaving. After which, Jeannie said she’d better have a dummy run, just to make sure she hadn’t forgotten how to ride.

It was all so lovely and free and easy. We were like a couple of kids let early out of school, and in a way I was a bit sad about it because next August, when I was writing book three and on the way to becoming a real, time-served novelist, I would look back to how it had been that summer at Deer’s Leap, and wonder who had bought the house and if they loved it as much as I did. And I knew they wouldn’t, couldn’t.

We wore leggings, the better to ride in, and shirts. Then we stuffed cardies in the saddlebags in case it was cold riding home. We pushed the bikes along the dirt road, neither of us being confident enough to brave the potholes.

When we got to the crossroads I said, ‘If we meet anything on the road, I’ll ride ahead, OK?’

‘If we meet anything on this narrow lane, I shall get off and stand on the verge! But there’s hardly any traffic hereabouts. What are you expecting – a furniture van?’

I almost said, ‘No – a flock of sheep,’ but I didn’t and we managed, after a couple of false starts and a few wobbles, to get going.

‘Don’t look down at your front wheel, Jeannie! Look at the road ahead. Y’know, I could get to like this. They say you never forget how to ride a bike.’

Jeannie soon got the hang of it and went ahead just at the spot I’d first seen the airman. I slowed and had a good look around, then told myself not to be greedy; that one sighting a day was all I could hope for.

‘Hey! Wait for me, show-off!’ I called, then pedalled like mad to catch her up.

The Red Rose wasn’t too crowded and we got a table beside an open window. Jeannie said she would get the first round and asked me what I was drinking.

‘Bitter, please. A half.’

She returned with two pint glasses, then asked me how I liked the Rose.

‘It’s ages old, isn’t it?’ The ceiling was very low, and beamed; the lounge end of the one long room had better seats in it than the other end, where there was a dartboard but not a slot machine in sight.

‘I could get to like this place,’ I said, lifting my glass. ‘Cheers!’

‘We’re in luck.’ Jeannie took a long drink from her glass. ‘Bill Jarvis is in the far corner. Would you like to meet him?’

‘You know I would! Are you going to ask him to join us?’

‘I’ll take him a pint and tell him it’s from a young lady who would like to talk to him.

‘He’s scoring for the darts, but he’ll be over in about five minutes,’ she said when she came back alone. ‘He said thanks for the beer, by the way.’

‘This is a lovely old pub. I’m glad they haven’t modernized it – made it into a gin palace.’

‘There’s no fear of that happening.’ She raised her eyes to the ceiling, which was pale khaki. ‘The last time it got a lick of paint was for the Coronation. When it was first built, in the early fourteen hundreds, it was the churchwarden’s house, and I don’t think it’s changed a lot since – apart from flush toilets outside.’

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that at the time of the Wars of the Roses, a churchwarden was quite an important man, in the village.’

‘Mm. He held one of the three keys to the parish chest – y’know, social security, medieval style. The other two keyholders would be the priest and the local squire. The parish chest is still in the church, but there’s nothing in it. You must go and see it before you go back.’

She was already halfway down her glass. My dad, I thought, would approve of Jeannie McFadden.

‘There’s a lot of things I must see and do,’ I said obliquely, ‘before I go back. But I think your friend is coming over …’

An elderly man made his way to our table, puffing out clouds of tobacco smoke that made me glad of the open window.

‘Now then, lass,’ he said to Jeannie, ignoring me completely, ‘what was it you wanted to know?’

‘It’s my friend, actually, Bill. She’s taken a liking to Deer’s Leap and wants to know all about it. She’s a writer,’ she added.

‘Then I’m saying nowt, or it’ll all be in a book!’

‘I write fiction, Mr Jarvis,’ I said, holding out my hand. ‘What I’m interested in is the history of the house. I’m not prying. I’m Cassie, by the way. What are you drinking?’

‘Nowt at the moment, though I wouldn’t say no to a pint of bitter.’ Reluctantly he shook my hand.

‘I want to know,’ I said, when he was settled at the table, ‘who lived at Deer’s Leap in the war. Jeannie said the Air Force just turfed them out without a by-your-leave. I’d have hated that if it had been my house.’

‘Ar, but my generation had to put up with that war and we hated it, an’ all. Didn’t stop the high-ups from London taking whatever they wanted, for all that. Smiths had no choice but to sell up and get out.’

‘And where did they go?’

‘Can’t rightly say, lass. Got my calling-up papers, so what became of ’em, I never knew.’

‘Did they have a family, Mr Jarvis?’

‘Not as you’d call a family – nobbut one bairn, three or four years younger than me. Susan, if I remember rightly.’

Susan Smith, I brooded, then all at once I remembered the initials S. S. and a tiny heart on the strap of the airman’s gas mask. The initials stood for Susan Smith. She, likely, had put them there!

‘How old was Susan when she had to leave Deer’s Leap?’ I managed to ask, a kind of triumph singing inside me.

‘Now then – I’d just been called up, as I remember. Was twenty-two. Usually they took you afore that, but they’d let a young man finish his training, sort of. I was ’prenticed to a cabinet-maker, so as soon as I’d done my time they called me into the Engineers and taught me about electrics! Any road, that would make the Smith lass about eighteen or nineteen. I’m seventy-six, so she would be seventy-two or -three now – if her’s still alive. Fair, she was, and bonny, but quiet, as I remember.’

‘It was rotten about their land – especially as the government expected farmers to work all hours to produce food,’ Jeannie prompted.

‘Ar, but t’farm were no use to Smiths any more. Them fellers from the Air Ministry took all their fields in the end. Nobbut the paddock left them. Then they said they wanted the farmhouse, an’ all.’

‘That was a bit vindictive,’ I said hotly.

‘No. Stood to sense, really. The Air Force wanted to extend the runway at the aerodrome, and they took Deer’s Leap to billet airmen in. ’em could do what they wanted in those days. Would have the shirt off your back if they thought it would help the war effort! They couldn’t get away with it now. Folk wouldn’t stand for it!

‘Mind, once they’d no more use for bombers, they soon upped and went! I suppose Smiths could have got their house back and their fields, an’ all, but they never tried. That farmhouse stood empty for years. It’d have fallen down if it hadn’t been solid-built and a good, tight roof on it. A man who’d won money on the football pools bought it eventually and fancied it up. He couldn’t stand the quiet, though, so it’s been rented out ever since.’

‘I think it’s a beautiful house,’ I said softly as Jeannie took Bill’s empty glass to the bar for a refill. ‘I wish it belonged to me.’

‘You’d never stand the quiet, lass.’

‘I would. I’m there for a month and I wish it was for ever.’

‘Ah, well, there’s folk in it now, so you can stop your fretting for it. Reckon they’m well satisfied with the place.’

‘Yes. They love it.’ I didn’t mention they’d be leaving it, come New Year. ‘I think the view from the front is unbelievable. There’s such peace there.’

‘Weren’t a lot of peace for folk around here in the war. ’Em had an aerodrome, don’t forget, on their doorsteps, and bombers overhead day and night. Bits of kids flying them. It’s a miracle there weren’t more crashes.’

Jeannie returned with a tin tray with three pint glasses on it. Bill Jarvis smiled, and took one of them.

‘Crashes?’ I probed.

‘Oh my word, yes!’ He pushed his empty pipe into his top pocket and took a long drink from his glass. ‘Mind, those bombers were great big things and needed a lot of room for takeoff, but folk around here could never see the sense in the Air Force wanting more land for longer runways. ’Em thought it was going to be something to do with the invasion; that we had a secret weapon that was going to take off from Acton Carey. But it was the Americans came in the end. Mind, I can’t help you a lot there. I was in Italy at the time, on the invasion.’

‘I wonder why the Smiths didn’t come back. I’d have wanted to,’ I said.

‘Ar, but talk had it that he was given some fancy job with the Ag and Fish; didn’t have to work so hard for his money.’

‘Ag and Fish?’ Jeannie frowned.

‘The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. For once, they took on a man as knew a bit about farming! I never found out what happened to him after that. Was none of my business. Now, I mind when I was in Italy …’ His eyes took on a remembering look, and I knew there would be no more Deer’s Leap talk. But I had made contact, and before we left I had arranged to meet the old man again at the Rose on Wednesday night.

‘You’re a fast worker,’ Jeannie laughed as we cycled home. ‘What are you up to with Bill Jarvis?’

‘Nothing at all,’ I called back over my shoulder. ‘But like I said, it’s all grist to a writer’s mill. Life here must have been a bit tame all round once the war was over.’

‘Yes, and a whole lot safer!’

We closed the white gate behind us. It would have been dark by now, but for a half-moon. We hadn’t passed one street-lamp. It made me feel good, just to think of how remote we were. Tommy was waiting, purring, on the doorstep; Lotus was away on her nightly prowl. Hector barked loudly as Jeannie unlocked the back door, then hurtled past us to run round and round the stableyard like a mad thing. I switched on the kitchen light, then filled the kettle.

‘Want a sarnie?’ I asked. ‘There’s ham in the fridge.’

‘Please.’ Jeannie kicked off her pumps, then flopped into a chair. ‘No mustard.’

‘It’s been a lovely, lovely day,’ I sighed as I cut bread. ‘Bet our legs’ll be stiff in the morning, though. I haven’t ridden a bike in years.’

We sat at the kitchen table. It was too late now to sit on the terrace and watch distant lights. Even the birds were quiet.

‘I’m tired,’ Jeannie yawned not long afterwards. ‘All this country air …’

‘Me too.’ I said I would check the doors and windows. I considered it my responsibility since Beth had left me in loco parentis, so to speak. ‘Off you go. I’ll be right behind you.’

Tommy had settled himself on the bottom of my bed, but I didn’t shift him. I cleaned my teeth, washed my face, then lifted the quilt carefully so as not to waken him. Then I sighed and stared into the shifting darkness, glad that Jeannie hadn’t wanted to stay up late, talking, because I needed to think.

Up until tonight, things had been a muddle, yet now it was as if I was looking down on a table top with the pieces of a jigsaw piled on it in a heap. I had found the corner pieces of that puzzle and laid them out carefully in my mind.

One was a long-ago airfield – aerodrome, Bill called it – at Acton Carey. It had been the cause of the Smiths – piece number two – leaving Deer’s Leap, which was corner piece three. The fourth was Jack Hunter, I knew it without a doubt, and that he and Susan were connected – or why were her initials on his respirator?

I had made a start! Next I must complete the entire outline of the puzzle so I could begin to fill in the story, which was the middle bit. I could rely on Bill for some things because Jeannie had been right: his brain was still razor-sharp. For the rest of it, I needed to talk to a sergeant pilot. Only he could help me with the difficult bits.

Were we to meet face to face again, and talk, or was he to be a wraith, slipping in and out of shadows – and through gates – always just out of my reach?

Susan Smith, I brooded. Born 1924, or thereabouts. Fair and bonny and shy. Jack Hunter – tall and fair and straight, and old before his time. Died in 1944 and a name now on a stone memorial. The really sad thing, I sighed, as my eyes began to close, was that he didn’t know it.

What, or who, had he been searching for over the years? I hoped he would tell me …

There was a comfortable silence about the place when I got up early on Tuesday morning. After making Jeannie promise hand on heart to visit next weekend, I’d stood waving as her London-bound train snaked from the station the previous evening.

I coughed, and the sound echoed loudly around the kitchen. The quiet was bliss, the only sounds, Tommy’s rhythmic purring at my feet and a swell of birdsong outside. Hector lay on the back doorstep, on guard. There was just me and the animals and the view from the kitchen window that stretched into forever.

The phone on the dresser rang, intruding noisily into my world. Reluctantly I answered it.

‘Cassandra?’

‘Piers! Oh – hi!’

‘What have you been up to? I’ve been ringing all the time!’

‘You can’t have.’ I felt a bit guilty for hardly thinking about him all weekend.

‘I phoned on Saturday night. Twice. Where have you been until now?’

‘We biked down to the pub on Saturday night. Jeannie had someone to see.’

‘What about Sunday?’

‘If you rang, then we were probably in the garden, cutting the grass.’

‘And last night?’

‘Most likely I’d gone to Preston, seeing Jeannie on to the train. Listen, Piers, what the heck is this? Are you checking up on me?’

‘No, darling. Sorry if I came over a bit snotty. But what was I to think when you didn’t even give me your phone number in the first place?’

‘You got it off Mum, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. After I’d asked for it. Why didn’t you ring me, Cassandra?’ He still sounded peeved.

‘Because!’ I said flatly and finally. ‘I’m very well, since you ask, and yes, we had a lovely, lazy weekend. Where are you?’

‘At the flat. I’ve just got up.’

‘We-e-ll, don’t ring any more in the expensive time. Leave it for after six, why don’t you?’

I’d be better able to cope with his bossiness then. An upset this early in the day could put me off my stroke – especially when he was making a meal of it, like now. ‘You’ve got to understand this book is important, Piers,’ I rushed on. ‘I came here to write – what you call my scribbling – and I do wish you would take me seriously. Just sometimes,’ I finished breathlessly.

‘But, my love, I do take you seriously.’ His tone was changing from accusing to placating. ‘It’s just that you seem to be wrapped up in it to the exclusion of all else. You and me, especially …’

‘Piers! Please not now; not this early in the day! And of course I’m wrapped up in it. It’s my work, you must accept that. This novel has got to be good and then Harrier Books might begin to take me seriously.’

‘You’re set on it, aren’t you, Cassandra? You really believe you can make a living from it when most writers need a daytime job too. Don’t you think you’ve been living off your parents long enough? Isn’t it about time you took a serious look at the way your life is going?’

‘I see. I’d be better shacking up with you, providing all the home comforts, you mean?’

‘Now you’re getting angry, sweetheart.’

‘Don’t interrupt!’ I was angry! Piers would have to learn you can only push a redhead so far! ‘I have never lived off Mum and Dad. I pulled my weight at home and only wrote when I could find the time. And yes, I do hope to make a living from writing! Ice Maiden is doing well; they’re reprinting it, as a matter of fact! Oh, don’t worry! I won’t be going into tax exile just yet, but I’m holding my own! And even if I wasn’t, I shouldn’t have to justify myself to you!’

I took a deep breath. I expected an explosion or a slamming-down of the phone, but all I got was a silence. Piers is good at pregnant pauses; can stretch five seconds into five minutes.

‘Cassie love, don’t get upset. I was anxious, hadn’t heard from you. For all I knew you could be – well …’

‘Having a passionate affair with a local yokel? Well, I’m flaming not!’

‘You seem determined to have a row. What’s the matter then – stuck for words?’

‘No, I’m not. The words are coming well, but thanks a heap, Piers, for helping me to start the day with an upset! I’m not doing a prima donna, but you narking on the phone I can do without! Ring after six, will you?’

I had meant to end the conversation firmly and with dignity, but I slammed the phone down angrily and now he’d know he’d got me rattled! I could imagine his smirk. Drat the man!

For the next two days I allowed nothing and no one to come between me and my work. Luckily Piers didn’t phone again. I existed on sandwiches and coffee, rewarding myself for my labours with a large sherry after I had switched off.

On Wednesday, at six o’clock exactly, I had safely stored two chapters on a floppy disk. I felt drained, but triumphant. Deer’s Leap was good to me, wrapping me round to keep out all interruptions.

I rotated my head, hearing little crackling sounds as I did so, deciding I needed to loosen up. My heroine had got herself into a bit of a mess, but she could stew in it until morning, I thought, well satisfied with the cliffhanger at the end of chapter twelve.

I was wondering whether to eat at the Rose or whether to boil the last couple of eggs, when Mum phoned.

‘Hullo, there! You sound a long way away!’

‘I am, Mum! I’ve just finished work, actually. I’ve got two chapters done since I came here! I’m having a sherry, then I’ll make myself some supper. How’s everything?’

‘We’re fine, only I’m afraid we won’t be able to make it up there this week. I’d forgotten your dad is judging at two flower shows. We’ll probably make it the week following. Is that all right with you, love?’

‘Come whenever you want to. I’d really like you to see this place. When I win the Lottery, I shall buy it!’

‘Ha! More to the point, are you getting enough to eat?’

‘I am, though I work while the mood is on me, and eat when I’m hungry. Jeannie is coming up again on Friday.’

‘Have you spoken to Piers, yet? I don’t suppose he’ll be coming to see you?’

‘Not unless you give him my address, Mum! I’m here to work. I don’t want any interruptions – leastways, not from him.’

‘Aah,’ she sighed, and I knew I had said the right thing.

‘I’m going to Clitheroe tomorrow. There’s something I want to look up at the library.’

‘You’re sure you’re all right, Cassie?’

‘I’m fine. We’ve eaten all the parkin, by the way. Bring me another piece when you come up, there’s a love? Jeannie really liked it.’

I could feel Mum’s glow of pleasure in my ear. Tomorrow, I’d take bets on her making a double mixing, then putting my piece in a tin to moisten. Parkin is best kept a few days before eating.

‘Of course I will! Anything else you want?’

‘No thanks, I’m fine, and working well. I miss you both. Take care of yourselves, won’t you?’

‘We will, lovey. And don’t go answering the door after dark!’

‘I won’t. And I’ve got Hector to look after me. He doesn’t like strangers very much!’

‘Well, then …’

‘I’ll phone you at the weekend, Mum. We’ll have a good long chat, then. Love you!’

I smiled at the receiver as I put it down, deciding to take the car down to Acton Carey, and drink Coke instead of bitter, even though it was unlikely I would meet any traffic on the way back.

The way back. Would I meet anyone, though? I hadn’t seen the airman since Saturday morning at the kissing gate, though I hadn’t gone out of my way to find him. I wondered if he was once billeted at Deer’s Leap after the Smiths left. At least I now knew the names of those long-ago people.

Maybe, though, Jack Hunter had been quartered somewhere else. He’d said he wanted to get to Deer’s Leap, but could he have been going there to meet Susan Smith? Had they been an item – or courting, walking-out as it would have been called in those days?

I put eggs to boil, then sliced bread. Lotus walked daintily into the kitchen, indicating, nose in air, that she would accept a saucer of milk. Tommy tried to share it and was warned off. I put a saucer down for him, then began to time the eggs as they came to the bubble.

That was when the phone began to ring. It was Piers, dammit! I moved the pan from the heat.

‘Hullo, darling. In a better mood, are we?’

‘I’m fine. Put in a good day’s work. I’m just about to eat.’ This time I wouldn’t let him get me rattled! ‘How was your day, Piers?’

‘Oh, routine, as always.’

‘Hm.’ He never explained what went on in that lab he worked in. I suppose that he supposed I wouldn’t understand it anyway. ‘I’m going out tonight.’

‘Oooh! Got a heavy date?’

‘Yes, and I’m looking forward to it. He’s called Bill Jarvis. I’m meeting him at the pub.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘In the village!’ Nice try, Piers!

‘And he’ll wine you and dine you, I suppose, then have his wicked way!’ It was meant to sound like a joke, but I knew he was purring with his claws out.

‘In the back of a Mini?’ I laughed. ‘I’m doing a spot of research, actually. I’m interested in World War Two. For a small village, it must once have been fairly jumping hereabouts. Lately, people seem to have got interested in that period. I might just use it for the next book. And for your information, I’ll be buying the ale! Bill is a pensioner, Piers. He’s seventy-six, and like I said, it’s research.’

‘Of course. As a matter of fact I thought it would be something like that, Cassandra.’

‘Oh, you did! Think I’m only capable of pulling a senior citizen, then?’

‘The thought never entered my mind! Have you been drinking? You sound – peculiar.’

‘Of course I haven’t!’ I smirked at the empty sherry glass on the drainer. ‘I just feel good, that’s all.’

‘Then it’s a welcome change! Usually, you snap my head off. Getting that book accepted has changed you, Cassie.’

‘Has it?’ I had a vision of him telling it to the long-suffering man in the mirror over the telephone. Piers Yardley was wasted on research! ‘Anyway, I’m going to have my tea now. Don’t ring again because I’ll be either in the bath or out! Take care of yourself, Piers. I’ll phone you at the weekend. Promise!’

‘Do I only merit off-peak, then?’

‘Bye, love!’ I ignored the snide remark.

Round two to Cassie Johns!

I parked the Mini at the back of the Red Rose, and, once inside, was glad to see Bill sitting alone, an empty glass in front of him.

‘Hi, Mr Jarvis,’ I smiled. ‘What can I get you?’

He smiled briefly and held up his beer glass, then asked me what the ’eck I was drinking when I sat down beside him.

‘I’m on Coke tonight. I’m driving. I want to pick your brains,’ I went on without preamble. ‘Will you tell me what it was like around these parts in the war? Was it really dangerous, having that airfield so near?’

‘Us called it an aerodrome in them days. ’Twas only the Yanks that called ’em airfields. I wouldn’t say it was dangerous, exactly. But when you come to think of it, they were nobbut young bits of lads flying those bombers. It must have been a bother getting them into the air. Well, they’d be heavy, wouldn’t they, with bombs and fuel?’

He placed his empty pipe between his teeth and sucked on it, reflectively.

‘I suppose that was before they made the runways longer?’ I suggested, trying to steer the conversation round to the Smiths’ fields.

‘Before and after. Was still a bit hair-raising. ’em made the chimney pots rattle as they flew over. Noisy, it was.’

‘I suppose it was better when they came back from a raid – well, safer for Acton Carey people, I mean. At least their fuel would be almost used, and their bombs would have gone. Landing wouldn’t have been so risky, would it?’

I saw Jack Hunter’s hands gripping the controls.

‘You might think not, but getting back from the raid didn’t mean they were home and dry, oh my word, no! Some mornings I’d be biking to the workshop, early, and I’d see ’em, wheels down, circling. Mind, it was when they was circling with their wheels not down that the trouble started.’

‘I don’t understand …’ I sipped at my drink, and wished it was beer.

‘Well, sometimes ’em couldn’t get their undercarriages down! Sometimes they’d been got at by enemy fighters; shot up, see, and the wheels wouldn’t work. Had to do a belly landing then, and the fire trucks and the ambulances standing by. It wasn’t a picnic in the Army, fighting in Italy, but I always reckoned I had a better chance of seeing my demob than those flyers.’

‘So there were a lot of accidents?’

‘Oh, aye.’

‘Where was the aerodrome exactly?’

‘Was about two miles from the village, going in the direction of that house you’re staying at. Two miles might sound a long way, but it was only seconds in flying time. I was once walking a girl out as lived in a cottage about half a mile from Deer’s Leap, though it’s tumbled down since. The land rises a bit at the back of the farm and we could look down, summer nights, and see them taking off below us. In miniature, sort of.’

‘So if I went to the back of Deer’s Leap and looked down, whereabouts would the aerodrome have been?’

‘If you was to walk to the top of that paddock, then keep on for about a hundred yards, and look over to your left, you’d have seen it. Mind, there was a wood there once. Sniggery Wood, we called it, and very handy for courting couples. The Air Ministry folk cut down all the trees. They’d have been a hazard, see, for bombers taking off and landing. Things change, lass, and not always for the better.’

‘So maybe,’ I asked cautiously, ‘the people – the Smiths, didn’t you say? – who lived there would be able to watch it all?’

‘Happen they would, if they’d been interested, but I suppose they had better things to do with their time.’

‘And the daughter – Susan – do you suppose she might have known some of the airmen there?’ Some, I said, trying to make it sound casual.

‘Her might’ve. Mind, it wasn’t encouraged. Getting fond of them aircrew lads could lead to trouble. They used to have dances at the aerodrome – had a good dance band there, I believe. Civilian girls were welcome, but my sister were never allowed to go!’

‘Why could it lead to trouble?’ I found myself sticking up for Jack Hunter. ‘I thought girls were sort of chaperoned in those days.’

‘You did, eh?’ He chuckled, wheezily. ‘We aren’t talking about when Queen Victoria was on the throne! Young lasses took notice of what their parents said, I’ll grant you that, and they didn’t leave home, usually, till they was wed or called up. But he-ing and she-ing went on like it always had and always will.

‘What I was trying to say was that if a girl got fond of a flyer, then she could get real upset if he didn’t come back from a raid. And there was a better than even chance that he wouldn’t. Parents didn’t want their lasses to get tied up with them, for that reason – apart from the obvious, of course. They could’ve ended up in the family way, an’ all!’

‘I see. That would have been awful for them?’

‘Awful? It’d have been a disgrace; a scandal. When a lass got into trouble in those days, she had to take herself off quick afore it became obvious – if you know what I mean – if the young man responsible didn’t wed her. I did hear as how one father around these parts just chucked his lass on to the street and told her to be off with her shame. Her jumped in t’river!’

‘But women were called up into the Armed Forces as well as men. I suppose parents would be a bit worried, their daughters never having been away from home, sort of …’

‘Suppose they would be, but they weren’t given much of a choice! And not all of them lasses as went in the Forces were all that upset about it. For some, it was an adventure – and they got away from strict parents, an’ all!’ He began to fidget with his empty glass.

‘Can I fill you up?’

‘That’d be decent of you …’

‘Did the Smith girl get called up?’ I asked, the second I put the glass in front of him.

‘Don’t reckon so. Farmers kept their daughters at home on account they worked on the land. Farming was a reserved occupation, remember, for young men as well as for young women. Some folk thought it wasn’t fair when their daughters went off to war and farmers’ sons stopped at home safe.’

‘But they left Deer’s Leap, you said. Maybe she would have to do war work when they left the farm?’

‘Maybe she would. I was called up myself before the Air Force emptied them out, so I never knew what became of them. You seem very interested in t’Smiths.’

‘Not particularly,’ I shrugged, hoping I sounded convincing. ‘It was just that I wondered what it was like for the farmer who once lived at Deer’s Leap. I’m interested in all the people who lived there. I suppose it would have been quite some property when it was built.’

‘Still is, I suppose. The man as built it would be well heeled.’

‘Mm. He’d have had servants and farm workers. I think they would have slept in the rooms over the kitchen. If we could invent a time machine and dial the year we wanted, we’d know exactly how it had been.’

‘Won’t be long,’ he grumbled into his empty glass, ‘afore they do, the rate they’re going on at! Spending all that money shooting off to the moon and what did they find when they got there? Nowt but dust!’

‘Are you ready for another?’ His interest was flagging. Mention of a refill revived it noticeably.

‘Tell me about Italy?’ I asked, returning from the bar.

‘Which bit?’ Carefully he lifted a brimming glass to his lips.

‘Monte Cassino?’ I hazarded.

The half-moon of Saturday night was full now. It hung in the sky, large and round and glowing. Was it the harvest moon, or would that be the next one, at the end of the month?

Everything around me looked beautiful and mysterious and aloof. What was it about the moon that made people think of magic? Trees and hedges cast long shadows, and the road was clear and visible for as far ahead as I could see. Maybe it was on nights like this that witches flew. I wondered if the Pendle women had really been witches? Had a harvest moon looked down when they were hanged, one long-ago August? W. D. and M. D. would have known all about that trial in Lancaster. In 1612, when it happened, Deer’s Leap had already stood for twenty years. Mary Doe, as I thought of her, might even have visited Mistress Nutter and exchanged herbal remedies with her, because in those days the woman of the house was responsible for all the nursing and doctoring that was needed within her family. I wished like mad for that time machine. What would Mary Doe make of my bright red Mini that could rush along faster than witches on broomsticks? I threw back my head and laughed out loud just to think of it, and then my smile set on my lips and my laughter ended abruptly.

I could see him clearly in the moonlight, and instinct made me switch off my lights. I braked, and dropped a gear. I wouldn’t have expected him to be beside the clump of oak trees; further up the lane, really.

His outline stood out darkly, and there was no mistaking his extended arm, his jutting thumb. My mouth had gone dry and I ran my tongue round my lips. In the slipping of a second I asked myself if I were afraid and knew I wasn’t.

He took a step backwards as I stopped beside him. Please, please don’t vanish, Jack Hunter. I leaned over and pushed open the door.

‘I’m going to Deer’s Leap,’ I said. ‘Want a lift …?’

Chapter Five

My heart was thudding; the little pulse behind my nose had joined in too. I felt a choking excitement and, at the same time, an amazing calm. I willed him to get in.

‘Thanks a lot.’ He took off his cap and pushed it under the epaulette at his shoulder. Then he tossed his respirator on the floor of the car, and sat down. This time he could stretch his legs because I hadn’t moved the passenger seat forward. He banged the door shut and I began to wish for a flock of sheep again. Without them it would take less than three minutes to Deer’s Leap, and he would take off, I knew it, just as soon as he saw the kissing gate.

‘In a hurry, are you?’ I said, staring ahead.

‘Afraid so. I shouldn’t be here really. I’m on standby …’

‘What’s that?’ This time, I had the chance to ask.

‘It means we might be going tonight.’

‘Going?’ I prompted carefully, driving slowly.

‘On ops. We might go, and then again, we mightn’t. I shouldn’t be here. When we’re on standby, we can’t leave the aerodrome – or we shouldn’t.’

‘Security?’ I suggested, trying to be with it.

‘Yes. And there might be a call to first briefing.’

‘And if that happens, you won’t be there, will you? What’s first briefing?’

I was talking gibberish; talking for the sake of talking so he wouldn’t get out.

‘First briefing is just that. Pilots and navigators only; the rest of the crew join in later on.’

He was being very patient with me, and I was grateful for the fact that his mind seemed to be on other things. Not that I blamed him. To Berlin and back in inky blackness with searchlights trying to pick you out and night fighters ready to pounce would have been a bit distracting, to say the least.

‘I see.’ I didn’t really; didn’t understand the half of it – only what I’d read in books and seen in films. There had been a lot about his war on television four years back. ‘Are you billeted at Deer’s Leap?’

‘Oh, no. The farmer lives there still. There’s a chance that the RAF will take it, though it hasn’t happened yet.’

‘They seem to do pretty well as they like, don’t they?’

‘Yes, they do.’ He turned to look at me, frowning. ‘But there is a war on.’

My God! Indoctrinated by propaganda about the nobility of the cause! I’d read about it, but I hadn’t quite believed it. And I could tell him, I thought wildly, the exact day that Hitler would commit suicide, and about the two atom bombs the Americans would drop on Japan. I could, I thought, horrified, tell him the exact day he would die!

‘I hope you won’t go tonight; not with this moon …’

‘The moon’s good for fighters. They get above it, then fly out of it, and they’re on to you before you’ve got time to think. We call it a bomber’s moon because you could go without a navigator on nights like this. Everything’s there, below you, as clear as day. On the other hand, a Lanc makes a great silhouette against the moon. Given a choice, I wouldn’t go tonight.’

‘Do you know Susan Smith?’ I asked like a fool, straight out of the blue.

‘Of course I know her! That’s why I’m going to see her; tell her I might not be able to make it. I haven’t met her parents yet, so we decided it would have to be tonight …’

‘Only you’re on standby,’ I finished for him.

‘Yes, and I don’t want her to think I’ve stood her up. We always meet at the kissing gate, you see. She’ll be waiting …’

‘Are you both – I mean, is it steady between you?’ Oh, but I was pushing my luck!

‘If you mean are we in love then yes, we are. Very much …’

His voice trailed off again. He seemed never quite to finish a sentence.

‘And you’re going to meet Susan’s parents – ask them if you can get married?’ That’s what they once did, Mum said. Ask permission.

‘Yes. And I call her Suzie, by the way.’

I could see the white gate ahead and beside it, the black-painted kissing gate.

I was annoyed now that I had carefully closed the white gate when I’d left, thinking that if I drove straight up to the front door I might disorientate him; that if he didn’t see the iron gate he would stay in the car.

But I hadn’t even time to open the door when he said, ‘Thanks a lot! See you! G’night.’

I didn’t see him leave the car – not physically, I mean – and I didn’t see him open the kissing gate, but I saw it open of its own accord and I heard its creak as I’d known I would. He had just dematerialized tonight. If I hadn’t heard the gate then I wouldn’t have known where he’d gone.

I called, ‘’Night. See you sometime!’ but had no means of knowing if he’d heard me. Shaking now, I went through the motion of starting the car, driving through the gate, then closing it behind me. Only Hector’s frantic barking pulled me back to the here and now. I took a deep breath, then fumbled my key into the lock.

Tonight – all of it – was going to take a bit of working out. I thought about the mental jigsaw puzzle and knew I had begun to fill in the outline, though there was a long way to go before I completed it – if ever I did.

Hector greeted me joyfully. I patted his head and he felt real and solid and of this age. Carefully, because I was trying to get a hold on myself, I bolted the front door, top and bottom, then double-locked it.

Only then did I say, ‘’Strewth, Hector, you’d never believe the half of what’s just happened!’

Next morning, I awoke to gloom and the sound of rain pattering against the window.

How dare it rain at Deer’s Leap! I got out of bed and closed the window. Heavy rain on wheat and barley and oats ripe and ready for harvesting for the war effort, Mr Smith could do well without!

Dammit! I was back to that war again! I was here to write and look after a house, not to dig back half a century because a ghost couldn’t find his girlfriend. We were coming up to the Millennium, and Susan Smith and Jack Hunter were history!

But they weren’t, the voice of reason whispered firmly. Jack Hunter didn’t know he had died more than fifty years ago and as far as I knew, Susan could still be alive. I not only wanted to establish that fact, but deep down I was certain that the niggling inside me would go on until I had found her!

But how do you find an elderly lady – who could perhaps be married and have children – grandchildren – and who maybe didn’t want to be found? And just supposing the impossible happened and one day she opened her front door to me, what would I say?

‘Hullo! You don’t know me, but not so long ago I met a ghost who was once in love with you! Over fifty years ago, mind, but I think you should know he still needs to find you. His name is Jack Hunter.’ And the poor old thing would look at me vacantly and say, ‘Jack who?’

I tied my dressing gown tightly around me, glad of the warmth, and switched on the kettle. Then I fed the animals, after which Lotus walked ahead of me, tail erect, indicating at the conservatory door that she wished to spend the morning in there. She was quite intelligent I had to admit, and lost no time showing me where she was in the habit of sleeping on wet mornings.

The view from the kitchen window was a forlorn one. Plants dripped miserably and a mist covered everything, blocking out the view – even the white-painted gate. I decided to bring in logs and light the kitchen fire, then realized that not even that would inspire me to words, for this was not a morning for creativity. I didn’t have word block. There really is no such thing. As far as I am concerned, when the words won’t come it is because I simply don’t want to write!

Having established that, my conscience refused to let me sit idly over a fire, curled up with a book. I would drive to Clitheroe instead. I needed to visit the library to check on something I wasn’t at all sure about; I would find it there, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, I was certain, but just in case I needed to borrow any books for research while I was staying at Deer’s Leap, Beth had left me her library ticket. Decent of her, really. And I must buy a couple of trout to replace those we had eaten for Sunday lunch. Raiding Beth’s freezer was not on! Maybe, too, I would buy sausages and bacon and have a comforting fry-up tonight – sitting at the kitchen table beside a comforting fire. After all, a writer needs some time to herself, though my professional conscience would insist I get down to work this afternoon when I got back.

I found a car park in Clitheroe with no trouble. Immediately inside the library, I told myself that once I had established that Dorcas in Firedance, as I was beginning to know the book, could have used a phonecard in 1985, I would leave at once. Indeed, I discovered that phonecards were in use as long ago as 1981, and would have cost two pounds for forty units. I was glad I had checked. You have to be so careful. Errors are jumped on at once!

Even though I had already made up my mind not to browse along the shelves, I began to look at the section headed ‘World Wars One and Two’. I walked slowly, willing myself not to pick up a book; not even for one quick glance.

Books with tanks, aircraft and submarines on their jackets tempted me, but I walked on. Not until novel number three, which I was almost sure now would be set in that period, would I start dipping into Jack Hunter’s war. Yet even as I walked away something hit my consciousness and said, ‘Look again!’ So I obeyed the tingling at the back of my nose, and did exactly that.

Bomber Command. The title stood out clearly. RAF Bases in Lancashire 1939–1945. As I picked it off the shelf, I knew that RAF Acton Carey would be listed there, even though hardly a trace of it existed now.

I made for the desk, determined not so much as to glance at it until tonight when I had had my supper and my time was my own. Supper! I bought sausages from a shop near the castle ruins, then crossed the road to buy rainbow trout. As I walked to my car, I realized the rain had stopped and that a sliver of blue sky had appeared somewhere in the direction, I calculated, of Beacon Fell. I might have known, I smiled, that rain so heavy, so early, couldn’t last.

I resisted the urge to buy a coffee, knowing that if I did I would open the book. Thoughts of that war would invade my mind, and I had already spent too much time thinking about the airman. And I had Suzie to worry about now; Susan Smith who might well be there for the finding! Oh, please, she would be?

I existed on a sandwich and far too many cups of coffee until nearly five o’clock. The garden looked green, the scent of wetness wafting in through the open window. The earth was dark again, having guzzled its fill, and all was well with my world.

I gathered up my papers, turned off the machine, then stretched long and lazily. The flow had returned, the lost morning atoned for. I felt almost smug as I let Hector into the yard.

First I would feed the animals and cook my supper. Then I would allow myself the luxury of a log fire and curl up with the book, hoping it would tell me something, however small, about how it had once been, at RAF Acton Carey.

I pricked sausages and rinded bacon. I would make fried bread too, I thought defiantly. I felt so pleased with my progress, one way or another, that I knew I would finish the bag of toffees as well, once I was relaxed in the firelight. I felt so good that I fixed the telephone on the dresser with my eyes, willing it not to dare ringing.

I should have let well alone. Five minutes later it rang.

‘Yes?’ I hoped I didn’t sound too cross.

‘Hi, love! It’s Jeannie. Thought I’d ring you before I left the office. I am expected, tomorrow?’

‘You are, but this last week has flown! Same train, is it? Will I meet you at Preston …?’

‘I’m so looking forward to it. Don’t bother making a meal. I’ll eat on the train. How’s the book coming along?’

‘Fine. It poured down, this morning, so I went to the library.’

‘Rain?’ She sounded put out.

‘Yes, but it’s cleared up now. We’ll have another good weekend. Anyway,’ said the market gardener’s daughter in me, ‘we needed a good shower.’

‘Anything I can bring, Cassie?’

‘Just yourself. See you tomorrow night.’

The fire flickered and snapped. Hector lay sleeping at my feet; Tommy, mesmerized by the fire, blinked and stretched and yawned. By my side was what remained of the bag of toffees; on the arm of the sagging old chair lay the book I had been longing to open since it shouted ‘Pick me up!’ from the library shelf.

First, I fanned the pages, stopping here and there to look at what had once been amateur snaps of crews and aircraft, and diagrams and plans of airfields – aerodromes, the compiler of the book called them.

By far the most important parts, as I saw it, were the runways and the control towers. The perimeter tracks – which ran right round each airfield – and various blocks of buildings were further away and lower in the order of things, it would seem. I turned to the index. What I sought was there, on page ten.

RAF STATION ACTON CAREY. Completed Oct. 1943. Aircraft consisted two squadrons of Lancaster bombers, Marks I & II.

There followed a history of all the raids from Acton Carey; which shipyard or factory or docks had been targeted and how many bombers were missing after each one. The operations flown from Acton Carey had been many. Each Lancaster carried a crew of seven, and seven young lives became statistics with each bomber that did not return.

I remembered the memorial outside the church, the grateful remembrance and the date. Then I scanned the list of sorties.

On 2 June 1944 a flying bomb site in France had been targeted, and on 3 June another site at Mont Orgueil. Then, right up until 6 June, marshalling yards in France had been raided every night.

And then it was there – 8 June 1944. Flying bomb site at St-Martin-Le-Mortier; a daylight raid on which four Lancasters were lost; one of them piloted by Sergeant J. J. Hunter.

I tried to remember what I knew about flying bombs; bombs with wings, hadn’t they been, and launched from France against the south coast and London? Hitler’s secret weapon; one which would wipe out the D-Day landings and bring Britain to its knees.

And Jack Hunter had dropped his bomb load on one of the launching sites, because until they were destroyed they were a very grave danger to this country. My history lessons in the sixth form had told me that, yet now I was looking at a list no longer impersonal, and I knew when and from where our bombers took off on so urgent a mission; knew too the name of one of the men who did not return from it.

Jack Hunter. Twenty-four years old and in love with Susan Smith from Deer’s Leap farm, who met him secretly at the creaking kissing gate. Did he ever get to meet her parents, I wondered, or were Jack and Susan never to see each other again?

I read on, fascinated to learn that on 15 July 1944, RAF Acton Carey had been handed over to the United States Army Air Corps, who flew daylight missions from there until the end of hostilities in Europe – VE Day. Those huge American Flying Fortresses needed longer runways to take off and land, and what remained of Deer’s Leap fields had been absorbed into the airfield.

Yet now Deer’s Leap was once again a place of tranquillity. All that was left were memories, a war memorial in a quiet village – and the ghost of a pilot who waited for his girl; had been waiting for more than fifty years.

Near to tears, I closed the book with a snap. It was history now, I insisted; had ended when my mother was a baby. It was nothing at all to do with me, so why was I thinking about it every spare moment I had? Why did I feel the need to find Susan Smith?

I had no way of knowing. All I could be certain of was that Jack Hunter had latched on to me as his only hope, and I could not let him down.

‘I lit a fire last night,’ I said to Jeannie as I stowed her bags in the car boot. ‘The house seemed a little cold, after the rain. Shall we light one tomorrow night? I’ve got a bottle of wine – or would you like to go to the Rose again?’ I said off-handedly, though I was desperate to talk to Bill Jarvis.

‘Go on the bikes, you mean? I’d love to, Cassie.’

‘So would I, actually.’ The relief in my voice was obvious. ‘And we’d be better at it this time. Cycling uses up four calories a minute, did you know?’

‘Big deal,’ Jeannie grinned, because she ate whatever she fancied and didn’t put on an ounce.

‘Bill Jarvis might be there. I’d like to talk to him again.’

‘It’ll cost us, Cassie. Bill never does owt for nowt!’

‘It’ll be worth it. I want to talk to as many of the old ones as I can – get them to tell me how it was when they were young. Money well spent!’

I indicated right at the next set of lights, taking the Clitheroe road. Soon we would be driving through Acton Carey; passing a clump of oak trees and the spot at which I first met Jack Hunter. I wondered if I wanted him to be there tonight when Jeannie was with me, and decided I did not, because Jeannie might not even know he was there. Not everybody can see, or even sense ghosts.

The matter didn’t arise, though. We drove past the oaks and The Place without incident and when she got out to open the white gate for me, I had time to take a look at the kissing gate. He wasn’t there, either.

‘Thanks, chum,’ I whispered as Jeannie waved me through; thanks, I meant, to Jack Hunter for not being there. After all, he was taboo, wasn’t he?

Jeannie took her bags upstairs whilst I made a pot of tea.

‘It’s a lovely evening. Shall we put cardies on, and have it on the terrace?’

Jeannie said it was a good idea, and was there any parkin left?

‘We ate it all, but Mum and Dad might come up for the day, next week, and she’ll bring some with her. I particularly asked her to. I thought they might’ve come on Sunday, but Dad’s busy, judging at flower shows.’

We sat there without speaking because Jeannie had closed her eyes and was taking long, slow breaths.

‘Penny for them,’ I said when I’d had enough of the quiet.

‘I was just thinking that I could get out of publishing,’ she smiled, holding out her empty cup, ‘if I could find a way to bottle this air. People in London would pay the earth for it.’

‘Then before you do – give up publishing, I mean – I think I ought to tell you that I’m getting ideas about the next book.’

‘Good girl. That’s what I like. Unbridled enthusiasm. Got anything of a storyline worked out?’

‘We-e-ll, what would you say if I told you it would have Deer’s Leap in it, and the year would be 1944? Will war books be old hat by the time I get it written?’

‘Dunno. Depends on who’s writing them, and the genre. Would it be blood and guts, sort of, or a love story?’

‘A love story – and tragic.’

‘A World War Two Romeo and Juliet, you mean?’

‘Mm. I was talking to Bill on Wednesday night. He told me there had been a lot of crashes hereabouts and that Acton Carey wasn’t a very safe place to be.’

‘And you feel strongly enough about that period to write about it with authority? There are a lot of people alive still who would soon let you know if you got anything wrong.’

‘I’ll tell you something, then.’ It was my turn to take a long, deep breath. ‘When I was at the library I saw a book about all the Bomber Command airfields in Lancashire during the war and bombing raids flown from Acton Carey are all listed in it. Someone went to a lot of trouble to get all the details. The Lancasters must have gone somewhere else, because in July 1944 the American Army Air Corps took the place over.’

‘I wonder where those squadrons of Lancasters went.’ Jeannie was getting interested.

‘I don’t know. But I did see the war memorial in the village. Remember Danny said the names of a crew that crashed hereabouts were included with the local dead?’

‘Yes. But I wonder why one particular crew, when there must have been a lot of crashes …’

Jeannie was interested, all right. It gave me the courage to jump in feet first and say, ‘I can’t tell you that, but I’m going – just this once – to talk about someone we agreed not to talk about again.’

‘Your ghost? I knew we’d get round to him sooner or later!’

‘His name was Jack Hunter,’ I rushed on. ‘There’s a J. J. Hunter on that memorial and the date is 8 June. It was one of the last raids flown before the Royal Air Force left Acton Carey. In the book it says it was a daylight raid on a flying bomb site in France.’

‘So why can’t he accept it? Doesn’t he know he’s on a war memorial?’

‘I don’t think he’s grasped the fact yet that he’s dead. I think,’ I said, not daring to look her in the face because I didn’t think, I knew, ‘that the girl who lived here and the pilot were – well, an item.’

‘And you want to write about them, even though you know he was killed?’

‘I’d use different names. No one would know.’

‘Except the girl who once lived here if she’s still alive. It’s just the kind of book she’d be interested in, she having had first-hand experience, kind of.’

‘I said I’d disguise it. There is a story there, and I’d handle it very gently, Jeannie.’

‘Yes, I do believe you would. You aren’t a little in love with that pilot, are you?’

‘Don’t be an idiot! Why would I want to fall in love with a ghost? Be a bit frustrating, to say the least!’

‘From what you’ve said, he seems the exact opposite of your Piers.’

‘He isn’t my Piers. I’ll admit we had something going once, but it’s wearing a bit thin – on my part, that is. But I don’t find Jack Hunter attractive!’ I crossed my fingers as I said it.

I lay in bed with the windows wide open, listening to the strange, waiting stillness outside; mulling over what we had talked about. And I thought about Jack Hunter too, and his slimness and the height of him and that I had found him attractive. Maybe that was why I wasn’t in the least afraid of him – or what he was. Excited, maybe, when he was around, but no way did he frighten me. That pilot was exactly my type. I’d already decided, hadn’t I, that if I’d been around these parts fifty-odd years ago, I’d have given Susan Smith a run for her money?

Jack Hunter danced perfectly, I knew it, and I felt an ache of regret that I would never dance closely with him. Then I felt relief that every time we kissed I would never know the fear it might be our last.

‘Stupid!’ I hissed into the pillow. Not only did I see ghosts, but I’d fallen in love with one!

I plumped my pillow and turned it over. I wasn’t in love with the man! I only wanted to be, with someone very like him; someone who was flesh and blood and whose kisses were real!

‘Deer’s Leap,’ I whispered indulgently, ‘what have you done to me …?’

Chapter Six

I awoke early in need of a mug of tea, after which I would throw open all the downstairs windows and doors – get a draught through the house.

August mornings should be fresh, not oppressive. I looked towards the hills as I let Hector out. Clouds hung low over the fells and there was little blue sky to be seen.

I put down milk for the cats and the clink of the saucers soon had them crossing the yard in my direction. Tommy had not slept on my bed last night, but then cats are known to find the warmest – or the coolest – places and he’d probably slept outside.

I drank my tea pensively, trying to push the words out of my mind that were already crowding there. Today and tomorrow were holidays – even if the weather seemed intent on spoiling them.

Did bad weather stop aircraft taking off and landing during the war? I frowned. Fog certainly was bad – it could still disrupt an airport – but how about snow on runways, and ice? Perhaps conditions like that gave aircrews a break from flying; a chance to go to the nearest pub or picture house. Or scan the talent at some dancehall, looking for a partner who might even be willing to slip outside into the blackout. Did they snog, in those days, or did they pet, or neck? Things – words, even – had changed over the years. Words! My head was full of them again; words to find their way into the next book, even though I was barely halfway through the current one!

I showered and dressed quickly and quietly, then told Hector to stay. I was going to the end of the dirt road to leave money for the milkman.

‘Good boy.’ I gave him a pat, and some biscuits, then shut the kitchen door. If Jack Hunter was at the kissing gate, I didn’t want trouble, even though dogs are supposed to be frightened of ghosts. Cats, too.

As I closed the white gate behind me, it was evident that no one was there. The kissing gate was newly painted in shiny black. Perversely, I touched it with a forefinger and it swung open easily.

There were letters in the wooden box, mostly bills or circulars. Only one, a postcard view of Newquay, was addressed to me.

Having a good time. Weather variable. Hope all is well. D. & B.

I glanced up at the sky. The weather was variable in the Trough of Bowland too. What was more, I’d take bets that before the day was out we would have thunder.

When I got back, Tommy was waiting on the step, purring loudly. I could hear Hector barking and hurried to tell him to be quiet before he woke Jeannie.

I stood, arms folded, staring out of the window. If a prospective buyer looked at Deer’s Leap on a day such as this, I thought slyly, one of its best assets – the unbelievable, endless view – would be lost. I supposed too that the same would apply if they came in winter, when the snow was deep. The view then would be breathtaking – if they managed to make it to the house, of course. Still, even if we had a storm today it wouldn’t be the end of the world. My troubles were as nothing compared to those of Jack and Suzie.

Hector whined, rubbing against me. Lotus was nowhere to be seen, but Tommy prowled restlessly, knowing a storm threatened.

I piled dishes in the sink, then set the table for Jeannie. Like as not she would only want coffee – several cups of it – but laying knives and forks and plates and cups gave me something to do.

Even the birds were silent. A few fields away, black and white cows were lying down. They always did that when rain threatened, so they could at least have a dry space beneath them when the heavens opened. Clever cows!

I turned to see Jeannie standing there, yawning.

‘Hi!’ I smiled. ‘Sleep well?’

‘Hi, yourself.’ She pulled out a chair, then sat, chin on hands, at the table. ‘I woke twice in the night; it was so hot. I opened windows and threw off the quilt then managed to sleep, eventually.’

‘Coffee?’

‘Please. Why is everything so still?’

‘The calm,’ I said, ‘before the storm. We’ll have one before so very much longer. Are you afraid of thunder, Jeannie?’

‘No. Are you?’

I shook my head. ‘Want instant, or a ten-minute wait?’ I grinned.

‘Instant, please.’ She yawned again. ‘You’re a busy little bee, aren’t you? How long have you been up?’

‘Since seven. I’ll just see to your coffee, then I’ll nip down to the lane end and collect the milk before it rains.’

All at once, I wondered how it would be when it snowed. It took me one second to decide that if I lived here I wouldn’t care.

‘We won’t go down to the Rose if the weather breaks, will we?’

‘No point,’ I shrugged. ‘There’s lager and white wine in the fridge. We can loll about all day and be thoroughly lazy.’

‘I’m glad I came, Cassie,’ she smiled.

‘I’m glad you did,’ I said from the open doorway. ‘Won’t be long.’

I didn’t expect anyone to be at the iron gate, or even walking up the dirt road, and I wasn’t disappointed. Ghosts, I reasoned, were probably the same as cats and dogs and didn’t like thunderstorms.

I put a loaf and two bottles of milk into the plastic bag I had learned to take with me, and set off back. It could rain all it liked now.

I wondered if there were candles in the house in case the electricity went off like it sometimes did at home when there was a storm.

I made another mental note to ring Mum tomorrow from the village, then sighed and quickened my step, glad that for two days I had little to do but be lazy.

Jeannie crossed the yard from the outhouse where Beth kept two freezers.

‘I think we might have chicken and ham pie, chips and peas tonight. And for pudding –’

‘No pudding,’ I said severely. ‘Not after chips! And is it right to eat Beth’s food?’

‘Beth told us to help ourselves – you know she did.’

‘OK, then.’ I decided to replace the pie next time I went to the village. ‘And are there any candles – just in case?’

‘No, but Beth has paraffin lamps. Everybody keeps them around here. Are you expecting a power cut?’

‘You never know. It could happen if we get a storm.’

‘Then thank goodness the stove runs on bottled gas! At least we’ll be able to eat!’

‘Do you think of anything but food? No man in your life, Jeannie?’

I had stepped over the unmarked line in our editor/author relationship, and it wasn’t on. Immediately I wished this personal question unasked. I put the blame on the oppressive weather.

‘Not any longer. I found out he was married – living apart from his wife.’

‘No chance of a divorce?’

‘His wife is devoutly Catholic, he said.’

‘He should have told you!’

‘Mm. Pity I had to find out for myself,’ she shrugged. ‘Still, it’s water under the bridge now.’

She said it with a brisk finality and I knew I had been warned never to speak of it again. So instead of saying I was sorry and she was well rid of him, I had the sense, for once, to say no more.

The storm broke in the afternoon. We sat in the conservatory, watching it gather. The air was still hot, but Parlick Pike and Beacon Fell were visible again, standing out darkly against a yellow sky.

‘This conservatory should never have been allowed on a house this old,’ Jeannie said, ‘but you get a marvellous view from it for all that.’ It was as if we had front seats at a fireworks display about to start.

‘Are the cats all right?’

‘They’ll go into the airing cupboard – I left the door open. Hector will be OK, as long as he stays here with us.’ She pointed in the direction of Fair Snape. ‘That was lightning! Did you see it?’

I had, and felt childishly pleased it was starting. I quite liked a thunder storm, provided I wasn’t out in it.

It came towards us. Over the vastness of the view we were able to watch its progress as it grew in ferocity.

‘You count the seconds between the flash and the crash,’ I said. ‘That’s how you can calculate how far away the eye of the storm is.’

We counted. Three miles, two miles, then there was a vivid, vicious fork of lightning with no time to count. The crash seemed to fill the house.

‘It’s right overhead,’ Jeannie whispered.

That was when the rain started, stair-rodding down like an avalanche. It hit the glass roof with such a noise that we looked up, startled.

‘Times like this,’ Jeannie grinned, ‘is when you know if the roof is secure.’

I knew that old roof would be; that Deer’s Leap tiles would sit snug and tight above.

The storm passed over us and I calculated they would be getting the worst of it in Acton Carey. Lightning still forked and flickered, but we were becoming blasé after the shock of that one awful blast.

‘I wonder if it was like this in the blitz – the bombing, you know.’

‘Far worse, I should imagine. Bombs killed people. Are we back to your war again, Cassie?’

‘It isn’t my war, but there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’

Even as I spoke, I knew I was being all kinds of a fool, so I blamed the storm again.

‘About …?’

‘About what we agreed not to talk about. Shall I make us a cup of tea?’

I was glad to retreat into the kitchen, to get my thoughts into some kind of order, relieved to find the storm had not affected the electric kettle. When I carried the tray into the conservatory, Jeannie was standing at the door, gazing out.

‘You think you’ve seen the ghost again – is that it?’ she said, her back still to me.

‘I’ve seen him. Twice more. Come and sit down.’ I made a great fuss of stirring the tea in the pot, pouring it.

‘Right then!’ She placed her cup on the wicker table at her side, then selected three biscuits, still without looking at me. ‘And I don’t for the life of me know why I’m so silly as to listen to you,’ she flung, tight-lipped. ‘You’re normally such a down-to-earth person!’

‘I know what I saw and heard,’ I said stubbornly. ‘Do you want to hear, or don’t you?’ I took a gulp of my tea. ‘Well – do you?’

‘There’ll be no peace, I suppose, till you’ve told me.’

There came another startling flash of lightning, followed almost at once by a loud peal of thunder. The storm we thought was passing had turned round on itself as if it were searching for a way out of the encircling hills.

‘I’m getting bored with this!’ Jeannie lifted her eyes to the glass roof. The rain was still falling heavily and making a dreadful noise above us. ‘Let’s go into the kitchen.’ She picked up the tray and I followed her, carrying the plate of biscuits. Hector slunk behind me, whining, so I gave him a pat and a custard cream.

‘Now.’ Jeannie settled herself at the table, back to the window. ‘You are serious? After all we agreed, you’ve been poking about again!’

‘I have not! I went to the Rose on Wednesday night, and I’ll admit asking Bill about the people who once lived here. It was natural that since the RAF was the cause of them getting thrown out, we should talk about the Smiths.’

‘And …?’

‘Look, Jeannie – I didn’t tell you, but I saw the pilot at the kissing gate, last Saturday morning! One second he was there; the next he’d gone!’

‘When you’d been to the post office, you mean?’

‘Yes. You said I was acting a bit vague; asked me if I had a headache.’

‘So I did,’ she said softly, ‘yet you said nothing!’

‘I only saw him out of the corner of my eye, but that gate opened of its own accord and I heard it squeak. He was there!’

‘That gate doesn’t squeak, Cassie!’

‘It did during the war, and was rusty and in need of painting!’

‘So when did he appear again?’ She licked the end of her forefinger, picking up biscuit crumbs with it from her plate. She was doing it, I knew, to annoy me.

‘Last Wednesday night.’ I took a deep breath, and she lifted her head and looked at me at last. ‘I’d been to the Rose, talking to Bill. I took the car, so I hadn’t been drinking! I saw him clearly, ahead of me, near the clump of oak trees. It was bright moonlight, Jeannie. I could’ve put my foot down, like it seems people around these parts do if they think it’s him. But I didn’t. I stopped. He seemed anxious to get to Deer’s Leap.’

‘Like last time?’

‘Yes. Just like last time. He wanted to let Susan Smith know he was on standby. And before you ask,’ I rushed on, ‘standby means they might be flying on a bombing mission. I asked him. Then he said he wanted to tell Susan he maybe couldn’t make it that night. Seems he was hoping to meet her parents for the first time.’

‘And it was important?’

‘Seemed so to me. They wanted to get married, you see.’

‘No, I don’t see. He’d never met her folks, yet they were planning to get married? Is that likely?’

‘Bill Jarvis said parents didn’t like their daughters dating aircrew because so many of them got killed. Jack and Susan managed to meet secretly.’

‘And the pilot told you all that – opened up his heart to you about Susan?’

‘Why shouldn’t he? Seems I’m the first person in more than fifty years to take any notice of him. And he called her Suzie, not Susan.’

‘Well, all I can say is that either you’ve got one heck of an imagination, or you really do think you’ve seen him again!’

‘I have! And talked to him. And don’t try to tell me he doesn’t exist. He’s real enough for Beth and Danny to more or less warn me off!’

‘But, Cassie – he might be something someone hereabouts invented.’

‘So who told me then? Bill didn’t say one word about him to me.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t. Nobody round Acton Carey talks about him! Like Beth said, they don’t want the press in on it.’

‘But if Jack Hunter doesn’t exist, why try to cover him up? Why not let the reporters run riot – make fools of themselves?’

‘OK, Cas!’ She threw up her hands in mock surrender. ‘So there have been rumours from time to time about – something …’

‘Too right there have! Beth has seen him. She as good as admitted it.’

‘But doesn’t he scare you?’

‘No. He doesn’t groan or rattle chains. You could take him for a real person, except he seems able to vanish into thin air like he did on Wednesday.’

‘Where did he seem to vanish to?’

‘I don’t know, exactly. I got out of the car to open the big gate and when I got back, he’d gone. All I knew was that I heard the kissing gate creak.’

‘The one that needs painting?’

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ I was getting annoyed. How could she be so stubborn?

‘I – I, oh, I don’t know what to believe. And why does the kissing gate feature so strongly in it, will you tell me?’

‘Because to my way of thinking, Susan Smith used to sneak out and meet him there. They’d be safe enough; the blackout would hide them.’

‘Except on moonlit nights and in summer, when it was supposed to be light until eleven at night,’ she shrugged, determined to play devil’s advocate.

‘When people are in love and they know they might not have a lot of time, they find a way. I would’ve.’

‘All right. Point taken! So tell me – what is he like, your airman?’

‘He’s tall and slim – thin, almost. He’s got fair hair and it’s cut short at the sides. I suppose what they’d call a regulation cut. But it’s thick on top, and a bit flops over his right eye. He has a habit of pushing it aside.’

‘So what are you going to do, Cassie – about the airman, I mean?’

‘I don’t know. I want to help, because he’s looking for his girl and there’ll be no peace for him until he finds her – or more to the point, until she finds him. I reckon, you see, that he’s rooted to what was once an airfield.’

‘Trapped in a time warp, you mean?’

‘Exactly. Look, Jeannie – are you with me or are you against me? I’d like to know.’

‘Why? So I can help you?’

‘No. It’s me Jack Hunter is interested in. Seems I must be a bit of a medium and he’s latched on to it. So it’s all going to be up to me. But you can help by believing that I’m not going out of my tiny mind.’

‘Somehow I don’t think you are, Cassie. Your vibes and his must match, I suppose, or why has Beth seen him, and not Danny? She told me about it years ago and swore me to secrecy in case people thought she was bonkers. She was scared witless, though. Like she said, if she sees him again and she’s in the car, she’ll put her foot down and get the hell out of it.’

‘Where do you think I should start? Where did the Smiths go when they had to leave Deer’s Leap? If we knew that we’d be some way to finding Susan.’

‘If she wants to be found. And, Cassie – you’re not going to let this business interfere with your writing, are you?’

‘Of course I’m not. Bill’s parents might have known where Susan Smith went to, but I don’t think they’re around, somehow.’

‘If they were, lovey, I doubt they’d be able to remember that far back.’

‘Don’t be too sure! Aunt Jane was born in 1915, but she remembered people going mad when World War One ended. She always called it the Great War.’

‘All right then. There just might be someone down in the village who remembers the Smiths – even knows where they went. But how do you go about finding them? Do you knock on every door in Acton Carey, or get the vicar to read it out from the pulpit next Sunday? You’ll get nothing out of that lot, Cassie. I reckon they know about the airman, too. Bill knows you’re a writer. They’d clam up on you.’

‘So that rules out the village. Y’know, Bill figured Susan Smith is about seventy-two or -three, and that isn’t old these days. Aunt Jane was eighty when she died, and bright as a button. I’ve been telling myself that at the worst, Susan Smith might not be alive, but I think she is. All I can hope is that she won’t slam her door in my face if I get lucky and find her.’

‘You really want to go on with this, don’t you, Cassie?’

‘Yes. I’m his only hope.’

‘Even though he thinks Susan is still living at Deer’s Leap?’

‘Even so. But just say I did find her – would she be willing to go along with it?’

‘I don’t know. But take it that she would – what do you both do? Drive up and down the lane until he’s in need of a lift? Or do you camp outside Deer’s Leap and wait for the kissing gate to start creaking? How long would it take, Cassie?’

‘That’s anybody’s guess. But it didn’t take me long, did it? He found me the first time I came here. But there’s something neither of us has touched on. OK – so we’re lucky – we find him first try! How is he going to recognize her? She’ll have changed, over the years. She’ll be old enough to be his grandmother now, and he’s looking for a girl of eighteen or nineteen!’

‘It won’t be easy, but if he accepts her it might be all he needs to convince him it was all a long time ago; that he’s dead, I mean. But what if Susan doesn’t believe in ghosts? What if she does, and is too scared to give it a try? What if she’s happily married? She’ll have children, by now, and grandchildren. Do you think she’ll want a past love raked up?’

‘Yes, I do, because I believe they were desperately in love. No matter how happy she is now, she won’t have forgotten her first love. I wouldn’t have forgotten him if it were me. He really was something, Jeannie.’

‘Oh, Cassie! Can’t we forget your airman, just for a little while?’

I grinned and said of course we could! Any time at all! And if she didn’t mind, I wasn’t in love with him, though he intrigued me – a lot!

In love with someone who, if he’d lived, would have been old enough to be my grandfather? I wasn’t that stupid!

Or was I? Because Jack Hunter would never be old. He was a young man my own age, and that was the way he would stay. And he’d go on thumbing a lift to Deer’s Leap for ever if someone didn’t help him.

‘Look – the sun is trying to get through. There are all sizes of wellies in the utility room. Beth never gets rid of any that are half decent. There’s sure to be some that’ll fit,’ Jeannie smiled. ‘Let’s go and sniff in some nice cool air.’

It was fresh again after the rain and the storm. The sun was shining the raindrops that still clung to everything, and the deep pools of water.

‘Let’s go puddle-jumping,’ I laughed, determined to say no more about the matter that shouldn’t be talked about. And anyway, we wouldn’t see the airman. Jeannie only half believed in him, so her vibes would be very negative. He wouldn’t appear.

‘Shall we take Hector?’

‘No! He’ll get wet through, then shake himself all over us!’

We took him for all that, and sloshed through sodden grass all the way to the end of the paddock, where the land rose. Then we walked on to the top of the adjoining field Jeannie said was called Wolfen Meadow.

‘Over there,’ she pointed. ‘You can’t really miss it, can you?’

Below, to our left lay a huge, flat area. It had no trees nor hedges and was fenced all round, as far as we could see, with wooden railings. And just to confirm our findings, a long, narrowing jut of land pointed in the direction of Deer’s Leap.

‘It’s the same shape as the diagram in the bomber station book. We should have brought it with us,’ I said. ‘Then we could imagine exactly where everything used to be.’

‘Do we want to?’ Jeannie said soberly. ‘I mean, if there really is such a thing as vibrations, then over there must be thick with them.’ She nodded in the direction of where RAF Acton Carey had once been, her face strangely sad.

‘Well, I do believe in vibes, and there would be all kinds if we cared to take them in. Relief, at getting back from a raid, for one. And what if a pilot was trying to make an emergency landing? The air would be white with sheer terror, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Do you think that’s how Susan’s pilot was killed, Cassie?’

‘I don’t know. According to the book, it was during the daylight raid on a flying bomb launching site. That was all it said.’

‘Poor Susan,’ she whispered. ‘I wonder how it was for her?’

‘I think,’ I said as I gazed in a kind of trance over that flat piece of land, ‘that she wouldn’t even be told. They weren’t married, so she wouldn’t be his next of kin. The telegram would go to his parents. I read, somewhere, that aircrews used to leave letters behind to be sent to people. Maybe Jack left one addressed to Susan Smith at Deer’s Leap. I’m almost certain the family was still there on 8 June.’

‘Hm. I must have a look at it tonight – take it to bed with me – if you don’t want to read it, that is …’

‘No. Not tonight. You’ll find it interesting, Jeannie.’

‘I think I will.’ She turned abruptly and began to walk towards the stone wall of the paddock. ‘And I’ve had enough of ghosts for one day, if you don’t mind. Let’s get the bikes out and go to the Rose. We could eat there, if you’d like.’

She laughed out loud, almost as if she were trying to shake off the spell of the past, then set off at a run, calling to Hector, her short-cut hair bobbing with every stride.

‘A good idea,’ I panted, when we reached the paddock wall. ‘I want to phone Mum, anyway.’

‘Good, then that’s settled. Let’s have a quick shower and get changed? All of a sudden, I’m hungry!’

I thought as we walked back through the wet grass that maybe Jeannie wasn’t as blasé about vibes and ghosts as she tried to make out. She was interested in the bomber station book and her eyes had been far away as she looked down to where RAF Acton Carey had once stood. I wouldn’t mind betting, I thought as I kicked off my wellies, that if she gave it a bit of effort she’d be quite good at sending out vibes. Maybe I shouldn’t be too sure that Jack Hunter wouldn’t appear if she were with me.

‘Would you be afraid,’ I said, ‘if you were to see the airman? On your own, I mean …?’

‘N-no, I don’t think I would; not after what you’ve told me, Cassie. But I’d be very, very sad, for all that. But let’s get ourselves off! I’m famished!’

The Red Rose was quiet when we walked in at seven o’clock. The darts team, the landlord told us, had an away fixture at Waddington and Bill Jarvis had gone on the mini-bus with them.

‘No grist to the mill tonight,’ I said as we looked at the menu, disappointed that Bill wasn’t there. ‘Look – would you order for me? Scampi and salad; no chips. And get a couple of drinks in, whilst I phone Mum?’ I laid a ten-pound note on the table. ‘Won’t be long.’

‘Cassie?’ Mum answered quickly, as if she had been waiting for my call. ‘I was wanting you to phone, love. Your dad’s just got back from the flower show and he says why don’t we pop up to see you tomorrow?’

‘Of course you can, but I thought he didn’t like the roads at weekends.’

‘Well, he’s changed his mind. If we set out early we should be with you about ten-ish. Is that all right, or shall we leave it till Wednesday?’

‘No! Come tomorrow!’ All at once I wanted to see them both.

‘No problem. I’ve got a chicken in the fridge. I’ll cook it tonight and bring it with me. Shall I bring saladings?’

‘Please, Mum. Lots. I don’t suppose there’d be any parkin …’

‘As a matter of fact there is, and I’ll bring an apple pie.’

‘You’re an angel!’

‘Sounds as if you haven’t been getting enough to eat, our Cassie.’

‘I have, but your cooking tastes so much better! Jeannie’s here. She’ll be pleased to meet you both.’

‘We-e-ll, if you’re sure it’s all right – somebody else’s house, I mean.’

‘Mum! Just come!’

‘In that case, no sense wasting money on the phone. I’ll give you all the news when we arrive. Dad will work out a route.’

‘If you look on the pinboard above my desk, you’ll find one there – very detailed. And warn Dad the dog doesn’t take kindly to strange men. A few cream biscuits in his pocket should do the trick – OK?’

Sunday was going to be a bright, warm day; I knew it the minute I pulled back the curtains. The grass still looked damp, but the flowers stood straight and looked more colourful against the moist black earth.

I thought with a squiggle of delight about ten o’clock and how much I was looking forward to seeing my parents.

‘Pity we didn’t get the grass cut yesterday,’ said Jeannie, who had got up early in their honour. ‘And it’s still too wet to do today,’ she said with relief.

‘I’ll do it later in the week. Want some toast?’

‘No thanks. Just coffee. What are they like, your folks: what are they called?’

‘Lydia and Geoffrey. They’re ordinary and direct. Dad has strong opinions about things – Yorkshire-stubborn, I suppose. And Mum fusses and is cuddly. I adore them. Oh, and they’d appreciate being called Mr and Mrs. They don’t go a lot on first names until they know people better. A bit old-fashioned, that way.’

‘If your Mum brings some parkin, I’ll call her Duchess!’ Jeannie grinned. ‘Now let’s tidy the place up a bit – put out the welcome mat!’

‘As long as the kettle is on the boil, Mum won’t mind.’ I felt light-headed and happy and eager to show Mum the house. ‘But not one word about the airman, if you don’t mind. They don’t believe in ghosts.’

‘Then who did you get your kinkiness from, Cas?’

‘Obliquely, I suppose, from Aunt Jane. We were always on the same wavelength. We still have little chats, sort of. Now, will you be a love and get rid of those dead flowers, and pick some fresh ones?’

I was acting as if Deer’s Leap were my own house, which it was, really, until the end of the month. And the end of the month was a long way away!

Chapter Seven

Mum and Dad arrived ten minutes early, which meant I hadn’t opened the white gate, nor shoved Hector in the outhouse.

‘They’re here!’ Jeannie called, but it was too late to stop the angry dog rushing out and snarling and snapping from the other side of the gate.

‘Behave yourself, dog!’ I yelled. ‘Just a minute – I’ll lock him up!’

‘No! Leave him be,’ Dad said quietly. ‘He’s got to learn a few manners! Open the gate, lass.’

‘Be careful, Dad …’ I was reluctant to let go of Hector’s collar.

‘I’ve never yet met the dog that got the better of me,’ he said, standing feet apart, arms folded. ‘Now then, my lad. Stop your noise!’

Man and dog glared at each other. Neither gave way. Dad dipped into his pocket and took out a cream biscuit, tossing it from hand to hand so Hector got the scent of it. Then he dropped it at his feet, standing very still.

Hector’s nose twitched; the barking stopped. Then he sidled on his belly to snatch the biscuit, retreating behind me to crunch it. Dad went down on his haunches, then offered his hand. Hector gazed back with suspicion, then with longing at the second biscuit on Dad’s palm.

‘Come on then, lad. Either you want it, or you don’t,’ he said reasonably.

Hector wanted it. Avoiding Dad’s eyes, he took it warily, then slunk away round the side of the house to reappear later, I shouldn’t wonder, in a more friendly frame of mind. And hopefully to be given another biscuit.

‘Mum! Dad!’ I hugged them both. ‘Sorry about the reception committee – and this is Jeannie, my editor from Harriers. My mother and father, Jeannie …’

‘Lovely of you to come,’ Jeannie beamed. ‘You’ve brought good weather with you. Did you enjoy the drive?’

‘Aye. Once we got off the motorway, it was real bonny,’ Dad said. ‘Not a great deal different to Yorkshire.’

‘Only the other side of the Pennines,’ I said. ‘But wait till you see the view from the terrace. I’ve got the kettle on. Can we give you a hand with the things?’

When the chicken and vegetables my parents had brought were stowed away, I said, ‘You didn’t forget the parkin?’

‘Of course not. I brought one for Jeannie, too, to take back to London.’

‘Mrs Johns! You are an angel!’ Jeannie opened the tin, sniffing rapturously. ‘Can I have just a little piece now?’

‘No, you can’t!’ Mum said. ‘It’ll spoil your dinner!’

We all laughed. Dad and Hector were friends; Mum had charmed Jeannie. The sun shone benignly. It would be a perfect day.

When the vegetables were cooking, the dining-room table laid and a bottle of white wine placed on the dairy floor to chill, I left Dad and Jeannie together, and showed Mum the house.

‘I noticed when we got here,’ she said, ‘that this place is over four hundred years old. What tales it could tell!’

‘Mm. Even going back to the war, there’s a story. I could write a series of books with Deer’s Leap as the focal point, sort of, starting when it was built until the present day. It was here when the Pendle Witches were tried and hanged, and I don’t know whose side it would be on in the Civil War; probably they’d be King’s men. I could get half a dozen books out of it if I set my mind to it.’

We walked round, up and down the many steps, Mum marvelling at the solidity of the house and its cosiness.

Then: ‘Cassie?’ She hesitated in a bedroom doorway. ‘Now you know I’m not one to pry, but has anything – well – happened since you came here?’

‘N-no. What makes you think it has?’

‘I can’t put a finger on it. It’s just that you seem different, somehow.’

‘We-e-11, Jeannie did say she liked the first ten chapters of the book and that I’m writing with more authority, though what she means I don’t quite know.’

‘Not the writing,’ Mum said, very positively. ‘It’s this place. There are no ghosts here but not far away is witch country, you said. Did a witch ever live here?’

‘I’m almost certain not or there’d be some record of it. Anyway, why are you worrying? You don’t believe in witches!’ I teased, because for the life of me I couldn’t tell her about the airman.

‘There’s something different about you, Cassie, for all that,’ she persisted.

‘Then blame it on Deer’s Leap. I’ve fallen in love with the old house! But we’d better be getting downstairs or Dad is going to think we’ve fallen into a priest’s hole!’

‘Oooh! There isn’t a priest hole too?’ Suddenly Mum forgot witches.

‘Not that I know of, but the house is the right age, and it’s very higgledy-piggledy, isn’t it? I’ll bet you anything you like that if someone tried hard enough, and went round measuring and knocking on walls, they’d find one. Around these parts is priest-hole country. A lot of northern people refused to acknowledge the Church of England and they mostly got away with it because this was such wild country. Catholic priests came and went almost as they wished.’

‘It still is wild country,’ Mum sighed as we walked through the kitchen. ‘I can understand why it’s got you bewitched. I wouldn’t mind living here myself.’

‘If you did, we’d be able to look for priest holes to our hearts’ content, wouldn’t we?’

We broke into giggles, which made Dad ask us what was so funny and we said, ‘Priest holes!’ at one and the same time, then refused to say another word on the matter.

After our lovely Sunday, and when I had taken Jeannie to the station next day, the house seemed empty and quiet. I went to sit in the kitchen armchair and Tommy jumped on my lap, purring loudly to be stroked; Hector settled himself at my feet and fell into a snuffling sleep.

Yet I couldn’t feel lonely; Deer’s Leap was a safe, snug house. And I wasn’t entirely alone; not if you counted the airman who was never very far away – of that I was sure.

Yet Mum was right. This house had no ghosts, which made me certain that Jack Hunter could not have met Susan’s parents before he was killed. I’d have felt his presence here if he had. Were they ever lovers, even though in those days girls were expected to keep their virginity for their wedding night? I wished fiercely that they had been.

I tutted impatiently. This place had got me hog tied, and the ghost of an airman and an airfield that had long ago disappeared were a part of it. And could a witch have lived at Deer’s Leap? Had Mary Doe practised the old religion and never been found out? Did she escape the hangman on Lancaster Common?

All at once I knew I had to read everything I could find about the Pendle Witches and about these wide, wild acres of Lancashire too. There were books in my head and this house had put them there; books spanning the centuries and ending with two star-crossed lovers. I had two weeks left in which to do it, yet Firedance must be finished on time, as my contract with Harrier Books demanded. Somehow I had to close my mind to all else but that; only then could I, as Deer’s Leap demanded of me, write its story.

And by then it would belong to someone else. It would be too late.

I wrote steadily for two days, not needing to leave the house because I was able to exist on chicken and salad, thick slices of sticky parkin and left-over apple pie.

The words flowed. By Wednesday evening I had completed a chapter and roughed out another. I rotated my head. I had been sitting far too long. There was a tenseness in my neck and shoulders and my eyes felt gritty. The chicken was all gone; only the carcass left for soup, and I’d had my fill of saladings.

A beef sandwich and a glass of bitter beckoned from the direction of the Red Rose. I switched on the kettle to boil and took a bright red mug from the dresser, all the time looking at the world outside.

The sun was still high; it wasn’t six o’clock yet, and it wouldn’t be dark until almost ten. I could cycle to Acton Carey and if I left early enough, could manage to get back without lights. Though we had tried, neither Jeannie nor I could find any lamps, though it hadn’t worried us too much. The road between Deer’s Leap and the village wasn’t what you could call busy; we had decided we could manage without them.

Mind made up, I fed the animals then changed into slacks and a sweater. With luck, Bill Jarvis would be at the Rose and might, perhaps, tell me how I could get a look at the parish records. I was hopeful he would know everything I needed so desperately to know, if only he could be steered away from the Italian campaign.

Would Jack Hunter appear tonight? Perhaps, I thought light-headedly, he didn’t thumb lifts from cyclists. And why hadn’t he reacted to the red Mini, asked why it wasn’t camouflaged in khaki and green and black? Even I knew that much about World War Two motors; surely he couldn’t miss something so startlingly red?

Or did he only react to the sound of a car engine? Could ghosts see colours or was everything in black and white? Did Jack Hunter see only what he wanted to see – a car in which he might get a lift to Deer’s Leap? I found myself wishing him, willing him to be there, but I reached the Red Rose without seeing him.

I wondered what would happen if I asked him if he knew he were dead; if I told him the war had been over for more than fifty years, showed him today’s newspaper to prove it! Would he, shocked, begin to age before my eyes? Would he become an elderly, grey-haired man, then disintegrate as I watched?

‘Eejit!’ I made for the back door of the Rose. I was hungry, and brain-damaged into the bargain from a surfeit of words! I needed the earthy presence of Bill Jarvis to bring me down from the giddy highs of my imagining.

It was a relief to see him sitting there, and the smile that crinkled his face when I said, ‘Hullo, Bill! What are you drinking?’

And when he chuckled and said, ‘Nowt at the moment. I was just off home, though I dare say I could sup another!’ I knew that for the duration of a couple of pints, the world would be back to normal again.

‘It’s quiet in here tonight. No darts?’ I asked, when we had eaten a plate of sandwiches between us.

‘No. Folks is spent up till payday and, any road, they’re busy with the last of the harvest; be at it till dark. That storm at the weekend flattened some of the standing wheat, though we needed the rain, mind.’

‘I haven’t found time to see the church yet,’ I said when I had replenished our glasses. ‘Is there anything of interest there – like old tombs?’

Or the baptismal register!

‘Not that I know of. St James’s isn’t all that old. Were a cotton man from Manchester as built most of it. Name of Ackroyd. Bought the Hall in my great-grandfather’s time. Brass, but no breeding.’

‘Oh dear. It looks quite ancient.’ I was quite put out by the intrusion of brass into Acton Carey. ‘I really thought the church was as old as this pub.’

‘He didn’t make a bad job of it, I’ll say that for him. Added it on to the little church as was already there – or so I believe.’

‘But where is the Hall? Is it old?’

‘It was. Got pulled down in the thirties and the stone bought up by a mason. Weren’t no money in cotton no more, with all them fancy fabrics getting invented. The heir couldn’t sell the place so he upped and left it. All he hung on to was the land, and a few houses in the village.’

‘They wouldn’t be allowed to demolish an old house now-a-days, Bill. It would be a listed building. Elizabeth Tudor might even have slept there.’

It was a feeble joke which rebounded on me.

‘No. Seems she never got this far north; folk in these parts was a law unto themselves in those days and her kept well away. But talk has it that King James stayed there on his way from Scotland to London. Well, that’s what my dad once told me.’

‘And we’ll never know now, will we?’ I felt quite peeved that an old house could have been demolished, with people gathering like vultures to cart away timbers and fireplaces and almost certainly the staircase.

‘No. But like I said, them at the Hall wasn’t real gentry and they weren’t locals neither.’

‘Foreigners from Manchester, Bill!’

‘Aye. But if you want to see inside the church, there’ll be someone there on Friday mornings as can talk to you. They alus gives the place a sweep and a bit of a dust ready for Sunday. My sister, Hilda, goes; collects all the news. A right gossip shop, it is!’

‘Your sister still lives here, then – the one who knew Susan from Deer’s Leap, I mean. The one you said wasn’t allowed to go to the RAF dances?’

‘She does. Married an airman at the end of the war and he settled here when he got his demob. Got work with a plumber in Clitheroe.’

‘But how did they manage to meet if the girls round here weren’t allowed to fraternize?’

‘Like courting couples alus did – on the quiet, of course! All the lasses round these parts were at it. Creepin’ out. Our Hilda used to say she was going to her friend’s house.’

‘And her friend said the same?’ I laughed. ‘I suppose it added spice. I should think Susan Smith had a boyfriend too – on the quiet.’

‘You seem a mite interested in the Smith lass.’

‘N-no. Not really. Only because I’m staying at Deer’s Leap. I mean, her living all that way from the village.’ I took a drink from my glass, nonchalantly, I hoped. ‘Things were different then, weren’t they? Young women didn’t have the freedoms I take for granted.’

‘They didn’t and that’s a fact!’

He tilted his glass, draining it to the last drop and I felt irritated that I would have to go for a refill just when the talk was getting interesting.

‘But girls still got married, in spite of the way it was.’ I put the glasses down and beer slopped onto the tabletop. ‘In the end, they all made it to the altar.’

‘Aye, and some of them in a bit of a hurry, an’ all,’ he chuckled. ‘But as long as they got wed, they was forgiven.’

‘So some of them got pregnant beforehand, in spite of everything?’

‘Oh, aye. It’s the nature of things.’ He tapped his nose with a forefinger. ‘Alus was; alus will be.’

‘Your sister would have known Susan Smith,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level.

‘They went to the same school, if that’s what you mean, though they were in different classes. But those Smiths kept themselves to themselves. Didn’t even go to the church here. Was Chapel, see. Got the pony and trap out and went over Leagram way, Sundays. Edwin Smith had no option, come to think of it. His missus was very devout. Eleanor Smith did a lot for the chapel.’

I sucked in my breath, marvelling how easy it had been – how I’d hoped to find some way of seeing the parish records, yet Bill had dropped two names right into my lap. Smiths can be hard to trace, there being quite a few of them, yet now at least I knew I was looking for Edwin and Eleanor Smith. I was on my way. Small beginnings, but I had avoided the disappointment of finding no record of Susan’s christening in St James’s registers. In a chapel over Leagram way, it would have been.

I felt so lucky I said, ‘Let me top you up before I go, Bill. I’ll have to be off – don’t have any lights on the bike, I’m afraid.’

I bought a half at the counter and placed it more carefully beside him.

‘You’ll be going, then?’

His face showed disappointment that we hadn’t even touched on the fighting in Italy.

‘’Fraid so. But Jeannie will be here again on Friday – we’ll be down at the weekend, I shouldn’t wonder.’ I drained my glass and got to my feet. ‘Night, Bill. See you.’

‘You be careful, lass, riding without lights. If you hear a car coming, you’ll have to jump off, though it isn’t likely you’ll meet anything on that road.’

‘No. It’s very quiet, but I’ll be careful. Bye, then …’

I smiled at the landlord as I left; a satisfied smile really, because deep down I was hoping I would meet something, someone, on that road.

The village lights were well behind me, and the narrow road ahead was unlit. I blinked my eyes rapidly, making out the dark shapes of trees and hedgerows and, dimly on my right, dry-stone walls. The only sounds were of my own breathing and the soft crunch of the tyres on the gravel at the roadside.

This, I thought, was what it must have been like when a complete blackout covered the entire country, but even as I tried to imagine it, I could see an orange glow in the sky ahead that was probably Preston. Yet during Jack Hunter’s war there would be no shine of lights below him as he flew; only, sometimes, the moon which could be his enemy as well as his friend.

I was passing the clump of oak trees, now, and began to look around me. The familiar little pulse behind my nose began its fluttering, and I wondered if it was because he was around and his vibes – his radar – were trying to beam in on me. Or was it myself sending out the signals, calling him to me? And why did I shake with dry-mouthed excitement? Why wasn’t I afraid?

Afraid of a ghost I could easily fall in love with? Afraid of a wraith that had no substance; who, if I tried to take his hand, would vanish into the air maybe never to return? Could you, should you, try to touch a ghost?

Something crossed my path just inches ahead of my wheel. It slid, soundless as a shadow and was quickly gone. A stoat, was it, or a rat? I began to shake. I was afraid of rats. Ghosts I could stomach, but not rats!

I attempted a smile. It was all right! Whatever the creature was, it was surely more afraid than I! Concentration broken, my front wheel began to wobble and I swerved across the road, hitting the grass verge on my right.

Fool, Cassie! I pushed both feet down hard and picked up speed, admitting for the first time that it was stupid of me to ride home in near-darkness. Suppose someone had seen me leave the Rose and was following me? It happened all the time. Women were attacked in broad daylight, even, yet here was I, asking for trouble! I was in the middle of nowhere, hoping to meet a ghost! It was completely ludicrous, and if Mum could see me now she would blow her top!

I pedalled harder, wanting suddenly to be safely back, with Tommy rubbing against my leg and Hector welcoming me home; Hector, who didn’t like strange men!

As I turned at the crossroads, I realized I had put Jack Hunter out of my mind, so sudden was my imagined danger. I jumped off the bike, walking carefully, feeling my way cautiously because the last thing I wanted was to trip and fall in the rutted dirt road.

Then I let go my breath, just to see the white gate ahead. It was all right. I was back. In just a few seconds Hector would begin his barking and things would be sane and safe again.

It was then that I heard the laugh; a man’s laugh, low and indulgent. My mouth filled with spittle and I closed my eyes and stood there, unable to move. He had followed me; allowed me to reach safety, almost, and now he was laughing.

I straddled my feet either side of the pedals then reached for the gate, wrapping my arms around it as if it could protect me, then waited, breath indrawn. I was rigid with terror. Times like this you were supposed to run, kick out, shout and scream, but I could do nothing.

I heard the laugh again, then a voice said, ‘Suzie …’

Suzie? My God, it was him; Jack Hunter at the kissing gate! I swallowed hard on the sob of relief that choked in my throat.

‘It’s Cassie,’ I gasped.

‘Suzie darling, don’t worry. It’s going to come right for us. I’ll make it come right …’

I listened, relaxing my hold on the gate, though my heart still pounded.

‘Sweetheart, we will be married. They can’t stop us …’ Him, talking again. ‘Don’t get upset. Tomorrow morning we’ll tell them. I do so love you …’

Jack, talking to Suzie, only Suzie wasn’t there! Jack, reliving one of their snatched meetings at the kissing gate! I felt like a Peeping Tom, spying on lovers, listening. Yet only he was there; I heard only one voice.

The shaking inside me had stopped, my fear gone. No one had followed me home.

‘Jack …?’ I said, more clearly.

The kissing gate creaked, then silence. I propped up the bike and walked towards the gate, pushing it gently. It swung without effort or noise. He had gone.

‘Jack Hunter!’ I yelled, but my voice was lost in the night.

It took me several seconds to unlock the back door. For one thing, it was dark and I had no torch; for another my hand wasn’t as steady as it might have been. But Hector was behind it, barking, jumping against it.

It was all right. I could have been followed home by a man, had heard a ghost, but it was all right! Just how mad can you get?

I slammed the door, pushing home the bolts. Then I bent down to stroke Hector, felt the comforting roughness of his tongue as he licked my face.

I reached for the light switch and Tommy blinked, stretched, then jumped from the armchair to purr against my leg.

I was home, with the safeness of Deer’s Leap around me. I would never do anything so foolish again!

‘Let that be a warning to you, Cassandra Johns,’ I said sternly, loudly, as I drew the curtains, then took down a mug; a sane, safe, familiar red mug.

The heavy old-fashioned key was still in my pocket. I shoved it into the lock, turned it, then hung it on the brass hook at the side of the door.

‘Ooooosh!’ I let go a deep, calming breath. The airman was still around. I had always thought the kissing gate was their meeting place and he’d been there, talking to Suzie.

‘Susan Smith, where are you?’ I demanded of the kettle. ‘He was waiting for you tonight and you didn’t show! I need to find you!’

When I collected the milk next morning, there was a letter in the lidded box from Piers, redirected from Greenleas, and a holiday postcard addressed to Cassie, Aunt Jeannie, Hector, Tommy and Lotus. It wished we were all there and was signed, Elspeth and Hamish.

I read it again, and propped it on the mantelpiece, then reluctantly opened the envelope bearing a London postmark.

There was only a single sheet, which pleased me – until I read what he had written.

Cassandra love,

I shall be taking the remainder of my holidays starting Monday next. What a pity you’ll be wherever it is and I shall be at Rowbeck, bored out of my mind – unless you relent, that is, give me a quick bell and tell me where I can find you. Why is your address such a closely guarded secret? What are you up to?

I will call at Greenleas whilst I am there – and meantime take care and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!

Yours,

P.

Feel free, Piers! Try to wangle it out of Mum if that’s the way you want it, but she won’t tell you!

‘And I’m not up to anything!’ I said out loud, pushing the letter in my pocket. You’d think I was having an affair in deepest Lancashire, I thought indignantly.

And aren’t you, Cassie? Aren’t you just a little in love with Jack Hunter and aren’t you enjoying it because you know you can never have him? Isn’t he the excuse you want to break up with Piers?

‘Don’t be so stupid, girl! How can you be in love with a ghost? And there was never anything between me and Piers, anyway. Just sex. Not love. Not like the way it was between Suzie and Jack.’

And I was talking to myself now! Roll on tomorrow night when I went to pick up Jeannie!

Jeannie! The cupboard was bare! I would have to go to the village for food, though it might be politic to go tomorrow when the ladies cleaned the church, find Bill’s sister, talk to her about Deer’s Leap and maybe, with luck, about Susan. A bit underhand maybe, but reporters do it all the time and, besides, I owed it to Jack Hunter. About time someone gave him a bit of help instead of pretending he wasn’t around.

I sliced bread, filled the kettle, took a red mug from its hook, because I had long ago learned that flights of fancy – of fiction – are all very well, but they must be turned off, shut down and pigeonholed. Otherwise, people who write for a living wouldn’t know what they were about!

At home, at Greenleas, I kept my fictional world in its place simply by pulling the curtain across my writing alcove, knowing it would be waiting there next morning. But here at Deer’s Leap, when I turned off Firedance, Jack Hunter and Susan Smith were there to bother me, and an old house that had charmed me from the minute I set eyes on it. Now I was obsessed with a house that could never be mine, a creaking kissing gate, and not a little attracted to a man who had been too young for the responsibilities forced upon him.

Imagine being in command of a bomber; of sitting on your parachute because it was too cumbersome to wear in flight, and hoping you could get the thing on if ever you had to jump for it. Imagine wings filled with aviation fuel that allowed the crew just seven more seconds of life if pierced by a shell from a night fighter, and of being responsible for the lives of six other men when all you wanted was to steer clear of fighters, stay airborne and make a safe landing at Acton Carey airfield – aerodrome.

The toast popped up with a startling noise and I looked at it almost in disbelief because it was so ordinary compared to a Lancaster bomber on a mission, and seven young fliers trying to stay alive. And they hadn’t flown missions. They had gone on ops – operations – in those days! I knew it just as surely as I had heard the roar of four great aero-engines, smelled fear, known the draining relief of getting back to mugs of tea laced with rum, trying all the while to concentrate on the persistent probing of the debriefing officer when all you wanted was sleep. Then to meet your girl, secretly, at a creaking kissing gate. Dry-mouthed, I pulled out a chair to sit, chin on hand, at the table.

I was shaking at the reality of it; of being there in the absolute darkness, flying every mile of the way to the target and back with an airman I loved to desperation. I was becoming a part of a war most people were too young to remember; was living it through the heart and mind of a girl who once lay awake, blessing her lover on his way then willing him back to her. How else could I know such things?

The kettle boiled, bubbled fiercely, then switched off. I spooned coffee into the mug and granules spilled over the tabletop because my hand was shaking so.

I closed my eyes then said out loud, ‘Cassie! That war is history! Count to ten, then open your eyes to the real world!’

This was indeed 1998 and somewhere was an elderly lady who was once called Susan Smith. She was still alive, I knew it, because I had just homed in on her vibrations, felt her long-ago fear. And if I didn’t stop myself I would know, too, her desperate heartbreak, feel her tearing despair as she came to realize that the bomber that crashed on a June day had been Jack Hunter’s!

Then all at once I heard Aunt Jane’s voice inside my head; heard it as surely as if she were here in this room.

‘Cassie, girl! It’ll be all right! Finish your saucy novel then give yourself to Deer’s Leap. Write those books, starting with Margaret Dacre in 1592.’

Aunt Jane? I sent out a desperate plea from my heart, my head, but her voice was gone beyond recalling. I took a gulp of coffee, swallowing it noisily. Aunt Jane was right. I must finish Firedance, and only then concentrate on the Deer’s Leap novels and the women who lived here through the ages, starting with Margaret Dacre. M.D.! Not Mary Doe, Jeannie! Now I knew the name of the woman who lit the first fire in this kitchen and hung her cooking pot above it! Aunt Jane had told me!

I smiled, all at once warm with tenderness, because now I had established a rapport with the woman who must have loved this house as much as I did, had likely walked these hills with her man until they found exactly the right spot on which to build; where there was water for the farm animals and a place to sink a well. They would have studied closely the lay of the land and from which direction the wind blew in winter and where to build for shelter from it. But on a distant spring morning, when the trees were green and the hills so beautiful they took your breath away, Margaret Dacre would have opened her arms in an expansive sweep and said, ‘This is where it shall be, husband, where the window of my summer parlour must face!’

‘So you may sit and look at yon view, Meg, and neglect your chores?’

Meg, he would call her, and as their family grew they would build on more rooms: a snug winter parlour, maybe, and another bedroom. Or did they call them bedchambers when Elizabeth Tudor was queen? And I must try to discover how many babies they had and if they were taken to the tiny church in Acton Carey for christening, before the cotton merchant from Manchester made it bigger and grander.

My heart thudded with pleasure. The Deer’s Leap books would be a joy to write. I had been meant to come here – if, sadly, too late. Come another summer, some other woman would be in this kitchen, though she would not hang her cooking pot over the fire, nor salt sides of bacon in the dairy as Margaret Dacre had done.

So I must enjoy the last of my summer days here, then return at Christmas to wish it goodbye and hope that if I was meant to, I would come back to Deer’s Leap one day.

The phone on the dresser began to ring and I gasped with annoyance because it was Piers, I knew it, homing in on my dreams, mocking them, damn him; Piers reminding me he was on holiday, and could he come up and visit?

I drew in my breath then said ‘Hullo?’ very evenly and normally, though only half of me was yet in the real world.

‘Cassie! It’s Beth! How are you?’

‘How lovely of you to ring!’ My relief was enormous.

‘Thought I’d better make sure you’re all right and not too lonely …’

‘Not a bit. Jeannie’s coming tomorrow.’

‘Animals OK?’

‘They are, Beth. Lotus leads her own life – I only see her when she’s hungry – but Tommy and Hector are never far away. By the way, my parents came to visit last Sunday – hope it was all right?’

‘Of course it was!’

‘Dad loved the garden and Mum thought the house was just beautiful. How are the children?’

‘Brown as berries and never far from the water.’

‘We had a storm last weekend, but we’re keeping on top of the grass cutting between us, tell Danny.’

‘And you’re sure you’re all right, Cassie?’

‘Loving every minute of it!’

‘Oh dear. The card’s running out. Love to Jeannie when she comes, and take care of –’

The call ended with a click and I smiled at the receiver by way of a goodbye, then plugged in my machine and screen. I would work until I felt hungry; no stopping for coffee breaks.

I had just decided to write one more page and then I could stop for a sandwich, when Hector growled from the back door, all at once alert.

‘What is it?’ I frowned, but he was gone, barking angrily.

I got up and went to the door. From the direction of the front gate came a furious clamour. A walker, was it, needing to ask directions?

I made for the front gate calling, ‘Stop it, Hector!’ then gasped, ‘Oh, flaming Norah!’

Beside the gate was a red BMW; a few feet back from it stood an angry-faced Piers. On the other side of it, Hector was at his magnificent best when confronting a strange male.

I grabbed hold of his collar then said, ‘Piers! What are you doing here? How did you know …?’

‘Look – just lock that animal up, will you? The blasted thing went for me as I tried to open the gate!’

‘He doesn’t like strange men!’

‘Ha! You could’ve fooled me! It nearly had my hand off!’

‘Don’t be silly!’ Hector continued to snarl, despite my hold on him. Hector, when angry, took a bit of controlling and I decided to put him in the outhouse. ‘Wait there,’ I said snappily, still shocked and not a little dismayed Piers had found me.

‘Why have you come?’ I demanded as I filled the kettle. ‘I mean, I made it pretty clear I didn’t want anyone here. I came to work and anyway, this isn’t my house. I can’t go treating it like it’s a hotel. It wouldn’t be right.’

‘Your father and mother visited – why not me?’

‘Mum and Dad are different.’

I could feel the tension round my mouth and it wasn’t entirely because I was angry. Piers had been determined to find me, probably annoyed because I wasn’t as biddable as I used to be, and wanting to know why.

‘And I’m not? I thought we had something going, Cassandra. It was good between us till you got this writing bug.’ He was doing it again: trying to belittle what I had achieved. ‘Coffee, please. Black, no sugar.’

‘I know!’ I said snappily, turning my back on him because I couldn’t bear to look at the did-you-think-I-wouldn’t-find-you smirk on his face. ‘Who gave you this address?’ I handed him a mug. ‘Did you wheedle it out of Mum?’

‘Not exactly …’

‘Then how?’ I glared, sitting down opposite.

‘I went to Greenleas. There was a postcard of Acton Carey on the mantelpiece.’

‘Oh, clever stuff, Piers! So who gave you directions?’

‘The postman. I asked him where I could find Deer’s Leap. And your mother didn’t tell me. She let it slip, accidentally. “Deer’s Leap is such a lovely house,” she said. “Very old and quaint. Cassie loves it there.” I don’t think she saw me pick up the postcard, by the way.’

‘You’re a sneaky sod!’

I went over to the dresser to sweeten my drink and he was on his feet in a flash, arms round my waist, pulling me close.

‘Stop it, unless you want coffee all over you! This is neither the time nor the place, so don’t get any ideas! You just can’t come barging in, upsetting things,’ I flung when I had the distance of the tabletop between us again. ‘You can’t take no for an answer; always want your own way in everything!’

‘Answer, Cassandra? I don’t recall asking any relevant question.’

‘Not questions,’ I was forced to admit, ‘but you did take it for granted I’d go to London, didn’t you? And you’ve no right to come here, stopping me writing. You know I can’t write if I get upset!’

‘Ah, yes. You’re a creative type. I forgot you must have your own space!’

I almost lost my temper, then; yelled at him to get out. But I took a deep breath and wondered if I should open the outhouse door, let Hector sort him out.

Instead, I said, ‘You can’t stay the night, Piers. It’s not on – not in Beth’s house!’

All at once I disliked him a lot, resented the way he could sit there unruffled and make me want to lose my temper. And I resented the underhand way he’d found me.

‘I mean it!’ I said as evenly as I could. ‘If I’d wanted you here, Piers, I’d have asked you. I came to look after the animals and the house for Jeannie’s sister, and to write.’

‘And I don’t merit just one day of your time, Cassandra?’

His expression hadn’t changed, his hands lay unmoving on the tabletop. All at once I wished him in a bomber, hands tense, his eyes and ears straining, wanting desperately to live the night through. And he’d soon be told to get his hair cut! He never had a hair out of place; Jack Hunter’s fell over one eye and he pushed it aside with his left hand; didn’t know he was doing it.

‘Come and see the garden, or better still walk with me to the top of the paddock, Piers?’

‘Why?’

‘I want to talk to you.’

‘Can’t we talk here?’

‘I’d rather walk.’ I wanted him out of the house.

‘OK. If that’s what it takes.’

He got carefully to his feet, shrugging his jacket straight, indicating the door with an exaggerated, after-you gesture and I thought yet again he should have been an actor. I locked the back door behind me and slipped the key into my pocket. ‘This way,’ I murmured, deliberately walking past the outhouse.

Hector snarled as we passed, and threw himself at the door, and I knew Piers had got the message.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ I waved an arm at the distant hills.

‘Very pretty, Cassandra.’ He was leaning, arms folded, against the dry-stone wall now, his boredom turning down the corners of his mouth. ‘So what have you to say to me?’

He didn’t yawn. I expected him to, but he spared me that and I was glad, because I think I’d have hit him if he had.

I drew in a breath, then said, ‘You and I have come to the end of the road, Piers. We aren’t right together. I don’t want to see you any more. It’s over.’

‘What’s over, Cassandra?’

‘Us. You and me. We couldn’t make a go of it.’

‘But I never thought we could! Your heart was never in it, even when we were in bed. To you it was just something else to put in a book – how it’s done, I mean.’

‘And you, Piers, made love to me simply because I was there and available. Another virginal scalp to hang on your belt, was I?’

‘I thought you’d enjoyed it …’

‘I did – at the time.’ I had to be fair. ‘It was afterwards, though, that I didn’t like.’

‘What do you mean – afterwards?’ He was actually scowling.

‘When it was over, Piers. I looked at you and found I didn’t like you. Oh, it was good at the time, but I think that when two people have made love they shouldn’t feel as I did – afterwards.’

‘Cassandra! You’re making it into a big deal! It was an act of sex, for Pete’s sake! You were willing enough. Curious, were you?’

‘Yes, I’ll admit I was and I was quite relieved it went so well. I was afraid I’d make a mess of it. I’d wondered a lot what it would be like, first time. But I think it isn’t any use being in love with a man if you don’t love him too.’

‘There’s a difference?’ He was looking piqued.

‘For me there is. Look, Piers – you and I grew up together. All the girls in the village fancied you. Then you went away to university and when you came back to Rowbeck you singled me out. I was flattered.’

‘I didn’t have a lot of choice. Rowbeck wasn’t exactly heaving with talent!’

‘Point taken!’ Piers was himself again! ‘But I always thought that the first time I slept with a man, he’d be the one, you see. And it seems you aren’t.’

‘Why aren’t I?’

‘I don’t know.’

Oh, but I did. He wasn’t young and vulnerable and fair. And his hair wasn’t always getting in his eyes – he wouldn’t let it! And he wasn’t desperately in love with me either, and sick with fear that each time we parted would be the last.

‘Piers!’ I gasped, because he was staring ahead and not seeing one bit of the beautiful view. ‘I just want us to be friends like when we were kids.’

‘But we aren’t kids. You aren’t all teeth and freckles, Cassandra, and mad at being called Carrots. You’ve grown up quite beautifully, as a matter of fact.’

‘Thanks,’ I said primly. ‘Flattery will get you everywhere – but not today. Sorry, but that’s the way it is. I really must work.’

‘Work? You don’t know the meaning of the word.’

He said it like a grown-up indulging a child and I knew I had made my point at last. I held out my hand.

‘Friends, then?’

‘OK.’ He smiled his rueful smile, then kissed my cheek. ‘My, but you’ve changed, Cassie Johns. Is there another bloke, by the way?’

‘No.’ I shook my head firmly. ‘And you’d best not tell Mum you’ve been. She’d be upset if she thought she’d given my whereabouts away.’

‘So you said she mustn’t let me have your address?’

‘Yes. I didn’t want any interruptions.’

‘I see. Would you mind, Cassandra, if I gave you a word of advice? Don’t take this writing business too seriously?’

‘I won’t,’ I said evenly, amazed he seemed no longer able to annoy me. ‘You’ll want to be on your way, Piers …?’

‘Mm. Thought I might take a look at Lancaster, get a spot of lunch.’

‘I believe it’s a nice place,’ I said as we climbed the stile in the wall. ‘They used to hang witches there.’

‘You haven’t seen it? Come with me – just for old times’ sake – a fond farewell?’

‘Thanks, but no.’ Deliberately I took the path that led to the kissing gate. ‘And thanks for being so understanding – about us, I mean, and me breaking it off.’

He got into his car, then let down the window.

‘There was never anything to break off, Cassandra. Like you said, another scalp …’

I stood for what seemed like a long time after he had driven down the dirt road in a cloud of dust thinking that, as always, he’d had the last word. But I could get along without him. I shrugged, closing the kissing gate behind me.

I let go a small sigh, straightened my shoulders then walked, nose in air, to let Hector out.

All at once, I was desperate for a cheese and pickle sandwich.

Chapter Eight

Page two hundred and fifty, and the end of chapter seventeen. I rotated my head, hands in the small of my back. Cassie Johns her own woman again, Firedance ahead of schedule and the mantel clock telling me it was time for tea and a biscuit.

I felt a surge of contentment, a kind of calm after this morning’s storm, waiting patiently for the kettle to boil, gazing arms folded through the window to the hills and the purple haze of heather coming into flower.

I would miss the space, the wideness of the sky, the utter peace of Deer’s Leap when I went home. I had just absently plopped a saccharin into my cup when the phone rang again. I had a vision of Piers calling me on his mobile, telling me he was lost in the wilds of Bowland.

‘Hi, Cas! It’s Jeannie. I’m leaving now. See you tonight, uh?’

‘You’re taking an extra day? But that’s wonderful! What time shall I meet you?’

‘It’s part business, part pleasure, so I’m driving up. I’ll tell you about it when I see you. I’d like to be clear of London before the rush hour starts. Once I’m on the M6 I’ll stop at the first caff for something to eat, so don’t bother cooking.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Absolutely! I’ll be there before dark. See you!’

‘That was Jeannie,’ I said to Hector, who had heard the rattle of the biscuit tin. ‘She’s coming tonight and there’s not a thing to eat in the house!’

I took a sip of tea, giving a biscuit to Hector. I would go right away to the village in case Jeannie got her foot down on the motorway and decided not to stop. Anyway, I was low on coffee.

Chicken pie, peas, oven chips – I made a mental list – coffee, white wine and a phonecard. Mum would cluck and scold for not waiting until after six, but she’d be pleased to hear from me. I smiled at the red rose that peeped, nodding, through the kitchen window, feeling almost completely happy, wondering if I wasn’t tempting fate, because no one could feel this smug and go unpunished. I looked at the calendar beside the fireplace. Soon, Beth’s lot would be home and I would have to give back Deer’s Leap. Just to think of it wiped the smirk from my face.

‘Want to come to the village?’ I reached for Hector’s lead and he was at the door with a yelp of delight, tail wagging. I would miss Hector too.

I stopped at the lidded box and left a note for the milkman to find in the morning, then wondered if there would be any sign of the airman. It seemed ages since the last encounter.

Yet the trip there and back passed completely without incident. Even my parents hadn’t been in; all I’d got was Mum’s posh telephone voice, inviting me to leave a message on the answerphone.

I got back a little after five, just enough time to make up Jeannie’s bed and dust her room. Then a quick tidy-up all round and with luck I’d be able to wash my hair before she got here.

The contented feeling was back again. I looked forward to seeing Jeannie and wondered why she was taking the day off, and driving up too. I opened wide the windows and smiled into the pale purple distance, remembering that the big, blowsy poppies Jeannie liked so much were just breaking bud, and though they would quickly open and fall indoors, I decided to pick some for her room.

Jeannie was her usual unruffled self with not a hair out of place, despite the long drive.

‘Did you stop to eat?’ was the first thing I asked and she said she’d had fish and chips and peas. Mushy, of course.

I helped her in with her things, thinking that if she wasn’t such a love, I could hate her for the way she could pig it, without adding an inch to her waistline.

‘So what’s news?’ We were sitting outside with glasses of wine, watching the twilight thicken. ‘How come you’ve driven up, and a day early too?’

‘There’s a literary luncheon hereabouts tomorrow and I’m minding Susanna Lancaster. You’ll have heard of her?’

‘Of course. Who hasn’t? But what is minding?’

‘That, my dear good girl, is the taking care of an author when she’s making an official appearance, so to speak. Writers of Lancaster’s calibre always get one. She’s the guest speaker. It’ll be her last time, so Harrier Books want it to go well for her. Her book comes out officially today, and after that she’s giving up writing, or so she says.’

‘And are you her editor, Jeannie?’

‘No, her regular editor is getting married on Saturday, so I volunteered. I tried to get a ticket for you, Cassie, but no luck. Strictly limited, and sold out ages ago.’

‘No problem.’ For some reason, literary luncheons made me think of poetry readings, and big hats. ‘Where will it be?’

‘At the Throstle Farm Hotel, about seven miles from here. The great lady will want driving there – it’s why I brought the car. I’ll have to be up early in the morning to give it a wash and polish.’

‘Does she live far from here?’

‘Near Lancaster, actually. I believe her house is really something.’

‘It follows.’ Every one of Susanna Lancaster’s novels were bestsellers and some had been made into television dramas. I figured she wouldn’t be short of a pound or two. ‘What’s her latest book called?’

‘Dragonfly Morning. There’ll be books for sale at the luncheon and she’ll do a signing session afterwards. The area sales rep will be there and we’ll organize things between us. And when she’s had enough, I’ll drive her home.’

‘Do all writers speak at luncheons and have book-signing sessions?’ Just to think of it made me uneasy.

‘Quite a few. It’s a pity you can’t come along, Cas, and see how it’s done. There’s more to getting to the top of the heap than writing good books, you know. Publicity is important, as well.’

‘Mm. Piers arrived this morning,’ I said, by way of changing the subject. ‘Uninvited and unannounced.’

‘Oh, lordy! I thought your mother wasn’t going to give him this address?’

‘She wasn’t – didn’t. But he saw a postcard of Acton Carey I’d sent home, and put two and two together. We had words and, to put it in a nutshell, I gave him his marching orders. Hector got so nasty I had to shut him in the outhouse.’

‘Well, if it’s to be the end of Piers Yardley I can only say I’m not altogether sorry. I got the impression, from things you let slip, that he can be a little bit selfish.’

‘He is, but it isn’t entirely his fault.’ I had to be fair. ‘His parents dote on him. From being little, nothing was too good for our Piers. He expects everyone else to bow down and worship too. It’s a pity, because he’s very attractive, if you like ’em dark and brooding.’

‘And all of a sudden you don’t?’

‘Seems not. Aunt Jane was right, I suppose. She always said you shouldn’t settle for second best and that’s what Piers would have been.’

‘Why, Cassie? Was there once someone else?’ She topped up the glasses, avoiding my eyes.

‘No. Piers was the first, but I think I always knew he wasn’t the right one. Better to end it than let it drift on and fizzle out. Mind, Mum would like to see me married, though I think she went off Piers a bit when she found he’d asked me to go to London and live with him.’

‘So we’re both fair, free and on the shelf. Spinsters, I suppose you’d call us.’

‘Then here’s to spinsters!’ I said defiantly, raising my glass. ‘And just look at that sunset!’

A blazing sun had reddened the sky and the hills stood mistily black against it. At the top of the laburnum beside the front gate, a thrush sang its heart out, and love of Deer’s Leap washed me with a sadness that hurt.

‘I must take a lot of snaps before I go back, Jeannie – for the Deer’s Leap book, I mean. And if Beth asks me here at Christmas, I’ll take some winter ones, too.’

‘She’ll ask you. I’m glad you’re still keen on the book, Cassie. I like the idea. I think it would do well.’

‘I’ve thought of doing a succession to take in the whole history of the place. I’ve worked out I could write four, all linked to Deer’s Leap. I’d start with the building of the house, I think, in 1592. There should be loads of good factual background material; the Pendle Witches, the Civil War …’ I decided not to mention Margaret Dacre.

‘OK. Get the current book finished and I can’t see why we shouldn’t give you a contract. Are you up to four in fairly quick succession? When it’s a series, it’s better if there isn’t too long a lapse between the books.’

‘I can do it!’ Of course I could. Writing about Deer’s Leap would be no trouble at all. ‘You know how fond I am of this place.’

‘You had mentioned it! And had you thought, Cassie, that the bank just might give you a mortgage on the strength of a four-book contract?’

‘Oh, I couldn’t!’ I felt my face flush. ‘I’d be so scared owing so much it would affect my work. I’d dry up, I know it. Besides, I don’t even have the deposit.’

‘Pity. You could do it, you know, but I suppose it isn’t for me to try to influence you.’

‘Aunt Jane always said that if a thing is for you, it will come your way in the fullness of time. I suppose I can always hope.’

‘Have you seen any more of the ghost?’ She changed the subject so quickly I was caught unawares.

‘Y-yes,’ I admitted, though I’d meant not to mention it. I mean, what would she say if she knew I’d biked back here in the dark, and been scared witless because I imagined I was being followed. ‘I thought I heard him at the kissing gate, but it was dark. I’d popped out to check that the white gate was shut.’ The lie came glibly. ‘I thought I heard him talking – maybe to Susan. Imagination, probably.’

‘I know. A lot of writers suffer from a fertile imagination, thank God! Shall we see this off?’ She divided the remaining wine between the glasses. ‘Then it’s me for bed. I shall sleep tonight. I always do here. It’s so peaceful after London. No street lights, no noise.’

‘Before you do, Jeannie, what’s the drill for tomorrow?’

‘I’ll give Susanna Lancaster a ring to confirm I’ll be picking her up, and at what time. The lunch is twelve thirty for one, so she’ll want to be there a bit beforehand – get her bearings. Suppose I should leave here no later than half-past ten. Don’t let me sleep in, there’s a love?’

‘I won’t. I’ll wake you with coffee – how’s that?’

‘You’re a good girl, Cassandra Johns,’ she murmured.

‘Yes, but good girls don’t have a lot of fun!’

‘I know exactly what you mean!’

So we laughed, which is all a couple of spinsters can do, come to think of it.

‘Get yourself off to bed,’ I ordered. ‘There’s plenty of hot water if you want a bath.’

‘Bless you.’ She finished her drink then kissed my cheek. ‘’Night, Cassie …’

The day lived up to the promise of the previous evening. The morning sky was clear and blue with not a cloud to be seen. I stood at the window, staring, a habit I seemed never to tire of, and felt sad that in ten more days there would be no more hills nor endless skies nor stone walls clinging to the hills in untidy lines. Soon, I would look up from my desk and see only a pinboard on the wall, just three feet away.

I filled the kettle, thinking about Susanna Lancaster; wondering if I would ever have a signing session.

The kettle began to whistle, pushing pie-in-the-sky dreams out of my head. Of more importance was the fact that I had little more than a week in which to do something about the airman, because I couldn’t leave here knowing I was in Rowbeck and he was still trying to hitch a lift to Deer’s Leap with everyone around pretending he didn’t exist.

‘But what can I do about him?’ I demanded of the coffee pot. ‘All things being equal, he just isn’t my responsibility!’

‘Beg pardon?’ Jeannie appeared in the open doorway, bucket in hand.

‘Good grief! Couldn’t you sleep?’

‘The birds woke me so I’ve been cleaning the car.’ She kicked off her wellies. ‘Why were you talking to yourself? They section you for that, you know!’

‘As a matter of fact, I was trying to straighten things out in my mind – about the airman, actually – and I’m coming to realize that what happened around these parts more than fifty years ago is really none of my business.’

‘No. But you’ve got yourself tangled up in it, love, so I reckon it is. And I’ll take bets that if you do the Deer’s Leap books, the last of them will be Jack and Susan’s story – or as near to it as you can get.’

‘You know it will, Jeannie. I’ll have to be careful, though. Wouldn’t want Susan to recognize it – nor people like Bill Jarvis and his sister. Deer’s Leap will have to have another name – right from book one – and Acton Carey too. But I’ll worry about that when Firedance is out of the way. There’s plenty of time. Did you sleep all right – apart from the birds?’

‘I just crashed.’

‘The coffee’s ready. Want to take the pot back to bed?’

‘No, thanks. I’ll just sit here and empty it. What did they do in your war, Cassie, about coffee? I suppose it was hard to get.’

‘It wasn’t my war. I’m interested in it, that’s all. Aunt Jane once said the tea rationing was awful; said you just couldn’t brew up whenever you felt like it. And they didn’t have teabags. Those came later. But coffee I’m not sure about. Tea was the drink of the masses, I believe. Coffee was more middle class in those days. I wish Aunt Jane were still here. There’s so much she could have told me – especially when it comes to writing Jack and Susan’s story.’

I decided to talk some more to Bill Jarvis before I left; try to meet his sister too – ask her how it had been to grow up in a war. I might be really lucky, and get her to talk about Susan Smith.

‘Cassie – you’ve got three books to see off before you can get down to the star-crossed lovers. Don’t get too tied up with them – not until you have to. Do you find the pilot attractive, by the way?’

‘Yes, I do.’ If she’d expected a red-cheeked denial, then she wasn’t getting one! ‘As a matter of fact, he’d have been the type I’d have gone for fifty years ago.’

‘Fair, didn’t you say – Piers’s opposite. Did he put you off Piers?’

‘Jeannie! I’m not that stupid! Don’t you realize if he were still alive, Jack Hunter would be seventy-five, at least! He wouldn’t be young and straight and fair – and a little bit strung up.’

‘He had a nervous tic, you mean?’

‘Not exactly. But he pushes his hair out of his eyes with his left hand. I don’t think he realizes he’s doing it. But then I suppose most aircrews got a bit stretched at times. I know I would have.’

‘So he’s young and attractive and you find his nervous habit endearing. Reckon you were born fifty years too late, old love.’

‘Maybe I was, but the matter doesn’t arise. He belongs to Susan. After all that time, he still loves her! If Piers had cared for me like that, I’d have eaten out of his hand!’

‘If I didn’t know you better, Cassie, I’d say you were a nutcase. As it is, I’m half inclined to believe you – about the ghost, I mean. I envy you really, but I’m a down-to-earth Scottish lassie and things like communing with World War Two flyers don’t happen to me.’

‘Then be glad of it!’ I really meant it, because since that first meeting when I’d thought Jack Hunter was one of Beth’s fancy-dress guests, he’d been there, waiting to take over every spare minute of my thoughts. ‘And I think we’d better talk about the luncheon. Can I do anything to help?’

‘No, thanks. The car should be dry by now. I’ll just give it a bit of a polish, then I’ll ring Susanna – ask directions. Think I’ll take the pretty route through the Trough and pick up some honey on the way. If you’re making toast, by the way, I’ll have a couple of slices. Cut thick, please.’

‘One day, Jeannie McFadden, all those calories are going to catch up with you, and when they do, don’t come running to me for sympathy,’ I laughed, wallowing once more in the contentment that hadn’t been far away since Piers drove out of my life in a cloud of dust. ‘And if you’re to get the speaker there on time, you’ll have to shift yourself!’

Jeannie got back at seven, just as I was beginning to wonder if she’d had a flat, or run out of petrol.

‘You took your time! Got lost, or something?’

‘No. We left the do at four and Susanna asked me in for coffee, then showed me her place. She’s a real love. Y’know, if I could guarantee looking like she does, I wouldn’t mind getting old.’

‘Yes you would, Jeannie. You’d hate it – just like Susanna Lancaster does, I shouldn’t wonder. But tell me about her – and the house?’

‘We-e-ll, she told me she had plans, but didn’t elaborate. I think she will start another book, but it’s up to her. That house, though! I’d kill for it. It’s just outside Lancaster and pure Regency. Red brick, white doors and windows, and seven steps up to the front entrance. I counted. She must have made a pile!’

‘It follows. The television dramatizations alone must have sent her sales figures soaring. Is Dragonfly Morning going to sell, do you think?’

‘Hope so. It isn’t her usual thing; nothing to do with mystery and murder. Seems it’s a love story. She said it could have happened to anyone born in the twenties and whose young years had been touched by war.

‘Someone asked her if the book was fiction or biography, and she went a bit pink and said it was a bit of both really. I’ve brought you one – got her to sign it for you and she wrote something rather nice in it.’

‘Thanks a lot! What do I owe you?’

‘I’ll settle for a sandwich. I’m starving!’

‘Why? Wasn’t the lunch any good?’

‘It was fine – but somehow we seemed to talk instead of eat. You know how it is with working lunches? You balk against speaking with your mouth full and the next thing you know it’s gone cold and they’re pushing the next course at you! I’ll just get out of these things – won’t be a minute.’

I looked at the book she had left on the table. The jacket was stark and eye-catching; a girl on a bluff, alone against a morning sky, and shaded hills in the background. Her face had a waiting look, her eyes were anxious. The artist had done a good job. I turned to the title page.

For Cassie, a new author,

from Susanna Lancaster,

an old one.

‘You told her,’ I asked, embarrassed, ‘that I was a writer.’

‘But of course! I also told her your first novel made it to the bestseller lists.’

‘Only just! I made a very little plop in a very big pond!’

‘She was impressed, for all that. She knows that most first novels don’t do as well as yours. She told me about her very first effort; said it came back so quickly from every publisher she sent it to that she was sure they hadn’t even bothered to read it. “Of course,” she said, “I know now that it just wasn’t good enough.” So there’s a compliment, Cas. You should give yourself a bit more credit for what you’ve done. Now, what say we take the dog for a walk?’

So we pulled on wellies and walked way beyond the top of the paddock and up the steep slope behind it so we could look down on Deer’s Leap and the space beyond, and I stored a picture of it in my mind in case I never stood there again.

‘I rather wish I’d been with you today, Jeannie.’ I pulled a stem of long grass, then nibbled the soft white end of it. ‘Just talking about it makes me realize there’s more to a novel than sitting at home writing it.’

‘Couldn’t agree more. What it boils down to, though, is selling books. Readers like meeting authors and Susanna seemed to enjoy herself today. I wish you could have seen her house, Cassie. Just to think of what royalties can buy would make you want to work like a dog.’

‘I’m looking forward to reading her book. I’m curious about the storyline.’

‘Then take my advice and do no such thing! Don’t get another author’s book into your head whilst you’re writing one of your own! Put it in a drawer, then read it when you’ve finished Firedance. Susanna told us she allowed herself little treats for working extra hard. She said she once gobbled five After Eights, one after the other, as a reward for finishing a chapter that had taken ages to get right. It made her seem very ordinary and human.’

‘She’s made an impression on you, hasn’t she, Jeannie?’

‘Mm. Pity I can’t write. I wouldn’t mind ending up like her.’

‘Filthy rich?’

‘Y-yes. But more the way she looks and is. She’s obviously getting on, but it doesn’t show somehow.’

We had reached the top of the rise now, and stood without speaking, to stare. The sun was beginning to go down and there was a hint of chill in the air. It made me remember that in a week it would be September, with autumn not so far away.

‘Have you taken in all you want of the view?’ Jeannie teased. ‘Because I think we should start back. It’s turned quite cold.’

‘Yes, but I’ll come here again with a camera.’

Not that I would need reminding of that one summer at Deer’s Leap. I would always remember it, and wonder who was living there, and worry too about Jack Hunter and that I hadn’t been able to help him find Suzie. How long would he wait at that gate for her? Into forever? It made me swallow hard on the sentimental tears in my throat.

‘Hey! You there!’ I heard the snapping of Jeannie’s fingers under my nose and shook my head clear of the pilot. ‘You were miles away!’

‘Years away, if you must know. Do you realize I’ve got little more than a week to find where the Smiths went when they left Deer’s Leap?’

‘So you were thinking about the pilot again?’

‘Suppose so. It looks as if I’m not going to be able to help him, for all that.’

‘You mean you’ve been serious all along about finding Susan Smith?’

‘I – I’ve wondered about it quite a bit …’

‘Then I don’t understand you, Cassie Johns! I can’t even think you’d waste good writing time chasing after a woman who probably won’t remember Jack Hunter – even if she’s still alive!’

‘She is alive, I know it! And she won’t have forgotten him.’

‘But she could have married someone else, for Pete’s sake! And if she hasn’t, what are you going to say to her, “Excuse me, Miss Smith, but there’s a ghost looking for you!”?’

‘OK, Jeannie! I agree with everything you say and it will be difficult.’

‘But if you find this Susan Smith are all your troubles over? The heck they are! Have you just once stopped to think you can’t take up residence at the kissing gate with an elderly lady, waiting for a ghost to turn up?’

‘We-e-ll, I suppose –’

‘No supposing, Cassie! Jack Hunter is none of your business and neither is Susan Smith! You can’t go poking and prying into things that don’t concern you. Leave it! Take the lid off that one and you don’t know what you’ll find. Nasty wriggling maggots, I shouldn’t wonder!’

‘You’re right, I’ve got to admit it, yet –’

‘Too right I’m right! Say you’ll forget it?’

‘OK! I’ll forget it!’

‘And you really promise, Cassie? You’ll let well alone?’

‘I just said so!’

I stuck my hands in my pockets and whistled to Hector, and it was only when we were manoeuvring ourselves through a kissing gate that didn’t squeak and wasn’t in need of a coat of paint that I knew I had no intention of keeping my promise, even though I might well be taking the lid off a tin of maggots.

Sorry, Jeannie!

We drove to the village next morning and the familiar feeling took me as we neared the straight stretch of road and the clump of oaks. But the airman didn’t show and I was reluctantly glad, because I didn’t want Jeannie messing up our encounter, and she would have.

I parked behind the Red Rose and left her to do the shopping, making for the phone box. Mum seemed pleased to hear from me and straightway asked if Piers had phoned lately.

‘Phoned! He turned up on Thursday, bold as brass!’ I told her what had happened. ‘He left in a huff,’ I finished. ‘I was so mad, the way he got my address!’

‘Mm. Sneaky. Mind, he was always a spoiled child. Maybe you’re well rid of him after all! You’ll be home, next week?’

‘Yes, but I’m not sure when. Is Dad about?’

‘He’s at the bottom of the garden, pricking out lettuces. Take too long to fetch him. I’ll give him your love.’

‘Do that, Mum. Anyway, the card has almost run out! I’ll ring on Wednesday.’

‘Don’t bother. I’ll ring you. Save you going out. Now don’t forget to check the doors and windows at night, and don’t answer the door after dark!’

I put the phone down just as Bill Jarvis walked past to stand at the bus stop, and I smiled at the lady by his side.

‘Now then, Cassie!’ he grinned. ‘How have you been lately? This is our Hilda.’

Hilda held out a hand and said she was pleased to meet me. ‘You’re interested in the Smith lass?’ she said without preamble.

‘Yes, but not in a nosy way,’ I said earnestly. ‘More how it was for people like her in the war. It couldn’t have been very nice, getting thrown out of your home.’

‘A lot about that war wasn’t very nice. Mind, I’ve got to be fair. I found a husband and I wouldn’t have done in the normal course of events. Young men were a bit thin on the ground in Acton Carey before the Air Force came. What do you want to know about Susan Smith?’

‘Nothing in particular – just anything you can tell me, Hilda. What did the RAF do with Deer’s Leap once they’d taken it over? I just can’t believe some man from the Ministry could knock on a door and say the occupants had to get out! There’d be an outcry if it happened now, and protesters everywhere!’

‘Happen so, lass, but when there’s a war on things are a mite different. Weren’t considered patriotic to protest in those days. But it isn’t me you should be talking to about Susan Smith. There were two years’ difference in our ages and that’s a lot when you’re young. Lizzie Frobisher as was would know more about her than me. Those two were close; both of ’em went to Clitheroe Grammar on the school bus every day. They’d be about fourteen when the war started. Lizzie’s dad worked for Mr Ackroyd at the Hall. She married a curate when the war was over.’

‘I see.’ The one person who could tell me about Susan could be anywhere now. ‘Do you know where she went?’

‘Aye. Somerset.’

‘Pity. I’d have liked to talk to her. I still want to see the church, though. Will it be all right if I pop in next Friday?’

‘Feel free. But about Lizzie. Her name’s Taylor now, and –’

‘Look! There’s your bus!’ I cut her short, which was very rude of me but I didn’t have a lot of choice. Jeannie was making towards us and we’d agreed that the Deer’s Leap affair was taboo. Saved by the Skipton bus!

‘What was all that about?’ Jeannie frowned. ‘Been asking questions, have we?’

‘Yes. About the church.’ My gaze didn’t waver. ‘I’m going to look at it on Friday morning – that’s when the ladies clean it.’

‘And why are you interested in the church?’

‘Because anything about Acton Carey interests me.’ I didn’t blush nor feel one bit ashamed. ‘You’re in a very suspicious mood, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘No, I don’t.’ She looked up at the church clock. ‘It’s a bit early for a drink. Would you like to hang around and eat at the Rose when it opens? We could have a look at the church while we’re waiting.’

‘No thanks. Best get back.’ I was almost sure she was calling my bluff. ‘We said we’d cut the grass today as soon as it was dry enough, don’t forget.’

‘So we did. I feel like a bit of exercise. We can see this off,’ she held up a bottle of wine, ‘when we’ve finished. As a reward,’ she added solemnly.

Chapter Nine

On Friday morning I drove into Acton Carey, a last, sentimental journey. I would take a look at the church, then buy Bill a pint, if he was around. Say goodbye. Because since this morning I had a feeling that I would never come back, never see Deer’s Leap again. And maybe it was better that way; better to forget Jack Hunter and that war, and anyway, I decided mutinously as I drove past the clump of oaks, why should I bother my head about a ghost who didn’t have the decency to turn up when he must surely have known I would soon be leaving here. For ever!

I still felt piqued as I parked the car, then made for the war memorial, to stand there, staring fixedly at the name J. J. Hunter, asking silently why he hadn’t been there this morning, wishing I had brought flowers as a kind of goodbye. Flowers from Deer’s Leap garden; a bunch of the red roses that grew up the wall and peeped in at the kitchen window! It was a very old plant with a thick, gnarled stem that could even have been there when Susan slept in the room above the kitchen! Why hadn’t I thought?

‘I’m going home on Sunday,’ I whispered in my mind to the name chiselled there. ‘I’m sorry about what happened to you and Susan and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help you. But I won’t forget either of you. One day, somehow, I’ll find how it was for you both …’

I blew my nose sniffily, then walked to the grandiose church, built to the memory of a cotton broker from Manchester whom almost everyone had forgotten, blinking my eyes to accustom them to the gloom, inhaling the churchy smell of dampness and musty books and dusty hassocks.

‘Hullo, love! Over here!’

I turned in the direction of the voice.

‘You came then!’ Hilda stood beside the lectern, waving and smiling.

‘I said I would.’

‘Happen you did, but you went off at a right old lick; didn’t give me time to tell you that –’

‘Your bus was coming.’ So too had been Jeannie! ‘I hope you didn’t think me rude.’

‘Nay. All I’d been going to tell you was that Lizzie Frobisher lives in Acton Carey.’

‘She lives where?’

‘At the vicarage. We don’t have a parish priest in the village any longer – all a question of money. Any road, there was a vicarage standing empty, so the Diocese made it into four flats for retired clergy. It was nice that Lizzie was able to come back to the village to live out her time. She’s over yonder, in the green cardigan.’

Here! Dusting pews no more than ten feet away!

‘Susan Smith’s friend?’ I whispered. ‘The one she went to school with?’

‘That’s the lady you should be talking to. Away over, and have a word with her. She’s Lizzie Taylor now.’

‘Did you tell her I was asking?’

‘No. But there’s none better to tell you about Susan.’

‘You don’t mind? I really came to look at the church …’

‘Then ask Lizzie to show it to you!’

Glory be! With only two days to go, I’d found Susan’s long-ago friend!

‘Mrs Taylor?’ I coughed loudly and she spun round, looking at me over the top of her glasses.

‘It is. And who might you be?’

‘I’m Cassandra Johns. I’m staying at Deer’s Leap.’

‘Ah, yes – you’ll want to talk about Susan?’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘I do, actually. But how did you guess?’

‘Ha! The whole village knows. Tell Bill Jarvis and you might as well tell the town crier!’ She pulled down the corners of her mouth and I took in her hand-knitted cardigan, the skirt gone baggy round the hips, the thin hair, permed into corkscrew curls. ‘Why are you interested in Susan Smith?’

‘I – I’m not especially. It’s Deer’s Leap really. I’m a novelist, you see, and I’m interested in anything to do with the place.’

And may you be forgiven, Cassandra Johns, for lying through your teeth in church!

‘Ah. An historical novelist! Then you can’t do better than write about Margaret and Walter Dacre – if you dare! Local folklore has always had it, you see, that those two were the worst of the bunch – the Pendle Witches, I’m talking about – but were never found out!’

‘Margaret Dacre?’ Oh, lordy! Aunt Jane had got it right! ‘The 1592 one?’

‘That’s her! Legend has it she worked spells and heaven knows what else. She got away with it too! I suppose people hereabouts were too afraid to shop her to the witch-hunters.’

‘But how do you know all this? I’ve never come across any reference either to her or to Deer’s Leap.’

‘You wouldn’t. Nothing was put on record; just handed down through the generations, sort of. But Mistress Dacre got her comeuppance, for all that. Seems she wanted to found a dynasty; pass that fine house on to her son, but she never conceived. The Lord’s punishment on her, if you ask me! But what’s got into you? You look quite odd, Miss Johns. Stupid of me talking about witchcraft, and you alone in that house. Let’s go outside for a breath of air? I’ve had enough dusting for one day. Feel like a cigarette?’

‘I – I don’t smoke.’ I followed her in a half-daze.

‘Afraid I do! A habit I picked up in the war, and never managed to kick!’ She settled herself on a bench beside the church porch and dug into her cardigan pocket. ‘But we can’t all be perfect, can we? Sure you don’t want one?’

‘Quite sure, thanks. But I really can’t imagine a witch ever having lived at Deer’s Leap. To me, it’s a beautiful old place. I’ve been alone there for days on end and never picked up one bad vibe – er – funny feeling.’

‘It’s all right.’ She inhaled deeply, eyes closed. ‘Vicars’ wives know what vibes are! Mind, there was often an atmosphere at Deer’s Leap – Mrs Smith’s fault, I reckon.’

‘Why? Wasn’t she happy there? Was it too isolated for her?’

‘I don’t think so. She just kept herself to herself. Not like in the village. No one locked their doors in those days. People just walked in without waiting to be asked. Mind, Susan’s father was a decent chap, though they weren’t much missed when they left.’

‘Then can you tell me,’ I whispered, ‘where they went when the Air Ministry took the house off them?’ My mouth was suddenly dry and my tongue made little clicking sounds as I spoke. ‘You and Susan would keep in touch?’

‘Well, that’s just it! It was as if they’d done a moonlight! One day they were there; the next day not a sign of them, and the place deserted. I know because I had arranged to meet Susan and she didn’t turn up. I went to Deer’s Leap looking for her because it was – well – rather urgent.’

‘And they’d vanished? All the livestock gone?’

‘Everything! I was hurt when Susan never wrote; not one line to tell me her new address, and she and I so close! I wonder to this day why she never got in touch. It was the talk of the village at the time; a nine-day wonder. No end of speculation, but no one ever found out. Susan never came back after the war. I’d have thought she’d have brought flowers or a poppy wreath to the memorial. It was as if Jack Hunter had never existed for her.’

‘Jack was her boyfriend,’ I said softly.

‘He was her whole life! They were so in love; right from the night they met. Mind, it wasn’t easy for them to meet, the way things were. It wasn’t on, going out with an airman, so I did all I could – gave Susan an alibi, sometimes …’

‘And the other times?’

‘She’d slip out of the house. When it was winter and dark before teatime, it was easier for her. He’d walk all that way, just to have a few minutes with her at the gate, then afterwards, in the barn.’

‘Was the aerodrome far away?’

‘About two miles from here. It was nearer to Deer’s Leap, actually, than to the village. That’s why the RAF took Mr Smith’s fields when they wanted to extend.’

I looked at the ash on her cigarette end. It clung there, more than an inch long and I waited, fascinated, for it to drop, thinking how steady her hand must be.

‘My mother said that in those days, girls didn’t have the freedom my generation has. I can’t understand it.’

‘I can! A girl obeyed her parents until she was twenty-one. That was when young people came of age in my day. Do you know, there were boys of twenty flying those huge planes. Old enough to drop a bomb-load on Germany and kill God knows how many, but not old enough to marry without permission! It was mad!’

‘What would have happened if Susan’s mother had found she was meeting an airman?’

‘She did know eventually. There was ructions!’

‘But couldn’t they have met sometimes when Susan left work? Didn’t she ever think to say she was working over-time?’

‘She never had a job; leastways only at home. She helped in the house and on the farm. Farming was work of national importance; so important it kept you out of the Armed Forces! Susan would have liked to join up, but it wouldn’t have been any use her trying. I felt sorry for her. It must have been awful, once she left school, with no one her own age to talk to for days on end.’

‘I’m surprised she ever got to meet her young man!’

‘She wouldn’t have, in the normal course of events, but there was something on in the village, I remember, to do with the church, and she stayed the night at our house. My mother had to practically beg permission. Susan’s mother said she couldn’t go, them not being Church of England, but Mr Smith said she could. He was a quiet man really, and hadn’t a lot to say for himself, but if ever he put his foot down, his wife didn’t argue! You’d have thought it was a bacchanalian romp, and it was only a beetle drive in the parish hall in aid of the church choir!’

‘They met at a beetle drive?’

‘No. They bumped into each other – literally – in the village in the blackout. People bumped into just about everything, come to think of it. Lampposts especially were the very devil. You could get a nasty bang from one of those, apart from breaking your glasses, if you wore them!

‘Anyway, this airman was full of apologies and insisted on walking us to the transport. The transport, I ask you! He thought we were going to the sergeants’ mess dance at the aerodrome! The RAF had a dance there every week, and they always sent a lorry round the villages, collecting girls. Lady partners were a bit thin on the ground, you see. Folk around these parts called it the love bus.

‘Of course, respectable girls weren’t allowed to go. No knowing the trouble they might get themselves into! Chance would’ve been a fine thing! I don’t know what got into the pair of us that night because we followed the airman and he helped us onto the transport. We were the only two from Acton Carey!’

‘And that’s where it all started – at a forbidden dance?’

‘That’s where. In a Nissen hut, actually. Not in the least romantic, but it was love at first sight for those two. I suppose you’d call it physical attraction nowadays!’

‘That was very daring of you,’ I teased. ‘I suppose you let him walk you both home!’

‘You bet we did! The blackout did have its uses, you know, and we both reckoned we might as well be hanged for sheep. I lived in one of the lodges at the Hall then, so it was a fair walk. We didn’t wait for the love bus because we had to be back before the beetle drive finished. Jack’s tail-end Charlie escorted me. Mick, his name was. Lovely dancer …’

‘Tail-end what?’

‘Charlie. There were two gunners to each bomber: one amidships, sort of, and another in the tail. Susan and I got to know them all. Mick and I started seeing each other, but we were more dancing partners than anything else. Not like Jack and Susan. Those two were smitten right from the start. He was gorgeous. Tall, fair-haired. Susan was fair too. A golden couple. I’d look at them together and think it was too good to last, and I was right!

‘But here’s me rabbiting on, and you wanting to look at the church!’ She ground her cigarette end into the grass, then brushed a hand across her skirt. ‘I’ll show you round if you’d like. We’d better get a move on. They’ll be finishing soon, and the church has to be locked. When I was young, churches were never locked and the altar silver out for all to see. Thieves left churches alone in those days …’

‘If there isn’t a lot of time left, then I’d rather see the original part of the building.’ I felt less breathless now. ‘It’s ages old, I believe.’

‘Built in the thirteenth century, when few could read or write but who believed implicitly in heaven and hell and eternal damnation! It’s the Lady Chapel now and so simple it’s beautiful. When it was built, so small a church wouldn’t have had pews and the faithful would have stood right through the service – all except the Lord of the Manor and his family, who’d have had special chairs. But let me show you …’

I didn’t go to the Red Rose when I left the church. My head was too full of Susan and Jack, and besides, Beth and Danny would be home the following day and I wanted to clean the house before I went to meet Jeannie’s train.

My word processor was already packed in its carrying box; no more Firedance until Monday; no more working at the kitchen table with Hector beside me and Tommy curled up in the armchair! Sadness took me just to think of leaving, so I thought instead of Mum and Dad and how pleased they would be to have me home again.

But it was difficult not to think of Susan and Jack and how glad I was to have found a lead in the very nick of time. I’d tried not to appear too interested for fear of arousing suspicion, because far too many people think that anything said to a novelist would appear, completely unashamed and unabridged, in her next book! I’d felt just a little guilty, especially when Mrs Taylor said, on parting, that I had only to write to her or phone if there was anything I wanted to know about the history of the area or about the war. I had her address and phone number in my purse, though at the back of my mind I knew it would be a long time before I would be in touch. Firedance must first be completed, and a lot could happen in the space of three and a bit novels – even supposing Harrier Books gave me that contract!

I was snipping red roses when the phone rang, and I ran to answer it.

‘Cassie! I’m at King’s Cross. Is the minicab available – same time?’

‘It is.’

‘Beth rang. Said they were taking it easy and would be home late on Saturday night about eight – give or take the odd traffic jam!’

‘She rang me too!’

‘Fine! See you, then!’

‘That was Jeannie,’ I said to Hector, who always came to investigate when the phone rang – just in case, I supposed, there was a man on the other end of it! ‘I’m going home soon. Are you going to miss me?’

He whined softly and looked at the biscuit tin, which was his way of telling me he would, and the custard creams too, and I felt a sudden ache inside me to think that soon he too would be leaving Deer’s Leap. Poor Hector, poor Cassie, poor Jack and Suzie!

‘Life’s a bitch,’ I said out loud. ‘And then you die!’

Even when you were hardly into manhood, I thought soberly, and you didn’t want to die and your girl didn’t want you to either!

Then I thought about Piers, whom I hadn’t really loved at all, and promptly burst into tears at the unfairness of it.

On the way back from Preston station, I slowed automatically as we neared the clump of oak trees and Jeannie slid me a warning glance

‘You’re at it again, Cassie! You’re still on the lookout for him! I thought you’d decided to let it drop.’

‘Yes, I had.’ I put my foot down, because there wasn’t a single vibe to be felt. ‘And I really meant it at the time, but something happened this morning.’

I told her about going to the church – hand-on-heart only to look at it! – and how I’d met Mrs Taylor who once was Susan’s closest friend, and there in Acton Carey all the time!

‘What do you mean – living in the village all along? Then why didn’t Bill Jarvis mention it? He knew we – you – were interested.’

‘Maybe it slipped his memory. It all happened a long time ago, and he was older than Susan, didn’t he say, and away in the army for a lot of the war. That could be why he wouldn’t know about the Smiths’ mysterious departure – without a goodbye to anyone. It was a shock to Lizzie. Even she hadn’t known when they were going.’

I told her all I’d learned, and said surely Bill would have told us about something that caused such a stir at the time, if he’d known about it.

‘Maybe he did. Maybe,’ she said over her shoulder as she got out of the car to open the white gate, ‘he was rationing his knowledge – with the beer in mind!’

She brought the matter up again, which surprised me, as soon as we were sitting at the kitchen table, a pot of coffee between us.

‘Why, all of a sudden, are you interested in Susan Smith, and the pilot?’ I asked her. ‘It’s not all that long ago you warned me off, Jeannie.’

‘We-e-ll, things have changed a bit since then. I mentioned the Deer’s Leap books at work. They showed quite an interest. Maybe they’ll ask you to come to London to talk about them when Firedance is finished. How’s it going, by the way?’

‘Fine. I’ll meet the deadline with no problem. And there’s something I forgot. Local folklore has it that Walter and Margaret Dacre were up to their necks in witchcraft!’

‘You mean W. D. & M. D. – the couple who built the house?’

‘You got it in one! There’s no record of it – and there wouldn’t be since they were never accused and tried – but Mrs Taylor said M. D. was a witch! Mind, things get added to and embroidered in the telling, but I always thought of Margaret Dacre as a happy contented wife with a lot of children. I even imagined them adding rooms as their family grew, but I was wrong. According to Mrs Taylor, the Dacres never had children. That can of maggots you warned me about might go a long way back!’

‘Cassie! It gets better and better!’

‘Yes, and it’s only just hit me! What if Margaret Dacre put a curse on Deer’s Leap?’

‘But why on earth should she?’

‘Well, for one thing she could well have been a witch, so ill-wishing would be second nature to her; and never to have given her husband an heir must have upset her a lot. Imagine building that lovely house for future generations to live in, and no son to inherit it! Maybe the curse was eternal and still applies – if there was a curse, I mean. Susan and Jack didn’t have children, that much we do know.’

‘Susan and Jack didn’t get as far as the altar, but what a theme to run through the books! Every couple who lived at Deer’s Leap to be childless! Mind, you’d have to lift the curse eventually – maybe in the final book, Cassie. Y’know, I really do believe we’re on to something!’

She was pink-cheeked with excitement which made me feel a bit of a meanie when I reminded her that Susan Smith was the daughter of the house, and Danny and Beth had two children.

‘Yes, but they were born in Edinburgh. They came here when they were toddlers! You’ll have to think of something for your novels, though, Cas. Can you?’

‘You know I can!’ Now I was excited too. ‘I’d have to do a fair bit of historical research, though. And had you thought – even World War Two is history now.’

‘I’ll grant you that, but Mrs Taylor is still around and didn’t she say you could get in touch with her?’

‘Oh, Jeannie. If only I could find Susan! She’s around too, I’m as certain as I can be.’

‘What you want, I think –’ Jeannie was an editor again, all else forgotten – ‘is a situation in the last of the books whereby the curse is lifted.’

‘Easy! My star-crossed lovers will have a happy-ever-after ending and live at Deer’s Leap, and have children too.’

‘Only the house won’t be called Deer’s Leap …’

‘Think I’m stupid? Of course it won’t.’ It would mean spending time around Acton Carey and maybe calling back the ghost of a pilot, but what the heck! ‘This morning I’d accepted I would never return to Deer’s Leap; never see it again after Sunday. I even went to the war memorial to say goodbye to Jack Hunter! Then in the next breath, almost, I meet Lizzie Taylor. Seems Deer’s Leap isn’t going to let me go, Jeannie!’

‘And will that worry you?’

‘Of course not.’ Bet your life it wouldn’t, because hadn’t that old house just handed me the plots of at least four novels; handed them on a plate because it was determined to keep its hold over me! ‘In fact, the only awful thing about it is that I’ll have all sorts of excuses for coming back here, and it mightn’t go down too well. Because by the time I’m ready to start writing those books, Jeannie, someone else will be living in Deer’s Leap, and I won’t like that one bit!’

Come to think of it, Margaret Dacre mightn’t like it either!

The lucky Cornish pixie Elspeth and Hamish hung in the rear window of my car swung from side to side as I reversed out of the white gate and onto the dust road. Beth and Danny stood waving, Tommy beside them, and Hector gazed at me mournfully.

‘I have never,’ I said to Jeannie, ‘seen a dog who could look so sad, yet wag his tail at the same time, the old fraud!’

‘You’re going to miss him, aren’t you?’

‘I am.’ And the snooty Lotus, who hadn’t condescended to see me off, and the view from the kitchen window and, oh just everything! I felt very choked up still at having to hand over Deer’s Leap, and I told Beth and Danny as we hugged a goodbye that I wasn’t turning to look back – not even for one last glance – because it’s unlucky and there’s a limit to what I can bear without bursting into tears.

So instead I wound down the window, and stuck out my arm in one last wave. Goodbye, Deer’s Leap and the animals and the garden and the kissing gate. And especially goodbye to Jack Hunter, who would still be waiting there for his Suzie for all time.

‘So!’ I let out my breath in a noisy huff. ‘That’s it!’

‘You sound quite full up, Cassie.’

‘I am.’ So full up that I wished I had never accepted an invitation to that fancy dress party, nor ever seen Deer’s Leap nor got myself involved with long-ago lovers. ‘Never mind. I’ll just chalk it up to experience, Jeannie; grist to the mill.’

‘You won’t, you know! I mean, how do you know that Margaret Dacre hasn’t put her mark on you? Hadn’t you thought she might really want a child to be born in that house!’

‘But children will have been born there! Dammit, it’s against the law of averages for a house to stand more than four hundred years and never have a baby born in it!’

‘How do you know, Cassie? Didn’t we agree that’s how the plots of the Deer’s Leap books will be: a house cursed never to know children!’

‘But that’s fiction we’re talking about! And anyway, we don’t know that Margaret Dacre was a witch. It’s only local tittle-tattle!’

‘Interesting, for all that and Cassie!’ She grabbed the wheel. ‘For God’s sake, watch it!’

‘Look!’ I slammed into reverse gear, bumping over the grassy edges of the road. ‘He’s there! Look! Behind you!’

The car went into a skid and I pulled hard out of it, all the time watching the man who stood at the side of the road, willing him, imploring him not to go!

I turned the car, throwing up gravel and dust. Out of the corner of my eye I’d seen him on the other side of the road as I drove past. He was still there, looking straight ahead, not one bit bothered by screeching brakes and a car almost out of control.

‘Look at him, Jeannie! Now tell me he isn’t real!’ I inched forward, my heart thudding in my ears. ‘And don’t say a word! Leave it to me!’ I stopped the car, my eyes not leaving him for a second. What could I say to him? ‘Hullo and goodbye’?

Jeannie had her hands over her eyes as if my performance had unnerved her. Or was it because she didn’t want to look at the airman?

‘Jeannie – please?’ Slowly, carefully I opened the door, got out, then quietly closed it. Jeannie took her hands from her face and stared at me, bewildered.

‘There’s no one here, Cas, but you and me …’ Her face was very white and she ran her tongue round her lips, turning slowly in her seat to look behind her. ‘No one at all!’

‘Jack,’ I said softly, so he would look at me. ‘Want a lift? Deer’s Leap, is it?’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.