Winter’s Children: Curl up with this gripping, page-turning mystery as the nights get darker. Leah Fleming

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СКАЧАТЬ of the house went back to the fifteenth century, with its arching roof timbers. Nathaniel Snowden had added to the house in the seventeenth century: sturdy rubble-filled walls and square neat windows befitting the Puritan gentleman. Then his grandson Samuel restored the fortunes of Wintergill with the purchase of enclosed land, rebuilding the house looking south down towards Pendle Hill and the River Ribble. He had sired sixteen children, ten sons to expand his fortunes across the globe.

      Then came George and his son, Joss, and his son, Jacob, the teetotal Methodist whose festive spirit was the talk of the dale, who prospered when Victoria was Queen. All of them had built on the strengths of their forebears, all were famous for their hospitality and open house. Grandpa Jo lost three sons with the Yorkshire Light Infantry and Tom, Nik’s own father, had ploughed a straight furrow for the war effort in the forties, seeing some of Wintergill’s most prosperous years.

      How could he now be the one to finish them off?

      Nora couldn’t settle while Nik was in the bath. She opened up the Side House, put on the heating and brought the linen down from her own airing cupboard. There would be time after the funeral to buy some bread, milk and flowers for the welcome basket. It was such a long time since the last let that she was nervous.

      Now she was sifting through her glove box to find a leather pair big enough to hide her gnarled fingers. No one wore hat and gloves much to church, but she believed a woman was undressed without them. She sat at the dressing table stool, staring at her hands.

      What a sturdy pair of friends these had been over the years, grasping the hind legs of newly delivered calves, planting vegetables, pickling fruit, plucking feathers, grabbing sheep, soothing sick beasts and children, grasping reins, steering wheels, holding the hands of the dying and whipping up the best sponge cakes in the district.

      Now they were gnarled and horny, coarsened by wind and rain, with mottled liver spots, as wrinkled as cooked apple skins. They were long and square with over an octave span: more a man’s hand than a woman’s. No amount of elderflower and lanolin ointment would alter that.

      Her dad’s only compliment on her marriage to Tom Snowden over fifty years ago was to look at her hands with pride. ‘You’ll earn your keep with those spades,’ he said. By then any dreams of further education and foreign travel as far from Scar Top as possible were blighted by war and the sense of duty that sent her scurrying back home to do her bit. There was never choice in the matter when Ben Frost, her dad, gave his orders.

      As a child she had lived off the moor, boarding in school houses in the town to attend the local girls’ grammar school, matriculating with honours with a place at university a certainty. Then war broke out and it was all ploughs to the furrow, trying to grow arable crops on wet, sodden hilltops. There was no time for regrets when there was a nation to feed.

      Where was that nation in the last few years when their produce was bottom of the heap of imported meat? When fleeces lay rolled in the shed and lambs were not worth the slaughter – and as for the poor pig farmers … If only supermarket shoppers would buy British then this terrible disease might not have happened.

      Once upon a time it was one sheep, one lamb, one acre but the temptation to intensify had taken over. There was little humanity in farming – not a local abattoir left in the district but a plethora of regulations and directives. Now nature had had the last word. Suddenly her hands started to twitch again as she fingered a silk scarf from the bottom drawer.

      Every Christmas for forty years, one new scarf was added to her collection from Tom. He was not one for lavish presents or romantic gestures. They weren’t bred like that in the Dales, but what he bought was always quality and long lasting so she picked out a navy and lilac stripe, not too flashy for a funeral. No one bothered much with full mourning but it was right to make the effort. The old-fashioned symbols were long gone: mourning veils to hide your tears, black armbands, funeral cards and mourning wreaths on the door, curtains closed in respect and hats off as the cortège passed. She would wear a hat out of respect and make sure that her son was decently dressed for the occasion.

      There was a time when Nik was one of the smartest, handsomest young men in the dale, with his rugged good looks. He reminded her so much of Tom in his prime; the man who stopped her heart with one of his grins and his blue, blue eyes. If Nik’s shoulders were stooped now it was for good reason. Worry was weighing them down. He was fighting a lost cause and she feared trying to hold back the hungry tide. This afternoon he must shoulder his friend’s coffin to an early grave.

      Jim’s suicide brought the pain of the collapse of their industry right to their doorstep. There was anger and confusion. If the vicar doled out any platitudes in his service, she

      would lynch him personally. She was not on familiar terms with their new vicar, being more a Mother Earth than God the Father believer, but she would attend high days and holy days as neighbours must, to honour the dead and their living. Solidarity was the word they bandied about but actions spoke much louder.

      They would bounce down from the tops to the church by the gill, with its stream coursing down the rocks that gave their village its name, and park Land Rovers and pickups where they could. There would be tea and sandwiches in the Spread Eagle, and the women would crack and gossip until it was time for evening milking and farm chores, but there were gaps now to fill in the farm routine. She powdered her red cheeks mapped with red veins. She had not missed doing her own farm chores one iota.

      How she longed for a cottage down by the village beck, centrally heated, draught free, with lamps lit in the dusk and a good fire. She would soon get her energy back if she had only a small house to heat and clean instead of this barn. Lately she had found herself dosing off in the afternoons over her reading, breathless at the slightest exertion, but now was not the time to moan about her health when there was a young man in his forties, leaving a wife and children to bury him.

      The service was mercifully short. She had to admit there was dignity in the old Prayer Book proceedings. It carried the distraught family through the ordeal. Even non-believers could take refuge in its language. Nik stood grim-faced, supporting the widow as the mourners stepped out into the autumn wind and rain towards the burial plot.

      She did not want to see the look of incomprehension on Karen’s face as she gripped her sons in anoraks. The farm hand had found Jim in the field with a note thoughtfully pinned to his jacket in a plastic freezer bag. He was a proud man. He wanted to free his children from the curse of being farmer’s sons. This was his only way out, but what a legacy for his poor kids. The mourners gathered awkwardly just as the clouds parted and the sun glinted for a second, bathing the stone walls in a soft pink light.

      It was more an afternoon for a ramble across the moor, if only the footpaths were open, than the burial of a young man gone mad with fear of failure. Nora stood silently for the final part of the ceremony, knowing a little of the grief Karen Grimoldby must be feeling. Time was not a great healer. It just took the edge off some of the pain so that you could breathe and carry on. The pain would never go away.

      She was not one for small talk. Women had to be brick walls when it came to their children, appearing tough and hard. Family was what mattered most, she believed. If you indulged your unhappiness then it would linger longer. Feelings were best kept under control.

      There would be time later to take Karen a plate pie and a tin of flapjack for the twins. When the sympathy letters were answered and the funeral expenses paid in the months to come – when winter held them in its iron fist– that would be the time to bob in and encourage the girl. That was when the chill of grief took its hold on a woman. Karen would be selling up and moving away, and another farm would be broken into lots to be bought as a holiday cottage for some blessed offcomers.

      She turned towards the corner СКАЧАТЬ