In the Shadow of Winter

by Lorna Gray

I choked back a sharp retort and merely smiled serenely. I was actually quite impressed with my self-control.

  “And who is this old fellow?” The Colonel had spied the elderly hunter who was snoozing gently with his chin resting on his stable door.

  “Harry. My father’s hunter.” That self-control suddenly seemed rather more precarious as the Colonel woke the poor horse by placing a heavy hand on its nose.

  “Send him to the knackerman and you’ll save plenty of money. Hell, the man might even pay you for him.”

  Clearly at this point I was expected to bow and scrape and express my effusive thanks for this suggestion. Instead I looked him squarely in the eye.

  “My father was very fond of this horse and he particularly asked me to look after him. He’ll go when he’s good and ready, and,” I determinedly continued across the Colonel’s remark, “not a day before.”

  The Colonel turned an interesting shade of puce. He stared at me for a few moments, a vein bulging in his temple, before turning sharply on his heel with a precision that would have impressed any drill-sergeant.

  “Come,” he snapped, relegating the Inspector to eager puppy once more. “We can see what my son has found, if anything. I have another son, but he is in the Army. He made Captain recently – very proud moment introducing him at Whitehall last week to my old friend Bernard … ah, I should say Viscount Montgomery, Chief of Imperial General Staff, you know.”

  “Yes, we know,” muttered one of the uniformed men who was either Thorne or Smith. “You told us before.”

  Someone tittered and the Colonel shot them a wild look before striding back out onto the road. Their assorted legs made very hard work of the hill past my house but I barely bothered to watch them go before turning back to the waiting pony. The poor creature had developed a faintly martyred air by now.

  I could not help letting out a resigned sigh as I set the pony’s foot back down on the ground again. With every man and quite literally his dog turning up on my doorstep, this day was starting to get ridiculous. But dutifully enough, I walked out through the gate and into the house with Freddy to take the waiting call. I could have laid money on who would be on the line.

  His secretary sounded harassed but Sir William was oblivious to the pressure on his staff as he finally took the telephone.

  “Good day, my dear,” he said warmly and I could picture the automatic lift of his hand.

  If I had to choose, I would say that Sir William was my favourite of the two elderly Langton brothers, although perhaps it would be more accurate to say he was the one I despised the least. He had at any rate been sufficiently bothered to send a note of regret when my father had passed away and it had been kindly written with some reference to a pleasant shared memory. His wife, an austere woman who was forever to be called ma’am and never by name, occasionally commissioned me to bring ponies up to the house for the entertainment of her grandnephews and nieces and so I had, over the years, built up a certain level of acquaintance with the family. I would never have claimed to be more than an overpaid servant in their eyes though.

  Sir William was not as openly sharp as the Colonel but I was not misled into believing that he was any the less calculating in his actions, and there was always the faint possibility that his morals were not quite as upstanding as his brother’s. The Colonel had his strict code of honour which ruled, often badly, over everything he did, whereas Sir William had what politely could be called a creative approach and impolitely, a criminal lack of concern for the needs of others. That being said, I had never had anything but politeness from him and I answered him now with perfectly unforced warmth in return.

  “Good day, Sir William. How are you?”

  “Very well, my dear, very well. I don’t suppose the Colonel is still there?”

  “You’ve just missed him, Sir William.” It always paid to show him a certain level of deference, even if I didn’t feel it. “He went along Bath Lane with the police officers, although given how deep the drifts are at Saltershill, they might have wished they’d cut straight across the fields …”

  “Ah,” he said cheerfully. “Thank you, my dear. We’re on the hunt, you know!”

  “So I heard. Goodbye!”

  The telephone clicked dead, rattling slightly as I returned it to its cradle, and I shut the door very firmly behind me as I walked back out to the yard. There were few members of the Langton family left to question me now and unless this was going to turn into a complete farce, I doubted very much that I would find his wife interrogating me later.

  Chapter 9

  The rest of the day did in fact pass rather more calmly. Beechnut, and possibly equally importantly her stable, were none the worse for the morning’s upset but I was more worried than I cared to admit when dusk arrived and still no sign of Matthew.

  For fear that I would upset Freddy I spent longer than usual out with the horses as I bedded them down for the night. Over the years, their comforting warmth and companionable silence had been my greatest source of support, and now I was standing with my arms slung over Beechnut’s withers and my forehead pressed into her warm fur, repeating you’re not just another gullible fool like some kind of mantra.

  Unlike me, Beechnut was now entirely calm and relaxed as she chewed steadily on her hay and we stood in this manner until the drizzling rainclouds had parted and the stars took over the blackening sky. On any other day I might have rejoiced at the sudden shift in the weather which had abruptly given us back some warmth but the budding pleasure of a clean frost and the hope of a brighter day to follow felt presently as far removed as the stars themselves. There might as well have been a forecast of more snow.

  Suddenly Beechnut stiffened and threw up her head to look out onto the yard. My mind really could not take any more dramas and, apprehension increasing by the moment, I went with her to peer over the stable door into the silent shadows. I could see nothing. But then she uttered a strange throaty noise and stamped about her box with an agitation that could only mean one thing. A man.

  Wary of calling out in case it was some other person I slipped soundlessly out of the stable and, keeping out of the blue light of the waning moon, I tiptoed closer to where I thought he might be. I could see no one but I had not heard anything bar the familiar tramp of heavy feet and subsequent bang of the kitchen door as Freddy finished shutting in the chickens so whoever it was must be still out here. I wondered whether I dared risk calling his name.

  “Who is he?”

  The low whisper came right behind my ear. I gave a squeak and whipped round, colliding with him in the process.

  “Matthew!” I cried in exasperated relief, cuffing his arm, adding; “Ooh, sorry,” as he winced in pain at my blow. His rough unshaven jaw was making him look very much the outlaw as amusement glinted down at me out of the darkness.

  “Did I scare you?”

  “At least I no longer need to worry whether you’re still alive. Whether my heart is still beating is another matter.”

  He very gently took my wrist between finger and thumb in a mock test for a pulse. “Well, it’s still going, but you might want to get it looked at. It’s running a touch fast.”

  I glowered at him although I suspect my look was lost on him. “Do that again and I’ll shoot you myself,” I hissed, not entirely jokingly.

  “Sorry.” He tried to sound contrite. “I couldn’t resist. So go on then, who is he?” A longer pause. “Your son?”

  I had to laugh, in spite of myself. “Have a heart. He’s not my son, he’s fourteen!”

  Slipping back into the shadows of my stables and taking an armful of hay from the barrow, I moved slowly along the row, nodding in acknowledgement as Matthew stepped aside to let me past. “I know he doesn't seem it but he really is almost grown up. His aunt lives in the village; he was sent there from the city in the usual rush to get the children out, you know how it was. He used to drift up from the village to watch the horses and I let him help with the mucking out occasionally. But the
n Dad died and he started coming up to help me properly; he just seemed to spend more and more time here. Goodness, sorry.” This as a mistimed thrust over a stable door dusted him liberally in blades of fractured hay. “Eventually it simply seemed easier to ask him to stay and I needed the help, so it worked out well for me.”

  Matthew was listening silently, his head turned away into shadow. The only sign of life he gave was the brief movement of a hand when it brushed the dried grass from his sleeve.

  Laying a hand on the soft velvet of the nose belonging to the occupant of the last stable, I went on to describe how the quiet and underfed boy had grown up to be the cheery Freddy that had just gone inside, although admittedly he still looked half-starved however much I fed him. It hardly needed to be said that Freddy was just not the sort to flourish at school; he was of an age to leave and the work with the horses suited him, for now at least; and my quiet little farm must have been a sort of haven for him after what must have been a turbulent upbringing. I had never known for sure but I was reasonably confident that he had been beaten regularly at home and, at any rate, no one cared enough to come and claim him, so here he stayed. And, I admitted, I cared very much that he did.

  Matthew didn’t say anything in response to that so after a few moments of awkwardness that left me wondering what he must be thinking, I finished meekly; “I’d better just go and say goodnight to Beechnut.”

  He waited for me to reappear before walking back with me towards the house. “Why does she do that?”

  Beechnut was stamping around her box once more. I let him open the gate. “Oh, that’s quite restrained. She normally tries to break the door down when there is a man on the yard. You should feel honoured.” I felt his curious glance; “She was bred to be a hunter, one of John’s young projects but she took a bad fall and it knocked her confidence.”

  “And that caused the behaviour I saw just now?”

  “Oh no, it was the rather less than sensitive training methods employed by John’s head groom in an effort to get her jumping again. I believe she very nearly killed him. Some horses have a flight instinct, some have a fight instinct; hers proved to be very strongly on the side of fight. At that point they were going to have her shot, but I inherited a little bit of money from Dad and so I bought her. She’s a very talented girl and I thought I might as well give her a chance to come good. She doesn’t jump any more, but that suits me perfectly.”

  There was another silence but then, as he followed the path to the door, I heard him say in a tone of private thoughtfulness, “I’ve been getting you all wrong, haven’t I? In fact, I think I’m finally beginning to understand you better – it’s been very odd feeling like I ought to know you and yet finding that I don’t actually know you at all…You’re a kind of earthly St Jude really, aren’t you?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

  “You just seem to go about collecting all these tragic little lost souls and nursing them back to health again, myself included.”

  “You count yourself as a lost cause, do you?” I said with an uncertain smile.

  “Why yes, without a doubt. Freddy, Beechnut … me. But what about you? You collect all these wounded people and animals, and focus all your energy on their needs without seeming to spend much time thinking about yourself.” He stopped in the shadow of the kitchen door. “What exactly do you get out of this?”

  I looked up at him, feeling extraordinarily unsettled. I found myself on the defensive feeling oddly like I had done something wrong, but without quite knowing what it was.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said stiffly.

  “Do you not?” he asked. “You do a very convincing act of being all hard and detached, and I almost believed it. But it’s not true, not true at all. You expend all this energy helping everyone else and it really is very commendable … but do you ever stop to think of the consequences for you?”

  “So who exactly should I turf out first? Freddy or the horse? And by whose criteria? Yours? Because you can’t even bring yourself to admit a few basic truths.”

  I still couldn’t see his face and I shook my head in disdain and pushed past him into the welcoming light of the kitchen. It seemed incredible to believe that yet again he had made a rare effort at communication only for me to find that this time we had strayed into a painful critique of my character. I was beginning to suspect he was doing it deliberately, and I did not like it.

  “Eleanor,” he called helplessly after me. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  I ignored him.

  I did after all have enough ingredients left to make a meal in the form of a vegetable stew that had spent the past two hours bubbling gently on the hotplate by the fire and a much overlooked can of whale meat now thrown in, literally. I could not help angrily crashing about with the pots; it was easier than talking.

  We ate our dinner in silence. Freddy kept looking from one to the other in anxious bewilderment and I wished that I could lighten the oppressive mood, but I was too tired and too wary of starting yet another conversation that would only end in disagreement. Casting little furtive glances at Matthew now that he couldn’t hide away in the shadows, I realised that he looked absolutely shattered. Clearly his afternoon adventures had taken it out of him. He looked moody and deep in thought as he chased beans around the dish with the fork in his good hand and, I realised with a painful jolt, he also looked terribly sad.

  The bleak tension that still hung about him had pulled at his face to make him look much older than his thirty-four years and there was a stiffness to his shoulder that made me wonder if his wounds were healing as well as they ought. The coarse stubble that was almost a beard by now seemed only to emphasise the current wild nature of his existence, and the paradox of it was, surprisingly, it actually rather suited him.

  He ran a hand though his hair and unexpectedly looked up to catch me watching him. His mouth twitched into a sudden smile, making the lines of strain and worry abruptly vanish, and my heart twisted painfully as he became the kind, gentle man I remembered once more. Sorry, he mouthed. I gave him a flicker in return before reaching across the table to take his empty plate away.

  “Is anybody going to tell me what’s been going on?” Freddy finally broke the silence with an exasperated shout. He leapt to his feet to carry his bowl to the sink, waggling his spoon as he went. “I’ve been sneaking food out for no more than a word of thanks and now you’ve been hiding with the horses all afternoon and he’s been off on an adventure. It’s not fair!”

  This outburst broke the impasse remarkably.

  “Steady on, lad!” Matthew flinched back as the rapidly descending jug splashed milk onto his sleeve and he and I were united in protest as cups and teapot came crashing down swiftly after.

  “Oh, sorry.” Freddy grinned sheepishly, reclaiming his seat, “But won’t someone tell me what’s been going on? Please?”

  I cast Matthew a silent challenge of my own as I passed him a tea-towel.

  He reached for the cloth. “All right …”

  His attention fixed upon the towel in his hands and if it were possible, his demeanour became even more impassive than before. Even now, it was not willingly that he was divulging his part in this thing.

  “Eight days ago I got a message at my office that Jamie wanted to see me and it was pretty insistent, so I went over as soon as I could, which was probably about two hours or so later by the time I managed to grind my way up the hill out of Gloucester. I’ve been staying at my mother’s for the past month; it’s easier when you don’t know whether the lanes are going to be hedge-high with snow from one day to the next, and at least it stopped her from worrying …

  “Anyway, when I got there, he was lying flat out on the floor and—” A grimace, a furtive glance. “Sorry, the details really aren’t for your ears. Suffice it to say, murder was not the first thing that crossed my mind.” He had to take a moment to collect himself. Then he added; “So there I was, trying to find a pulse
and as I felt his neck, it finally began to dawn on me that this was no accident. But I didn’t get much time to think about what it was, because at that point something hit me from behind.”

  His thumb nail was rubbing at a loose thread and I don’t think he realised he was working a little hole in my tea-towel.

  “I must have been laid out for a little while because when I came round, I was face down in the dirt and my head was hurting like the devil. I tried not to move, but out of the corner of my eye I could see the boots of at least two men and they were discussing what to do with me. Their accents were odd, Irish, I think, but it is hard to be sure. But of this I am sure: one of them picked up the telephone and it was clear I was in for it.”

  “Why, what did he say?” Freddy’s question was anxious. I glanced over at him with a concern of my own but he seemed relatively undisturbed.

  “Let’s just say that the person on the other end of the line wasn’t exactly my friend. They were to fix it that my fingerprints were all over the room, which they were anyway because I’d walked in like a friend, not a criminal. Then he was to put Jamie’s watch and money in my pockets and say that he had burst in on me as I was standing over the body. After a brief struggle he was, in self-defence of course, to land an unlucky blow which was to kill me. Nice, eh?”

  “But you did manage to escape?!” Then, as his eyes lifted, I realised what I had said and muttered crossly to myself, “Of course you did, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Idiot.”

  He gave a rare smile, “You’re not an idiot and yes, I managed to escape. Just about, anyway …”

  I could picture the scene. Two men, knowing that one man was dead and believing the other to be at least halfway on the route to becoming the same, were taking their time as they rifled through the corpse’s pockets.

  “I heard something heavy being lifted. I don’t know what it was, a bar of some sort; a lamp stand perhaps. Whatever it was, by some miracle I managed to roll aside just as it came crashing down. Then I rolled back and by a second miracle I managed to bring the fellow to the ground. And then I ran. I ran until my lungs hurt and then I ran some more. They fired a shotgun at me but I was unbelievably lucky and I managed to throw myself down into the streambed. Then, using the stain of frozen water to cover my tracks, I made for the trees. It was dark by then and they couldn’t track me so long as I was careful, and believe me, I was very careful – I could have slipped under the nose of a fox, I was moving so quietly. That whole night is just one hideous exhausted blur of motion in my memory now; I didn’t dare to rest for even a moment in case they found me.”