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One Summer at Deer’s Leap
Elizabeth Elgin
A present-day love story which springs from a tragic wartime romance …It is the 1990s. Cassie Johns is a young, lovely writer on the threshold of success after a less-than-silver-spooned girlhood. Driving through the glorious countryside to a fancy-dress party in the Vale of Boland, she gives a lift to a mysteriously attractive young man wearing the uniform of an RAF pilot: ready for the party Cassie assumes. But in the evening there is no sign of the airman.Cassie – hitherto rational, sceptical, a woman of her times – becomes obsessed by Jack Hunter, a pilot whose plane crashed in 1944, but whose long-ago love for a girl at Deer’s Leap makes him unable to rest in peace. Cassie’s love for the dead hero takes her into an unknown war-torn past, where old passion burns and becomes entwined with new.
ELIZABETH ELGIN
One Summer at Deer’s Leap
Dedication (#ulink_f9dd8dff-ad89-50c5-86a7-afcfa7bf74c5)
Gratefully to Patricia Parkin, Caroline Sheldon and Nancy Webber
Contents
Cover (#u98d87ed2-b231-5e35-b6d7-b5cf4c679b19)
Title Page (#u331a7ed8-9c18-5611-ad3b-b2d071bb24db)
Dedication (#ulink_bf512837-6259-5e3c-acbe-14d78d3f6642)
Part One (#u339b5ccc-224e-5639-a31a-34a33291559b)
Chapter One (#ue41241ed-49b7-540a-9566-3e0a2001ef89)
Chapter Two (#uc0762b62-e0fc-5a62-b70e-0196f4fc9f7b)
Chapter Three (#u007b7228-836a-5a8a-9544-223aaaf4cb94)
Chapter Four (#uc840f3b1-3eb4-537e-9f9d-5fa2846f577b)
Chapter Five (#u8a4b2c6d-93f6-502c-a229-7449e1999d0d)
Chapter Six (#ucc53f1c1-a657-56dc-9c45-6b3128c991aa)
Chapter Seven (#ua71c7973-8f8a-52d3-a54b-049fc20560d2)
Chapter Eight (#ue7f6e18a-0f6f-54f6-9151-44979c95f304)
Chapter Nine (#ue2c736c8-f597-5fc4-81a9-a65894de2439)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Dragonfly Morning (#litres_trial_promo)
Dedication (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#litres_trial_promo)
Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
One Summer At Deer’s Leap Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Part One (#ulink_be4a13c0-278d-5509-9f6a-1e92849c5964)
Chapter One (#ulink_a5710a01-effc-5495-a839-a685526b7bcd)
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.
