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‘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.’
