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