Rowbeck is on the Plain of York where the earth is rich and black and bounteous. Distantly we can see the tops – the hills of Herriot country – where winters can be vicious and shepherds work hard to make a living.
There’s a Broad into Rowbeck, which runs round the green in a circular sweep, then out again by the same road; a sort of circumnavigation that takes all of forty seconds, driving slowly.
The only other way out of the village is by a narrow lane at the top end of the green by the church. That’s where we live. Half a mile further on the lane becomes little more than a track, then peters out. Only the odd farm tractor passes. It’s a nice place to live if you like the back of beyond – which I do.
Dad was doing the evening rounds of the glasshouses when I got back and putting down a saucer of food for the hedgehog that lives in the garden and eats slugs and is worth its weight in gold. Mum said did I want a cup of tea and could I unpack tonight and put out my dirty washing? Mum always washes on Mondays and bakes on Fridays, no matter what. She runs the house like clockwork, with a place for everything and everything in its place. It’s because her star sign is Virgo and she can’t help it. She’s inclined to cuddly plumpness and hasn’t a wrinkle on her face.
Dad came in and remarked that the first of the early spray chrysanths should be ready for cutting in about a week, though we could do with a drop of rain. Only when Mum had poured and we were sitting at the kitchen table did he ask if I’d had a nice weekend.
‘Dad! That house is just beautiful! I’d kill for it!’
‘Out of the way is it, like this place?’
‘Greenleas is secluded; Deer’s Leap is isolated. They get snowed up in winter, but in summer it’s magic. You can look out into forever from the upstairs windows. I’ve never seen such a view. It’s in the Trough of Bowland.’
Dad said he’d never heard of it and I said I wasn’t surprised; that it was as if the people who lived there had conspired through the ages to keep it a secret and out of the reach of incomers. Foreigners, I meant, as in Yorkshire folk and people from further north. ‘You look over to Beacon Fell and Parlick Pike and Fair Oak Fell and it isn’t far from witch country.’
‘There’s no such thing as witches.’ Mum pushed a plate of parkin in my direction.
‘I know that, but it’s so beautiful; sort of breathtaking. Jeannie’s sister is leaving there at the end of the year. It would break my heart if it were me.’
‘Seems as if it’s made an impression on you. You haven’t gone over to the Lancastrians, have you?’
Dad looked a bit put out. The Wars of the Roses may be long over, but in Lancashire and Yorkshire they still keep the feud going, if only over The Cricket.
‘Of course I haven’t, but I’d love to go there again, just for another look. Beth – that’s Jeannie’s sister – has invited me for a goodbye party, sort of. Christmas in a house like that would be wonderful.’
‘So what’s this precious Deer’s Leap like, then?’ Mum sounded a bit piqued because I was making such a fuss over a house I mightn’t even see again and because, I suppose, I could even consider spending Christmas anywhere else but Greenleas.
‘We-e-ll, it’s stone, and tile-roofed. One end of it has a gable end that’s V-shaped and it has three rooms and an attic in it. The middle bit has a huge sitting room, with a terrace outside, and two bedrooms. Then there’s an end bit with a big kitchen and dairy and pantry, and a narrow little staircase off it to three rooms above. I suppose the workers slept up there when it was a farm and they wouldn’t have been allowed to use the main staircase. The windows are stone-mullioned, and all shapes and sizes. From the front it looks as if it’s still in the sixteenth century, though it’s been tarted up at the back. It’s a smaller version of Roughlee Hall, Danny says.’
‘Never heard of that place, either,’ Dad shrugged.
‘Of course you have! Surely you’ve heard of the Pendle Witches. Alice Nutter lived at Roughlee. She was a gentle-woman and how she got mixed up in witchcraft, nobody seems to know. She was hanged on Lancaster Moor in 1612.’
‘And you believe such nonsense?’ Mum clucked. ‘All that stuff is a fairy tale, like Robin Hood.’
‘They don’t seem to think so around those parts.’
‘If they believe that, they’ll believe anything!’ Mum had the last word on witches. ‘And I forgot – Piers rang.’
‘What about?’
‘He didn’t say and I didn’t ask!’
‘Well, he’ll ring again, if it’s important.’
‘Aren’t you going to call him back?’
‘Don’t think so.’ As from this weekend, I’d stopped jumping when Piers snapped his fingers.
Mum put mugs and plates on a tray, wearing her button mouth. She placed great hopes on Piers. He was Yorkshire-born, which was a mark in his favour, and even if he had defected to parts south of the River Trent and was earning a living amongst Londoners, she considered it high time we were married.
‘Think I’ll go and unpack. Then I’ll write to thank Beth. By the way, she was really pleased with the flowers.’
‘So she should be! Your dad grew them!’
‘Won’t be long,’ I smiled. Long enough, though, to let Mum get over whatever wasn’t pleasing her.
I hung the green dress on a hanger, then wondered what to do with the two silk arum lilies, because even to say the words ‘artificial flowers’ is blasphemy in our house. So I stuck them in a drawer because they were a part of the weekend, and I couldn’t bear to throw them away.
I sat back on my heels. To open my case was to let out Deer’s Leap and Jack Hunter and the promise I’d made to Beth and Jeannie to forget him. Yet I couldn’t, because somehow he was a part of that house; was connected to Deer’s Leap in some way, and I had to know how.
Common sense told me to leave it, that ghosts didn’t exist. But Beth had half admitted that maybe they did in the very real, very solid form of a World War Two pilot whose plane had crashed more than fifty years ago. A very attractive man and Piers’s exact opposite.
Piers. I hoped he wouldn’t ring tonight when the spell of Deer’s Leap was still on me. Just to hear him say ‘Cassandra?’ very throatily – he rarely calls me Cassie – would intrude on the magic. For bewitched I was, with the enchantment wrapping me round like a thread of gossamer that couldn’t be broken. One gentle tug on that thread would pull me back there whether I wanted to go or not.
And I wanted to go.
By Monday morning I’d sorted out my priorities. All thoughts of the weekend were banned until after I switched off my word processor. I have to set myself targets. The contract said that Harrier Books wanted the manuscript by the end of December, so it couldn’t be delivered any later than the first week in January, even allowing for the New Year holiday.
I write in my bedroom. There’s a deep alcove in one corner that is big enough to accommodate my desk. My latest extravagance was to hang a curtain over it so that when I’d finished for the day I could pull it across and shut out my work. What I couldn’t see, I figured, I couldn’t worry about. The curtain has proved to be a good idea.
I had just finished reading last Friday’s work and got my mind into gear, when the extension phone on my desk rang. It would, of course, be Jeannie. People had got the message now that up until four in the afternoon it was best not to ring. Only my editor was allowed to disturb my thoughts.
‘Hi!’ I said brightly. ‘You made it home OK, then?’
‘Cassandra?’