‘OH, WHAT—?’
All Georgia could see in the atrocious conditions were snaking brake lights, and she feathered the brake pedal, glad she’d left a huge gap between her and the car in front.
It slithered to a halt, and she put on her hazard flashers and pulled up cautiously behind it, trying to see why they’d stopped, but visibility was minimal. Even though it was technically still daylight, she could scarcely see a thing through the driving snow.
And the radio hadn’t been any help—plenty of talk about the snow arriving earlier than predicted, but no traffic information about any local holdups. Just Chris Rea, singing cheerfully about driving home for Christmas while the fine, granular snow clogged her wipers and made it next to impossible to see where she was going.
Not that they’d been going anywhere fast. The traffic had been moving slower and slower for the last few minutes because of the appalling visibility, and now it had come to a complete grinding halt. She’d been singing along with all the old classics as the weather worsened, crushing the steadily rising panic and trying to pretend that it was all going to be OK. Obviously her crazy, reckless optimism hard at work as usual. When would she learn?
Then the snow eased fleetingly and she glimpsed the tail lights of umpteen cars stretching away into the distance. Far beyond them, barely discernible in the pale gloom, a faint strobe of blue sliced through the falling snow.
More blue lights came from behind, travelling down the other side of the road and overtaking the queue of traffic, and it dawned on her that nothing had come towards them for some minutes. Her heart sank as the police car went past and the flashing blue lights disappeared, swallowed up by the blizzard.
OK, so something serious had happened, but she couldn’t afford to sit here and wait for the emergency services to sort it out with the weather going downhill so quickly. If she wasn’t careful she’d end up stranded, and she was so nearly home, just five or six miles to go. So near, and yet so far.
The snow swirled around them again, picking up speed, and she bit her lip. There was another route—a narrow lane she knew only too well. A lane that she’d used often as a short cut, but she’d been avoiding it, and not only because of the snow—
‘Why we stop, Mummy?’
She glanced in the rear-view mirror and met her son’s eyes. ‘Somebody’s car’s broken down,’ she said. Or hit another car, but she wasn’t going to frighten a two-year-old. She hesitated. She was deeply reluctant to use the lane, but realistically she was all out of options.
Making the only decision she could, she smiled brightly at Josh and crossed her fingers. ‘It’s OK, we’ll go another way. We’ll soon be at Grannie and Grandpa’s.’
His face fell, tugging her heartstrings. ‘G’annie now. I hungry.’
‘Yeah, me, too, Josh. We won’t be long.’
She turned the car, feeling it slither as she pulled away across the road and headed back the way she’d come. Yikes. The roads were truly lethal and they weren’t going to get any better as more people drove on them and compacted the snow.
As she turned onto the little lane, she could feel her heart rate pick up. The snow was swirling wildly around the car, almost blinding her, and even when it eased for a second the verges were almost obliterated.
This wasn’t supposed to be happening yet! Not until tonight, after they were safely tucked up with her parents, warm and dry and well-fed. Not out in the wilds of the countryside, on a narrow lane that went from nowhere to nowhere else. If only she’d left earlier...
She checked her mobile phone and groaned. No signal. Fabulous. She’d better not get stuck, then. She put the useless phone away, sucked in a deep breath and kept on driving, inching cautiously along.
Too cautiously. The howling wind was blowing the snow straight off the field to her right and the narrow lane would soon be blocked. If she didn’t hurry, she wasn’t going to get along here at all, she realised, and she swallowed hard and put her foot down a little. At least in the fresh snow she had a bit more traction, and she wasn’t likely to meet someone coming the other way. She only had half a mile at the most to go before she hit the other road. She could do it. She could...
A high brick wall loomed into view on the left, rippling in and out like a ribbon, the snow plastered to it like frosting on a Christmas cake, and she felt a surge of relief.
Almost there now. The ancient crinkle crankle wall ran alongside the lane nearly to the end. It would give her a vague idea of where the road was, if nothing else, and all she had to do was follow it to the bigger, better road which would hopefully be clear.
And halfway along the wall—there it was, looming out of the blizzard, the gateway to a hidden world. The walls curved in on both sides of the imposing entrance, rising up to a pair of massive brick piers topped with stone gryphons, and between them hung the huge, ornate iron gates that didn’t shut.
Except that today they were firmly shut.
They’d been painted, too, and they weren’t wonky any more, she realised as she slowed to a halt. They’d always hung at a crazy angle, open just enough to squirm through, and that gap had been so enticing to an adventurous young girl out for a bike ride with her equally reckless older brother.
The gryphons guarding the entrance had scared them, mythical beasts with the heads and wings of eagles and the bodies of lions, their talons slashing the air as they reared up, but the gap had lured them in, and inside the wall they’d found a secret adventure playground beyond their wildest imaginings. Acres of garden run wild, with hidden rooms and open spaces, vast spreading trees and a million places to hide.
And in the middle of it all, the jewel in the crown, sat the most beautiful house she’d ever seen. A huge front door with a semi-circular fanlight over it was tucked under a pillared portico that sat exactly in the centre of the house, surrounded perfectly symmetrically by nine slender, elegant sash windows.
Not that you could see all the windows. Half of them were covered in wisteria, cloaking the front and invading the roof, and the scent from the flowers, hanging delicately like bunches of pale lilac grapes against the creamy bricks, had been intoxicating.
It had been empty for years; with their hearts in their mouths, she and Jack had found a way inside through the cellar window and tiptoed round the echoing rooms with their faded grandeur, scaring each other half to death with ghost stories about the people who might have lived and loved and died there, and she’d fallen head over heels in love with it.
And then years later, when her brother had started to hang out with Sebastian, she’d taken him there, too. He’d come over to their house one day to see Jack but he’d been out, so they’d gone out for a bike ride instead. His idea, and she’d jumped at it, and they’d ended up here.
It had been their first ‘date’, not really a date at all but near enough for her infatuated sixteen-year-old self, and she’d dragged him inside the still-empty house just as she had her brother.
Like her, he’d been fascinated by it. They’d explored every inch of it, tried to imagine what it would have been like to live there in its hey-day. What it would be like to live there now. They’d even fantasised about the furnishings—a dining table so long you could hardly see the person at the other end, a Steinway grand in what had to have been the music room and, in the master bedroom, a huge four-poster bed.
In her own private fantasy, that bed had been big enough for them and all their children to pile into for a cuddle. And there’d be lots of them, the foundation of a whole dynasty. They’d fill the house with children, all of them