Revenge in the Cotswolds (2 page)

Daglingworth was as pretty as a hundred other little Cotswold settlements. Built around the intersection of two insignificant little roads, it enjoyed a peace and quiet that undoubtedly elevated the property values. The map clearly showed how the modern A417 had replaced older routes to Cirencester, with Daglingworth most likely a point of some importance at some long-gone time. But now the little lanes led nowhere but to other secluded villages or simply formed loops back to the big main road. The starting point of the footpath was somewhere close to the Fosters’ house, and she scanned the lane for a sign. Back towards the centre of the village was an elevated path running alongside the road, presumably constructed in order to keep pedestrians and their dogs clear of any traffic. The houses in view were mostly discreet stone cottages, the colours showing their age.

Peering at the map, she concluded that the path she wanted was adjacent to the old school a little way further down to the right. She set off that way, and found she’d guessed correctly. Pausing to inspect the converted school, she drifted back in time to when it would have rung out with childish voices and a summoning bell. Now it seemed to have become a single dwelling, boasting very generous living space. ‘All right for some,’ she muttered.

A grassy lane presented itself, running in roughly the expected direction, but with no official indication that it was a public path. ‘Must be right,’ said Thea and let the dog off the lead. Hepzie ran ahead a little way and they proceeded comfortably along, enjoying the sunshine and listening to birdsong. The gradient was just enough to make her aware of her breathing. ‘Not as fit as I should be,’ she sighed. Perhaps if she did this walk every other day, she would notice an improvement.

The lane itself was interesting, and she wondered whether it had once been a well-used thoroughfare. It was hard underfoot even after a muddy winter, and was just wide enough for tractors and cars to traverse if necessary. It crossed the little road on which she had driven into the village a few hours earlier and headed for Itlay, which turned out to be almost too small a place to justify a name of its own. The view became more open and traffic was audible. The uphill slope had levelled out, much to her relief.

Hepzie seemed safe enough running free, and the absence of an eager dog pulling at her arm made it easier to pursue her own thoughts. Thoughts which tended towards Drew, as if to a magnet. Drew’s cool, gentle hands; his attentive grey eyes; his easy charm and boyish humour – five years Thea’s junior, he did strike her as inescapably boyish. Falling in love had not embarrassed Drew as much as it had Thea. She had still not disclosed the full extent of her feelings to her daughter, nor to any other relatives. The truth was leaking out, bit by bit, but nothing had actually been said to them. Since the dramatic events around Christmas, less than three months earlier,
love
had been a word she and Drew had used a lot, but only in private between themselves.

The future didn’t worry them. ‘No need to decide anything irrevocable,’ said Drew, if the subject arose. She assumed that they intended to set up home together at some point, whilst knowing it had to be delicately arranged. She was not in any rush to take the role of stepmother to Stephanie and Timmy. Motherhood had never entirely suited her, even with her own child.

Before she knew it, there was a large square tunnel before her, and Hepzie was yapping at something inside it, the sound echoing and reverberating alarmingly. The dog herself was bewildered by the noise she was making and quickly fell silent. The squirrel she had spotted made a rapid escape and Thea joined the spaniel under the westbound carriageway of the A417.

‘Come on, silly,’ she said, quelling the urge to yodel and enjoy making her own echoes.

A second tunnel was a few yards ahead, and then they emerged onto another lane, with a dramatic and unexpected sight to the right. Through the spindly bare trees, a huge stone quarry fell away below them. Massive chunks of yellow rock were lined up and giant diggers sat waiting to be activated. Such an industrial scene was entirely alien in this soft self-indulgent region – and yet Thea had been aware all along that the lovely stone houses had been built from material dug out of the ground on their very doorstep.

There were quarries galore throughout the Cotswolds. Her map showed them on all sides. And yet this one was simply marked with a few discreet squiggles that only then did she interpret as suggesting stones. She recalled a road sign saying ‘Daglingworth Quarry’ and concluded that this enormous hole in the ground was the site it referred to.

A minute or two more walking brought her to a specific viewing spot, with a fence and chippings of yellow stone to stand on. She stood and peered over, wondering how many feet above the quarry floor she must be. Too many for comfort, as a nearby sign warned. You certainly wouldn’t want to fall that far. She glanced around for Hepzibah, hoping the dog wouldn’t find a hole in the fence and go bouncing down the rock face. Her pet was close by and met her eye with a reassuring wag, as if to say,
I wouldn’t be such a fool as that
.

They wandered on and exactly as the map predicted, the lane soon emerged onto a proper road, which was apparently part of ‘The Welsh Way’. Somewhere there should be a stile into a field on the left, a dotted red line showing a direct path to Bagendon’s Upper End. ‘Not far now,’ said Thea. The quarry was on her right, shielded by trees, and she soon forgot all about it.

A footpath sign confirmed her map-reading skill, albeit standing in the middle of a thicket of brambles that was impassable even in early spring. ‘Huh!’ Thea complained. ‘How do we get through that?’

Hepzie sniffed the ground, and trotted a few yards along the road. She then veered to the left, and jumped onto a pile of stones. Following her, Thea realised that this was the way into the field – not a stile, but a gap in an old wall, which you could simply step through. ‘Okay,’ she murmured.

A very faint path showed in the grass of the field, which sloped gently down to a strip of woodland. No further signs could be seen, but there was no alternative to entering the wood and finding a way through. Hesitantly, with another close examination of the map, she stepped beneath the leafless trees. Just to her left, two large upright square stones showed where shepherds of a century and more – probably a lot more – ago had built a permanent barrier to exclude or contain their sheep. She wished Drew had been there to see them with her. Such small indications of long-ago human activity always delighted them both.

Hepzie’s yapping drew her attention to people sitting amongst the trees on the horizontal trunk of a fallen birch or ash. They were talking intently together, and took almost no notice of Thea and her dog, apart from a visible flicker of irritation. Two young women were perched there, eating bread and swigging from a wine bottle. The conversation was obviously too absorbing to allow anything to interrupt.

‘He’ll get around to it in his own good time,’ said one. To Thea’s interested gaze, she appeared to be somewhere in her mid twenties, with hair rolled up and tucked inside a woolly hat. Long flexible limbs, straight back and high ringing voice.

‘That’s not good enough, though, is it?’ replied her companion. ‘Nella’s going mad, waiting for him to get his act together. And you can’t blame her. It’s been
ages
now.’

‘Less than six months. Loads of couples stay engaged for years without fixing a wedding date. I don’t know why she’s in such a rush.’

‘She wants a proper old-fashioned wedding, that’s why. And it can take a year to arrange it all. She thinks she’ll be middle-aged before they get around to it, at this rate.’ The second speaker was shorter, plumper and younger than her friend. She had a peaches-and-cream complexion and fair hair.

Thea knew she was expected to simply keep walking past them, but two things stopped her. One was that she genuinely wasn’t certain as to where the path had
gone. There were narrow ways going off in at least three directions, and she could not see where any of them led. The trees might be bare but they were close together, screening anything further than a few yards away.

The other reason was that she felt it rude of the twosome to ignore her so completely. She wanted them to acknowledge her, to be friendly and interested. So she simply stood there, looking at them, waiting for a pause in which she might ask the way.

The conversation continued in the same vein for another minute or two – the hesitant fiancé, the increasingly frustrated would-be bride, each with a defender. Thea found herself siding with the younger girl who favoured a quick wedding, despite an irritation with the idea that it would take a year in the planning.
Just tell them to get on with it
, she wanted to call out. One lesson she had learnt was that delay was seldom a good idea. You never knew what might happen to snatch away your security and well-being. If the engaged couple really loved each other, they should sweep aside all doubts and grab every available moment together.

And then she quietly tutted at her own maudlin thoughts. After all, she and Drew were at a standstill in their own relationship. Undue haste could be just as bad as a moderate delay. Perhaps there were good reasons for this man to take it slowly.

In the end, Hepzie took the initiative and decided to introduce herself to the two women ahead, and
ran between them, with complicated results when she tried to jump up at the longer pair of legs, stretched out from the tree trunk. Always awkwardly balanced, the spaniel twisted and landed back on the leaf-strewn ground with a squeak.

‘Good heavens!’ snapped the girl. ‘What on earth are you trying to do?’ She looked directly at Thea for the first time. ‘Is this yours?’

Silly question, thought Thea. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘This is Hepzie. She thinks it’s time she made friends with you.’

The interruption was plainly unwelcome, though more by the older person than her friend. The two seemed to be at least five years apart in age, Thea judged. The younger one was perhaps only about nineteen. She had a pretty mouth and grubby jeans. She laughed and bent down to play with the spaniel’s long ears. ‘Hello, Hepzie,’ she said. ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Tiffany.’

‘And I’m Sophie,’ said the other one, considerably less enamoured of the dog.

Thea seized the chance for a bit of information exchange. ‘I’m Thea Osborne. I’m house-sitting in Daglingworth, and thought we’d go for a good walk. Bagendon’s just down there, isn’t it?’ She pronounced it with a hard g, as seemed the obvious way to say it.

‘It’s Ba
jen
don, actually. Soft “g”. Not that there’s much to it,’ said Sophie, with a little sigh. ‘Where do you live normally?’

Thea repeated the village name to herself, recalling
that Mrs Foster had also said it with the ‘g’ sounding like a ‘j’. ‘Witney,’ she answered. ‘But I’ve done a lot of house-sitting in the Cotswolds. I like to explore these tiny villages – especially the ones nobody’s heard of. I was in Hampnett a year or so ago. Nothing could be smaller than that. Except possibly Itlay,’ she added, with a backward look towards the place she had recently passed.

‘Hmm.’ The scrutiny Thea was receiving reinforced her assessment of this Sophie woman as decidedly rude. ‘You value the countryside, then, do you?’

‘Pardon?’

‘You must be aware of the threats to it from all sides. Wind farms, hunting ban, barn conversions, badger culls, fracking, new roads, gated communities…’ The list seemed set to continue, but Tiffany interrupted.

‘Steady on, Soph,’ she laughed. ‘You’re sounding like a crackpot.’

Sophie frowned, but said nothing more. Thea sensed something unexpected and made no move to walk on. ‘That’s a lot of threats,’ she remarked. ‘I agree about badger culls and wind farms – but I can’t believe they’d put any up around here.’

‘Nowhere’s sacred. The whole thing has become so totally corrupt, you can’t rely on anyone. They say one thing and do another. Broken promises as far as the eye can see. And as fast as you see off one lot of developers, there’s two more popping up. All you can do is go to the source.’

‘
Sophie
,’ begged her young friend.

‘How would you ever be able to do that?’ Thea was intrigued. ‘Even if you change the government, things won’t alter very much. Nobody’s going to lift the ban on hunting, for a start.’ She was struggling to devise a unifying theme to Sophie’s list of outrages. ‘Besides, since when was hunting so good for the countryside? Don’t they break fences and make holes in hedges? All those thundering great horses churning up the fields, as well.’ Personally, she had never felt much sympathy for the practice.

‘You have to undermine them at the roots.’

‘Gosh.’ It sounded almost frighteningly serious, the way she said it. ‘Nothing short of revolution, eh?’

‘Ignore her,’ said Tiffany. ‘It’s nothing like that at all. We just want to look after things like landscape and heritage, don’t we? And the badger cull’s barbaric, obviously.’

‘We?’ Thea was quick to ask. ‘Just you two, or a whole lot of friends and workmates as well?’

‘There’s a lot of us,’ Tiffany began. ‘Students, and loads of others.’

‘I’m not a student,’ Sophie said, as if the idea were demeaning.

‘No, you’re not,’ her friend agreed peaceably.

Thea’s unspoken enquiry as to what she was then went unanswered.

‘Come on, Sophie, we need to get a move on,’ Tiffany urged. ‘Nella’s going to be waiting for us.’ She
and her friend stood up, brushing at their legs, and in unspoken accord, all three trod the obscure footpath in single file. ‘It’s this way,’ said Tiffany superfluously. ‘It comes out in a field just over there.’

‘The badger cull is appalling,’ Thea said. ‘You would think they could find a better way. All those experts and scientists ought to come up with something.’

‘“Experts and scientists”!’ scoffed Sophie. ‘Just a lot of self-interested idiots, that’s all
they
are.’

If Thea hadn’t heard the woman sounding perfectly sensible ten minutes earlier, when discussing their friend Nella, she would have begun to wonder about her sanity. As it was, she was rapidly concluding that Sophie was obsessive and unbalanced, at the very least.