Authors: Linda Gillard
‘
Mum?
... Is something wrong?’ she asked, frowning. ‘Where’s Connor?’
‘He’s still here,’ Phoebe said, pointing towards the door.
‘I was about to put your fish pie in the oven,’ he said, approaching the bed again, glad to see recognition and relief in Ann’s eyes.
‘We can all have a lovely midnight feast!’ Phoebe announced with a fixed smile.
Ann looked from Phoebe to Connor and said, ‘What happened in the wood?’
‘Tonight?’ he asked.
‘No. Forty years ago.’
‘Phoebe will explain. I’ll be downstairs if you need me.’
He closed the door behind him and began to descend the stairs. Glancing at his watch, he saw it was almost 2.00am. Still a long time till dawn, but at first light he would go up to the beech wood and take down the swing before Ann had a chance to set eyes on it again.
ANN
By the time Ann arrived at the clearing in the beech wood Connor had already taken down the swing. She stood at a distance, watching him, trying to remember what life was like before yesterday; before Connor rang the doorbell on a rainy January morning and asked to view the house; before he’d come to seem so very necessary in her life. She couldn’t remember that time. There was only now.
She walked on towards him, stepping carefully on the mossy ground, heavy with dew. She made no noise, but he looked up, suddenly alert. Winding long pieces of rope round the swing seat, he said, ‘You’re up. How are you feeling?’
‘Very strange. Fish pie for breakfast was a new experience. It tasted surprisingly good.’
‘You can’t beat home-made.’
As he bundled the seat into a holdall, Ann said, ‘No, don’t. Show me. I’d like to see it.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. Phoebe said you borrowed one of my books on William Morris.’
‘For the decoration. I know you love what he does with plants.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Phoebe said. She explained about the Morris room. How he was your hero.’
She smiled. ‘You like Phoebe, don’t you?’
‘I think I love Phoebe.’ He held Ann’s eyes. ‘But not as much as I love you.’
She said nothing and looked down. When she felt able to speak, she said, ‘Show me what you made.’
He unravelled the ropes again and displayed the wooden seat. A pattern of carved beech leaves curled around the edge and in the centre it said
Ann de Freitas 2015.
‘I wanted to make something to remind you of the time we spent here. And I’m not really up to making garden benches.’
She traced the shape of a leaf with her finger. ‘It’s beautiful, Connor. Such a thoughtful present. Thank you’
‘I didn’t know—’
‘No, of course you didn’t.’
‘And I wanted to give you something that would last.’
She looked up into his face. ‘Oh, believe me, you have… If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like you to hang the swing back up for me. It belongs here.’
‘No trouble at all.’
He bent to put to the seat down. As he straightened up, Ann put her arms round his waist and laid her head down on his chest. He folded her in his arms and they stood in silence until she said, ‘Phoebe always said he loved us. She insisted on that. I suppose that love just wasn’t enough.’
‘If you’re very ill, sometimes it’s not. My Dad didn’t love me enough to stop drinking.’
‘She talked about him recently. Sylvester. I’d brought the subject up. I said I wondered if he ever thought of me, the way I often think about him. She said something rather odd. It seems even odder now that I know.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She said, “I’m absolutely convinced, wherever he is now, your welfare still matters to him”.’
‘I think she believes that.’
‘Do you?... I wish I could.’
‘You could try. Can’t do any harm, can it?’
‘No, I suppose not.’
She laid her head down again and they listened to the silence of the beech wood until Connor whispered, ‘Could you use some coffee? Let me make you some.’
‘That would be nice.’
He took her hand and they walked through the wood, past the laughing Green Woman, into the spring sunlight.
Connor looked up at the cloudless sky and said, ‘It’s going to be fine.’
‘Yes,’ Ann replied. ‘I think it is.’
THE BEECH WOOD
She has remembered what she saw long ago, what she found. There was a dark place in the wood and in her heart, a place that held secrets. Now nothing is hidden. Now she can grieve. Forgive. Love. Her life is full.
We, who have lived long, have borne witness to these things.
Were we human, we should rejoice.
Were we human, we should weep to see what we have seen, see what we see.
~~~~~
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank the following people for their help and support in the writing of this book: Tina Betts, Clare Cooper, Amanda Fairclough, Lorna Fergusson, Margaret Gillard, Amy Glover, Philip Glover, David J. Hogg, Bill Marshall, Erica Munro, Joanne Phillips, Sally Salmon and Katherine Wren.
I would also like to thank the staff of the National Trust at Tyntesfield, Somerset.
~~~
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~~~
Also by Linda Gillard
HOUSE OF SILENCE
Selected by Amazon for
Editor’s Pick Top Ten
BEST OF 2011.
(Indie Author category.)
Orphaned by drink, drugs and rock’n’roll, Gwen Rowland is invited to spend Christmas at her boyfriend Alfie's family home, Creake Hall – a ramshackle Tudor manor in Norfolk. Soon after she arrives, Gwen senses something isn't quite right. Alfie acts strangely towards his family and is reluctant to talk about the past. His mother, a celebrated children's author, keeps to her room, living in a twilight world, unable to distinguish between past and present, fact and fiction.
When Gwen discovers fragments of forgotten family letters sewn into an old patchwork quilt, she starts to piece together the jigsaw of the past and realises there's more to the family history than she's been told. It seems there are things people don’t want her to know. And one of those people is Alfie…
~
EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY
Short-listed for the WAVERTON GOOD READ AWARD 2006
A passionate, off-beat love story set on the bleak and beautiful island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides.
Rose Leonard is on the run from her life. Haunted by her turbulent past, she takes refuge in a remote Hebridean island community where she cocoons herself in work, silence and solitude in a house by the sea. A new life and new love are offered by friends, her estranged daughter and most of all by Calum, a fragile younger man who has his own demons to exorcise. But does Rose, with her tenuous hold on sanity, have the courage to say “Yes” to life and put her past behind her?...
~
STAR GAZING
Short-listed for
Romantic Novel of the Year 2009
and
The Robin Jenkins Literary Award
, the UK’s first environmental book award.
Blind since birth, widowed in her twenties, now lonely in her forties, Marianne Fraser lives in Edinburgh in elegant, angry anonymity with her sister, Louisa, a successful novelist. Marianne's passionate nature finds expression in music, a love she finds she shares with Keir, a man she encounters on her doorstep one winter’s night.
Keir makes no concession to her condition. He’s abrupt to the point of rudeness, yet oddly kind. But can Marianne trust her feelings for this reclusive stranger who wants to take a blind woman to his island home on Skye, to “show her the stars”?...
~
UNTYING THE KNOT
Marrying a war hero was a big mistake. So was divorcing him.
A wife is meant to stand by her man. Especially an army wife. But Fay didn’t. She walked away – from Magnus, her traumatised war hero husband and from the home he was restoring: Tullibardine Tower, a ruined 16th-century tower house on a Perthshire hillside.
Now their daughter Emily is getting married. But she’s marrying someone she shouldn’t.
And so is Magnus...
~
A LIFETIME BURNING
A BOUQUET OF BARBED WIRE meets THE FORSYTE SAGA in this powerful
and haunting novel spanning the 20th century.
Flora Dunbar is dead. But it isn’t over.
The spectre at the funeral is Flora herself, unobserved by her grieving family and the four men who loved her. Looking back over a turbulent lifetime, Flora recalls an eccentric childhood lived in the shadow of her musical twin, Rory; early marriage to Hugh, a handsome clergyman twice her age; motherhood, which brought her Theo, the son she couldn’t love; middle age, when she finally found brief happiness in a scandalous affair with her nephew, Colin.
“There has been much love in this family – some would say too much – and not a little hate. If you asked my sister-in-law, Grace why she hated me, she’d say it was because I seduced her precious firstborn, then tossed him on to the sizeable scrap heap marked ‘Flora’s ex-lovers’. But she’d be lying. That isn’t why Grace hated me. Ask my brother Rory.”
~
THE GLASS GUARDIAN
Ruth Travers has lost a lover, both parents and her job. Now she thinks she might be losing her mind.
When death strikes again, Ruth finds herself the owner of a dilapidated Victorian house on the Isle of Skye:
Tigh na Linne
, the summer home she shared as a child with her beloved Aunt Janet, the woman she’d regarded as a mother. As Ruth prepares to put the old house up for sale, she discovers she’s not the only occupant. Worse, she suspects she might be falling in love.
With a man who died almost a hundred years ago.
~
CAULDSTANE
A gothic novel in the tradition of Daphne du Maurier, Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt.
“If you live in fear, you fear to live.”
When ghost writer Jenny Ryan is summoned to the Scottish Highlands by Sholto MacNab – retired adventurer and Laird of Cauldstane Castle – she’s prepared for travellers’ tales, but not the MacNabs’ violent and tragic history.
Lust, betrayal and murder have blighted family fortunes for generations, together with an ancient curse. As the MacNabs confide their sins and their secrets, Jenny learns why Cauldstane’s uncertain future divides father and sons.
But someone resents Jenny’s presence. Someone thinks she’s getting too close to Alec MacNab – swordsmith, widower and heir to Cauldstane. Someone who will stop at nothing until Jenny has been driven away. Or driven mad.
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
Especially a dead woman.
~~~