on your travels?’
‘He’s in the greenhouse,’ Hanna informed her, going to write on the calendar in green crayon while crunching into a carrot. They each had their own colours for the calendar, although they did get mixed up from time to time, which could be hilarious when they discovered that Jack was down for Brownies at six, or David was going for a leg wax on Wednesday morning after dropping himself off at the town hall.
It was much later that evening, as a thunderstorm racketed about outside cracking apart the heavens and sending switch lightning across the fields, that the whole family was in the kitchen with the windows and stable door wide open to let in the cooling air. Having finished their current favourite, spaghetti bolognese with lashings of Parmesan on the top, the children were now tucking into second helpings of another of Grandpa’s specials, plum crumble made with their very own fruit – picked by Josh and Perry, with fresh cream courtesy of Giles’s dairy herd.
Full to bursting, Shelley kicked back to enjoy the last of Kat’s home-made elderflower wine before starting the clearing up. She’d have help from Nate and Kat who’d brought Perry over for tea as they often did, while David, when he’d finished his own wine, would no doubt take off to inspect what havoc the storm had wreaked on his precious raised beds. Jack, she remembered, was planning to go out with Josh to try to put a dear little owlet back into the nest it had tumbled from. (Josh had tried to do it himself after discovering the owlet on one of his rambles, but he hadn’t been able to climb high enough on his own.)
For the moment, Jack was flicking idly through the mail she’d sorted for him earlier, while chatting with Nate about their cricket team’s fixture at the weekend. When he came to a stop she knew he’d reached the request from Sir Humphrey. His eyes came straight to hers, and the roguishness of his smile made her forgive him for calling her Ma Larkin when he’d come in for tea.
‘Are you going to answer it?’ she asked.
Nate regarded them questioningly.
Passing him the letter, Jack said, ‘We’ll send him our usual Oscar Wilde quote,’ and Shelley laughed. ‘The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable’, with Jack’s usual addition of a blunt ‘No’, or ‘Keep your bloody progeny orf my land’, or ‘Pick on someone your own size’.
‘He’ll no doubt do the same as he does every year,’ Nate declared, handing the letter to Kat, ‘clog up the roads around us with hunt vehicles, let the hounds loose in our garden before they set off, and leave us to clear up the shit.’
David said in a fatherly scold to his sons, ‘They’re such an unpleasant family, those Bleasdales, that I worry about the way you antagonize them.’
‘So you want us to make friends with them?’ Jack asked, clearly more intrigued by the idea than surprised.
‘His wife, Jemmie, is adorable,’ Shelley put in, ‘so it’s not the whole family. And their younger son – I forget his name – is quite different from those ghastly twins, or so they say, I’ve never met him myself. And their daughter, Fiona, is just like her mother.’
Nate’s expression showed distaste. ‘If the younger son is the hothead who blasted me off the road the other day in his souped-up sports car, and I’m sure he is, then I’m here to tell you that he’s very much like the other males in his family.’
Letting it go, Shelley began clearing the table, while Jack and Josh went to return the owlet to the nest it had fallen from and the others peeled away to various parts of the house. Finally, just before dusk, with the rescue mission complete and the children getting ready for bed, Shelley and Jack put on their wellies and wandered into the sparkling wet fields to watch the artful Dodgy rounding up his sheep. It was rare for them to manage some time together without the children running and yelling around them, demanding attention, falling out of trees, getting stuck in hedges, and generally shattering the peace. Now, being just the two of them, they let the sounds of nature wash over them as they walked hand in hand through buttercups and clover and felt at one with Deerwood and all the beauty – and challenges – it had brought to their lives. They gazed out at the distant earthworks of an old hilltop fort far away on the southern horizon, and on to the ancient forest that bordered their land to the east where it was said Bonnie Prince Charlie had once hidden from the Redcoats, and on to the undulating patchwork of fields that stretched out around them as far as the eye could see.
At a kissing gate they took a moment to honour its tradition, then turned back to check on Dodgy’s progress, impressed and enchanted as always by how swiftly and efficiently he tended his flock.
‘So what are you going to do about Bleasdale’s letter?’ Shelley asked, turning her eyes skywards to where a hot-air balloon was going over.
‘Same as always,’ he replied, waving out to the balloon’s passengers. ‘I’ll send a polite note back explaining that if I want to get rid of a fox I’ll shoot it, clean and quick. Same goes for deer and rabbits.’
Although she knew very well that as a vet, as well as a compassionate human being, the last thing he’d ever be into was the torturing and terrorizing of animals, she still felt a surge of pride every time he confirmed it. They might not be quite as daft or romantically soppy as Ma and Pop Larkin, but there was no doubt in her mind that they were every bit as much in love.
As the heat of August drained away into the cooler and shorter days of September, and their finances stopped adding up, Shelley began to notice a change in Jack. She understood that he was worried about how they were going to keep the farm going when their savings ran out, but there was more doubt or concern exercising him than that. She could sense it, even though he steadfastly denied it.
‘We’ve always shared everything,’ she reminded him one night after he’d returned from a late shift at the surgery and they sat down to enjoy a drink together.
‘We still do,’ he responded, ‘unless you’re hiding something from me.’
Though his tease made her smile, and she felt reassured by the way he added, ‘We’ll sort everything out with this place, I hope you know that,’ she still couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that something else was on his mind.
A few days later she cornered him in the barn. ‘Something’s going on between you and the Bleasdales,’ she accused. ‘Don’t deny it, because I know when things aren’t right with you.’
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