with windows flanking a satisfyingly solid red front door. A straight path led up through what must have once been an old-fashioned garden.
That was the good news.
It had been six months since Rachel had seen it last. She’d forgotten the ivy growing up the walls and across the windows – choking the brickwork and stealing the light. She’d forgotten the crazily dangling guttering. She’d forgotten the five-foot-high weeds obliterating the front garden.
She was mad, they’d said. Perhaps she was.
Rachel turned her back on the house and faced its view instead. This was what had sold it. The cottage stood on rising land, some way from the rest of the village of Stoke St Mary and could be reached only by a rutted track. The farmland behind sloped gently upwards, but in front of the house there was nothing but glorious open countryside.
The estate agent had said that spring was when Herefordshire was at its finest. Mr Foster had been a nice old boy, very different from the gelled-up-haired and shiny-suited types in London and she’d dismissed him as eccentric. She’d been wrong. She’d first seen the cottage in October and thought the landscape beautiful then, clothed in crimson and brown. But now, in early April, it was magnificent.
To her right she could see the baldy-smooth Brecon Beacons and beyond the jagged mountains of Wales loomed. Her eyes followed a sweep of hill to where the river valley sank and then rose again towards the east. Isolated houses were dotted about burnt-sienna fields, vast patches of a yellow so vivid it hurt her eyes interspersed ploughed fields and the apple orchards yet to blaze with blossom.
The furniture removers had finally gone. They’d backed the van, in a haze of dust and diesel fumes, down the track that led to the village and the outside world. Rachel felt her shoulders drop and exhaustion creep in. She turned back to scrutinise her new home once again. Behind it, the curving slopes of farmland seduced. Each field, green or red, was shining with fertile promise. Rachel tried not to look at the roof of the cottage; the choking moss and missing tiles were a symphony of neglect and future expense.
Was she mad? Her friends might yet be right. When she’d announced her decision to leave London and set up home in this tiny village in an isolated part of an isolated county they had forecast doom, gloom and a hasty retreat back to ‘civilisation’. No matter how much she tried to persuade them, they all thought it was a mistake.
A cottage?
In where?
On your own?
But Rachel was to be thirty soon. That’s when people made changes, she’d told them, made big, life-changing decisions. That her parents had announced their imminent departure to spend their retirement in the Algarve and had given her a lump sum in advance of her inheritance, had seemed like fate dealing her a hand. It had been the catalyst for change. She’d grown weary of London, anyway, and of the men who just wanted to play games and hurt her in the process. She wanted a simpler life; somewhere she could work uninterrupted. And maybe, just maybe, she would get the chance to become a new person – reinvent herself.
‘But won’t you miss all this?’ Best friend, Jyoti, gestured to the packed cocktail bar they were in. Rachel scanned the crowd. To her it looked full of men on the pull for another empty conquest. It made her queasy. She’d met Charles in a bar like this – and he’d screwed with her head and then cheated on her. If he was typical of London men, she was in no hurry to meet another.
She smiled at Jyoti over her margarita and thought hard before answering. When she’d moved to London as a student, she’d seen every play and gone to every exhibition and museum she could afford. Now she lived in a flat in the dusty suburbs of south-east London and rarely went to the West End. This was the first trip for ages. She simply didn’t feel the need any more.
‘I won’t be that far from Birmingham and I think there’s an arts centre in Ludlow – that’s only half an hour away and Malvern has some good pre-West End things on.’
‘But won’t you be lonely, sweet-pea? You’ll not even be in the actual village itself, will you?’ Kind-eyed Tim was concerned. Secretly so was Rachel, but with her small circle of friends coupling, moving abroad, having babies, Rachel was lonely now and too proud to admit it. She thought she might as well be lonely somewhere beautiful.
So she had sold her little London flat and bought Clematis Cottage. She had been shocked by what little her money would buy, even when it had been swollen by her parents’ gift. She was self-employed too, meaning that a bigger mortgage was difficult. Last year, she had been bumped up the steep track by a Mr Foster of Grant, Foster and Fitch Estate Agents to be shown Clematis Cottage. And she had fallen instantly, irrevocably in love. It had been the biggest decision she had ever made and it might be the biggest mistake. But she was determined to prove everyone wrong, including herself. With hands back on hips in a defiant gesture, she abandoned thinking and looked to the view that had been the deal-maker. She would make a success of this – she knew she would.
She thought back to kindly old Mr Foster’s words. When it had become apparent that she was seriously intent on buying the cottage, the comfortably rotund estate agent had seemed worried.
‘It’s an awful lot of work to be taking on, dear girl.’ He looked doubtfully at her high-heeled suede boots and thin jacket. ‘And with you being on your own. You’ll have a survey done, I expect?’
‘Erm, I don’t know,’ Rachel had said, feeling foolish, ‘It might put me off.’
Mr Foster gave her a steely look and sighed. ‘Here,’ he scribbled something on the back of his business card. ‘It’s the number of Mike Llewellyn. He’s a builder, but he’ll turn his hand to most things. He lives in the village and he knows the house. He’s not the cheapest, but he’s reliable and he does a good job.’
Rachel had thanked him and stored the card away in her bag. In the months since she’d last seen it, the cottage had taken on an unrealistically romantic air in her mind and she had forgotten just how much work it needed. She was glad she’d kept the number.
Brought back to the present by some crows flying overhead, cawing as they went, she closed her eyes and listened for a moment. Those who claimed that the countryside was silent were lying, but it was certainly peaceful. The air was full of sound. She could hear birds; she recognised a blackbird’s melodious tune, somewhere in the distance there was a tractor gearing up and nearer, the noisy lowing of cows. The wind got up and she could hear it making the trees on the hill behind the cottage shiver. It made a change from emergency sirens and the incessantly thumping bass from her London neighbour. The breeze lifted her hair and cooled her neck. She was glad; it had been a warm day to be moving house. All in all it had gone smoothly. True, she hadn’t got her washing machine plumbed in, she was without a landline and couldn’t coax the boiler into life, but the removal men had been hard-working, cheerful and nothing had been broken.
That she knew of.
They had been surprisingly good company, but she had wanted them gone long before the day was out. She flexed her tense shoulders, glad to be, at last, completely on her own.
Rachel tore herself away from the view and turned to explore her new home. As she did, she caught sight of a man striding up the rough track. To her intense irritation he stopped when he got to her and joined in her examination of the cottage.
‘You do need me. Mr Foster was right.’
Rachel stared at him. Her first impression was of gold and brown. He had longish hair, burnished treacle by the sun and tied
