by Fiona Walker
Petra had barely shrugged off her Cambridge gown and mortar board when she’d had her first novel published and been hailed as a precocious new talent. That novel, written for fun on a six-month placement archiving records in an isolated stately home, had propelled her from junior researcher to bestselling author. In a twenty-year career that had taken her from early critical and commercial success to the less audacious times she was enduring now, Petra had never let go of her dream. It remained her greatest inspiration, the kernel of all her work. Her career as author Petra Shaw and her marriage as wife Petra Gunn might be firmly in retrograde, but she’d never lost the romantic daydream of galloping to Squire Gordon’s aid. The chestnut mare was her confidante and co-conspirator.
Looking down at Compton Magna Stud, reminded afresh of that early inspiration, she fought a desperate urge to jump the golden-stone wall and gallop across the field towards it, whispering, ‘Come on, Beauty!’
‘The Percy family’s notoriously tricky.’ Gill pulled a packet of mints out of her pocket to offer across. ‘I’ve been treating the Captain’s horses for over twenty years and I can count the number of times he’s said, “Thank you,” on one hand, which is five more than his late wife ever gave me.’ Her gaze panned round the poppy-streaked cornfields surrounding them. ‘Selling this land to a big scale agri-magnate like Sanson was just Ann’s style. Whatever Bay did to offend her, he was a marked man.’
‘You really don’t know what happened?’ Petra handed her mint down to the Redhead, whiskery lips lifting it from her palm with the delicacy of a jewel thief.
‘No idea.’ Gill turned as the others caught up at last, horses snorting, hoofs pounding. ‘I was away in Newmarket learning colic surgery. He can’t have been much more than a teenager. Bay’s at least ten years younger than me.’ She gave Petra a penetrating look.
‘You have a toy-boy admirer!’ Bridge grinned at Petra, trying to pull up but the grey shot straight past them, ears flat back.
‘I’m at least ten years younger than Gill!’
‘Seven years and three months.’ Gill was a stickler for detail. ‘D’you know what Bay did that put the Percys’ backs up, Mo?’ she asked, as their friend and her cob lumbered up, both blowing hard.
‘He had a fling with the Captain’s granddaughter, didn’t he?’
‘Definitely not.’ Gill shook her head. ‘Alice married a Petty. They met at Young Farmers when they were fourteen.’
‘The other one. The redhead, Patricia. What was it everyone called her? Pash?’
‘Pax. And I think you’re right. Summer romance. Didn’t last long because she buggered off to work in London. Shame, really. We all thought she’d run the stud one day. She was a blisteringly good rider.’ She gave Petra a crushing look as she lolled on the Redhead with her stirrups kicked out. ‘He could never resist a Lucy Glitters.’
‘Wasn’t she an X Factor finalist?’ asked Bridge, now turning wild circles around them, still hauling on the brakes.
‘It’s a character in a book, a foxhunting glamour girl,’ Petra explained, illogically jealous of the youngest Percy granddaughter and her riding prowess.
‘Bay likes a woman who can take on big Cotswold timber.’ Mo’s chuckles were breathlessly Carry On.
‘Pax was the Captain’s favourite,’ Gill remembered. ‘Best lower leg I ever saw on a horse. Tipped to take over the stud, but sodded off to join an uncle’s architecture firm. Some sort of structural engineer now.’
‘The nuts and bolter!’ Bridge offered Gill, gratified with an explosion of laughter.
‘Not as notorious as her mother, I’ll grant you,’ Mo conceded. ‘They say Ronnie ran off with her lover in a sports car wearing just her bikini.’
‘Wasn’t it her dressing-gown?’ Gill was still wiping her eyes.
Before speculation could be satisfied, Bridge’s pony took exception to something in the cornfield opposite them, this time unstoppable in her panic.
‘Oh, shit, she’s bolting.’ Gill set off in pursuit.
‘That’s exactly what they said about Veronica Percy.’ Mo kicked the fat cob into action and he broke into a steady trot.
Knowing the Redhead was faster than any of them and would catch the pony first, Petra let the brake off and they streaked into action.
*
When Ellis was born, Carly had taken up running to get fit. With Sienna it had been boxercise. With Jackson, her favourite endorphin kick came from off-roading with the double buggy. The three-wheeled colossus was nicknamed ‘Mum’s Truck’ because the first thing Ash had spent a chunk of his eight-year-service bonus on had been a snarling twin-cab pick-up that Ellis called ‘Dad’s Big Truck’. They’d bought the double buggy on Gumtree. It took a toddler in front, and the baby car seat clicked in over the back seat so a newborn could smile as his sweaty mother lugged her weighty child-barrow over the ruts and potholes of the Cotswold Hills, Ellis racing alongside.
After its first few outings, it was clear Ellis couldn’t manage the long walks on foot, so today Carly had left the car seat behind and strapped the baby to her chest. Now the buggy was even heavier to push, the ground wet and slippery from the storm, which made it tough going along the track that led past the allotments and through the woods. It emerged at the highest point of the Compton ridge, the most breath-taking place to admire the view from the Fosse Hills. Here, she could see for miles, her panorama across the Vale of Fosse celestial, a Philadelphia moment in a hard cheese world.
Carly had been fifteen when she’d met Ash in a nightclub, sneaking in with a mate and false ID. She’d been a wisecracker with nerves of steel, hard-knock schooled through her parents’ divorce, which had taken her from army family to awkward baggage for a single mum with a new boyfriend.
She’d known straight away that she wanted to marry the tall, olive-skinned stranger, who looked like a Vampire Diaries heartthrob, his eyes as pale as a husky’s. They’d danced without blinking, bodies getting closer and closer, an hour of hard-core drum ’n’ bass foreplay, until his mates, jeering from the balcony, had finally put them off. Laughing, he’d bought her a drink and done the shouting-over-the-music introductions. He’d told her he was in the Fusiliers. She’d told him she was doing her GCSEs.
He’d put a hand on her arm. ‘I’m afraid, as you’re under age, it’s my duty to accompany you outside.’ On a dark, litter-strewn pavement, he’d kissed her thoroughly, taken her number and put her into a cab home. ‘You’ll thank me for this.’
Gobby daredevil Carly Gibson was lost for words and totally in love.
The text arrived before the taxi even got to the end of the street. When can I take you out for your sixteenth birthday?
Ash was fun-loving, horny, a little wild and definitely one of the lads. He kept it quiet that his father was a Traveller, knowing it would mark him out in a uniform world, his volatility and waywardness already an issue. The life-and-soul, Ash was always on the edge of trouble in the army for poor discipline and rule bending. But he was a brave soldier, who would have laid down his life for his country and his brothers in arms, and thrived on institutional life – like a hound, he needed to run with a pack.
‘I’m a lifer,’ he told Carly, on their first date. ‘They fused my boots to my feet when they put them on.’
They’d got engaged after two years of largely long-distance love, for much of which he was on tour in Iraq at the end of Operation Telic. She wrote him emails almost every day, full of misspelt, horny fantasies and her alien abduction plans for her stepdad, Gary, which made him laugh.
She loved all the uniforms at their wedding, the rowdy speeches, the camaraderie. That day, his two families – now hers – had briefly come together: soldiers and Travellers. His heritage was an old Romany one. Although their customs had long since been dulled by settling down and marrying out, Carly was still aware that she was entering into another world, which she found as strange as the army was comforting.
Carly had adored married life in a garrison town,
back on familiar turf, embracing army-wife friendships, and the brigade of bumps she’d joined when she fell pregnant. She was back where she belonged. Ash doted on their new son. Ellis was so like his father, with those big silver eyes and his graze of black hair; Sienna followed eighteen months later while Ash was still serving in Afghanistan.
Carly was a loving wife, a plain speaker and close collaborator, yet she’d suffered from post-natal depression after both births, terrifying disconnects from her new-born babies which she’d battled to overcome with the help of her mother, friends and her GP. She’d kept it from Ash, the battle in her head tiny by comparison to that of a world in conflict.
When Ash came back from Afghanistan, that sense of unfamiliarity had returned, disconcerting and disorienting. Only it was Ash who was the stranger. Something had changed him from her laughing, daredevil, sexy-as-hell husband to a man who could barely look her in the eye, who woke up every night drenched in sweat, whose hands shook so much sometimes that he couldn’t pick things up or type a text.
He insisted he was fine. Some of the other lads had come out of it much worse, he snapped. He was just tired. He had a week’s leave and they went away to their favourite holiday park. He stared out to a grey sea for hours on end.
‘How would you feel if I left the army?’
‘Like crying,’ she said honestly.
He didn’t mention it again. They made sandcastles with Ellis, hoods turning inside out in the wind, gave Sienna her first ice-cream. Ash talked properly for the first time about his childhood, part of a big extended family growing up in the beautiful Cotswold village he’d taken her to not long before they’d married. He made his early years there sound idyllic – all apple-scrumping, hay-making and gypsy fairs, although she knew from previous conversations that he’d been bored rigid and had got into a lot of trouble.
Back at barracks, army life went on. Ash seemed to relax into the familiar routine, still subdued but more like his old self. He still woke up trembling sometimes, but he and Carly found sex a great cure for that. Jackson had been conceived when Sienna was barely a year old. When his unit went away on a training exercise to Brunei, they’d Skyped with silly conversations and laughter like the old days.
When he got back, they visited his family in Compton Bagot in the Cotswolds. The Turners’ long-standing hold over the Orchard Estate made them unofficial village clan leaders. They had spread through the estate since the early seventies when Ash’s Traveller grandparents, Norm and Betty Turner, and their four children had been rehoused by the council. ‘Social’ Norm was now great-grandfather to eleven, respected elder to those who had remained settled, while others, like Ash’s father, Nat, were back on the road, in clink or just off radar.
Ash never talked much about his father beyond the bare facts that he’d been in and out of prison all his life, and nobody knew where he was. He and his sister had been brought up largely by their grandparents. Their mother, an apologetic little woman who lived with the television permanently on at her maisonette, had become a severe agoraphobic after her husband’s departure.
‘She’s a Gorgio,’ Ash had explained. ‘Not born a Traveller.’
‘So I’m a Gorgio too?’
‘I’m not like my dad. We travel together. And you’re tougher.’
It was the first time Carly had encountered most of the Turners since the wedding. In the interim there had been multiple births, divorces, fights, feuds and at least three criminal convictions. She had trouble working out who was who: they all shared the same dark hair and silver eyes, which seemed to slide sideways to watch her while Ash was welcomed like a hero, with a huge feast for twenty cooked by Janine in his honour.
Domineering Janine was the family princess – now caring for widowed Norm, who was almost housebound with emphysema – and unofficial landlady to the Turner property portfolio.
‘To my family regiment!’ Ash had toasted them all, to table-thumping cheers.
It had been a horrible wet day in March, with grey clouds lower than a sagging tent roof. Ash insisted on taking them for a walk around the villages, striding out with his characteristic swagger, Ellis on his shoulders shouting that he wanted to go home, rain drumming on the plastic buggy hood over a sleeping Sienna. They had paused by a pretty Cotswold-stone school, with a clock-tower and two big gables, like a spiky M, rain splashing down from the big yews towering over them.
‘This is where I learned my three Rs – reading, rioting and rutting. Beautiful, isn’t it?’
‘I thought you said you played truant all the time?’
Sienna had started to cry, so they had moved on to walk past a pretty church, then on to a meadow, its curving contours dented by a stream and pond, rising to a group of three weathered standing stones. Once they had been as tall as men, but were now reduced to little more than bollards, having enduring four thousand years of the same driving, hilltop rain.
Ash had reached up and covered his son’s ears. ‘Lost my virginity in there.’
‘I thought you said it was at a Millennium party?’
‘That’s where they held it. Church meadows. Bonfire as big as a skyscraper.’
The only thing Carly had enjoyed about the wet walk was stopping at a field gate to watch some foals, only a few days old. They’d turned away from the rain and were pressed to their mothers’ sides, fragile and ribby, with their coats flattened wet. One was watching her, a wide white mark running down his face, one eye blue and the other darkest chocolate brown. Bigger than the others, golden coat rain-streaked, like tiger bread, he made his way across to the gate, uneven white stockings splattered with mud, like a Sunday-league footballer. As he stood snorting and watching them, Ellis pointed, said, ‘Hoss!’ repeatedly, and Sienna, awake now, chuckled from beneath the buggy hood.
‘Isn’t he a beauty?’ Carly had breathed, her love instant and unconditional.
But Ash’s pale eyes had narrowed. ‘This place belongs to a right bastard. Horse-whipped me once.’
‘What century was this?’ She’d snorted, accustomed to his exaggeration.
‘It was before the bonfire,’ he muttered, eyes still hard. ‘You figure it out.’
‘Did he really whip you?’
‘Yeah, called me a pikey, then clouted me round the head for joy-riding on the hunt’s quad-bike.’
‘I’m glad they banned foxhunting.’
‘Try telling that to people round here. Knowing you, you will. Beautiful village, isn’t it?’ He’d turned around, arms wide. ‘Welcome to your new home.’
Carly hadn’t felt at home at all.
Now she pushed the double buggy through an open gateway to walk on the wide grassy headland alongside a crop, the ground easier to wheel along. She followed a recent set of tyre tracks that had flattened and compacted the grass. At the far end of the field there was no gate back out onto the track, so she followed the hedge around until she found one. This took her into a huge field of corn that stretched as far as the eye could see, dotted with a run of telegraph poles. Following the long headland back uphill, she eventually found a gateway that she assumed would lead back onto the track, but instead it had a field of sheep beyond it and a large padlock on it.
Reluctant to retrace her steps, Carly chatted to the kids as she pushed on along the headland, the grass strip far narrower here – barely wide enough for the buggy, her hands numb and sweaty on the handles as the familiar heat coursed through them. Her ‘healing gift’ was getting on her nerves. Today it was like a tic in her fingertips and a throb at her temples, and she felt continuous spasms of worry for her family, Ellis pressing carrots up his nose, Sienna staring wide-eyed at a plane crossing the sky, Jackson asleep in his carry pouch, their big strong hero of a dad, who was slowly becoming feral, and herself. Her marriage was being absorbed by the Turners, Ash to ashes, dust to duster.
Jackson was grizzling in his sleep, his little back arching, colicky discomfort and hunger bringing him to the verge of waking up. Carly sang lullabies
as she pushed the cumbersome buggy, throwing in Beyoncé’s ‘Running’ for good measure – she’d been the army wife karaoke star in their garrison with that track – but while Sienna and Ellis’s heads lolled in front of her, the baby squirmed. A cry burst out of him now, and there was a loud squelching noise. The smell made her hold her breath.
‘What’s that pong?’ Ellis woke up with a start.
‘Your brother’s filled his nappy.’ In fact, peering down, she could see it was an explosion so epic it was leaking out of the sides, staining his Babygro. No wonder the poor little man had found it hard to sleep if he’d been cooking that all night.
‘Ewww!’ Ellis leaned away, almost toppling the buggy over because he was far too big for it. ‘Make it go away!’
‘Get out and walk if you don’t like it,’ snapped Carly, angry because she should have planned better – and not got lost.
Ellis clambered out of the buggy and ran ahead, charging into the wheat crop with a war cry that sent up a deer. It bounded away.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A photo-text from Ash. Where are you, bae? Come back to bed. This needs you. Still hung-over, he’d photographed a lot of duvet, some muscular thigh and a corner of hairy ball, but she could guess the rest. She texted Laters xx as she pushed on.
