Revenge in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  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 Bajendon, 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 cul
ls, 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.

  ‘You need to talk to Nella,’ Sophie went on. ‘She puts it all a lot better than I can.’

  ‘And Danny, of course,’ said Tiffany. ‘Between them, they can convert just about anybody.’

  ‘Danny just does what Nella tells him to,’ said Sophie with scorn.

  ‘Apart from fixing a date for their wedding,’ Tiffany flashed back. ‘She’s really cross about it, you know. You didn’t see her last night.’

  Thea was losing interest in the romantic tribulations endured by the oddly named Nella. Her dog was running impatiently ahead, and the western horizon was filling with unwelcome grey clouds. ‘How far is it?’ she asked. ‘That looks a bit ominous over there.’

  ‘We can be at the church in ten minutes if we bustle.’ Sophie’s long legs began to stride out, regardless of her companions. Thea was regretting the impulse to grab any chance of conversation, reproaching herself for such a bad choice of local informants. Sophie and Tiffany were apparently deeply involved in some sort of protest activity against a bewildering array of issues. Whilst faintly aware of a major feeling of disaffection in Middle England, she had hardly expected to walk into a hotbed of revolution in the rolling wolds of Gloucestershire.

  Feeling very much surplus to requirements, she began to allow a space to develop between herself and the others. Fiddling with Hepzie’s lead gave her the excuse to hang back. She had a murky sense that she ought not to advertise the fact that she was responsible for Mrs Foster’s sister’s house, or that it was empty and vulnerable for the coming week. Tiffany glanced back and gave a little wave as Sophie increased her pace. They disappeared through a gap into another field, and Thea imagined she would never see them again.

  Upper End turned out to be a loop of quiet road due west of the rest of Bagendon, with the church and a huge manor house on rising ground above it. On a whim, Thea decided to carry on past the house she was supposed to monitor, and walk down to the church for a quick look. For all she knew it would rain for the next ten days and she wouldn’t fancy any more walks. According to the map provided by the Fosters, the house in question was to her left and around a curve. She would come back to it and give it a good inspection, before walking back to Daglingworth. The day would be almost done by then.

  It took a further five minutes to arrive at Bagendon Church, past a selection of large houses plainly owned by people of means. A massive barn conversion, and a second defunct village school destined to become a house caught her eye. To her relief the clouds had come no closer. A shiny new Freelander was parked outside the church, and Thea could see her new acquaintances standing beside it with a third young woman. She chewed her lip, wondering whether they would object to her following them again. Then she squared her shoulders and marched forward, with Hepzie firmly on the lead. She had every right to go and have a look at the church, after all.

  It was very obvious that Tiffany had muttered a quick explanation as to who she was, before she came into earshot. The third woman looked enquiringly at Thea and her dog and said nothing. She was older than the other two, and very thin. Her dark hair was pulled back in a straggly ponytail and her eyes had shadows beneath them. She wore green wellingtons and a blue duffel coat.

  ‘Here you are again,’ said Sophie. ‘She’s a house-sitter,’ she told the thin woman. She flipped a hand and added, ‘This is Nella.’

  Thea had already understood that this was the would-be bride, who did a sideways little nod of acknowledgement, and patted the vehicle behind her.

  ‘Why’ve you got Danny’s motor, anyway?’ asked Tiffany.

  ‘He wanted me to take it for its MOT and then meet him here. He’s walking back from Woodmancote, apparently. There’s a badger sett up there that they missed in the culling. He’s trying to camouflage it.’ Nella’s explanation was certainly comprehensive, Thea thought, imagining the absent Danny as a bearded, sandalled protester with more money than was good for him, if he could afford such a vehicle.

  ‘They’ll find them, in the end,’ said Sophie bitterly. The slaughter of hundreds of badgers should have been old news by this time, but it had continued to remain in the forefront of people’s minds. Thea suspected it was because of a wholesale sense of shame that proved surprisingly difficult to shake off. Inevitable stories of appalling injuries and lingering deaths had circulated widely, as well as rumours of underground workers saving animals as if they’d been wartime resistance personnel. Even at a remove from the centre of the action, Thea had gleaned something of the heightened emotion and dogged determination to obstruct officialdom that rippled through the countryside.

  ‘So – what are we doing?’ asked Tiffany. ‘I’ve got an essay to write by Tuesday. I can’t be out here all day.’

  ‘We’ll wait a bit longer. What did you find for me at Itlay?’ Nella’s voice was low, and her gaze roamed across the rising ground towards Daglingworth and all the places Thea had traversed during her walk.

  All three then glanced at Thea, as if fearing she might be a spy. ‘Tell you later,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Well, so this is Bagendon,’ said Thea heartily. ‘I’m going to have a quick l
ook at the church, while I’m here.’ She smiled vaguely and went to the small gate into the churchyard.

  ‘Nice meeting you,’ said Tiffany. Of the three, this was definitely Thea’s favourite. The other two both seemed faintly bonkers.

  ‘Danny’s behaving himself, then?’ asked Sophie, as Thea tried to operate the unusual latch.

  She caught Nella’s laugh as she finally got through and up towards the small low-slung church. ‘Oh yes. You should have seen him this morning. Really apologetic. He’s going to be fine from now on. It was all just a silly mix-up.’

  Tiffany’s yelp of pleasure echoed in Thea’s ears as she entered the porch.

  Chapter Three

  The church was probably very historic and interesting, for an aficionado. Thea liked wall paintings, gargoyles, and the ungrammatical little leaflets and notices that were sometimes to be found. In this one, she liked the red kneelers, each with a different animal or bird embroidered into the centre. She thought the kneelers were lovely. And then, idly reading the memorial plaques, she found one dedicated to a man called Rev. John Lewis Bythesea and his brother Edmund. She almost crowed with delight, much as Tiffany had just done outside. She wished passionately that Drew were with her to see this incredible name fixed for eternity on a marble slab. The brothers had been born in the 1760s, she calculated. John had previously lived in Wiltshire – which was not at all by the sea. How, how, did anybody acquire such a surname? She was transported and fascinated. Here was a glimpse of eighteenth-century rural life in a single surname. Did anybody still carry it, centuries later? Almost certainly not, she assumed. They’d change it to Blythe or Birtlesea or something.

  With a final giggle, she went back to retrieve the dog she’d left in the porch and retrace her steps back to Upper End – which was also vaguely eighteenth century, she supposed.