The Country Lovers

by Walker, Fiona

  ‘I heard what she said,’ Pax pointed out in her deep, over-kind voice, ‘I just was wondering where?’

  Carly felt squashed.

  ‘They’re wassailing in the old orchard at dusk,’ Bridge was explaining. ‘There’s always loads of bacon sarnies and mulled cider on offer. Why don’t we all go after you show us round here? Your lot’ll be there, won’t they, Carl?’

  ‘If it’s not raining.’ Carly shrugged, still smarting at being corrected. The Turners were big on wassailing, a tradition of blessing the cider apple trees each new year. She’d never understood the appeal and the cider punch was always lethal.

  ‘They still do the wassail?’ Pax was wide-eyed. ‘I thought that stopped years ago. It used to lead to anarchy.’

  ‘Sure, it’s now a fun village tradition, very family friendly with a big bonfire and buckets of grog,’ Bridge laughed. ‘Everyone gets rat-arsed on cider, but they do a Health and Safety assessment first so it’s all good. Shall we go?’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s—’ Pax started.

  ‘Course we will!’ Bridge had already made the decision. ‘Hear that, Carl? We’re having a hooley! Did I not say this woman’s one of us?’

  Carly caught Pax’s eye and knew for certain she wasn’t.

  Calling her son with the weird name back, Pax turned to look across the yard and then her face developed a fixed expression. Following her gaze, Carly watched Luca O’Brien stride up, all leather boots and smiles, black Puffa over a green farmer’s overall. Eyes bright as nocellara olives, he looked a million times better than the exhausted traveller she’d met on New Year’s Day.

  ‘Carly, how are ya?’ The deep Irish accent was double cream in contrast to Bridge’s sharp lemon Belfast lilt. He handed over his number on a piece of paper. ‘Best to text on that number with the bad signal here. It’s this coming weekend you’re starting, yeah?’

  ‘I can do seven till midday. This is my friend Bridge.’ She made sure she got her manners right this time.

  ‘How’re you doin’?’ He nodded at Bridge and the children, his smile disarming.

  ‘Better for meeting you.’ Bridge gave him comedy lash-bats over her glasses. ‘How are you settling in?’

  ‘Sure, it’s a pretty place.’

  ‘Come wassailing later. We’re all going. Beezer cheap cider.’

  He looked to Pax, Carly noticed. Was he seeking permission?

  Arms tightly crossed, Pax flashed her big hazel eyes back at him. He shrugged, still smiling. ‘I might. I’ve the yard to finish, mind.’

  ‘Carly’s going to help you,’ Bridge said brightly. ‘Work experience.’

  Carly gaped at her.

  ‘We’ll look after all the kids, won’t we, Pax?’

  Pax was gaping at Bridge too now.

  Carly heaved Jackson from his harness. ‘This one’s nappy needs changing first, but if you’d like to do it, Bridge…?’ She held him out.

  ‘Wet wipe allergy.’ Bridge held up her hands, eyes glittering, enjoying the backchat. ‘I’m sure Luca can hang on for five.’

  ‘Sure,’ he smiled and Carly was reminded how kind his face was.

  ‘Use the cottage.’ Pax pointed her towards the arched gateway. ‘It’s unlocked. Kes and Ellis can play in the hay store.’

  With a grateful war cry, Kes raced off again to an open bay side of the stable yard where several big round bales were stacked for netting up, Ellis and his duster in hot pursuit.

  ‘Come and find me when you’re ready.’ Luca raised a black coat arm, loping off in the direction Ronnie had taken earlier.

  ‘We will!’ Bridge called, steely eyes rolling from Pax to Carly, voice hushed. ‘Oh my fecking God, is he hot or what? That’s a lot of testosterone right there.’ She returned to her buggy to hoik Flavia out, sending her in after the boys, then turned back for Sienna, catching herself, eyes cast up to heaven to mouth ‘sorry’ before turning to Pax and Carly. ‘Sorry. Language. I’ve a Belfast docker’s mouth, so I have.’

  ‘It’s nothing compared to the language these walls have heard; horsemen are far worse,’ Pax laughed, which made Carly like her a bit more.

  She picked up her changing bag to carry inside with Jackson, using her teeth to pull her gloves off scorching fingers as she went, no longer convinced their healing heat was for Bridge.

  The cottage smelled of burnt cake, polished leather and dog, a big mantel clock creaking uneven ticks as Carly laid Jackson out on his changing mat on a threadbare woven rug. There were antlers and stuffed fox masks on the walls and lots of hunting paraphernalia lying around, incongruously counterbalanced by brightly coloured toys underfoot. Jackson mewled for a large remote-controlled car nearby.

  Leaving him crab-crawling towards it, she bagged up the soiled nappy and took it through the kitchen and out to a dustbin she’d spotted on the way in, stopping in amazement as she realised that what she’d taken to be a ferret in a hutch was a fox, fast asleep; it was the same colour as Pax’s hair. Carly was transfixed by its caged closeness.

  A gurgling wail of fury brought her back to the present and she dashed inside to find Jackson had pushed the toy car into the hallway, losing it under a bowed Welsh dresser, small grabby fingers now pulling out the contents of a big box stored there, which he was rapidly emptying.

  ‘You little – oh!’ As she dropped down to tidy the mess, she realised they were letters, a lot of them ripped and creased. Surely Jackson couldn’t have done so much damage in so little time? She raked them out of the way, reaching under the dresser for the car to distract him again.

  The letters, many in small fragments, were written in beautiful old-fashioned ink handwriting on thick paper, something she’d never seen. Nobody wrote letters any more, she realised. At least not to her. Ash had written a few when he was deployed in Iraq, but by the Afghanistan tour it was all email and Skype. He wasn’t a great wordsmith, unlike this correspondent in whose flowing lines she could already spot phrases like ‘the moonlight silvers our tears’ and ‘a thousand nights for one with you’. Two different hands, she realised, one rounded blue ink copperplate, the other black and spidery, both sides of a secret conversation.

  Jackson was chewing on one. She tried to pull it away and he wailed furiously.

  ‘Give that back to me, you—’

  ‘Everything all right?’ The plummy voice.

  Carly was straight on the defensive. ‘I was taking his nappy to the bin. He pulled them out.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Pax stooped beside her to help clear them. ‘Lester’s going to be furious with me. He keeps all sorts of old – oh!’

  ‘Everything all right?’ Carly watched her study a shred of paper, the luminous eyes stretched wide.

  Pax didn’t respond or move, breath stilled as she read. Whatever was in the letters was a bone-deep shock.

  Carly’s hands were raw with the heat that was now stealing up her body. ‘These were already ripped like this when Jackson found them!’ she flashed.

  Pax had turned her face away. ‘Please would you mind leaving me alone?’

  ‘It’s not his fault.’

  ‘I’d like you to go right now.’

  17

  The kids had been playing in the hay a long time; Kes’s eyes were turning mouse red, Ellis’s ’Splorer Stick was coated with seeds, and both girls were runny-nosed with cold, their baby brothers growly and restless. The light was fading. Ronnie had just clattered off down the drive on a horse with a cheery goodbye, stirrups showjumper short, no high-vis on whatsoever.

  Bridge hadn’t been able of get much out of Carly beyond a gruff summary that Pax had got the hump over some old letters and had been very rude.

  ‘We should go and check she’s okay,’ she said after Pax had failed to reappear for ten minutes.

  ‘Be my guest.’ Carly was perched high in the hay to get a signal, adding filters and stickers to the pictures she’d just taken of her kids to post onto her Facebook and Instagram feeds.

  ‘Did you see who t
he letters were from?’

  ‘No idea.’ Easily offended, accustomed to having a million things to do, Carly wasn’t one for hanging around. ‘Perhaps I should be helping Luca out like Ronnie suggested.’

  ‘She might be really upset.’

  ‘Still bloody rude when you’ve got guests,’ Carly complained, taking a picture of Bridge in the gloom to add to her news story. ‘I thought we were all getting a guided tour and going wassocking.’

  ‘Wassailing. Don’t tag me on that. Aleš doesn’t know I’m here.’

  ‘What’s it to him if you are?’

  ‘I like to maintain an air of mystery.’ After last night’s row, Bridge wanted the possessive sod to stew. She’d turned off her own phone and needed her timelines to stay clean too. Unlike Carly and her personal propaganda army, Bridge kept family life off screen. On principle, she and Aleš never posted pictures of their children, home, each other or their food. Instead, Bridge curated dark-humoured video funnies, GIFs and memes, spreading lovehearts and scream-faces wherever she went, while Aleš shared pictures of plant machinery and roof trusses. Both secretly checked one another’s feeds and friends on a regular basis.

  ‘I could murder for a cup of tea,’ Carly said, shivering. ‘You know, I might as well be helping Luca out right now.’

  ‘Go ahead, why doncha? I’ll knock for Pax and follow with the kids in a bit.’

  Carly was gone faster than smoke. The moment she did, Jackson started bawling, setting Zak off.

  Lacking her usual breezy cool, Bridge hovered by the cottage gate with a heavyweight screamer on each hip. She bellowed at the older boys to get away from a lethal-looking rusty chaff-cutter; Sienna was draping Flavia with binder twine.

  The door in the wall opened before she knocked. Bridge recognised the signs: bloodshot eyes, red-tinged nose, dry and swollen upper lip. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry! You poor things. That was so rude of me.’

  ‘Is it the ex?’ Bridge secretly relished the prospect of some insider dirt.

  ‘No, nothing like that.’

  The smile surprised her, the deep voice hypnotising, the gather-up-all organisation effortless, Jackson lifted and muted with a nose-rub within seconds.

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea and a chat?’

  ‘Really, it’s all fine. Let me show you round before it gets dark. Let’s go, everyone!’

  She was a Boudicca of self-control, Bridge realised with grudging admiration, watching the children gathering like eager Von Trapps and wishing Carly was still there.

  *

  Luca was grateful he didn’t need to tell Carly anything twice. It was clear her reactions were lightning quick: mind, hands and hair-trigger sharp tongue.

  ‘Muck out, turn out, pick out, skip out,’ she rapped coolly, ‘tie-up, rug-up, mix-up, fill-up. Not necessarily in that order. Have I missed one?’

  He grinned, shaking his head. He was looking forward to having her on the yard. She reminded him of an acerbic German groom he’d worked alongside years ago who could muck out a stable in four minutes, liked horses far more than people and ran back-to-back marathons for fun.

  ‘Let’s get this yard swept and we’ll put the kettle on. Give that here…’ She took the yard brush from him, making short work of clearing hay and stray wood shavings from the cobbles. ‘That Pax isn’t much of a one for offering guests a cup of tea, is she? She’s got the right hump with me.’

  ‘How so?’

  When she explained that her baby had dug out some old letters from under a cupboard he felt uneasy, realising they must be the ones he’d stuffed there after the puppy had shredded them. He tried to remember what he’d read in them, the love letters written in two old-fashioned hands.

  ‘Pax on the yard much at weekends, is she?’ Carly asked leadingly, clearly hoping not.

  ‘We all muck in, depending what needs doing. Sure, we’re all pretty new here, and the work’s always there if you look for it.’ He thought back to the previous weekend. While Ronnie had vanished like a shot the moment Blair rolled up, Pax had taken her mind off Kes being with his father by undertaking a gargantuan sort-out of the tack room, unearthing all manner of museum pieces. There had been no shortage of tea that day, swigged while boggling at kinky-looking vintage bits and leatherwork. Worried she wasn’t eating, he’d also made her falafels for lunch which he later spotted in Laurence the fox’s cage.

  ‘I’m not one for backchat if that’s okay,’ Carly was saying. ‘I like to get my head down and work. You okay with me wearing earphones, yeah?’

  ‘If it’s what you want.’

  ‘I listen to audiobooks and podcasts mostly,’ she told him, eyes fierce, keen to be taken seriously. ‘I like learning things. At the moment I’m listening to a book called Everyday Sexism that Bridge recommended.’ The side of her mouth curled up. ‘And Beyoncé.’

  Luca sensed she took no prisoners. In that, she reminded him of Pax. But whilst Carly seemed to want to like the horses more, she handled them awkwardly, manoeuvring one heavily pregnant mare out of her stable like a pallet trolley.

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ he assured her, distracted by a waspish buzzing against his hip as, finding signal briefly, his phone started vibrating.

  He had four missed calls, its screen told him, all Unknown Number. There had been many in recent days, the frequency increasing in the past forty-eight hours, but no voice messages. Was it Mishaal?

  The prince’s London visit was helpfully all over the sports pages, the devoted fans of his newly acquired football club thrilled by the millions being sunk into their team, less so by the family’s cut-throat reputation for humanitarian crime and corruption. Luca had been perpetually on edge this week, counting down the days until Beck’s royal nemesis was safely back in the bosom of his family in the Middle East. Knowing Mishaal was in the same country made Luca very jumpy indeed, no matter how often he reminded himself that a man who travelled with such a rigidly fixed itinerary wasn’t about to slip out to the Cotswolds at the whim of his father. He had done his duty and called. They would both be relieved to leave it there.

  By Luca’s calculation, there were just one or two more days before the prince and his caravan court departed until summer. Almost there. While the unknown calls to his phone were almost certainly ambulance chasers and sales scams – Mishaal had the landline number here, after all, kept under constant siege by Ronnie – he still preferred to ignore them until he knew for certain the prince had left the UK.

  ‘What next?’

  He jumped when he realised Carly was beside him again. Mind still on Mishaal, he showed her where they pressure-hosed the feed buckets and barrows.

  ‘What exactly is my hour rate again?’ she asked between blasts.

  ‘That you’d have to ask Ronnie.’ Who had yet to pay him anything, but he remained too loyal to share that information just yet.

  ‘I’ve given up two other weekend jobs for this.’

  Luca was grateful to hear a child’s voice yell beyond the walled yard and then a familiar husky catch of laughter amid talk: Pax.

  His ear was already tuned for it, able to pick it out in an instant.

  ‘I need a contract,’ Carly insisted.

  ‘It’s just casual weekend work.’ Even Luca didn’t have a contract.

  ‘Where I come from, we don’t do casual – work, dress or sex.’ The lip curled prettily again. ‘Once bitten and all that. Working for Bay Austen taught me that.’

  ‘Yes?’ He realised Pax and her entourage were moving further away. Then he registered who Carly was talking about, his blood quickening angrily. ‘Bay Austen, you say?’

  ‘That man screws everyone,’ Carly said bitterly. ‘I wasn’t the first.’

  ‘He took advantage of you?’ Surprised at her frankness, Luca was appalled.

  ‘Promised me I could stay on at the farm shop and be first in line for a good job when they open the café there, instead of which I was put on a zero-hours contract with no hours.’

  ‘I s
ee. That’s bad.’

  A snort of rare laughter. ‘Did you think I meant he’d booty called me? I’m married with three kids. End of. My old man’s going to be a farrier soon.’

  ‘Good on him.’ Her fierce expression twisted his belly instinctively, unwanted and tight as a stitch, remembering that familiar tug of attraction he’d felt towards her when they’d first met. Unhappy wives were his forte, and his fool heart had hit the ground running, the race on to fix on someone to rescue like an over-zealous knight, unaware that his affections had already been ambushed.

  He listened for the others as he hurried Carly around the yards, finishing up the day’s work, intermittently catching sight of Pax and her pink-haired friend herding children in the distance.

  ‘You got kids?’ Carly caught him by surprise as she watched him add more bedding to Beck’s stable, already box-walked to a grooved track. She hummed a tune that made the horse turn from his customary shadow statue at the back of the stable, ears pricked.

  ‘Not with me. So you like Beyoncé?’ he diverted clumsily, recognising the tune she was humming.

  ‘She’s okay, but my favourite music to work to is film tracks. You can’t beat Gladiator.’ She held open the door for him.

  ‘True enough.’

  ‘Or Last of the Mohicans. You know it?’ Carly started humming, ‘Dum ditty dum ditty dum ditty dum ditty da da da. Dum ditty…’

  ‘Stop dumming.’ He’d played it in Canada until his fingers were too numb to hold down the strings.

  ‘Am I that bad?’

  ‘At dumming, yes. At yard work you’re top-notch there for a beginner.’

  ‘And you’ll teach me healing?’ She scratched Beck’s nose through the stallion grille.

  ‘You don’t learn it, Carly. You feel it. What you’re doing right there, you have no idea how exceptional that is; he’d have anyone else’s fingers off.’

  She grinned. ‘Ronnie reckons I’ll earn a fortune from these hands. They’re on bloody fire again today. Feel.’

  He flinched as they landed on him like red-hot brands, a palm on each forearm, grey eyes cool by contrast.