Farm Fatale (21 page)

    "Oh, dear," Rosie said politely.

    "But they're never about when you need them, oh, no," the farmer went on, his mouth a straight line of exasperation. "During lambing or when a sick cow needs help, they're nowhere to be bloody seen. But the minute summer arrives, there they bloody are, demanding to know why there isn't a ford or a stile where their maps say there should be."

    Rosie twisted her hands. What, after all, was she expected to do about it?

    Jack seemed to collect himself. "What can I do for you, anyway?" He sighed.

    Rosie rapidly explained she was an illustrator and had been commissioned to do a book on farm animals. She hesitated to say more; Jack may have warmed up slightly, but he still didn't appear the sort of person likely to be impressed with the idea of a sheep shopping at Macy's, still less taking in a production of
Much Adewe About
Mutton
. Both these rather questionable plot lines had appeared in the post that morning from the writer. Oh well, Rosie had thought. It was money, wasn't it?

    "No problem," Jack said. "Draw whatever you like."

    He had, Rosie now noticed, a crumpled quality, a rather bruised, sad-puppy air reinforced by the sloping, melancholy set of his eyes and brows.

    "Thanks," she said, and was rewarded with an unexpectedly warm smile.

    "I was just on my way back to the farmhouse. Come and have a cup of tea. You can pick your models on the way. Come on, Kate," he added to the dog.

    Rosie had never met anyone who covered ground as quickly as Jack did. To her downturned eyes, ever-watchful for cowpats, the grass was little more than a blur of green as, with Kate galloping alongside, they shot across the fields, through a gate, and up a stony, muddy track. Never, thought Rosie, had painting seemed so exhausting. And she hadn't even picked up a brush yet.

    SPITEWINTER FARM proclaimed a sign at the top of the track. Once she plucked up her courage, she might ask him about that odd name.

    "Careful," Jack said, looking doubtfully at her trainers as he dragged open the battered gate. "It's a bit muddy."

    An understatement, Rosie saw. Any lingering, town-bred, toyfarm idea that farms were romantic places with neatly stacked hay bales, hand-brushed cattle, and sparkling cobblestones evaporated as she saw the ground now beneath her Nike Airs. It was a sea of stony mud, with dank, pewter pools of rainwater here and there reflecting a suddenly cloudy sky. In fact, the yard of Spitewinter Farm bore a strong resemblance to the back garden at Cinder Lane before she had gotten to work on it. Piles of breeze block, lurid plastic barrels, and lengths of tubing lay scattered about between rusting hulks of tractors and other alarming-looking items of farm machinery whose purpose Rosie could only guess at. It was obvious, even to her inexperienced eye, that Spitewinter was a far from wealthy concern. Roughly arranged around the yard was a jumble of buildings of different sizes, the largest of which was a ramshackle barn from whose dark interior came a strong smell of fermented hay and the sounds of bovine mooing, stamping, and clanking. It sounded, Rosie thought, like an orchestra tuning up.

    "It's a bit scruffy," Jack said, apparently reading her thoughts. "Not much money for hanging baskets, you see. Used to be better, but it's only me running it now."

    Rosie looked at him in surprise. What on earth made him think she was expecting hanging baskets? She may be an ex-townie, but even so…"The house is lovely," she said diplomatically.

    It was true. Opposite the barn was a long and graceful gray-stone farmhouse whose ancient roof swooped down low at the front over a row of deep-set, mullioned windows. Behind it, lime-green fields piled one on top of the other to the horizon.

    Jack dragged off his Wellingtons and bent to enter a low front door that was a good foot less than his own height. Removing her mud-clogged trainers, Rosie put them carefully by Jack's boots, which looked exactly twice their size.

    When she entered the deliciously warm farmhouse kitchen, Jack was standing with his back to her at the stove. In the gloaming, Rosie could see him throwing tea bags into mugs.

    "Why's the farm called Spitewinter?" she asked.

    Jack turned, pushing one sloping eyebrow up into his creased forehead. "Because it spites the winter. Keeps you warm, in other words. The walls are about three feet thick, even if the roof's pretty much a colander."

    "I know what you mean." Rosie smiled. "So's ours."

    Did Jack have a wife? She looked for signs of a woman but could see none. No flowers, no magazines, no fragrant stew on the stove.

    "Milk in your tea?" Jack asked, interrupting her thoughts.

    "Yes, please."

    Perhaps his wife was out at work? And would she necessarily be a wife, anyway? She could be a cohabitee. Or even a boyfriend, although that seemed unlikely. Rosie had nothing to go on but gut instinct, but she sensed something firmly heterosexual about Jack.

    He bent to look in an ancient fridge. "Damn. I've run out."

    "Oh, don't bother

    "It's OK. Hang on a minute."

    He picked up a jug and strode out of the kitchen. Rosie watched him lope across the muddy yard, swinging it, and took the opportunity to look round without inhibition. The darkness of the room seemed intensified rather than illuminated by the pools of light, dancing with dust motes, that flooded in from the deep-silled windows overlooking the yard.

    Spite the winter it may well do, but now, in the spring, the room had an empty air. Of the solid chairs at the thick-cut slice of ancient table, only one was pulled out—disproving, possibly, the theory that anyone else lived there—while, with its back to the table, a single worn armchair sagged before an enormous fireplace practically the height of the ceiling. Set into its cavernous space was a brisk little log-burning stove, yet despite the warmth from this and the kitchen stove, the chill from the stone flags seeped into Rosie's thin-socked soles.

    "Milk," Jack announced, stooping into the room with the jug carefully balanced in his hands. As he put it down on the table in front of her, Rosie breathed in the warm, slightly sour smell.

    "How wonderful to never run out of milk," she said enviously, sipping her tea from a mug extolling the wonders of a cattle-feed company. "Amazing how different it tastes when it's fresh. Not like normal cow's milk at all."

    "That's because it's sheep's," Jack said with a grin. "The cows have been milked once already today and they'll be done again tonight. So I got some off one of the ewes. Needed some for the little fella here, anyway. It's his feeding time." Jack gestured over the top of the table toward the armchair before the fireplace.

    Astonished, Rosie leaped to peer over the chair's back. Had someone, then, been sitting in it all this time?

    Dozing before the fire, on the worn patchwork cushion lining the armchair, lay a tiny black creature that seemed to be asleep. "A lamb!" she exclaimed in delight. "It's a little lamb!"

    Hearing her voice, the tiny creature tried to raise its head. Once again, she felt helpless tears rush to her eyes. "Does he have a name?"

    "Oliver. So called because he always wants more. Finishes the bottle in seconds flat, he does." Holding a baby's feeding bottle in a hand as broad as a spade, Jack filled it with milk from the jug as he spoke.

    "Why are you feeding him with that? Is he ill?"

    "He's lucky he's not dead," Jack said, stepping clumsily round to the front of the armchair. "His mother rejected him a couple of days ago, as soon as he was born. He's been bottle-fed since then."

    Rosie remembered the contemptuous-looking sheep with the black face. The only one with no lambs.

    "I know which one his mother is," she said excitedly. "I saw her in the field. Blacker face than the rest."

    Jack nodded. "That's her." Hunkering down, he gently put the teat to the lamb's mouth. There was, Rosie thought, something infinitely touching about the sight of someone so huge ministering so tenderly to something so tiny. She felt her heart beat slightly faster.

    Jack glanced up at her. "Want a go?" Rosie, nodding, was powerfully aware of his strong brown hand as he handed her the bottle. "That's right. Just hold his head and keep the milk flowing. He'll finish it soon." Holding the teat in his mouth as the animal sucked, Rosie felt the surprisingly strong draw of his hunger.

    "There's always one lamb that gets into trouble," Jack told her. "Sometimes more. Last spring, there was still snow in the fields when the lambs were born. Some of them nearly froze to death. Had to bring them all into the kitchen and revive them with teaspoons of whiskey."

    "Here you are, Olly darling," Rosie rubbed her nose on the lamb's tiny, tufty forehead and kissed it. She looked up at Jack. As they smiled at each other, she felt something warm and unexpected surge within her. Somewhere not a million miles from her lower pelvis.

    A sudden squeal of tires, a slammed car door, and the slap of envelopes on the floor broke the spell. Jack glanced irritably toward the open door.

    "Post," yelled Duffy, sticking his head through. "Better news on the bull semen today, Jack." Suddenly his eyes, bouncing round the farmhouse like squash balls, spotted Rosie in the gloom holding Oliver. They widened in amazement. "Eh, up," he said, grinning. "Y'all right then?"

    "Fine, thanks." Rosie was unable to stop herself from reddening. It dawned on her that there was something very intimate in being in the darkened kitchen of a man she had never met before. Not to mention sticking a teat into the mouth of his pet lamb.

    Duffy obviously thought so. He raised his eyebrow, grinned, and left in a squeal of tires.

Something had woken Guy. He squinted up into the sylvan sorority of toile de Jouy shepherdesses in the canopy above the bed and groaned when he recognized, in the garden below the window, the hectoring voice of Samantha as she lectured the unfortunate gardener over preparations for her bloody awful-sounding party.

    "Tulips down by the gate are looking beautiful, madam," Wilbursdean was saying in an obvious effort to please. He was the latest in a line of four, and a man looking increasingly likely to go the way of his predecessors.

    "What color tulips?" Samantha snapped.

    "Red, madam. A lovely bright scarlet, they are. Really nice, it is—"

    "Red!" Samantha shrieked. "I will not have red tulips in my garden. Red is revoltingly common. Disgustingly vulgar. Go and get rid of them now."

    Guy heard the door slam as she stormed back into the house. He recognized the conversation as fatal. From the way Wilbursdean was swearing as he crunched off down the road, the gardener had obviously come to the same conclusion. Torder, the last gardener, had been sacked for allowing some large yellow daffodils to remain in the herbaceous borders. "What was good enough for bloody Lady St. Felix is not good enough for me," Samantha ranted as she appeared before him in the bedroom.

    "I've had a terrible night's sleep." Guy groaned.

    As a powerful waft of garlic drifted her way, Samantha wrinkled her nose. "You're always saying that," she snapped, thinking she'd have to give Consuela another talking to. Her cooking definitely left something to be desired, and that something wasn't Guy after he had eaten it.

    "Well, it's true. I've never had such appalling nightmares in my life as I've had here. Last night I'm pretty sure I saw a strange woman in the bedroom…"

    Remembering some of the strange women—particularly that one called Lalla—she had deleted from his mobile phone memory while he was in the hospital, Samantha scowled.

    "What I'm saying," Guy went on, "is that I think there's something creepy about this bloody place."

    Samantha took a long, deep breath. As ploys to move back to London went, they didn't get much more obvious. "Well, I've never noticed anything."

    Guy rolled his eyes. That, he thought, could be written on her gravestone. "I know it sounds mad," he continued evenly, "but I'm sure I've heard someone having a swordfight."

    "You're right," said Samantha.

    Guy looked at her in wild surprise. "You've heard it too?"

    "No. I mean you're right. It does sound mad."

    "But I heard it. Clashing metal, screams, everything."

    "Don't be ridiculous, darling. Consuela sounds exactly like that when she's cleaning the cutlery. And the scream is probably when she drops it on her foot or something. You know what a clumsy cow she is."

    "But Consuela's hardly going to be washing knives and forks in the middle of the night, is she?"

    "Very possibly," said Samantha. "Consuela has quite a backlog of cleaning to catch up on. As I want everything looking wonderful for the party, I've, ahem,
encouraged
her to work the longest hours she feels she's able."

    Guy's heart sank. The party again. Just as he had lulled himself into imagining his worst fears were of the supernatural variety.

    "Anyway, darling," Samantha added briskly, "there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about. You know this is the time of year we normally change from our winter to our summer champagne…"

    "Is it?" said Guy. The heart attack had been quite useful in some ways. A spring clean, almost. Entire files of useless information seemed to have disappeared in an instant. Including that. His eyelids, despite his efforts to keep them up, pushed heavily down.