Cressida McLaughlin - The Dawn Chorus

She wasn’t sure why she had ended up here now, deviating from her course and slipping away from the nature reserve, but something about this beautiful, deserted building captivated her, and not just because it belonged to her boss, and had been standing empty for over fifteen years. She wondered if any furniture remained, or if the large rooms had been stripped bare of everything except cobwebs. She passed the house’s main gates on her way to and from work every day, could imagine the trail of cars that had, at one time, driven through them. But now they were kept secure, the huge padlock not to be messed with.

The house might be abandoned, but Penelope Hardinge was still intent on keeping people out.

She owned the Meadowsweet estate, the greater part of which was now the Meadowsweet Nature Reserve. Only Swallowtail House, abutting the reserve but secluded behind its red brick wall, was off limits. The stories Abby had been told by long-term residents of Meadowgreen village varied, but it seemed that Penelope and her husband Al had started the reserve soon after their marriage, that Al’s death sixteen years ago had been sudden, and that Penelope’s flight from Swallowtail House had been equally hasty.

She had left it as if it was plagued, purchasing one of the mock-Tudor houses on the Harrier estate, a five-minute drive out of the village, leaving the grand, Georgian mansion to succumb to the nature she and her late husband loved so much, although she had continued his legacy. She had been running Meadowsweet reserve with a firm grip ever since, showing no signs of slowing down even though she was now in her sixties.

For the last eighteen months, Abby had been a part of it. She had found a job that she was passionate about, and while she occasionally bore the brunt of Penelope’s dissatisfaction, and sometimes felt her confidence shrinking in the older woman’s presence, she could understand why she had to be so strict, especially now the reserve was in trouble.

Abby closed her eyes against the September sun and listened to her surroundings. The wind rippled through the woodland, the dancing leaves sounding like the rhythmic churn of waves against sand. A robin was singing its unmistakable, bubbling song, and she wondered if it was the young one who, for the last few weeks, had been landing on the windowsill next to the reserve’s reception desk, curiosity winning out over any fear of humans. He was a fluffy bird, his feathers never entirely flat, as if he hadn’t quite got the hang of preening, and she and Rosa had named him Bob. But she wasn’t sure he would stray this far out of his territory, and the reserve wasn’t short of robins delighting the visitors with their upbeat chorus.

Somewhere in the house’s overgrown grounds was the melodic trill of a warbler. It could be a blackcap or a garden warbler, their songs so similar that, even now, she found it hard to distinguish between them.

Opening her eyes, Abby turned away from the house and towards the laid-out trails of the nature reserve. She often wondered if Penelope ever returned, if she walked through the rooms of her old home and found it calming, or if her husband’s death had forever tainted the place in her memories.

Abby didn’t know why she was drawn to it, but ever since she had moved to the village she had found herself frequently staring up at the serene house, as if it held answers to questions she didn’t yet know how to ask.

The swallowtail butterfly it was named after wasn’t a regular visitor to north Suffolk, making its UK home exclusively in the Norfolk Broads, and this in itself was intriguing. She wondered if, at the time the house had been built, the population of large, yellow butterflies had been much more widespread; like so many other species, its numbers had declined, crowded out by the constant expansion of humans. Stephan, who ran the reserve’s café, had told her that since Meadowsweet records had begun, there had only been two swallowtail butterfly sightings, and those were likely to be visitors from the continent. In some ways, it added to the house’s mystery.

Threading her slender legs through the fallen elder and the tangle of brambles, she stepped onto a narrow track that led to the woodland trail. When she had first been shown round the reserve she had noticed the house, and as she found out more about its history, had decided that when Penelope and Al had lived there, this must have been their main route to the old visitor centre. She thought that the fallen tree might even have been left there on purpose – discouraging people from heading towards the abandoned building.

Back within the confines of the reserve, Abby turned her focus to her job, to the place she would now have to work so hard to rescue.

Meadowsweet wasn’t the only nature reserve that looked after the lagoons and reed beds around Reston Marsh in north Suffolk. But whereas Penelope owned Meadowsweet, Reston Marsh Nature Reserve – already more identifiable because of its name – was run by a national charity. That the two were so closely situated had never been a problem up until now; the habitats were worth protecting, and while the visitor experience was a little less polished at Meadowsweet, it hadn’t stopped people coming to enjoy the walks, weather and wildlife on offer. There was enough to go around, as Stephan always said, and Abby liked the slightly less kempt trails she walked along every day, the sense that nature was always on the verge of taking over completely.

But Meadowsweet didn’t have a committee to make the decisions, to test ideas collectively. Penelope kept everything close to her chest, and no amount of gentle encouragement or forcefulness could persuade her to share. Nobody had yet worked out how to chip away at her firm, upright exterior.

And now the reserve was in trouble. The last few months had seen falling visitor numbers, the damp summer not helping, and recently there had been another dark cloud hanging over it, something which Abby was convinced was the subject of the staff meeting Penelope had called for later that morning.

She was nearly finished. The ladybird was the final piece in her nature trail, a new activity she had devised for the school visits that would happen throughout the autumn term. She found a particularly gnarly root, easily visible from the wide walkway that cut a swathe through the woodland, and secured the ladybird beneath it, writing down its location in the notebook she always carried with her. The sculptures had been made by a local artist, Phyllis Drum, crafted from twigs and bound with twine. Abby liked the hedgehog best; it must have taken Phyllis hours – days, maybe – to put his spines in place.

When she got back to the visitor centre, she would create the map and the questions that would lead intrepid groups of children across the reserve to each of the crafted creatures.

It was the first week in September and the sun was still strong, sparkling on the surface of the coastal lagoons, but there was a faint chill to the air, a clarity that made Abby shiver with nostalgia for fireworks and bonfires, crunching through drives of shin-high leaves. She loved autumn; the sun bold but not stifling, the ripples of leafy scent and pungent sweetness of apples, the way everything burst forth in a blaze of colour, as if refusing to succumb to winter. She picked up her pace, hurrying along the trail that was one of the reserve’s main arteries. Paths led off it down to the water, to the heron and kingfisher hides, to the forest hide, and along the meadow trail.

She greeted a couple in matching navy parkas, a tripod slung over the man’s shoulder, the woman’s rucksack bulky with extra camera lenses.

‘Anything doing down at the heron hide?’ the man asked, spotting Abby’s reserve jacket, the logo of a sprig of meadowsweet and a peacock butterfly on the breast pocket.