Lorna Gray - In the Shadow of Winter - A gripping historical novel with murder, secrets and forbidden love

For a moment I thought he might try to break his way past but then, with a short agitated cry that seemed to come from somewhere between impatience and despair, he abruptly stopped and stood before me, swaying gently.

Then he lifted his head once more and where the shadowed eyes stared watchfully out at me from beneath frosted brows, I was startled to realise that his dirtied cheeks were actually streaked with tears.

“You were going the wrong way, Matthew,” I repeated gently, by way of an explanation.

There was a very, very long silence when I thought he had not heard. But then, in a voice that was so faint that it almost seemed to be coming from somewhere else entirely, he finally whispered, “The wrong … way?”

The question was vague and flooded with uncomprehending weariness, and it made my heart ache. “My home is that way.” My voice was soft and steady like a parent talking to a frightened child and, being careful not to startle him, I lifted a hand in an imprecise indication of its direction.

His gaze wavered briefly as he unwittingly turned to look, not that we could see more than twenty yards from our feet let alone all the way down to the farmhouse. But then his gaze snapped suspiciously back to my face, filled with hard distrust in case I had moved, only for the expression to fade again to guilty abstraction as he remembered who I was.

“Your home?”

“Home,” I said firmly and then, in the manner of a casual afterthought, added; “Would you like to come?”

It was lucky that I had thought to bring the pony; I would never have got Matthew back on my own. It was almost as if in that instant of deciding to accept my help, however reluctantly, all of his remaining strength had been spent and for a few horrible long minutes I had feared that even maintaining a grip on the pony’s mane as it towed him steadily along was going to be a demand too far.

If I had thought that task difficult however, getting him to relinquish it for an arm about my shoulders and from there steering him into my house proved even more of a challenge. He had neither spoken nor moved from his hunched position since we had started for home and as I set about tugging him along the path, it became horribly apparent that he must have been wandering about out there for far longer than just a few hours. In truth he was barely conscious and although he was obviously trying to spare me as much as he could, he very nearly crushed me when we finally attempted to coordinate a sort of crabwise shuffle into the house.

Freddy, however, was utterly amazing. The boy had already appeared noisily by my side before I could have possibly expected him and, as soon as Matthew and I had set off on our unsteady way, had whisked the tired pony away to hay and a dry stable, only to rush to the door before we had even made it around the side of the house, still talking ceaselessly. He was there now, ahead of us, pushing the door open and dragging it wide so that we could slowly shuffle our way into the short passage by the kitchen.

Even with the boy’s help, the doorway was still very narrow and it took some manoeuvring to ease us both through. I suppose if I had thought, I could have got Freddy to run and open the more impressive – and therefore much wider – front door but as with all farmhouses, the kitchen door was the one that we used on a daily basis and I wasn’t even sure if the thick ancient bolts could be drawn back on the other.

It had been my intention to cross the wider space from kitchen to stairs, and from there take Matthew up to a bedroom where he could rest and recover in relative comfort but Matthew himself forced me to swiftly abandon that idea. I had managed to get him this far by taking his right arm heavily across my shoulders while his other groped drunkenly from handhold to handhold but whether it was from the blaze of unaccustomed heat or the unexpected realisation that his ordeal was nearly over I do not know, but all of a sudden his remaining ability to support himself abruptly vanished. Entirely without warning, his fingers fell short from their reach towards the tabletop and then his head drooped. He had already been testing me pretty near to my limit but this sudden collapse took me far beyond tolerance and we were very lucky that I even managed to get him as far as the living room settee, let alone all the way upstairs to my bed.

A peculiar pause followed this where, after my abrupt release from such a heavy burden, the sensation of being airborne was so strange that the force of it nearly finished what Matthew’s weight had begun. My face burned from exertion and, added to the heat of the fire at my back, it seemed to take an eternity before my aching lungs could adjust to breathing warm air. But then, in the next instant, normality reasserted itself and I had time to wonder that it was Matthew Croft of all people who had been found lost in a snowstorm. And then to notice almost immediately afterwards that the voluble enthusiasm, which had been an almost constant backdrop to our journey across the kitchen, had faded sharply to silence.

Freddy’s delight at his part in an apparently heroic rescue ought to have been inexhaustible; I quickly turned with a smile and encouragement so that the boy would be protected from understanding the full urgency of getting the object of his adventure warm but he wasn’t looking at me. Freddy was staring with eyes fixed wide at the man who was sitting slumped before us and blinking blearily at the threadbare carpet by our feet.

I took a steadying breath. “Freddy, will you fetch some of my father’s old clothes? We’d better get him into something dry.” My voice was bright and carefully filled with that lively tone of artificial cheer that was usually the reserve of matronly housekeepers but I might as well have said nothing for all the notice he took.

“Freddy,” I said sharply, “did you hear what I said?”

Then I turned my head and followed his gaze.

Matthew was still sitting exactly where he had landed when I had clumsily surrendered him to the settee except that now he was making an ineffectual attempt at unfastening the buttons of his soaked jacket. Finally able to see it properly, the jacket looked like it was made from a kind of stylish brown wool and would have originally been better suited to a walk through town towards his office than across country in the snow. Whatever it had once been however, now it was only disgustingly grimy and the torn seam on his sleeve that had been noted before had since parted even further so that it was now exposing a large expanse of lining.

I suppose it was because of this obvious damage to one shoulder that I had not noticed what had happened to the other.

The stain had spread from his collar down towards the elbow of his left sleeve and it was entirely different to the multitude of scuffs and scrapes of mud and filth that coloured the fabric elsewhere.

“Here, let me.” The quickly delivered request was tinged with disbelief as I leant down and reached for the sodden jacket.

His numbed fingers surrendered the task of fumbling with the buttons readily enough and then in a few short seconds I was pulling the icy flaps apart.

“Oh, good God.”

Blood had soaked through the shirt onto his woollen jumper and from there spread in an ugly stain across his chest, and it was very clear to me now that there could be no ordinary explanation for what I had found out in the snow.

“Good God, Matthew!” I said again. “What has happened to you?”

He looked up at that and gave me a faintly blurry smile. “Pay no man, isn’t that what they say? No, hang on, that isn’t it – what’s the saying…?” He was speaking with the careful enunciation of one who was not in nearly as much control of himself as he would have liked to have been. He blinked and then added, “Ah yes, owe no man. But that isn’t fair; I don’t think he can have meant for it to turn out like that…”