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

LORNA GRAY

A division of HarperCollins Publishers

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Harper Impulse an imprint of

HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Harper Impulse 2015

Copyright © Lorna Gray 2015

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Cover layout design © HarperColl‌insPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover design by HarperColl‌insPublishers Ltd

Lorna Gray asserts the moral right

to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are

the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is

entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International

and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

By payment of the required fees, you have been granted

the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access

and read the text of this e-book on screen.

No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted,

downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or

stored in or introduced into any information storage and

retrieval system, in any form or by any means,

whether electronic or mechanical, now known or

hereinafter invented, without the express

written permission of HarperCollins.

Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780008122720

Version 2015-02-20

For Mary Stewart

Contents

Cover

Title Page In the Shadow of Winter LORNA GRAY A division of HarperCollins Publishers www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright Harper Impulse an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk First published in Great Britain by Harper Impulse 2015 Copyright © Lorna Gray 2015 Cover images © Shutterstock.com Cover layout design © HarperColl‌insPublishers Ltd 2015 Cover design by HarperColl‌insPublishers Ltd Lorna Gray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress. Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780008122720 Version 2015-02-20

Dedication For Mary Stewart

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Acknowledgements

Lorna Gray

About HarperImpulse

About the Publisher

The Cotswolds, England. 1947

I suspect that my impression of the past is something akin to a soldier’s image of his homeland – all improbable blue skies and greenery like a treasured souvenir postcard where the colours have been painted in. That being so, I can only sympathise with all those war-wearied men who, instead of returning to find the picture held dear in their imagination, discovered a land brown with the stain of bombed-out buildings, plain rationed clothing and the soot of struggling industry.

Not that the land was brown at present, admittedly. If snow was good for something, it could be said that it was at least clean .

Right on cue, the first hard spikes of a fresh storm flung themselves against my cheek. Reaching for the last two buckets, I hurried, or at least hurried as much as a person can in a foot or more of drifted snow, across to the house before Freddy could return. It only felt like a moment ago that we had put the poor ponies out to wade about in the valley but it appeared to have been a pattern of the past two months that the hours of every day would vanish in a blur of turning ponies out or bringing them in again, mucking them out and feeding them. Although, just for a change, the last hour in particular had been filled with endlessly lugging water across the treacherous roadway.

It is tempting here to launch into an explanation of the past weeks of hardship and isolation, and the conditions of our ceaseless battle against the bitter wind but I have never yet heard anyone describe this unnatural winter, a year into peace, without making it seem exaggerated or even simply downright invented. What I will say however, is that entire crops of winter vegetables were frozen uselessly into barns and with animals dying in herds at a time from cold and malnutrition on the whitened hillsides, these hard facts do perhaps begin to paint the right kind of picture. I know of at least one local farmer who, defying regulations, butchered his own sheep to feed his stranded neighbours.

For me, it was the addition of water to this list of deprivations that formed my most immediate difficulty. Like most of the Cotswolds, we had no mains water but the trusty hilltop spring, which normally supplied my hairy menagerie, was buried several feet beneath a hard cap of snow and ice and now only the rustic pipes that some former landowner had laid deep underground from pond to house could still be relied on to flow. It did seem particularly perverse that wherever I went I should be surrounded by great powdery heaps of the stuff.

I had actually finished the present watery mission however, and brought in everyone from the upper slopes before I finally caught the rough sound of Freddy's return. The ponies were blowing hard and hurrying out of the narrow valley when they ought to have been walking and, instantly dropping whatever I was doing, I stepped quickly across the yard to meet whichever miniature disaster had happened to the boy this time. It was beyond me to guess how he had somehow managed to turn even this mundane task into yet another adventure but there he was, fiddling about with the valley gate and standing at the centre of a sweating and excited cluster of tossing manes; bothered, overheated, but perfectly unharmed.

Getting him to speak was the next challenge. The boy was so excited and so agitated, and so very desperate to tell me about it that his words kept coming out in the wrong order, and sometimes even the letters too. Only then he finally managed it and any habitual urge to scold him abruptly evaporated.