Elizabeth Elgin - One Summer at Deer’s Leap

‘Never heard of that place, either,’ Dad shrugged.

‘Of course you have! Surely you’ve heard of the Pendle Witches. Alice Nutter lived at Roughlee. She was a gentle-woman and how she got mixed up in witchcraft, nobody seems to know. She was hanged on Lancaster Moor in 1612.’

‘And you believe such nonsense?’ Mum clucked. ‘All that stuff is a fairy tale, like Robin Hood.’

‘They don’t seem to think so around those parts.’

‘If they believe that, they’ll believe anything!’ Mum had the last word on witches. ‘And I forgot – Piers rang.’

‘What about?’

‘He didn’t say and I didn’t ask!’

‘Well, he’ll ring again, if it’s important.’

‘Aren’t you going to call him back?’

‘Don’t think so.’ As from this weekend, I’d stopped jumping when Piers snapped his fingers.

Mum put mugs and plates on a tray, wearing her button mouth. She placed great hopes on Piers. He was Yorkshire-born, which was a mark in his favour, and even if he had defected to parts south of the River Trent and was earning a living amongst Londoners, she considered it high time we were married.

‘Think I’ll go and unpack. Then I’ll write to thank Beth. By the way, she was really pleased with the flowers.’

‘So she should be! Your dad grew them!’

‘Won’t be long,’ I smiled. Long enough, though, to let Mum get over whatever wasn’t pleasing her.

I hung the green dress on a hanger, then wondered what to do with the two silk arum lilies, because even to say the words ‘artificial flowers’ is blasphemy in our house. So I stuck them in a drawer because they were a part of the weekend, and I couldn’t bear to throw them away.

I sat back on my heels. To open my case was to let out Deer’s Leap and Jack Hunter and the promise I’d made to Beth and Jeannie to forget him. Yet I couldn’t, because somehow he was a part of that house; was connected to Deer’s Leap in some way, and I had to know how.

Common sense told me to leave it, that ghosts didn’t exist. But Beth had half admitted that maybe they did in the very real, very solid form of a World War Two pilot whose plane had crashed more than fifty years ago. A very attractive man and Piers’s exact opposite.

Piers. I hoped he wouldn’t ring tonight when the spell of Deer’s Leap was still on me. Just to hear him say ‘Cassandra?’ very throatily – he rarely calls me Cassie – would intrude on the magic. For bewitched I was, with the enchantment wrapping me round like a thread of gossamer that couldn’t be broken. One gentle tug on that thread would pull me back there whether I wanted to go or not.

And I wanted to go.

By Monday morning I’d sorted out my priorities. All thoughts of the weekend were banned until after I switched off my word processor. I have to set myself targets. The contract said that Harrier Books wanted the manuscript by the end of December, so it couldn’t be delivered any later than the first week in January, even allowing for the New Year holiday.

I write in my bedroom. There’s a deep alcove in one corner that is big enough to accommodate my desk. My latest extravagance was to hang a curtain over it so that when I’d finished for the day I could pull it across and shut out my work. What I couldn’t see, I figured, I couldn’t worry about. The curtain has proved to be a good idea.

I had just finished reading last Friday’s work and got my mind into gear, when the extension phone on my desk rang. It would, of course, be Jeannie. People had got the message now that up until four in the afternoon it was best not to ring. Only my editor was allowed to disturb my thoughts.

‘Hi!’ I said brightly. ‘You made it home OK, then?’

‘Cassandra?’ a voice said throatily.

‘Piers! Why are you ringing at this time?’

‘Do I need a chit from the Holy Ghost to ring my girl?’

‘I – I – Well, what I mean is that it’s the expensive time. You usually ring after six …’ I closed my eyes, sucked in my breath and warned myself to watch it.

‘I rang yesterday. Didn’t your mother tell you?’

‘Of course she did.’ My voice was sharper than I intended.

‘You didn’t ring me back.’

‘I was late getting home – the traffic. I was tired …’ I tell lies too, Piers.

‘So how did the weekend go?’ It seemed I was forgiven.

‘It was nice.’

‘Only nice, Cassandra?’

‘Very nice. Jeannie’s family are lovely, though I didn’t meet the children,’ I babbled. ‘They were away at camp and –’

‘You sound guilty. Did you have an extraordinarily nice time?’

‘Piers! I’m not feeling guilty because I have nothing to feel guilty about! If I sound a bit befuddled it’s because I had a whole paragraph in my head and now it’s gone!’

‘You’ll have to think it out again then, won’t you?’

‘It isn’t that easy! Once it’s gone you never get it back again – not as good, anyway.’

‘Oh dear! I’ll ring again tonight if you tell me you love me.’

‘Why should I, at ten o’clock in the morning?’

‘Cassandra – what’s the matter?’ The smooth talking was over. He actually sounded curious.

‘Nothing’s the matter. I’m working, that’s all. If I were a typist in an office I probably wouldn’t be allowed private calls and I certainly couldn’t yell that I loved you over the phone for everyone to hear!’

‘You don’t yell it. “I love you” has to be said softly …’

‘Yes, and secretly for preference.’

‘Then say it softly and secretly from your bedroom.’

‘ Piers …’ I said in my this-is-your-last-warning voice. ‘I am busy!’

‘OK! Pax, darling. I’ll ring tonight! Get on with your scribbling.’

I sat back, part of my make-believe world once more, reading from the screen, searching my mind for the lost paragraph.

But it didn’t come. All I could think was that for once, in all the four years of our on and off affair, I’d challenged Piers and almost won!

‘Pop out and get me a few tomatoes, there’s a good girl. And tell your dad it’ll be on the table in five minutes!’

Once I got back in my stride, and sorted the wayward paragraph, the words had come well; it was going to be a word-flow day, I’d known it. I’d just come to the end of a page when my stomach told me it was lunchtime and my mind told me it needed a break.

I saw Dad at the end of the garden, so I waved and yelled, ‘Five minutes!’ then went into the tomato house, sniffing in the green growing smell, loving the moistness of it and the lush, tall plants heavy with red trusses. A few tomatoes, at our house, meant a bowlful and not half a pound in a plastic bag. I bit into one, marvelling that half the country didn’t know what a fresh tomato was.

I felt very relaxed. Once I’d got into my stride again, nothing intruded on the make-believe world at my fingertips. I had forgiven Piers, I realized, for ringing when he shouldn’t have done and I had not thought once about the kissing gate through which a World War Two pilot had disappeared.

Now my thoughts were free to roam again, my self-discipline on hold, and I wondered how I should go about finding the name of the family who lived at Deer’s Leap before the Air Force took it and they had to find somewhere else to live.

They might have moved to Acton Carey or further afield. They may even, since losing their acres under a runway of concrete and seeing their trees felled and hedges ripped out, have given up farming in disgust.

It was best I began the search in Acton Carey, but this would be risky, as Danny or Beth would be bound to hear of me doing it. I could not, I realized, visit locally without calling on them and if Lancashire villages were like Yorkshire villages, they would soon discover that a red-haired foreigner had been asking questions in the pub. Villagers close ranks at such times, and mention of anything remotely concerned with the ghost they wanted to sweep under the mat would be sidestepped at once! I would be taken for a journalist, no doubt, and that would be the end of that.