had provided a certain amount of food, but there were things she would need, a certain amount of stocking up to do, which meant driving to the nearest market town.
Breakfast first and then she would make plans later, she decided, finding and filling the coffee filter and switching on the machine.
Two mugs of fragrant coffee and a piece of toast later, she decided that she might as well brave the wet weather and investigate a little of her immediate surroundings. From the field at the bottom of her wilderness of a garden, ran a footpath that went from the village right through up into the hills. Harriet didn’t want to walk quite that far, but she decided that a breath of fresh air would help to settle her breakfast and her thoughts.
Pulling on her red boots, and adding a bright yellow shiny oilcloth jacket with a hood, she stepped outside.
Underfoot the ground was squelchy and muddy, and she was glad she had had the forethought to buy the boots. Her garden gate swung creakily as she opened it.
She walked through, across the lane and on to the footpath in the field beyond it.
CHAPTER TWO
HARRIET walked for almost half an hour without seeing or hearing anyone, in sheer bliss after London’s frenetic streets and busy, uncaring crowds. She had learned a long time ago that it was possible to be far more lonely in the midst of a great press of humanity than it was in solitude, but she knew that Louise could never have understood her feelings.
She wished her sister well in her new life, and felt that this time she had found in her American husband a man who would give her order and direction.
Wrapped up in her bright yellow oilskin and her waterproof boots, Harriet was not bothered by the heavy rain and cool wind, and, walking past her overgrown garden, she smiled a little ruefully, remembering how in London she had dreamily planned to spend those hours when she wasn’t writing in turning her small private wilderness into the kind of secret, romantic garden she had always dreamed of having.
Here, deep in this wet glade, it was impossible to look up clearly at the sky, but she suspected that the rain had set in for the day, which meant that, instead of wilfully wasting time walking, she ought to be at her typewriter. For the first of the four commissioned books her publishers had given her a deadline which should not prove too arduous to meet, but that did not mean that she could necessarily spend her time walking around dreamily in the rain, she told herself severely, deciding regretfully that it was time she returned to the cottage. She would have a certain amount of decorating to do over the next twelve months if she was to turn the cottage into the home she had envisaged, but decorating was a task she had set aside for the winter months.
Gardening…decorating…solitude…she was fast turning into the archetypal ‘old maid’ Louise had so often accused her of being. She would be thirty-five years old in three months’ time. Not old precisely, but not young either, and age was after all a state of mind, and while a man of thirty-five and even of forty might be considered to be in his prime, for a woman—even in these liberated days…She stopped walking, and found that somehow or other, without her knowing how it had happened, a mental image of a tall, dark, and very damp man had slipped into her head and refused to leave it. A very male man…a very angry man…a man who had plainly not seen her as a desirable woman at all, but rather as an object of irritation and contempt.
Would it really have hurt her to give him a lift? A neighbourly act of charity and kindness? Had the years of living in London, celibate, alone in so many ways, and with so many responsibilities, turned her into the kind of timid, over-imaginative single woman who thought that every man she met represented some kind of danger?
She didn’t like the picture her thoughts were drawing, and dismissed it as irrational. Of course she had been quite right to refuse his request. The police via the media were constantly warning women about the dangers inherent in exactly the kind of situation she had found herself in last night. No, she had nothing to reproach herself with, and yet—Her reverie was abruptly shattered as a large and very muddy chocolate-brown Labrador suddenly came crashing through the undergrowth towards her, hotly pursued by a small, slim red-haired girl, bare-headed despite the rain, and dressed in enviably well-worn and well-used dark green jacket, faded jeans and dark green wellingtons.
‘Come here at once, Ben,’ she shouted to the dog, her eyes rounding in surprise as she saw Harriet.
‘Oh! I didn’t know anyone else was here—I thought that Ben had got the scent of a rabbit. He never catches them, thank goodness, but I’m in enough trouble already, without having to spend half the morning chasing him all over the countryside. Oh, no, Ben…down, you bad dog!’
It was too late. Ben, evidently a gregarious animal, had flung himself enthusiastically at Harriet, almost knocking her over in the process, and was now proceeding to lick her, despite the girl’s attempts to call him to heel.
Harriet didn’t mind. She loved dogs and always had done. In London it had been impossible to keep one, but perhaps here…
‘Oh, dear, I am sorry,’ the girl apologised, rushing up to Harriet to rescue her from her pet.
She had wide-set hazel eyes, a retroussé nose, and the kind of warm smile that illuminated her whole face. She looked about sixteen or seventeen, and Harriet guessed probably had the kind of quick, almost intuitive intelligence that matched her manner. Altogether something of an enchantress, who would probably drive the male sex mad once she was old enough to recognise her own power, Harriet reflected, gently pushing the dog down and holding on to his collar for her.
‘Oh, goodness, look what he’s done to your jacket!’ The girl grimaced guiltily.
The front of Harriet’s yellow oilskin was covered in muddy pawprints, but she shook her head in dismissal of another apology.
‘They’ll wash off, there’s no real harm done.’
‘Thank goodness for that,’ her companion said with disarming frankness. ‘All I need right now is someone to go complaining to Rigg about me. I’m in enough trouble as it is.’ She rolled her eyes theatrically, and giggled. ‘Right at this moment, I’m supposed to be in my room contemplating my sins. Have you ever heard anything so archaic? Rigg really is the end. I keep on telling him I’m an adult, not a child.’
Her mouth became stubborn and resolute all of a sudden, striking a vague chord of memory within Harriet. She frowned a little herself, but before she could say anything the girl was speaking again.
‘I’m Trixie Matthews, by the way, and this, as you’ve probably guessed, is Ben.’
Trixie. An unusual name, and now she had heard it twice within one single span of twenty-four hours…Not merely coincidence, surely? Could this be the niece of whom the man who had stopped her car last night had spoken so furiously?
The tempation to find out was almost overwhelming; it wouldn’t have been difficult, not with this girl, with her confiding, open nature, but Harriet had a very strict personal moral code, and to ask the questions teeming through her brain would undoubtedly break it—and, besides, what did it matter? Last night’s interlude by the roadside was over and done with, and had already occupied far too many of her thoughts.
Giving the girl a polite, dismissive smile, she turned round ready to head back to the cottage. The smile was one she had perfected over the years, for keeping other people at a distance, but the girl seemed unaware of that fact, and fell into step beside her. Ben, the Labrador, having drawn his mistress’s attention to the stranger in their midst, was apparently quite content to snuffle in the undergrowth a few yards ahead of them.
‘Are you staying in the village?’ Trixie asked Harriet interestedly. ‘Not that we’ve had much of a summer this year.’ She pulled a face. ‘I keep telling Rigg that I need a proper holiday.’ She gave Harriet a mischievous smile.
‘He’s so stuffy and old-fashioned…Loads of girls my age are living on their own, never mind going on holiday with a friend and her mother.’
Many