“What did you do to your foot?” She asked, walking up to me and placing a hand on one of my arms to gently lower it.
“We saw a truck,” I said, rubbing my arms to restore the circulation, “and I thought the driver was injured so we tried to get him out. Turns out he was bigger than me and Jerry put together and dead with it, and he fell on me.”
Just thinking about being buried under all that dead flesh brought the memory back sharp and clear enough that I could feel the panic rising in my chest again. I took several deep breaths and pushed it away as she sat next to me and without asking took my bandaged foot, placing it carefully in her lap as she unwrapped it.
“Who put this bandage on?”
Jerry finally found his voice.
“I did.”
“Well it was nice of you to try and help your friend but it’s a good job I came along when I did. It was on so tight the circulation was being cut off. Another couple of hours and it would have caused permanent damage. What do they teach you nowadays?”
“I’m an astrophysicist, not a nurse!”
“Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know how to tie a bandage. My Emily could tie one better than this by the time she was five.” She looked up at her husband, who still pointed the shotgun at the roof but glared at us as if he’d rather have it shoved in our faces.
“Ralph, we need to get this boy to the cottage so I can look at his ankle properly. I think it’s just a bad sprain but it might be broken. How about you take him in the car and I’ll have young Jerry walk me back?”
Ralph growled, squinted and spat, but to my relief did as he was told, helping Jerry to gather our equipment and stow it in the car while Harriet, surprisingly strong for her age, helped me out to the car.
“Thank you,” I said with feeling as she guided me out into the night, “I really appreciate this. I’m sorry about the lock on the barn, and of course we’ll pay for it.”
“Oh shush,” she said, as if I were apologising for smashing a glass, not for breaking into their barn, “it’s not even ours anyway. We’re caretakers, of a sort, and the farm isn’t producing at the moment anyway, so there’s no one breathing down our necks about repairs and such.”
I was about to ask her what she meant when Jerry took me off her hands, easing me into the passenger seat while Ralph sat on the driver’s side, the shotgun next to his door where I couldn’t reach it.
As he drove away slowly, following a track that led away from the barn and across the field, I glanced back to see Jerry awkwardly offer his arm to the old woman as they followed.
“Thank you for helping us, you won’t regret it, I promise,” I said to Ralph, but instead of replying he just grunted and patted the shotgun, as if reminding me of who was in charge and what would happen if I tried anything.
As if it was something I was likely to forget. I knew, for better or for worse, that no matter what Harriet might think, we were completely at her husband’s mercy and should he decide that we were too much of a risk, there wasn’t much we could do to stop him from putting us in the ground.
Chapter 10
We pulled up in the yard of a medium-sized, two storey cottage that looked to have been built around the turn of the last century. It was built of solid-looking red brick, with ivy liberally covering the wall nearest to us, two small windows peeking out from between the leaves.
The yard itself was large enough to park half a dozen cars, with an open-sided stable that had been converted into a garage for a car that was currently covered with a dust sheet.
On the far side of the cottage, I could just make out some kind of vegetable garden, plants growing in neatly ordered rows with some clinging to a framework of bamboo. Just past that, I could see another shed, and from this came the lowing of a cow seemingly disturbed by the sound of the engine.
As I opened the door of the car, a black and white border collie began to bark excitedly, running up to sniff at me, tail wagging as one blue and one brown eye looked up at me with fierce intelligence and a questioning look.
“Maggie, quiet!” Ralph snapped at her, and she stopped barking, instead growling low in her throat even as her tail wagged and she continued to sniff every part of me she could reach.
“I take it she’s friendly?” I asked, easing myself out of the car and leaning against the door while she investigated my injured ankle.
“Friendlier than some who don’t think you should be here,” he said, then collected his shotgun and stood with it casually tucked under his arm as we waited for Harriet and Jerry to catch up.
I spent the time looking at the cottage and the fields surrounding it, realising that the reason we hadn’t seen it from the road was the gentle roll of the ground, forming a natural dell with a small hump in the middle upon which the building stood.
The yard itself was made from concrete, the only mud on it from the tracks the car had made coming in. The rest of it was scrubbed bare and clean, with nothing in the yard so much as an inch out of kilter.
Jerry and Harriet came into the yard a few minutes later, chatting and laughing like old friends. I wondered how someone as friendly and likeable as Harriet had married someone as grim and forbidding as Ralph, but I knew from experience that some marriages just worked and some didn’t, no matter the demeanour of the participants.
“Ralph Morris, have you left that poor man standing in the cold with an injured ankle?” Harriet demanded as soon as she saw us standing there. “Honestly Ralph, have you no shame?”
He stiffened and glared at me as if it was my fault that he was being dressed down by his wife.
“Not when it comes to your safety, no. I wanted to make sure that your man there behaved himself.”
Harriet shook her head in frustration and came around the car to me, brushing an excited Maggie out of the way.
“I’m sorry dear, let’s get you inside and get that foot seen to. Welcome to Bramble Cottage.”
With her on one side and Jerry on the other, I was almost carried inside while Ralph followed behind, out of sight but still obvious by the stony silence he carried with him.
The door they led me through opened into a large kitchen with a parquet floor, in the centre of which stood a table more than large enough for the eight chairs that sat around it.
Every wall was covered in shelves, and all the shelves were packed with jars, bottles and packets of things I couldn’t identify in the light of the torches Jerry and Harriet carried.
Three of the walls had doors seemingly nestled between the shelves, while the fourth had a long, low cooking range finished in dull enamel, from which two large pipes emerged and ran up the wall to disappear into the ceiling.
The range gave off a warmth that instantly made it feel homely, and as they placed me carefully in one of the chairs I could smell a dozen different spices and the faint scent of cooking meat.
Maggie had followed us in and immediately made for the range, curling up in front of it on a tattered old blanket while Harriet bustled about and lit several oil lamps, their glow surprisingly bright.
Throughout this, Ralph stood by the back door as if at attention, clearly unhappy about the turn of events but unwilling or unable to cross his wife as she welcomed two strangers into his home.
“Now,” she said once the lamps were lit. “I’ll make us all a nice cup of tea and then we’ll have a look at your ankle, see what we can do.”
Jerry sat next to me, his chair half pulled out so that he could keep an eye on the still-armed Ralph while he spoke to me.
“Looks like we’ve landed on our feet, if you’ll excuse the pun,” he said quietly. “Harriet told me on the walk over that Ralph likes to posture, but she said he’s got a heart of gold.”