Within minutes the ground was white all over with a layer of crunchy hailstones, and lightning was dancing over the fields as if the thunderclouds had come right down to touch the earth. Freddie had never felt afraid of storms, in fact he’d rather enjoyed them, but out in the open, he knew there was a danger of being struck. If that happened, the petrol tank would explode in a fireball and he would die. All his life Annie had relentlessly instilled her fears into his young mind and he felt engulfed by the accumulated mass of terror, the sting of each hailstone was like a word she had spoken, bombarding him with ice. He felt he had to hack his way through it to get to the bright flame that was Kate.
Freddie wrapped his arms over the steering wheel and put his head down on them, the sound of the hail roaring in his ears, the lorry shuddering with each roll of thunder and the branches of the crack willow bending and tossing outside. He closed his eyes and saw himself hunched there in the storm, like a pip inside an apple, protected in a hard shiny case. The cab of the lorry was shielding him, the hailstones battering at the glass, building peaks of ice up the windscreen, but he was inside, and once he had travelled into the centre of his mind, he felt calm. An old sweet scent from long ago filled the cab, a sharp tang of boot polish, the heavy sweetness of meadow hay.
‘Start the engine.’
Freddie looked up into the eyes of his grandfather, the man he had seen under the lime tree in the wood. He was stunned. After all the years of unyielding toil he could still see spirit people. He wasn’t dead inside. And they hadn’t abandoned him.
He pulled the starter, and the engine hiccupped a few times, then fired, blowing smoke out of the exhaust. Freddie smeared the steamed-up windscreen and peered out. Now he could see the far edge of the storm like a slice of apple in the western sky. It was still hailing, but he drove forward slowly, the tyres crunching through slush. He didn’t dare turn his head but he sensed his grandfather was still beside him along the treacherous road, over the river bridge, and up onto higher ground, the hailstones melting and pouring down the lanes in twisting rivulets of brown water. The hail changed to silver bristles of rain sweeping and swerving across the landscape, and when he reached the village of Hilbegut it was awash with flood-water. People were rushing about with brooms and buckets, the water lapping at their doorsteps.
Freddie drove slowly through, making a small bow-wave, and headed uphill towards the chimneys and turrets of Hilbegut Court. He paused outside the entrance to the avenue of copper beeches, and saw that the great wrought iron gates were closed, the lawn grass was long and unkempt, and a thousand jackdaws sat on the roof, beaks to the western sky, the brassy light glistening on their black feathers.
Turning in to Hilbegut Farm brought a familiar buzz of excitement in his body. He imagined Kate opening the door to him, her big bright eyes filling his soul. She always made him feel like the most important person on earth. When he’d spent a couple of hours with her, his face actually ached from unaccustomed smiling.
He knew that Kate’s parents liked him. Sally and Bertie had made him welcome with cups of tea and scones fresh from the oven. Only Ethie had been offhand and resentful, and he’d been surprised to find Kate being so kind and understanding towards her prickly-natured sister. Today he felt sure they would welcome him and perhaps be glad of the help he and his lorry could offer if they were moving house.
The storm had slunk away towards Monterose and the late afternoon light glowed mellow on the farmhouse chimneys. But the stone lions were gone, the tall gateposts demolished, and in their place were two iron stakes and a pair of metal gates.
A dread, cold as the hailstones, entered Freddie’s heart. He parked the lorry and got out, stretched, and picked his way through puddles to open the gates. A terrible sight confronted him. Barbed wire had been wound along the tops of the gates, and a padlock on a heavy chain held them firmly closed. Inside was a white notice with black letters: ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED’.
Devastated, Freddie stood at the forbidding gates, looking in at the farmyard. Not a duck or a goose or a chicken, no sound of cows from the milking shed, no dogs barking. Only the swallows dived in and out of the barns. The swing hung, unused, in the barn doorway. And the windows of the farmhouse, which had always been bright with curtains and ornaments, had the wooden shutters closed, barred and padlocked. It made the friendly old house look blind and sad.
They couldn’t have gone far, Freddie reasoned. Kate knew he lived at the bakery in Monterose, and surely she would contact him. He walked along the boundary wall round to the back, seeking a way in. The back gate was locked and wired and he peered through, noticing that the saddle stones which had lined the path had gone. He stood on a milk churn against the wall and climbed over, using the espalier pear tree as a ladder to climb down inside. He listened, and heard the garden dripping and the gurgle of water pouring over the sides of the rain butt. Even the sparrows seemed to have gone, and only a robin sang in the abandoned garden, the ground covered in lingering clusters of hailstones and mirror-like puddles.
One of the shutters was broken, and he squinted through into the interior of the kitchen. In the dim light he was surprised to see the kitchen table and chairs still there, the mat still on the flagstone floor in front of the stove. A shining trickle of water was creeping across the floor. He watched it gathering into a pool, and no one was there to sweep it out with the brooms that stood unused against the wall. The room which had been a hub of life with Sally and her two girls bottling fruit and making butter, a room which had rung with Kate’s laughter, now looked colourless and tomb-like.
Freddie needed to think, so he sat on the swing in the barn door, feeling sure that no one was watching him, a grown man swinging like a child in a place where trespassers would be prosecuted. The words sounded dreadful to him, like ‘hung, drawn and quartered’, but he didn’t care. He moved the swing to and fro, higher and higher, and he could feel Kate there with him, her red ribbon flying as she swung out of the barn and in again. The higher he swung the more he could see over the wall, and in the golden, storm-washed sky of late afternoon a tower of black smoke was rising. Freddie got off the swing and climbed the stone steps up the side of the barn to the open archway of the hayloft. From there he could see across the Levels to Monterose, the rhynes gleaming in the sunlight, the fields glinting with water. Freddie focused on the smoke billowing from a blazing fire in the middle of the Levels. A tree. It was a tree on fire. A cold realisation crept up Freddie’s spine. The old crack willow where he had parked his lorry had been struck by lightning and was burning fiercely.
Stunned, he watched it, suddenly aware that his life had been saved. Why? he thought. Why me? Why does my life matter? The answers came as he thought of Kate, and he thought of the stone angel waiting to be carved from the block of Hilbegut stone. I’m not a lorry driver, he thought. I’m someone else, someone I haven’t discovered.
A loneliness crept over him. Cold and tired, he headed back to climb over the wall and go home. Then something made him turn, as if a hand pushed him, and he walked round to the front of the house. He stood looking at the front door under its thatched porch, and a fragment of red caught his eye. A red ribbon, hanging from a crack in the wall.
Freddie reached up and pulled it gently, and found it attached to a white sealed envelope which slid out of the crack and into his hands.
Chapter Fifteen