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

       Chapter 1

       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.

      His tale must have demonstrated every one of the usual inconsistencies inspired by his wonderfully overactive imagination but it would have taken a harder woman than me to ignore the underlying thread of genuine alarm. Even then, I probably could still have dismissed it as fantasy and, thanks to his appalling lack of self-confidence, he almost certainly would have believed me. But his description of the moment of spotting someone floundering on the furthermost slopes with its madcap image of that same foolish soul trying to force their way uphill through deep shifting powder was inescapable and, in the end, I found it unavoidably convincing too.

      And so that was how I found myself first prising a pony from its hay to reluctantly accompany me out into the disorientating amber light of a thickening snowstorm. Then, with the dark shadow of a hedge as my only guide, why I set about blindly tracing a path along the ridge top until yards felt like miles. And why now, nearly an hour later, I was standing cold and painfully breathless while the wind carved white spirals around me, dispassionately staring. At a dead man.

      He was sitting unnaturally slumped and motionless in the lee of an old dry-stone wall and with wind-driven drifts already beginning to claim his silent body, he was rapidly becoming nothing more than a misshapen extension to the shade. If I had been any later I might never have seen him at all. Everything about him was adding weight to the appearance of habitual vagrancy and where his head had sunk down onto his chest, I found that I could see very little of his face beneath the tattered and filthy remains of a scarf that may once have been patterned. His stained coat had a gaping tear to the seam of one sleeve and, lying half-propped against the hard frozen support of the tumbled stones, he had one hand jammed into the buttons near his chest, presumably in a useless quest for warmth. The other, just visible as white lifeless fingers within the swathes of a fraying cuff, had slipped from his lap to rest among the exposed stones by his side. It seemed to me that he must have made that same cruel mistake experienced by many other homeless people before and, having failed to beg his way into the cover of a dry barn and a hot meal, had chosen to pause and catch his breath for a while in the comparative shelter of this old stone wall. And then, with energy and resources at their lowest ebb, he must simply have, tragically but inevitably, expired.

      So it came as a surprise when the pale frozen hand suddenly tightened gruesomely upon the rock by his side to thrust him awkwardly to his feet.

      I had been creeping closer with that macabre curiosity of one who needs to at least be sure before turning for home so it only took one staggering plunge forwards in a search for balance for him to crash blindly into me.