In the Shadow of Winter: A gripping historical novel with murder, secrets and forbidden love. Lorna Gray
gentle grin that had appeared in response to mine darkened abruptly to that same unspeakable tension that was so unlike him.
“I … er …” he began and then stopped. I waited but he didn’t continue.
“Look, you don’t need to tell me anything if you don’t want to,” I said hastily as my embarrassment increased. “It doesn’t matter, but it might help if I understand a little of what’s been happening. Just a very little…?”
“Eleanor … I … I don’t think that I should…You…” He faltered.
My intense shame clouded to puzzlement then. The contractions of his mouth had already betrayed the pattern of his emotions from surprise through to discomfort and onwards, not entirely unreasonably, to impatience. But in this last awkward hesitation, I thought I saw another expression flicker briefly across his face. It was so swiftly suppressed that it barely registered, but just for a moment, only a brief fleeting instant, I thought I saw guilt.
I watched him run a hand over his face and it shook a little. He tried again, “It’s difficult. You’re…”
Then his eyes flicked up to catch mine, crucially, before dropping quickly away again.
“Oh,” I said with that odd note of sharpness back in my voice. It could not have been made plainer if he had tried. “Of course. You can’t tell me.”
He didn’t contradict me.
“Right,” I said in a strangled croak and ignored the pathetically appeasing smile he attempted.
It was a shock to be so emphatically rebuffed. I know that I had been half expecting something like this but somehow the wise thoughts of three o’clock in the morning were no consolation now that it was daylight and he very clearly had not lost his mind.
I turned abruptly away to crash the breakfast things into the sink, setting about scrubbing the dishes as if the boiling water from the pan on the stove could cleanse me of the strain of his unwelcome presence. After all the worry I had expended in the night on his behalf, I had thought that, at the very least, he would owe me a little basic honesty. But instead it appeared that I was to be roughly abandoned to the thin logic of my imagination, understanding nothing except the very bitter sting of his rejection. And knowing all the while that it ought to have been for me to shun him.
Apparently, however, this last little truth was not allowed to matter. Instead, infuriatingly trapped within a straitjacket of compassion, I could do little else but maintain an icy silence while the day passed into a blur of keeping him fed, keeping him warm, making him tea; providing, in fact, any one of the many little things that were essential to his ongoing comfort and recovery. He didn’t even seem to register the insult contained within his unthinking acceptance of my continued care.
It might have been a little easier if I could have continued my chores in some other room. Unfortunately, however, there were no fires laid in any other part of the house and while I could still remember a time when there had been a wall between kitchen and living room, my father had removed it years ago so that my mother could have one of the new Calor gas stoves that were suddenly all the rage. Her lively presence and divine cooking had left us for higher things in my early teens but the gas oven still lived on and the only boundary that could separate me now from the presence on my settee was the thin join between the red-tinted tiles in the kitchen and the fraying carpet of the living room floor.
For his part, Matthew, in his brief moments of full wakefulness seemed fixed upon giving me glimpses of that same bright meaningless smile which had irritated me before. This was apparently an attempt to conceal the darker moments of being caught looking broodingly thoughtful and intensely fierce but the improbability of a civilised man such as him even bearing such an expression was unsettling enough.
Added to his continued silence, this obvious secrecy was actually making my own show of frosty distance seem absurdly irrelevant and with the acknowledged flaw in my living arrangements to deal with as well, I was forced in the end to spend the rest of the day attempting to take myself as far away from him as possible. In weather such as ours, however, there was only so long that I could bear it and by about eight o’clock I was shattered, slumping defeated in the armchair by the fire, unable to pretend any longer that I was anything but utterly wearied of this act. I would have dearly liked to have abandoned it, but the only thing I could think of was to scream at Matthew to explain what had happened to him. But he had already made it clear that he had no intention of letting me understand anything about his business and so I held my tongue, and kept my stare fixed upon the crackling flames.
“Eleanor?”
“Um?” I responded sleepily, blinking myself out of my stupor.
“You didn’t get a doctor, did you? Last night I mean.” Matthew had turned slightly awkwardly against the arm of his settee to look back at me.
“Er…?” My brain was struggling to get into gear.
“These bandages,” he gestured to his chest, “did you fetch someone to do them?”
I glowered at him, “No, Matthew, I didn’t. It was snowing in case you’ve forgotten and we’re cut off again for the moment; I did them with my own fair hands. I’m sorry if they’re not up to scratch.”
“No, no,” he corrected hastily, “they’re very good.” He paused, “So no one knows I’m here?”
“No, Matthew, no one knows you’re here,” I said tiredly, concealing the shiver as I realised that his fears had not just been a symptom of his confused ramblings in the night.
I climbed stiffly to my feet without looking at him, concentrating instead on straightening the cushions of my chair; “Do you want anything else? Only I’m going to bed now.”
“No, nothing, thank you,” he said, but then, as I opened the door to the stairs, added; “Eleanor?”
“Yes?” I demanded curtly.
“Just …” A pause. “Thank you,” he finished gently.
As if to compound my exhausted frustration, the handle to my bedroom door decided this was the ideal moment to come off in my hand. Crossly, I slapped it down on the dresser and as I bent to wedge the door shut with a small pile of books, I had to wonder whether the house had it in for me too.
Very wearily, I peeled off the five or so layers of clothing that were my defence against winter. My fingers were stiff as I fumbled with the buttons and then, as I gave in and drew the shirt off over my head, I suddenly realised that my wrists were aching with far more than just tiredness.
I looked down and it was with a kind of fascinated horror that I observed dark marks encircling each one. They were ugly and tender and I had to spend some minutes just sitting on the edge of my bed. Somehow in the preoccupation of being offended by his determined silence, the whole shocking truth of my discovery out in the snow had faded in my memory to become nothing more than a product of my uneasy imagination. But the bruises were indisputable and, allied with his refusal to make any kind of explanation, I found that as I finally slipped into bed, I was actually trembling.
His late night comments on my altered appearance had been right; I was slimmer now. I had been a softly rounded teen but the subsequent years of hard physical work made worse by the deprivations of the war had stripped my body down to lean muscle that I suspected was rather boyish, and sadly no amount of dreaming would allow me to pretend that I had magically transformed my baby fat into a model-like elegance. I supposed that I still had hips somewhere, but they were so well hidden by handmade trousers and the loose folds of my thick winter jumpers that I would have been hard pushed to prove it.
Reassuringly, the bruises appeared less substantial in the light of day and as I quietly slipped down the stairs to the familiar sounds of a windswept world dawning to thick snow,