Chapter One
“Esther!”
Her mother’s tone of pleased surprise morphed into confusion, and then, predictably, worry, as her kindly face creased with concern. “Why have you got a suitcase?”
“Two suitcases,” Esther Langley answered, and hefted both as she stood on the stone steps, the March wind cold and damp as it buffeted her. “May I come in?”
“Of course, darling. You don’t have to knock. You usually don’t.” Her mother’s forehead was furrowed as she stepped aside so Esther could walk into the Victorian tiled porch of her childhood home, the vicarage of Thornthwaite, a village of two thousand hardy souls nestled at the foot of Lonscale Fell in England’s Lake District.
Esther put the suitcases down in the porch and her mother glanced at them askance. “Shall I put on the kettle?”
Esther nodded in relief, grateful for the momentary reprieve from her mother’s well-meaning concern. “Please.”
She followed her mother down the hall and around the back of the Georgian house to the kitchen, the cosy heart of the home. The family’s elderly black lab, Charlie, was sprawled in his usual place in front of the rather battered Aga, and there was a smell of sugar and spice in the air.
“I’ve just made some Bakewell tarts for the pop-in morning in the church hall,” Ruth said as she filled the electric kettle and switched it on. “But they can spare two, I think.”
“Thanks, Mum.” Esther let out a hefty sigh and sank into one of the colourful, mismatched chairs at the table of scarred oak where she’d eaten countless childhood meals. It felt both good and awful to be back in her childhood home at aged thirty-five, enveloped in the sweet-smelling warmth of the kitchen, yet with a leaden weight of sadness and disappointment in her stomach.
Ruth didn’t ask any prying questions as she made the tea, and Esther rested her chin in her hands, feeling absolutely shattered but knowing she couldn’t show up at the vicarage with two suitcases and no explanations. Her mother deserved to know why she was here. In any case, her life’s trials would inevitably play out on the small stage of the village; that was the price of being one of the vicar’s daughters for the last thirty years. Everyone knew everything about her, sometimes even before she did.
She’d learned their family dog before Charlie, Molly, had died from a well-meaning neighbour expressing condolences as Esther had walked home from school. In her teenaged years, she’d discovered her sister Rachel had been dumped by her boyfriend by the woman at the post office shop. That was how life went in a village like Thornthwaite, and Esther had learned to live with it, mainly by never giving anyone anything to talk about it. Too bad that wasn’t possible now.
“So.” Ruth put down two Bakewell tarts, each on its own little plate with a napkin, on the table. “Is everything all right, Esther?”
Esther took a sip of tea, closing her eyes as she savoured the comforting warmth of the drink her mother believed cured almost every ailment, or at least helped a little. Unfortunately, she still felt empty and aching inside, and no amount of tea, lovingly brewed as it was, could help that. She didn’t think anything could.
“I’ve left Will.” Best to state it plainly, up front, get the worst right out and then try to recover. Soldier on, as she was desperate to do, mostly because she didn’t know what else she could do. Most of her life had been about ploughing ahead, head down, chin tucked low, getting things done.
Ruth goggled at her, nearly spluttering her mouthful of tea. “Left… but…”
“We’re separating,” Esther clarified. “That’s why I’m here. Will offered to be the one to leave, but with the farm it didn’t make much sense.” She put her hands flat on the table, her wedding ring winking in the light. She’d wondered about taking it off, making things clearer, at least in her own mind, but she didn’t feel ready for that yet. She’d only been separated, informally at that, for two hours.
“Oh, Esther.” Ruth bit her lip, looking near tears. “Is this… is this because of the baby?”
“There was no baby, Mum,” Esther reminded her. Even now, two months after the miscarriage—if she could even call it that—she felt the lightning flash of pain, like a toothache but in her heart. The blank blackness of the ultrasound screen still reverberated through her, an image she’d never be able to banish, an image of nothing, and she’d felt an awful nothingness when she’d seen it, and then something worse. Something she couldn’t bear to articulate, even to herself, and certainly not to her mother.
“There was a baby, Esther,” Ruth said quietly, her expression both sad and dignified. “It’s just that it died very early.”
“So it’s in heaven?” Esther answered, unable to keep a sarcastic edge from entering her voice, and her mother winced. Esther felt a flash of guilt, on top of the pain. She hadn’t meant to sound so cutting, so disbelieving, but she’d seen the screen and her mother hadn’t. There had been nothing there. Absolutely nothing. And faith felt like a very frayed, thin thread indeed in moments like that one, although her parents chose to cling to it as often as they could.
“Sometimes this happens,” the doctor had said, called in by the newly-qualified and nervous ultrasound technician. “The gestational sac is empty, because the embryo never actually developed…”
No embryo. No baby, and there never even had been. All along, while they’d been telling everyone and buying booties and baby gros, there had been nothing there. It felt like a mean trick played on them by fate—or God, if she wanted to believe the way her parents did, except of course they didn’t believe God operated like that. No doubt, her father would smile sadly and say there was some wretched purpose in this, as there was in everything. Esther reached for her tea.
“All right,” Ruth relented, her tone cautious. “As you say, then. But it’s still a loss, Esther, no matter what showed up on that screen.”
Esther buried her nose in her mug and kept her gaze lowered. No need to reply, then, although she still felt churlish, and she hated hurting her mother, who had to be one of the gentlest people on earth. How she shared the same DNA, Esther had no idea. She was certainly missing some of those crucial genes.
“Is that why you and Will have separated?” Ruth pressed, sounding genuinely upset. “Because grief can do strange things to people, Esther. Trust me, I know—”
“I know you know.” Esther could hardly compare her own relatively paltry loss to her mother’s grief over her only son and Esther’s younger brother, Jamie, hit by a car and killed instantly when he was only ten years old. It had been twenty years ago, but sometimes the pain still felt fresh and raw, like a wound that kept breaking open, oozing blood, reminding everyone of how much it had hurt.
Over the years, they’d all become used to his absence, gaping as it was. They toasted him at Christmas and on his birthday in July, recalled happy memories, smiling and laughing a little, and occasionally brought out the photos. It all seemed healthy and right, the sort of thing you read about in self-help books as the proper way to manage grief, but sometimes Esther felt as if they were just applying a layer of gloss to an ugly stain. It didn’t make it better. In some ways, it only made it worse.
Which was why, in her own blunt, forthright way, she’d decided to name this particular wound for what it was. Something that couldn’t heal instantly or easily or maybe even at all. And it wasn’t the miscarriage. It was her marriage.
“Do you mind if I stay here for a while?” she asked her mother.
“Oh, darling, of course not. We have the room, obviously, but…” Ruth trailed off, looking unhappy, and Esther knew why. She hated the thought of Esther and Will being apart, and she probably thought a romantic dinner out at The Winter Hare, the village’s tiny bistro, would knock the problem on its head, bring them back together, easy peasy. All they needed was a little wine and good food to grease the wheels of their creaky marriage.
Unfortunately, life didn’t work like that. And Will wouldn’t even think of taking her out to dinner, not that Esther would want to go. They didn’t have that kind of money, and they’d both see it as a waste.
“Thank you,” Esther said briskly as she stood up from the table. “And thanks for the tea. I should be getting on. I’m due for a farm visit out near Penrith in an hour.”
“All right,” Ruth said. She looked like she wanted to say something else, but Esther turned away, taking both of their mugs to the sink and rinsing them out. “Is Dad around?” she asked, mainly because she wanted to avoid him and the prospect of another concerned conversation, his well-meaning but prying questions, the commiserating clap on the shoulder.
“He’s doing a funeral visit,” Ruth said. “Mary Stanton died—do you remember her? She always sat in the back pew, wearing a pillbox hat.” She smiled in fond, bittersweet recollection.
Esther vaguely remembered the woman; she’d stopped going to church when she’d moved back to Thornthwaite after uni, much to the quiet grief of her parents, and she only barely remembered the parade of grey-haired wrinklies who had, over the years, passed her sweets and pinched her cheek, told her how tall she was, how like her mother or father.
“That’s too bad,” she said as she dried her hands on the dish towel hung over the Aga’s rail and then gave Charlie a pat as his tail thumped on the floor.
“She was ninety-three. She lived a good, long life.”
“Yes, that’s something I suppose.” A silence ticked on, both of them lost, or perhaps trapped, in their own thoughts. Then Esther turned towards the door. “I’d better get on. I’ll just take my suitcases upstairs.” She paused. “Is there a bedroom you’d prefer that I…”
“You can have the one you used to share with Rachel,” Ruth answered. “Or if you’d rather have a little privacy, one of the spare rooms on the top floor. Whatever you like, Esther, of course.”
“Okay.” Esther smiled, grateful for her mother’s easy acceptance of her situation, even if she clearly didn’t like it. “Thanks, Mum.”
The house was quiet all around her, the only sound the steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall, as Esther hefted her two suitcases up the wide staircase. The vicarage had been built on grand proportions two hundred years ago, with soaring ceilings, sashed windows, and rooms the size of football pitches. It made the place freezing no matter what the season, with draughts regularly blowing through the old, thin windowpanes and heat rising to the high ceilings. Still it was lovely, and even now it felt like home. Perhaps it always would, even after her parents moved out in four months, when her father took up a pastor’s position in China.
Esther paused outside her old room, which faced her parents’ bedroom, and then decided to head up the narrow stairs to what had once been the old servants’ quarters but now housed two cosy guestrooms under the eaves, mostly used when her parents had temporary lodgers—mercy guests, Rachel called them, for they never paid anything. Priests without posts, locals down on their luck, whatever waif or stray was currently in need of a bed and a roof over their head. And now that was her.
She chose the room on the right, with the small window that overlooked Lonscale Fell, now covered in a white, glittering frost even though it was March. She dumped the suitcases by the bed, unable to face unpacking just then. She also felt unable to face heading out to Penrith to visit Andrew Tyson and see how he was getting on with his drystone walls.
Her job at Natural England involved some travel to farms around the Lake District, encouraging farmers in their implementation of environmental programs and clean technology. It also involved many chats around the kitchen table and countless cups of tea. She was part civil servant, part counsellor—and sometimes she felt like the last person on earth who should be dispensing advice of any kind. She certainly felt that way now.
When Esther wasn’t travelling to farms, she worked from home, part of a budget cut made in the last few years to reduce full-time office workers. Esther missed the camaraderie of the office in Penrith, and she disliked the ever-increasing mundane reality of the government box ticking and spreadsheet filling her job now required. Half her job, it seemed, was simply proving she was doing something. Still, it was the only job she’d ever known, and she believed in its mission wholeheartedly, which was what had kept her going this long.
With a sigh, she ran a brush through her unruly brown hair before catching it up in a ponytail. She glanced in the little square mirror above the bureau; deeper crow’s-feet by her hazel eyes, and stronger lines from nose to mouth. She was nearly thirty-six years old and showing her age. That had been what had spurred them to finally try for a baby. Those eggs were getting curdled, or whatever happened to unused eggs. Did they wither? Shrivel? Explode?
Downstairs, Ruth came out of the kitchen as Esther headed for the front door. “Will you be home for supper—”
Esther pictured her and her parents gathered around the kitchen table every night, suffering through tense, concerned silences as Ruth and Roger struggled to know what to say to their errant daughter. The one who had failed, who had had to limp home, downtrodden and depressed.
“I’m not sure,” Esther hedged as she shrugged on her waxed jacket. “I’ll ring you.”
“All right.” Ruth watched her go, clearly struggling not to say something Esther obviously didn’t want to hear, and then with a distracted, apologetic smile aimed at her mum, Esther wrenched open the door and she was free.
The air was sharp and cold, with the bone-pervading damp that three weeks of wintry rain had caused, even though the sun was now attempting to break out from behind a bank of dark, dank clouds and spring was technically only a few weeks from now.
The air was still, the only sound the bleating of lambs in the distance. It was the middle of lambing season, and Esther had felt a curdling of guilt in her stomach that morning for leaving Will at the busiest time of a sheep farmer’s year. But she hadn’t felt as if she’d had any choice; it had been either that or claw her own eyes out.
Things between them had been getting steadily more strained, the silences that had once been comfortable and uncomplicated feeling like a scream that Esther struggled to suppress.
When she’d woken that morning she’d felt, with a leaden certainty, she couldn’t wade through one more unendurable day. She just couldn’t. And so, after breakfast, she’d told Will she’d thought they should separate. He’d stared at her blankly, as if she’d been speaking Swahili.
“Separate? What on earth are you talking about?”
“Oh, come on, Will.” Esther dumped a frying pan in the sink and stared despairingly around at the cluttered mess of the low-ceilinged kitchen of Will’s family home for nearly a hundred years. “Even you have got to realize things haven’t been good between us.”
“Even me? And what’s that supposed to mean?” He was standing by the door, wearing an old fleece, mud-spattered all-weather trousers, and wool socks, a Wellington boot in one hand. His hair was an unruly shock of light brown around his weather-beaten face, his eyes, piercing blue, now narrowed.
Esther had always found Will’s rugged, farmer looks sexy, but now he just seemed tired. It was six-thirty in the morning and he’d already been up for two hours.
“Nothing.” She shook her head, too tired herself to go into lengthy explanations. And neither of them were the emotional sort, anyway. They didn’t analyse each other’s words or rake over old arguments. They didn’t give each other lovey-dovey nicknames or send sappy love notes, never mind some kind of appalling sext. They just got on with things, two sensible people, happy in each other’s company. Until now. Or, really, until the last few months, when Esther had gone into this awful, emotional tailspin. She was still trying to regain her balance, and feared she never would.
“Well, what are you talking about then, separating?” Will put his boot down. “I’ve got nowt time to have a pagger, Esther.”
Esther always knew when Will’s emotions were engaged, because he lapsed into the Cumbrian dialect he usually avoided, not wanting to seem parochial. Sheep farming was a gentleman’s business these days; Oxford-educated philosophers were buying up farms in the fells and then writing blasted books about it. Will couldn’t afford to seem like some sort of backwards yokel.
“I don’t want to fight,” Esther said. “I thought I was stating the obvious.”
“It’s not bloody obvious to me. Look, is this about the baby? Because—”
“It’s not about the baby. That was just… a symptom, I suppose.”
Will looked thunderous. “A symptom? Of what?”
“Of us not working anymore,” Esther burst out. Of her not working, as a wife, as a person. “Of not being happy,” she persisted, “either one of us, not really. Come on, Will. Tell me you haven’t been miserable these last few weeks.”
He stared at her, a storm in his eyes, and said nothing. That was answer enough, surely.
“I’ll move back to the vicarage,” Esther said. “It’s the most sensible thing.”
“If you feel you can’t live with me,” Will said, sounding furious, “then I’ll be the one to move—”
“Will, come on.” He had an old-fashioned code of gentlemanly behaviour, but it didn’t make sense now. “You have the farm, and the lambs to see to. I’ll go.”
He stared at her, his jaw bunched and working, his eyes snapping icy blue sparks. “Fine.”
“I’ll leave this morning.”
“Can’t wait to get away, can you?”
Esther flinched but took it as her due. This was her fault. She accepted that. She should have been strong enough to keep muddling on, the same as always. She knew Will was. He would have gone on another forty years, the same day in and day out, without a flicker. She was the one who had suddenly detonated inside, ruining everything.
Will nodded tightly and then yanked on his boot. He paused in the doorway, slightly stooped under the low stone lintel, looking as if he wanted to say something, but wasn’t sure what. And in the end, that had been part of the problem, hadn’t it? They’d never known what to say to one another. It just hadn’t mattered all that much until grief had reared up and sucker-punched them both.
Except you’re not all that grief-stricken, are you?
That was a treacherous little voice she quickly silenced now. It was hard enough dealing with all the other rubbish she had going through her mind. Climbing into her beat-up Land Rover, she gripped the steering wheel and set her jaw, determined to soldier on, and not to think, to wonder, to doubt.
She couldn’t picture her future—living at her parents’ at thirty-five? Really? And besides, her mum and dad were moving out of the vicarage in just four short months. They were moving all the way to China, and that was something Esther tried not to think about, either.
She often acted as if she merely endured her parents’ enthusiastic presence in her life, but the truth was, she couldn’t imagine them not in it, the strong and silent foundation to everything she did and believed.
She couldn’t imagine not being able to stop by the vicarage whenever the feeling took her, to sip tea and eat her mother’s delicious baking while she tried—sometimes harder than others—not to roll her eyes on her mother’s unsubtle poking and prying; the when-are-you-going-to-have-a-baby conversation had been dancing around that table for years.
The sudden sting of tears behind her lids took Esther by surprise. She was so not a crier. She hadn’t cried that morning, when she’d packed her bags in the eerily silent farmhouse, with Toby, Will’s springer spaniel, twelve years old, a puppy when they had been dating, whining at the bottom of the old, narrow stairs he was no longer spry enough to climb, sensing something was wrong.
She hadn’t cried when she’d seen that awful, blank screen at the hospital, felt the silence in a moment when she should have heard the watery whoosh of her baby’s heartbeat. She hadn’t even cried when her brother Jamie had died; she’d been called from her history classroom in Year Ten, taken to the head teacher’s office, everyone looking far too solemn.
In each case, she’d just felt frozen inside, and the truth was, she’d never tested to see how deep or thick that layer of ice was, or whether any emotion lurked underneath. And now she was afraid to find out, afraid to probe those dark depths and discover how deep they went. Afraid she’d drown.
Eyes narrowed against the wintry glare of the sun emerging from behind the clouds, Esther drove over the little stone bridge that crossed St. John’s Beck and out of Thornthwaite.