One Summer at Deer’s Leap. Elizabeth Elgin
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there is, they haven’t said. And the war was a long time ago. The girl might be dead, even …’
‘And she’ll no longer be a girl if she isn’t,’ Beth said coaxingly.
‘OK. I’ll accept that. But someone should find out and tell Jack Hunter, because he doesn’t know he’s dead. It happens, sometimes, when someone dies suddenly or violently. He’s a lost soul, Beth!’
‘And you mean you’d try to get on his wavelength again,’ Jeannie said incredulously, ‘if you could winkle out the girl he’s still looking for?’
‘I don’t see why not.’ By now I’d got a hold on my feelings. ‘She’d be easy enough to trace without a lot of publicity. Have you ever thought to look at Deer’s Leap’s deeds? Whoever lived here in 1944 will show there.’
‘We’ve never seen the deeds,’ Danny said, offering me a glass of wine. ‘We don’t own this house, remember. And I know what it’s like for you writers, Cassie.’
‘What do you mean, we writers?’ I accepted the glass to show there wasn’t any ill feeling, then took a gulp from it. ‘Surely you don’t think I want to go sniffing around because I think it might make a good story? Book number three, is that it, Jeannie?’
‘Not at all!’ Now Jeannie was using her soothing voice. ‘What Danny means is that he thinks writers are a bit imaginative, sort of.’
‘We are, I suppose, though I wouldn’t go playing around with someone’s love life, even if it happened more than fifty years ago. But if you’re prepared to admit that I saw something – or someone – and that I’m not going out of my tiny mind, then I’ll take your advice and let it drop.’
‘I think you saw him,’ Beth said softly. ‘We all do. But like you said, Cassie, he’s a lost soul and there isn’t a lot anyone can do about it.’
‘You’re right. Mind, I wouldn’t want him exorcized,’ I said hastily.
‘He won’t be, I’m sure of it, if we don’t go stirring things.’
‘Right, then.’ I lifted my glass. ‘Bless you for having me, both of you. It’s been great. And if you have a wake before you leave, will you invite me, please, because I do so love this house?’
‘What a great idea,’ Beth laughed, her relief obvious. ‘We’ll have a goodbye party for Deer’s Leap whilst the Christmas decorations are still up – if we aren’t snowed up, that is!’
They’d believed I’d let it drop, I thought as I lay in bed that night, and I knew it was sneaky of me and deceitful because they were smashing people who had made me welcome and were prepared to ask me back at Christmas. But there was a young man looking for his girl and who needed my help. Besides which, I’d found him attractive; had wanted him to be at the party. OK – so he was in love with someone else, but I’d have given that girl at Deer’s Leap a run for her money if I’d been around fifty years ago! And I knew, too, that I would never let Piers make love to me again.
‘Sorry, Piers,’ I whispered, feeling almost relieved.
And then I said a silent sorry to Danny and Beth, because I knew too that I would try to find Jack Hunter again, but secretly, so no one would know – especially Beth and Danny. How I’d go about it I hadn’t a clue, but if the pilot really wanted to be in touch again, then I’d find a way.
Or he would!
We left Deer’s Leap at six the following evening; three cars, in convoy, sort of. Me to pick up the A59, Beth to take Jeannie to Preston station in an ancient Beetle that was worth a bomb, did she but know it, and Danny in the estate car to pick up the children and their gear down in Acton Carey.
I drove with Danny in front going far too fast for the narrow lane and Beth driving much too close behind. I knew what they were up to. I was being hustled into the village so that if the airman appeared again, I wouldn’t be able to stop.
We got there without incident and Danny flagged us down. Then he and Beth and Jeannie gave me a hug and a kiss through my open window and said I really must visit over the Christmas break – if not before – and how lovely it had been to have me.
‘Let me have a look at the book, uh, as soon as you can.’ The holiday was over. Jeannie was wearing her editorial hat again. ‘When you get to chapter ten, run me off a copy; I’d like to see how it’s going.’
‘Of course. Want to make sure I don’t start mucking about with the storyline,’ I grinned; ‘introduce a good-looking ghost?’
‘Now, Cassie,’ she said quite sternly, ‘I thought we’d forgotten all that. You said you’d keep shtoom about it.’
‘And I will. Not a word to the parents when I get home. Promise.’
Mum and Dad didn’t believe in ghosts anyway; only in things they could touch and see and smell – and in Dad’s case, drink from a pint pot.
‘That’s all right, then,’ Beth beamed. ‘Mind how you go, Cassie. See you!’
Waving, I pulled out, yet before I’d gone a couple of miles I was planning how I could get to drive past that place again without Beth and Danny getting wind of it.
I concentrated on the winding, tree-lined road that dropped slowly down to Clitheroe, then rose sharply at the crossing of a river bridge. Not far away was Pendle Hill; somewhere not too distant was Downham. Witch country, without a doubt, with wild, lonely tracts of land where ghosts and witches could roam free; one ghost in particular, looking for a girl who once lived at Deer’s Leap. A young man who didn’t realize he was dead.
Jack Hunter. He had flown, I shouldn’t wonder, from the airfield that was probably called RAF Acton Carey. The coming of bombers to that little village must have caused quite a stir, yet now all traces of the base had gone. Even the track that ran round the perimeter of the airfield had grassed over and could only be picked out, Danny said, in an exceptionally dry summer when the grass on it browned and died. You could trace the outline of it then, he said, and wonder about those too-young men who trundled their huge bombers around it before takeoff.
Jack had been one of them, though I’d thought it politic not to ask Danny specifically about him in view of what had happened. He’d looked about my age. I frowned. I couldn’t imagine those nervous fingers grasping whatever it was they had to pull back to get that great, death-loaded plane into the air. Lancasters, they’d been. A Lancaster bomber and a Spitfire and a Hurricane flew over London during the Victory in Europe celebrations, fifty years on, yet Jack Hunter was still twenty-four.
A great choke of tears rose in my throat and in that moment I didn’t care about broken promises, nor letting well alone nor even about snoopers from the tabloids upsetting the peace of Acton Carey if news of a World War Two ghost leaked out. As far as I was concerned it was, and would remain, between me and Jack Hunter and the girl it seemed he was looking for.
How I would go about it, where I would begin, I didn’t know. But I liked doing research; could pretend I was setting my next novel in the countryside around Deer’s Leap; might even be able to poke around there if the house stood too long empty and for sale after Beth and Danny had left.
Yet they weren’t leaving for six months and I couldn’t wait that long.
I noticed I was passing the Golf Balls at Menwith and decided to think about Jack Hunter tomorrow and concentrate instead on the roundabout ahead at which I would turn left to bypass Harrogate, a pretty run through Guy Fawkes country.
I indicated left, then closed my mind to everything save getting home before dark. Home to Greenleas Market Garden, Rowbeck. Safe and sound