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      CHAPTER ONE

      AS ALWAYS when she drove down Woolerton’s main street Kate felt a warm glow of contentment. Moving to Yorkshire from London had been the best thing she had ever done. She loved the Yorkshire Dales with their ageless grandeur, and she also loved the villages with their clusters of stone-built cottages, their gritty timelessness that said they had withstood for centuries and would continue to do so for many centuries to come. If man allowed them to do so. She grimaced faintly, as she stopped her small car outside the woolshop she owned jointly with her friend and partner Margaret Bowes.

      When she had first come to Woolerton she had been looking for escape, and she had not visualised, when she bought the small, out-of-date handicrafts shop, just how successful and stimulating a career she would make of it; a career that now took her regularly to London and New York, where the hand-knitted jumpers she designed and had knitted by her faithful local circle of workers were pounced on avidly by the buyers of top stores. And this latest batch far surpassed anything they had done before, Kate thought enthusiastically as she climbed out of her car, opening the hatchback to remove the garments she had spent the day collecting.

      At first when she had approached local farmers’ wives, through the medium of the vicar’s wife, to ask if they would be interested in knitting up the patterns she designed, they had been sceptical, but once they had discovered how well the jumpers sold, their enthusiasm had kept pace with Kate’s own, and now she had a regular circle of knitters, all of whose work she could rely on. Dales wives learned young how to pass the cold dark evenings when their husbands were out with the stock, and this latest batch had been finished well ahead of schedule. Tomorrow she and Margaret could sort and pack the garments ready for despatch.

      ‘Ah, there you are. I was just about to close up,’ Margaret smiled in welcome as Kate walked in.

      ‘I stopped off to see Sarah,’ Kate explained. Sarah Keddy was one of her favourite knitters, and one of the oldest. There had been Keddys in Ebbdale as long as there had been an Ebbdale, but Sarah Keddy was now alone. Her grandson and his wife, together with their children, had emigrated to New Zealand two years before Kate came to the valley, and although she had many friends Kate knew she suffered from their absence. The hill farm that had been her home for so many years had had to be sold after her husband’s death and now she had a cottage at the far end of the village.

      She was a ‘warm’ woman, or so Kate had been told by some of her other knitters, but there was never any evidence of wealth in the tiny but immaculately clean terraced cottage down by the river; rather the opposite. In many ways life in the valley was still hard, but Kate wouldn’t change it for luxurious city living. It was here in Woolerton that she had found peace and hope for the future after … Her mind swerved violently away from the past, as always reluctant to dwell on the events that had brought her to Ebbdale. Two years had passed since then. Two years in which she had grown new tissue over the old scars. But new tissue didn’t totally obliterate the pain; and tranquillity couldn’t entirely wipe away her sense of failure at having a broken marriage behind her.

      Margaret had helped her so much in those early days. Kate had found Woolerton by accident. Driven mad by a need to get away from London she had driven north, heading for Scotland, but her car had broken down just outside Woolerton, and Meg had then been working in the Woolerton Arms where she had gone to enquire if they had a room for the night.

      The one day it was to have taken to get her car back on to the road became three and then four, and by the fifth day Kate had known that she never wanted to leave this quiet valley. Meg, widowed and on the point of being made redundant, had leapt at Kate’s suggestion that they buy the craft shop, and although they did quite a brisk trade in local crafts in the summer months and during the winter wool always sold well, it was from the jumpers Kate designed that they made the majority of their profits.

      ‘Matt’s picking me up in half an hour,’ Meg told her, as she relieved Kate of the pile of jumpers. ‘There’s a cottage pie in the oven …’

      Meg had taken on a new lease of life since she met Matt Wrexley, Kate mused as her friend went upstairs to change for her date with the hill farmer. Widowed like Meg, they had met through his daughter who attended the local Youth Club where Meg helped out three evenings a week. That they would marry Kate did not doubt, although in the Dales such things were not rushed. What would she do when they did? She would have to employ someone in the shop for those days when she was visiting her knitters or away seeing buyers. Time enough to worry about that when it happened, Kate reflected as she locked up the shop and followed Meg upstairs to the small flat they shared above the shop.

      As Meg switched on the light, warmth flooded the pale apricot-painted room. Meg had been slightly dubious when Kate explained how she wanted to decorate the flat, but the shop property was Kate’s, bought with the mortgage she had raised when they first set up in business, and Meg had been generous in her praise when she saw the finished results.

      Rusts, apricots and soft creams dominated the colour scheme, the cane furniture was glossed in the same apricot as the walls, the cushions covered in cream cotton with a rust and apricot design. The floorboards had been stained and a couple of beautifully soft sheepskin rugs were their only covering.

      Meg disappeared into her bedroom, while Kate wandered into the kitchen, checking on the cottage pie. When she had lived in London she would have laughed at anything as homely as