A Heartbeat Away (21 page)

I awoke trembling, my entire body racked by an uncontrollable shivering. It was just a dream, just a stupid, over imaginative dream. But the dream seemed so real that I couldn't get it out of my head. It was as if I knew the place I dreamed of. As if Daniel was reaching out to me, trying to tell me something. Perhaps I had left returning too long. Perhaps if I hadn't run away as I had, if I had been here for him sooner…

I jumped out of bed, flinging back my duvet and embracing the cold morning air. This was crazy. Daniel was dead, and there was no message from the grave, no promise to be kept. It was all just a stupid childish dream.

 

“I'm going to get a job,” I announced at breakfast. Aunt V raised one eyebrow and carried on pouring the tea from her favorite yellow-flowered teapot. The golden liquid spiraled down into my warm brown mug and I watched it for a moment before repeating the sentence.

“I'm going to get a job.”

“I heard you the first time,” she remarked, placing the teapot carefully down on its stand.

“What has brought this on? Have you been having the dream again?”

My body froze. “What do you know about my dream?”

“Do you realize how many nights I have been woken by your cries?” she replied in a gentle voice. “How many times I have sat on the side of your bed and listened to you wrestle with…whatever it is…Your memories?”

I nodded. “Something like that. And do you wake me up?”

Did she? Was that why my dream had never ended—until today? But today it had ended all wrong. Ben's face sprang into my mind and I pushed his image away.

“Sometimes,” she told me. “But sometimes I just stroke your head, and you settle down again.”

“I think I need to get a job,” I explained. “To get back to a more normal life. It's all just so weird. I've been waiting, you see, until I could ride over the fell. To Brookbank.”

Her forehead puckered into a puzzled frown.

“It was our place,” I told her simply. “Daniel's and mine. I thought that if I went there—” I broke off, unable to carry on.

Aunt V put her hand over mine. “You thought that if you went there, everything would be different,” she finished for me. “But the answers weren't there, were they?”

“How did you know?”

She shrugged. “You don't get to be my age without learning something. I've had my share of grief, too.”

I remembered then about my gran, that other Lucy. When Aunt V was little more than a child herself, she had found her own mother swinging by her neck in the barn.

I looked down at my hands, twisting my engagement ring around and around on my finger. “I have been so selfish.”

She was quick to defend me. “Not selfish,” she insisted. “Just self-absorbed.”

“And weak,” I went on. “Look how I ran away.”

“Not weak, just…”

Amazingly we laughed then, she and I. Across the breakfast table in our tiny, sunny kitchen, we laughed at our woes.

“The thing is,” she said wisely, “you can't change the past, but you can make a difference in the future. Daniel is gone—you can never change that—but you still have a future.”

Did I really want a future on my own?

Reading my thoughts, she stood determinedly. “Come on,” she commented, putting a hand firmly on my shoulder. “While you decide what to do with your future, you may as well make yourself useful at the tearoom. But first I suggest that you go and take some flowers to Daniel's grave.”

A lump formed in my throat and my voice emerged in a whisper. “I went there. I went and sat beside his stone and I read the words. But…”

“But what?” she murmured.

My voice broke and sob a rose up in my throat. “He wasn't there. I couldn't feel him near me. Then I went to Brookbank and—”

“Oh, Lucy,” she interrupted. “What makes you think that you will find him at all?”

“He promised me,” I said fiercely. “He promised he would never leave me.”

I
really did try to follow Aunt V's advice and move on with my life, although I never plucked up the courage to discuss it with Edna. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps she was the one person who might have understood my reluctance to give up on Daniel. Even when the dream came back to haunt me, I never mentioned it to her. After all, would she have really wanted to know that I couldn't believe he had totally gone?

However hard I tried to forget, deep inside me it always felt as though there was something else. Something unresolved. Something hovering, awaiting my attention. Something that ate at me and refused to let me rest.

At Aunt V's suggestion, until I could decide what I wanted to do with my life, I threw myself into working at the tearoom. Edna kept me busy, serving customers, stocking shelves, running errands, but however hard I tried, I still felt in limbo.

Ben was like a breath of fresh air. He called every couple of days and always managed to make me laugh. Aunt V kept trying to persuade me to meet him again, yet what was the point? It wasn't fair to lead him on when I knew that our friendship could never go any further.

“But how do you know that if you never even see him?” she asked.

“I just know,” I told her firmly.

Every day I rode Timmy, along the lanes and onto the fell, where I would gallop and gallop with the wind in my face and the sound of his pounding hooves in my ears. But I never went back to Brookbank.
Maybe when the spring comes
, I told myself.
When the buttercups grow once again and turn the meadow back to gold.

Strangely it was Edna who finally persuaded me to meet up with Ben again. We were stocking shelves in the gift shop, one of my favorite tasks. I loved to unwrap the items that my aunt and Edna had ordered, and I never failed to be surprised by their choices. On this particular day a family of wooden pigs took my fancy. They were standing on their two hind trotters, wearing beautifully handcrafted clothes.

“They'll be collectors' items one day—you mark my words,” declared Edna. I smiled and placed the mother and father side-by-side on the shelf, gazing down benevolently at their unruly looking offspring.

“Why don't you bring that young man of yours around to see us one day,” she said casually.

I froze in my tracks. Had I heard her correctly?

“Ben,” she went on, carefully rearranging the pig family. “The one who saved your life. We'd like to meet him, Harry and I.”

“First of all, he's not my young man,” I told her clearly. “I've only seen him once in weeks. And anyway—”

“Anyway what?” she asked.

“Anyway, I don't want to encourage him.”

“And why might that be?”

Her mouth was set in a firm line, and when she stared straight at me with narrowed eyes I found myself gazing at the floor.

“If it has something to do with Daniel or a misplaced idea about upsetting Harry and me, then you've got it all wrong, Lucy.”

“Have I?” I inquired quietly.

“Bring him around,” she repeated. “Let him into your life and then see how it goes from there.”

“Just as a friend, then,” I clarified, placing the baby piglet in his tiny cradle.

She threw me a satisfied smile. “Whatever.”

I phoned Ben the next evening, and eventually agreed to let him take me out for a meal. Aunt V was so excited that she made me get changed three times. Finally we agreed on beige trousers and fine wool, toning sweater in shades of cream. My hair was no longer the tight cap of curls it had been when Ben had last seen me, and I twisted it up on the top of my head and secured it with a large pin.

“Very sophisticated,” commented Aunt V.

Something inside me recoiled. I didn't want to be sophisticated. Running back up the stairs, I shook it out into a dark cloud around my face.

“That's more you,” declared Aunt V when I reappeared in the living room, just as the doorbell rang out shrilly from the hallway. I threw her a pleading glance, and she rose from her chair to answer it, shaking her gray head in despair.

Ben's huge shape seemed to fill our small lounge. I felt awkward and embarrassed, unsure where to look, until, with an extravagant flourish, he produced a large bunch of flowers from behind his back and suddenly I was laughing.

He raised his eyebrows, pursing his lips. “Too corny, eh?” he remarked with a cheeky grin. “Just as well I didn't buy them for you, then.” He turned to hand the beautiful bouquet to Aunt V. She buried her nose in the sweetly scented blooms, not quite hiding the flush his generous gesture had brought to her pale cheeks.

“Creep,” I whispered, smiling impulsively. When he turned back to look at me, for one strange, uncomfortable moment I felt as if his honey-brown eyes could see right into my soul. What was it about Ben? I wondered.

And then we were out of the door and into the car and I was giggling all the way to the restaurant in Appleton.

I wanted to talk to him about Daniel, to tell him why
our
relationship could never be more than just what it was—a friendship. Yet I couldn't seem to broach the subject. Daniel was in my heart and I didn't want to let him out, so I hugged him close, like a wedge between Ben and me.

I can't remember much of what I ate, but after the meal we walked alongside the river and found a place to sit in the early evening sunshine. Daffodils grew in huge golden clusters all along the riverbank, and for a while we sat in silence, watching them nodding their beautiful heads in the gentle spring breeze. All of a suddenly I found myself beginning to talk, all about Homewood Farm and Harry and Edna Brown.

Ben listened in silence. Without even needing to be told why, he seemed aware of just how much they meant to me. He wanted to learn everything about them. What kind of people they were; what they looked like; if they had any children.

“Just one,” I answered quietly. “But—” My throat constricted. “He died.”

A trembling silence followed, and when Ben's fingers twined themselves in mine, I didn't draw back.

“Daniel meant a lot to you, didn't he?” he murmured.

I nodded, gazing into the rushing water as memories flooded in. But I hadn't told him about Daniel, had I?

“How did you know his name?” I felt suddenly angry. “Was it Aunt V? Did she tell you?”

He shrugged. “She may have—I really can't remember. Anyway, it isn't a secret, surely.”

I stood abruptly, pulling my jacket around me. “We'd better get back. My aunt will be worried.”

We barely spoke on the journey home. I could sense Ben's hurt and my heart ached for him but it ached far more for…For what? Why did it matter that Aunt V had told him about Daniel?

His car slid to a standstill outside the cottage. What now? Where did we go from here? As I took hold of the door handle, I saw the living-room curtain twitch, then slip back into place.

“It seems we have a spy at the window,” remarked Ben dryly.

A giggle gurgled up my throat, pushing aside my unfounded anger. “I'm sorry,” I blurted.

He smiled, a warm kind caring smile that I didn't deserve.

“Don't worry about it,” he told me. “We all have our demons to sort out.”

“Have
you?
” I asked quietly.

For a moment he just held my gaze. “You don't know the half of it,” he eventually replied, glancing away. “But I wouldn't really call them demons.”

“Will you tell me about them?”

Color tinged his face. “When the time is right.”

All of a sudden I felt awkward and uncomfortable. The camaraderie we had shared was gone, replaced by an electrifying tension. There was something I didn't know about Ben, something that hovered between us, spoiling our friendship. Or was it just me?

I flung open the car door and jumped out.

“Come on, then,” I insisted in a false, high-pitched tone. “My aunt will never forgive me if you don't stop in for a coffee.”

I didn't look back, but I could sense his tall shape following me along the narrow pathway to the front door, and as I reached the stone step, he drew alongside. I glanced up to meet his brooding gaze and a flicker of alarm made my nerve ends tingle. Who was this man beside me? Up until tonight I had seen him as easy company, amusing and funny, but beneath his lighthearted exterior I now sensed a terrifying intensity. Was there something I should be aware of?

For the rest of the evening he became once again the man I knew, laughing and joking with Aunt V and playing with Taff. I found myself wondering if my earlier fears about him were all just in my overactive imagination. When he left at midnight, our camaraderie was almost back in place.

We never mentioned that evening again, even though we met a couple of times a week over the next month or so. Our dates—if you could call them that—were simply fun, two friends enjoying each other's company, just the way I wanted it.

 

It was over a month before I finally plucked up the courage to ask Ben to Homewood. Edna was constantly encouraging me to.

“This Saturday,” she announced one day while we were taking a lunch break. “I'll make us a meal and V can come, too. It'll be like a proper family party again.”

I knew that it would never be a proper family party ever again, but I didn't wish to dampen her enthusiasm.

“I'll ask him,” I promised. Of course he said yes.

On Friday morning the tearoom was busy. Edna spent all her time in the kitchen, baking wonderful scones and batch after batch of her mouthwatering biscuits. My duties were to answer the phone
and
work on the counter, so when a Mrs. Hunter called and asked for Edna's list as I had three customers waiting, I fell into a panic.

“You just go and find out where this list is,” directed Aunt V. “I'll sort these people out. Jenny can manage by herself for a bit.”

Jenny was a homely middle-aged woman who had just started at Homewood. I glanced uneasily across at her and she laughed and waved me off.

“Go on. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to make a cup of tea and serve a few biscuits.”

Edna threw her hands up into the air when I told her about Mrs. Hunter.

“I've been waiting for her to call for a week!” she exclaimed. “She's going to get me some really special items for the shop. You'll love them. Now, where did I put the list I made?” She placed one hand on her hip and ran the back of the other over her brow, leaving behind a streak of powdery white flour. “Aha! I finished it off when I was in bed the other night. Be a dear and nip up to my room. It will be in the little drawer in my bedside cabinet.”

As I hurried off to do her bidding, her voice floated after me.

“On the left-hand side.”

“I think I can remember that,” I responded.

“I might have changed sides, for all you know.” She laughed.

Edna Brown change? I didn't believe so.

The bedroom was just as I recalled. Heavy oak furniture that gleamed with polish, and the same beautifully embroidered bedspread, made by her mother a lifetime ago. Nostalgia swept in as I headed for the small drawer. I pulled it out with an overenthusiastic yank and papers fluttered onto the floor, papers and letters and a couple of photographs. Where was the list? I scrabbled among them on my knees, visualizing Mrs. Hunter waiting impatiently on the phone, and then suddenly there it was, neatly written in Edna's careful hand. I pushed it into the pocket of my jeans and began tidying up the mess, stuffing everything back into the drawer.

One photograph had drifted underneath the high bed. As I leaned down to pick it up, my eyes flickered upon the image that stared out at me, and a cold hand clamped itself securely around my heart. Ben! It was Ben's familiar face that smiled up at me!

But it couldn't be. Edna didn't know Ben…or did she?

Instances flashed into my mind, tiny things, such as Ben's knowing Daniel's name without me telling him, and just the other day, Edna's mentioning the village where he lived. She said that I had told her where he came from, but had I? Doubts flooded my mind. If she had his photograph in her bedside drawer, then Edna must know Ben quite well. But why keep it a secret? What was it Ben had said that night—about his inner demons. That he would tell me about them when the time was right? It seemed to me that the time was at hand.

Edna's voice from the bottom of the stairs jerked me back into now.

“Lucy! Do you need a hand?”

I picked up the letter that accompanied the photograph.

Dear Mrs. Brown
, it began.

Her footsteps thudded up the stairs.

After our telephone conversation I…

Reluctantly, I stuffed the letter back into the drawer alongside the photograph and retrieved the list.