The Country Escape Read online

  Fiona Walker lives in rural Worcestershire with her partner and two children, plus an assortment of horses and dogs. Visit Fiona’s website at www.fionawalker.com

  Also by this author

  French Relations

  Kiss Chase

  Well Groomed

  Snap Happy

  Between Males

  Lucy Talk

  Lots of Love

  Tongue in Cheek

  Four Play

  Love Hunt

  Kiss and Tell

  The Love Letter

  Sealed with a Kiss (e-book short story)

  The Summer Wedding

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Sphere

  978-0-7481-2047-5

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Fiona Walker 2014

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  SPHERE

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  The Country Escape

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Also by this author

  COPYRIGHT

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  For my wise owl, hacking buddy,

  fast-Googling iPhone researcher and Buddha

  in a Dalai Lama, with love and thanks.

  Prologue

  ‘Is this thing working?… I think it is. The red light’s on. Blast… get off the recorder, Daphne. Lie over there. No, not on the Telegraph – I haven’t finished the crossword. That’s better. Good girl. Where was I? Ah, yes, Katherine. Hello, Katherine. This is Constance Mytton-Gough.

  ‘I was intending to compose a letter to you “to be opened in the event of my death” – such a wonderful, self-indulgent sentence to write because it affirms one is still alive – but as you know my wretched fingers are too arthritic to hold a pen for long nowadays and I don’t trust that girl from the solicitor’s to take this down verbatim – she’s always adding whereforeins and whenceforths. I’ve borrowed this recording apparatus from dear Miriam, whom I trust to be utterly discreet in passing my message on to you. You must listen very carefully – I’ve always wanted to say that too, what fun! Where was I? No, Daphne, leave the cushion alone. Ah, yes, my death. We won’t dwell on it, but when one reaches one’s ninety-fifth year it is rather closer than it is in one’s ninety-fourth, and I need to get my ducks in a line before I go. Where was I? I have a list somewhere.

  ‘Ah, yes. As you know, the animals will all need looking after when I’m gone – yes, that’s you, Daphne, and you two, my darlings, along with your disreputable lurcher chums wherever they are, plus the horses, of course, and all the other stock here, which is why I have made provisions. It’s all legal and signed and, of course, you and I have spoken about it often, Katherine, but this letter… recording, whatever it is, will help verify my wishes should anybody contest the will, and I rather fear they might. The solicitors are clearly convinced I’ve lost my marbles. You are totally over-qualified to take on this role, but you were also over-qualified to come here and look after me, and we both know why you did that. Ignore the doubters who say a nurse from the suburbs cannot be a Herefordshire small-holder. You are young and strong and quick to learn. You love animals and are frightfully practical. Gosh, this is exhausting. I must take a breather.’

  ‘… must be this one, eh, Daphne? There we go. Red light.

  ‘Katherine, I do have several additional wishes that I want to – Hello? Oh, you’re here. How awkward. Is it the yardarm already, Katherine? What joy! Set it down over there, will you?… What? This thing? It’s a Dictaphone. Now, take these dogs out for a run, there’s a good girl.

  ‘Good. You’ve gone. That rather interrupted the flow, but while I remember please do something about your appearance. It’s easier for you to hear this when I’m dead. One hates to criticize so take this as a back-handed compliment. You’re a very pretty girl, but you give out a rather wanton message, not to mention a frightful colour clash with all that ridiculous cherry red hair and whatever it is you use to make your skin orange. Scrub up, have a bob and knuckle down to country life. Male suitors will distract you, especially at first. They’ll all be circling once I’m gone and you’ve got Lake Farm, but I’ve thought of a way of protecting you on that front. Marry and you lose the lot. Tough but fair, I feel.

  ‘Where’s that blasted piece of paper? Ah, here! This must be to do with it…

  ‘Unlike the rest of my estate, which will pass to my heirs… Lake Farm to be held in trust after my death… blah… managed by the Constance Mytton-Gough Memorial Animal Sanctuary charity… for the purpose of caring for the family pets and other domestic animals that survive me so they may live out their lives in peace amid familiar surroundings… blah… looked after by my former nurse Miss Katherine Mason, who has the right to live in the property known as Lake Farm until such time – This isn’t my Letter of Wishes. This is the change in the will. You know about that. The Wishes are just as important. Ah, yes. Here they are.

  ‘First, and forgive an old bat a frightful romantic indulgence here, you must promise me that you will only marry for love. You may think me quite unreasonable insisting upon it, but it’s such a simple thing and I regret not doing it. The clause about losing the farm in the event of your marriage is rather counter-intuitive – but it’s a forfeit you must be prepared to pay, and is only there for your own protection.

  ‘My sec
ond wish is rather more eccentric and requires a great deal of dedication on your part, but I think it will be the making of you. Blast. I do wish we had a bit more time to train you up, Katherine. Think I’ll enjoy my snifter now.’

  ‘… think I’d remember how to turn on the wretched thing by – ah, light!

  ‘The Bolt. Katherine, you must ride the Bolt! It’s in the Letter of Wishes. I know you said you want to do it before I die, which is terribly sweet of you, but it’s jolly hard and quite dangerous and you have to learn to ride first. I want you to do it for a greater reason than my entertainment, or for the Eardisford Purse, which naturally is a part of the reward. I want you to do it because it will set you free. You will understand what I’m talking about when it happens.’

  Chapter 1

  Kat dodged Daphne the dachshund’s cold wet nose as she tried to change as close to the halogen heater as humanly possible, its glow making her pale skin appear curiously orange. It made her think of the weekly Fake Bake ritual she’d once endured, her freckled body smelling faintly of burning tyres while it transformed to Mediterranean bronze. When her friend Dawn had left nursing to retrain as a beauty therapist, she’d used Kat as a guinea pig and taken over the task of copper-plating her with professional zeal, first at a boutique spa, and later at her own salon above a Nascot Village florist, where Kat had also enjoyed cut-price manicures, pedicures, facials and waxing. For a long time, she’d been the glossiest, smoothest, most unfeasibly conker-skinned redhead in Watford.

  Today she would be seeing Dawn for the first time in two years and worried she was now the palest, scruffiest yokel in Herefordshire, although at least she had clean jeans and a new fuchsia pink fleece, courtesy of a local promotional printing company that donated overstock and seconds to the sanctuary. Kat’s new hoodie had Fresh’n’Up Thrush Relief emblazoned on the back, but its warmth was all she really cared about. On windswept and bitter February days, Lake Farm felt as though it was held together with ice. She hoped Dawn had brought plenty of layers.

  A quick check in the mirror confirmed that pink definitely didn’t go with cherry red hair, a trademark she refused to surrender amid the russets and olives of country life, although her natural copper would have been perfect camouflage. Kat had inherited it from her father. She sometimes wondered if that was why her mother had treated her so diffidently through childhood, this visual reminder of a failed marriage. Kat also shared her father’s rebellious, daredevil streak, and entirely lacked her mother’s flirtatious glamour. The many boyfriends coming and going through the Mason household during tomboy Kat’s teenage years had been her mother’s. It wasn’t until she’d met Nick that she’d briefly become a swan.

  A loud splash immediately outside the front windows made the terriers shrill with alarm, joined by enraged door-snarling from the lurchers. The splashing grew louder. Kat hurried to her gumboots: no Canada goose could generate such noise unless it weighed six hundred kilos. There was only one creature around here capable of making a splash of that magnitude. ‘Please tell me I shut the gate to the spinney!’

  She rushed outside, dogs at her heels, pulling on her hood against the chill wind.

  It was blowing a gale, branches groaning and the roar from the millstream weir as loud as busy traffic. Black rainclouds were muscling around overhead, the lake already pitted with the first drops of a downpour as Kat scanned its choppy grey surface, seeking a familiar face.

  There she was, limpid eyes glazing ecstatically as she wallowed in the shallows. Usha the water buffalo – ‘the lady of the lake’, as the locals called her – had been in residence on the Eardisford Estate for almost twenty years. Dating back to an experiment in farm diversification in the nineties, Usha had declined to leave Eardisford when the rest of the mozzarella-making herd were deemed unprofitable and sold on. Instead she’d waded into the deep oxbow lake and refused to budge. Admiring her tenacity, landowner Constance Mytton-Gough had decided to keep her as a parkland curiosity and estate mascot. The old buffalo still spent a great many of the summer months in the lake, wallowing contentedly, but in winter she sheltered in a wooded enclosure with two cheery alpacas, a cantankerous llama and a few determined pygmy goats that guarded the hay feeder jealously. This meant that she spent a long time staring over the post and rails to the lake, plotting her escape back into the water she loved.

  ‘It’s far too cold for you in there!’ Kat shouted, remembering with horror that the last time Usha had done this she’d ended up with colic.

  When rattling a bucket of pony nuts from the bank did nothing to coax the old buffalo on to dry land, Kat realized she’d have to take more drastic measures. The sanctuary’s self-appointed animal expert, Russ, would no doubt suggest a patient approach. He was very hot on mimicking species’ natural behaviour to try to befriend the animal kingdom – the only monarchy he acknowledged – but Kat knew there was no time for that. It had recently taken him ten hours to catch the Shetland ponies using his intelligent horsemanship techniques when they’d escaped into a field of winter wheat, and Usha was a lot more stubborn. Kat was already running late to meet Dawn’s train.

  ‘I’ll use the rowing boat.’ She was already running towards the jetty.

  The terriers crowded around her feet on the slippery boards, tripping her, as she untied the boat and tugged it alongside the wooden walkway. The wind was now so high and bitter the boat was slamming against the jetty.

  Kat looked into the boat and across the lake, the familiar panic rising. Last time she’d taken the boat to shoo Usha out – many weeks ago when the water had been much warmer – she’d only made it to the first island, where she’d been forced to wait until rescue arrived.

  Legs like jelly, she clambered in, shooed the terriers away and pushed herself from the jetty with an oar. Usha was only a few metres away and she drifted alongside her easily.

  ‘Get out!’ Kat pleaded, splashing the surface with the oars.

  Watching her with interest, raindrops bouncing off her head, the water buffalo was already looking uncomfortably cold.

  ‘Scram!’

  The dogs barked furiously from the jetty. The rain was hammering down now and Kat could hardly see.

  Usha’s thermostat finally kicked in. With a bad-tempered bellow, she flailed towards the bank, sending up such a rip tide that the boat shot backwards, prow rising out of the lake like a giant shark’s fin.

  ‘Shit!’ To Kat’s horror, she was capsizing. Heart pounding, she lunged towards the front, dropping the oars. At the same moment, half a ton of alarmed water buffalo reared overhead as Usha charged back to her wooded harbour, knocking the boat neatly up the bank and tipping Kat out on to dry land.

  Drenched and muddy, she lay deeply stamped into the soft bank like a cake decoration in chocolate icing, winded and disoriented. Then she heard laughter and realized Russ was watching her from his bicycle.

  ‘’Mazing! How ’mazing was that?’ He was pedalling towards her. ‘You can take that back about not being an animal communicator. Kat Mason, you’re a natural!’

  ‘You’re late,’ she grumbled, squelching her way upright to shoo Usha back to her enclosure, embarrassed that he’d seen her, yet again, struggling to cope alone.

  ‘Are you okay?’ He abandoned his bike and loped alongside. ‘I know you’re scared shitless of water.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Russ’s dark eyes were anxious so she raised her smile to its brightest setting, reluctant to admit just how terrified she’d been. Kat’s smile was a lethal weapon, a thousand watts of positivity and kindness that hypnotized all-comers. By contrast, Russ never smiled unless he found something genuinely funny or moving. When they’d first met the previous summer his hair had been dyed white with a black cross on it – something to do with a protest he’d staged with some friends outside an embassy – and she had found it absurdly funny. Russ didn’t find it easy to laugh at himself, but her irrepressible giggles had captivated him and the two had shared hours of mirth over pints in the Eardisford
Arms.