Valentine's Night

‘Let’s get this stuff inside,’ Simon announced, heaving down the sacks of fuel and carrying it into the lean-to porch that sheltered the back door.

The door opened straight into the stone-flagged kitchen, the stone floor striking chill through the thin soles of Sorrel’s boots and making her shiver.

‘It’s summer now in Australia, isn’t it?’ she asked through chattering teeth. ‘I wonder if this Val realises how cold it is here.’

‘It just feels it because the house has been empty. Wait until we’ve got the range lit.’

‘I’ll do that,’ Sorrel told him, knowing he was anxious to start back. ‘You bring the rest of the stuff in.’

She filled a small kettle and had just set it to boil on the emergency gas ring she had brought with her when Simon came in with the last load. The range was now lit and the chill just beginning to ease off the kitchen.

‘I’ll fill the lamps with oil,’ Simon told her. ‘I checked upstairs when I came with Fiona. The bedroom isn’t damp, so you should be OK. Remember to keep the range in, though, otherwise you’ll have no hot water.’

‘Don’t even mention it,’ Sorrel groaned.

‘Why don’t you light a fire upstairs?’

Sorrel had forgotten that the main bedroom had a working fireplace. In view of the unexpected iciness of the wind and the frozen ground outside, it seemed a good idea.

She made Simon a cup of tea while he checked that there was nothing left in the Land Rover and that she would be comfortable and safe.

Once he had gone, Sorrel didn’t feel alone, as she had expected. Perhaps because there was so much still to do.

The bedroom, as he had said, was dry but very cold. She lit the fire, and once she had assured herself that it was going properly, mentally thanking heaven for the convenience of modern firelighters, she set about making up the old-fashioned double bed with its wooden footboard and headboard. It had to be polished first, and the faint smell of beeswax that hovered in the air after she had finished this task reminded her very much of her childhood visits to her grandparents.

Her mother had wisely sent up a very large duck-down duvet and, a little to Sorrel’s surprise, the patchwork cover which had originally covered the bed and which had been made by her grandmother as part of her trousseau.

Once that was on the bed, the fire casting dancing shadows on the plain white walls, the room suddenly took on a cosy, homely look. Unlike the old-fashioned bathroom, which felt as though it was refrigerated, Sorrel reflected, her teeth starting to chatter before she had been in it for more than five minutes.

It needed, as her mother had forecast, cleaning, and by the time she had performed this chore she was beginning to feel a bit warmer. Even so, she did not envy her grandparents having to leave the warmth of their bedroom on a cold winter morning to come in here.

Downstairs the range was now thoroughly warming the kitchen, and Sorrel polished the large oak dresser which was set into one wall, unpacking the crockery from home and putting it on the shelves. It looked rather lost on a dresser designed to show off an entire family dinner service.

At first she was so busy that the sudden change in the quality of the light from outside didn’t strike her, and then a certain betraying silence, a certain inborn instinct, made her lift her head and go to the window. Her heart sank as she saw the snow swirling down outside.

Uncle Giles had been right, after all. She only hoped that it wasn’t snowing in Ludlow. If it was, her mother would be having forty fits of anxiety.

What time was it? She looked at her watch. Just gone four. Too early yet for the appearance of Valerie, if indeed she could still appear. If the weather deteriorated as dramatically as it could do at this height, the hill pass would soon be blocked and the farm would be cut off. It happened almost every winter.

Everything was ready now and there was nothing she could do other than wait … and hope that Cousin Val did not get stuck somewhere in the snow.

She lived in Perth, the beautiful town on the Swan River where Sorrel, whose knowledge of Australia’s weather was only sketchy, suspected they did not have the winters suffered by the Welsh hills. She wondered how Val’s parents felt about their daughter going half-way across the world to visit unknown relatives. What would she be like?

Sorrel filled the kettle and placed it on the hob of the old-fashioned range and then went to the window.

Already the landscape had turned white, the low stone walls thickly covered in snow. The wind had increased, driving the flakes into a frenzy of blizzarding white violence that eddied and whirled in front of the farm, changing the landscape as she watched.

Sorrel shivered. She was safe enough here inside the old farmhouse, and Simon would be back in three days, but she would hate to be driving in this weather. How far had her cousin got? To Ludlow perhaps, with its historic castle, now merely a ruin, but even in its destruction impressive, giving to the imaginative a strong sense of what its power must once have been. The redstone fortress on the River Teme conjured up to Sorrel’s eyes vivid impressions of all that it had once been.

Or had Val already driven through Ludlow and into the Welsh hills?

The kettle sang and Sorrel shivered. She felt restless and ill at ease in a way that was unfamiliar to her, alien to her normal placidity and calmness. Her placid nature was one of the things Andrew admired most about her. For some reason or other, that seemed to amuse her family. It was true that as a child she had often been driven to quick-tempered outbursts against her brothers, but she had outgrown such childishness long ago. She sat down in front of her tapestry, trying to concentrate on the stitches. It was an ambitious project, unlike any of her previous work—something she was doing purely for the creative pleasure it gave her; something along the lines of a medieval wall-covering, depicting the four seasons in relation to the traditional work of the farmer’s wife. She was doing it as a special gift for her mother, who had often remarked that the bare galleried landing of the old farmhouse cried out for some kind of tapestry.

The Shropshire farmhouse was even older than the Welsh one, but its Tudor-style beams and wattle and daub walls gave it a soft prettiness that the more sturdy stone Welsh building lacked.

The light was fading rapidly, and Sorrel had to get up to light the lamps and to go upstairs and check on the fire. The bedroom felt deliciously warm now, although the bathroom was still icy cold. She hadn’t investigated the other bedrooms, which she knew would be bare of their furniture and very cold.

Simon had brought down a box from the attic which contained the old diaries, and on impulse Sorrel kneeled down on the floor beside it and lifted one out.

It had been a tradition that the women of the Llewellyn family kept diaries, originally merely to record the events of their working year: to record details of their produce from the kitchen gardens, to list the ingredients of herbal remedies and the money paid out for those household necessities which could not be made at home.

Their farm had been a productive one compared with many, but even so it made Sorrel wince to realise how hard their lives must have been.

She was so deeply engrossed that it was gone six o’clock before she lifted her head from the book. She went to the window and could see nothing in the dark, so, picking up one of the lanterns, she opened the door.

The moment she opened the outer porch door, the wind blew in fierce eddies of snow, the lamp flickering wildly as she held it up.

Beyond the farmyard lay a sea of white. Deep drifts blocked the drive. No car could possibly get through them, and even a Land Rover would have had problems. There was no way Cousin Val was going to be able to make it to the farmhouse now and, mingled with Sorrel’s feeling of relief that she had been spared the three days’ intimate company of a woman she had no idea how she was going to get on with, she had a prickling sensation of apprehension as she wondered where on earth her cousin was.

And it wasn’t even as though the farm had a telephone and she could alert her family to the situation.

If anything, the temperature had dropped even lower, and just those few minutes’ exposure to the cold had turned her fingers numb and was making her shiver. Sorrel was glad to get back inside.

The remoteness of the farm caused her no fear, and neither did she find the thought of her own company disturbing. It struck her that by rights she ought to be yearning for Andrew to be with her, but when she thought of her fiancé it was in the knowledge that, if he were here, he would be alternately complaining and worrying.

Andrew was devoted to his business, fussy to the point of irritation about his appearance and that of the small flat above the bookshop. He would hate the farmhouse with its lack of amenities.

When they got married they planned to find a house in Ludlow, and she would then use Andrew’s present flat as her workshop; at least, that was what she had suggested, and Andrew had seemed to go along with her idea. It was odd, when she thought about it, how they had got engaged. They had been dating casually for a few months, and then Andrew had taken her to see his great-aunt, and it had been while they were there that the subject of an engagement had first come up.

The old lady had been extremely forthright in her views and speech, and she had commented that it was high time Andrew settled down and produced his family; he was too old to remain single any longer without becoming eccentric.

And then it had been on the way home that he had proposed to her … stumbling over the words a little, making her aware of both how much she liked him and how vulnerable he was. He had wanted to buy her a ring, but in the end they had decided to save the money instead. At twenty-four, she felt she was too mature to need the visible trappings of their commitment to one another. Only, recently that commitment hadn’t seemed quite so strong, on either of their parts.

The sudden sound of someone banging on the outer door made her jump. She got up uncertainly and hurried towards the kitchen door, opening it and stepping into the porch.

As she reached for the outer door, the knock sounded again, demanding impatiently that she hurry.

She fumbled with the lock and then turned the handle. The wind caught the door, pushing it back so hard it almost knocked her over, and a very Australian and irritable male voice proclaimed ‘At last! Thank heaven for that.’

Cousin Val … it had to be. But by no strength of the imagination was Cousin Val what she had expected … what any of them had expected.

‘This is the Llewellyn farm, isn’t it?’ the Australian voice demanded, and Sorrel nodded. Her own voice seemed to have deserted her for some reason. Temporary paralysis caused by shock, she told herself, as she stepped back into the kitchen. The shock of discovering that Cousin Val was not, as they had all supposed, a woman, but a man … Very much a man, Sorrel acknowledged as he followed her inside the kitchen, shrugging off a snow-covered sheepskin jacket as he did so, and then bending to tug off his wellingtons.

‘I thought I wasn’t going to make it,’ he told her calmly. ‘I had to abandon my car way down the bottom of the lane. Fact is, I had no idea there was going to be this kind of weather.’ He looked round the kitchen and frowned, picking up her tension.

‘Is something wrong? You did get my letter?’

‘Oh, yes, we got your letter,’ Sorrel told him bitterly. ‘But we assumed, because you signed it Val, that the Val was short for Valerie.’

‘Valerie?’ He stared at her. The snow had melted on his head, revealing thick black hair, well-cut and clinging damply now to his skull.

As he stood up, she realised how tall he was, how very broad-shouldered, even without the enveloping sheepskin.

‘We thought you were a girl,’ Sorrel told him tensely.

He gave her a slow look. His eyes, she realised, were grey—cool and hard as granite.

‘Did you, now?’ He seemed faintly amused. ‘I suppose I should have thought of that. The Val is short for Valentine … a family name on my mother’s side. She was part Russian. So you thought I was a girl. Well, as you can see, I’m not. It doesn’t matter, does it?’

Doesn’t matter? she thought! Just wait until he knew!

‘As a matter of fact, it does,’ she said as calmly as she could. ‘You see, this farmhouse is no longer occupied and we didn’t realise you were planning to visit us until it was too late to let you know what a bad time you’d picked—’

‘What do you mean, it isn’t occupied? You’re living here, aren’t you?’

He seemed more annoyed than concerned, and for some reason that annoyed her.

He had walked past her without so much as a ‘by your leave’, and was standing in front of the range. The small canvas bag he had brought in with him was still on the floor, snow melting on it.

‘I left the rest of my stuff in the car. How long is this snow likely to last?’

‘I don’t know!’ Sorrel told him grittily. She had seldom experienced the antagonism towards anyone that she was experiencing now, and never without undue provocation. So what was it about this man, with his air of easy self-assurance, that so rubbed her up the wrong way? She could feel herself bristling like a defensive cat confronted by a large dog. She didn’t want him invading her space. She didn’t want him anywhere near her, she realised.

‘Mm … Well, someone must know. Where’s the rest of the family?’

‘Not here,’ Sorrel told him succinctly, and had the pleasure of seeing him momentarily disconcerted.

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