Read Online River of Destiny by Barbara Erskine - Free Book Online Page B

across the front garden and into the communal grounds, and his peace would be shattered for the next however many days they stayed. He gave a wry grin. He liked Jade, and her parents were decent enough, if congenitally noisy and untidy, but her brothers were the pits! He gave a deep sigh. The first thing he had to do was go out and close his gate against those damn dogs.
     
    Rosemary was standing in the field below the barns, a carefully folded Ordnance Survey map in her hand, turning it round first one way then the other, her eyes narrowed against the wind. It was cold and her hands were turning blue but she had forgotten her gloves. She looked round again, carefully noting the lie of the land. There was no footpath marked, but there had been one on the old map she was looking at this morning in the library. The field lay diagonally to the river; almost at its centre there was a roughly circular area of scrub, which was fenced off from the rest of the field with rusting barbed wire. On the map the footpath would have gone through the middle of this patch, followed on down the slight hill and debouched onto the lane below the hedge. When you thought about it, it was the logical place for a path to go, otherwise it was necessary to veer left up quite a steep slope towards the gate in the top corner of the field and then walk down the far side of the hedge to join the lane several hundred yards further on. She reached into her pocket for her notebook and folded it open, fighting the increasing wind as the pages flapped wildly for a moment until she smoothed them flat. She drew a quick sketch and began carefully to pace the line of a possible path down towards the scrub. When she reached the barbed wire she paused, staring into the undergrowth. Why had it been fenced off? Squinting, she tried to see if there was a pond or feed bins or maybe a sign that there were pheasant-rearing cages in there. That was always reckoned to be a good enough reason for farmers to close off access. There was nothing that she could see, just a substantial mound of earth, brambles, nettles and several small skimpy trees. She began to circle the wire, sure there would be some means of access on the far side. There wasn’t. After getting badly scratched by brambles and mauled by the wire she gave up and stood, frustrated, staring down towards the river. The wind was rising. She could hear it roaring through the trees and, out of sight, on the moorings she could hear the clap of metal halyards against a metal mast. Briefly she wondered if Zoë and Ken had come back yet. She had seen them walking across the grass early this morning laden with a sail bag and basket, and each with a serviceable-looking day sack on their back.
    Turning with her back to the water, she stared up the line of the missing path and saw through her whipping hair that someone was approaching her down the field. It was the farmer, Bill Turtill. She had always found him polite and, if not overfriendly, at least approachable, and she walked towards him with a smile. ‘Bill, how are you?’
    ‘All right, Mrs Formby. And yourself?’
    ‘I am well, thank you. Cold in this wind.’ She gave a theatrical shiver to illustrate the point.
    ‘I’ll be ploughing this field in the next week or two,’ he said after a moment. ‘You would find it easier walking if you stayed on the footpaths.’
    ‘Oh, I know.’ Her smile froze on her lips. ‘I was just wondering, Bill, why the footpath doesn’t come straight down across the field any more. You do know that it used to come across here?’
    He shook his head. ‘The footpath follows the hedge up to the lane.’
    ‘It does now, yes. But originally it came directly across the field.’
    ‘I don’t think so. Not in my time or my father’s. It is clearly way-marked, Mrs Formby, and on all the maps, as I’m sure you’ve seen.’ He looked pointedly at her Ordnance Survey map.
    She sighed. There was always trouble when anyone suggested