“I’m glad I bought an all-terrain pram,” he said, eyeing the track’s deep ruts doubtfully. “Do you have your cell phone with you, in case you get lost?”
“I do have my cell phone with me,” I said, “but I won’t need it. According to Emma, the track hugs the northern boundary of your father’s property, so I can’t possibly get lost.”
Emma Harris was not merely a good friend and an accomplished equestrian. She was a master map-reader as well. She’d spotted the disused farm track on an old ordnance survey map, but though she’d told me of her discovery, she hadn’t yet explored it. It cheered me to think of Bess and I going boldly where no Emma had gone before.
“Don’t walk too far,” Bill cautioned.
“Forty minutes out, forty minutes back,” I promised. “Unless the track vanishes before our out-time is up, in which case we’ll turn around sooner.”
“A sensible plan,” said Bill, adding under his breath, “if only you’d stick to it . . .” He gave me a kiss and bent low to kiss our sleeping daughter, but as he headed for the humpbacked bridge he couldn’t resist calling over his shoulder, “Ring me when you get lost!”
I gave him a dark look as I steered the pram through the opening in the trees and onto the bumpy track. I didn’t need Bill to remind me that my map-reading skills were less highly developed than Emma’s, but I didn’t need map-reading skills to follow the old track’s twin ruts. And no map on earth could have warned me—or Emma—of what lay ahead.
None of us could have known that Bess and I were about to enter the strange and mysterious realm of the Summer King.
Two
I felt almost giddy with freedom as I stepped onto Emma’s track. The wild winds and the drenching rains that had kept me indoors throughout March, April, and May had at last given way to soft breezes and shimmering sunshine.
The air was filled with the delicate scents of violets and primroses. Wild strawberries climbed the hedgerows, bluebells carpeted the woods, buttercups gilded the meadows, and birds twittered in the trees. Spring teetered on the edge of summer and I was ready to greet it with open arms.
Inclement weather alone hadn’t kept me cooped up in the cottage for weeks on end. A month of strict bed rest culminating in a prolonged and complicated delivery had produced a gratifyingly healthy baby, but it had also put a serious strain on my forty-one-year-old body. In a way, I’d been pleased by my postpartum feebleness, for it had allowed me to spend many guilt-free hours alone with my baby girl.
While a phalanx of friends filled my fridge with casseroles, took care of my household chores, and helped Bill to look after the boys, I tottered from bedroom to nursery and back again, with my daughter in my arms, barely conscious of a world beyond the one I shared with her. She and I weren’t completely alone, of course. Bill changed Bess’s diapers more often than I did, while Will and Rob, our self-appointed knights errant, kept us fully supplied with cookies, drawings, and dinosaurs.
When our menfolk were away, however, I enjoyed the luxury of having Bess all to myself. My earliest days with the twins had passed in a blur of new-mother panic and blinding fatigue and I didn’t want history to repeat itself. Bess would, I knew, be my last child, and I cherished the chance to devote myself to her, body and soul, during the first fleeting weeks of her infancy.
Feeble tottering was not, however, the best way to get back into shape after a difficult pregnancy, a fact that had been made painfully clear to me when I’d tried on my matron of honor gown at a fitting. Amelia’s bridesmaids, a quartet of whippet-slim art students who were half my age and who’d never given birth to anything bigger than an idea, had also attended the fitting, and though I wasn’t abnormally vain, I couldn’t help noticing that, while the seamstress had taken their dresses in, she’d gone to great lengths—literally—to let mine out.
I knew I would never be whippet-thin again, but I had no intention of becoming a too matronly matron of honor. The fitting inspired me to get off my backside before it became any broader. As soon as the weather calmed down, I began to take Bess for long walks through the countryside, exploring the web of pathways and lanes that spread outward in all directions from the village. I was so pleased to be outdoors and so intent on my tiny companion that I sometimes lost track of the time. And the mileage. And my whereabouts.