Shadows in the Cotswolds Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the hide. When the woodpecker had gone, she looked it up, and readily identified the ‘greater spotted’ variety. The thrill persisted for many minutes; the glimpse of the wild creature had been an unearned privilege that made her feel honoured and awakened to a world she so often forgot. Then she flipped through a section depicting small brown birds, and concluded the answer to that mystery was a willow warbler. She wasn’t at all sure she had ever heard of a willow warbler before, and certainly had had no idea what it looked like.
    And she should not forget this world of British wildlife, because Carl, her husband, had been an environmentalist, fully aware of the birds of Britain, as well as the badgers and foxes and otters. She had walked with him and seen larks and swallows galore in the open fields, and coots and cormorants in the Essex marshes where they had holidayed. But they had not spent time crouched in a woodland hide watchingthese little things in such numbers and taking time to admire the soft breast feathers of a woodpecker.
    ‘Well, old girl,’ she told her dog, ‘I think we might be due for a rather enjoyable stay at this rate.’
    Hepzie wagged a slow plumy tail, and Thea felt something that had been in abeyance for very much too long. She could not recall a sense of anticipation in the whole of the previous year, other than for the most fleeting moments. She had enjoyed the big house in Cranham for a day or two, she reminded herself, and the lovely old buildings of Snowshill had raised her spirits, but she had lost her sense of wonder at the natural world, which had been there twenty years ago. Although, of course, she had permitted herself to anticipate each new encounter with Drew Slocombe. The sight of his boyish features and engagement with his witty banter had been the main pleasures in her life since the previous March. A mere six months since she first met him and all she had to show for it was a depressed foreboding that nothing happy would ever come of it.
    And now she could rediscover her natural lightness of heart by watching wild birds. It was like tapping into a vein of gold she had forgotten existed; a beam of sunlight to remind her that it was in fact a wonderful world.
    It was a shame, then, that her mother was due to arrive the next day, with her mysterious new man. No way would Thea bring them to the hide andshare its secrets. She would come down early to fill the feeders and check the camera, and then spend the day being sociable and hospitable, and take them to Winchcombe Church and perhaps Sudeley Castle. No mention had been made of the proposed duration of the stay, but she hoped it would not be more than two or three days. The idea that they might intend to stay for the whole fortnight gave her a nasty jolt. Surely there was no danger of that. Her mother had a short attention span; she would soon get bored, especially if the weather took a downward turn. And the man, this Fraser Meadows – did he not have a life of his own? From what she had heard of him so far, she rather suspected that he had little to distract him other than his long-ago girlfriend, who could barely remember him.
    She went back to the house, approaching it from the north-east, so that the whole wall was in deep shadow in the late afternoon. The door, which she had mentally labelled the back door, had a modest porch over it, and opened into a passageway that led through the middle of the house to another door, which she thought of as the front. But the house did not have an obvious facade with which to greet the world. It was much the same both sides, with a door and four windows like a child’s drawing. It sat awkwardly on the uneven ground, and the question of an approach drive and somewhere to leave the car had never been properly resolved. Oliver clearly cared little for suchdetails, and had done nothing to address them. It gave a sense of a fairy-tale cottage in the woods, sheltered by large trees and