Some Kind of Fairy Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

haddisappeared. It didn’t seem right. There were more walks, but they went instead to Bradgate Park, where the spirit of Lady Jane Grey sighed in the ruins of her Elizabethan mansion, or up on Beacon Hill, with its Iron Age earthworks and its weird crags. The Outwoods forever carried the stamp of Tara’s ghost. Peter had been sure for twenty years that she had haunted the place, and for some reason the sudden unpicking of that belief terrified him more than had Tara’s ghost. Now that she was alive he quickly had to review his ideas about hauntings. Perhaps living souls had greater phantom powers than the dead.
    “She wants us all to go for a walk with her,” he told Genevieve. “All of us.”
    “What, she thinks we can drag this lot out walking? Doesn’t know much about teenagers, does she?”
    “Says she’s going to tell me everything.”
    “You should go alone.”
    “You want to come?”
    “I’d like to. I’d like to hear what it is she has to say. But I’ve got a feeling it ought to be just you and her.”
    “I think I need you to be there. To stop me from punching her.”
    Genevieve blinked at that. Peter, a strong and powerfully built man, had never talked that way and had never raised his fists to anyone in all the time she’d known him. “We could leave Zoe in charge. I’ll come if you want me to. Think it over.”
    Think it over. The problem was that was all he could do: think about it. Last thing at night and first thing in the morning. He considered that maybe he should go back to work early, take his mind off Tara.
    Peter was a farrier. He had his own business, mostly shoeing horses but occasionally turning his hand to other bits of ironwork. He hadn’t always been a farrier. After completing a degree in social psychology he had looked around for a job related to his studies. A recession-hit Britain didn’t seem to have too many vacancies, so he took a sales job in confectionary, thrashing up and down the motorway, selling bars of chocolate.
    He was an affable man and found strangers easy to talk to. He got the orders and didn’t find the job too stressful. But it was a kindof sleep to him. You descended into work mode and hardly noticed that a day of your life had passed. After a few years he became a regional manager; he was efficient, well liked, and he reached his quotas. Then the company he worked for was bought out by a larger corporation and he was made redundant.
    With two very young children it wasn’t a great moment to be out of work. At the time no one could find a plumber. When he calculated out what plumbers were earning he wondered why the hell he’d bothered studying for a degree in social psychology to become a chocolate salesman; and so he decided to look into retraining as a plumber. Dell and Mary were mortified. Peter had hauled himself out of the working class only to parachute right back in among it.
    But then Peter heard that no one could find a farrier, either, and that there was a living to be made shoeing the horses and ponies of leisure riders for anyone who had a strong back. What’s more, a local, ancient, and crusty farrier had died and his cottage was up for sale, complete with an old forge. That’s what the cottage was called: The Old Forge. So Peter, with his redundancy check in hand, put in an offer.
    “Christ,” Genevieve had said. She had Jack gamely hanging off one tit at the time and Zoe had only just finished breast-feeding.
    “I’ll retrain.”
    “Christ.”
    “Are you up for it?”
    Genevieve shifted a tumbling curl out of her eye and hitched baby Jack higher on her nipple. “Do I get to look at the place?”
    The property was ramshackle. It needed heating installed and fixing up and decorating from top to bottom. The forge itself was antiquated and hardly in working order, but Peter pointed out that it didn’t need to be: most farrier work these days was mobile and done from the back of a van.
    Genevieve was not, like her husband, of