In the Shadow of Winter: A gripping historical novel with murder, secrets and forbidden love
‘Absorbing and chilling, yet tempered with echoes of a lost romance…this story is one of the best I've read this year for its imagery and originality’ Jane Hunt ReviewsSet in the bleak winter of 1947, you will love this compelling drama if you love historical dramas.The Cotswolds, 1947A relentless winter holds post-war Britain in its deadly grip, and Eleanor Phillips rides out from her beleaguered Cotswold farm to rescue a stranger lost in the storm. But the near-dead man is no stranger and when she recognises Matthew Croft, the old ties of a failed romance tug deeply. Her sweetheart has returned from the war.Suspicion, the police and the panicked flight of a desperate man beat a path to her door. With a wanted man hidden in her home and stealing back into her heart, Eleanor must be on her guard – for the net is closing in on them both and enemies are all around…Praise for In the Shadow of Winter:‘An enchanting debut’ Romance Junkies‘I now have another author to add to my ever growing list of excellent historical fiction writers!’ BitsnBooks‘I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed reading this book…sweet, provocatively steamy, and absolutely swoony’ Feminist Reflections
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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2015
Copyright © Lorna Gray 2015
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Contents
The Cotswolds, England. 1947
I suspect that my impression of the past is something akin to a soldier’s image of his homeland – all improbable blue skies and greenery like a treasured souvenir postcard where the colours have been painted in. That being so, I can only sympathise with all those war-wearied men who, instead of returning to find the picture held dear in their imagination, discovered a land brown with the stain of bombed-out buildings, plain rationed clothing and the soot of struggling industry.
Not that the land was brown at present, admittedly. If snow was good for something, it could be said that it was at least clean.
Right on cue, the first hard spikes of a fresh storm flung themselves against my cheek. Reaching for the last two buckets, I hurried, or at least hurried as much as a person can in a foot or more of drifted snow, across to the house before Freddy could return. It only felt like a moment ago that we had put the poor ponies out to wade about in the valley but it appeared to have been a pattern of the past two months that the hours of every day would vanish in a blur of turning ponies out or bringing them in again, mucking them out and feeding them. Although, just for a change, the last hour in particular had been filled with endlessly lugging water across the treacherous roadway.
It is tempting here to launch into an explanation of the past weeks of hardship and isolation, and the conditions of our ceaseless battle against the bitter wind but I have never yet heard anyone describe this unnatural winter, a year into peace, without making it seem exaggerated or even simply downright invented. What I will say however, is that entire crops of winter vegetables were frozen uselessly into barns and with animals dying in herds at a time from cold and malnutrition on the whitened hillsides, these hard facts do perhaps begin to paint the right kind of picture. I know of at least one local farmer who, defying regulations, butchered his own sheep to feed his stranded neighbours.
For me, it was the addition of water to this list of deprivations that formed my most immediate difficulty. Like most of the Cotswolds, we had no mains water but the trusty hilltop spring, which normally supplied my hairy menagerie, was buried several feet beneath a hard cap of snow and ice and now only the rustic pipes that some former landowner had laid deep underground from pond to house could still be relied on to flow. It did seem particularly perverse that wherever I went I should be surrounded by great powdery heaps of the stuff.
I had actually finished the present watery mission however, and brought in everyone from the upper slopes before I finally caught the rough sound of Freddy's return. The ponies were blowing hard and hurrying out of the narrow valley when they ought to have been walking and, instantly dropping whatever I was doing, I stepped quickly across the yard to meet whichever miniature disaster had happened to the boy this time. It was beyond me to guess how he had somehow managed to turn even this mundane task into yet another adventure but there he was, fiddling about with the valley gate and standing at the centre of a sweating and excited cluster of tossing manes; bothered, overheated, but perfectly unharmed.
