I really did try to follow Aunt V’s advice and move on with my life, although I never plucked up the courage to discuss it with Edna. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps she was the one person who might have understood my reluctance to give up on Daniel. Even when the dream came back to haunt me, I never mentioned it to her. After all, would she have really wanted to know that I couldn’t believe he had totally gone?
However hard I tried to forget, deep inside me it always felt as though there was something else. Something unresolved. Something hovering, awaiting my attention. Something that ate at me and refused to let me rest.
At Aunt V’s suggestion, until I could decide what I wanted to do with my life, I threw myself into working at the tearoom. Edna kept me busy, serving customers, stocking shelves, running errands, but however hard I tried, I still felt in limbo.
Ben was like a breath of fresh air. He called every couple of days and always managed to make me laugh. Aunt V kept trying to persuade me to meet him again, yet what was the point? It wasn’t fair to lead him on when I knew that our friendship could never go any further.
“But how do you know that if you never even see him?” she asked.
“I just know,” I told her firmly.
Every day I rode Timmy, along the lanes and onto the fell, where I would gallop and gallop with the wind in my face and the sound of his pounding hooves in my ears. But I never went back to Brookbank. Maybe when the spring comes, I told myself. When the buttercups grow once again and turn the meadow back to gold.
Strangely it was Edna who finally persuaded me to meet up with Ben again. We were stocking shelves in the gift shop, one of my favorite tasks. I loved to unwrap the items that my aunt and Edna had ordered, and I never failed to be surprised by their choices. On this particular day a family of wooden pigs took my fancy. They were standing on their two hind trotters, wearing beautifully handcrafted clothes.
“They’ll be collectors’ items one day—you mark my words,” declared Edna. I smiled and placed the mother and father side-by-side on the shelf, gazing down benevolently at their unruly looking offspring.
“Why don’t you bring that young man of yours around to see us one day,” she said casually.
I froze in my tracks. Had I heard her correctly?
“Ben,” she went on, carefully rearranging the pig family. “The one who saved your life. We’d like to meet him, Harry and I.”
“First of all, he’s not my young man,” I told her clearly. “I’ve only seen him once in weeks. And anyway—”
“Anyway what?” she asked.
“Anyway, I don’t want to encourage him.”
“And why might that be?”
Her mouth was set in a firm line, and when she stared straight at me with narrowed eyes I found myself gazing at the floor.
“If it has something to do with Daniel or a misplaced idea about upsetting Harry and me, then you’ve got it all wrong, Lucy.”
“Have I?” I inquired quietly.
“Bring him around,” she repeated. “Let him into your life and then see how it goes from there.”
“Just as a friend, then,” I clarified, placing the baby piglet in his tiny cradle.
She threw me a satisfied smile. “Whatever.”
I phoned Ben the next evening, and eventually agreed to let him take me out for a meal. Aunt V was so excited that she made me get changed three times. Finally we agreed on beige trousers and fine wool, toning sweater in shades of cream. My hair was no longer the tight cap of curls it had been when Ben had last seen me, and I twisted it up on the top of my head and secured it with a large pin.
“Very sophisticated,” commented Aunt V.
Something inside me recoiled. I didn’t want to be sophisticated. Running back up the stairs, I shook it out into a dark cloud around my face.
“That’s more you,” declared Aunt V when I reappeared in the living room, just as the doorbell rang out shrilly from the hallway. I threw her a pleading glance, and she rose from her chair to answer it, shaking her gray head in despair.
Ben’s huge shape seemed to fill our small lounge. I felt awkward and embarrassed, unsure where to look, until, with an extravagant flourish, he produced a large bunch of flowers from behind his back and suddenly I was laughing.
He raised his eyebrows, pursing his lips. “Too corny, eh?” he remarked with a cheeky grin. “Just as well I didn’t buy them for you, then.” He turned to hand the beautiful bouquet to Aunt V. She buried her nose in the sweetly scented blooms, not quite hiding the flush his generous gesture had brought to her pale cheeks.
“Creep,” I whispered, smiling impulsively. When he turned back to look at me, for one strange, uncomfortable moment I felt as if his honey-brown eyes could see right into my soul. What was it about Ben? I wondered.
And then we were out of the door and into the car and I was giggling all the way to the restaurant in Appleton.
I wanted to talk to him about Daniel, to tell him why our relationship could never be more than just what it was—a friendship. Yet I couldn’t seem to broach the subject. Daniel was in my heart and I didn’t want to let him out, so I hugged him close, like a wedge between Ben and me.
I can’t remember much of what I ate, but after the meal we walked alongside the river and found a place to sit in the early evening sunshine. Daffodils grew in huge golden clusters all along the riverbank, and for a while we sat in silence, watching them nodding their beautiful heads in the gentle spring breeze. All of a suddenly I found myself beginning to talk, all about Homewood Farm and Harry and Edna Brown.
Ben listened in silence. Without even needing to be told why, he seemed aware of just how much they meant to me. He wanted to learn everything about them. What kind of people they were; what they looked like; if they had any children.
“Just one,” I answered quietly. “But—” My throat constricted. “He died.”
A trembling silence followed, and when Ben’s fingers twined themselves in mine, I didn’t draw back.
“Daniel meant a lot to you, didn’t he?” he murmured.
I nodded, gazing into the rushing water as memories flooded in. But I hadn’t told him about Daniel, had I?
“How did you know his name?” I felt suddenly angry. “Was it Aunt V? Did she tell you?”
He shrugged. “She may have—I really can’t remember. Anyway, it isn’t a secret, surely.”
I stood abruptly, pulling my jacket around me. “We’d better get back. My aunt will be worried.”
We barely spoke on the journey home. I could sense Ben’s hurt and my heart ached for him but it ached far more for…For what? Why did it matter that Aunt V had told him about Daniel?
His car slid to a standstill outside the cottage. What now? Where did we go from here? As I took hold of the door handle, I saw the living-room curtain twitch, then slip back into place.
“It seems we have a spy at the window,” remarked Ben dryly.
A giggle gurgled up my throat, pushing aside my unfounded anger. “I’m sorry,” I blurted.
He smiled, a warm kind caring smile that I didn’t deserve.
“Don’t worry about it,” he told me. “We all have our demons to sort out.”
“Have you?” I asked quietly.
For a moment he just held my gaze. “You don’t know the half of it,” he eventually replied, glancing away. “But I wouldn’t really call them demons.”
“Will you tell me about them?”
Color tinged his face. “When the time is right.”
All of a sudden I felt awkward and uncomfortable. The camaraderie we had shared was gone, replaced by an electrifying tension. There was something I didn’t know about Ben, something that hovered between us, spoiling our friendship. Or was it just me?
I flung open the car door and jumped out.
“Come on, then,” I insisted in a false, high-pitched tone. “My aunt will never forgive me if you don’t stop in for a coffee.”
I didn’t look back, but I could sense his tall shape following me along the narrow pathway to the front door, and as I reached the stone step, he drew alongside. I glanced up to meet his brooding gaze and a flicker of alarm made my nerve ends tingle. Who was this man beside me? Up until tonight I had seen him as easy company, amusing and funny, but beneath his lighthearted exterior I now sensed a terrifying intensity. Was there something I should be aware of?
For the rest of the evening he became once again the man I knew, laughing and joking with Aunt V and playing with Taff. I found myself wondering if my earlier fears about him were all just in my overactive imagination. When he left at midnight, our camaraderie was almost back in place.
We never mentioned that evening again, even though we met a couple of times a week over the next month or so. Our dates—if you could call them that—were simply fun, two friends enjoying each other’s company, just the way I wanted it.
It was over a month before I finally plucked up the courage to ask Ben to Homewood. Edna was constantly encouraging me to.
“This Saturday,” she announced one day while we were taking a lunch break. “I’ll make us a meal and V can come, too. It’ll be like a proper family party again.”
I knew that it would never be a proper family party ever again, but I didn’t wish to dampen her enthusiasm.
“I’ll ask him,” I promised. Of course he said yes.
On Friday morning the tearoom was busy. Edna spent all her time in the kitchen, baking wonderful scones and batch after batch of her mouthwatering biscuits. My duties were to answer the phone and work on the counter, so when a Mrs. Hunter called and asked for Edna’s list as I had three customers waiting, I fell into a panic.
“You just go and find out where this list is,” directed Aunt V. “I’ll sort these people out. Jenny can manage by herself for a bit.”
Jenny was a homely middle-aged woman who had just started at Homewood. I glanced uneasily across at her and she laughed and waved me off.
“Go on. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to make a cup of tea and serve a few biscuits.”
Edna threw her hands up into the air when I told her about Mrs. Hunter.
“I’ve been waiting for her to call for a week!” she exclaimed. “She’s going to get me some really special items for the shop. You’ll love them. Now, where did I put the list I made?” She placed one hand on her hip and ran the back of the other over her brow, leaving behind a streak of powdery white flour. “Aha! I finished it off when I was in bed the other night. Be a dear and nip up to my room. It will be in the little drawer in my bedside cabinet.”
As I hurried off to do her bidding, her voice floated after me.
“On the left-hand side.”
“I think I can remember that,” I responded.
“I might have changed sides, for all you know.” She laughed.
Edna Brown change? I didn’t believe so.
The bedroom was just as I recalled. Heavy oak furniture that gleamed with polish, and the same beautifully embroidered bedspread, made by her mother a lifetime ago. Nostalgia swept in as I headed for the small drawer. I pulled it out with an overenthusiastic yank and papers fluttered onto the floor, papers and letters and a couple of photographs. Where was the list? I scrabbled among them on my knees, visualizing Mrs. Hunter waiting impatiently on the phone, and then suddenly there it was, neatly written in Edna’s careful hand. I pushed it into the pocket of my jeans and began tidying up the mess, stuffing everything back into the drawer.
One photograph had drifted underneath the high bed. As I leaned down to pick it up, my eyes flickered upon the image that stared out at me, and a cold hand clamped itself securely around my heart. Ben! It was Ben’s familiar face that smiled up at me!
But it couldn’t be. Edna didn’t know Ben…or did she?
Instances flashed into my mind, tiny things, such as Ben’s knowing Daniel’s name without me telling him, and just the other day, Edna’s mentioning the village where he lived. She said that I had told her where he came from, but had I? Doubts flooded my mind. If she had his photograph in her bedside drawer, then Edna must know Ben quite well. But why keep it a secret? What was it Ben had said that night—about his inner demons. That he would tell me about them when the time was right? It seemed to me that the time was at hand.
Edna’s voice from the bottom of the stairs jerked me back into now.
“Lucy! Do you need a hand?”
I picked up the letter that accompanied the photograph.
Dear Mrs. Brown, it began.
Her footsteps thudded up the stairs.
After our telephone conversation I…
Reluctantly, I stuffed the letter back into the drawer alongside the photograph and retrieved the list.
“Ah,” she cried. “You’ve got it. Go down and read it out to Mrs. Hunter, would you? Tell her that I’ll have two of each of those.”
I read the words to Mrs. Hunter in a slow, wooden voice, while my heart pounded in my ears. Why, why, why? I had to see Edna.
She was washing her hands at the sink when I rushed into the kitchen.
“Ah—Lucy!” she exclaimed with a smile. “I’ve finished at last. Is it still as busy in the shop?”
“I have to talk to you.” My voice sounded like that of a stranger, and a frown flitted across her face.
“Well, sit down and we’ll talk over a nice cup of tea.”
“I have to know how you know Ben and why you kept it a secret.”
There. It was out. I slumped onto a pine chair at the end of the table, waiting for her reaction. To my surprise she just sighed, a deep, heartfelt sigh almost of relief.
“I told him he should tell you,” she said sadly, “but a promise is a promise. V felt just as bad as I did, but he insisted that he’d speak to you himself when the time was right. You’ll understand why when you know.”
“What should I know? Tell me, Edna…please.” I felt as though my precarious world was finally collapsing around me. “Aunt V knew, too, and even she didn’t tell me. How could you? How could you both keep secrets from me?”
“You will understand,” she persisted. “But you’ll have to speak to Ben.”
“I can’t believe that all this time you knew him—”
“Oh, no,” she cut in. “I’ve never even met him. I just know of him, and that he wrote to me.”
Aunt V came in then. She realized at a glance what the problem was.
“Go and see him, Lucy,” she persevered. “Then you’ll understand. Phone him right now.”
I can’t say how I drove to Appleton that afternoon. When I arrived in the market square and climbed out of the car, I couldn’t even remember the road I had traveled. All I could think of was meeting Ben.
He had refused to say anything on the phone.
“I need to see you face-to-face,” he insisted. “I’ll come around this evening.”
This evening was too long for me to wait.
“This afternoon,” I said. “Please…I’ll meet you down by the river. Where the daffodils are.”
“If they’re still there,” he said sadly.
“They will be,” I replied.
And they were. Not perhaps quite in their fullest bloom, but still spread out in front of me in a golden carpet, dancing gently in the breeze.
I saw him at once. He was standing with his back to me, beside a clump of trees, staring out across the river toward the hills beyond. Suddenly I was filled with apprehension. What was going on? What could he say to make the lies right? What could warrant everyone keeping such a secret from me?
When he turned toward me, his eyes were soft and welcoming. I hesitated. What if I didn’t like what he had to say?
He held out his hand. I took it tentatively.
“Tell me,” I pleaded. “What is it? What are you all keeping from me?”
“I’ve wanted to tell you for ages,” he said quietly. “But I met you by accident, before I got the chance…and then it was too late. I just wanted you to get to know me for myself before I said anything.”
“But I do know you,” I cried. “Or at least, I thought I did.”
He lifted my face in his hands, looking down into my eyes.
I held his gaze, my heart pounding in my ears. “Tell me,” I whispered.
“There is something I have to do first,” he murmured, lowering his face slowly toward mine. All of a sudden I was melting against him, lost to everything but the warm solid feel of his body pressed against me and the tingling ecstasy of his lips on mine.
When he drew back, I was trembling, exhilarated, ashamed and afraid all at once.
“I had to find out how you really felt about me before I told you,” he said softly. “In case it changes everything. And now that I have…Well, however long it takes, I’m willing to wait.”
He led me by the hand to a wooden seat beneath the trees, and settled me down like a child, his arm cradled protectively around my shoulders as he stared into the distance again.
“I was there when Daniel died,” he said simply. “And it should have been me.”
I felt as if a hand were squeezing my heart.
“You were with him?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what?”
My fingers dug fiercely into his arm.
“In the moment that Daniel died, I found a whole new life—and I’ve felt guilty ever since.”
Abruptly I was filled by an incredible sense of calmness and strength. “I think you’d better start at the beginning,” I said quietly.
His fingers twisted into mine as he began to speak.
“I was ill for a very long time—a heart condition. I couldn’t run or do anything physical. Sometimes I felt I didn’t have a life at all. Anyway, it suddenly got worse and I was rushed in for surgery. It was when I was in that weird woozy place, coming around from the anesthetic, that I heard the ambulance siren. I remember feeling really bad that someone nearby must be suffering…and then my heart just stopped beating.
“All I was aware of was a blinding pain and distant, panic-stricken voices. I felt as though I was floating away into numbness…a strange vacant numbness filled with dreams.”
He turned toward me then, his eyes dark with emotion.
“I thought they were just dreams,” he cried.
For a moment we sat in silence, side-by-side but not quite touching.
“Tell me about the dreams,” I said.
He clasped my hand again but didn’t meet my eyes.
“I am the most practical man in the world,” he said. “I’m not superstitious and I don’t believe in ghosts or the supernatural or anything like that. But something happened to me that day, Luce, something I can’t deny—and God knows I’ve tried to. I can’t say how or why, but I just knew things…felt things. It wasn’t until much later that it all started to make sense.”
I waited then with baited breath, my heart pounding in my ears as his whole body shuddered with a sigh.
“Next day, when I was feeling more like me again, the nurses were all talking about yesterday’s tragedy. The handsome young man who was killed on his motorbike.”
He stared into my face.
“The very second that Daniel was declared dead was the moment that my heart began beating again. It was written right there in our records. And then suddenly things kind of clicked into place and I knew. I just knew….”
“What? What did you know?” The question screamed silently from inside my head.
“That the thoughts and feelings from my dream were his. That somehow, no matter how crazy anyone might think it is, in that moment between life and death, we made some kind of connection.”
I closed my eyes tight shut, wrapping my arms around myself, drowning in a stifling sadness tinged with joy.
“He loved you all so much, Lucy, and he was sorry that he couldn’t say goodbye. He had so much to live for. It was me who should have died. Sometimes I feel as if I took his life.”
“No.” I placed my hand on his arm. “Fate took his life. It was fate.”
“That’s what Mrs. Brown said.”
“Edna? You told Edna this?”
He nodded. “Yes. I wrote to her and we talked on the phone.”
“But why not me, Ben? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“She said to wait until you came home. When you didn’t…Eventually I found you, anyway.”
“That day in the park,” I breathed.
He touched my cheek.
“I knew your name,” he whispered. “Before she told me, I already knew your name. And there’s something else, something only for you.”
I waited in silence, certain somehow that the answers I had been longing for were finally here.
“His promise,” Ben said. “He’ll never forget his promise.”
A sense of release washed over me, a fulfillment that flooded my soul. Daniel might be gone, but he hadn’t forgotten.
It was Ben’s voice, though, that broke the silence.
“I didn’t know it was you that day in the park, and by the time I did, it was too late.”
“Too late for what?”
His fingers twisted into mine. “Too late for us.”
“Us,” I repeated, daring to meet his eyes. “Is there an us?”
He gently wrapped his arms around me, drawing me close against his chest.
“Daniel will always be your first love—I understand that,” he said softly, “but I hope so, Lucy…Oh, I hope so.”
For a fleeting moment I caught the scent of bluebells, sweet and nostalgic, and suddenly I knew. Daniel had kept his promise, for he was all around me. In the breeze that caressed my cheek, in the murmuring branches of the trees, in each and every precious memory stored deep inside me, safe forever. But Ben was here now, too, and there was room in my heart for them both.
My eyes caught a distant cloud scudding across an ocean of blue that seemed to stretch into eternity.
“Goodbye, Daniel,” I whispered.
And as a ripple ran across the fading daffodils, I heard a distant sigh.