CHAPTER TWO

Wulfecombe, Devon, UK

Clare Evely awoke to the smell of coffee and cinnamon and rain. A big warm hand fell on her back. "Time to wake up, love."

She rolled over luxuriously, bumping into a much-battered cat who was, by their best guess, at least seventeen. He croaked at her, then settled back down. Clare was finally rested after a three-week stretch of back-to-back ceremonies—weddings, a funeral, a handfasting, and her daughter's thirty-seventh birthday, a particularly precious thing now that Sage was pregnant. Clare had several grandchildren that she shared with Levi's children, but Sage had walked a difficult road, and this pregnancy was a blooming of a life that had been entirely too full of challenges.

"Good morning." Her voice was throaty. "Did you bring me a cinnamon roll, you wicked man?"

Levi rubbed her belly with his giant hand. "You've earned it." He kissed her forehead. "I've got to run. Nan Granger's mare is failing."

"Ah." She squeezed his hand. "It's never easy, but she loves that horse like a husband. I should bake her a cake."

He grunted in agreement, and Clare rolled over to watch him dress. He winked as he noticed, shedding everything to stand naked in the cold bedroom with its fading William Morris wallpaper. Light came in the dormers and skated over his big, solid form. He was a cheerful, lusty man, and it showed in his belly and thighs, weight he carried easily on his six-foot-five-inch frame. She had made a great many mistakes in her life, but Levi was not one of them. They'd been together for thirty years, and she thanked the goddess for him every day.

Reaching out, she brushed the back of his thigh. "Hurry home tonight, and I'll cook for you for a change."

He laughed and clapped her hip. "It's cooking you're wanting, is it?" After forty years in England, much of his Jamaican accent had been subsumed in the West Country cadence, but it came through now.

"Maybe."

"Mm. I'll get back as soon as I can." He finished dressing and bent to kiss her again, then made a little sound of pain and pressed a hand to his low back.

"Still bothering you?"

"Just gettin' old, I fear."

"Never!" She sat up. "Take some ibuprofen, will you?"

"Already done."

Clare watched him depart, noting the way he favored his right side, giving his walk a bit of a rocking limp. It had been bothering him for quite a while. Time he should see a doctor. "Don't overdo!" she called after him.

"You're the one! I'm not the one who hasn't had a free day in weeks. Take an easy day yourself, missus."

"I'll try. Liam's coming next week. I have a lot to do."

"He won't mind. Give yourself a day."

"I'll try if you will."

He grunted and was gone.

She scrolled through her phone, drinking coffee and nibbling the cinnamon roll. There were the usual texts from her daughters and the usual zero from her sons. Sage wanted the recipe for her seedy bread; her stepdaughter Meg reported back on a test for her youngest's bad throat—no strep. Meg's sister, Amelia, was always the chattiest. She lived on a nearby farm, and they shared the most in terms of interests. She reported that the daffodils were budding, and she had a great crop of lettuces already. Clare texted each one back, then texted the boys, too—neither she nor Levi had had any before they married, but the union gave them two, Ben and Arthur. An enormous brood of children, everyone said. She wouldn't have minded more, honestly, but time ran out.

She texted them in a group: Don't forget Liam will be here for Sunday lunch. Remember, no one but you and your families. No friends.

They were all a little swoony over their famous cousin coming to Sunday lunch out in the wilds of Devon, and Clare had had to crack down on the whole group of them. The girls remembered him, of course, but only as a boy, not the celebrated man he'd become.

Liam was her dearest friend's youngest. Helen had brought her brood home from New Zealand for a summer after the shocking, devastating death of her husband. The lot of them had stayed the season, healing in the sea air with cousins and good food and the ever-changing host of rescued animals that populated the farm. Clare had taken the broken Liam under her wing, patching him up with greenhouse experiments and the feeding of the limping, blind, and ancient pets. He'd proven to be a good correspondent, apart from a long stretch in his twenties, and they'd carried on a lively discussion of life, books, and the nature of spiritual pursuits for decades. She deeply looked forward to his visit.

Phone calls and laundry and garden tasks would wait. The lure of fresh air tugged her out the door and down the forest path she'd been walking since young adulthood, beneath branches just now swelling with the buds of leaves or flowers, still wet in the aftermath of last night's rain.

From the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of movement. A fluffy black tail was disappearing, gone. Her heart quickened. Surely it wasn't a wolf? She stayed very still, peering into the green dimness. The only sound she heard was the drip of water to the earth. No birdsong.

Without moving her body, she moved her eyes from tree to tree, looking up, looking left, looking—

Gooseflesh broke out over her entire body, and Clare whirled, yelling at the top of her voice. Into the depths of the forest dashed a big gray wolf, unmistakable. She could see his head and his big paws and, when he paused to look over his shoulder, his big yellow eyes.

She shivered in wonder and terror and, of course, the never-distant grief. No one had believed the tales of wolves in these woods, but here one was again.

Like an omen.

The Evelys had lived in the village of Wulfecombe for hundreds of years—over a thousand, according to some family legends, which stated that Thomas Evely had established a farm near the ford before the Conqueror came. Clare had her doubts about that, but she could feel the roots of her ancestors on every road and dale of the county, from Barnstaple to the sea. Her people had always been stewards of the land, raising sheep and growing corn—both the grain corn of old and the modern corn, and tending their needs from orchards and market trading.

She was rooted here, which wasn't always as romantic as it sounded. Her father, like many of the men of her line, had a penchant for drink, and when he drank, he was mean. Never physically brutal, which perhaps her grandfather had been, but a tongue could do a lot of damage. Her mother dealt with him in her long-suffering way, and Clare followed suit, ignoring him when necessary but mostly paying him no attention whatsoever. Her world was encompassed by the ways and rules of women—her two grandmothers, both long widowed; her aunts and girl cousins and their female neighbors; her two sisters, who had grown up and moved far away—one to Chicago, one to Vancouver. Many of her cousins flew away, too, leaving the village an echoey version of itself.

The only one Clare missed was Liam's mother, who'd followed a boy to New Zealand. They'd written letters sporadically, long missives that were a joy when they arrived in the post. Helen became a farmer herself on the North Island, a vegan, and a mother of six while Clare stumbled and stuttered, starting one thing or other, never quite finding her fit. She tried nursing school but longed for home, and returned to try her hand at a shop that failed. She married a man who proved to be meaner than her own father, but she left him in Barnstaple and returned to Wulfecombe with her children in tow.

Two years later, in the darkest moment of her life, Clare's maiden aunt Gillian had died and left Clare her house—a sudden and shocking surprise, as it was a house of some substance a couple of miles from the village on fertile land surrounded by forest.

It was both a blessing and a curse. Her aunt had lived in three rooms and left the rest to rot, which some of it had. Clare spent the first two years dragging things off to the tip—chifforobes and small tables, clothing from five generations, a trunk full of mildewed, rotting letters. It was good for her, giving her the focus and hard work she desperately needed.

She learned to love the process of clearing and remaking those old, dark rooms. One at a time, she gave them new life. A year on the back bedroom, two on the ancient kitchen. It would never be featured in Country Life , but she loved it.

The house had given her a place to offer Levi's children when they married, and space for their combined families to live together in relative peace. In those rooms, Clare had discovered her best life was as a mother, a wife, and a caretaker of the land her family had held for so many generations.

It was still a tumbledown mess most of the time, in need of one thing or another or perhaps twenty things. The entire east wing was closed off: three rooms that were never used, one with a fireplace the size of a plow horse. She fretted about it in the back of her mind sometimes, but not all of it could be managed at once. It was enough that the building stayed standing, that she looked after the small church and its graveyard by the river, that she was doing her small but significant part to make sure it didn't fall down.

Now she was getting it ready for guests on Sunday. Liam had been a beautiful boy, now a more beautiful man whose spirit shone as brightly as his hair.

This late afternoon, she kneaded bread on the old table in the kitchen. The light from the stark overhead fixture she kept meaning to replace was not the best at this time of evening, but it was enough to illuminate the task at hand—a big, seedy loaf smelling of ancient starter.

Levi came in through the back door, his heavy step telling her his day had been even longer than the hour suggested. "Hello," she said in as kind a voice as she could muster.

He nodded, stopping to hang his coat on the hook by the door, kicking off his muddy, knee-high wellies.

"Are you hungry? I've a chicken pie in the oven."

"I could eat." He washed his hands and arms at the big sink, and dried them with a tea towel hanging by the cupboard. She eyed his limp.

"Let me finish this last little bit, and I'll get it for you."

He was independent and didn't like being waited on, but tonight he only sank into the chair and rolled his shoulders. Not a good day, and hard on his body. She didn't want to rush his stories—he'd get to them as he settled—and she left him alone to watch her roll the dough, press, roll, press, turn, press. Sprinkle with a dusting of flour, knead again, until it felt like young skin beneath her palms.

As she kneaded, she offered soft, soothing samplings of her day, a feather coverlet under which he could rest. "I think I've finished the planting for summer. Cabbages are coming along nicely." She washed her hands, plucking off crusts of flour. "I saw Sage, and she let me sing to the baby." The pie she took from the oven was hot and crumbly, packed with carrots and potatoes and leeks in a savory white sauce she had perfected over the years. She placed it before him, touching his shoulder, and poured a glass of water.

Then she sat, apron gathered in her lap, and waited.

"The foal died," he said, and she'd known those would be his words. "Mrs. Granger howled like it was her own babe."

"The mare?"

"She'll be all right." He ate. She knew him well enough to know the small movements hid great pain. "It was all I could do to pull the colt from her." He put down his fork, rested his fists on the table.

Clare covered one of those fists with her own two hands. "It's hard work."

He nodded. "And I've grown too old for it."

"Maybe," she agreed. "Maybe a check with the doctor, just to see if there might be a slipped disc or something that could be fixed?"

He raised his eyes.

She sensed something more. "What is it?"

He turned his hand over and grasped hers. "They found bones at the new housing estate."

A chill ran down her body. "Bones?"

"An excavator dug them up, it seems, digging a cellar. A child's bones. They don't know if they're ancient or recent. That's all I've heard. I'm sure it's an old grave."

Clare felt the past open and howl. "Or it isn't."