1

It all started with a knock on the door.

Cadi Jones threw down her pen with an exclamation of annoyance and, pushing back her chair, she stood up. Her next-door neighbour Sally Price was standing on the doorstep -clutching a handful of letters. She held them out. ‘I'm just coming back from work and I met Gethin at the gate. He's later than ever today.' Gethin was their postman.

‘Someone's off sick, so he's covering two rounds.' Cadi was already turning away.

‘Sarnelen Cottage.' Sally read the address off the top envelope out loud.

‘Yes. That's my address. You know it is.' Cadi stepped back, wanting to close the door, wanting to go back to her desk but acknowledging reluctantly that it wasn't going to happen. Not yet. Sally was already in the room.

‘Do you have the deeds, Cadi?'

‘The deeds?'

‘The Land Registry deeds of your house. Sorry, it just occurred to me.' Belatedly Sally took stock of the untidy room, the scattered papers on the table, the piles of books on the old bureau, more books and files on the floor. The desk lamp was on. ‘I'm sorry, were you in full flow?'

Of course she was. ‘What on earth do you want to know about my deeds for?' Bewildered, Cadi walked over to the round table that stood in the centre of the room and pulled out a chair for her visitor, then sat down opposite her. It was too late to go on working now anyway. Her thought process had been interrupted, the fluent flow of words dammed.

The two women were complete contrasts in every way. Cadi was tall with wild, prematurely grey hair and vivid green eyes. Stunningly beautiful eyes, her ex-husband David always said, but the woman who went with them was far too complicated, too much of a dreamer, for him to handle. Sally on the other hand was short, whip thin, with dark straight hair, neatly bobbed, and steady brown eyes, and sensible with it. She fixed Cadi with what Cadi always thought of as her head-mistress look. One glance from her at the children in her primary school probably ensured instant silence. Cadi was silent now as Sally went on, ‘It's this house. It might be our only hope. David did give you the deeds?'

Her divorce, ten years before, had proceeded inevitably and completely amicably, with David keeping their London flat and Cadi, the cottage. The flat was worth probably twenty times as much as the cottage, so he had thrown in a lump sum as well ‘to balance things out a bit and tide you over'. She had been living off the lump sum ever since and she hated London anyway: win-win. They were still close friends.

‘To be honest, I have no idea about the deeds.' Cadi stood up restlessly. ‘I expect the solicitor has them. Why on earth do you want to know?'

‘I was wondering if by some wonderful chance you owned Camp Meadow.'

There was a long pause. Camp Meadow lay beyond their small terrace of houses at the end of the village, ten acres or so of flower-studded grass, bordered by a line of ancient willows and beyond them a rocky brook. It ran along the far side of the meadow and down the shallow hillside, following a tributary that bisected the village near the church, driving the ancient mill wheel from which the village took its name, Cwmfelin, before turning sharply south-west and winding for miles towards the distant Severn Estuary. Beyond the meadow rose a steep overgrown hillside, topped by an Iron Age hill fort. ‘I'm pretty sure I would know if I did. Why?'

‘Because someone has applied for planning permission to build an estate of new houses on it.'

There was a shocked silence as Cadi registered what she hadsaid.

‘They can't!' Her anguished cry, when it came, was heartfelt. Too shocked to move, Cadi stood immobile staring down at her friend.

‘So you didn't know. Thank God! Everyone in the village thinks it's you.'

‘Of course it isn't me. How could anyone believe that for a single second.' Cadi threw herself back into her chair. ‘I always thought it belonged to Dai Prosser,' she said at last. ‘It must be his, surely.' Dai was the local farmer.

Sally shook her head. ‘Someone has asked him. He knew nothing about it either. The whole village is stunned. He says he's got grazing rights; the sheep are his, but he's admitted he has never paid any rent. He assumed it belonged to the Caradoc family. He says his father and his grandfather have always had the use of it and he had sort of assumed that, after your divorce from David Caradoc, it belonged to you and you were happy with the arrangement. Knowing Dai, I don't suppose he tried too hard to find out. He wouldn't want to pay rent if he didn't have to, would he.'

Cadi sat still, her mind a blank. When at last she looked up, she shook her head slowly. ‘Why don't I know about any of this, Sal?'

‘Because your head is always in the clouds.' Sally gave her an affectionate smile. ‘And someone had to drag you down to earth to make sure it wasn't you who sold it to the developers.'

Stone-built, with low ceilings and small windows, the end-of-terrace cottage had a single open-plan room downstairs, a kitchen one end, with a pantry and back door leading out into a passageway with a gate into the garden. The other half of the downstairs space formed a living room-cum-study, with French doors onto a pretty terrace with beyond it a long thin strip of garden, while upstairs there were two bedrooms plus a boxroom. Sarnelen had originally been a labourer's cottage on the Caradocs' vast estates until, as more and more of the land was sold off and farm after farm disappeared, at last only the one cottage remained. It finally became Cadi's husband's family holiday retreat, their only foothold left in Wales, but even so no one had seemed to miss it when he gave it to her as part of the divorce settlement. No one else was interested in it anymore. She loved it. It was home.

She rang David that evening.

‘Dear God, it never occurred to me to even wonder about the meadow.' He sounded as shocked as she was. ‘I don't think we owned it. Leave it with me. I'll find out what's going on.'

He rang her back two hours later.

‘Bad news, I'm afraid. Once upon a time the family owned practically the whole valley, as you know, but the last bit, the home farm, was sold off after the war. I'm afraid Camp Meadow was part of that deal. The only thing my grandfather kept for old time's sake was Sarnelen Cottage. I gather the whole estate was split up after it was sold and that included the other cottages in your terrace. The largest slice of land, which included Camp Meadow, last changed hands four years ago. It was sold to someone or something called Meadow Holdings. Apparently they applied for planning permission for this development a few weeks ago.'

‘But Camp Meadow isn't development land!' Cadi's cry was desolate.

He sighed. ‘I think you'll find it is. I've looked it up online and they've submitted outline plans for forty-eight houses. You can put in an objection, Cadi. The whole village can, but in the present climate I'm afraid it's unlikely the developer will be turned down. I'll forward you the links so you can do it asap. I'm so sorry, darling.'

He still called her darling even though they had been apart for ten years, more than five times as long as they had been married.

With a sigh she switched off the phone and walked out into the garden. The summer night was very still. Beyond the hedge the meadow stretched out in the twilight towards the trees that lined the brook. From somewhere in the distance she heard the hoot of an owl and seconds later she saw the bird float silently across the grass.

Across the houses.

She could visualise them clearly in her mind's eye, neat rows, there in the shadows, identical roofs tiled with identical slates, a straight road leading north where the footpath ran towards the ford. It couldn't be allowed to happen. It just couldn't. There was someone standing in the field, she realised, the figure with its back towards her, staring as she was towards the distant hills. The sun had set, the red glow of its parting turned to cold clear palest pink and then to yellow. The evening star hung bright and low in the north-west and in minutes would follow the sun down behind the black line of the hills. There was a flash of green light across the horizon and the colour had gone, leaving only the memory of silhouetted trees on the hillside where two thousand years ago an Iron Age tribe had built their township. A horizontal band of cloud appeared black against the sky and then everything faded into obscurity. She smiled ruefully, turning her attention back to the figure in the field. It was Sally walking her dog.

Cadi woke to the sound of rain pattering on the roof of the porch below her bedroom window. She had worked late, hunched over her desk in the pool of lamplight, aware of the silence of the village around her. Sally always went to bed early; the other two cottages in the terrace were second homes now, too small for a family these days but resolutely refused planning permission for extensions by the same authority which was presumably happy to grant it for the development of an ancient meadow.

She was almost asleep again when she heard the distant marching feet. She froze, her heart thudding with fear, then she sat up, straining her ears. She had heard it before, this strangely sinister sound and always she had thought it part of a nightmare.

Marching. Marching. Soldiers marching.

She was fully awake now and the sound of marching was in her ears, not in her dreams. Men in hobnailed boots. In step. In the street outside. Throwing back her covers she slid out of bed and, tiptoeing over to the window, drew back the curtain, staring out into the night. The road was deserted. Slowly her pulse rate steadied, her terror subsided. A shadow moved on the tarmac in the moonlight and disappeared. It was a cat. There was nothing else out there. After a moment's hesitation, quietly, she pushed the window open. She could hear it again now, further away, the sound of marching growing eerily fainter. It was still raining. The air smelled of damp earth, wet grass. There were no street lamps, but there was enough filtered light in the street outside to see that there was no one there. The sound came from the rain, the empty echoes, the very silence of the night itself. She shivered. It was so real, so immediate it had confused her brain. Or her ears. She pulled back into the room and shut the window with a bang. Outside, the sounds stopped immediately.