The Warrior’s Princess. Barbara Erskine

for everything, cheers, Ash.

      Underneath he had scrawled, Your door was open. Sorry to miss you. A x

      Ash had been in her flat. Not Will. Ash, quoting from Troilus and Cressida. He must have been watching, waiting for her to go out so he could sneak in. She closed her eyes with a shudder.

      It took ten minutes to load the car, racing up and down the flights of stairs with her boxes and cases, constantly scanning the pavements. At last everything was in. She went back to the flat one last time and glanced round to check she hadn’t forgotten anything. Just the flowers. With a grimace of disgust she picked them up and rammed them head first into the waste bin. She threw the card in after them, ran out of the flat, double-locked the door behind her and headed into the car.

      Slamming down the door locks, she sank down behind the wheel taking deep breaths to try and calm her panic. ‘All over. He’s not here. He won’t know where I’m going. I’ll be safe.’ She was whispering the words out loud as she rammed the key into the ignition and turned it.

       3

      As the old Ford Ka bumped up the track towards the house Jess peered through the windscreen at her sister’s small sprawling farmstead nestling against the wooded hillside and felt a sudden wave of intense happiness and relief. The feeling wavered a little as she turned into the courtyard and switched off the engine. Where was Steph’s car? The house was empty. She was too late. Steph had already gone – why else would the front door be closed? She had never seen it closed before in all the time Steph had lived there, even in winter.

      Climbing out, stiff after the long drive, she stared round. Fighting off a wave of sudden loneliness she went to look for the key. It was in its usual hiding place, cocooned in cobwebs, a sign of how seldom it had been used, under a terracotta pot in the porch. As she bent to pick it up an indignant swallow swooped out of the nest tucked into the shadows above her head, leaving a row of sullen babies, half-fledged and bursting out of the nest leaning out, glaring down at her.

      She pushed the key into the lock and turning it with difficulty, opened the door and went in. The house was eerily silent.

      Her sister was a sociable woman. In the past when Jess had visited, the place had always been full of people – artists and writers fleeing the town, ex boyfriends and husbands who all appeared to be on astonishingly good terms with her sister, fellow teachers from the west London art college where Steph had taught for ten years before retiring to her pottery, people she had picked up on her travels, animals who followed her home, together with waifs and strays their mother had met on her research trips and blithely redirected to her daughter in Wales. As Jess unloaded the car and cautiously began to explore the house which would be her kingdom for the summer, she was expecting at any moment to see a sleepy face peering at her from one of the bedrooms, a stray cat, a motherless lamb, a homeless artist. There was no one. The house was neat and tidy and empty. On the kitchen table there was a note with a box of nougat.

      Sorry I’m not here to welcome you. Enjoy the peace. Stay as long as you like. I mean it. Wine in fridge. See you some time. S xxx

      She chose the largest of the spare rooms to make her own. It had a double bed with a patchwork quilt, an antique pine chest and an old French armoire with a beautiful if threadbare Afghan rug on the polished oak boards, plenty of space for her books and its own quaint old bathroom set in what must have once been another bedroom behind the huge chimney breast. Carefully she put the smaller of her plants, an exuberant Flaming Katy in full scarlet flower, on the windowsill. The other plant, a mother-in-law’s tongue given her by Will, which had barely escaped with its life after their break up, when she had still been throwing things about, she put in the bathroom, a room large enough for an antique dressing table and an ancient creaking settle covered by an exotic crimson shawl, and yet another bookcase beside the free-standing bath.

      She wandered round the rest of the house, the sitting room with its open hearth swept and filled with dried flowers, the dining room with its refectory table, so often crammed with talking, arguing, noisy people. Steph’s cooking was adventurous and not always terribly successful – she was frequently rescued from her culinary crises by more talented visitors who didn’t seem to mind standing in at the last minute as chef. Jess smiled fondly at the memory. She wandered on into the large old-fashioned kitchen which was unnaturally tidy, overlooking the courtyard, and then through the passage with its small pointed windows, built to blend with the medieval lines of the lovely old byre which Steph had converted as her studio. Standing in the doorway she looked round at the unused materials on their shelves, the newly made pots carefully packed in boxes, the craftsman pieces which Steph sold through galleries in Radnor and Hereford and Hay, the piles of broken crocks. She hated the studio like this. Empty, like the house, the kiln cold, the soul somehow gone out of the place without her sister there. She stood for several moments, listening to the distant songs of the birds and she shivered. Walking back into the passage she turned the key in the lock and leaving the studio to its own devices she went back into the kitchen.

      Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to come after all, with Steph not being here.

      Why hadn’t Steph said at once, come with me. Come to Rome. Come to the sunshine. Jess glared at the plants crowded onto the windowsill behind the sink. ‘It’s all your fault,’ she said out loud. ‘I’m plant sitting and it’s not what I had in mind at all!’

      She frowned. What she had in mind was to paint. To forget London and what had happened to her there. To look forward and not back. The thought cheered her. Suddenly she could hardly wait to open her sketchbook, to feel again the reassuring grip of a pen or brush in her hand. She wanted to capture everything. Trees. The silhouette of the hills. The warm soft outlines of the stone walls; the colours of the flowers, the incredible structure of the petals of the orchid on the kitchen windowsill. It was going to be OK.

      That night her dream returned. She was standing outside the front door, staring across the yard towards the open gate and the wood behind it. The branches of the trees were moving uneasily and she could sense a storm drifting along the broad river valley below the fields. The voice when it came was thin and wavering.

      Can we stop playing this game now. I’m frightened.

      It was coming from somewhere in the wood, almost drowned out by the sound of raindrops pattering down onto the leaves.

      ‘Where are you?’ Jess ran towards the gate. ‘Come in. It’s going to pour. Come here, sweetheart. You’ll be safe here.’

      The rain was growing heavier. She could feel it soaking into her jacket, drenching her hair. Her fingers were slippery on the top of the gate as she peered into the darkness. ‘Where are you?’

      A flash of lightning lit up the track and in the distance she caught sight of the child, her pale hair hanging in ropes across her shoulders, her little face pleading as the darkness closed in once more.

      ‘Wait. I’m coming! Wait there.’ Jess started to run down the track, her feet slipping in the mud as the first crash of thunder echoed around the hills.

      With a start her eyes opened and she lay looking up at the ceiling. For a second the dream lingered, then it was gone as she became aware of the drumming of rain on the slates above her head and on the flagstones in the courtyard outside the window. The rain was real. As was the thunder. As another rumble echoed round the house she sat up and reached for the light switch.

      In the kitchen she found herself staring out of the window into the darkness. There had been a child in her dream. A lost child. She shivered. It would be awful to be outside on a night like this. She was about to reach for the kettle when she heard a crash from behind the door which led into the passage to Steph’s studio. With a shiver she hugged her bathrobe round her. She ought to go and see what it was. Perhaps a tile had been dislodged by the wind or the rain or a window had blown open. If she left it something might