Free Green Grass by Raffaella Barker

capital gains. Anyway, that was four years ago, and we’ve moved on.’
    Inigo leans his giant candle against the Aga and prepares to leave the kitchen, but cannot resist a parting shot. ‘Well, I think your problems start and end with this derelict heap of rubble, and the idea that its land pays for it is absurd. No one since Marie-Antoinette has got away with toy farming.’
    â€˜Your candle will melt if you leave it there,’ warns Hedley.
    Inigo grins wickedly. ‘I know, that’s the point,’ he says. ‘I’m off to bed so I can be up early to have a look at this ferret frenzy. I’ll send the children up so you two can carry on bonding for as long as you want.’
    Just to annoy him, Laura blows him a kiss. Hedley shoots him a suspicious glance, but Inigo is sweetness and light now, smiling benevolence at bedtime.
    Laura looks after him wearily. ‘He’s good at making up,’ she says into Hedley’s silence, and then, feeling more is needed, ‘I do love him, you know.’
    She sighs. Hedley sighs too, then looking across ather says, ‘It’s a pity, I always wished you’d married Guy myself. Then you could have come back and lived here too.’
    There is a silence. Laura laughs first. ‘I think I’d better go to bed,’ she says. ‘Inigo won’t like facing rural noises on his own at night – he’s a real wimp about stuff like that.’
    One of the things that Laura had found most attractive about Inigo when she met him was his passion for an urban existence. She didn’t know he loathed the countryside though. He was in New York selling himself and he was loving it. Laura’s small apartment on the Lower East Side was shared with a boy from Seattle training to be an opera singer and a Spanish hairdresser. Laura became a part-time waitress to subsidise her course. She knew no one save her fellow students but she could be who she wanted to be, and she thought she’d never go back to provincial life again. Meeting Inigo at the point where she wanted to give up and go home changed everything. The art world fascinated her, Inigo drew her into it, and gave her a role she enjoyed. Now though, leaning out of the bathroom window, watching the stars and breathing a shock of cold air, she realises that Hedley is drawing her back to Norfolk.

Chapter 6
    Laura is woken at first light by Fred whispering, ‘Come on, Mum, you don’t want to miss the ferrets arriving, do you?’
    The bed is warm, Laura’s nose, exposed to the room, tells her that it is arctically cold – she must have forgotten to turn the heater on when she went to bed, out of practice with the primitive system at Crumbly Hall. There is nothing she would like more than to miss the ferrets arriving; she would love to wallow in this soft bed in the room that was hers when she was growing up, watching the light change throught the roses scattered on the curtains, but Fred is tugging at her arm.
    â€˜Come on, Mum,’ he is whispering loudly. ‘If I can get up, I know you can. Dad said he was coming too, didn’t you, Dad?’
    Inigo groans and turns over.
    â€˜Mmm, later, just a bit later,’ he agrees sleepily.
    Fred pulls back the curtains with a clatter of rings,and Laura braces herself and throws off the covers. The room is icy cold; she can’t face taking her nightie off, so pulls her clothes on over the top. She follows Fred out into the sullen morning, inhaling damp air with each breath. Mud stretches in furrows towards a small copse where Hedley is part of a huddled group of men. They stamp their feet, and flap their arms, pacing around one another, their feet crunching through frosted leaves and crystalline grass. Feeling like King Wenceslas’s slave, but with mud instead of snow, Laura trudges behind Fred to the spinney, half-listening to his torrent of information. ‘… the girl ones are called