Embroidering Shrouds Read Free

feeling the comforting shape of it beneath her feathered rump. She eyed the other hens with a certain air of smugness. None of them could have produced such perfection.
    Lydia stopped writing and stared through the window, her thoughts years away. How different all their lives could have been if ...
    She tutted to herself; no use dwelling in the land of If. She must accept what was and be practical. So instead of searching through dreams she forced herself to see what was through the window: a yard, muddy and strewn with branches and twigs blasted from the trees by the storm, a corrugated tin roof lurching at a drunken angle over the hen house. Damage had been done and now there was work to do.
    Joanna’s contentment temporarily returned as she wheeled her bike round to the front of the house and took a long glance back at their home. Waterfall Cottage never failed to delight her. Built in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, it had originally been a farmworker’s cottage in the attractively but misleadingly named village: there was no waterfall. There were stocks and a pinfold, an ancient parish church, and a school which had been closed for twenty years but still served as a village hall. Waterfall Cottage stood opposite the triangular village green, a small, pretty stone cottage that backed on to the churchyard. She and Matthew had gutted the entire house, preserving what they could and at the same time improving it with a damp course, central heating, a kitchen which masqueraded as traditional yet held every available modern labour-saving device: a microwave, a dishwasher, a fridge-freezer. They had decorated throughout in modern, bright colours, chosen every stick of furniture together: an antique pine dining table and eight chairs, a feather-stuffed sofa, a cabinet which she had filled with her only inherited heirlooms, a collection of Victorian Staffordshire figures, bequeathed by an aunt.
    She negotiated the blue brick path, mounting her bike at the front gate and carefully manoeuvring around Matthew’s maroon BMW which still stood outside. He would leave in half an hour.
    It was a perfect day for cycling, blustery and cool, fresh and damp, the moors today bathed in a sunshine too golden for any season but a fine English autumn day. The only hazard left by last night’s rain were slippery leaves that lay rotting on the lanes and a few branches strewn across the road like objects in an obstacle course. Joanna wheeled around them carefully; she didn’t want another broken wrist.
    She sped down the hill, quickly crossing the flat patch of moorland that lay between her and Leek. But as the town came into distant view she felt a sudden reluctance to abandon the countryside with its fields bordered by dry-stone walls, the grass speckled with grey stone cottages and isolated farms. As she flicked her feet around the pedals she scolded herself, Leek was really a peaceful town, she was usually glad to see it slide into view. It was as she changed gear to climb the hill that she finally acknowledged the reason for her alien emotion, a spate of burglaries that had begun early in the spring had escalated to robbery with violence. What had started as petty pilfering from empty houses had progressed to a spree where the burglars didn’t care whether the owners were in or out. Twice the crimes had been committed while the owners had been obliviously watching television. And then a few months ago, through a wet summer, the crimes had altered again. In July the burglars had pushed past an old lady, causing her to fall down some stairs and break her hip. In August another of Leek’s elderly widows had reported that masked men had broken in to her home and robbed her of £300 which she had kept with her tea bags ready to pay the gas bill.
    While the town was still nervous from those pointless acts, the crimes had taken on an even more threatening turn. Two weeks after the last robbery the thieves had