As she spoke she slipped out of her Barbour jacket and wrapped it around Harley as best she could without further disturbing his broken body.
‘I’ll have your coats too, you guys,’ she ordered. ‘Just pile them on him.’
It was only fifteen minutes later when they heard the ambulance siren wailing in the distance on the road through the village, but it seemed for ever.
‘I’ll go to the lane gate,’ said Freddie as, able to think properly again now, he climbed behind the wheel of the Land Rover. ‘They’ll never get an ambulance across a ploughed field in the state of this.’
Minutes later he was back with two paramedics — a tall young man, boyish-faced but prematurely balding, and his woman partner, small, slight, possibly even younger, but somehow clearly the senior — laden down with equipment.
‘Jesus,’ said the female paramedic peering down the precipice-sided ditch. ‘How did you get yourself in this mess then, mate?’
‘That’s just what I’ve been asking him,’ said Constance.
Harley managed a wan smile.
The paramedics were in control within minutes. They did not touch the tourniquet. Harley was quickly checked from head to toe before being given a powerful pain-killing injection, wrapped in warm life-restoring foil and carefully loaded on to a stretcher. Acting on instructions from the paramedics the farm workers and Freddie helped carry Harley on the stretcher up to the field and then load him into the back of the Land Rover.
‘Who did the tourniquet?’ asked the woman paramedic.
‘She did,’ said Freddie, glowing with pride as usual and gesturing towards his wife who was standing quietly to one side now, gratefully wrapped in her Barbour jacket once more.
‘Good job,’ said the paramedic. ‘He’s got a lot to thank you for, that young man.’
Constance smiled but did not speak.
‘He’ll be all right, you can save his arm, can’t you... can’t you?’ she heard Norton Phillips ask over and over again as he clambered into the Land Rover alongside his son.
There was no answer from the medical team.
Constance sighed. She was the practical one, the doer. She had attended so many emergencies locally. Always it was her they called for. And, although with the passage of time she considered herself to be no more than a competent first aider, her long-ago learned medical skills — she had been an SRN at Bristol Infirmary — were rarely allowed to go rusty for long. Nonetheless, when the moment of crisis was over she almost always experienced a kind of emptiness.
You could never do enough, she felt. Constance didn’t believe in miracles. She certainly knew enough to appreciate the extent of the damage to Harley’s arm — and it was his right arm too, unfortunately. The boy was a manual labourer, a farmworker, and never likely to be anything else. He needed that arm in full order.
The ambulance was belting off down the lane now, its siren wailing again. In the distance Constance heard her husband’s voice.
‘Come on, old girl. Let’s go home and put the kettle on. You’ve done a wonderful job, again.’
Constance inclined her head, smiling just a little. She was so used to holding everything together in an emergency, it was second nature to her. Perhaps it wasn’t that strange that she was inclined to suffer a reaction when it was all over. She wanted to be on her own for a bit, to regain her strength. It was also second nature to Constance never to show signs of weakness.
‘You know, I think I’ll walk back, if you don’t mind Freddie,’ she said lightly. ‘Stretch my legs. I could check that fence down by Marsh Wood where the cattle broke through yesterday, too.’
Freddie hesitated just a moment.
Constance glanced up at the sky. ‘It’s brightening up, I think we could have a lovely evening. The walk’ll do me good...’
Freddie smiled at her. ‘Of course,’ he said finally. ‘If that’s what you want.’
‘See you later then,’ said Connie, already setting off at a good pace.
‘Right.’ Freddie hesitated again. ‘And, thank you, love. I don’t know what we’d do without you...’
She waved her acknowledgement over her shoulder. He was a good man. She was a lucky woman and she knew it.
Before her stretched all the splendour of Somerset. The beautiful English oak in the top corner of Brook Meadow spread its lushly foliaged arms wide over the rolling field. Beyond it was a huge American oak, the second biggest in England, so Constance believed, which barely changed colour at all in the autumn and was always the last deciduous tree to drop its leaves — sometimes not until the new year.
The English oak would turn golden-red early this year, she suspected. September was still almost a week away and yet the weather had felt autumnal for days. But this particular day, that had earlier offered only more of the heavy rain which had been drenching the countryside for so long, was in the process of transforming itself. The skies had lightened almost simultaneously with the moment young Harley had been made safe in the ambulance.
Constance skirted around the edge of the ploughed field, meadow in name only nowadays. All was quiet at last. She relished the silence and the solitude. At the bottom end of the ploughed meadow, she turned off left through the little hunting gate and on through the woodland which had been partially cleared and replanted with saplings the previous spring.
There were enough big trees left to make it dark already within the wood. But a weak late-afternoon sun was now shining wetly — she could just see its glint in dappled patches through the foliage.
She could have walked home from Brook Meadow in half an hour across country had she taken the most direct route through the woods, crossing the footbridge over Chalmpton Water and along the lane behind the school. Instead she had chosen to detour, on the pretext of checking the fence down by Marsh Wood. In spite of the damp chill still in the air and the shock of the afternoon’s events, she was beginning, very slightly, to enjoy herself. Being alone in the country always did this to her. It was rejuvenation.
The cattle, one of the last remaining herds of pedigree Red Devon in the country, were grazing contentedly exactly where they should be. Constance spent longer than she needed counting their number, checking them out. Then she carefully inspected the hastily mended fence which would have to be properly rebuilt before winter set in, she reckoned.
There was a footpath that led from the site of the suspect fence alongside Chalmpton Water — little more than a stream but running swiftly now after the consistently heavy rainfall — through Marsh Wood, beneath Church Rise, and all the way back to Chalmpton Village Farm.
Constance liked this route, and set off almost eagerly along the path. At one point she noticed two flashes of brilliant blue over the water and stopped at once, peering through the bushes which partially masked the brook from her gaze. She had glimpsed, she knew, a pair of kingfishers in darting flight and the sight never failed to make her heart soar. She leaned against a tree trunk and remained there for several minutes, quite still, watching, almost trancelike.
Even after almost twenty-five years of marriage to a major landowner, Constance found it hard to believe that this beautiful place belonged to her and her husband. In fact they owned almost nine hundred acres of prime Somerset land. And unlike Freddie, who was the nearest thing Chalmpton Peverill had to a lord of the manor and whose family had farmed in the village for generations, Constance had not been born to the kind of world into which she had, however, so splendidly fitted. In fact, very far from it.
Constance had been brought up in children’s homes and a string of foster homes. Her Irish mother, whom Constance could barely remember, died when she was a toddler. She knew of no father.