The Yuletide Child

The further south they went the more cars and lorries surrounded her. Warily, she stayed in the slow lane, but that meant having a lorry in front of her and another behind.

Her back was aching again, she had a tension headache, and when her car tyres skidded on the snow her whole body was wrenched with fear. She gripped the wheel, fought to control the skid, her car sliding sideways, and finally managed to pull out of it, but vehicles around her hooted angrily, making her nerves worse.

She glared at them in her driving mirror, a sob in her throat Stupid idiots! Did they think she’d skidded deliberately?

The incident left her shaking, sweat trickling down her back. She was relieved to see that she was almost at the Penrith exit from the motorway. She had meant to go on to the next exit, but she couldn’t stand driving in these conditions.

It was a relief to escape on to quieter country roads. She had visited Jenny half a dozen times, but coming from the south more often, before she’d married Ross. She didn’t know this approach, from the Northern Lakes. Jenny lived near Windermere, the most popular part of the country, always busy with tourists, even in winter. The landscape was beautiful, but oddly unfamiliar under a coating of white. Trees took on a tinsel look, glittering with ice, fields were sugared and sparkling when the sun came out, gilding the hills and spires of villages hidden among the folds of fields.

She was trying to follow the road signs for Windermere, but she began to have an uneasy feeling that she had taken a wrong turning somewhere.

Pulling up at the next crossroads, she peered at the road signs pointing in each direction—which way now? She hadn’t thought of bringing a map with her. She didn’t recognise any of those names, and she couldn’t see anyone to ask.

Another car came along from her left and took a turning to the right, then a second car did the same—that must be the main road, surely? Dylan followed them.

The road wound downhill steeply. Her wheels began to spin too fast. She was sliding again, the car skating across the road. Terrified, Dylan hurriedly turned the wheel sharply, only to find herself driving down a narrow lane which led off at right angles to the road she had been on at first. She couldn’t slow down or stop. Her car rushed downwards until it finally crashed into a high wall.

CHAPTER SIX

DYLAN wasn’t actually knocked out, but for a moment or two she didn’t move, so shocked that she almost lost consciousness, lying across the steering wheel.

When she sat up at last she realised she was in pain. Her seat belt had held but she had been flung forward so hard that she had seat belt burns across her chest and abdomen, and her forehead and cheek ached where she had hit her face on the steering wheel.

Releasing the seat belt with deep relief, she opened the door to heave her body out and winced as she put her foot down. Oh, no, had she broken her ankle?

Gingerly, she moved the foot again. Yes, it hurt badly. She raised her leg a little, very slowly and carefully, because at this stage of her pregnancy a movement like that was not easy, and peeled back her sock. Bending forward to feel the swollen ankle was even more of a problem. She was so sick of being pregnant! The puffy red flesh was tender, but she decided the ankle wasn’t broken, merely sprained. She must have twisted it somehow during the crash.

After pulling up her sock again she put her foot down with a sigh of relief, then slid her other foot out of the car. When she put that one on the ground it didn’t hurt at all. Gripping the handle of the car for support, she stood up straight. But was she going to be able to walk?

The car bonnet had crumpled on impact, but luckily the base of the wall was cushioned with a mound of earth, thick grass and gorse, which had taken some of the impact. Her flower wagon wasn’t a total write-off.

Where on earth was she? Her gaze travelled around the snowy landscape in search of clues, but all she could see at first was fields and trees veiled by the swirling blizzard. It was still snowing just as hard and showed no sign of stopping.

She glanced back up the lane she had driven down but it was far too steep for her to want to walk back up there, especially as she would have to hop on her one good foot.

What was she going to do?

Ross’s mobile phone! Thank heavens she had brought it with her. Leaning back into the car, she hunted for it in her bag. At least she would be able to ring for a taxi. She could only be a few miles away from her sister’s house. Her fingers skidded over the keys to tap in the code—but when she tried to ring her sister, meaning to ask Jenny to look up a local taxi firm for her, she got the ‘No Service’ signal. Frantically she tried again. ‘No Service’. She closed her eyes, groaning. Oh, no! Ross was always complaining about that. This could be a blind spot, or the weather might be breaking up the radio waves or something. She didn’t quite understand how mobile phones worked; they were a bit of a mystery to her.

She leaned on the car, considering her options. Well, she could get back into the car and wait for another vehicle to come along, but what if no other car went past? She would freeze to death out here.

She could force herself to walk back up to the busier road she had driven along a few minutes ago. The hill looked steeper than ever as she stared up to the top.

Surely there must be a farm or a cottage somewhere around here? Her desperate eyes hunted over the countryside again and stopped as she saw a gleam of light across the other side of a field. A house! And somebody was living there because she saw, too, a faint wisp of grey smoke curling up from a chimney.

Somehow she was going to have to make it to that house, and the sooner the better. She was getting colder every minute. Dropping the phone into her bag, she shut the car door, locked it, and set off.

It was very hard going with only one good foot. It was going to be painful, and slow, getting across that field. She leaned on the stone wall for a second and suddenly realised there was a tree growing a few feet ahead. Dylan had no idea what sort of tree it was, except that as it was leafless at the moment it must be deciduous, but to her delight one of the lower branches had half broken off, hung loosely downwards from the torn edge where it joined the trunk.

That would make a very useful walking stick to lean on. Gripping it firmly, she pulled and the branch came off in her hand. It was almost as tall as Dylan herself, thicker than she had expected, and pretty strong.

Leaning on it, she limped to the gate, but had a tussle to force it open because so much snow had built up behind it. At last she managed to get through, but closing the gate was almost as much of a problem. When she had managed that she leaned there for half a minute, breathing roughly while she peered through the blizzard.

Were there cows in this field? Under the coverlet of snow it was impossible to guess if a crop was being grown in there, or if this was a meadow where animals grazed, but she couldn’t see any animals, so she started off again. She was halfway across the field when she found herself sinking into a snowdrift.

Close to tears, she leaned on her stick and tried shouting. ‘Help! Hello? Hello, can you hear me?’

The wind took her voice away; nobody answered at first, and then suddenly something moved a few feet from her. Dylan gave a startled cry.