By the gleaming water tower, the crew were doing their best to ignore Penny as they finished packing up their van. When they slammed the back doors, Penny’s eyes finally landed on Ellie. With a squeal of delight, she rushed towards her niece, enveloping her in a hug that was equal parts bosomy warmth and a cacophony of fabric layers.
Ellie found herself momentarily lost in a sea of frilly shirt, cardigan, and waistcoat, all topped off with a floor-length patchwork skirt that swirled around them both. Compared to Ellie, her tastes were much similiar. Block colours, anything a little loose and long. Anything that made her feel cosy.
As Penny began to repeat everything she’d said in her voicemail, Ellie gently extricated herself from the embrace.
“Oh, Eleanor!” Penny cried, taking her in from head to toe. “I’ve been worried sick all morning. Thinking up the worst things, I was. I imagined you dead in your apartment while your poor cats were picking away at your—”
“I don’t have cats, Auntie Penny,” Ellie interrupted, holding up her phone as a lie bubbled up in her stomach like fizzing poison. “That’s where I’ve been. At the phone shop. Been playing up all week. Your voicemails all just came through.”
It wasn’t like Ellie to lie.
But it also wasn’t like Ellie to lose two jobs in six months.
“Your mother was certain you had cats,” Penny said, as though Carolyn’s certainity could override Ellie’s feline-free reality if she thought about it enough. “We all know you haven’t worked on Wednesdays for the last ten years, so when you didn’t answer your phone, I jumped straight in a taxi to come and find you. I don’t think I realised just how big Cardiff is.”
Ellie sighed, a familiar weight settling in her chest—she still hadn’t told her family about losing her job, about the coffee shop, about any of it.
“I have no complaints about you coming, Auntie Penny,” she said as their arms looped together. “And I’ll come back with you.”
“You will?” Penny almost collapsed from relief. “Because the taxi is waiting.”
“Weren’t you going to give me any time to pack?”
“Oh.” Her face scrunched before she tossed her head back and laughed. “I didn’t think about that, did I? Silly me. Good idea. You go and pack and then we’ll meet up by...” She looked around and then up at the water tower. “What does this thing do, anyway?” She shook her head. “Never mind that. You go and grab your stuff. I think Taxi Tony left the meter on.”
Taxi Tony.
There was a name Ellie hadn’t heard in years.
“I don’t have much to pack,” Ellie said, missing off that she hadn’t unpacked most of her stuff; she’d also only given herself six weeks above Club Tropix. “Before I go, two questions: is my grandmother okay, and what was this ‘incident’?”
Chapter 3Once a Meadowling
As the taxi wound its way through the narrow country roads, Ellie pressed against the window, soaking in the familiar sights of the Wiltshire countryside. Rolling hills stretched out before her, dotted with sheep and cows, while wildflowers painted the roadside in vibrant hues. The closer they got to Meadowfield, the more she wondered what she was doing.
Beside her, Auntie Penny hadn’t stopped fidgeting, her layers rustling with each movement. The journey had taken far longer than anticipated, thanks to an unexpected lane closure that had trapped them in a sea of frustrated drivers.
As the first buildings of Meadowfield came into view, Ellie muttered, “Were these roads always so narrow?” She squinted at the hedgerows pressing in on either side of the car.
The taxi passed down a row of cottages, and before Ellie knew it, they were driving past the old post office and then around the corner towards The Drowsy Duck, one of two pubs in the village, though the only one overlooking the duck pond.
Ellie had forgotten how vibrant with flowers the village was. Pots and hanging baskets overflowed with blossoms, and ivy climbed the walls of the buildings. The whole place was in full bloom, showcasing the height of summer in a way Ellie never saw in the city.
Rather than go straight to Meadowfield Books, Taxi Tony turned up the side street between The Drowsy Duck and the local museum. They drove past a row of small terraced cottages with thatched roofs, one of which Ellie had grown up in with her mother. They swung around the large village green, split down the middle by a footpath connecting the two sides of the village. A stone cross war memorial stood in the centre of the grass, overlooked by St. Mary’s Church from its elevated position at the head of the green. Across from her mother’s row was The Old Bell pub, and next to that, the grand silhouette of Blackwood House behind its high gated wall. And again, the whole place was alive with the colours of summer petals.
As the car emerged on the other side of The Drowsy Duck, facing the pond, Ellie slowed down, her eyes roving over every detail, cataloging the changes and similarities.
“The chip shop’s gone,” she noted. The lone building across from the pub was now a hairdresser’s.
“The Golden Sun Chinese place around the corner does the best chips for miles around,” Taxi Tony said, catching her eye through the rearview mirror as he had been doing periodically through their crossing from Wales to England. “I know your face, don’t I? You’re a Meadowling.”
Ellie smiled at the phrase and nodded, a mix of warmth and apprehension settling in her chest. She knew exactly why Tony recognised her, and she’d spent much of the journey silently hoping he didn’t remember what she did on that fateful day when she was eighteen.
Oblivious, Penny chuckled beside her, the sound as warm and comforting as a crackling fire. “Once a Meadowling, always a Meadowling,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “And there aren’t many of us, mind. People born in Meadowfield, that is. We’re a rare breed.”
“A name that goes back centuries,” Tony added, “and nobody seems to know who first came up with it. I heard that posh lady, Sylvia Fortescue, say that it means something about being hardy and resilient, or something like that.”
“That’s us Meadowlings,” Penny confirmed with a definite nod. “And long may the tradition continue, I say.”
Ellie hadn’t thought about the phrase in years, but as the familiar sights of Meadowfield passed by the window as they closed the distance between the pond and the top corner of South Street, something stirred in her chest. Twelve years of determination to build a life for herself anywhere else, and all it took was twelve minutes back in the postcode to remember you could take the girl out The thought settled over Ellie like a well-worn blanket, both comforting and slightly stifling. She found herself caught between the pull of nostalgia and the urge to run that had driven her away twelve years ago. After what happened to Luke Thompson, she hadn’t wanted to spend more than a day at a time in the village.
Ellie caught Tony’s eye, knowing he remembered her. She hoped he wouldn’t bring up what happened in 2012, that no one would. But they always did. Every time, someone would make it clear they still blamed her for what happened to Luke, whisking Ellie back to that day outside her mother’s house, staring at the graffiti sprayed across the door that had made her flee that very night.
Maybe there wouldn’t be graffiti to remind her twelve years later, but she couldn’t expect people not to bring it up. Luke was popular, after all, and people in Meadowfield rarely forgot. It was the kind of place where the local history was the only history.
She’d have to be alright with it this time. For Granny Maggie.
But as Meadowfield Books came into view on the corner of South Street, the winding cobbled shopping street it guarded over, Ellie’s heart sank at the sight before her. The old family bookshop looked as pretty as a picture in Ellie’s memories, but the once-charming cottage reeked of neglect. The thatched roof, once its crowning glory, sagged in the middle, with patches of moss creeping across the weathered straw, now tinged with grey. The lush green ivy that had adorned the walls had grown over the upstairs windows, and given more time it would threaten to swallow the building whole.
Granny Maggie’s vibrant themed weekly-updated window display was nowhere to be seen in the windows now clouded with dust and grime. Strips of brown packing tape crisscrossed over cracks in the small square panes of glass, a makeshift attempt to hold them together.
The green door that had always welcomed her with open arms seemed to have receded back into the building, its paint peeling and bubbling in the sunlight. The brass doorknob, always polished to a shine, was now tarnished and dull. The red postbox outside, which added a classic charm, was rusted and leaning slightly to one side, its vibrant shell faded to a muted, washed-out shade. The postbox didn’t legally fall under Maggie’s care, but she always tried to keep it clean. She used it. A scruffy postbox reflected poorly on the bookshop, she’d always say. And the village.
Struggling to take the decay in, Ellie wasn’t sure what the state of the shop was reflecting around the village. Meadowfield had lost its glow for Ellie years ago, but never Granny Maggie’s shop.
Never Meadowfield Books.
It was Ellie’s one haven.
