Greenwood Tree : Prologue

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1900
The child has been sleepwalking – again. Housekeeper and lady of the house hold conference and decide upon aniseed in her milk and herbs under the pillow. An ancient repository of herbal remedies is brought out and consulted.

A small figure in white comes downstairs in a natural enough manner, and moves towards the main door in the entrance hall. The only unnatural aspect about her is the fixedness of her stare, that unseeing stare of the blind and the somnambulist. She is forestalled as she reaches up to turn the handle; her aunt has caught up with her, takes her hand and guides her back upstairs, taking care not to waken her.

The house settles down again, and night passes into dawn – a distant cockerel sounds the morning fanfare, the vixen calls her cubs and the badger returns to his den.
The child awakens with no recollection of anything but a deep night’s sleep, punctuated by vivid dreams that mirror her waking days in the great and magical land to be found outdoors. Another day in such a land stretches out before her and she can think of nothing else other than racing through the trees after mythical beasts and rainbow-coloured birds.

1927
Leaves, roots, flying colours, the red of a squirrel’s tail, a patch of blue sky, a piece of green lawn, falling over each other in kaleidoscopic chaos, merging and separating, moving seamlessly one into the other. Now came a rustling, a pattering, and finally a bird’s squawking that softly exploded into the distant sound of a car horn. The pattering turned back into the clopping of a well-worn charabanc, wending its cautious way through increasingly motorized traffic, while the rustling had surely been caused by the maid pulling the curtains back. Julia’s head slumped back into the pillow. The world outside with its traffic, its noise and bustle, its deadlines and publishers could wait while she sought a few minutes more of her comforting dream of forestland and empty skies.

Editors and deadlines however would not be put off. The rustling, it turned out, had not been the sound of curtains moving discreetly along their brass rails, but the maid’s diplomatic attempts at alerting Julia’s attention to the letter sitting primly in the toast rack. A little reminder. Tea that afternoon with her editor. Just to see how she was getting along.
Her readers were clamouring for more, he always claimed. And it was not a huge publishing house, so the more they could be churning out under the name of Julia Frobisher-Warren, the healthier everybody’s bank balance would be looking.
‘It’s all going so well – we don’t want it to flicker out and die,’ he would point out earnestly. ‘I’ve seen it happen too often before – so I was wondering . . . perhaps for next Spring ? And what do you think of bringing in a bit of the old cloak and dagger – or at least, three murders by chapter 4 ? It’s the only reservation people have had – not enough corpses early enough, they say, not enough blood.’

Julia gazed dully at the teapot, her mind gradually coming into focus, still hovering nervously around the edges of the note lying opened in her fingers and snatching hopefully at the scraps of dream floating somewhere inside her head. These ephemera however deserted her treacherously, finally chased away by rumblings in her stomach which demanded toast and marmalade. As she munched her way to clarity, she mused over her present situation, as she had done every morning for the last month or so. Yes, her books were bringing in enough to pay for a miniscule flat in a quiet area of London, yes, she was beginning to feel the pressures of very slightly increased public demand, and yes, she too felt that her work could do with an injection of something to wake it up. She was not entirely convinced that it depended on the number of dead bodies lying about, but if it would keep him happy, then she would - . . .and there was the main problem, for it was also true that she’d been stumped for a new plot for a little longer than was really entirely comfortable. Her editor had been truly inventive and quite generous in his attempts to encourage her creative flow, but even he evidently felt that the time had come to ‘have a chat’. She had between now and the afternoon to invent a convincing storyline.