On his Thursday delivery route through the Highfield valley, two days after the recovery of the posthouse deed, Len Vey turned off the main gravel highway onto a narrow cart-track that climbed toward the northern foothills.
The morning was crisp, cold, and brilliant, with a light skin of rime glistening on the heather and dry bracken along the ditch.
Barnaby walked behind him at the length of his braided lead-rope, the wicker side-hampers swaying with a gentle, rhythmic creak. In the off-side hamper rested twelve jars of sweet blackberry preserves for the schoolhouse, a bundle of scythe blades from the forge. A single, small leather pouch containing the morning’s personal letters for the isolated homesteads along the sheep moors.
At the three-mile turn. There, the birch woods gave way to open pastures of rough mountain fescue, stood an ancient sheep farm.
The farmhouse was built of dry-stacked granite boulders, chinked with moss and lime, its low-pitched roof thatched with thick layers of heather and turf that had turned dark copper-brown with the autumn frost. A stone enclosure wall, four feet high, ran along the front garden where a row of winter cabbages stood stiff and green in the sun.
At the sound of Barnaby’s iron shoes ringing on the track, an elderly woman emerged from the low timber doorway of the cottage.
