When Jessie woke, the sky had mellowed to a normal daybreak pastel and all she was left with from the early morning was a vaguely nagging headache from waking up so early and the slow dawning realisation that she was meant to be in a different county in six hours.
She swallowed a swear word as she swung her legs out of bed, thanking anything that was listening that she had packed her case the previous night. At least she didn't have to think about anything today except dragging herself into the train station and hoping the British Rail website had listed her connections correctly. The case looked uninvitingly heavy as it sat there, bulky and unappealing in the dim morning light, and she sighed.
Jessie loved her job, truly – working for the RSPB had been her dream since she was a little girl, throwing bread onto the river for ducks or watching blue tits play outside her window, wishing she had wings and chalking pictures of the birds onto the pavement until the neighbours told her off for making a mess. Now she finally had the job, it was everything she'd hoped, and she was able to feel she was making a difference to something she loved. Therefore, she had jumped at the opportunities for field research, but she would be lying to herself if she didn't admit she hated the travel with a passion. Lugging cases through awkward stations was one of the few things to cause a bump in the smooth road of her plans.
Jessie dragged on the outfit she had also mercifully arranged the previous night, checking for emergency belongings like her ID, her purse, and her train tickets. Satisfied she was at least mostly organised, she hauled a brush through her hair, gave her a teeth a swift brush and applied a dab of mascara before she could stuff all the things into the case and lock it shut. It was a difficult job – she hated living out of a bag and these days she saw more hotels than the inside of her own flat, so she didn't travel light. Just because she was an environmental consultant didn't mean she necessarily enjoyed being muddy and wearing the same pants three days in a row. She smiled to herself at the thought. A couple of her more refined university friends had been genteelly horrified that she worked in a field with a notepad all day rather than in crisp business suits in a modern office, and had expressed visible relief when she had next met up with them with tidily bobbed hair and a stylishly silky dress. She loved her friends, but she did wonder about some of them sometimes. Oxford had provided an amazing education and the Biology department was one of the best in the country, but the culture was almost nineteenth century in many ways. Conversely, friends at home who had gone to less ivory-tower establishments had been baffled by the plethora of rituals and ancient, pointless events that she had had to attend at her Oxford college. Secretly she enjoyed the silliness and tradition, but her heart lay in the country rather than in a business or academic setting. She had loved the opportunity to have a foot in both worlds for a while – studying and networking, and then returning home in the holidays to watch and play in the garden just as she had sixteen years ago when she had seen her first bird pecking seeds from the love-in-the-mist.
She shook her head, knowing she was woolgathering. In a strange way, it seemed only appropriate; this was her first trip to Dartmoor, the favoured site of her great, late mentor, the conservationist Stephen Williams. He had died in a car accident just over three years ago now, and Jessie often found herself wishing she could have shown him the things she had discovered over the years, knowing he would have been thrilled and enthused by every discovery, every chick they had hatched from a rare egg, every piece of knowledge they had gathered. He loved Devon and Dartmoor most of all; just a few months before he had died, they had taken dinner in London, and, staring wistfully into a glass of wine, he had told her that the moor had a magic most people would never find, and the most privileged times of his life had been there. Jessie had pressed for details, hoping for more information about his work with the nearby Dawlish black swans or the rare moor birds, but he had just shaken his head with a soft smile, and said, "There was this one day, when I found something existed I had never believed could. That moor has those kinds of secrets, and if you're lucky, if you're patient and gentle, it will open them up to you, and you'll never be the same again. Believe in magic, Jess. You won't see it every day, but when you do, you'll know, and it's there, for those that can see, believe me." He had smiled proudly at her. "I know you can. I can see it in your face, that you're like me, that if it came, you wouldn't run away. You'd stay and you'd find all those mysteries and love them, every one." He had died before he had ever said any more on those secrets, without a wife or child to whom he might have imparted them, and Jessie knew she would never discover what he meant from his own lips. That was just one more reason she had wanted this assignment; she wanted to complete her mentor's legacy, discover the secrets, share them with the world and make those beautiful moors even more revered than they were.
Stephen's strong, chiselled features in her mind, his wise eyes, she grabbed his greatest work off her shelf, a study into the Dawlish black swans, and thrust it into her bag, to prepare her mindset for arriving in the moor during the long boring journey. With one last glance around, she tugged the wheeled case to the door, heaved it over the step and locked the flat up for the fortnight ahead.
YOU ARE READING
Swan on the Moor
FantasyPOSTED FOR REFERENCE. Aine and her mother were thrown from the Fae Sithen when Aine was nothing more than a child, for the crime of her being the daughter of a human father. Once her beautiful mother has wilted and died, Aine roams the moors alone...
