Spear of Destiny

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Christmas came to Woodmancote that year on wings of ice, amid flurries of snow that banked steeply against the stone walls and barn doors of Hamberley Farm. It had been a late winter in coming, but once its time had arrived, it descended with exceptional ferocity, turning autumnal skies to craggy ranges of arctic cloud. On Radio 4, they said it was due to global warming, and down in the Cap in Hand, old heads nodded and said it would get worse before it got better. They were droll old men, and they’d seen too many winters, lived through too many Christmases.

Snow covered fields and roofs and hedgerows with a solid sheet of white velvet, and for day upon day it would not melt. When the last flakes had fallen, there were nights of moonlight and starlight and shining lamps, nights when the whiteness of the countryside turned to silver, nights so crisp birds fell from the trees and berries froze and cracked on the branches. Animals died in their multitudes, sheep in the open fields, squirrels in their nut-filled trees, owls in the solitary darkness of the yews.

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