Broken Country, Clare Leslie Hall (Extract)
Everyone in the village said nothing good would come of Gabriel's return. And as Beth looks at the man she loves on trial for murder, she can't help think they were right.
She was seventeen when she'd first met Gabriel. Over that heady, intense summer, he made her think and feel and see differently. She thought it was the start of her great love story and that it would last forever. When Gabriel left to become the person his mother expected him to be, she was broken.
It was Frank who picked up the pieces. Together they'd built a home very different from the one she'd imagined with Gabriel. And there was a time - even years - when she was happy. Watching her husband and son riding a tractor across their farm, she remembered feeling so sure that, after everything, this was the life she was supposed to be leading.
But then Gabriel came back, and all Beth's certainty about who she was and what she wanted crumbled. Even after ten years, their connection was instant. She knew it was wrong and she knew people could get hurt. But how could she resist a second chance at first love?
A love story with the pulse of a thriller, Broken Country is a heart-pounding novel of impossible choices and devastating consequences.
I don’t know which of us hears the barking first. We spin around to a golden-haired lurcher tearing towards us.
A stray dog, no owners with him, charging our lambs.
‘Get out of it!’ Frank tries to block the lurcher. He is six foot two, broad and fierce, but the dog just darts around him, straight into the thick of our ewes.
The sheep are moaning, tiny offspring bleating in fear; only a few days old, but they sense the danger. A flick switch change in the dog. Eyes black, teeth bared, body rigid with adrenaline.
‘Gun, Jimmy! Now!’ Frank yells, and Jimmy turns and runs to the shed.
He’s fast, Frank, racing at the dog with his primaeval roar, but the dog is quicker. It picks off a lamb, nips it up by its neck, throat ripped open. The appalling red of its blood, a jet of crimson pools on the grass. One lamb, two lambs, then three; guts spilling out like sacrificial entrails. The ewes are scattering everywhere now, stumbling out, terror-blind, their newborns exposed.
I’m running at the dog, shrieking, trying to gather up the lambs but I hear Jimmy yelling,
‘Out of the way, Beth! Move.’
And then Frank has grabbed me into his arms so tightly I’m pressed right into his chest, and I can feel the thundering of his heart. I hear the gunshot and then another, and the dog’s quick, indignant howl of pain. It’s over.
‘Bloody hell,’ Frank says, pulling back, checking my face, a palm pressed against my cheek.
We walk over to the dog, the three of us cooing and calling out to the sheep, ‘Come on, girls,’ but they are shivering and bleating and giving the three infant corpses a wide berth.
Out of nowhere, like a mirage, a boy comes running up the field. Small and skinny in shorts. Maybe ten years old. ‘My dog,’ he screams.
His voice so sweet and high.
‘Fuck,’ Jimmy says, just as the child sees the bloody heap of fur and yelps, ‘You killed my dog!’
His father is here now, panting and flushed, but scarcely different from the boy I knew. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, you shot him.’
‘Had to.’ Frank gestures at the butchered lambs.
I don’t think Gabriel has any idea who Frank is, or at least, who he is married to, but then he turns and catches sight of me. Momentarily, panic flits across his face before he recovers himself.
‘Beth,’ he says. But I ignore him. No one is looking after the child. He is standing by his dog, hands covering his eyes as if to black out the horror.
‘Here.’ I’m beside him in seconds, my hands on his shoulders. And then I kneel in front of him and wrap my arms around him. He begins to weep.
‘Keep crying,’ I say. ‘Crying will help.’ He collapses against me, wailing now, a boy in shorts in my arms.
And this is how it begins again.
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