Chapter 1
The autumn rain dripped cold but quietly around the Reese family’s private cemetery. From the kitchen window of the family side of the Morganwg estate, Ciara Mac Innes-McBatton watched a lone figure sitting on a bench by a recently installed headstone. Typically, the Jewish family waited until the dedication ceremony before uncovering the headstone but this was not the typical Jewish family.
She was grinding herbs for a special tea she had been making throughout the year of mourning. Ostensibly it was to help the mourner better manage the inevitable sadness that accompanies loss. But, this activity was more for her benefit, giving her something to do, some way to cope with what was a loss for her as well. She was stuck at Kubler-Ross’s anger stage of death and loss – the pulverizing of the herbs in her mortar and pestle. But anger was not an emotion the elderly animal whisperer and druidic priestess was used to as it was not normally part of her nature. And as she considered the figure in the distance, she finally accepted that her anger was simply a reflection of her helplessness. There was nothing she could do for the figure now slumped over, likely crying. She knew he was dying. The rest of the family did not, particularly the younger ones – he had insisted that she say nothing and there weren’t any external signs. He didn’t want the kids to worry and she knew his sadness would kill him long before the cancer did.
“Mum?” Brianna, Ciara’s oldest daughter, came in the kitchen and her presence shouldn’t have startled her but it did.
“Sorry?”
“Mum,” the concerned daughter said as she rested her hands on her mother’s slumped shoulders, “shouldn’t we convince him to come inside? The groundskeepers need to put up the tent before the grass turns to mud.”
