* * *
The next day, on Christmas Eve, Bramble, our little minx of an alpaca, goes into labour. Usually alpacas ‘unpack’ without a fuss, but Bramble struggles.
‘It’s as though she knew I was coming up for the weekend,’ Jamie says, getting his veterinary bag out of the car. He never goes anywhere without it.
Jamie soon determines that Bramble’s cria is facing the wrong way, and after trying to unpack her without success, he has to perform an emergency caesarean or risk losing both mother and baby.
I can’t watch – I’m not great with blood – but George stays with him the whole time, helping wherever needed.
Unfortunately, after going through so much trauma, Bramble rejects her offspring, a dark-brown boy who is the spitting image of Blackthorn.
‘You found your old friend again, didn’t you?’ I say to poor, exhausted Bramble.
She and Blackthorn were born the same week and used to play together all the time before he was moved into the boys’ paddock.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you together again in the spring,’ I promise.
Right now, though, we have to take on the responsibility of bottle-feeding her cria. Emilie wants to help, so I decide to let her have a later bedtime than usual. It’s not as though she’ll be able to sleep anyway, with the excitement of Father Christmas coming.
Mum brings the bottle out to the barn. I’m sitting on the straw-covered ground with Emilie in between my legs and the cria on her lap. Bramble is resting in the stall beside us.
Emilie is cradling the cria like a baby. I show her how to hold the bottle and her face brightens with delight as he begins to suck.
Mum smiles at me. ‘She’s a natural.’
‘I’m not going to be able to get her away from the barn after this,’ I say.
My daughter will make this cria her own – at least until he goes back in with the herd, and then he’ll no doubt have a few aunties who will take him under their wing.
As I look down at Emilie’s face, lit with wonder, I know that this is another moment that I’ll be writing to Theo about. My letters to him have become almost diary like. I’ve taken Mum’s advice and will put them somewhere safe until the day that Emilie might like to read them. It will be her Life Story book of sorts.
‘What shall we call him?’ I ask Emilie now, before looking up at Mum. ‘Were there any more “G”s left to choose from?’
We’ve already had Geranium, Gerbera and Gladioli this year.
‘Gardenia, Goosefoot, Gillyflower… Or we could do Gerry for another type of Geranium?’
‘Do you like the name Gerry, Emilie?’ I ask her.
She screws up her nose. ‘I want to call him Teddy.’
I glance up at Mum as a memory of Ashlee comes back to me. ‘A teddy named Dolly and an alpaca named Teddy. All we need now is a dolly named Alpaca and we’ll be sorted.’
Mum laughs. ‘Whoever said life made sense? Teddy it is.’
* * *
On Christmas morning, we take a family walk up to Brimham. The silver birch trees have shed the last of their leaves so there’s no more russet-coloured confetti to rain down on our heads as we pass through the wood. Emilie loved it up here in the autumn.
While Uncle Jamie chases her between the withering ferns, and Mum and Dani take their time catching us up, George and I walk out to the overhang.
A few weeks after George moved in with us, I came clean to him about scattering Theo’s ashes. He claimed he was glad to have somewhere to go to think about him too, but I reassured him that this space up on the rocks belongs to all of us. It always was and always will be somewhere to go to get away from it all, to simply sit and appreciate nature. It was never my intention for it to all be about Theo. He seemed glad to hear that.
But now, as we sit down, side by side on the dry, cold rock, I know that we’re both thinking about my husband.
I lean against George and he wraps his arm around my shoulders, pulling me close.
‘I love you,’ I say, pressing a kiss to his jaw.
‘I love you too.’ He takes a deep, shaky breath. ‘Do you think he’d be okay with it?’ he asks. ‘With me?’
I nod. ‘I think so. Yes, I do.’
But if I have any doubts, a few minutes later, they’re extinguished. As we make our way out past Mini Druid’s Writing Desk, via the hole in the rock, I look down to see that it has frozen over with water to just the right amount.
And it’s as though Theo himself is sending a message of love to us straight from his heart.
Epilogue
Neither then nor now…
… but sometime in the future
‘I thought I’d find you here,’ I say, handing George his tea.
‘Hey you,’ he replies with a smile up at me. ‘Thank you.’ He takes the reusable cup and pats his lap, opening his arms to me.
The ground is damp so I accept his invitation, snuggling into his warm embrace. We stare up into the bare branches of the big old oak tree.
I passed his silver birch just now, running my hand along the satin-white trunk as I always do when I’m seeking out my husband. He doesn’t have many hiding spots, but this is by far his favourite.
To our left and right, spanning both lower paddocks, is one of his many achievements. Alpacas don’t need much land to graze on – a paddock each is more than enough – so we moved the boys up to the field adjacent to the girls, and, with help from the Woodland Carbon Fund, expanded our wood across the lower land.
We have a broad variety of species, from silver birch and wild cherry to western red cedar, willow and oak, plus a collection of conifers. A more diverse forest is a more resilient forest, George says, so ours will be better equipped to defend itself against pests, diseases and the threat of climate change in the future.
We’ve called it Ivan Wood, after my father.
George and I won’t live to see it grow to maturity, and neither will Emilie, but we created it with the youngest generation in mind, and all of those who’ll come after.
‘I’m looking forward to tomorrow,’ I say to George.
‘Me too,’ he replies with a sideways smile.
Sophie and Jack are visiting with their newborn baby. They met at university in Leeds – Jack is a lovely local boy who made it his mission early in their relationship to show Sophie practically every inch of Yorkshire. She grew to love it almost as much as he did and now they live in York permanently. We see them whenever we can.
I still vividly remember the look of elation on George’s face when Sophie told him she was coming to study here. He never had to feel guilty about choosing North Yorkshire and me over Devon and his sister because she moved to be closer to him anyway.
We still make it down to Devon for the occasional holiday, although Ernie, sadly, is no longer with us. George sold the cottage years ago, but it wouldn’t have been big enough for us these days anyway. The effort to secure larger accommodation is worth it: a break by the coast does the whole family a world of good.
Jamie and Dani are also coming this weekend. They left London when their first baby was born as Dani had finished her apprenticeship and Jamie missed the country. They live on the outskirts of Ripon with their four kids, the eldest of whom, Josh, takes after his dad. He comes whenever Jamie attends to the herd. Only last week, Teddy had to have an abscess cut off his toe. Emilie was in a state – she still considers Teddy her baby – but Josh sat with his dad the whole time, passing him the scalpel and helping him to clean up Teddy and bandage his foot afterwards. He’s a chip off the old block, that’s for sure.