Love Heart Lane by Christie Barlow

Author:Christie Barlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008319694
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Felicity put her hand in the air to fend off the multitude of questions being fired at her. Inside she felt close to tears. She wanted to be anywhere but here right at this very minute. Not only had she had the run in with Fergus but now most of the village seemed to think she was wholly responsible for erecting a bridge and getting it built ASAP so Heartcross could get back to normality.

The room was packed to the rafters; there were even villagers standing against the back wall armed with notepads and pens, and Felicity was standing right in the line of fire at the front of the teashop.

Everyone seemed a little on edge, and they all wanted answers to their questions, but it wasn’t as easy as that.

‘Please, please speak one at a time,’ insisted Felicity, still holding her arm in the air and trying to bring some order back to the room.

‘What if the council refuses to erect a temporary bridge?’ shouted Louis, a local farm labourer, from the corner of the room. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

There was angry muttering in the room which unnerved Felicity. ‘We are losing our livelihood. We can’t get across to Glensheil,’ he continued, and there were jeers from the back of the room.

Hearing a scraping of a chair, Felicity looked over to see Fergus jump to his feet and wave his hand above his head to calm everyone down, much to her surprise. The room fell silent. ‘Can we just stop and take a moment? Felicity has agreed to be our spokesperson, not to take on the job of building the bridge single-handedly by herself.’ He cast his eye around the room. ‘The way you are speaking to her is out of order. It’s for all of us to pull together, support each other and be kind to each other. That is the only way to get through this. Felicity, Rona and Meredith have all agreed to open up this place as a food kitchen and prepare all our meals and ration the food until we know how we are going to transport supplies. We’ve had tough times before with the weather; granted, we haven’t been totally cut off, but what we need now is solutions, not shouting at each other.’

‘It may be the case that once the river dies down we can transport supplies by boat … maybe?’ offered Felicity as a solution.

‘See, this is what we need, ideas we can take on board, positive suggestions without pointing the finger,’ encouraged Fergus sitting back down and catching Felicity’s eye who mouthed ‘thank you’.

‘First things first, I’ll attend the virtual meeting in the morning and will post an update for you all on the Facebook page. Does that sound fair to everyone?’

Felicity followed the nods around the room and was thankful that the majority of villagers had calmed down.

Rona was flitting from table to table filling up cups with tea and generally chatting to keep the mood uplifted.

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