The Antique Dealer’s Daughter. Lorna Gray
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Antique Dealer’s Daughter - Lorna Gray страница 7
Название: The Antique Dealer’s Daughter
Автор: Lorna Gray
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Книги о войне
isbn: 9780008279585
isbn:
Mr Winstone was scuttling along behind her, between his helpers. He wasn’t terribly steady on his feet. It was only after they had made it through the gate and past me to move on towards the car that Danny said something rather dry that made the ugliness that had been working its tentacles after them along the path sharply turn on its heel and climb out over the garden wall. He said that he was glad that someone was on hand to give such a well-founded explanation of how his stepfather’s injury today had stemmed from that scene in March, because this was the first mention he’d heard of that tragedy for almost six months. His dry humour was for his friend’s sake. I knew it was because it drew that man’s attention from the immediate task of preventing the invalid from pitching headfirst into the side of the car. I saw Matthew Croft right the old man and then turn his head to give a surprisingly warm grin. And then I was only left with the puzzling realisation that while I had been watching and worrying over the reasons why a man like Danny Hannis might find himself unable to risk offending Mrs Abbey, I really should have been noticing that she didn’t like his friend at all.
She was, however, perfectly, convincingly repentant. She knew she’d made a crass mistake and if she didn’t, she certainly found out when it cost her the right to accompany Mr Winstone on his trip to consult the doctor. I felt almost sorry for her when she joined me just as the men were depositing their charge in the passenger seat. She had been roundly excluded from the crush as Mrs Winstone organised herself into the back seat. Danny was folding himself in beside his mother without so much as a glance for the neglected neighbour. It became all the more humbling when the small dog clambered in after them. The only person who didn’t go was the wavy-haired youth Freddy, who was hovering by the bumper in that helpful way people have when they desperately want to be useful but have no idea what to do. I thought he was waiting for orders and it belatedly occurred to me that Matthew Croft had been intending to offer the boy as my companion when he’d been trying to organise my walk home.
I didn’t mean to give Matthew Croft time to remember. I was a few yards away, at the limit of the pockmarked garden wall, and I would have left there and then except that Mrs Abbey had her hand on my arm as she told me earnestly, ‘You’ve been badly shaken by your brush with this fellow, haven’t you?’
She was speaking as though nothing else mattered beyond Mr Winstone’s injury. Perhaps nothing else did. They all knew each other, these people, and the slip about a man’s death must have been made by others before. I played for the same indifference while carefully dodging away from that clutching hand of hers. After all, it had last been seen grasping a bloody rag.
I remarked lightly, ‘Shaken by that man? No.’
She looked disbelieving. ‘You kept dithering in and out of the room all the time that we were talking.’
I conceded the point with a faintly worn smile. Rightly or wrongly, I soon took advantage of a disturbance within the car to make my getaway from all of them. That telephone was ringing again – that blessed reminder of noisy things that belonged in the companionable bustle of my familiar city life – and I went to it like it was a lifeline.
Suddenly it wasn’t as late as I’d thought. I supposed escape might feel like that. The large house that stood on the opposite side of the triangle was still touched to warmth by the last of the day’s colour. It wasn’t the one that was ringing. That was coming from the other side of the village; in the space after the church but before the turn where the lane coursed away downhill. This grand house was the steward’s house and it was where my cousin had lived and grown until her father had died and her mother had retired to the cottage. I’d only visited these parts once as a child and that had been when I was eight. I barely remembered it but I did remember the village boys who had waged cheerful war with my cousin’s older brothers while my cousin scolded and I trailed about behind the lot of them like a pathetic undersized shadow. It was possible that Danny Hannis had been one of them.
The house seemed to be a boarding house for farm workers now. There was a steady stream of them passing between the steward’s house and what I’d taken earlier to be a derelict farmyard, only now it was flooded with light and crowded with men and tired carthorses. This, suddenly, was the bustle I was used to. Here the crowds took the form of dusty males ranging along the lines of various low stone walls, smoking and drinking weak beer. The farmhands were all, to a man, tanned and wiry. None of them wore a pale summer jacket. I suspected that most weren’t wealthy enough to own one.
Freddy didn’t own one either. He caught up with me before I’d even reached the point where the track veered to the right, downhill to my cousin’s cottage, or left around the lower limit of the churchyard and towards that telephone. He grinned at me as he fell into step beside me. He was all limbs and amiableness. ‘I don’t mind walking with you, Miss.’
The boy matched my sense of escape. He was on that cusp between childhood and manhood. He was aged perhaps fifteen and his face had the unsymmetrical structure of a teenage boy whose features were just beginning to settle into the mould of the man he would become. He wasn’t tall. He was perhaps my height and no more, but he had an endearing air of doubtful friendliness; warm and cheerful because it was in his nature to be so, but doubtful because perhaps other people didn’t always welcome it.
A certain sense of this boy’s niceness after that room full of adult complications made me protective but perhaps less tactful than I ought to have been. I remarked, ‘I’m going to answer that telephone. But I’ll be very glad of your company if you can explain to me precisely how it happens that there is so much danger tonight that I must let you escort me about the place, and yet somehow once I’m home I’m supposed to be perfectly happy to send you merrily onwards to your own home alone.’
He wasn’t offended. He told me simply, ‘My home isn’t just downstream from the turbine house Mr Winstone mentioned.’
Ah.
I confessed sheepishly, ‘That’s my cousin’s nearest neighbour. I thought that little brick hovel was somebody’s cottage.’
I made Freddy laugh. ‘Absolutely it is. And did you notice that it comes complete with running water laid on beneath the floorboards? You should be careful who you say that to. The turbine house is a matter for local pride. It gives light to the farmyard and the Manor. And it would give power to the steward’s house too if we had a man in there at the moment. We’re as modern as you like here.’
But not so modern, I thought, that anyone thought to mind the traditional distinction between the luxuries experienced by the land-owner compared to those of his tenants.
Then Freddy added doubtfully, ‘Did you say you were going to answer that? It’s in the Manor. Someone should be there.’
That told me what dwelling had the boldness to possess a telephone in this humble place. Its busy farmyard yawned in the gloom beneath us, where life hummed from every ancient stone and sagging roof, and stables for carthorses nestled against the rear wall of a massive stone barn. Below, the trackway descended into stillness. So did the cobbled surface that curved along the front of the enormous barn and veered left at the corner of another. There was no farmhouse attached to this enclosed run of buildings. There was no reassuring glow from watchful windows to oversee either route. Moths and shadows were the only traffic СКАЧАТЬ