A Half Forgotten Song by Katherine Webb Read Free Book Online

nobody has any pictures I can look at, there’s not really a lot of point in me staying,” said Zach. The landlord seemed to consider this for a while, wreathed in steam rising from beneath the counter as he dried clean glasses from the dishwasher. His face shone with the moisture.
    “Well, there is one place you could try,” he said carefully.
    “Oh?”
    The publican pursed his lips, and seemed to consider for a second longer. Then he leaned forward and spoke in a hushed tone, so conspiratorial that Zach almost laughed.
    “If you just happened to take a walk along the track that heads southeast out of the village towards Southern Farm, and about half a mile along there you took the left fork, you’d come to a cottage called The Watch.”
    “And . . . ?”
    “And there’s somebody there who might talk to you about Charles Aubrey. If you pitch yourself right.”
    “And what would be the right way to pitch myself?”
    “Who knows? Sometimes she’ll chat, sometimes she won’t. It might be worth a shot, but you didn’t hear about her from me. And go carefully—she lives alone, and some people are . . . protective.”
    “Protective? Of this woman?”
    “Of her. Of themselves. Of the past. Last thing I need is it getting out that I’ve been helping a stranger ferret for information. This lady’s the private kind, you know. Some of us in the village used to drop in on her, to make sure she was all right, but she’s made it known over the years that she doesn’t appreciate it. Wants to be left alone. What can you do? Must be a lonely life for her but if a person doesn’t want help . . .” He went back to wiping glasses, and Zach smiled.
    “Thanks.”
    “Oh, don’t thank me. It may come to nothing, just to warn you. I’ll make up that bed upstairs for you, shall I? The rate’s forty-five a night.”
    “Take a credit card?”
    “Of course.”
    “I’m Zach, by the way. Zach Gilchrist.” He held out his hand, which the landlord shook with a smile.
    “Pete Murray. Good luck at The Watch.”
    D imity had been dozing again, after a lunch of hard-boiled eggs and salad leaves. Two of the hens were going into molt. They looked patchy and bedraggled, and she muttered to them when she found no eggs underneath them. Lay, lay my girls . Let the eggs drop or be straight to the pot. Repeated over and over, the little rhyme sounded like a spell, and soon the voice Dimity heard was her mother’s, not her own. Valentina kept coming back to her since her waking dream, since her vision, her premonition. Her mother had been gone a long time. Dimity had thought maybe forever, and hadn’t been sad about that—apart from the endless quiet sometimes, the stillness. But lately she’d caught her mother watching her from the citrine eyes of the ginger cat; in the coils of skin as she peeled an apple; reflected, minute and upside down, in the bloated drip of water that always hung from the kitchen tap. After the night of the storm, after the night she saw Celeste and had her premonition, Dimity had found the old charm on the hearthstone. Knocked out of the chimney by the wind after nigh on eighty years, a shriveled nugget of old flesh the size of an egg; the pins gone rusty, and some of them missing. And then the dreams had started. That was how Valentina had got in; and that was a puzzle, because the charm should only keep evil spirits away. Perhaps not such a puzzle.
    Dimity would have to make a new charm, and soon. Where to get a bullock’s heart, fresh, no more than a day old? Where to get a packet of new pins, clean and sharp? But each day without it the house was open to intruders. A wide-open door, especially when she slept. She roused herself from her doze and caught a flash of yellow hair, reflected in the windowpane. Dull yellow hair with black, black roots; gone when she blinked.
    “Good day to you, Ma,” Dimity whispered, just to be civil. Just to stay on the safe side. She stood carefully, straightening