A New Dawn Over Devon by Michael Phillips Read Free Book Online Page B

when I was so mixed up before.”
    â€œI know,” rejoined Catharine, giving Amanda an affectionate hug, “—do you want to be alone? I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
    â€œNo, it’s all right. I’m through.”
    â€œWould you like to go for a ride? That’s why I was looking for you.”
    â€œWhere are you going?” asked Amanda as arm in arm they left the tower and began the descent together.
    â€œI was thinking about riding out to see Grandma Maggie.”
    â€œYes, I think I would like that,” answered Amanda. “In fact, I was just thinking about her.”
    â€œGood, I was hoping you would—I already asked Hector to saddle both horses.”
    â€”———
    Another young woman stood at the wood stove of a tiny flat in one of the coastal towns of that far southeastern portion of England known as Cornwall. She was neither old enough nor experienced enough to be as reflective as her Devonshire counterpart. But she stood staring at the sizzling skillet in front of her with eyes that might have been reflective had they anything to think about.
    She was but thirteen, and hers had not been an easy life. The struggle merely to survive and make the best of it consumed the days that made up her existence. She did not stop to consider whether she was happy or unhappy, or whether life was a good or an evil thing. Life was simply life. It was hard, but she had never known anything else and did not question it. She was still a child, though hints of changes gradually coming to her body gave evidence that womanhood was not far away.
    She stood at the stove watching the small slab of meat that was her father’s breakfast brown over the heat. He had not come home last night, and whenever he must work through the long hours when she had to stay alone, he arrived home in the morning hungry. She did not know what he did, only knew that some of it had to do with ships. What else occupied him at such times, she did not need to know. She knew enough not to ask, knew that the people she sometimes saw with him were bad people, knew enough to realize that whenhe spoke with them in low tones it was about things they would not want the bobby who sometimes walked their street to hear.
    Sully Conlin was a rough man, with rough friends. He laughed with them, swore with them, and drank with them, and sometimes fought with them. She thought ill neither of them nor her father because of it. She was not shocked by what she saw and heard. As much as is possible the crude language and coarse behavior passed over her. She did not know otherwise, and took it as one of the laws of existence that men did such things and that girls like her did their best to take care of them.
    That Conlin had once been a sailor he had not exactly told his daughter in so many words, but she knew it from the purple tattoo of anchors and ropes on his burly forearm, from the way he spoke, knew it from his dream of taking her away from Cornwall and showing her the world. He never talked about leaving or going somewhere . . . but always of sailing away.
    She knew it too from the fond gleam in his eye whenever he spoke of the sea.
    â€œThe sea, Betsy,” he had said many times, especially after hard days of backbreaking labor on the docks, “the sea is our only friend. It may be hard, but the sea is fair, and treats all men the same. It took your mother, and to the sea we will all return in the end. If ever you are lost, find the sea and follow it.”
    But whatever he had been, and whatever kind of life he lived, Sully was good to his little girl and treated her gently. He was her father, and she loved him.
    Her mother had been dead now many years. All she had to remember her was a small oval photograph that her father kept beside his bed.
    Sometimes when he was gone, she would stare at the tiny picture and try to force to the surface from some region deep in her mind an image from her