Ashenden by Elizabeth Wilhide Read Free Book Online

exclusion—of money made elsewhere in cities and trade—ditches, hedges, fences, and walls enclosed fields and woods into parcels of ownership and put a price on every tree. The common land, where generations of villagers had grazed theirlivestock and scratched out a living, was fast disappearing, taking with it all the old ways. No one knew yet what the new ways would bring, but the poor, who found themselves poorer, had reason to dread them.
    The sun rose and burned off the mist. Light caught the windows of the old manor house and reflected off broken, faceted panes, glanced up the leaning chimneys, and grazed the irregular roofline. On the upper story a casement squeaked open and a dust cloth shook out of it.
    In front of the old manor, daylight laid bare the raw scars of trenches and earthworks that had been dug into the chalky soil, exposing flints and whitened animal bones. The foundations of the new house, which made its plan tangible and real, scored an intention of building into the ground.
    Gazing at the trenches, Woods was aware that an intention could always be reversed, if not by human will, then by the lack of it. Left alone, the foundations would become waterlogged, the sides would erode and eventually fall in, and grass would grow over the top. The ground would stitch itself up. To build was a form of human folly that pitted itself against forces of nature bent on reclaiming their own. To imagine otherwise, to imagine that what you built might last, was akin to madness.
    “I hear the Gypsies are back.”
    Woods turned. Joshua, unshaven, red-eyed, and slipshod, a gray blanket draped round his shoulders, was chafing his hands.
    “So rumor has it.”
    The mist had lifted and the sky was clearing, but there was not a trace of the camp to be seen nor a sound to be heard, not a wisp of smoke, not a single child’s cry, not a dog’s bark to break the morning silence. The Romany were masters of stealth, a law unto themselves. By now their fires would be covered, and their shelters, formed of supple hazel twigs covered with skins, were fashioned to blend into the woods.
    “Wilkes thinks they’re bad luck.”
    “My mother thinks so too,” said Joshua, yawning.
    “Your mother is an excellent woman, but all females incline towards superstition. Bad luck is bad judgment.”
    Joshua’s mother was a handsome widow from Thirsk. She had been left comfortably off and was no more inclined to take another husband than Woods was inclined to take any wife: their arrangement, conducted discreetly over the years, suited them both. A widow’s company was one thing, and a fine thing in moderation, but he would never have taken on the lad had he not seen his promise for himself. None of this was spoken of.
    Joshua shrugged. “Did Wilkes read the drawing?”
    “No.”
    “I thought as much.”
    “Get yourself dressed. You’re a sight,” said Woods. The lad must have sat up drinking until the small hours, judging by the state of him. “You should have listened to me last night and gone to bed.”
    “I did,” said Joshua, drawing the blanket around him. “So you needn’t look at me like that. But then I had such a strange dream. It woke me and I couldn’t get back to sleep again.”
    Woods was unsympathetic. “And Nurse didn’t come to tuck up your covers.”
    “No,” said Joshua, shivering. “Nurse didn’t come. In my dream the stone was floating up the river. Piles and piles of it, stacked high.”
    “Then let’s hope your dream was prophetic.”
    Joshua stared into the distance for a time. He was a good-looking lad, tall and dark, not yet grown into his rangy frame. Normally his intelligence was a flare of energy; this morning he was subdued. He shivered again. “Let’s hope not. It was a terrible dream.”
    “It’s the waiting,” said Woods. “You’ll get used to it. A good deal of this work is to do with waiting. It takes its toll on the nerves.”
    “My dream was not about waiting. It was about