Ashenden by Elizabeth Wilhide Read Free Book Online Page A

harm.” Joshua shook his head, as if he might dislodge something in it, and went off to the manor.
    Gypsies, dreams, a pattern of leaves in a teacup. Bad luck was nothing more than bad judgment, thought Woods, and bad judgment you could do something about.
    *  *  *
    They had made a kind of roadway of split logs from the site to the landing stage at the riverbank, skirting the steepest part of the slope. The roadway was Wilkes’s notion and the rabble of men he had hired as jobbing labor had been sawing and splitting and tamping for days. When Woods walked the length of it later that morning, he could feel the timber teeter under his boots. The earth was sodden.
    He called one of the men over. “See this?” He bounced on a split log and splashed his boots with mud. “This, all this”—he gestured up and down the roadway—“needs to be backfilled. It’s not going to hold the weight with the ground so wet. Where’s Wilkes?”
    The man didn’t know. Wilkes had his team of craftsmen, a tight-knit group, chiefly masons and joiners. These rough laborers were disaffected, unused to pulling in harness. Itinerants or villagers, largely unskilled, they were aged by hardship beyond their years.
    “Tell the rest of them,” said Woods. “Don’t use the coarse rubble. The finer gravel is better. There’s a pile of it up on the south side of the site, so you’ll need to cart it down in barrowloads.”
    The man stared at him and nodded his assent, which under the circumstances meant next to nothing.
    Woods gazed downriver in the direction of Reading. In his mind’s eye he was pulling the stone closer and closer, willing it along. The worst, surely, was over. The journey down the Avon from Bath to Bristol, then into the open sea, skirting the treacherous west coast, along the Channel to the Thames estuary, was hazardous even in good weather, and the threats—piracy, rocks, the French—were many. Now a mere few miles of inland waterway remained.
    Despite what he had said to Joshua about waiting, and the need to learn how to endure it, Woods was not a patient man on the whole. He may have been stubborn, meticulous, and precise—qualities which were in themselves forms of patience or of subduing the will to a greater end—but waiting upon events that were in the control of others was not in his nature. After watching the river for a while, during which time one lone heron lifted slowly up from the water, and coots and moorhens scuttled in the shirring, hissing reeds, he returned up the muddy slope.
    On the way back, he saw Joshua, now dressed and shaved after a fashion, coming from the manor. As they passed each other, Joshua frowned, put up his hand, and moved his mouth as if to say something. Woods, the stone on his mind, gave him a brisk nod and went on with no further acknowledgment. The lad had to learn how to stand on his own two feet.
    Later, during the long and unanticipated years of his old age, Woods would have time to regret his reluctance to show close affection. Joshua was near enough a son; he’d known the boy half his life and he had all the qualities anyone might wish for in their own flesh and blood. Warmth was due him and warmth Woods may have felt but rarely showed. Others might have put it down to a north-country reserve bred in the bone, a lid clamped down on sentiment, a suspicion of smooth and emollient words. But he knew the origins of this reluctance lay in something less excusable. On the few occasions when he allowed himself to think about it, he recognized it as a form of selfishness. He had lived a long time alone and on his own terms.
    *  *  *
    When on site, it was Woods’s custom to eat sparingly during the day, and his afternoon meal was cheese and bread, washed down with half a jug of small beer. The cheese was good, the bread a little stale, the small beer so weak it would have been fit for the nursery. He pushed the plate and jug aside. Work, not food, was the remedy for