Brides of Aberdar by Christianna Brand Read Free Book Online Page A

indecision. ‘I’d sort of… When I said I’d have the black one, I felt he—belonged to me. So, now…’
    ‘He couldn’t belong to you all in a quarter of a minute.’
    ‘He did,’ said Christine. Blue eyes filled with tears. The sacrifice made—what had been second-best had become immediately her own, to the depths of her faithful heart.
    ‘This is spoiling the day,’ said Miss Tetterman over their heads, to Hil. ‘Before it’s even begun, they’re spoiling their day.’
    ‘It’s you who are spoiling it,’ he said, low-voiced. ‘You want your favourite to have what she wants—like all the rest of them. Lyneth, it’s always Lyneth, with everyone.’ He put out his hand to Christine. ‘Come here, my flower! Lyneth, stay back with Miss Tetterman. Christine, come and pat the ponies, stroke their noses—aren’t they soft and pink? Now, which do you really want for your own? Never mind for the moment which Lyneth wants—whisper to me which you’d really like if Lyneth wasn’t here.’
    Christine stood with one hand in his, the other slightly, nervously caressing the two pretty creatures. She reached up at last and he bent so that she could whisper into his ear. He straightened himself. ‘Well, there we are, then. You both get your way. Because from the beginning Lyneth wanted Ivory and now she can have him; and Christine loves Ebony and she can have him . What a good thing it’s all turned out exactly right.’ He called Lyneth over—‘Come, sweetheart!’ and took her little hands and put one close to the bit and the other on the rein of the white pony and with Christine did the same for the black. ‘Now, lead them about and get to know them. Just walk them round, you’ll be perfectly safe with them, they’re beginning to love you already. Make friends with them and then they won’t mind letting you ride them.’ He jerked his head towards a rough bench between two stable doors. Miss Tetterman, a little bemused, went obediently and sat down there beside him. ‘We’ll leave them to it,’ he said.
    ‘Hil, truly you managed that marvellously.’ She found herself saying, half apologetically, ‘ You don’t have favourites.’
    ‘Oh, but I do,’ said Hil. ‘Only I choose with a little more percipience than most. And I try to show no difference. A pity others don’t.’
    You are a strange man, she thought, to be no more than a factotem here. And he was so—well, really, it seemed an odd thing to say about a man but was he not almost—beautiful? Slender, but straight and well-built and with that challenging deep blue glance of his. She turned away her eyes, almost embarrassed as she saw how the autumn sun lighted the golden hairs on his strong brown fore-arms. And a strange conversation to be having with a mere—servant, only that he seemed entirely unaware of any difference in station.
    She felt herself in some doubt. Was it right that he should be so speaking of them, these two little girls, petting them, calling them by sweet names, practically taking their charge out of her hands? She had often wondered whether she would not speak a quiet word to their father about it. Not to Tante Louise; in her difficulties, she never if she could help it had recourse to The Walloon. Meanwhile…‘You really love them, don’t you?’ she said.
    ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘Everybody loves them. Everybody must—they’re so trusting and confiding, so absolutely sweet. But it’s true that I love them more deeply than that; in a different sort of way.’
    She said: ‘Differently?’
    ‘I am so desperately afraid for them,’ he said.
    Afraid for them. It was strange that she should not feel more astonished, be more taken aback. Have I too felt, unrecognised, some same glimmering of this? she thought. From that first moment that I entered the house with them? And she recalled the faint stirrings of their flossy golden curls as though a breeze had blown them, though there had been no breeze