Daughter of Satan by Jean Plaidy Read Free Book Online Page A

she would tell them what to do with these plants and what to say while they were doing it. She hardly ever received money, but a few days after these transactions, a gift would be laid at the door – rye bread or an egg or two. Bill Lackwell or Luce took them in and they would all share, no thanks being given to the old woman; but everyone knew that it was due to her that they came.
    But, reasoned Tamar, these gifts came too rarely to buy for the old woman her seat in the overcrowded cottage. Yet she was never spoken to harshly, never asked to move. They were afraid of her, as they were beginning to be of Tamar.
    One day the child sidled up to the old woman.
    â€˜Granny,’ she said, ‘tell me about the herbs that grow in our patch.’
    Then one of the skinny hands touched Tamar’s thick black curls.
    â€˜Fair and beautiful,’ mumbled the old woman, so that Tamar had to move close to her to hear what she said. ‘You will know what you have to do when the time comes.’
    So Tamar, pondering these words behind her ring of stones,knew that she was a very important person and one day would be more so.
    She lived her own secret life. When it was warm she slept out of doors. She liked that, and was sad when the colder nights came to drive her under the Lackwell thatch.
    Luce was no longer a slim young girl, but a tired woman, weary with constant child-bearing – her body thickened yet scraggy from the state of semi-starvation which was invariably her lot. The hair, which Mistress Alton had said was a gift from Satan, was now long, but it had lost its lustre and fell untidily to her waist. Out of the horror she had experienced during her first months as Bill Lackwell’s wife had grown a dull acceptance of her fate.
    She watched her eldest daughter with apprehension. Tamar was named after the river near which her conception had taken place; for such a child, Luce had felt, should not be named with a name that might belong to any child. She had anxiously awaited that moment when the perfectly formed feet might change to cloven hoofs. They remained perfect human feet. She felt the shapely head for those excrescences from which horns might be expected to grow. There was no sign of these. Tamar might have been anybody’s child, except that from an early age that brightness of eye, that shapely oval face and the perfectly moulded limbs, as well as a quickness of perception, distinguished her from others. The beauty was an accentuation of that which had been Luce’s in the days when she had served under Mistress Alton; but the other qualities did not come from Luce.
    Luce wanted to love this daughter, but it was impossible to overcome her apprehension concerning the child, and Tamar could not help but be aware of this.
    The little girl had been healthy from the day of her birth; she had remained unswaddled, for in Bill Lackwell’s cottage there were no swaddling clothes. This meant that her young limbs were free to kick and feel the fresh air, and certainly to enjoy a modicum of cleanliness which was denied more well-cared-for children.
    And so she grew – knowledgeable, longing to use her bright intelligence, missing little that went on around her. She sawthe cruel treatment of her half-brothers and sisters by the bully Lackwell: she saw her mother suffering also from his violence, she saw their reconciliations and she knew what frequently happened under the rags on their bed of straw. She saw her mother change gradually from a shrivelled, bony woman to a big one, and she knew what that meant.
    She was six years old when the difference between herself and others became fully apparent to her.
    Betsy Hurly sometimes came to the cottage. Betsy had done rather well for herself, for she had induced Charlie Hurly to marry her and was now mistress of the Hurly farm. The noisy, full-blooded farmer’s wife still hankered after adventures which varied only in a few details from those which