Holding On by Marcia Willett Read Free Book Online Page A

the terrible day when he’d been playing under the kitchen table and the policeman had come rushing in, recounting the tragic news of the murders to Cookie. For years this had been her own private anguish. The official story was that the car had been ambushed and its occupants shot by Mau-Mau, but since then many other stories of atrocities had filtered back and she guessed that their end had not been so straightforward.
    Freddy forced her mind away from such horror and thought about Susanna. Happy, friendly, well balanced: Susanna was the easiest of all the children. Since she had been too young to remember her parents and brother, she had settled contentedly into The Keep and now had no other memories. This was her home and these were her people. She belonged here – as they all did in one way or another, which was why Freddy had insisted that The Keep must be kept as a refuge for them all. Hal might be the natural candidate to take over the reins, to preserve the trust for his own children and their cousins, but this was the condition attached to his ‘inheritance’. After all, there were not only the children to consider.
    Freddy thought: I suppose we’re an odd collection. Dear old Ellen and Fox who have been with me for ever. Caroline. What in the world would we have done without Caroline? And Theo . . .
    Sitting there in the sun, her basket beside her on the seat, Freddy smiled sadly. All those years in which she had loved him and yet he had never guessed. How terrible it had been to marry the man you thought you loved only to fall in love with his youngest brother. It had been hard to live without any return of that particular kind of love . . . At least he had never married. No doubt being a priest had had something to do with that, although as a naval chaplain he might have done so. Even now, all passion supposedly spent, Freddy experienced a faint thrill of jealousy at the thought of Theo romantically involved with another woman. How happy she had been when he had decided to come home at last, how precious his companionship had been for these last seven years. She had railed at him, spurned his faith, leaned on him and loved him for more than fifty years. Life without Theo was unimaginable.
    The robin flew down, pecking at the cracks between the paving stone beside her shoe, peering at her with his bright, knowing eye.
    â€˜Quite right,’ she told him. ‘I’m slacking,’ and, climbing to her feet, Freddy picked up her basket and went back to the roses.
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    Mole, climbing the hill to the narrow house in Above Town, was thinking what luck it had been to have Fliss living in Dartmouth during his first two years at the college. He loved the town with its narrow streets and quaint old houses, its life centred round the river, busy now with pleasure steamers plying between Dartmouth and Totnes, or taking the visitors out to sea for trips along the coast. The castle guarded the mouth of the river and beneath the wooded shoulder of the hill called Gallants Bower huddled the small stone church of St Petrox.
    Mole thought: I feel as if I belong here. Perhaps one day I shall buy a house on the river and come to live here.
    During the last year he had begun, at last, to free himself from the nightmare of his family’s death; not just to push the horror down where it might spring back at him at any moment but actually to grow away from it. He had begun to think that this would never be possible but his new life – Dartmouth, the Navy, a sense of real belonging – this combination seemed to put his burden into some kind of proportion. For years it had filled his mind, corroding anything else it touched, the words and images blinding and suffocating him. None but he had heard the policeman’s account, blurted out to Cookie on that hot afternoon ‘. . . Oh my Christ! The blood was everywhere. They had machetes, axes, sticks . . . The boy’s shirt was soaked with blood