Kitty Little by Freda Lightfoot Read Free Book Online Page B

her own. All she needed to do was to establish her own personality a little more, though how this was to be achieved Esme hadn’t quite worked out. Frowning, she reached for her writing pad. She wouldn’t think any more about her wretched problems, not tonight. Her father lived in a world of his own, one of rectitude and duty, as all parsons did. A fact she must simply accept.
    Now what titivating gossip could she find to entertain Archie?
     
    Esme awoke early the following morning, stretching her limbs deliciously in the warm cocoon of sheets. Today she had at last turned nineteen, one small step closer to being her own woman. She smiled at the dust motes dancing in a ray of sunlight. What did it matter if life would go on as usual? Inside she could at least feel different.
    She wondered if her father had bought her Great Expectations, or The Old Curiosity Shop perhaps. If he hadn’t, she could only hope for something a little livelier than the copy of Pilgrim’s Progress he’d bought for her last yearwhich remained on her shelf, unread. And anything would be a change from Swiss Family Robinson.
    From the crags surrounding the vicarage garden, she could hear the chack-chack of a merlin falcon. It brought her leaping from her bed to fling open her window and draw in lungsful of clear, crisp air.
    ‘The first day of the month and I forgot to say white rabbits,’ she chided herself. ‘Now I shall have bad luck.’ But she was laughing as she pulled on her old grey pleated skirt and blouse, for the day was already showing every promise of being hot, and perhaps, if she hurried over making her father’s porridge and skimped on the dusting and cleaning today, (since it was her birthday after all) she might have time to walk up through the woods and find some real rabbits.
    Esme splashed water from the jug into the blue bowl and dipped her hands in it, enjoying the sting of its coolness on her warm cheeks.
      Would anything ever change? This afternoon she must attend the sewing circle as usual, and no doubt be politely scolded for slipping out early last week. Tomorrow evening she must attend a special meeting of the Sunday School teachers where suitable infant hymns would be chosen and lessons planned. The only possible subject which might provoke interest and even a lively discussion, would come over where to take the children for the summer picnic. The superintendent would suggest a long walk in stout shoes. Mrs Walsh would opt for a steamer trip while Miss Agnes would offer dire warnings about children falling overboard. The children themselves might dream of a trip to the seaside, to Morecambe or Blackpool, but in the end they would do what they always did. They would take a charabanc to Arnside, then walk over to Fairy Steps and eat their picnic before trekking all the way back again.
    On Wednesday there was to be tea and buns at the Mother’s Meeting, for which she’d promised to fill the urn with water to be boiled in good time. Someone recently returned from the Far East was to give a lantern slide show. What relevance it would have to motherhood she couldn’t imagine, nevertheless it was an undoubted improvement upon the usual dull lecture on the problems of colic or nappy rash. And so the week would continue, dull, dutiful, all carefully set down in the parish diary.
    But this morning, apart from the preparation of breakfast and lunch for her father, and because Esme was determined not to do a scrap of housework, she was free. Gloriously free. It was her birthday and she meant to enjoy what she could of it, meetings or no meetings.
    She left the porridge simmering on the stove and ran all the way up the hill without even pausing for breath. In the woods she did indeed see several rabbits, moving through the dewy grass quite unafraid at this hour of the morning. A thin pearly light filtered down through the branches and here and there patches of blue sky glowed bright as a jewel, seeming to represent a