Snow Angels by Elizabeth Gill Read Free Book Online

went. Half past eight and still they were not there. Then, before nine o’clock, while it was daylight and only the coolness and the long shadows foretold of night, a carriage came up the drive and stopped in front of the house.
    His parents were outside at the bottom of the steps and so was Edward. Gil didn’t want to go forward but, almost as though the house itself propelled him, he went and stood in the doorway. It was a defence. He felt as if marauders had made their way through the gates and up the drive and were about to storm the house. They could have been sixteenth-century Border Reivers on an October raid, screaming and yelling, the horses’ hooves dull in the night as they rode in to steal everything they could carry off.
    Two ordinary people stood beside the carriage, but there was nothing ordinary about the young woman who turned towardshim. Gil had never seen anybody like her. Her hair was the brightest shade of yellow. Her face was pink and cream and her eyes were a cool, dark-blue liquid. He could already imagine what her mouth would taste like: strawberries and pepper. Her lashes cast shadows on her cheeks. He thought of her hair loose, of how long it was, past her waist, and of her breasts bared for his mouth and hands. Gil tried to back away from the shocking images, but he couldn’t. He had never felt like this about any woman in his life. He knew from that very moment that it was not the first time they had met. He recognised her. Helen Harrison was meant to be his; it had been written, ordained. He could smell the softness of her skin; he knew how she turned in her sleep. He could see her belly rounded with their child. He could hear her distant laughter as she ran away from him in game down a path that led to a rose garden. She didn’t move or speak, though her eyes held his. Gil felt like somebody who had been struggling endlessly upstream until he was exhausted. His arms and legs were leaden with tiredness and the water was pulling him down. Her gaze didn’t flicker, even when Edward came to introduce them and, as she moved towards him Gil gave up the fight. He went down for the last time and the waters closed over his head.

Chapter Three
    Rhoda hadn’t danced with anybody all evening and Abby felt disloyal as she polkaed and waltzed. Her mother had once told her that dancing was the only respectable way to get close to a man outside marriage and it was certainly easier than staying near Robert Surtees. She regretted, in some ways, having agreed to go to Hexham with Charlotte. She liked him well enough but no more than she liked several other young men, except that he was handsome and rich, and those were not, she kept telling herself, good reasons for liking anybody. Her father had already noticed Robert watching her and had talked about how smitten Robert was. He called her his sly puss. Abby had brushed him off. All she really wanted was to be with Gil, yet well into the middle of the evening they had not spoken, except in greeting. Most of the time she couldn’t see him, the crush of people was so great.
    The evening was warm and Rhoda was disinclined to dance, so they went walking outside and here, finally, Rhoda talked to her about Jos Allsop.
    ‘He comes into my bedroom in the mornings, he and my mother, and they laugh and joke and he tickles me as though I was seven. Sometimes when my mother oversleeps, because often she’s up most of the night with that brat, he comes alone, getting on to my bed and … I’m in my nightgown. He tells me how pretty I’ve become and during the day he spends a great deal oftime with me. He touches me whenever he can. I’m afraid of him. I feel as though he’s the spider and I’m the fly.’
    They walked back through the quarry gardens to the house and were in time to see Helen Harrison arrive. They stood at a distance.
    ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ Rhoda said, but it was Gil’s reaction that Abby saw. He had not looked at her like that, nor at