The Colour by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online

end.
    â€˜Beauty!’ Harriet kept calling, for the cow was obedient, and always tried to reach them when they shouted into the vast emptiness of the air. ‘Beauty!’ And then listening in the white silence for the sound of her lowing. But it didn’t come.
    They had reached the end of the west wall now. Harriet was thirsty and held a handful of snow in her mouth and let it melt against her teeth.
    Inside the Cob House, they could hear Lilian coughing. Then, as they turned and began to dig their way towards the door, Harriet saw Beauty’s coat – a smudge of tartan just visible on a mound beside the front door.
    â€˜There she is, Joseph!’
    They began to wade through the drifts, thigh-deep, Joseph leading, trying to clear a path for his wife, towards the mound that was Beauty, who had simply done what she often did in the cold nights, come to the Cob House wall and lain in the shelter of it, seeking some warmth.
    Harriet thought: I used to hear her breathing, but last night I heard nothing. The snow smothered every sound.
    They uncovered Beauty’s head. Furiously, they cleared the frozen snow from her nostrils, slapped her neck, put their faces close to hers, giving her their own breath. But the flesh of her muzzle, flesh that had been warm, supple, drooling, had become hard and set. Her amber eyes had rolled backwards under the long-lashed lids.
    Harriet knelt in the snow, tears brimming, one hand helplessly tugging at the ridiculous tartan coat. What she felt, more strongly than anything else, was admiration for an animal who could die so slowly, so patiently, without a sound.

The Orchard Run
    I
    Toby Orchard was a big man who had always felt confined and hot and unhappy in his job in the City of London.
    A voice inside had called to Toby night and day: Set me free, set me free, set me free. As his girth expanded and the buttons of his finely tailored coats kept bursting off, his dreams of owning his own horizon became more and more ardent. His brown eyes restlessly examined the sooty roofs and spires of Threadneedle Street and London Wall and found them fearful. He longed to ride strong, unbreakable horses and shoot guns and shout at dogs under a monumental sky. He thought he would die of this longing, if he did not satisfy it.
    He set sail for New Zealand in 1856, with his heiress wife, Dorothy, and they lost no time in buying land and stock, as much as they could acquire, and taking on the labour they needed. They put in so many miles of fence posts, they could no longer remember where the fence had begun or where it ended. On this part of the Okuku flats, all that could be heard above the sighing of the wind was the bleating of Orchard sheep. Toby thought of his land as a continent. Acres of tussock grass were ploughed up and sown with clover for his horses, which seemed to spend their days galloping in wild, unknowable circles, stopping only to sniff and nibble at the succulent clover when the moon came up and glimmered on it and the stillness of the night let them rest.
    Toby and Dorothy Orchard built a house of surprising beauty out of the materials to hand: totara pine from the bush, slate from the gullies, lime wash from a hand-hewn quarry. Saplings of oak and maple, willow and poplar had been hauled across the miles of flat and planted in the wet seasons, and had flourished, and the earth around Orchard House had become cool and shady and kingfishers nested there.
    Inside, the place was grander and more comfortable than its lime-washed wooden exterior suggested. The stone fireplaces, in which scented apple wood was burned, had been carved with rough approximations of the Orchard family crest. All Toby and Dorothy’s wedding gifts – mahogany dressers and dressing-mirrors, Caroline day-beds and candle sconces, Regency silverware and fine French and German porcelain – had endured the same kind of journey as Lilian Blackstone’s ill-fated tea-service and survived to