The Colour by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online Page B

conducted a lizard hunt. In his fury and sorrow at what had happened, he shot at everything that moved or rustled within thirty yards of the house. He showed Pare the bloodied remains of a green gecko. Then he sent her away. He let her take water and food and a little money in her bundle of possessions, but he felt no mercy for her. He didn’t care where she went or what became of her. He would have liked to have given her a whipping.
    Edwin Orchard woke up five days later.
    For a year, he seemed weakened by what had happened, his face pale and his eyes peculiarly large. But then he started to become like any other boy, except that he always wanted to be rocked and never grew out of it. At eight years old, he would still climb on to his mother’s knee and say: ‘Rock me, Mama. Rock me like the wind.’
    II
    When the snow melted in the warm winter sunshine that succeeded it, it was to the Orchard Run that Harriet Blackstone travelled.
    She and Joseph had looked at what had happened – the loss of Beauty and of almost all their hens, the donkey grown thin and tormented by coughing, the tin roof of the Cob House buckled and leaking – and seen their own responsibility in these disasters, their own ignorance.
    â€˜We’re fools,’ said Joseph. ‘We’re blunderers. We’re geese.’
    He thought in his panic and pessimism that they wouldn’t survive the winter. It was Lilian, with her belief that only the well-to-do could succeed in the world, who suggested the journey to Orchard House. Drying Beauty’s tartan coat by the range, so that it could be put on to the suffering donkey, she sniffed and said: ‘The only people who will set you straight are the Orchards. You will have to go cap-in-hand to them.’
    Cap-in-hand? Joseph thought that all of that had been left behind in England. He’d seen how the squires of Norfolk had looked down on his father, the livestock auctioneer, and how few of them had bothered to attend his funeral or even send a condolence letter. He rounded on Lilian and snapped: ‘I am never again going cap-in-hand to any living soul!’
    â€˜Well,’ retorted Lilian. ‘Then you are more of a fool than I took you for. Wulla .’
    That night, in their calico room, Harriet took Joseph in her arms. She said she had always wanted to visit the Orchards so that she could see what grew in their vegetable plot and learn how they irrigated it in summer. She reminded Joseph that Dorothy Orchard, virtually alone in a world of men, was a woman who might enjoy discussing with her how to make a carrot cake or poach an eel.
    It was a long time before Joseph said anything. On the edge of sleep, he muttered: ‘You are not travelling all those miles alone.’
    â€˜Yes I am, my dear,’ replied Harriet, wide awake. ‘The donkey and I will go at a very slow trot, taking the cart so that I can return with some milk. We shall rest there for a day and a night, or a little longer. I will see what has been planted on the edge of the Orchards’ pond.’
    She travelled almost due south. When she reached the Ashley River, she stopped and stared at the hectic, jade-green water. A raft made of kanuka trunks, worked with ropes and pulleys, took carts and passengers across the Ashley, and this contraption was waiting there, under the charge of a ferryman, chewing tobacco and spitting into the water.
    The ferryman saw Harriet hesitating. ‘Bring him on, Miss! Bring him on!’ he shouted. So Harriet tried to lead the terrified donkey to the water’s edge, where the raft fretted at its mooring. But the donkey wouldn’t go on. He attempted to rear up between the shafts of the cart. He brayed to the sky.
    â€˜Cover his head!’ yelled the ferryman. So Harriet took off her cloak and tied it round the animal’s face and thought that in this way he would go on, but blind as he was, he could feel the cold of the river and the