The Evil Seed by Joanne Harris Read Free Book Online

have a pizza, or see a film, or both. Does that sound good?’
    ‘That’s fine.’
    Alice must have
hesitated for an instant, because Joe picked up on it at once.
    ‘Hey, Alice? Are you
sure?’
    Alice made her voice light.
‘I’ll look forward to it, Joe. Keep playing those blues, hey?’
    ‘Hang in there. I’ll be
round at about six. I tell you, things are going to be just great. You won’t be
disappointed.’

 
     
     
     
     
    One
     
     
    I DON’T SUPPOSE THERE WAS ANYTHING I COULD
HAVE done to avert what she had planned. As I said, she was very clever, and
she knew my failings only too well. When I hauled her, dripping, into the cab
with my coat flung protectively around her shoulders, myself only half-dressed,
with my shoes and hat and tie still abandoned by the edge of the Cam, she must
have smiled to herself, as such creatures may. She must have smiled through her
lavender eyes as I hastened to revive her with my little flask of brandy,
panting around her like an eager dog. There was nowhere to take her except to
Grantchester and my landlady’s house, nothing to do but to take her in (she was
shivering now and could walk shakily from the cab to the door of the house), to
explain as best I could and to watch helplessly as she was whisked away upstairs
by a concerned and clucking Mrs Brown to an unknowable and half-defined realm
of hot water and soft pillows.
    Lucky that she was such
a kind, easy-going old soul. Other, more suspicious landladies might have
treated my strange visitor with less consideration; but Mrs Brown was by far
the best woman in my long and varied experience. She provided sympathy,
attention, and tea — her all-purpose cure-all — then left Rosemary in the best
bedroom, threatened me with the direst consequences if I were to disturb the
young lady, and retired to her business, supremely unruffled, as if I brought
half-drowned ladies to the house every day of the week. Bless her.
    Left on her own in the
best spare room, her bright hair washed, and wearing one of Mrs Brown’s
starched linen nightdresses, how Rosemary must have laughed. Laughed at the
foolishness of it all: at our kindness, our misplaced sympathy; my hopeful
adoration. I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
    I spent the rest of that
day in a haze. I did not dare leave the house in case some new development
arose; in case the girl disappeared. Her face haunted me. The memory of her
silent floating on the water filled me with poetic thoughts. I spent the long
enchanted hours lying in my room, reliving those dreamlike instants again and
again, my ears tuned to the slightest sound from that secret, silent room in
which she slept, my heart bursting with a kind of music. Mrs Brown came and
went with cheerful, concerned efficiency. A vase of early cherry-blossom found
its way into the sleeping girl’s room, then a number of patchwork cushions; then,
at about half past four, a tray of tea and biscuits. At five Mrs Brown
announced that the young lady might like to get up and have some hot soup; and
at six I found myself sitting at the dinner table, shaking with anticipation,
staring at the extra place set by my landlady, my head feverish and my hands
clenched out of sight in my lap.
    I was love-lorn, I
suppose; what young man would not have been? She had stepped out of a fairy
tale for me, a white Ophelia borne from nowhere on a muddy wave and a whisper
of morning. The threat of scandal, the riot of speculation which might have
arisen later from the society of which I was a part did not even enter my mind;
for me, Rosemary might have been new-born there and then, like Venus from the
wave. And it was with these thoughts in mind that I waited for my first glimpse
of her, half afraid to look, as if I might see some hitherto unsuspected flaw
in her perfection. I need not have worried. A quick moth-like sound on the
stairs, a clip of high heels, and suddenly, she was there, her features,
blurred by the movement of light and shade in