The Legacy by Katherine Webb Read Free Book Online Page B

at the floating house as I started to climb.
    “Go carefully!” Beth gasped, sucking the fingertips of one hand as I missed my footing, wobbled. She followed me up, frowning in concentration, careful not to look down. A loose curtain of bags marked the doorway. Inside, Dinny had arranged plastic sacks stuffed with straw. There was a wooden crate table, a bunch of cow parsley in a milk bottle, a pack of cards, some comics. It was quite simply the best place I had ever seen. We painted a sign, to put at the foot of the ladder. The Crow’s Nest. Trespassers will be Persecuted . Mum laughed when she read it. We spent hours up there, adrift in whispering green clouds with patches of bright sky sparkling overhead, eating picnics, far away from Meredith and Henry. I worried that Henry would ruin it when he came to stay. I worried that he would crash through our magical place, mock it, make it seem less magnificent. But by happy, happy chance, it turned out that Henry was afraid of heights.
    In my head Henry is always bigger than me, older than me. Eleven when I was seven. It seemed an enormous gap at the time. He was a big boy . He was loud and bossy. He said I had to do what he told me. He buttered Meredith up—she always preferred boys to girls. He went along with her on the rare occasions she came out to the woods, and more than once helped her make a nasty scheme a reality. Henry: a fleshy neck with a receding chin; dark brown hair; clear blue eyes that he would narrow, make ugly; pale skin that burnt across the nose in summer. One of those children, I see him now, who is a grown-up in miniature rather than a child, who you can look at and know, at once, what they will look like as an adult. His features were already mapped; they would grow, but not develop. He wore himself in his face, I think, charmless, obvious. But this is unfair. He never got the chance to prove me wrong, after all.
    E ddie still has the face of a child, and I love it. A nondescript boy’s face, sharp nose, tufty hair, kneecaps standing proud from skinny shanks in his school shorts. My nephew. He hugs Beth on the platform, a little sheepishly because some of his classmates are on the train behind him, banging on the glass, sticking up their fingers. I wait by the car for them, my hands puckered with cold, grinning as they draw near.
    “Hey, Eddie Baby! Edderino! Eddius Maximus!” I call to him, putting my arms around him and squeezing, pulling his feet off the ground.
    “Auntie Rick, it’s just Ed now,” he protests, with a hint of exasperation.
    “ ’Course. Sorry. And you can’t call me Auntie —you make me feel a hundred years old! Sling your bag in the back and let’s get going,” I say, resisting the urge to tease him. He is eleven now. The same age Henry will always be, and old enough for teasing to matter. “How was your train ride?”
    “Pretty boring. Except Absolom locked Marcus in the loo. He screamed the place down—quite funny really,” Eddie reports. He smells of school and it starts to fill the car, sharp and vinegary. Unwashed socks, pencil shavings, mud, ink, stale sandwiches.
    “Pretty funny, indeed! I had to go in and see the head a fortnight ago because he’d shut his art teacher in her classroom. They pushed a block of lockers against her door!” Beth says, voice loud and bright, startling me.
    “It wasn’t my idea, Mum!”
    “You still helped,” Beth counters. “What if there’d been a fire or something? She was in there for hours!”
    “Well . . . they shouldn’t have banned mobile phones then, should they?” Eddie says, smiling. I catch his eye in the rear-view mirror and wink.
    “Edward Calcott Walker, I am appalled,” I say lightly. Beth glares at me. I must remember not to conspire with Eddie against her, not even over something tiny. It can’t be him and me against her, even for a second. She resents my help already.
    “Is this a new car?”
    “New-ish,” I tell him. “The old Beetle finally