The Shivering Sands by Victoria Holt Read Free Book Online

gardening myself. I find it so…soothing.”
    I was scarcely listening. A great excitement had come to me. This house thrilled, yet repelled me. The machicolated towers with their crenellations seemed to give a warning to those who would carelessly enter through the gate below. I imagined arrows and boiling pitch being thrown from the heights of those towers on to the enemies of the great house.
    Mrs. Lincroft was aware of the effect the house was having on me and she smiled. “I suppose we who live here are inclined to take it all for granted,” she said.
    “I was wondering how it felt to live in such a house.”
    “You will soon find out.”
    We were on the gravel path, bounded on both sides by the moss-covered wall, which led directly to the gate house. It was an impressive moment as we passed under the arch and I saw the door of the gatekeeper’s lodge with the peephole through which visitors to the mansion must have been scrutinized. I wondered whether anyone was watching there now.
    Mrs. Lincroft brought the trap to a standstill in a cobbled courtyard. “There are two courtyards,” she told me, “the lower and the upper.” She waved a hand at the four high walls which enclosed it. “These are mostly the servants’ quarters,” she went on. She nodded toward an archway through which I caught a glimpse of stone steps going up. “The nurseries are over that gateway; and in the upper courtyard are the family’s rooms.”
    “It’s vast,” I said.
    She laughed. “You will discover how vast. The stables are here. So if you will alight I will call one of the grooms and then take you into the house and introduce you. Your bags will be here shortly…by the time I have given you tea, I imagine. I’ll take you to the schoolroom and there you can meet the girls.”
    She drove the trap into the stables, leaving me standing there in the courtyard. There was a hushed silence and now that I was alone I felt I had stepped right back into the past. I calculated the age of those walls which closed me in. Four hundred…five hundred? I looked up; two hideous gargoyles projected from the walls, seeming to scowl at me. The Gothic tracery on the leadwork of the water spouts was exquisitely delicate in odd contrast to those grotesque figures. The doors—four of them were of oak, studded with massive nails. I looked at the windows with their leaden panes and I wondered about the people who lived behind them.
    As I stood there, though completely fascinated, I was again conscious of that feeling of revulsion. I could not understand it, but I felt I wanted to run away, to go back to London, to write to my music master in Paris and beg for another chance. Perhaps it was the evil expression on the faces of those stone images jutting out from the walls. Perhaps it was the silence; that overwhelming atmosphere of the past which made me fancy that I was being lured from this present century into an earlier age. I had a vivid picture of Roma coming through that gate into this courtyard, demanding to see Sir William, asking him if he thought his park and trees were more important than history. Poor Roma. If he had refused his permission, would she be alive today?
    It seemed that the house was alive, that those grotesques were not merely stone figures. Was that a shadow at the window over the second gateway? The nurseries, Mrs. Lincroft had said. Perhaps. But what more natural than that my pupils should be interested enough in their new music teacher to take a preview of her, when they believed her to be unaware of them?
    I had never been inside a house of such antiquity before, I reminded myself. It was the circumstances of my coming which made me feel as I did. “Roma,” I whispered to myself. “Where are you, Roma?”
    I could imagine that the gargoyles behind my back were laughing at me. I felt as though something was telling me that I should not stay here, that if I did I should be hurt in some mysterious way. And with this