The Stepson by Martin Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page A

and began to run. Then, changing her mind, she stood and allowed the gig to pass her, watching it with her hard agate eyes. Thebreeze divided the thick grey fleece into a long ragged horizontal parting like a deep split in a wooden beam, showing the clean silvery-yellow wool below the surface. Kate’s feather streamed and fluttered: she raised her hand to her hat.
    â€˜Are you cold?’ Ben asked her.
    â€˜No: quite warm, thanks,’ she said. But the wind was, in fact, cold, and it was only the glow of her new happiness and the sense of well-being which it brought her that made her invulnerable. If they had driven through snow and ice she would have welcomed the biting air as a part of her unquenchable joy. It was wonderful, after years of unchanging monotony, to be standing on the very edge of an unknown future. The unknown had ceased suddenly to be an unreal and distant dream: it had come near and was enfolding her. Each moment she was advancing into a new, unpredictable world, larger and fuller and more beautiful than any she had known. As she bowed her head to the breeze her gaze fell on her lap, and once more she was amazed to see that her dress was blue instead of the old black.
    Ben pointed with his whip. ‘See that clump of trees?’ he said. ‘That’s the farm’: and Kate gazed at the distant dark mound that broke the flowing lines of undulating plough and pasture, and the image of the place as her mind had made it began to waver and fade even at that distant glimpse of the reality. Shewas glad the farm lay among trees. Trees were homely and sheltering things: they promised a beauty and richness which her arid life at Penridge had never known.
    The road approached the farm by devious ways. Sometimes it sheered off to the right or left, sometimes it almost turned its back on it, and more than once it dropped into a shallow valley filled with thickets of hazel and oak and the farm was lost to view. Then trees began to appear once more at the roadside and in the hedges that divided the fields, and soon they swung through an open gate into a woody cart-track and the gig-wheels and the mare’s hoofs became suddenly muffled.
    â€˜Are we there?’ Kate asked, and a sudden misgiving stirred within her, for now the unknown was engulfing her and soon she would be among strange folk and strange eyes would examine her.
    â€˜Yes,’ said her husband, ‘only a few yards now.’
    A brick wall, its warm red mottled with the green of moss, now bordered the right flank of the road. Over it Kate saw the sloping tops of haystacks and the high thatched roof of a barn huge as a church. The gig turned sharp to the right, then to the right again and through a gate, and now the wheels skidded and rattled on the cobblestones of the farmyard. Three large downy yellow ducks waddled out of the mare’s way, opening and shutting their yellow beaks like mechanical toys. A collie with ears laidback and smiling eyes approached the gig slowly and respectfully, wagging its tail. Kate was aware of low-roofed sheds and a taller, windowed building which was the house. At the side of the house door there was a low stone bench: two or three pails were ranged upon it upside down. The bench, the doorstep, and the window-sills near the door were spotlessly clean and smooth and washed to a warm tint with reddle-stone. Their edges were outlined in white. A large woman in an apron, her pleasant round face ensconced in her wide shoulders and bosom, was standing in the doorway. As the gig drew up she stepped out to help Kate down.
    â€˜This is Mrs. Jobson,’ said Humphrey, who was getting down on the other side, and Kate shook hands with her.
    â€˜You’ll be hungry, I expect, ma’am, after the drive,’ said the old woman. ‘The dinner’s ready as soon as you’d like it. But perhaps you’d like me to show you upstairs first.’
    A man came out of an outhouse and he and Ben