Water Like a Stone by Deborah Crombie Read Free Book Online

couldn’t afford to burn their only source of cash. Nor would he be able to forage easily for more wood with snow on the ground—if the cold snap lasted more than a few days, they would be in real trouble.
    Rowan’s eyelids had begun to droop again. “You sleep now, do you hear?” he whispered. “I’ll take care of everything.” And he would, too—it was just that it was becoming harder and harder to see how he was going to manage it.
    Rowan was asleep, her breathing shallow but regular, and from next door the children’s voices had faded from drowsy whispers to silence. Giving his wife’s shoulder a squeeze, he moved quietly through the children’s cabin and into the stern.
    He stood for a moment, gazing at the remains of the stew he’d made for dinner, still standing on the hob; at the laceware and brasses decorating the polished wood of the cabin walls; at the bright detail of the castle scene Rowan had painted on the underside of the drop table. The children had strung tinsel and a red-and-green paper chain over the windows and Marie had tacked up a drawing she’d made of Father Christmas wearing a pointed red hat.
    Only embers glowed in the stove. With sudden decision, Gabe took a log from the basket and fed it into the fire. It was Christmas Eve, and he’d be damned if they’d spend it freezing. Maybe tomorrow the weather would break. Maybe he’d find a carpentry job before the New Year. He had contacts here—it was the only thing that had brought him back to the Nantwich stretch of the Cut.
    Right, he thought, with the wave of bitterness that swamped him all too often these days. Maybe Father Christmas would come. Maybe the boat’s makeshift loo would work properly for once. And maybe his wife would miraculously get better, instead of more frail by the moment.
    Tears stung his eyes and he blinked furiously, stabbing at the fire with the poker until the heat scorched his face. She was slipping away from him and he couldn’t bear it, not after everything they’d been through.
    There was only one option that he could see. He could sell the boat. There were always collectors sniffing around the Cut, looking for traditional working narrowboats built before the 1950s, the less altered, the better. Willing to pay a handsome price to do without plumbing or central heating, they would restore the boats to their original state and show them off at boat shows. Never mind that entire families had lived in seven-by-eight-foot cabins and babies had played on top of the sheeted coal or cocoa in the cargo space—that only added to the romance.
    Gabe snorted in disgust. They were fools, playing at being boatmen, and he’d not give up the Daphne to the likes of them. He’d been born on this boat, as had his father, and now his family was one of the last still clinging to the old way of life.
    And selling the boat would only be a stopgap measure at best—he knew that. Where would they go? What would they do? They knew nothing else, and there was nowhere else they would be safe.
    He thought of the face from the past that had appeared so unexpectedly today. The woman had been maneuvering her boat round the angle where the Middlewich fed into the main branch of the canal at Barbridge; skillfully, he thought, for a woman alone. Then she had looked up.
    It had taken him a moment to place her in the strange context, and then he’d felt the old, familiar lurch of fear. She had recognized them as well, and had spoken to Rowan and the children in a friendly way, but he didn’t trust her. Why should he, even after what she had done for them?
    She and her kind, no matter how well-meaning, meant nothing but trouble—had never meant anything but trouble for him or his people. He’d been the fool to think they could run away from it forever.
    Moving slowly back into the children’s cabin, he stared down at their sleeping forms. The light reflecting off the snow came through the small window more brightly than a full moon.