A Witch In Winter Read Online Free PDF Page A

girlfriends coming over and we’ll have a great time.’
    I stood in the doorway, waving him off as the car bumped down the rutted track. Soon I couldn’t see him at all, just hear the crack and crunch of branches in the lane. Then the sound of the engine fading as he disappeared down the main road. Then … nothing. I was alone. Alone in Wicker House.
    The heavy front door swung shut, and suddenly the house was full of small sounds, almost as if it was waking up, stretching, yawning. A clock ticked; pipes expanded, clunking and dinging; floorboards creaked; the wind shushed and moaned in the maze of cavernous chimneys. The house was coming to life.
    ‘OK,’ I said aloud, and my voice sounded small and lonely in my own ears. ‘Better get started.’
    I’d warned them about the state of the bathroom so I hoped they’d all remembered to shower before they left, but I tried to scrub the worst of the green slime off the tub anyway. Then I made a huge batch of brownies, changed Dad’s sheets so they’d have somewhere to sleep, and unrolled the futon on the floor of my room.
    I was just adding extra logs to the living room fire when I heard the sound of tyres in the lane outside. Looking out I saw that dusk had fallen and Prue, June and Liz were bumping up the lane in Liz’s battered Land Rover, waving cheerily out of the window as they saw me. I flicked the switch on the outside lamp, wincing as it fizzed and sputtered under my hand.
    ‘O. M. G!’ June said as they came into the hall, breathing frostily into the cold air. ‘This place is amazing.’ She peered into the living room. ‘Your dad must have worked miracles. It’s soooo beautiful, like something out of Vogue Living !’
    Dad had packed a lot into his week of decorating. He’d painted the walls a kind of dark cream and the floor had been waxed and polished. Now it gleamed in the firelight, reflecting little flickers of light from the irregular panes of the leaded light window. The intricately carved fireplace had been scrubbed, and you could see the strange animals and plants that twined and coiled over the stone surround.
    It still wasn’t a patch on our lovely house in London but, seeing it through my friends’ eyes, I realized again how hard my dad was working to try to make a home for us. Still, I only said, ‘Well don’t speak too soon – wait ‘til you see the bits of the h="bits ofhouse he hasn’t decorated.’
    Liz and June wanted to go around the whole house straight away, but Prue said, ‘We’ve got pizzas from the takeaway – they’ll get cold. Shouldn’t we eat first?’
    So we sat around the kitchen table and ate slice after slice of pizza, swapping gossip about Winter and all its inhabitants.
    ‘It’s the kind of place that unless your grandparents were born within sight of Winter Castle they still refer to you as “the incomers”,’ Prue explained round a mouthful. ‘Everyone pretty much knows everyone, and most of the people have roots in the fishing industry if you go back far enough.’
    ‘How old is Winter, then?’ I asked.
    ‘Oh it goes right back to the Domesday book and beyond,’ Liz said. She was very keen on history, I’d discovered, and her shyness disappeared as she began to talk. ‘There was a settlement up on the cliffs in Roman times. But they didn’t settle down in the harbour until the Middle Ages – I suppose because of the risk of attack from the sea, or perhaps because of the floods.’
    ‘Does it ever flood these days?’ I asked.
    ‘Not any more. There’s harbour defences.’
    ‘There was a dreadful flood in the seventeenth century,’ Prue said with relish. ‘Loads of people died. It was supposed to be caused by a witch and the villagers burned her for it.’
    ‘They didn’t burn her,’ Liz corrected. ‘They stoned her and drove her away, and she was caught in the flood and drowned.’
    ‘Let’s face it, it’s all rubbish anyway.’ June started to fold up the pizza boxes for