Act of Will Read Online Free PDF

discovered she could not.
    High Cleugh drew her towards it like a powerful magnet.
    With every step she took Audra Kenton told herself she was making a mistake, exposing herself to heartache, especially today of all days, yet still she continued to walk, almost against her own volition.
    By the time she came to the bottom of the long, twisting lane she no longer cared whether she was being foolish or not. She was conscious only of her yearning to see the one place she loved above all others on this earth. She had stayed away far too long.
    She climbed over the stile set in the wall, jumped down into the long pasture and ran through the tall grass. It rippled and swayed like an undulating sea of green under the light breeze which had blown up. Unexpectedly, a couple of cows lazily lumbered across her path, and she dodged around them, plunging ahead, her young face taut with anticipation, her long hair flying out behind her as she ran.
    Audra did not break her pace until she came to the huge sycamore tree at the end of the pasture. Upon reaching it she stooped down and stepped under itsspreading branches which formed a canopy of green, shutting out the sky. She leaned her body against the tree, pressed her face to its trunk and closed her eyes. She was out of breath and panting with exertion.
    After only a few moments she began to breathe more evenly. Slowly, she smoothed her hand over the tree, felt the rough texture of the bark under her fingertips, and she smiled to herself. This was her tree. Her place.
    She had named it the Memory Place in her mind. For that was exactly what it was—the place to remember
them
, to relive the past, to recall the happiness and joy that had once been hers and was no more.
    Frequently they had come here together. Her mother. Her brothers, Frederick and William. And Uncle Peter. And when she was here at the tree they were with her again, and her misery was vanquished for a brief while.
    Audra opened her eyes, blinking in the cool green darkness of the sycamore’s shade, and then she moved out from underneath its branches. Circling the tree, she came to a standstill at the edge of the little slope that fell away to the banks of the River Ure just a few feet below her. Finally she lifted her head and gazed out across that narrow band of swift-running water to the wooded valley on the opposite side of the river. There it was, nestled in the palm of a natural dell set amidst the trees.
    High Cleugh
: the small but lovely old manor where she had been born nineteen years ago today. The house where she had grown up, had lived for the best part of her life. Her beloved home until five years ago.
    She feasted her eyes on it, struck as always by its simplicity and gentleness which, to her, were the things that made it compellingly beautiful.
    High Cleugh was an eighteenth-century house, long and low, with a fine symmetry that gave it an incomparablegracefulness. It was built of local grey stone and had many leaded windows that winked and glinted now in the bright sunlight. These faced out onto a terrace made of the same ancient stone; running the length of the house, the terrace was broken in the centre by a very long flight of steps that sliced its way through lawns tilting to the river. Herbaceous borders, wide, rambling, grew beneath the terrace walls, splashed vivid hues against the dark stone and verdant grass.
    But it was the massed delphiniums which caught the eye, entranced. These flourished in great abundance at the bottom of the lawns near the river’s edge, their blossoms blanketing the ground with a breathtaking mixture of blues. Cobalt bled into a powder blue so delicate it was almost white, this tint giving way to cornflower, then a luscious violet-blue that in turn brushed up against lavender and the purple tones of belladonna.
    Her mother’s delphiniums… planted with such care and nurtured so lovingly by her over the years. Audra’s heart clenched with a bittersweet mixture of