After Clare Read Online Free PDF Page B

hand.
    Marta did not seem to see it. ‘He’s refusing to see the specialist any more. But I shall get him there, I’ll make him see sense,’ she went on, with a sudden air of confidence and authority that made Emily feel she might have underestimated Marta Heeren. ‘Well, that’s how it is. I suppose it may still all come right.’
    â€˜Pray that it will.’
    Marta nodded, a full stop to the conversation, as if she had regretted speaking. She turned to go, saying they would leave for dinner at Steadings at about seven. Emily finally watched her stump to the door. It closed very quietly behind her and Emily was left alone at last.
    After she had washed her hands and face and tidied her hair, she stood for a moment in the bay window overlooking the garden, thinking about what she’d just heard. She recognized now the unfathomable look in Dirk’s eyes when he’d taken off his glasses as the dark anguish of a man who fears he is going blind. Her own preoccupations seemed suddenly slight.
    She leaned against the casement and the soft, scented air laid a caress on her cheek as she let the old, well-remembered scene work its own particular soothing alchemy.
    Vavasours had lived here for centuries, landowners and local squires, but her grandfather, Henry, had also ventured successfully into business and made a great deal of money. Too busy to care about maintaining many acres and several outlying farms, he had sold them off piecemeal. By the time Anthony inherited, as a very young man, the estate as such had dwindled to the extensive gardens surrounding the house, a small area of woodland and a few fields, which was, however, enough for Anthony. He did not ask for more than he had: his garden and sufficient funds to live the leisured life of a wealthy gentleman.
    Leysmorton lay before her, its Rose Walk, its lily pond, and there, right at the end of the garden, by the high brick perimeter wall, the great yew Clare had named the Hecate tree. Beyond the wall was a meadow and the narrow, mouse-brown ribbon of the River Ley; hardly a river, not much more than a slow, shallow stream, overhung with willows. They had dragged it all the same when Clare had disappeared.
    A rainy afternoon in the library. The two little girls are hugging their knees before the fire, listening to the story of the polished wooden drinking cup that stands in the recess above the stone fireplace in the hall, a most precious possession, they have now learnt. It’s called a chalice, Anthony tells them, and has been made from the richly red heartwood of the yew, and is so old it might possibly have been used by those Druids who worshipped the tree for its magical properties.
    â€˜Go on. Please, Papa, go on.’ Clare’s hands are clasped together, her wide, green-gold eyes are fixed on Anthony, fierce and compelling, begging for more.
    Slightly alarmed at the intensity of feeling he has induced, even Anthony, who will normally allow Clare to wheedle him into anything, looks sorry now at what he has started. ‘No, that’s enough.’
    Not for Clare. She pesters for more stories and when he refuses, she later rummages among the old books on the library shelves and finds out for herself. ‘“The tree has powers of perpetual renewal, for it goes on living, and expanding in girth, to an inestimable age,”’ she reads out, thrilled, to Emily, who is by no means thrilled.
    â€˜â€œIt used to be associated with death, yet—”’ Emily, not naturally a timid child, shivers and wants to clap her hands over her ears, but Clare goes on, ‘“—yet its powers of healing and regeneration come through its exceptional ability to regrow and rejuvenate itself. This most ancient of trees is often known as the death tree, sacred to Hecate, the dark goddess of both rebirth and death,”’ she finishes in sepulchral tones.
But she goes on to inform Emily that the yew must have