Autumn Softly Fell Read Online Free PDF

and weeks since she’d arrived at Clifton Park. It was impossible. One day blurred into another. Time dragged, yet seemed to pass her by. It had been weeks and weeks since she’d last left the confines of the nursery – since she had seen her fierce uncle or kind-hearted Henry or the black bat-figure of Mrs Bourne. Did any of them even remember her, after all this time? She felt as if she was being slowly suffocated.
    Nanny had sent her to bed early this evening. ‘I can’t be doing with you, fiddling and fidgeting.’
    ‘But I didn’t—’ (She hadn’t).
    ‘None of that! I won’t have you answering back! Now off you go, and be quick about it!’
    Dorothea did not really mind. It was all the same being bored in her bedroom as bored in the day room. It was Sunday, too, which made things even worse. Sundays were days that lagged, dreary days when the nursery seemed more like a prison than ever. Nothing was allowed; even reading was forbidden on Sundays.
    ‘The Sabbath is a day of rest,’ said Nanny. ‘Whoever doeth any work on the Sabbath, he shall surely be put to death.’
    But this did not seem to apply to Nora who did as much work on the Sabbath as she did on any other day – not that Dorothea dared point this out to Nanny who, she felt, was more than capable of putting people to death. Nanny reminded her of Mrs Browning with her short temper and cuffs round the ear. They even had the same red nose; but Nanny never smelt of gin.
    The nursery was a lonely place. Baby was no company at all, Nora was often too busy to talk, and Roderick had gone away. Dorothea was not entirely sure that she liked Roderick, but he was better than nothing. He had, however, been sent off to school. There were schools where boys went to live for weeks at a time without ever coming home. That was where Roderick had gone. The way he’d described it sounded horrible, another kind of prison, but Roderick had stuck out his chin and said, ‘It’s not as awful as all that, not really.’ Afterwards she wondered if he’d been telling the whole truth. There’d been a look in his eye that she remembered seeing in Mickey’s when he was telling fibs.
    So Roderick had gone, and even Nora escaped the nursery each evening when she went home to the village.
    ‘I wish I could go too, Nora! I’d much rather live in your cottage than here!’
    ‘Whatever for, miss, when you’ve a room to yourself and your own comfy bed? What a funny one you are! Why, there’s no room to swing a cat at home, and six of us to share two bedrooms. You’d not like it at all.’
    But Dorothea felt it was exactly what she
would
like. Had not five of them shared just
one
room in Stepnall Street? Nora’s village, she was sure, was a place where real people lived – ordinary people: not like this house, full of the strangest, most objectionable people you could imagine.
    Dorothea shivered, listening to sleet pummelling the window and the sound of the wind seething amongst the branches of the big tree (a cedar tree, it was called). Whatever Nora might say, Dorothea could not get used to a room of her own. It made her think of the old woman in Stepnall Street – the old woman who’d lived in a basement room in the same court where Dorothea lived. The old woman had hardly ever been seen. No one had noticed when she’d stopped being seen altogether. And then one day she’d been found dead. Mickey had known all about it, of course. Someone had come looking for the rent, he said. When their knocking went unanswered , they had broken down the door. The old woman had been found sitting in her chair dressed in her old rags, covered from headto foot in lice. She had been dead a week at least. Mickey had laughed. He was like that.
    Lying in the dark of the deserted room, Dorothea wished she had never known about the old woman. She wondered if she would end up forgotten too. She wondered if she might die and no one would know.
    When at last her eyes shut and she slid into