Bird Read Online Free PDF

again.”
    “Oh,” the boy said, clearly puzzled. “ ’Tis a grand kite.” His voice rose in admiration at the end of the sentence, and I knew that he must be from far away, perhaps another country entirely, though, never having been anywhere, I had no idea where that could be. “I’ll return it to its owner when I find her,” he said, putting his cap back on and tipping it at me.
    Wysteria closed the door abruptly, without bidding him good day. “Bothersome,” she mumbled, coughing into her handkerchief. “How dare he walk up here with no warning, no introduction! Doesn’t he know who we are?”
    “Apparently not, or he wouldn’t have come,” I said, only meaning to state the obvious, but Wysteria took it as impertinence and glared at me.
    “Why do you think he came
here,
Miranda?”
    “I have no idea. Perhaps it is because we are the only house along this stretch of beach.”
    “Perhaps,” Wysteria said, though she seemed to doubt that possibility and began pacing the floor. She was upset by the intrusion. No stranger ever came knocking on the door of Bourne Manor. Never. But if any ever did, they would venture cautiously and address Wysteria with a certain degree of apprehension and deference.
    “Perhaps you should not spend so much time in your room and instead concern yourself with your work. There is plenty to keep you occupied, is there not?”
    “Yes, Wysteria.”
    She eyed me curiously. “Hold out your hands,” she demanded. I held them out to her. She examined them thoroughly, turning them over and checking for calluses. “Why will they not callus over?” she asked aloud. “They only blister and then crack. What a terrible nuisance.” Still, after several minutes, she nodded, clearly appeased by my cracked and dried skin.
    “There will be a new delivery of nets tomorrow,” she said with satisfaction. “Sixty in all.”
    “Yes, Wysteria,” I replied, but I did not feel the same oppression that normally accompanied such an exchange, for in my mind I could see clearly the boy’s cap tipping in my direction, and I knew that regardless of Wysteria’s dislike of intrusions, I would see him again.

6
    I was awakened by a soft scratching, a creaking twist of branches. The limbs of the elm outside, bent down almost beyond their natural limit, were rubbing against my windowpane. Squirrels. They regularly rattled the branches and scurried along the ledges beneath the windows of the Manor. Spring was their season. Having nestled all winter in the holes and crevices that the house so amply provided, they had finally emerged and were busy training their young to search for food.
    I wasn’t bothered by their play. In fact, I often sat and watched them chase one another up and down the trunk of the great tree. I only feared for the birds, whose nests were frequently disturbed by the squirrels’ exuberance. For, more than the squirrels, it was the birds that fascinated me.
    Being so close to the lake, the grounds of Bourne Manor were home to an abundance of waterfowl—cormorants, ospreys, mergansers and herons—as well as raptors. Above the cliffs I had seen hawks and falcons, and once, a bald eagle, soaring over the harbor. But the birds closer to the Manor, the ones brave enough to nest within its walls, were the ones I viewed most intimately.
    A pair of robins had, that particular spring, constructed a nest in the branches just beneath my window. I had watched as their babies hatched from their sea blue eggs and were carefully tended by the mother robin. I found myself at times wishing that I, too, had a mother who would tenderly look after me and patiently teach me to negotiate the breezes. But the boundedness of my life was far distant from the freedom of those winged creatures. I viewed them only from behind a thick layer of glass, for I spent a great deal of time merely looking out at life through the leaded panes of the Manor’s multitude of locked windows.
    Wysteria detested birds and